PEI Obert: The Brighter Nations in Solidarity: Even in the Midst of a Genocide, a New World Is Being Born
PEI Obert presents a lecture by Vijay Prashad. The Colonial West is in decay, losing its economic grip on the world and its control over our minds. The birth of a new world is neither clear nor easy. This talk envisions that horizon, forged through the solidarity of past and present anticolonial struggles, and heralds its inevitable arrival.
This lecture draws on the framework of The Darker Nations, a book by Vijay Prashad, to speak to the unbearable clarity of our present: we are witnessing a genocide in Palestine, and the so-called democratic world – the very architects of the postwar international order – stand by in silence, or worse applaud it. What does this tell us about the moral architecture of the West? These are states built on colonialism, slavery and expropriation. Their silence is not accidental – it is structural.
We should turn our gaze to the forgotten dreams of the Third World Project – Bandung, Belgrade, Havana – not with nostalgia but as a necessary exercise of memory. A time when leaders and movements from Asia, Africa and Latin America gathered not to beg for space within the imperial system, but to imagine a world beyond it. A world anchored in sovereignty, dignity and socialist possibility. This was tricontinentalism: a revolutionary commitment to unity across borders, forged in the furnaces of anticolonial struggle.
This lecture is a part of the PEI Obert Lecture Series, given at MACBA. Many of them are available to watch online. Learn more here.
Vijay Prashad. Image courtesy MACBA
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MACBA
PEI Obert: The Brighter Nations in Solidarity: Even in the Midst of a Genocide, a New World Is Being Born
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MACBA
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MACBA
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MACBA
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MACBA
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MACBA
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Museo Reina Sofia
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