The World After Gaza
Published on 6. February 2025
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-1-911717-49-2 (ISBN)
Description
*SHORTLISTED FOR A PALESTINE BOOK AWARD*
From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications
'Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding' NAOMI KLEIN
'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world' ANDREW O'HAGAN
'Urgent' HISHAM MATAR
'Brilliant' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world - the 'darker peoples', in W. E. B. Du Bois's words - the main historical memory is of 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 takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly 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 Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and 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 this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, 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. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.
From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications
'Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding' NAOMI KLEIN
'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world' ANDREW O'HAGAN
'Urgent' HISHAM MATAR
'Brilliant' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world - the 'darker peoples', in W. E. B. Du Bois's words - the main historical memory is of 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 takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly 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 Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and 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 this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, 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. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.
Reviews / Votes
The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year -- William Dalrymple * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2025* * A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation -- Peter Frankopan A seething and erudite indictment of the west's role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it * Guardian * This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding -- Naomi Klein As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it's by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year * Spectator, *Books of the Year* * Stimulating and brilliantly researched * Irish Times * In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity -- Rashid Khalidi This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the centre of this book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza -- Hisham Matar An impassioned account . . . Richly researched . . . Riveting * The Tablet * If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World after Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was to his -- Andrew O'Hagan A brilliant book, as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, colour and religion -- William Dalrymple We all owe Pankaj Mishra a debt for crafting eloquent, urgent and undeniable words from the horrors we are struggling to witness -- Afua Hirsch An astute, humane and necessary intervention, opening a path to the altered consciousness which has to be a consequence of Israel's war on Gaza -- Ahdaf Soueif Pankaj Mishra remembers the future. The World After Gaza, with its elegant outrage and eloquent ache, will be the reference for those who judge our times tomorrow. Thanks to Mishra's all-too-human work, the next generation will know we were not all in vain -- Ece Temelkuran Both a timeless and timely book, reading The World After Gaza feels like engaging in an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the Holocaust and colonialism with a good attentive friend' -- Eyal Weizman, Director, Forensic Architecture Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilisation in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present -- Samuel Moyn With clarity and even a dose of self-reflection, the always brilliant Pankaj Mishra sifts through the many implications of the horrid war on Gaza -- Joe Sacco An insightful and persuasive analysis * Times Literary Supplement * [Mishra's] insistence that what's happening in the Middle East is not remote and not something about which we can figure out the whys and wherefores at a later date that Mishra makes his most powerful arguments... this is brave writing that demands to be read * ArtReview *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
410 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-911717-49-2 (9781911717492)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Pankaj Mishra's books include The Romantics, which won the LA Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for fiction, Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire. He contributes political and literary essays to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.