“an indispensable guide to understanding the contradictions of the pandemic” —Himal Southasian
Book covers of works featured in Himal Southasian’s “What has Southasia been reading: 2021 Edition”
What has Southasia been reading in 2021?
Chuang’s Social Contagion!
The editors of Himal Southasia collected a list of “the most interesting books they read over the past year.” Chuang’s Social Contagion joins this list of greats. Other important 2021 releases included A Passage North: A novel by Anuk Arudpragasam, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism: as narrated by Charvak by Partha Chatterjee, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, and All Incomplete by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.
For Himal Southasia, Geoffrey Aung, an anthropologist of Myanmar at Columbia University, wrote, “Chuang is a collective of communists who locate the ‘China question’ at the heart of contemporary capitalist contradictions. For years now, they have provided the most penetrating English-language analyses of capitalism and state power in China to be found anywhere, with a welcome emphasis on drawing out practical implications for communist struggle more broadly. This book, based on their article ‘Social Contagion’, published in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, is an indispensable guide to understanding the contradictions of the pandemic.”
Read the full article here.