Against Discouragement - HOWARD ZINN Interviewed by David Barsamian
Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is perhaps this country's premier radical historian. He was born in Brooklyn in 1922. His parents, poor immigrants, were constantly moving to ...
Further Reflections on Violence By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
When confronted by the usual line of questioning about the ‘totalitarian’ potential of universal truths, I’m often reminded of the following joke: a group of tourists go on holidays ...
Sri Lanka’s Common Future by Pradeep Jeganathan.
“Every prospect pleases, but only man is vile” goes the racist, colonial refrain, which is still the dominant ‘international’ framing of ‘news’ of the coveted pear...
Gayatri Spivak, Interviwed by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera: At this point in your life, in your career, how would you cast yourself? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: I have always had great difficulty casting myself, surely it is ot...
Socialism of the 21st Century
Companeros and Companeras: Permit me to bring you the most affectionate and fraternal greetings from our president Evo Morales. He has followed this continental gathering step by step, has followed yo...
THE LAWYERS AND THE OLD GRANITE BLOCK
First Historical Note by way of Prologue 'Those who sow should eat' [Jo kheray so khai] - this was the slogan upon which the radical and revered Sufi poet Shah Inayat set up, in the 18th cent...
Israel’s Bankrupt Politics
To this historian of empire, the Israeli onslaught on the captive Palestinians of Gaza strikingly recalls the tactics of colonial counterinsurgency, as recent research by Laleh Khalili at SOAS unde...
‘Scoundrel times’: Paris, Baghdad, Lahore...Interview with TARIQ ALI
Qalandar Bux Memon and Jacopo Moroni in conversation with Tariq Ali: Jacopo Moroni – Mr. Ali, we would like to begin by concen...
Janam's Commitments
On January 4, 1989, Jana Natya Manch (Janam) convened at Jhandapur village, on the outskirts of Delhi, to complete an interrupted play. Three days before, Janam began to perform thei...
To be or not to be is not the question – On Beckett’s Film
We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet) Samuel Beckett wrote just once for the cinema.&n...
LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT MASTERS.
AN INTERVIEW WITH SLAVOJ zIZEK BY OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA London, November-December 2007 1. GETTING RID OF THE BIG OTHER. OGR: It seems as if, in the end, your philo...
Human Beings and (Other) Animals
Can philosophy make room for animals? Perhaps that is the only question I want to ask in this paper. My worry is that the language of philosophy has kept us in a cage as far as animals are concerned...
My country, Left or Right (from theSamosa.co.uk)
Political hand-wringing over the ethnicity of Britain’s babies simple reveals the pervasiveness of racist attitudes Good news: the population is stabilising. The people of Britain ar...
The Violent State
Whose headless body is this Whose scarlet shroud Whose torn and wounded cloak Whose broken voice? (1) I Meditations on violence The macho encounte...
Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek has been telling lies about me. He attacked a recent book of mine, Infinitely Demanding, in the London Review of Books.[1] Since then, things have gone from ba...
Beyond the Page - Hammad Nasar on Contemporary Pakistani Art
Jan. 12, 2008 From issue 10 of Naked Punch Review Juliana Cerqueira Leite: Peter Weibel has described the curator as a 'producer' ...
"Creating Something Artful": Interview with Richard Shusterman
From Naked Punch 05.Tully Rector: Much of your work focuses on the idea of self-fashioning, the creation and shaping of oneself, as askesis. What constitutes askesis for you? Richard Shusterman: It&r...
DREAMING BETWEEN THE FRAMES
From Naked Punch: 04WW: I’ll do my best to answer them. Let’s see… Naked Punch: You've written that "the act of filming is a heroic act", because "the camera is ...
Nostalghia unto Death
FROM NP COMMUNARD: Journal of Critical Globalisation www.criticalglobalisation.com The famous Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky once described the experience of exile for a...
Blinded by race
We imagine our life to be lived through a singular journey in which we are striving for a meaningful existence. The start of this journey is predicated on the foundational idea that there is a basic b...
'Between Art and Life': NP Interview with Arthur Danto
From Naked Punch 03, Summer, 2005. NP: We’re familiar with the discontinuity between art produced before, say, the 14th century, and art produced after that period, w...
On Franz Fanon
Forward to Black Skin, White Masks By Zia Sardar. Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon, Pluto, London, 2008http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/main.pl I think it would be...
'The Politics of Aesthetics': Jacques Rancière Interviewed by Nicolas Viei...
From issue: 10.Translation by Anna PregerArt and politics N.V.: Your thought mainly revolves around mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, around a great divide defining positions and shares, determi...
