Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad (born 1967) is an Indian Marxist historian, journalist, political commentator, and editor. He is the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at the Renmin University of China's Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies. Prashad is known for his criticisms of capitalism, neocolonialism, American exceptionalism, and Western imperialism, and his support for communism and the Global South.

Personal life and education Vijay Prashad was born and raised in Kolkata, India. His grandfather was the scientist and translator Baini Prashad and his aunt is Marxist Indian politician Brinda Karat.

He attended The Doon School as a child. He records that he was subjected to violent rape in his early teens while at school.

He received a BA from Pomona College in 1989 as well as a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994, writing a dissertation under the supervision of Bernard Cohn.

Prashad is queer.

Career Prashad was the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and a professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1996 to 2017.

Prashad has provided political commentary for Monthly Review. and Salon. He has had three articles published in The Nation.

He is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and co-founder of the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL).

Prashad said that Noam Chomsky was "a great mentor to me", having co-authored two books with the well-known linguist. When details of Chomsky's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the Epstein files, Prashad said he was "disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him", adding that "here is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage."

Political views

Vijay Prashad is a proponent of democracy, Marxism, socialism, and communism.

Criticism of capitalism is a recurrent theme throughout his work, in addition to criticisms of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism.

He debated historian Juan Cole on the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya, which Cole supported. Prashad argued that the genuine Libyan uprising had been "usurped" by various malicious actors, including some with CIA connections. Prashad wrote the 2012 book Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, released through AK Press, on the topic.

Mother Teresa and Western charity

Prashad analyzed Mother Teresa's missionary work in Kolkata as representative of the collective "bourgeois guilt" of Western nations. For example, he states that the Bhopal disaster, which was caused by Union Carbide, was a flagrant example of a transnational corporation's disregard for human life in defence of its own profit. After the disaster, Mother Teresa flew into Bhopal and, escorted in two government cars, offered Bhopal's victims small aluminium medals of St. Mary. "This could have been an accident," she told the survivors, and "it is important to forgive."

Resignation of Evo Morales Prashad has written extensively about the 2019 Bolivian political crisis and the 2020 Bolivian general election. He described Evo Morales' removal from the presidency as a coup d'état and said the Organization of American States had legitimized the coup through unsubstantiated conclusions in its preliminary report. According to Australian historian David Brophy, the article whitewashed Chinese government crimes and contained "fake sourcing" from the use of AI.

Reception Historian Paul Buhle has described Prashad as "a literary phenomenon." Writer and journalist Amitava Kumar wrote: "Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope."

Prashad has come under scrutiny for his association with Neville Roy Singham, who has been accused of funding and promoting pro-Chinese government messaging and causes via a network of organizations (including the Tricontinental Institute, The People's Forum, BreakThrough News and NewsClick). Prashad has responded to the criticism, characterizing it as an attempt "to conjure a conspiracy from something that is no secret at all" as well as a pretended "scoop based on public statements that I – and others – have made."

Selected publications As author (2000) The Karma of Brown Folk. University of Minnesota Press. . (2002) Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community. Oxford University Press. . (2002) War Against the Planet: The Fifth Afghan War, Imperialism and Other Assorted Fundamentalism Manohar. . (2002) Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. Zed Books. . (2002) Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Beacon Press. . (2003) Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism under US Hegemony. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. . (2003) Keeping up with the Dow Joneses: Stocks, Jails, Welfare. Boston: South End Press. . (2007) The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. The New Press. . (2011) Marx's Capital: An Introductory Reader. Contributed by Vijay Prashad, Venkatesh Athreya, Prasenjit Bose, Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, T. Jayaraman, R. Ramakumar. LeftWord. ISBN 978-93-80118-00-0. (2012) Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. AK Press. . (2012) Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today. The New Press. . (2013) Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso Books. Foreword by Boutros Boutros-Ghali. (2015) No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. (2015) Letters to Palestine. Verso Books. (2016) The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution. University of California Press. . (2017) Red October: The Russian Revolution and the Communist Horizon. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. (2017) Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Climate Change. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. (2019) Red Star Over the Third World. Pluto Press. . (2020) Washington Bullets. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. . Preface by Evo Morales Ayma. (2022) Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, edited by Frank Barat. Haymarket Books. . (2022) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, with Noam Chomsky. The New Press. . Foreword by Angela Davis. (2024) On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle, with Noam Chomsky. The New Press. . Foreword by Miguel Díaz-Canel.

As editor (2016) Communist Histories, vol. 1. New Delhi: LeftWord Books. (2017) Land of Blue Helmets: the United Nations in the Arab World, co-edited with Karim Makdisi. University of California Press. (2017) Red October: The Russian Revolution and the Communist Horizon, New Delhi: LeftWord Books. (2019) The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, New Delhi: LeftWord Books.