The West is no longer the motor of history

The possibility of a new politics emerging from the new left social movements to reconfigure the nation state.

Image credit Alisdare Hickson via Flickr (CC).

In this video, University of California University at Los Angeles history professor Vinay Lal talks to the Indian website Newsclick about “the new movements developing in different parts of the world, whether in West Asia, North Africa to Europe and the United States. He sees the possibility of new politics emerging from this and how it can reconfigure the nation state.”

There’s also a Part 2 to the interview with Lal. It may be worth spending a day or two with Newslick interviews with experts to educate yourself on some refresher course for a third worldist understanding of global politics other than Western or non-hegemonic viewpoints on what gets covered as “international news.”

* Hat tip to Zunguzungu’s regular “Sunday Reading” posts, which I can never finish by the time the next Sunday comes around. Feels like graduate school again.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.