Boycott of Israeli cultural institutions
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Boycott of Israeli cultural institutions

Published in Cultural Commentary

More than 1,000 authors have launched a boycott of Israeli publishers complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and Culture Matters supports the boycott. These writers and authors have pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions. The letter (published below) represents the largest commitment to cultural boycott ever made by the global literary community against the Israeli cultural sector:

We, as writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers, publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century. The overwhelming injustice faced by the Palestinians cannot be denied. The current war has entered our homes and pierced our hearts.

The emergency is here: Israel has made Gaza unlivable. It is not possible to know exactly how many Palestinians Israel has killed since October, because Israel has destroyed all infrastructure, including the ability to count and bury the dead. We do know that Israel has killed, at the very least, 43,362 Palestinians in Gaza since October and that this is the biggest war on children this century.

This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months. Israeli officials speak plainly of their motivations to eliminate the population of Gaza, to make Palestinian statehood impossible, and to seize Palestinian land. This follows 75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Culture has played an integral role in normalizing these injustices. Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.

We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement. This was the position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there.

Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:

A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel's occupation, apartheid or genocide, or

B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.

To work with these institutions is to harm Palestinians, and so we call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge. We call on our publishers, editors and agents to join us in taking a stand, in recognising our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.

Initiating Signatories,

Fatin Abbas
Taiba Abbas
Nuzhat Abbas
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Amy Abdelnoor
Sandy Abdelrahman
Idil Abdillahi
Mohamed Abdou
Hassan Abdulrazzak
Omar Abed
Jordan Abel
Aria Aber
Charlotte Abotsi
Alex Abraham
George Abraham
Susan Abulhawa
Maan Abutaleb
Samuel Ace
Tendayi Emily Achiume
Pip Adam
Brittany Adames
Juana Adcock
Amanda Addison
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nancy Agabian
Pragya Agarwal
Tolu Agbelusi
Zena Agha
Silvia Aguilera
Aamina Ahmad
Rukhsana Ahmad
Naylah Ahmed
Shahnaz Ahsan
Cina Aissa
Jim Aitken
Amna A. Akbar
Kaveh Akbar
Sascha Akhtar
Vasiliki Albedo
Ammiel Alcalay
Kathleen Alcott
Aleksander Aleksander
Michelle Alexander
Kristen Vida Alfaro
Farah Ali
Kazim Ali
Hassan Ali
Najwa Ali
Sabrina Ali
Salma Ali
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Kip Alizadeh
San Alland
Ashleigh Allen
Esther Allen
Rachael Allen
Lulu Allison
Ekbal Alothaimeen
Yazan Al-Saadi
Yassin Alsalman
Hanan Al-Shaykh
Lilliam Eugenia Gómez Álvarez
Miguel Álvarez Sánchez
Raquel Alvarez Sanchez
Hatem Aly
Alia Alzougbi
Justice Ameer
Suad Amiry
Sarah Amsler
Tahmima Anam
Anthony Anaxagorou
Darran Anderson
Sophie Anserson
Abi Andrews
Chris Andrews
Noah Angell
Callum Angus
Aileen Angsutorn
Sinan Antoon
Raymond Antrobus
Marni Appleton
Gina Apostol
Laura Arau
Nilson Araujo de Souza
Farhaana Arefin
John Manuel Arias
Julia Armfield
Amy Arnold
Mirene Arsanios
Ayan Artan
Claire Askew
Marigold Atkey
Polly Atkin
Jennifer Atkins
Jacqueline Atta-Hayford
James Attlee
Matthew Austin
Makram Ayache
MiMi Aye
Sarah Aziza
Hajjar Baban
Indie Laras Bacas
Tareq Baconi
Danielle Badra
Valérie Bah
Bilal Baig
Priya Bains
Jennifer Baker
Jo Baker
Nikkitha Bakshani
Sita Balani
Emily Balistrieri
Ibtisam Barakat
Frank Barakat
J. Mae Barizo
Lana Barkaei
Tim Barker
Frankie Barnet
Cassandra Barnett
Damian Barr
Emily Barr
Ania Bas
Lana Bastasic
Liam Bates
Rim Battal
Alyssa Battistoni
Jumana Bayeh
Richard Beck
Sarona Bedwan
Hannah Beer
Henry Bell
Kobby Ben Ben
Ronan Bennett
Ariana Benson
Sophie Benson
Laura van den Berg
Franco Berardi Bifo
Bennet Bergman
David Bergen
Chase Berggrun
Jay Bernard
Susan Bernofsky
Sarah Bernstein
Omar Berrada
Marie-Helene Bertino
Rahul Bery
Deepa Bhasthi
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Fatima Bhutto
Rose Biggin
Joanna Biggs
Irene Bindi
Maya Binyam
Beverley Birch
Brandi Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird
Farid Bitar
Adelheid Bjornlie
Sin Blaché
Grace Blakeley
A K Blakemore
Nicholas Blincoe
Selina Boan
Lindsey Boldt
Yolanda Bonnell
Naomi Booth
Patricia Borlenghi
Houria Bouteldja
Felix Chau Bradley
Gracie Mae Bradley
Katie Bradshaw
Solomon Brager
Nathaniel Braia
Beth Brambling
Dionne Brand
James Bridle
Elizabeth Briggs
Octavia Bright
Victoria Brittain
Rula Jones Brock
Marianna Brooker
Jennifer Brough
Jericho Brown
Kerry Donovan Brown
Simone Browne
Natascha Bruce
Anca Bucur
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Judith Butler
Alex Caan
Troy Cabida
Amina Cain
Danny Caine
Felicity Callard
Jen Calleja
Anje Monte Calvo
Marta Fernández Campa
Rosa Campbell
Olga Campofreda
Paul Cannon
Anthony V. Capildeo
Anna Carastathis
Peter Carey
Daragh Carville
Brad Casey
Maya Caspari
Joyoti Grech Cato
Fesal Chain
Jody Chan
Vajra Chandrasekera
Jade Chang
Hayan Charara
Jos Charles
Ruth Charnock
Amit Chaudhury
Cathy Linh Che
Alexander Chee
Melissa Chemam
Anelise Chen
Ching-In Chen
Lisa Hsiao Chen
Tim Tim Cheng
Heerahn Cheon
Selim-a Atallah Chettaoui
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
Anne Chisholm
Satinder Kaur Chohan
Mona Chollet
Cat Chong
Chrysanthemum
Bora Chung
Gina Chung
Tice Cin
Jo Blair Cipriano
Susannah Clapp
Eliza Clark
Caro Clarke
John Clifford
Dave Coates
Lucy Coats
Lindsey Collen
Bea Colley
Peter Collins
David Colmer
Joey Connolly
Rachel Connolly
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Swithun Cooper
Hannah Copley
Jonah Corne
Jacqui Cornetta
Rio Cortez
Mary Costello
Glen Coulthard
Leah Cowan
Molly Crabapple
Raymond Craib
Mac Crane
Andy Croft
Paul Ian Cross
Tess Cullity
Harriet Cummings
Doreen Cunningham
Faye Cura
Grace Curtis
Lauren Aimee Curtis
Sarah Cypher
Selma Dabbagh
Sky Dair
Gabriel Dalpiaz
William Dalrymple
Alain Damasio
Jared Davidson
Danielle Davis
Jenny Fran Davis
Roisin Davis
Gloria Dawson
Aviah Sarah Day
Eccy de Jonge
Saraid de Silva
Ren Dean
Tricia Dearborn
Siddhartha Deb
Claire Dederer
Sharanya Deepak
