The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good is William Easterly’s investigation and critique of international development, foreign aid, and Western intervention, including the histories and effects of colonialism and imperialism. Easterly comes with decades of experience as a development economist working with global institutions such as the World Bank and on projects across the developing world, which is reflected in his... Read The White Man’s Burden Summary

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The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a nonfiction book by Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher. Together with such texts as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), The Wretched of the Earth is a founding text of modern postcolonial studies. It is also Frantz Fanon’s most internationally acclaimed book, translated into more than 25 languages, though he is... Read The Wretched of the Earth Summary

Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s first novel. Simultaneously portraying the traditions and beliefs of Nigerian Ibo culture and engaging with the narrative of European colonialism in Africa, Things Fall Apart uses one man’s story to speak for many. It is considered the first modern African novel, and it is the first African novel published by a Western press. It has become a classic of African postcolonial literature and explores... Read Things Fall Apart Summary

Pramoedya Ananta Toer—a famous Indonesian editor, essayist, and social activist—wrote This Earth of Mankind (1980)—the first book of his series The Buru Quartet—while imprisoned in the Buru Concentration Camp following a military coup that overthrew Sukarno, the first democratically elected president of Indonesia. Incarcerated for 14 years and prevented from having writing material, Toer memorized the books of his series and recited them to his fellow inmates each day until his release in 1979. The... Read This Earth of Mankind Summary

Waiting for the Barbarians is a 1980 novel written by John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African and Australian novelist who was winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. Penguin chose the book for its Great Books of the 20th Century series, and the novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. Waiting for the Barbarians was influenced by the 1904 poem of the same name written by... Read Waiting for the Barbarians Summary

When We Were Orphans is a novel by distinguished Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, originally published in the UK in 2000. Set largely in England and Shanghai of the 1930s, the historical novel is structurally adventurous with elements of detective fiction. The plot deals with the childhood memories and the present detective work of a man in search of his missing parents, while painting a large canvass of the social systems in China and the UK... Read When We Were Orphans Summary

Xala: A Novel was written by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. The satirical work was originally published in France in 1974 and released in the United States in 1976. In 1975, it was adapted into a film directed by Sembène. The postcolonial novel deals with the aftermath of Senegal’s formal independence from France on August 20, 1960—two years after the country had become a republic. Senegal celebrates its Independence Day on April 4... Read Xala Summary

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