Biographical note:

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Professor of South Asian History at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter.

Country of final manufacture:

US

Main description:

In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off.

Since the ’70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issuebased movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival—in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism.

In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad “has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today’s global situation and standoff.” The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.

Review quote:

“It is startling how insulated the West has remained from the thinking, achievements, and struggles of the great majority of the world’s people. This lucid and well-informed study reveals how much there is to learn from this rich and vibrant record.”—Noam Chomsky

“At a time when the ideologues of the Washington Consensus appeal to former colonies to free themselves from history, Vijay Prashad recalls a past without which it is impossible to understand the present.”—Tariq Ali

“Vijay Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope.”—Amitava Kumar

“Vijay Prashad helps to uncover the shining worlds hidden under official history and dominant media.”—Eduardo Galeano

“Vijay Prashad has courageously and meticulously forged a fascinating study that challenges mainstream, Western narratives of world history. In this provocative and sweeping exploration, the injustices and subjugation of peoples in the global South are not only made visible but political.”—Susanne Soederberg, Professor in Global Development Studies, Queens University, Canada

“With eloquence, wit, and urgency, Prashad tells the real story of global restructuring, the dismantling of the Third World Project, the rise and demise of neoliberalism, and how the future of the planet is tied to the dreams of the dispossessed.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times