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Bland Fanatics

Name: Bland Fanatics
Brand: Verso
Price: 11.99 AUD
Availability: OnlineOnly

Liberals, Race and Empire

By: Pankaj Mishra

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eBook | 28 July 2020

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One of the most acclaimed essayists writing today on the political hysteria plaguing the West

In England and America, 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: imperial atavism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most intelligent of Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and culture of this hysteria, anatomizing the dominant establishment discourses of our times.

In essays that grapple with the meaning and content of Anglo-American liberalism, 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; 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.

Bland Fanatics is not available from Verso Books in the United States and Canada.

About the Author

Pankaj Mishra is the multi-award-winning author of numerous books, most recently The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. He writes literary and political essays for the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, New Yorker, London Review of Books, and Bloomberg View, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time, the Independent, Granta, the Nation, n+1, Poetry, Common Knowledge, Outlook, and Harper’s.

Industry Reviews

“Dazzling … an extraordinarly powerful argument, by a writer of powerful and perhaps even remorseless conviction, for the case that we need first to rethink our past in order to reshape our future.”
ArtReview

“An important and illuminating critic of liberalism and globalisation.”
Kenan Malik, Observer

“Compelling.”
Edward Luce, Financial Times

“The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater … Mishra’s analysis of Anglo-American barbarism is cutting.”
Rebecca Liu, White Review