What is the personal origin of The Darker Nations: A Peoples History of the Third World?
VP: There are many origins for this book. One of them was that I grew up in a period when the Third World Movement was beginning to fall apart. That was in the 1970s, when my lingering interest, you might even call it my obsession, with the early years of the Third World Project began. I read as much as I could about Algeria when I was in India. I was very interested in the developments taking place in East Africa, and Vietnam, of course, was another interest. I was reading widely about all of this. So I have always been interested in the Third World Movement. When I came to study in the US, particularly in graduate school, what surprised me was the dismissal of nationalism as a concept. This simple dismissal, an almost untutored dismissal: all nationalisms were bad. What struck me about this – this was in the late 1980s – was that this dismissal, both in popular and academic culture, was at some level symptomatic of not just theories in fashion, but it was symptomatic of a reality, wh
