News and Interviews

Featured Video: Jennifer Welsh's CBC Massey Lecture Predicts More Trouble Ahead

Every year, House of Anansi Press, CBC, and Massey College work with a leading Canadian thinker to publicize and publish the CBC Massey Lecture. Subjects vary widely, but have touched on topics cultural, political, and philosophical. From identity to debt, AIDS research to citizenship, it's one of the most interesting collections of non-fiction writing in the world. Past lecturers include Margaret Atwood, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, and even Martin Luther King Jr

This year's lecture and the accompanying book, Jennifer Welsh's The Return of History, is an examination of the world we now live in - one of increasing, rather than decreasing, economic disparity, refugee crises, and violent conflicts that leave both historians and pundits uncomfortable about the direction in which we are heading. 

The title is a riff on Francis Fukuyama's famous 1989 essay, "The End of History", which posited that the end of the Cold War signalled a new era, calling it "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government". Welsh's thesis is that rather than having achieved the calm that Fukuyama predicted, the world is sliding back into the conflicts of the past. It's a fascinating, if alarming premise, and Welsh's clear and contextualized ideas are now available in a video series from House of Anansi. 

You can see the full series with Welsh (which is presented in five parts - the above video is the first one) by visiting House of Anansi's YouTube page

Tags