The East Was Red

On the politics of literature: how writers create the world

In The East was Red Pankaj Mishra beautifully demonstrates, using examples from all over the world, an important and lately neglected truth: literature is inseparable from its social and political context. It is a mode of social enquiry.

Through a sequence of portraits, Mishra introduces us to writers and how life and literature informs their political evolution. He shows Edward Said's multiple selves, forged between Palestine and the US, and witness the impact of the Six-Day War on his writing about colonialism, Palestine and the politics of identity.

We also see the improvisations and distortions imposed by colonial rule and immigration to the West on two very different writers: R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul.

The East Was Red also explores the underground literary culture of Palestinian Israelis, the trajectory of Chinese intellectuals through the twentieth century, the modern literary cultures of Turkey and Egypt. It assesses the American literary response to the 9/11 attacks; explores the postmodernism of Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Egan and David Foster Wallace; underlines the rediscovery of class war in America by Elizabeth Strout's fiction; and examines, through the cult of Barack Obama as highbrow reader and writer, the fashionable new idea of literature as a generator of empathy.

Global in scope, and informed by political and intellectual as well as literary history, this book is Pankaj Mishra at his majestic best.