Michael DeForge
Trynne Delaney
Lauren Delphe
Jemma Desai
Sharan Dhaliwal
Junot Díaz
Natalie Diaz
Susannah Dickey
Ellen Dillon
Brian Dillon
Nicola Dinan
Merima Dizdarević
Farzana Doctor
Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Ted Dodson
Anna Doherty
Michael Donkor
Sarah Dowling
Nicky Downes
Erin Doyle
Ian Dreiblatt
Sarah Driver
Sophie Drukman-Feldstein
OmiSoore H. Dryden
Sharon Duggal
Lisa Duggan
Cyrus Dunham
Natalie Dunn
Roisin Dunnett
Ben Durham
Carolina Ebeid
Caroline Eden
Martin Edmond
Chikè Frankie Edozien
Ben Ehrenreich
Deborah Eisenberg
Nidhi Zakaria Eipe
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Nadine El-Enany
Tala El-Fahmawi
Yara El-Ghadban
Walid El Hamamsy
Mirna El Helbawi
Mohammed El-Kurd
Mirna El Mahdy
Yasmin El-Rifae
Inua Ellams
Zetta Elliott
Maia Elsner
Lucie Elven
Soula Emmanuel
Jonathan Emmett
Shareefa Energy
Mercedes Eng
Annie Ernaux
Ninar Esber
Martín Espada
Nick Estes
Sarala Estruch
Diana Evans
Gareth Evans
Percival Everett
Eve L. Ewing
Keeyana Ezna (Kezna Dalz)
Allegra Le Fanu
David Farr
Shon Faye
Sonia Fayman
Melissa Febos
Silvia Federici
Elaine Feeney
Anita Felicelli
Camonghne Felix
Jordan Felkey
Megan Fernandes
Ferrao
Julie Finidori
Susan Finlay
Samuel Fisher
Emily Fitzell
Fernando A. Flores
Genessee Floressantos
Angela Flournoy
Omar Foda
Ashley Fortier
Sesshu Foster
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Dan Fox
Lorna Scott Fox
Livia Franchini
Micha Frazer-Carroll
Indigo Freeman
Ru Freeman
Talia Freimanis
Sasha Frere-Jones
Connor Frew
Temim Fruchter
Diane Fujino
Oliver Fugler
Elizabeth Fullerton
Aja Gabel
Ellen Gabriel
Kay Gabriel
Mary Gaitskill
Harry Gallon
Shannon Galpin
Jay Gao
Angela Garbes
Marc Garcés
Suzanne Gardinier
Ed Garland
Camryn Garret
Florence Gauthier
Karl Geary
Joma Geneciran
Puloma Ghosh
Nadene Ghouri
Annie Gibson
Harry Josephine Giles
Cassia Gaden Gilmartin
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Fausto Giudice
Nicholas Glastonbury
Carly Gledhill
Rory Gleeson
Sinéad Gleeson
Brannavan Gnanalingam
Katie Goh
Em Goldman
Martin Gollan
Noam Gonick
Gia Gonzales
Elisa Gonzalez
Avery Gordon
Sylvia Gorelick
Molly Gott
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Niven Govinden
Marlowe Granados
Greg Grandin
Charlotte Geater
Aoife Greenham
Madeleine Grive
Faïza Guène
Amba Guerguerian
Gioia Guerzoni
Guy Gunaratne
Anna Gunin
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Susila Gurusami
Kevin Guyan
Marilyn Hacker
Saleem Haddad
Swapna Haddow
Subhi Hadidi
Jessica Hagedorn
Simon Haines
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Robert Hamberger
Mohsin Hamid
Omar Robert Hamilton
Isabella Hammad
Mohammed Hanif
Kaoutar Harchi
Githa Hariharan
Matef Harmachis
Malcolm Harris
Will Harris
Alison B. Hart
Markus Harwood-Jones
Sabrin Hasbun
Mir Shamsedin Fallah Hashemi
Sarvat Hasin
Tobi Haslett
Janet Hatherley
Owen Hatherley
Alice Hattrick
Naomi Head
Sophia Hembeck
Nadia Henderson
Catherine Hernandez
Etzali Hernández
féi hernandez
Liz Heron
Trevor Herriot
Kit Heyam
layla-roxanne hill
Matt Rowland Hill
Afua Hirsch
Emma Hislop
Bára Hladík
Jean Chen Ho
Hermione Hoby
Jennifer Hodgson
Annie Hodson
Rachel Holmes
Cathy Park Hong
Claire Hong
Amelia Horgan
Tansy E. Hoskins
Andrew Hsiao
Jane Hu
Sally Huband
Mike Huett
Caoilinn Hughes
Femi Hughes
Kelly X. Hui
William Rayfet Hunter
Anton Hur
Amber Husain
Emteaz Hussain
Lizzie Huxley-Jones
Jungeun Hwang
Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
Mayada Ibrahim
Sabrina Imbler
Saba Imtiaz
Paul Ingram
Mie Inouye
Anne Irwin
Burhana Islam
Hanan Issa
Deepa Iyer
Mira Jacob
Harriet Jae
Sarah Jaffe
Nasim Marie Jafry
Wren James
Leslie Jamison
Randa Jarrar
Tom Jeffreys
Nozizwe Jele
Mike Jempson
Mike Jenkins
Claire Jimenez
Ha Jin
Jessica Gaitán Johannesson
Jessica Johns
Daisy Johnson
Evan Johnson
Galen Johnson
Jenny Johnson
Rebecca May Johnson
Caitlin Johnstone
El Jones
Ellen E Jones
Owen Jones
Kira Josefsson
Fady Joudah
Laura Ellen Joyce
Helen Jukes
Park min jung
Loll Jung
Jennifer Kabat
Dina Ahmed Kabil
Elaine Kahn
Shubnum Khan
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Donia Kamal
Anjali Kamat
Meena Kandasamy
Malav Lanuga
Balsam Karam
Ghada Karmi
Raghu Karnad
Yumna Kassab
Karim Kattan
Arthur Kaufman
Sophie Monks Kaufman
Navjot Kaur
Rupi Kaur
Sharada Keats
noam keim
Robin D.G. Kelley
Kaie Kellough
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Niyati Keni
Peter Kennard
Louise Kenward
Emily Kenway
Jennie Kermode
Amy Key
Porochista Khakpour
Muhammed Ali Khalidi
Hannah Khalil
Amyra El Khalili
Shamus Khan
Taran Kahn
Tawseef Khan
Michelle Khazaryan
Lydia Kiesling
Crystal Hana Kim
SJ Kim
Shilo Kino
Ana Kinsella
Gary Kinsman
Blue Kirkhope
Alyson Kissner
Vanessa Kisuule
Naomi Klein
Cecilia Knapp
Rosalie Knecht
Lisa Ko
Claire Kohda
Jamil Jan Kochai
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Gowri Koneswaran
Amelia Kraigher
Kate Kremer
Michelle de Kretser
Nancy Kricorian
Charlot Kristensen
Mark Krotov
Zaffar Kunial
Hari Kunzru
Rachel Kushner
Grace Kwan
Abdellatif Laabi
Souad Labbize
Armelle Laborie-Sivan
Catherine Lacey
Daisy Lafarge
Marion Olharan Lagan
Sabinha Lagoun
Jhumpa Lahiri
Léopold Lambert
Asma Lamrabet
Charles Lang
Michael Langan
Patrick Langley
Sarah Lasoye
Davide Gallo Lassere
Andrea Lawlor
Tim Lawrence
Kiese Laymon
Jessica J. Lee
Matthew Lee
Soje Lee
Sara Lefsyk
Eugenia Leigh
Raven Leilani
Mica Lemiski
Ben Lerner
Céline Leroy
Jonathan Lethem
Anna Leventhal
Sophie Lewis
Daryl Li
Erika Olofsson Liljedahl
Sasha Lilley
Thea Lim
Ursula Lindsey
David Ross Linklater
Jazmine Linklater
Robert Liu-Trujillo
Mikaela Loach
Kirsty Logan
Amber Lone
Layli Long Soldier
Cherise Lopes-Baker
Alan Pelaez Lopez
Kyle Carrero Lopez
Nora Loreto
Roberto Lovato
Lia lovenitti
Rebecca Lowe
Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Emily Lee Luan
Canisia Lubrin
Melissa Lucashenko
Valeria Luiselli
Ed Luker
Len Lukowski
Tariq Luthun
lisa minerva luxx
Alexis Lykiard
Eadaoin Lynch
Rosa Lyster
Maatin
Helen Macdonald
Robert Macfarlane
Carmen Maria Machado
Kama La Mackerel
Weston MacLeod
Guy Maddin
Simon Maddrell
Michael Magee
Sabrina Mahfouz
Michael Malay
Ayisha Malik
Rachel Malik
Emanuela Maltese
Bo Mandeville
Preethi Manuel
Olivier Marboeuf
Spyros Marchetos
Miriam Margolyes
Lauren Markham
Francisco Márquez
Andrew Martin
Manjula Martin
Ariél M. Martinez
Vanessa Martina-Silva
Ahmed Masoud
Patricia Massay
Noreen Masud
Hisham Matar
Sarah Thankam Mathews
Ioanna Mavrou
So Mayer
Robyn Maynard
Kelli McAdams
Tim McCaskell
Sophie McCreesh
Breanna J. McDaniel
Jen McDerra
Martine McDonagh
MK McGrath
Fiona Kelly McGregor
Jon McGregor
Lisa McInerney
Kimberly McIntosh
Oisín McKenna
Rachel McKibbens
Matthew McNaught
Cassie McQuater
Don Mee Choi
Susana Medina
Shafik Meghji
Jamal Mehmood
