Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire

Book “Bland Fanatics” by Pankaj Mishra — October 6, 2020

Book formats

  • Hardcover No offers

Book short specifications

Author
Pages
224
Publisher
Farrar , Straus and Giroux
Language
english
Release date
October 6, 2020
ISBN
978-0-374-29331-4
GTIN
9780374293314
Publisher's website
us.macmillan.com

About

A wide-ranging, controversial collection of critical essays on the political mania plaguing the West by one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and culture of this hysteria, challenging the dominant establishment discourses of our times. In essays that grapple with the meaning and content of Anglo-American liberalism and its relations with colonialism, the global South, Islam, and “humanitarian” war, Mishra confronts writers such as Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Salman Rushdie. He describes the doubling down of an intelligentsia against a background of weakening Anglo-American hegemony, and he explores the commitments of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ideological determinations of The Economist. These essays provide a vantage point from which to understand the current crisis and its deep origins.

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