Age of Anger: Pankaj Mishra

Thursday, March 2, 2017
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. EST
Location: Copley Hall Copley Formal Lounge Map

Political systems across the world have seen stunning upheavals in recent years, as voters fueled by anger and frustration have upset the established order. The historic Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, and the growing popularity of right-wing political parties across Europe serve as just a few examples of this global phenomenon.

Pankaj Mishra—one of the most original and incisive public intellectuals working in English today—came to Georgetown for a public conversation centered on his acclaimed new book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present. In the book Mishra links up the political anger in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in right-wing-friendly France to the anger in Turkey, India, and elsewhere, and proposes that all this anger has a common source: the resentment articulated by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche, the anger of “young provincials against a largely metropolitan civilization of slick movers and shakers that seemed to deny them an authentic and rooted existence.”

Mishra was in conversation with author and Berkley Center Senior Fellow Paul Elie, editor of Mishra’s books Temptations of the West and From the Ruins of Empire.

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Pankaj Mishra and Paul Elie

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About Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

Paul Elie's Profile

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About Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Pankaj Mishra's Profile