CityReads│6 books on Global Cultural Understanding

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6 books on Global Cultural Understanding

Shortlist of the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, which celebrates books that promote “global cultural understanding”.

Sources:https://fivebooks.com/best-books/global-cultural-understanding-ash-amin/

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medals/nayef-al-rodhan-global-cultural-understanding

Every year the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize is awarded to a nonfiction book that has contributed to 'global cultural understanding.' Cambridge professor Ash Amin, chair of this year's panel of judges, talks to FiveBooks.com about the 6 fabulous books that made the 2019 shortlist and explains why they're so important.

I highly recommend FiveBooks.com, which interviews experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. This site has an archive of more than one thousand interviews, or five thousand book recommendations. It publishes at least two new interviews per week. Here is one of the latest interviews with Prof. Ash Amin.

We are living in times when it is common to think of ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’ inpreconceived ways, as given by the distinctions—perhaps the myths—of country, race, class and religion. Thinking along these lines has become really quite dangerous, because it’s leading to the vilification and indeed harm of people considered to be on the outside of these divisions—particularly with the escalation and greater prevalence of a politics of resentment and national disengagement.

Yet, on the ground, cultures and identities are constantly on the move; they’remixed, and they cross borders. Our affiliations de facto are plural because of our social engagements and mobility, because of our consumption and travel, because of global interaction. If you look further back, human history itself is actually a history of shared needs and aspirations, common ideals and philosophies, and an awful lot of cultural borrowing and exchange.

Whether we like it or not, each one of us is made up of multiple identities. Having an openness to the world—dare I say a cosmopolitan way of thinking—doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to our deeply held views. To be of a wider world actually is not a threat to national and local identity, to strongly held affiliations of race, nation or class. My thinking here is that it’s not a question of either/or, but of and.

1 The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

The Lies that Bind is a most timely book. Anthony Appiah wrote the book on the back of his Reith Lectures, which were informed and stimulated by the vexed politics of our times. It tackles deeply-etched senses of identity and belonging, based on presumptions of class, race and nation. In the book, Appiah—with his characteristic wisdom, good humour, and liberal good sense and so many rich historical tales from around the world and from the past—asks us to interpret identities not as pre-given, or monolithic or unchanging, but instead as shaped by our own rich and often contradictory experiences as human beings. He’s getting us to think about identity and belonging through the multiplicities that we inhabit and that we have to engage with, and as a kind of challenge, as opposed to a pre-given.

Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation―of self-rule―is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage.

Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities. These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities―from chattel slavery to genocide. Andyet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns.

2 How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

How the World Thinks sets out to provide a map of human thought in different regions of the world by looking at the composition and the impact of certain founding philosophies: Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Islamic. He also touches on certain oral traditions, especially in Africa. He wants to look at the impact of these founding philosophies on the development of ways of thought.

In How the World Thinks, Julian Baggini travels the globe to provide a hugely wide-ranging map of human thought. He shows us how distinct branches of philosophy flowered simultaneously in China, India and Ancient Greece, growing from local myths and stories - and how contemporary cultural attitudes, with particular attention to the West, East Asia, the Muslim World and Africa, have developed out of the philosophical histories of their regions. Interviewing thinkers from all around the world, he asks why, for instance, do our European systems of governments and justice differ so widely from the East? Why can Islam not easily incorporate secular knowledge? How do we understand China? By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, the first step to greater understanding.

I think this book is an achievement in several ways: as a bringing together of anumber of world philosophies, as an illustration of why philosophy matters for global understanding, and as a bridge between Western and Asian thought. He shows us that there are very strong commonalities, but that where differences exist—between, say, warring Muslims and Hindus or warring Christians and Muslims—there are reasons rooted in a clash of worldviews.

3 A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of theSlave Trade to the Age of Revolution

The author, To by Green, draws on years of work in the archives—consulting written and oral histories, art, maps, and artefacts—to tell a completely different story of pre-slave and pre-colonial Western Africa. It is an eye-opener for anyone who thinks that the coastal regions of North and West Africa were closed, sedentary or “backward” prior to the 18th and the 19th centuries.

Green shows, through the extraordinary research he has done, that these West African kingdoms were confident, cosmopolitan, economically advanced, trading far and wide—with the West and beyond—and culturally sophisticated (hence his interestin looking at artworks and the archaeological archive as well).

What he argues is that the two-way connections between this region and Europe were immensely strong, worked to mutual benefit, and were reflective of the sophistication of the West African economy around copper, gold, cowrie shells, and all forms of industry and manufacture.

