The World After Gaza

Memory of the Holocaust has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. But for most people around the world the main historical memory is the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world.

The World After Gaza by British-Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra takes the war in the Middle East, and the polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazism and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, versus the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality.

At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In his powerful and pointed treatise The World After Gaza, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration.