Days and Nights of Love and War

Title: Days and Nights of Love and War
Author: Eduardo Galeano
ISBN: 978-81-89833-70-1
Binding: paperback
Publisher: Aakar books
Number of Pages: 178
Price: Rs 225

Days and Nights of Love and War is the personal testimony of one of Latin America’s foremost contemporary writers. In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galeano movingly records the lives and struggles of the Latin American people, under two decades of unimaginable violence and extreme repression. Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelougues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence.


Originally published in Cuba, Days and Nights of Love and War won the Casa de las Amèricas prize (1978).


Lannan Foundation awarded the 1999 Cultural Prize for Freedom to Eduardo Galeano, in recognition of those “whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

Title: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
Author: Eduardo Galeano
ISBN: 9781846272479
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Portobello
Number of Pages: 391
Price: Rs 599.00

In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form.

From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends.

Combining unimpeachably vast knowledge with irresistible fireside storytelling skills, Galeano’s world history is completely unique: a ground-breaking, mind-changing mosaic made of lives lived on our sorry, sparkling planet.

About the Author
Eduardo Galeano's works, which have been translated into 28 languages, include Memory of Fire; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; Open Veins; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he fled in 1973 after the military coup’s leaders imprisoned him, and lived in exile first in Argentina until death threats there forced him onward to Spain, until returning to Uruguay in 1985 upon the collapse of the military dictatorship. He has lived there since, active in journalism, television and politics. He was awarded the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Illustrated)

Title: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
Author: Ed by Donald Preziosi
ISBN 10: 0192842420
ISBN-13: 978-0192842428
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 608
Price: £16.99

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.

The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940

Title: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940 Author: Julian Carter
ISBN: 978-0822339489
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: Duke University Press
Price: £17.95

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940

Title: Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940
Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
ISBN: 978-0-691-07030-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number of Pages: 272
Price: $ 28.95

Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness."

The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.

Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Title: Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Author: Benedict Anderson
ISBN: 978-1844670901
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 256
Price: £9.99

In this sparkling new work, benedict anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea.

A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila’s 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist José Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin.

Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new “science” of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, José Marti’s armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism.

Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

Radical history review 100/ winter 2008 - Queer Futures

Title: Queer Futures (Radical History Review (Duke University Press)) (Paperback)
Contributors: Regina Kunzel, Dan Irving, Christina Hanhardt, Margot D.Weiss, Anna M.Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Tamara L.Spira, Susan Stryker, Maxime Cervulle, Aaron Belkin, Patrick McCreery, Vincent Doyle, Nan AlamillaBoyd
ISBN: 978-0822366867
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 257
Price: £ 10.99

In this special issue of Radical History Review, scholars and activists examine the rise of "homonormativity," a lesbian and gay politics that embraces neoliberal values under the guise of queer sexual liberation. Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.

Distinguished by its historical approach, "Queer Futures" examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant's antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the "endangered child." Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and a history of how "safe streets" patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano

Forward : Isabel Allende
ISBN: 81-88789-66-6
Binding: Paper
Date: October 2008
Publisher: Three Essays Collective
Number of Pages: 317
Price: INR 375/-

"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing" - thus Galeano begins this history of Latin America from Columbus to Castro and there is no doubt as to what side the continent is on. It is "a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity," "at the service of others' needs," forced to work "as a menial" first for Britain and then for the U.S.A. while within itself the larger nations prey upon the smaller and the cities suck the rural areas. Latifundia - and also minifundia, their opposite - are "bottlenecks choking the growth of agriculture"; prosperity generated by mono-"plunder-cultures" (sugar, tin, cacao) vanishes when boom turns to bust; industrial development in the cities leads to greater urban poverty. What is urgently needed, in lieu of a "creative bourgeoisie" which these countries never had and never will, is an agrarian-based, Fanon-type revolution with a Castro as caudillo. Galeano affirms that Cuba (its dependence on Russia ignored) is using its sugar-culture "as an instrument of development"; the people work from "enthusiasm," not out of greed or hunger, since socialist societies do away with both as motives. Ideological propinquities becloud other assessments - of the British abolitionists or birth control campaigns - but one cannot say entirely nay; this horrific history, graphically and indignantly portrayed, is sadly how it was and is. (Kirkus Reviews)

A superbly written, excellently translated, and powerfully persuasive exposé which all students of Latin American and U.S. history must read. - ChoiceWell written and passionately stated, this is an intellectually honest and valuable study. - Library JournalA dazzling barrage of words and ideas. - History

Eduardo Galeano’s analysis of the effects and causes of capitalist underdevelopment in Latin America presents a clear, passionate account of almost 500 years of Latin American history. Galeano shows how foreign companies reaped huge profits through their operations in Latin America. He explains the politics of the Latin American bourgeoisies and their subservience to foreign powers, and how they interacted to create increasingly unequal capitalist societies in Latin America. 'Open Veins' continues to speak to generations of people who want to understand capitalism and exploitation in Latin America, and in the rest of the world. – ELIZABETH DORE, University of Southampton, author of Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

He has more first-hand knowledge of Latin America than anybody else I can think of, and uses it to tell the world of the dreams and disillusions, the hopes and the failures of its people.…Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoilation. … This almost superhuman talent for storytelling is what makes 'Open Veins of Latin America' so easy to read. The book flows with the grace of a tale; it is impossible to put it down– ISABEL ALLENDE, from the Foreword

The Myth of the Holy Cow

Title: The Myth of the Holy Cow
Author: D.N. Jha
ISBN: 9788189059163
Binding: Paper
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages: 208
Price: INR 200/-

With additional material: B.R. Ambedkar on beef-eating and untouchability.

In this book, historian Dwijendra Narayan Jha argues that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth and its flesh played an important part in the cuisine of ancient India. Citing Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious scriptures, he underlines the fact that beef-eating was not Islam’s ‘baneful bequeathal’ to India. Nor can abstention from it be a mark of ‘Hindu’ identity, notwithstanding the averments of Hindutva forces who have tried to foster the false consciousness of the ‘otherness’ on the followers of Islam.

This new Navayana edition features an excerpt from Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s 1948 work on the connections between untouchability and beef-eating. Ambedkar marshals evidence to argue that in the Vedic period, ‘for the Brahmin every day was a beef-steak day.’

“While cow veneration and vegetarianism may be the hallmarks of Hinduism today, Jha compiles copious evidence that this has hardly always been the case.” — New York Times

“Jha draws on an amazingly wide range of material … an enlightening endeavour, demonstrating a critical understanding of a popular misconception.” — Journal of Asian Studies

“Jha traces the history of the doctrine forbidding the eating of cows… soundly and thoroughly covering both the classic texts and cutting-edge scholarship, Indian and European.” — Times Literary Supplement

“This little gem of a book provides a wealth of evidence exposing myth creation and the way symbols are used politically to divide people.” — Socialist Review

Fearless Speech- Michel Foucault

Title: Fearless Speech
Author: Michel Foucault
ISBN 10:1-58435-011-3 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-011-8
Binding: Paper
Date: 2001
Publisher: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Number of Pages: 183
Price: $12.95

I would like to distinguish between the 'history of ideas' and the 'history of thought.' The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas, which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience becomes a problem, raises discussions and debate, incites new reactions, and induces crisis in the previously silent behaviors, practices, and institutions. It is the history of the way people become anxious, for example, about madness, about crime, about themselves, or about truth.

Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault's project as a philosopher.

A Very nice blog on Foucault

Archeology of Violence by Pierre Clastres

Title: Archeology of Violence
Author: Pierre Clastres
ISBN: ISBN-10:0-936756-95-0 ISBN-13:978-0-936-75695-0
Binding: Paperback
Date: December 1994
Publisher: MIT Press (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Number of Pages: 200
Price: $14.95

Pierre Clastres broke up with his mentor Claude Levi-Strauss to collaborate with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari on their Anti-Oedipus. He is the rare breed of political anthropologist—a Nietzschean—and his work presents us with a generalogy of power in a native state. For him, tribal societies are not Rousseauist in essence; to the contrary, they practice systematic violence in order to prevent the rise in their midst of this "cold monster": the state. Only by waging war with other tribes can they maintain the dispersion and autonomy of each group. In the same way, tribal chiefs are not all-powerful; to the contrary, they are rendered weak in order to remain dependent on the community. In a series of groundbreaking essays, Clastres turns around the analysis of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity of their societies. These "savages" are shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization."

History of sexuality: Volume 1 for 195 Rupees

Title:The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: Popular Penguins

Author:  Michel Foucault

ISBN13: 9780141037646
Binding: Paperback
Date:  1 September 2008
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Number of Pages:  180

Price:  195/-

Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge is the first part of his influential trilogy of books on 
the history of sexuality. He argues that the recent explosion of discussion about sex in the West means that, far from being liberated, we are in the process of making a science of sexuality that is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure. This is a brilliant polemic from a groundbreaking radical intellectual.

Photo-Biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar

Title: Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Contributors: Prakash Vishwasrao, Vijay Surwade, Vasant Abaji Dahake, Nitin Rindhe, Jayprakash Sawant, Ramesh Tukaram Shinde, Gayatri Pagdi, Shubha Chitre - Piplapure, Vijay Mohite
ISBN: 81-88284-99-8
Binding: Hardbound
Date: October 2007
Publisher: Lokvangmay Griha
Number of Pages: 288
Price: 2000/-

About The Book

The epochal life, mission and thoughts of Dr.Bhimrao Ramji alias Babasaheb Ambedkar left indelible imprints on the twentieth century India. His life was devoted to raising the down-trodden to human dignity, and to earn for them the right to live as human beings. He led people into movements and agitations, founded organisations and launched newspapers in a bid to wrest from the hostile, unbending and conservative upper classes, political, social, religious and financial rights for the Deprived Classes. His was a multifaceted personality. From an aggressive leader to the chief architect of the Constitution of Independent India, he functioned effortlessly at various levels. He was a journalist, scholar, researcher, commentator on theology, eminent economist, political diplomat, leader of the masses and a social reformer. His writings are rich and extensive. The bibliography provided in this volume is ample proof to his erudition. This photo-biography gives an insight into Dr.Ambedkar's life and his mission through photographs, documents, front pages of newspapers and covers of books, from Vijay Surwade's valuable unique collection. Behind this rich and comprehensive collection are years of obsessive search and hard work. The photographs are historically important because of their period and context. The chronology enumerates important events prior to and after Dr. Ambedkar's birth. 'Pravartan' by Vasant Abaji Dahake, in the first part of the book, introduces the reader to the ideology of Dr. Ambedkar. This is followed by 'Jatak' and 'Charit-kal.' In addition, there is a section devoted to the introduction of some of Dr. Ambedkar's close associates. It is believed that this endeavour will appeal to the reader and will prove useful to the student of the Ambedkarian movement. <http://bookonambedkar.com/about.htm>

The Penguin History of Latin America

The Penguin History of Latin America Edwin Williamson - Author

Price : 900/-rs

Book: Paperback 5.07 x 7.79in 640 pages ISBN 9780140125597 07 Sep 1993 Penguin 18 - AND UP

Edwin Williamson traces 500 years of history from the time of Columbus and the Spanish Conquest to the present day. By the 1750s the Spaniards and the Portuguese governed vast territories in the New World. It was not until the eighteenth century that reforms and political upheavals undermined the stability of the Iberian empires in America and led to bitter conflicts between liberals and conservatives in the independent nations that succeeded them. The author shows how this turbulent modernization continued into the twentieth century, as well as giving an overview of the last hundrerd years, looks in detail at developments within Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Cuba.