Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt

Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change

Contributed by John Bellamy Foster, Amitav Ghosh, Naomi Klein, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Ghassan Hage, Rafia Zakaria, Masturah Alatas, Shalini Singh, Susan Abulhawa

Paperback

978-93-80118-47-5

LeftWord Books, 2017

118 pages

A book that connects the dots between climate change, capitalism, occupation, and imperialism.

INR 175.00

In stock

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pro_1668

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With the earth and its inhabitants under more pressure than ever before, and with bona fide climate change deniers in the most powerful positions on the planet, reading this book is essential. It informs and inspires the actions that we all need to take to protect ourselves and our homes. Read it, and after you've wept, act. — Emma Thompson, Actor

Naomi Klein, delivering the Edward Said lecture, links the question of climate with the question of occupation (with Palestine as the focus). Klein points out that those who are 'othered' will be the first victims of the climate catastrophe. This volume collects Naomi Klein's superb essay, along with reactions from important writers who live across the globe. John Bellamy Foster and Ghassan Hage offer direct reflections on Klein's lecture, while other writers are spurred by Klein's insights. Rafia Zakaria takes us to the shoreline of Karachi, Masturah Alatas wonders about hijab and air-conditioning in Malaysia, Shalini Singh meanders through the climate wars in India, and Susan Abulhawa writes from the 'fossil fuel sacrifice zone' at Standing Rock (North Dakota, USA). The book closes with Amitav Ghosh's meditation on nutmeg and cloves, leading to important insights into globalization, interconnectedness and transformation.

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke.

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Carlos Drummond De Andrade

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) was a Brazilian poet, whose poem, Canção Amiga, was on the 50 cruzado novo bill.

Ghassan Hage

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the university of Melbourne, Australia. He has held many visiting professorships around the world including at the American University of Beirut, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, University of Copenhagen, University of Amsterdam and Harvard. His work includes White Nation (2000), Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003) and Alter-Politics (2015).

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). His most recent books are The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

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Masturah Alatas

Masturah Alatas is the author of a tale about climate change, The Girl Who Made It Snow in Singapore (Ethos Books, 2008) and The Life in the Writing (Marshall Cavendish, 2010), a memoir-biography of Malaysian sociologist, Syed Hussein Alatas, who was also her father. Born in Singapore, she worked as a journalist in Malaysia before moving to Italy in 1992 where she teaches English at the Univerity of Macerata. A regular contributor to Counterpunch, Masturah has completed a novel and is working on another.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and journalist who authored three landmark books — No Logo (1999), Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), which Amitav Ghosh called ‘one of the most important books of the decade’. In 2016, Naomi won the Sydney Peace Prize for her work on climate change. Her book Fences and Windows was published by LeftWord Books in 2002.

Rafia Zakaria

Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for Dawn (Pakistan) and the Boston Review’s ‘Reading Other Women’ Series. She is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press) and Veil (Bloomsbury). She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Nation, Guernica and various other publications.

Shalini Singh

Shalini Singh is a Delhi-based journalist, who has written for The Week and the Hindustan Times. In 2012 she won the Prem Bhatia Award for excellence in environmental reporting. Shalini is a founding trustee at the People’s Archive of Rural India. In 2013, she was described by Elle as ‘a headliner, one of journalism’s new guard that asks difficult questions, risks life and limb, and will stop at nothing for the truth.’

Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian novelist and poet. Her most recent novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015), is an international best seller, translated into 28 languages. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a volunteer organization dedicated to upholding the Right to Play.

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. He is Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter, and editor at LeftWord Books. He has appeared in two films – Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017). Previously, he was the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and a professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, United States, from 1996 to 2017.

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ECOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT | CAPITALISM & GLOBALIZATION | IMPERIALISM |

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Reviews

The main theoretical achievement of Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt is that it reveals how global climate change is organically connected to the global capitalist economy and thus to the manifold social tensions and inequalities of our world.

David K. Johnson, Counterpunch