Pauline Melville
Maaza Mengiste
Juliana Mensah
Lucy Mercer
Iman Mersal
Lina Meruane
Philip Metres
China Miéville
Jon Lindsay Miles
Iulia Militaru
James Miller
John Douglas Miller
Maggie Millner
Nina Millns
Bridget Minamore
Adrian Minckley
John Mingay
Frankie Miren
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Pankaj Mishra
Peter Mitchell
Hussein Mitha
Monique Mojica
Kagiso Lesego Molope
Nadine Monem
Adam Moody
Nathan Alexander Moore
Caroline Moorehead
Alan Morrison
Ghazal Mosadeq
Maria Motunrayo Adebisi
Hannah Moushabeck
Michel S. Moushabeck
Dwi Rahmad Muhtaman
Neel Mukherjee
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Alex Mullarky
Lorna Munro
Nora Lester Murad
Sahar Muradi
Rob Myatt
Sara Mychkine
Taiyo Na
Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi
Noor Naga
David Naimon
Ambika Nair
Ron Naiweld
Taghreed Aref Najjar
mélie boltz nasr
Susheila Nasta
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem
Jennifer Neal
Nawara Negm
Cecily Nicholson
Shanice Nicole
Nic Nicoludis
Kerem Nisancioglu
Rémy Ngamije
Joshua Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mark Nowak
Clara Nubile
Matteo Nucci
Jonathan Nunn
N S Nuseibeh
Alice Nuttall
Téa Obreht
Richard O'Brien
Anthony Christian Ocampo
Mark O'Connell
Meaghan O'Connell
Sinéad O'Hart
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Nathalie Olah
Daniel José Older
Lola Olufemi
Hussein Omar
Ondjaki
Troy Onyango
Andrés N. Ordorica
Chibbi Orduna
Ian O'Reilly
Kenan Orhan
Amanda Orozco
Fiona O'Rourke
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
Alice Oswald
Peter Oswald
Naomi Paik
Patty Paine
Allison Tamarkin Paller
Angela Palm
Gianfranco Pancino
Stan Papoulias
Ajay Parasram
George Parker
Jen Parker
Morgan Parker
Heather Parry
Shailja Patel
Vikki Patis
K Patrick
Lara Pawson
Martha Paynter
Jeda Pearl
Jonathan Pelham
Telka Pelova
Nicola Penfold
Lee Pepper
Rebecca Perry
Zoë Perry
Holly Pester
Gordon Peters
Torrey Peters
Andreas Petrossiants
Richard Phoenix
Laura Di Pietro
Alycia Pirmohamed
Hazel Jane Plante
Edward Plett
Casey Plett
Joanna Pocock
Justine Podur
Ethel Baraona Pohl
Clare Pollard
Gabriel Polley
Max Porter
Nina Mingya Powles
Pratyusha
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Cameron Price
Devon Price
Rosie Price
Joy Priest
Alexandra Pringle
Mira Ptacin
Jasbir Puar
E.R. Pulgar
Derecka Purnell
Marcia Lynx Qualey
Michael Quille
Linda Quiquivix
Zaynah Qutubuddin
Jamali Rad
Monika Radojevic
Nat Raha
Sue Rainsford
Monisha Rajesh
Shivanee Ramlochan
Ravinder Randhawa
Rahul Rao
Clarie Ratinon
Vidyan Ravinthiran
Kate Rawles
Cathy Reay
Jini Reddy
Francesca Reece
Martin Reed
Will Rees
Dave Rendle
Nausicaa Renner
Sarah Resnick
Emma Reynolds
John Reynolds
Jamie Richards
Geoffrey Rickly
Keith Ridgway
Charlotte Lydia Riley
Claude Rioux
Chrissie Roberts
Luke Roberts
Corey Robin
Tom Robinson
Sallyanne Rock
Monique Roffey
Fariha Róisín
Sally Rooney
Sophia K Rosa
Jacqueline Rose
Michael Rosen
Jordy Rosenberg
Gabriel Rosenstock
Tracy Rosenthal
Andrew Ross
Leone Ross
Margaret Ross
Noah Ross
Rhonda Roumani
Heather Rounds
Anita Roy
Arundhati Roy
Ryan Ruby
Chloe Ruthven
Hugh Ryan
Reda Sadiki
Eun Sae (검은새)
Kholod Saghir
Burcu Sahin
Ron Sakolsky
Trish Salah
Aida Salazar
Sara M Saleh
Edward Salem
Mohamed Salmawy
Seif Salmawy
John K Samson
Julia Sanches
Varli Pay Sandi
Nasia Sarwar-Skuse
Ayşegül Savaş
Julian Sayarer
Bobuq Sayed
Laura Scarmoncin
Robin Beth Schaer
James Schamus
Maya Schenwar
Sarah Schulman
Kit Schluter
Bhakti Shringarpure
Susan Schuppli
Claire Schwartz
Cam Scott
Grayson Scott
Walter Scott
Waithera Sebatindira
Kenza Sefrioui
Namwali Serpell
Richard Seymour
Sarah Shaffi
Hamid Darwish Shahkaly
Durre Shahwar
Elhum Shakerifar
Kamila Shamsie
Charif Shanahan
Solmaz Sharif
Azad Ashim Sharma
Kashif Sharma-Patel
Cason Sharpe
Christina Sharpe
Clare Shaw
Dan Sheehan
Farhana Sheikh
Shela Sheikh
Jack Shenker
Tyler Shipley
Parini Shroff
Nikesh Shukla
Terisa Siagatonu
Michèle Sibony
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Safiya Sinclair
Sunny Singh
Hamed Sinno
Leona Skene
Johanna Skibsrud
Ryan Skrabalak
Tara Skurtu
Paulo Slachevsky
Alice Slater
Zeina Sleiman
Gillian Slovo
Mike Small
Nichola Smalley
Deborah Smith
Courtney Smyth
Rhona Snelling
Jess X. Snow
Oki Sogumi
Addy Rivera Sonda
Natasha Soobramanien
Ahdaf Soueif
Rae Spoon
Nicola Spurr
Gina Srmabekian
Cath Staincliffe
Alina Stefanescu
Rebecca Stoehill
Degna Stone
Anna Della Subin
Olivia Sudjic
Jaz Sufi
Smokii Sumac
Marsha Swan
Brandon Sward
Kate Sweeney
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Neferti Tadiar
Madiha Tahir
Rana Tahir
Tanaïs
Ginny Tapley Takemori
Preti Taneja
Rebecca Tamás
Ben Tarnoff
David J Tate
Sasha Tate-Howarth
Annie Taylor
Astra Taylor
Joelle Taylor
Nicholas Taylor
Brian Teare
Saeed Teebi
Janne Teller
Matthew Teller
Emily Temple
Jocelyn Tennant
Jacques Testard
Xuanlin Tham
Charles Theonia
Kai Cheng Thom
Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow
Ashley Thorpe
Andrzej Tichý
Lena Tichy
Jenevieve Ting
Shze-Hui Tjoa
Tara Tobler
Miriam Toews
Owen Toews
Naima Tokunow
Jia Tolentino
Samuel Tongue
Mohamed Tonsy
James Tookey
Justin Torres
Joshua Gutterman Tranen
Jessica Traynor
Shash Trevett
Addie Tsai
Birukti Tsige
Tori Tsui
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Aviva Tuffield
Tony Tulathimutte
Lestyn Tyne
Oana Uiorean
Jack Underwood
Emily Unwin
Hanna Thomas Uose
Simran Uppal
Ryan Vance
Angelique Tran Van Sang
Alejandro Varela
Joe Vaughan
MG Vassanji
Françoise Vergès
Katherena Vermette
Margaux Vialleron
Cecilia Vicuna
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Ursula Villarreal-Moura
Hannah Vincent
James Vincent
Shola Von Reinhold
Clara Vulliamy
Ocean Vuong
Lindsay Wagner
Mirza Waheed
Isabel Waidner
Rinaldo Walcott
Emma Wallace
Nicole Wallace
Joanna Walsh
Zukiswa Wanner
Patricia Sarrafian Ward
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
Noah Warren
Rosie Warren
Raffi Joe Wartanian
Bryan Washington
Nadia Wassef
Michael Waters
Max Weiss
Robert Welbourn
Joma West
Imogen West-Knights
Adam Weymouth
Jessica Widner
Rachel Wiley
Elvia Wilk
Frances Williams
Hattie Williams
Lara Williams
Luke Williams
Jenny Heijun Wills
Mia S. Willis
Kitty Wilson
Lorraine Wilson
jiaquing wilson-yang
James Wilt
Gabriel Winant
Jan Winter
Milo Wipperman
James Womack
Marian Womack
Adam Woods
Jan Woolf
Jacob Wren
Kyle Lucia Wu
Karen Wyld
Frank Wynne
Jessica Widner
Robin Yassin-Kassab
Kieran Yates
Jane Yeh
Jade Young
Eris Young
Nariman Youssef
M.O. Yukael
Juliano Zaffino
Abi Zakarian
Kate Zambreno
Javier Zamora
Haifa Zangana
Nazanin Zarepour
Hannah Zeavin
Ghassan Zeineddine
Alia Trabucco Zeran
Aisha Zia
Rasha Zidan
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Luck
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Luck

