Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization by Esmat Elhalaby ISBN 9780520389267, 9780520389274, 9780520389298, 0520389263, 0520389271, 0520389298 instant download

Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization by Esmat Elhalaby ISBN 9780520389267, 9780520389274, 9780520389298, 0520389263, 0520389271, 0520389298 instant download

Parting Gifts of Empire narrates an untold story of how Arabs and South Asians in the twentieth century sought to decolonize their minds. The histories of Palestine and India—both partitioned by the British Empire—are intimately linked. In the face of similar imperially created chasms, Arab and Indian intellectuals reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge. In this book, Esmat Elhalaby traces the forgotten lives of scholars like Wadi’ al-Bustani, revisits Arab and Indian feminist meetings, highlights gatherings such as Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference, and argues for the centrality of Palestine to the rise of the Third World. This book breaks new ground to unfold a global intellectual history of anticolonialism, Asian unity, pan-Islamism, and nonalignment in the making of what became known as the Global South.

"Parting Gifts of Empire brilliantly brings to light anti-imperialist forms of knowledge produced by Middle Eastern and Indian intellectuals preceding and following decolonization. Instead of engaging in a customary examination of the bilateral colonizer-colonized relations, it turns its eye on South-South interactions to show that Palestine figured prominently in a range of spheres—in philosophical writings and translations, academic meetings, and political, diplomatic, and women activists’ conferences. This is a timely and much-needed reminder that the question of the colonial oppression of Palestine is not new but has long been an expression of anticolonial thought and politics."—Gyan Prakash, author of Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point