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MIDNIGHT'S BORDERS

Name: MIDNIGHT'S BORDERS
Author: Suchitra Vijayan
ISBN: 978-1-61219-858-3

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF MODERN INDIA

by Suchitra Vijayan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2021

Dozens of powerful, intimate stories of people affected traumatically by India’s expedient geopolitical borders.

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A viewpoint of modern India via a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many borders. An India-born barrister, journalist, and photographer who worked for the U.N. war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before founding the Resettlement Legal Aid project in Cairo, Vijayan spent years interviewing stateless refugees around the entire border of India. She uses those stories to create a candid and heartbreaking work of exposé journalism. “The journey was…a return home,” she writes. “But after being away for more than a decade, I was coming back to a place I no longer recognized. I wanted to understand ‘my country,’ and I wanted to make sense of the ongoing violence at its borders, the debates over nationalism, citizenship, and the unanswered questions about belonging. I traveled to the frayed edges of the republic to meet the people who inhabit the margins of the state and to study the human toll of decades of aggressive, territorial nationalism.” Vijayan incisively shows how the lives of countless people are governed by often arbitrary borders created by imperialists who knew nothing of the ethnic makeup of the regions. She divides the book into five main sections, delineated along specific borders: the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, created by the looming Russian threat to British control of India in 1893, also known as the Durand Line; the India-Bangladesh border, another “contested colonial inheritance”; the India-China border; the India-Myanmar border; and the India-Pakistan border, “one of the most complex, violent, and dangerous boundaries in the world.” Each carries deep traumatic memories of India’s creation in 1947, and Vijayan is adept at teasing out the fraught, complicated social, political, and spiritual dynamics at play in each region. In the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reelection in May 2019, writes the author, “the government has aggressively implemented policies that seek to remake India into a Hindu nation,” thus again disenfranchising millions. Dozens of powerful, intimate stories of people affected traumatically by India’s expedient geopolitical borders.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-61219-858-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Melville House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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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)