Published in Poetry

Luck

by Nick Moss

One of those days when hope seems like
A delusion you should have long since outgrown.

Al-Aqsa Hospital bombed for the 7th time
And all the tents in the camp of displaced people
Sheltering in its grounds, all the tents, they catch fire
And there’s a rain of ash, and a kid gives an interview
Talking about what it's like watching his mother and sister
Burn to death, and a volunteer surgeon says ‘It’s a horror show here.
Honestly, sometimes I feel like this is not real life,
That this can go on, and this degree of suffering
Is allowed to happen in this world.’
And what he means is that they are dying
While the world flicks through channels on the remote,
And where can you take the victims
With third degree burns on 80% of their bodies
When the ICUs are all just bomb-debris?

And we’re sitting in a pub in Chalk Farm and it’s about as atmospheric as a disused car park toilet and then in they come, a shouting, buzzing , pill-eyed, fast-chatting group, two couples, another friend and a Staffie, and I kind-of-vaguely recognize them, small time Somers Town dealers, Oxford Street shoplifters, good-hearted, would give you a snatched sandwich from Pret and a can of brew if you were goin hungry, all dressed up in knock-off Camden Market designer Amiri T shirts an Versace man-bags and ever-hopeful baggy shorts in mid-October an they bring an optimistic noise through the door with them and the Staffie runs round to every table lookin for love and crisps an one of the lads shows you how it can shake hands an all of a sudden the barman’s put on Sweet Female Attitude's ‘Flowers’ an the group’s up an dancin in the space between the bar an the door so that anyone comin in is automatically embroiled in the dancin an the rush of pop-garage charm, all sass and bassline, an then we’re all up, an then there’s somethin that runs through us just a kind of vibe, a winking thumbs-up joy of what would you call it? Working-class recognition? A look that says I know you an I’ve got you and we’re not finished yet, not done, not done, never beaten, we’ll be the revenant horde callin for justice from century to century til we run these streets like we own this space between bar and door, and yes life is shit, and yes there’s always someone face down boot stamping on their neck havin it worse but here mate have one of these an

With a little bit of luck
We can make it through the night

a year has passed time flies and we with it like moths towards lights and fire
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

a year has passed time flies and we with it like moths towards lights and fire

Published in Poetry

a year has passed time flies and we with it like moths towards lights and fire

by michal lowkain

when you eat
and when you sleep
when you walk
and when you do your shopping
when you dance in the morning
and when you cry later
when you can’t see the ends
and yet you make them meet

when your thoughts are too heavy to bear
when you love your children
when you love the child in you
when you mind your head
when you mind the step
when you try to grow
when you try to connect

when you understand
and understand nothing
when love tears you apart
and you’re not even in love
when you make love
and when you just dream about it
when you enjoy yourself
and when you don’t
when you wish to change
and when you do nothing
when you want to live
and when you want to die

when we do all the things
and many more

and when i’m writing these words right now
(and probably when you read them after some time)

apartheid israel
still murders civilians in gaza

and

IT’S GENOCIDE!

