From The Ruins Of Empire The Revolt Against The West And The Remaking Of Asia

Author: Pankaj Mishra

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $37.00 NZD
  • : 9780241954676
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Allen Lane
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  • : June 2012
  • : United States
  • : 37.0
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Pankaj Mishra
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  • : Paperback
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  • : English
  • : 950.3
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  • : 358
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Barcode 9780241954676
9780241954676

Description

A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world. A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers--Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire--are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, "From the Ruins of Empire "is as necessary as it is timely--a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Reviews

"Pankaj Mishra has produced a riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. He follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. In the end we realise that what we are holding in our hands is not only a deeply entertaining and deeply humane book, but a balance sheet of the nature and mentality of colonisation." --Hisham Matar "After Edward Said's masterpiece "Orientalism," "From the Ruins of Empire" offers another bracing view of the history of the modern world. Pankaj Mishra, a brilliant author of wide learning, takes us through, with his skillful and captivating narration, interlinked historical events across Japan, China, Turkey, Iran, India, Egypt, and Vietnam, opening up a fresh dialogue with and between such major Asian reformers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries as Liang Qichao, Tagore, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, and Sun Yatsen." --Wang Hui, author of "China's New Order" and "The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought" and Professor of Chinese Intellectual History at Tsinghua University, Beijing "From the Ruins of Empire" jolts our historical imagination and suddenly places it on the right, though deeply repressed, axis. It is a book of vast and wondrous learning and delightful and surprising associations that will give a new meaning to a liberation geography. From close and careful readings of some mighty Asian intellectuals of the last two centuries who have rarely been placed in this creative and daring conversation with each other, Pankaj Mishra has discovered and revealed, against the grain of conventional and cliched bifurcations of 'The West and the Rest, ' a continental shift in our historical consciousness that will define a whole new spectrum of critical thinking." --Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University "In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population.