Talk: Patriotism and Dissent in the Global South

The Mosaic Rooms are pleased to present authors Pankaj Mishra and Vijay Prashad in conversation about the rise of authoritarianism in Egypt, Turkey and India; the germination of cultures of resistance; and important questions surrounding the intellectual and solidarity.

Space for dissent closes rapidly in several major countries of the Global South – whether by military coups (as in Egypt and Thailand) or by use of sedition and anti-terrorism laws to arrests dissidents (as in India and Turkey). Authoritarianism rises in these states, whose managers have no answers to the pressing problems of their societies. The answer to inequality is social suffocation – whether in terms of the attack on women’s rights (ending reproductive freedom in Turkey or the revival of the khap panchayats in northern India) or putting pressure on social minorities (Kurds in Turkey, Muslims in India). But this attack by the ruling regimes has provoked the revival of cultures of resistance, and has put on the table the question of solidarity.

Vijay Prashad, who teaches at Trinity College (USA), is a journalist for Frontline (India), BirGün (Turkey), al-Araby al-Jadeed and Alternet. He is the author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013). His most recent book is an edited collection, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Verso, 2015). He is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi).

Pankaj Mishra, who received the 2014 Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction, is the author most recently of A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours (2013) and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012). His novel, The Romantics, won the 2000 Art Seidenbaum award for Best First Fiction.