A distant glare
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

A distant glare

Published in Poetry

A distant glare

by Farid Bitar

A distant glare
Peace out
Peace never comes
Nothing is making sense
I keep repeating to myself
I keep forgetting
I light a candle every day
367 days and counting
The slaughtering of civilians
Never stops
Now they are burning humans
In the shelter zones

Revenge is ugly
Retribution is around the corner
Revise and rewind

I keep staring into space
I keep trying to get over
I keep thinking it's a bad dream

Zionista and genocide joe
Donating troops
To perfect the army machine
To conquer the rubble
To combat the resistance
To kill some more
Before an exit

I call my sister near Bethlehem
She tells me the END is near
Had no words to tell her
Tears falling on the receiver

My nation is in a quagmire
My emotions are done
My state of being is massacred

A friend poet sends me
Reconciliation
I reply back
What time is it
Did l just wake up from my
Nightmare

The storyline never stops
The news keeps getting worse
The slaughtering continues
Now they are invading
Lebanon
To kill more civilians
To claim Hezbollah is an enemy state
Always a Hamas member
When they are bulldozing the camps
They are never done
The dead are way too many
To blame

Sing the song: Are you
Are you are you
Staying silent too
While the children
Are dying for you
Far away from you

Are you are you
Watching Palestine
Burn to the ground
Are you are you
Living your own life
While Beirut burns to the ground

Farid Bitar's new collection of poetry, Testament / Sajél, is available here.

The Tenementals: ‘Songs of Protest: Scotland, Spain, and Santiago’
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

The Tenementals: ‘Songs of Protest: Scotland, Spain, and Santiago’

Published in Music

Brett Gregory interviews Professor David Archibald (University of Glasgow), from The Tenementals

BG: Hi, I'm Brett Gregory, and this is Professor David Archibald from the University of Glasgow, founder of the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals.

DA: Brett, it's good to be back in touch. It's been quite a year for The Tenementals; last year we released our first single, Die Moorsoldaten or Peat Bog Soldiers; and, out of the blue, we were contacted by the people who oversee the archives of the concentration camp in which the song was first performed on the 27th of August 1933. The reason the archivists were in touch was because they wanted the song to be placed in the archive that they have about the camp, and they've got an archive about that song because it's been covered by a number of various artists previously. They also said some very moving words about the two versions that we had made –one English, one German. To receive this news was overwhelming

Then we produced another cover, a song by Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and singer, who was murdered during Pinochet’s coup against the elected government in Chile in 1973. We were doing an event at St. Luke's which is a beautiful venue in the East End of Glasgow on the 15th of September last year, almost 50 years to the day when Victor Jara's body was found dumped in a street. He'd been arrested during the coup, he was held in a makeshift prison, and in the prison the guards broke his fingers to stop him playing the guitar. They shot him dead, and they dumped his body. And because we were doing an event which was 50 years and one day after the death or the finding of Victor Jara's body, we wanted to do something which kept his memory alive so we sang ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. It's a song which is about remembering really, and it's also about people involved in the struggle to build a better world, and sometimes the sacrifices that are involved in that.

Monica Queen is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful singer who's maybe known quite well in Glasgow and Scotland. I'm not so sure how well she's known out of Scotland, but her voice is extraordinary, and we asked her if she would sing it, and she was up for it. Our drummer Bob Anderson drums with Monica and her partner, Johnny Smiley, is the mixing maestro on our recordings, so it seemed like a good idea. So that night I said a few words about Victor Jara, and why we were going to sing that song, and then introduced Monica and our guitarist, Simon. She sang it in Spanish, and there were 500 people in the room, and time seemed to stop it.

We wanted to recreate something of that moment. We did that in the spring, but we're very slow and our rhythm is pretty irregular, so we're just bringing out a video now. We went down to the River Clyde, and we shot it. And the original song is about someone remembering, someone goes to a factory, so we went to Glasgow's industrial landscape, and we filmed a little video. We don't want to be overly romantic, but when we listen to the songs of Victor Jara, we think that in some ways he walks with us. Every time Victor HJara's songs are sung it's a blow against the people that would kill the writers, the poets, the dreamers, the people who try and imagine a different world.

The album's called ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’: it's coming out with Strength in Numbers records in November.

The first track we brought out wasA Passion Flower’s Lament, and it's about the men from Glasgow who travelled to Spain, and who died in the Spanish Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. It's written from the perspective of a statue that sits on the banks of the River Clyde which commemorates the members of ‘The International Brigades’. The statue is named after a very famous Spanish communist politician commonly known as ‘La Pasionaria’. It was erected in the 70s and it's become an important part of Glasgow’s cityscape. The Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, is a contested historical period.

There was a period in that war called ‘The Civil War within the Civil War’ where different leftist groups were, you know, fighting each other, but they weren't just arguing with each other about the contents of their paper, they were shooting each other, and one of the people that was caught up in that was a University of Glasgow student, Bob Smillie, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the Aragon front, and he died in a prison cell in Valencia. He was arrested by the forces on the Republican left. He was in the process of leaving Spain and he was beaten up and died. It's murky, you can't be exact but it's possible, perhaps probable, that he died at the hand of the people who were on the same bloody side as him.

The song asks whether we should be worrying about the difficult aspects of the conflict when, as the song says, ‘Once more the jackboot seeks to recruit’. What do we do about the troubling aspects of anti-fascist history at the moment when the fascists are coming back? The song leaves that open. Perhaps art poses questions rather than answers them, but also what the song seeks to do is to resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Spain, to focus on a moment of revolutionary possibility. If it happened once it can happen again. The Spanish ruling class are fearful of the memory of the Spanish Revolution, precisely because they know that better than anybody else.

Peter Pike or Pink with Sarah Martin

Peter Pike or Pink with Sarah Martin

The song is sung beautifully by Jen Cunnion who sings most of the songs on the album, but Jen is not always available so we've worked with other fantastic singers as guest vocalists: Belle and Sebastian’s Sarah Martin has sang live with us a few times, but she also recorded one of the tracks on the album called ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, about the events in Scotland known variously as the 1820 ‘Radical War’, the ‘Radical Rising’ or the ‘Scottish Insurrection’. Therese Martin also sings on the song so there's two Martins on that song. No relation other than they're both great singers. 1820 witnessed a period in Scotland of sustained civil unrest, a general strike, and aborted armed uprising; and it culminated with its leaders sentenced to death while others were deported.

During the lockdown I took a trek up to Sighthill Cemetery where there's a monument dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the rising. The memorial lists those who were executed but also those who were deported to Australia, and one man's name is listed as Thomas Pike or Pink. I thought, now we don't even know his name, and that that was interesting in the sense that 1820 sits somewhat uncomfortably in the Scottish national consciousness. For some it's too radical, for some it's too nationalist, for some it's a bit murky because the British state was involved. There's a poetic connection with the uncertainty around one of the participants’ names as much as there is around the uncertainty of what that the event is, and what it means. We added our own artistic license to the mix when we tweaked the title a little.

It's the second track in the album, and the album will be released in November. It contains nine tracks. There's two other singles that are likely to come out: ‘The Owl of Minerva’ imagines what the owl associated with Hegel's aphorism, The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk’.  What would it be like if The Owl of Minerva was living in the Finnieston Crane, one of the magnificent titan cranes that sits on the Clyde? In that song she flies over the city, commenting on what she encounters and reflecting on the historical process. And we're also bringing out a single called ‘Universal Alienation: We’re not Rats’ which riffs off a celebrated speech by Jimmy Reid, who was a major trade union figure in Glasgow in the 70s.

Thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust who gave us some money which subsidised some of the production costs of the album, we're able to put on a free to enter album launch, so we're going to be having that on the 27th of November in Oran Mor.

And we've started working on Volume II. We've written a few songs, there's a song about hope, there's a song about the city's connections with the anti-apartheid struggle, and other material which is quite close to our hearts which will come out in good time.

