Ash Amin's Reading List

"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. The book for us is really quite compelling because of its erudition. The writing style is magical. It’s very clear. And the argument, in its own right, is vital for what I would call our identitarian times. Yes, and one might be tempted to think that, coming from a privileged background, he can afford to be cosmopolitan, and that such cosmopolitanism runs in his blood. But I think the beauty of the book is that he says, ‘Well, in actual fact, we’re all like this. We are all the product of multiple affiliations and attachments and moorings.’ That’s what makes it really compelling. Quite apart from the revelations of his own biography in the book, there are so many other rich examples from around the world. His awareness of the detail of what goes on in the past and elsewhere in the contemporary world is really quite extraordinary. He’s saying that the way in which we’ve come to think of identity—along the lines of divisions of class, race and nation—are based on a whole series of fictions and myths that don’t actually map onto reality, in terms of how lives are led. But they are passionately held, which is why unmasking the lies and their affective grip is so important."

"That’s right. 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. What he reveals are the commonalities but also the differences in thought and belief. He shows why worldviews that can appear strange or anomalous to others are as they are because they’re rooted in particular philosophical precepts. Part of his project in How the World Thinks is to say, ‘Look, philosophy really matters. Philosophy is not part of a dry world of abstract erudition. Philosophical ideas make their way through into religion, into systems of beliefs, into cultural habits and so on.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think this book is an achievement in several ways: as a bringing together of a number 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. So How the World Thinks is a book in which the erudition is deep, that’s very clear and immensely relevant. One very general example is that the Western philosophical tradition—from the Greeks to the Enlightenment—is centred around the rational individual, while most Asian philosophies place the individual at the heart of a much wider cosmos where the individual is, to a degree, decentred. Even more importantly, there is as much weight given to reason as there is to faith or belief. He invites us in the West to say, ‘Let’s try and understand other parts of the world and get to the bottom of why people think the way that they do.’ And of course, as a philosopher, he’s rightly saying that we should look at their philosophical precepts."

"A Fistful of Shells is groundbreaking. The author, Toby 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 interest in looking at artworks and the archaeological archive as well). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . 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. It begins to be undermined. How brightly, how wonderfully this book dispels myths about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ and its ‘enlightenment’ from the West! It’s not an argument against globalisation, if we take globalisation to mean international connections and engaging in global trade. It’s an argument against the terms on which globalisation unfolds, who sets the rules and to whose advantage. It’s a defence of global trade, but a rejection of the skew and hidden power plays behind global trade that end up rewarding the rich and powerful and not others."

"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 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. Many of them were bowled over after they’d met Mao. She also writes about the support that the Chinese gave—financial, engineering, sometimes military—to all these movements. The book is of course honest about the oppression that followed from Maosim both in China and abroad—like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. But the book is equally true to the passion for Mao and Maoism felt within many anti-colonial struggles around the world. It’s all too easy to caricature it today, but it explains a quest for change in China and abroad. 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. Yes, and when I was finishing my ‘O’ levels in an East London School in 1971, The Little Red Book was everywhere. It was quite extraordinary. In the book, Lovell does talk about Mugabe and ZANU-PF. The ties were very strong. There was a fervent belief in the values of Maoism, the ideas of continual revolution, of maintaining constant vigilance, of enacting a cultural revolution. It was about not going down the industrial pathway in the way that Russia had done, but introducing a form of rural socialism. It was also very avidly taken up through Ujamaa in Tanzania. These ideas were underpinned by a huge amount of moral and material support from China and that explains quite a lot. The book is 600 pages, but you’re compelled to read all of them. What Lovell argues is that there was never that much closure. During the Maoist period, the Chinese state purported to be relatively closed off, but it wasn’t—that’s what she’s saying. She also argues that after Mao, internationalism continued, but it changed as well. In the book, she traces connections between Maoist internationalism and China’s current internationalism under Xi Jinping in a very subtle and interesting way. He is closer to Mao than his predecessors have been, and there is a revitalisation of Mao and Maoism going on in China. 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. But the line of reasoning is that what we see today is part of an old internationalist story. It does. I was in China last summer and he’s still there on full show."

"Remnants of Partition is a very poignant book. Through intimate conversations with survivors and their memories, unlocked by treasured items that they carried across the new border in the flight from India or Pakistan 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. These are stories of cross-border longing and connections that are made utterly senseless by the division. 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. “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?’” 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. She hauntingly brings together the oneness of people separated from kith, kin and place. And the portraits are full of weight. Of course, they make you cry—but there are also a lot of funny, humorous sentences in the book. The portraits are full of nuance and wisdom. Her method of drawing on material culture to delve into memory and identity is very clever. Yes, and not just because of Kashmir. For quite a while now, in India, Hindu nationalism has been very much in the foreground. Politicians speak quite openly and categorically of India as a Hindu nation and that speaks volumes to the very many millions of Muslims in India and to India’s Islamic neighbours. And we have exactly the same happening on the Pakistani side. So yes, this small but very significant book. Were it to get the publicity it absolutely deserves in India and beyond, it would help to set the record straight and show that “the lies that bind” are actually lies that blind ."

"Across the books we’ve shortlisted this year runs the theme of the everyday, which always crosses and rubs up against the categorical and the ascribed, which is always a bit of an enclosure. So it is with Latinx by Ed Morales. He calls it Latinx because he wants to user a gender-neutral term to describe Latinos and Latinas in North America. Yes, he says in the introduction that it is a much-contested term and that people have criticised it from all sorts of different angles, but he still wants to cleave to it. What the book does—again 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 the 17 per cent of America’s population that comes from Hispanic backgrounds. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Morales traces the history of their migration from different central and Latin American countries and views the resulting cultural practices and subject positions as one of ‘ mestizaje ’ or mixedness and hybridity. It mixes; it brings together and straddles numerous ethnic and linguistic distinctions—black and white, English and Spanish, and so on. 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 a different 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. For example, for the 1960s we understand some of the proximities with black struggle for autonomy. There is a textured richness to the account. So one way or another we have, this year, six very carefully researched, eloquently argued and highly readable books that disclose the world, that disclose us, that disclose nation, as so much more than a clash of closed cultures. This is why all of us on the jury felt that these six books absolutely deserve prominence in the public arena. By reading them, we can build on our belief that culture is ultimately engagement and not difference and separation. For us at the British Academy, we are so delighted to have this prize; it speaks to all our values. These are six fantastic books, they really are."