Over the past few years, I have often found myself frustrated with the limitations of my view of the world, with the relative narrowness of my perspective on our current political moment. I am, for better and for worse, a citizen of that part of the world we call the West, and as someone who can read with any degree of fluency only in the English language, my view of the world is largely, and necessarily, informed by the media of the anglophone West.
And so even on those occasions when I do read about the affairs of the world beyond Europe and America, it tends to be mediated through a resolutely western perspective. There are times when I experience this as a frustration with whatever media outlet I happen to be reading – as I did, for instance, earlier this week, reading The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman’s tortured and frankly moronic comparison between the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Minneapolis and Hamas in Gaza. More often than not, though, it’s a frustration with myself for paying attention to the wrong things, in the wrong places.
And neither do I, as a writer, exonerate myself from any of this: my columns in this newspaper are necessarily informed by what I am reading and thinking about, and therefore tend to reflect the very narrowness with which I find myself frustrated.
This sense of wanting to look farther afield, to reorient my perspective, is informed by a growing sense that the world is changing with perplexing speed, and that the poles of global power are shifting. It is perhaps the most obvious possible thing to observe, of our historical moment, that the postwar alliance of European and American interests has been irredeemably fractured, and that we are witnessing new symptoms of that fracture every day. It might be even more obvious still to say that the larger story, the story against which that somewhat parochial western drama is unfolding, is the decline of American empire, and the inexorable rise of China as the global superpower.
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I have been thinking about all of this, and in some small but significant sense beginning to address it, through regular reading of a new and consistently interesting magazine called Equator. The magazine, launched last October, is based in London, which strikes me as both ironic and entirely appropriate, given that city’s history as a centre of western colonial power and its more recent identity as an outward-looking cosmopolis. Its founding team are a global bunch, and an impeccably pedigreed one, too: among them are the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra; the Sudanese-British journalist Nesrine Malik; the Indian non-fiction writer Samanth Subramanian; the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid*; and the American magazine editor Jonathan Shainin. (Shainin previously worked at The Guardian, where he founded the The Long Read, the supplement devoted to longform journalism, before becoming the paper’s opinion editor.)
Equator, which covers not just politics but also art and culture, positions itself as an alternative, and a kind of implicit rebuke, to an Anglo-American media its founders view as having largely failed to live up to the current moment. In a “What We Stand For” statement on the magazine’s website, the editors refer to a collective “moment of moral despair” amid the slaughter in Gaza, and the magazine’s conception as a response. It’s a combative document – almost, in fact, a good old-fashioned 20th-century-style manifesto.
“The genocide in Gaza has destroyed what remains of the illusion that the West should determine the future for the rest of the world,” they write. “The United States and its satellites, having taken the centre stage of history to great fanfare after the fall of the Soviet Union, are now exiting in disgrace. A profound disorientation is the fate of the intellectual class that was created and sustained by the ‘American Century.’ ... For us the, the widely proclaimed ‘end of the West’ is not the end of the world; the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination.”
As broad as the strokes might be, it is energising to witness the founding of an explicitly left-wing publication – of all things, a magazine! – with such a sense of political purpose and intellectual vigour. And the content itself has, to an impressive degree, borne out this foundational sense of purpose. Naomi Klein on the antifascist foundations of surrealism. An essay by the novelist Hisham Matar on images of cruelty and the limits of power, from the Renaissance paintings of Titian to videos from Gaza posted on social media by members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The historian Nikhil Pal Singh on the Trump administration’s enactment of a borderless American power, from Venezuela to Minnesota. A personal essay by the Mongolian writer Soyonbo Borjgin about censorship and self-censorship under the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the media.
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Equator, so far at least, has tended to prioritise more long-form essayistic writing: the sort of pieces that take time to research and write, and involve a great deal of editing. But in recent weeks, there have been forays into other, more nimble and reactive forms, including, this week, an illuminating interview with Iranian-born academic Arang Keshavarzian about the protests in Iran, the murderous response of the regime, and the strange re-emergence of Reza Palahvi, the Shah’s son, as a potential political contender.
Amid the relentless anxiety and uncertainty of the present political moment, certain intimations of a global future can be glimpsed. The disintegrating mental faculties of the US president – as palpable, in its way, as that of his immediate predecessor – are, along with his increasingly stupid and reckless actions, painful to observe; but it’s possible to see that some good might come of the chaos, not least in its hastening of Europe’s decoupling from a collapsing American hegemony. And we might, in time, become less relentlessly focused on our own particular region of the world, as the gravitational pull of its once central body loses its force. In the meantime, there is Equator.
*This article was amended on February 3rd to correct a misspelling of Arang Keshavarzian’s name and to correct Mohsin Hamid’s name and nationality