We don't have time to focus much on political party leaders; we focus on what we can do, where we are. We need to pressurise them of course in Britain and Scotland and then elsewhere, and perhaps there's no more pressing subject on which to pressurise the leaders of the British State at the minute than on the question of their participation in the genocide in Palestine. We've participated in many of the marches in Glasgow as we could have. We're absolutely alive to the fact that while that event takes place in Palestine, Britain is actively supporting that event, and I think the scale of that event hasn't not really been made clear yet. There was an article recently by Professor Sridhar who's the chair of global Public Health at the University Edinburgh which built on the report in the Lancet which had estimated that the death count in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people, and she extrapolated that methodology, and argued that if the conflict continued until the end of 2024 then the total deaths could be in the region of 335,000, a third of a million people, the killing of one third of 1 million from a population of 2 million. I mean what is the word for that?

So what can we do? Little, we march, we put pressure on our leaders, we bear witness to their participation in genocidal war crimes, and we call them out at every opportunity.

The Tenementals is what I've called a wild research project and some of the band members are academics. It's got one foot in the university but for a project like The Tenementals to have a life, to breathe, it has to move to its own beat. The Tenementals has to run on the logics of a rock band rather than the metricised logics of the neoliberal university. Art has to be accountable to itself rather than the control mechanisms that come with working in higher education, so that's really the only way that The Tenementals can be alive. And I've been working on developing this thinking around the concept of Wild Research. We’re having a symposium on Wild Research, at Stephen Skrynka’s amazing Revelator Wall of Death in September where different artists and academics, filmmakers, writers will come together and discuss the whole the idea of Wild Research.

So my work with The Tenementals since astride my work as an academic. I'll be heading back to Cuba later in the year with my Catalan comrade and colleague Núria Araüna Baro to work on the feminist filmmaking project which we've started -  it's been a busy, busy time.

Thank you, Brett, for taking some of your time out. I know that you, as I said earlier, you've been working on your filmmaking projects, the Kafka short, and working on your own writing, and your blog and so on, and all power to you. We need as many radical voices out there as we can. We all make a modest contribution, but combined those modest contributions hopefully add up to something more, so let countless radical voices bloom.

You can find 'The Tenementals' on Spotify here, and on social media here: @tenementals

Reactionary Reflexivity: Sealing the Iron Dome on Media Coverage of Gaza, Part One
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Reactionary Reflexivity: Sealing the Iron Dome on Media Coverage of Gaza, Part One

Part One of two articles on the modern media, by Dennis Broe. Image above: The New York Times: Is Any of Their News Fit to Print? 

There was a time, before postmodernism had atrophied and before it simply became a formal textual strategy for ignoring what is going on in the world, when one of the early postmodern bywords “reflexivity” connoted a kind of fun and carefree field of play with a satirical overtone that made all kinds of intertextual relations possible.

In today’s media field, however, reflexivity is a trick used to seal the discussion and make sure that the limited media boundaries of discourse are never breached. In literature there is the rise of narcissism in autofiction (Karl Ove Knausgård’s A Death in the Family) or of an infinite play of incestuous signifiers in metafiction (Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night).

In film and television, the earlier exposure of the wires of the cinematic apparatus has given way to complexification as a trope that conceals the fact that there is no actual referent outside the apparatus. Thus, Marvel’s Loki maps the possibilities of the online world of diverging timelines which do nothing but reify and promote Facebook’s virtual and now failing (as is the Marvel formula) Meta World.

Loki serie

Loki and Meta World - limited, not infinite 

This predilection though is most overwhelmingly dominant in the mainstream corporate media’s coverage of what is happening in Gaza. The New York Times continually uses the trick of linking as an assertion of proof to stories by… The New York Times. A recent article purported to be perplexed at, despite the supposed groundswell and its attendant pressure, why the Writer’s Guild had not condemned the October 7 uprising. However, the “groundswell” and the pressure was mainly coming from…The New York Times. The media bubble validates itself and makes it seem that it is part of an overall movement when in fact the stories originate from the same source or sources, all behind a hermetically sealed bubble.

Reflexivity, no longer a playful and potentially satirical device, has hardened into simply a means of a minority maintaining power and acting like they are the majority, as now most of the people in the U.S., from no matter what party, favour a ceasefire in Gaza. That fact is seldom acknowledged in the corporate media bubble, as CNN initially forbid the word “genocide” from ever being emitted on its soundstages, and as the New York Times in a memo to its staff equally forbade “genocide” as well as “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.”

NYTBias The Intercept SCREEN

The News Not Fit to Print 

Those words were only then adopted and in a limited and “italicized” format when it became clear that most of the American public, the media audience, was resisting the one-way coverage. The boundary around which “civilized” media discussion is permitted is sometimes called ‘The Overton Window’.

The window may shift depending on public opinion but there are narrow limits beyond which corporate media will not allow. To suggest for example that October 7 was not a terrorist attack but rather, as George Galloway described it on YouTube, “a prison breakout”; or to point out that Joe Biden soiled himself as he used D-Day to campaign for more war; or that Biden’s emergency aid port in Gaza was used by the Israelis in a mass slaughter in Gaza, where the Israelis besides killing and wounding over 1000 people freed 4 hostages but killed 3 others, all these are outside the window.

If they do make their way into corporate media coverage they do so as an aside dropped in in the middle of a discourse that rationalizes the other actions: i.e., D-Day where the Germans, the cause of the invasion, are invited and the Russians, who largely rid Europe of the Nazis, are not, is a glorious event; that Biden’s port is a humanitarian endeavor; and that the “daring” Israeli raid was a courageous act akin to the Mossad’s freeing of the hostages at Entebbe instead of a war crime.

The Times will often backtrack, as they did on the Israeli attack on the Palestinian camp in the hostage release story and the next day ‘reassess” what actually went on, but the impression is formed in the first 24-hour news cycle. If, as in this case, the media files an assessment the next day, it is then countered, as was this story, a day later in a return to the “heroic” tale, most likely after the outlet has been chastised by its State Department masters. The Overton Window in the case of coverage of Gaza is an Israeli Iron Dome through which little alternative coverage penetrates.

The Perversion of Reflexivity

The coalescing of self-referential trends in postmodern thought was outlined in Robert Stam’s Reflexivity in Film and Literature in 1985. Stam’s work, describing what he termed this “other tradition,” drawing on literary texts including Rabelais, Lawrence Sterne and his “ur text” Cervantes’ Don Quixote, focused attention on the process of “the construction of the fictive ‘world’ through writing [and no longer] through consciousness.

Besides the playful aspect of these references, Stam argued that the political thrust of this tradition, carried forward most notably by Brecht and which in film and literature has continued to expand, is that by “drawing attention to the process of the construction of the fictive world,” these works “lay bare the material construction of the text.” By pointing to their own textual constructs, they “break with art as enchantment.”

The argument is that reflexive examples – and in cinema Stam’s ur texts are by Jean-Luc Godard – “interrupt the flow of narrative in order to foreground the specific means of literary and filmic production through such methods as “narrative discontinuities, authorial intrusions, essayistic digressions, stylistic virtuosities.” The accumulation of these strategies is “playful, parodic and disruptive” demystifying “our naïve faith in fictions while opening new vistas for literary and cinematic expression as a whole in a double movement of “celebratory fabulation and demystifying critique.”

Stam’s argument is highly nuanced, acknowledging that there is a perennial tension between illusionism, though here presented negatively as “substantiated fact,” and reflexivity which “points to its own mask and invites the public to examine its design and texture.” Aware also of the fact that “the reflexivity of a certain avant-garde is eminently co-optable and easily reappropriated by the hegemonic culture” and that forms of television reflexivity including commercials and that employed by the direct address of the audience by TV news “rather than trigger alienation effects” “often simply alienate.”

