An Uneasy Embrace

The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Ghanaian protests over Gandhi statues to American Vice President Kamala Harris's story, this relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that reveal how race reverberates throughout the modern world. Shobana Shankar's groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, she traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic, forcing a racial reckoning over the course of the twentieth century. While decolonization brought Africans and Indians together to challenge Euro-American white supremacy, discord over caste, religion, sex and skin color simmered beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity. This book examines the cultural movements, including Pan-Africanism and popular devotionalism, through which Africans and Indians made race consciousness, alongside economic cooperation, a moral priority. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. Calls to dismantle statues, from Dakar to Delhi, are not mere symbolism. They express new solidarities which seek to salvage dissenting histories and to preserve the possibility of alternative futures

'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak' The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today. THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR A BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD

This book will attempt to explore faith-based responses to unending injustices by embracing the reality of hopelessness. It rejects the pontifications of some salvation history that move the faithful toward an eschatological promise that, when looking back at history, makes sense of all Christian-led brutalities, mayhem, and carnage. To embrace hopelessness moves away from a middle-class privilege that assumes all is going to work out in the end. By upsetting the norm, an opportunity might arise that can lead us to a more just situation, although such acts of defiance usually lead to crucifixion. Hopelessness is what leads to radical liberative praxis.

African liberation is often seen in terms of heroism, but seldom in terms of thought. Even Sartre, in his preface to Frantz Fanon's seminal The Wretched of the Earth, wrote of the 'native' with his coiled muscles about to explode into rebellion. The African and the black person are denied the condition of philosophy, apparently driven only by frustration and anger. Stephen Chan's new book charts the long history of African political thought, from the years of North American slavery, through the development of modern African nationalism and the difficulties of governing new states, to Africa's political philosophy today, taking on the world as an equal. He dwells at length on major figures from Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah's postcolonial generation to Biko, Mandela and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. He shows their leadership to be inseparable from their ideas, and from those of literary giants including Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. This is no hagiography: Chan critically examines his thinkers, who also include Mugabe and Mobutu, and expresses concern for the future of Pan-Africanism. But his fascinating account reveals a thoughtful continent that has made complex, significant contributions to the world's intellectual commons-yet continues to seek freedom.

This book traces three decades of securitization in Angola. As a governing strategy during war and peacetime, it muted the aspirations of those on opposing sides, distorted the state, emboldened elites and redefined the identity of Angolans. Through this lens, Paula Cristina Roque provides an original account of Angola's post-conflict state-building. Securitization protected the interests of President dos Santos, the ruling MPLA party and the elites supporting the regime. Angola's array of security forces and infrastructure provided an alternative to a fully functioning executive, at national, provincial and local levels. The intrusive way in which any form of dissent or activism was crushed allowed the presidency to control the direction and narrative of the post-war years. But the facade of democracy, development and stability hid a very different reality for the majority of Angolans, who remained poor, disenfranchised and marginalized. Roque explores the inner workings of the intelligence services, army and presidential guard, explaining the trajectory of a survivalist and fearful regime presiding over scarcities and injustices. She shows that the survival of national security and governing elites was the highest priority. The 'shadows' held far more power than institutions, and weakened them-widening the gap between government and governed.

Heart of Darkness is often considered the world’s best short novel. The book serves as a bridge between the 19th century and modernism, an adventure tale revolving around the ambiguity of themes such as truth, morality, and evil. Joseph Conrad witnessed the European exploitation of the Congo with his own eyes. He once sailed up the Congo River himself to locate a countryman at a trading station deep within the country – even though this man wasn't named Kurtz. The goal and enigma of the journey have become synonymous with this name, one of the most unforgettable fictional characters of our time. JOSEPH CONRAD [1857–1924] was born in Ukraine to Polish parents, went to sea at the age of seventeen, and ended his career as a captain in the English merchant navy. His most famous work is the novella Heart of Darkness [1899], adapted into a film by Francis Ford Coppola in 1979 as Apocalypse Now.

This important book analyzes nuclear weapon and energy policies in Asia, a region at risk for high-stakes military competition, conflict, and terrorism. The contributors explore the trajectory of debates over nuclear energy, security, and nonproliferation in key countries—China, India, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other states in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Arguing against conventional wisdom, the contributors make a convincing case that domestic variables are far more powerful than external factors in shaping nuclear decision making. The book explores what drives debates and how decisions are framed, the interplay between domestic dynamics and geopolitical calculations in the discourse, where the center of gravity of debates lies in each country, and what this means for regional cooperation or competition and U.S. nuclear energy and nonproliferation policy in Asia.

What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.