Running down the wrong road
Vijay Prashad considers the regional alternative to troop escalation in Afghanistan, and suggests its neighbours are ready to take on the burden of stabilising the country - but only if the US ...
Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists?
In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou's account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of Christianity signals a number of in...
Bad Sufi
The Bad Sufi A look at the practise of Contemporary Sufism in Pakistan. It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism and Wahhabism, in ...
Vortex in Bengal.
Violence in West Bengal's western districts has reached crisis proportions. Each day, one or more cadre member or sympathizer of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM] is killed either by Ma...
Caught in Justin Lieberman’s Web: A critique, or homage, or some other t...
Something strange happened after interviewing artist Justin Lieberman for his latest exhibition, Salto Mortale, at the Bernier Eliades Gallery in Athens, Greece; I suffered a crippling ca...
British terror trial: UK collusion with Musharraf’s dictatorship
The London trial of Baloch human rights activists on trumped up terrorism charges revealed high level collusion between the British government and the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf. Prime Ministe...
Chhattisgarh: The Future of India?
NANDINI SUNDAR Chhattisgarh: The Future of India? Interviewed by David Barsamian New Delhi, India 29 November 2009 Nandini Sundar is a professor of sociology at the Delhi Sch...
Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex
Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex Images: Catarina Neto Carvalho This report is for information. &nbs...
Come back to Pleasure
Despite his image as the sober genius of high modernism, T.S. Eliot often speaks of art as essentially amusement. The poet, says Eliot, "would like to be something of a popul...
The War on Pakistanis
The War on Pakistanisby Qalandar MemonWhen empires move in on a country, they do not aim to salvage peoplefrom oppressive power structures of the native country, but to furthertheir own interests. Pak...
'Islam, Colonialism, and Resistance' - Zia Sardar
Zia Sardar Interviewed by Bux Qalandar Memon (forth-coming in NP 14 - Summer 2010). 1 - In your recent book Balti Britain you recall racist encounters that you had as a child growing...
Naked Punch sponsors Philosophy and Music Festival Of Hay
Naked Punch is a proud sponsor Philosophy and Music Festival Of Hay. 28th May - 6th June The HowTheLightGetsIn Philosophy and Music Festival at Hay program...
The Athens December Events (Ta nea dekembriana or honouring the name)
(PART OF OUR DOSSIER ON GREEK RIOTS OF 2008: FROM NP 12) Few events in recent Greek history have created such an avalanche of hermeneutical ingenuity and analytical perspicacity as ...
The New American Imperialism
Interviewed by David Barsamian MIT, Cambridge, MA 2 April 2010(Article Courtesy of Alternative Radio : www.alternativeradio.org)One of the themes that Howard Zinn tried to addre...
Aid is not a substitute for politics : unmaking Gaza as a humanitarian casu...
“The occupied territories have the dubious distinction of having become a failed state before even becoming a state.” (International Crisis Group, 2007). The international spotlight is ba...
Beirut Diary
Beirut Diary, April 2010 Walking into Beirut this spring was like walking into history. Not ancient history, necessarily, but the history of the city which is the history ...
No Catharsis in Sight: The Greek crisis revisited
Since the beginning of the year, Greeks have been pinching themselves. All of a sudden, Greece became front page news every day, everywhere. Just like 2008 made Lehman Brothers a household name, 201...
Israel’s Disease, and the Rising Kites.
On a feverishly hot day in August 2009, I walked the streets of the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem I'd waited so long to see. That day, I met families and people whose lives touched my own in s...
Interview with Felix Vogel, curator of the 4th Bucharest Biennale
After a half hour discussion with Felix Vogel, curator of the 4th Bucharest Biennale Handlung: On Producing Possibilities, I quickly forget how old he is – probably a good thing consider...
A Cypriot’s Problem, or How Not to Deal with Existential Anxiety
A Cypriot’s Problem, or How Not to Deal with Existential Anxiety Costas M. Constantinou There is an old joke that participants to Cyprus c...
Landscapes of the Green Line of Cyprus: Healing the Rift.
Landscapes of the Green Line of Cyprus: Healing the Rift. From a deep wound to a beautiful scar. The UN controlled Gree...
Mujeres Creando: rebellion, it’s your fault i’ll be happy
(from our communards at the Commune: http://thecommune.wordpress.com/) Translation of an article by Helen Álvarez Virreira about the Bolivian anarchist feminis...
Class struggle for Democracy in Thailand
Anyone who supports Democracy or Social Justice would have little difficulty in choosing sides in the current class war being conducted in Thailand. On one side we have th...
The Withered State
Disaster is the only news of the day. It was providential that a sinkhole has opened up in Guatemala. It is 100-feet deep with a circular chasm of 66 feet. An act of nature, it is felt...
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