But all of this begins to fracture and come apart—very much to the detriment of the West African kingdoms—as a result of the imbalances of slavery and colonial extraction. It’s at that point when the kingdoms are selling slaves instead of selling gold that the imbalances in trade and in the balance of payments arise, because what the West is getting is far more valuable than what the West African kingdoms are receiving in return. It has become a skewed trading system.

He also shows that later on, as we enter into the colonial period, much of that very rich, secular history of civilization—of trade, of confidence—comes apart. How brightly, how wonderfully this book dispels myths about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ and its ‘enlightenment’ from the West!

4 Maoism: A Global History

Maoism by Julia Lovell is another towering book. It offers a rich and brilliantly researched history of an important world ideology. At least, at the end of this book, you come to realise that Maoism is a truly important world ideology.

Lovell re-evaluates Maoism by showing how internationalism lay at the heart of it. The Maoist experiment wasn’t about closure, but about supporting all manner of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, nationalist liberation movements around the world.

The book looks at how Maoism was taken up in different countries and the many regions around the world that were influenced by it. The 1968 movement in Europe and America, the political struggles in Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania,  South Africa, India and Nepal all turned to Maoism.

Very interestingly, she notes that much of this happened at a time when Russia was in the ascendancy. It was beginning to open up a bit more under Khrushchev. But it was not seen—by anti-capitalist and liberation movements around the world—as the appropriate state system or political philosophy to pursue. Instead of Marxism, they turned to Maoism.

The book gives us all the details of the individuals, the leaders of those countries, who were enchanted by Mao and Maoism. Lovell writes about their travels to China and veneration of Mao. She also writes about the support that the Chinese gave—financial, engineering, sometimes military—to all these movements.

Lovell provides an astounding and close-up portrayal of a protagonist and a political ideology that changed the world and shaped China’s internationalism. If you scan the world after the post-war period and especially after the 1960s, you have to marvel at how influential Maoism was.

She also argues that after Mao, internationalism continued, but it changed as well. But it’s a new form of internationalism which is much more about helping developing countries build their infrastructure and providing expertise—rather than fomenting Maoist struggle and anti-capitalist revolution.The line of reasoning is that what we see today is part of an old internationalist story.

5 Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided

Through intimate conversations with survivors and their memories, unlocked by treasured items that they carried across the new border in the flight from India orPakistan in 1947, Aanchal Malhotra recovers the buried emotions and traumas of Partition. She also tells the stories of her family, torn apart by Partition.

What’s interesting is that the stories of pain, rupture, violence, chaos and displacement are pretty well known, but the deeply personal reflections of individuals on both sides are not. She speaks to people from varied backgrounds and once their memories are jogged by these rather touching objects they bring out—whether cooking utensils, or a shawl, or books—the individuals are thrown back into that time. The objects and the interviews unlock traumas that had been long buried. Amidst the tears when the stories are narrated, you find that to all these individuals who were young people at the time, Partition made no sense whatsoever, because Muslims and Hindus lived in harmony with each other.

The book also shows (again through interviews and conversations) that for most of these individuals, it still doesn’t really make sense in the here and now. After Partition some have gone back to India or to Pakistan to visit family and they ruefully ask, ‘Why did this have to happen? Are we not one people? Are we not one nation?’

What she does in this book, very eloquently and poignantly, is restore the everyday to one of the great dramas of the 20th century.  Her method of drawing on material culture to delveinto memory and identity is very clever.

6 Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture

“Latinx” (pronounced“La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers one of the largest and fastest growing minorities in the United States, accounting for 17 percent ofthe country. Over 58 million Americans belong to the category, including a sizable part of the country’s working class, both foreign and native-born.Their political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. And yet Latinx barely figure in America’s ongoing conversation about race and ethnicity. Remarkably, the US census does not evenhave a racial category for “Latino.”

What the book does—with a lot of rich historical material—is question the staple of thinking in America: thinking through the filter of white and black. The book does that by delving into the identity formations and the cultural quest of the17 per cent of America’s population that comes from Hispanic backgrounds.

Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje—“mixedness” or “hybridity”—and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America’s infamously black–white racial regime.

By considering the mixedness of nearly 20% of the American population, he makes the very interesting and original claim that Latinx both challenges the nation’s racial regime and suggests a new form of border thinking exceeding the racialisations of black and white. It helps to define belonging in the US in adifferent way—an important idea given the animosities of identity and belonging drummed up by Trump and the resurgent Right.

He goes back to the origins of Latinx, but the real power of the book stems from his coverage of the cultural turns and details of different post-war decades. As a cultural thinker, he gives us lots of vignettes—of rap, of art, of cultural practices, of culture-inflected political leanings.

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