Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.
Pankaj MishraTo think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.
Pankaj MishraPolitics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.
Pankaj MishraDespite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.
Pankaj MishraI think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still see on a daily basis when Madeleine Albright says that it's all right, we have to live with the idea of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying because it contains Saddam Hussein.
Pankaj MishraDickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.
Pankaj Mishra