Tremendous research demonstrates how “indignity is a form of generalized social violence” corroding democracy.
A sharp critical study of the steady decline of democracy in India.
In a hard-hitting, relentless chronicle of social and political ills, Chowdhury, a Hong Kong–based journalist, and Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, trace the decomposition of Indian democracy since the hopeful time of independence in August 1947—a process that has accelerated in recent years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The great experiment of Indian democracy, forged from staggering diversity and the “polychromatic reality” of Indian society, is now in critical danger. “Weighed down by destitution of heart-breaking proportions,” write the authors, the world’s largest democracy suffers glaring “emergencies” in the societal structure (clean air and water, education, health care, etc.) that have been ignored or underestimated during decades of feeble leadership, leaving tens of millions of impoverished Indians without essential constitutional rights. In an impassioned narrative, the authors move from the first parliamentary general election—“which began in October 1951 and took six months to conduct. It was the grandest show the world had ever seen”—to the most recent, when Modi, with his Hindu-dominant Bharatiya Janata Party, used his money and power to intimidate voters and quell dissent. The authors delineate the heartbreaking collapse of the social fabric and how the pandemic has exposed the abysmal health care system. Most Indians endure “indignities” unheard of in the West, such as rampant pollution, food insecurity, malnutrition, lack of health care and education, especially for girls and women, and even slave labor. While some elections have been effective, especially because the poor have been participating in greater numbers, the recent Modi years demonstrate how money and intimidation dominate the landscape, essentially neutralizing the other arms of government. The authors warn of Modi’s creeping despotism. For example, “in August 2019, with the stroke of a pen, Modi’s government revoked the autonomous status of the restive state of Jammu and Kashmir.” This book sounds an urgent alarm.
Tremendous research demonstrates how “indignity is a form of generalized social violence” corroding democracy.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-884860-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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