Each day over the next week we’ll be publishing one of the six lectures on the theme of ‘Representation of the Intellectual’ that Edward Said recorded in 1993 as part of the annual BBC Reith Lectures.
The fifth lecture is titled: ‘Speaking Truth To Power.’
Speaking Truth To Power (30 mins): MP3
Each day over the next week we’ll be publishing one of the six lectures on the theme of ‘Representation of the Intellectual’ that Edward Said recorded in 1993 as part of the annual BBC Reith Lectures.
The fourth lecture is titled: ‘Professionals and Amateurs.’
Professionals and Amateurs (30 mins): MP3
Each day over the next week we’ll be publishing one of the six lectures on the theme of ‘Representation of the Intellectual’ that Edward Said recorded in 1993 as part of the annual BBC Reith Lectures.
The third lecture is titled: ‘Intellectual Exiles.’
Intellectual Exiles (30 mins): MP3
Each day over the next week we’ll be publishing one of the six lectures on the theme of ‘Representation of the Intellectual’ that Edward Said recorded in 1993 as part of the annual BBC Reith Lectures.
The second lecture is titled: ‘Holding Nations And Traditions At Bay.’
Holding Nations And Traditions At Bay (30 mins): MP3
Each day over the next week we’ll be publishing one of the six lectures on the theme of ‘Representation of the Intellectual’ that Edward Said recorded in 1993 as part of the annual BBC Reith Lectures.
The first lecture is titled: ‘Representations of the Intellectual.’
Representations of the Intellectual (30 mins): MP3
On May 15th, while thousands of people were getting shot and gassed in the streets, the Coen Brothers (and many others) took a million dollars from Tel Aviv University, in the form of the Dan David Prize. I’m sure someone would have cared to protest, had over 15 people not been killed and hundreds injured, during the Nakba Day commemoration demonstrations, that same day.
Update (17.5.11): 21 dead, and over 200 injured.
Continue reading “Dear Coen Brothers, It’s Nothing Personal (It’s all Political)”
Like many activists, I get hoards of hate mail. As someone who’s committed to abolishing violence, whether it be peer-to-peer or on a global scale, I believe that none of us should fear exposing violence towards us, or our friends and loved ones, who don’t have the privilege to do so. In my case, I truly believe I have absolutely nothing to fear, and so I bring to you a “correspondence”, initiated by Jeffrey S Wiesenfeld, after I had sent a stencil letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees members, including himself, regarding the Tony Kushner affair. I believe this is called harassment.
Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents is an elegantly crafted elegy for the postwar consensus and a concise and erudite statement by a towering public intellectual of political wisdom accumulated over a lifetime of achivement. Its intended audience is ‘youths on both sides of Atlantic,’ who are too leery of civic engagement because of their disillusionment with politics and suspicion of government. Judt aims to invigorate their interest with challenging ideas and a practical project for political transformation. He offers no utopia, but an alternative that is ‘better than anything else to hand.’ He makes a case for social democracy, a form of government that can play an enhanced role without threatening liberties.
Judt begins with a diagnosis of the present malaise, a condition JK Galbraith described as ‘private wealth and public squalor.’ Judt finds something ‘profoundly wrong’ with an age which has made ‘a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.’ Like Oscar Wilde’s cynics, he laments, ‘we know what things cost but have no idea of what they are worth.’ With ‘growth’ as the only index of progress, politicians have been able to claim success even as inequality has reached grotesque proportions. The decline began with Reagan and Thatcher’s assault on the welfare state, but has proceeded apace both in Britain and the US under successive Democratic and Labour governments. The result is a society marked by extreme inequality and broken communities. Judt draws on the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level, to show a correlation between the extreme inequality of the American and British society and its adverse consequences on health, crime, and social mobility.
By Huma Dar
Of Civilities and Dignities
On 22 June 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, asserted that burqas (or the burqa-clad?) are “not welcome” in France, adding that “[i]n our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and that “the veils reduced dignity.” France’s Muslim minority is Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, estimated at six-million-strong. And this is just an approximation, as the French Republic implicitly claims to be post-race and post-religion via a prohibition on any census that would take into account the race or religion of its citizens. (This anxiety mirrors the brouhaha in Indian media àpropos the much-contested enumeration of OBCs or Other Backward Castes in the Indian census surveys of 2011, or the urgency to declare some spaces post-caste, post-feminist, and post-racist while casteism, patriarchy and racism continue unabated.)
Continue reading “Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial Feminisms”
WALTHAM, M
A- Today (Wednesday) Omar Barghouti, one of the leading founders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, presented at Brandeis his new book BDS: Boycott Divestment and Sanction: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. The event was hosted by Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine (BSJP) and Haymarket Books.
P U L S E 