Tariq Ali, Novelist, historian, journalist and film-maker

Axis of Hope: Latin America on the March

Thursday, October 18, 5pm, Room 1100 Grainger Hall

Ali will discuss his latest book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope. A revolution is moving across Latin America. Since 1998, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela has brought Hugo Chávez to world attention as the foremost challenger of the neoliberal consensus and American foreign policy. Tariq Ali shows how Chávez’s views have polarized Latin America and examines the aggression directed against his administration. Pirates of the Caribbean offers a guide through a continent that is once again on the march (http://www.tariqali.org/).

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and co-sponsored by the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change, Tariq Ali’s visit is made possible by the U. W. Madison Center for Humanities as part of their week-long series of events on “Legacies of Al Andalus: Islam, Judaism, & the West,” October 16-20, 2007

TARIQ ALI was born in Lahore in 1943. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union debating club and became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Active in the New Left of the 1960s, he has long been associated with the New Left Review, of which he is currently a board member and editor. During the 1960s, he also owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso. Ali’s fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s. A book of essays, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was published in 2002. Tariq Ali’s latest works include Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005), and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author. The Leopard and the Fox (2007) is the script of a three-part TV series commissioned by the BBC and later withdrawn, and includes the background to the story.