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From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra
“They cannot represent themselves,” Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “they must be represented.” Marx was referring to the French peasant class whose interests in the...
View ArticleFiction or Non fiction: That is the question
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction?Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar.Mishra answers, “Even writers working within...
View ArticleDo Writers Also Have to Be Protesters?
Pankaj Mishra has always been a politically outspoken writer, so when Mo Yan, who has defended the Chinese government’s censorship, won the Nobel Prize, Mishra was the last person anyone expected to...
View ArticleHighbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Nobrow
Critics have been locked in debate over the Internet’s effect on cultural production and reception for as long as most millennials can remember, exclamations like “democratized content” and “death of...
View ArticleBooks for Ladies
When an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth...
View ArticleThe Moral of the Story
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach:Not only does moral...
View ArticleWriting from the Margins into the Universal
Sahota takes it further in “The Year of the Runaways”: “What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare...
View ArticleArt as Moral Privilege
For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral...
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