The book’s appearance in the mid-80s was at the time when these techniques were passing over into the mainstream, being employed on network TV for example in the constant debunking of the staid devices of late-night talk shows by NBC’s David Letterman and Showtime’s meta series It’s Gary Shandling’s Show about a comedian named Gary Shandling who lived in Sherman Oaks with actual friends and neighbors such as Tom Petty popping in to say hello.

The trend toward reflexivity though has hardened. Instead of a progressive deconstructive device, the movement of “the process made visible,” now part of its own genre termed metafiction, is often seen, instead of expansionary, as “a symptom of literary exhaustion.” And not creativity but narcissism is the description now most often levelled at this hardening of literary reflexivity.

It was, as one critic put it, as if the novel had no more territory to develop and so it turned inward on itself in a kind of “spectre of infinite regress.” This is a frenzy of a style whose most salient characteristic is not its exposure of the means of literary production but rather its construction of an interior world hermetically sealed from the actual one.

What is driving this regress and retreat is a failure to confront the triple dangers of an ever more rapid escalation toward nuclear war, unheeded climate catastrophe, and ever increasing inequality, marked by an attack on the working and middle classes under the claim of fighting inflation and the creation of more low paying jobs in a condition now called “in work poverty.”

Trump and Biden

No wonder that (bourgeois) artists are now “committed only to endless, self-indulgent textual play,” which in the end is a mirror of the sealed-off quality of the Western, imperialist, settler-colonial world that is even now being surpassed and isolated by the Global South in forms such as the BRICS alliance. In a sense metafiction, sometimes seen as a harbinger of the end of the novel, is, as is the candidacy of the geriatric defenders of an ever more oligarchic “Free World” Trump and Biden, also a harbinger of the end or exhaustion of the West and in particular of Western bourgeois democracy.

This aesthetic practice, in an era of increasing financialization and ever more rapid deindustrialization, has its “reflexive” echo in the economic practice of stock buybacks where companies instead of productive investment pump up the value of their own stock to further reward already wealthy shareholders.

These parallels also help to explain why literary and cinematic metafiction has broken through to enter the privileged mainstream of a public consciousness now imbued with these values.

Whereas for Stam, “A socially strategic reflexivity…can lay bare the devices of art while exposing the mechanisms of society,” that moment may have passed into simple reaffirming of a closed world.

 db2    db

David Letterman, before and after

Take the aforementioned examples of David Letterman and Gary Shandling. Letterman’s rabid critique and exposing of the money-grubbing, penny-pinching methods of General Electric’s ownership of NBC was bounded by his not getting The Tonight Show host job. When he then was awarded the CBS equivalent, the satirical exposing element of the reflexivity disappeared and hardened, as in metafiction, into complicated games playing.

It must be noted that Shandling, who never got a job as a late-night host, went on to create one of the most vicious exposés of the vacuousness and backbiting of late night entertainment culture in The Larry Sanders Show, but here the reflexive elements of his previous series receded and the more overt satirical elements came to the fore.

In series TV production, the element of reflexivity has combined with a hardening of generic conventions to produce, with mixed results, series which reflect on their own generic construction, seen in the continual film noir clips viewed by the movie-loving detective in Sugar and the meta-references and sometimes deconstruction of cinematic depiction of the Vietnam War in the spy series about the end of that war, The Sympathizer.

While the reflexive elements harden, actual attempts to overturn the generic codes are instead discarded. Take the example of the BBC’s Channel 4 2004 series NY-LON, a romcom where in the end none of the three couplings are successful and the main romance flounders on the opposition of the bohemian female to the lifestyle of a banker. That rewriting of the genre was never pursued and the romcom promptly returned to happily ever after.

TheCurse 110 1364 RT 2400x1350

The Curse, orbiting the earth and leaving critique behind 

Perhaps the most vacuous use of the meta-reflexive trend was in the final episode of The Curse, (23) a series about the greed and hypocrisy of gentrifying land developers which instead of driving home that critique becomes simply an epic and literal flight of fancy and manages to nearly abolish what had gone before. Needless to say that bastion of bourgeois reflexivity The New York Times hailed the episode as a series breakthrough.

Conclusion: Toppling Another Postmodern Icon

There is another pillar of postmodern thought that is equally in danger of collapsing, and that is “post-colonialism.” The discipline came to the fore in the two decades of the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, a time of US unipolar dominance. Post-colonialism itself, whose founding tenet is that there is no separating the imbrication of the colonizer and the colonized, is a kind of compromise formation. The push of Global South scholars for equality was met by a pushback by Anglo and Western scholars fearful that this area of study would leave no place for Western intellectuals. So was born, in the wake of and, partially as a reaction to, 40 years of revolutionary activity, an imperative to put studies of the colonial center back at the heart of the debate.

What is happening though is similar to what Freud claimed with Dora: reality is intervening and curing the neurosis. The emergence of BRICS and the resistance of the Global South, first to being enlisted in the Ukraine war and then in general to being made a part of three global wars against Russia, China and Iran that would decimate the world and halt the drive for development of those in the majority of the world, is hastening a questioning of whether in key ways the Global South may go its own way and throw off the yoke of colonial “imbrication,” with the new key word being “sovereignty,” the ability of each of these countries to pursue their own path to development.

New anti-colonial movements in eg Niger and New Caledonia are calling “imbrication” into question as these areas demand control of their own resources, uranium in the former and nickel in the latter. As they do the Western media responds by disingenuously attacking these movements as “undemocratic.”

The New York Times following Le Monde lauded an amendment proposed by New Caledonia’s colonial overlord Emmanuel Macron to allow more French citizens in the territory to vote, which the Times described, “a move toward full democracy.” What the story leaves out is that the move is a trick to extend the franchise to more French voters in order to shut out the demands of the Kanaks, the indigenous movement, for independence and keep the nickel, crucial for future development of batteries, under French control.

Here media reflexivity and post-colonialism go hand in hand, with both operating to sustain Western power as that power is rapidly decaying and becoming increasingly irrelevant in ever more expanding economic regions and intellectual spheres of the world.

Tyrant
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Tyrant

Published in Poetry

Tyrant

by Pete Godfrey, with image above by Martin Gollan

Never have we seen one quite like this,
Empty of respect or feeling, King Disdain,
Terror his watchword, bombs his calling card,
Antipathy towards those of different faiths.
No god or devil could have dreamed him up
Yet here he is, a human wrecking-ball
Adamant Gaza’s made rubble, Palestinians too.
Hubris will fell him, stop his sorry project dead,
Unveil delusions there are lesser beings (I speak as a Jew). 

Jaffa
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Jaffa

Published in Poetry

Jaffa{used to be a byword for a succulent orange

by Steven Taylor

Before you say I’m antisemitic

He wasn’t Jewish

But there was a child in our class
at St. George’s (kindergarten)
who kept stabbing other girls
and boys with leaded pencils

It didn’t seem to bother him
how much pain he caused

The teacher warned him
repeatedly, explaining

how children other than himself
had feelings, nerve endings

Eventually she became so
exasperated with his behaviour
she took away his pencils

told him,
read a book instead of stabbing

So why does Britain
supply arms to Israel?

Whose Name?
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

Whose Name?

Published in Poetry

Whose Name?

by Mike Jenkins 

Whose name on the bomb?
Is it yours or is it mine?
Is it the men & women on the lines?
The factory owner or the shareholder?

Is it that genial politician we voted for?
Or the one who only cares for his own future?
Is it the madman calls himself a ruler?
The pilot, tank commander, drone controller
With their coordinates & radar?

