Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Vijay Prashad

This scholar/critic, when not making panel attendees swoon, teaches at Trinity College in Connecticut. And he not only wrote Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting…, he’s authored about a dozen books, including his just-released Uncle Swami: South Asians In America Today. Three of his works received major kudos: Village Voice named Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting… and The Darker Nations: A People’s History Of The Third World (2007) won recognition from the Asian American Writers Workshop as the Best Nonfiction Book in 2008 and got the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award in 2009.

Like his compatriots Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley, and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, Dr. Prashad moves his ideas across media platforms: he writes about global politics at, among other places, Asia Times, The Nation, Counterpunch, and Frontline and has commented on NPR and Twitter. (Thanks to Dr. Mark Anthony Neal for hipping me to Dr. Prashad’s presence on there!)

So, how did Dr. Prashad become so down for the people? In a 2006 interview he said:

Born in Calcutta in the middle of the Naxalite movement. I grew up in the affluent world of India’s metropolitan cities. My family forms part of the salariat, with a considerable section at work for the State or for old corporations in decline (in industries like jute, for instance). The generation born in the 1940s and 1950s tended to liberalism, with a few taking the road to communism. While the value placed on formal education was low, many of my family took a great interest in ideas. My father, for instance, had his studies disrupted by World War II and by the Indian freedom struggle, but till he died he read several newspapers in the morning and read as widely as possible from books and encyclopedias. This was our world.

I came to the U. S. in the early 1980s to live with my brother. I brought my inchoate political history to the struggles against Reaganism, which for me personally was formative. The three legs of that struggle: anti-apartheid, the dirty wars of Central America, and finally the Jackson campaign for president.

I am a Marxist who has an affinity with working-class movements around the world…

And we at the R have an affinity for Dr. Prashad. But no babies.

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