The World After Gaza
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Publishing:6th Feb '25
£20.00
This title is due to be published on 6th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications
'Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding' NAOMI KLEIN
'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world' ANDREW O'HAGAN
'Urgent' HISHAM MATAR
'Brilliant' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world.
The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population.
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.
In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity -- Rashid Khalidi
This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding -- Naomi Klein
This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the centre of this book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza -- Hisham Matar
A brilliant book, as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original,The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, colour and religion -- William Dalrymple
If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World after Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was to his -- Andrew O’Hagan
An astute, humane and necessary intervention, opening a path to the altered consciousness which has to be a consequence of Israel’s war on Gaza -- Ahdaf Souief
Both a timeless and timely book, reading The World After Gaza feels like engaging in an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the Holocaust and colonialism with a good attentive friend’ -- Eyal Weizman, Director, Forensic Architecture
Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilisation in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present -- Samuel Moyn
With clarity and even a dose of self-reflection, the always brilliant Pankaj Mishra sifts through the many implications of the horrid war on Gaza -- Joe Sacco
As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it’s by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *
ISBN: 9781911717492
Dimensions: 222mm x 138mm x 25mm
Weight: 400g
304 pages