Is it the trader , the dealer ,
The captain of the ship which carries it?
Is it the people who cheer,
Or the reporter who fails to trace it back?

Is it the names of everyone who let it happen?
A bomb the size of our planet.

*

Mike Jenkins writes:

This is one of the poems in For Gaza, a new collection of poems. "How can you write about an atrocity of such enormity?" some ask about the genocide in Gaza since last October. To which I'd reply - " How can I not write about it?"

It has consumed my waking ( and dreaming) thoughts and visions since Israel began its merciless assault on the people of Gaza. When I have found most of the mainstream media appallingly biased and ready and willing to go along with the Israeli government line, we sought out Al Jazeera, the only channel with reporters on the ground , many of whom paid for the truth they told with their lives.

I have been here before and wrote several poems about Palestine for my book Nobody's Subject over a decade ago. I have marched for Palestinian freedom for many years and especially recall the time thousands of us marched towards the Cardiff City stadium when Wales were playing Israel in a Euro qualifier. I stood with protesters as both family and friends passed by on the way to the game and I stood alone outside afterwards listening for sounds of us scoring. For a member of Y Wal Goch, this was hard. But the constant suffering of those people of Gaza, the daily tales of utter brutality by the IDF fully sanctioned by Western governments leaves my sacrifice looking tiny and trivial.

As with all my work , the oppressed people are at the very centre of my concerns and particularly the boy Mohammed with his kite-making, the poet Mosab Abu Toha and the small girl Hind Rajab trapped in a car and surrounded by Israeli tanks. I also wanted to include poems about other war experiences: the effect of the Troubles on my wife and, from our visit last year to Krakow and Auschwitz, my reactions to the sheer horrors of the past there.

I was very much influenced by reading the great US anti-war poet Brian Turner and his book Phantom Noise. The wars live through us and around us and, if we do not speak out then they will surely suffocate us. For many , the whole myth of the democratic, civilised West has been torn apart by the realisation that our so-called reasonable politicians and commentators could actively condone a modern holocaust. I experienced this on a smaller scale in Northern Ireland, where security services killed civilians with impunity.

I never thought this pamphlet would happen; I had so many knockbacks. But I was looking everywhere except in front of me and I'm wrth fy modd (as we say in Welsh) that For Gaza is a Red Poets publication. It is available from Mwnci Coch / Red Monkey on Facebook, or directly from Mike Jenkins at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. All proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestine.

'Gaza: This Bleeding Land', by John Wight
Monday, 11 November 2024 14:33

'Gaza: This Bleeding Land', by John Wight

Published in Fiction

John Wight presents an extract from his new book, Gaza: This Bleeding Land, which tells the story of this prolonged tragedy through the eyes of two rival combatants. The novel is currently available from Amazon and all good bookstores and shops in the US and UK. It comes in hardcover, softcover, and eBook formats.

GAZA: THIS BLEEDING LAND

Death will overtake you wherever you may be, even in high towers

- Quran 4:78

I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life that both thou and thou and the seed may live.

- Deuteronomy 30:19

CHAPTER 1

Five days and four nights we've been waiting, and still they don't come. Instead they attack us from the air like cowards, pouring their hatred down on the heads of our villages and towns, killing our children. God be praised, is there nothing we can do except wait? It feels as if we are fighting a giant machine instead of men. The Zionists own the skies, the sea, even the air we breathe it seems.

But, then, we have our sacred cause of freedom which gives us courage and, inshallah, we shall be victorious.

Hamza beside me has finally stopped talking. And even if it's only while we eat our dates and bread and drink our tea, it is a welcome respite from his constant chattering. Hamza, like Mustafa, is young and inexperienced. This is their first experience of combat and I recognise in their bravado an attempt to conceal their fear. They keep telling me how excited they are to be given the honour of fighting the enemy, of how happy they are to have been selected for martyrdom. I have heard such talk before. There is no shame in being afraid to die. There is only shame in allowing your fear to conquer you. We will have to watch Hamza in case, like Mustafa, he does something rash and get us all martyred before we get a chance to confront the Zionists.

Even so, we mustn't be impatient with them. We were all like Hamza and Mustafa at one time, interested only in fighting without thinking. Too many of us have sacrificed their lives too cheaply as a result. Things have improved now that many of us have received training from our Lebanese and Iranian brothers. The discipline it has brought to our ranks gives me confidence.

Every day the Zionists bring more tanks and guns up to the edge of Gaza. When will they enter? When will we get the chance to make them pay for oppressing and killing our people; stealing and

occupying our land? Five days spent listening to the explosions of their bombs and missiles, the roar of their jets over our heads is enough. Our commander doesn't think it will be long now. They cannot attack us from the air forever. Sooner or later they will have to come and fight like men. And when they do then we will see.

Before we left the assembly point our dear imam told us that all the jets, helicopters, tanks and missiles in the world cannot crush the human spirit when it is placed in the service of a just cause, he said. As long as God is on our side we shall prevail. Many of us have been martyred, yes, and many more will be martyred before the day of victory comes. But what is death to a Palestinian? We are a people for whom death remains as close as the next breath. Ever since the Zionists invaded our land it has been this way.

No, the death of one Palestinian is of little consequence when compared to the life of Palestine. This is what our oppressor with their Western clothes, cafes, bars and decadent lives could never understand. They are happy to kill for their luxuries and comforts, but less willing to die for them. Else why fear us like they do? Else why attack us from the air and cower inside the protection of tanks and bulldozers? Why?

But better not to think of them now. Soon enough they will come. Then I will think of them. Then and not before.

Why are we still waiting, freezing our asses off in this shithole?

Sergeant Weiss has just told us the assault's been delayed again. The sappers found more mines on the approach, he says, and we have to wait for them to be neutralised before we can start. More bullshit. Who planned this fucking operation anyway? Some clown in Tel Aviv, no doubt.

Rabbi Solomon came to our position earlier and exhorted us to remember the many periods in history when the Jews faced extinction. He described this operation as another fight for our survival. I agree. It's about time we taught those terrorist dogs a lesson. For too long they've been firing rockets at our towns and people in the south. And for too long we've stood back and done nothing serious to stop them. But soon — soon those fucking savages will pay a price they will never forget.

I can't lie though — I've never experienced combat and despite myself, I'm nervous. Ben, next to me, thinks it'll be a piece of cake. Nothing more than a mopping up operation after the airforce gets done bombing the shit out of them. I hope he's right. I hope that all we have to do when we go in is count bodies and bodyparts.

Crazy to think that just two weeks ago I was in Haifa on vacation, drinking cold beers on the beach. Before leaving to report for duty, Rachel told me my old man had called to pass on his love. When she told me I shrugged it off, more concerned over him managing to get my number than anything else. I wish now I'd taken the opportunity to try and patch things up with him. We haven't spoken since Rachel and I moved to Israel three years ago. I wonder how things are back in Brooklyn? I bet nothing's changed in the old neighbourhood. Nothing much, anyway.

It's just gone nine. Simon will be tucked up in bed sleeping. Poor little guy had a cold last time I saw him. Hopefully by now it's gone and he's back to himself again. Only nine months old yet the way he's grown you'd think he was three. I love going round to Rachel's to see him. Soon as this shit is over I'm going to focus on meeting someone new and having more kids. I'd like to have three more. Yes, three more sounds about right.

Anyway, shit, I'm freezing my fucking ass off here. How long? How long before we get going and get this fucking thing over with?

Come on.

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