Geography Archives: Asia

Whereas once the primitive was our savage other, today the native is the bearer of an alternative future.  In the late 1980s the Kayapo Chief Raoni, with his spectacular feathered headdress, accompanied the pop star Sting on concert tours to enlighten western audiences of the ecological disaster in the Amazon that came hand-in-hand with human […]

Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South.  The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]

  “This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality.  Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through.  When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried.  She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba.  But now she would return to Honduras as […]

And so I left Montserrat, a place of brief and merciful funerals.  She does a good burial, Montserrat — the only place in the world where the barefoot gravedigger rules.  He gets to choose the hymns sung, judge the quality of the choir’s voices, and keeps up a running conversation as he joyfully sets about […]

  The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe.  From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War.  This is a global crisis.  Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession […]

No political action can be judged outside its epoch and circumstances.  No one knows even one percent of the fabulous history of man; yet, thanks to that history, we know events that exceed the limits of the imaginable. The privilege of having known some of the people involved, including the places where some of the […]

  Samir Amin: You see, the US establishment — and behind the US establishment its allies, the Europeans and others, Turkey as a member of NATO — derived their lesson from their having been surprised in Tunisia and Egypt: prevent similar movements elsewhere in the Arab countries, preempt them by taking the initiative of, initiating, […]

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response.  “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a […]

Intersectionality as a key concept in women’s studies has up until the present proven rather durable.  Feminist journals are peppered with it and feminists use it pretty much without having to explain what they mean, the term’s affinity with feminism taken for granted and its import unquestioned.  Attend any women’s studies meeting, and sooner or […]

The search for the political truth will always be a difficult task even in our times, when science has placed in our hands a huge amount of knowledge. One of the most important was the possibility to know and study the fabulous power of the energy contained in matter. The person who discovered that energy […]

The 66-day hunger strike of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan brought overdue attention to Israel’s practice of detaining Palestinians for lengthy periods without criminal charges.  It also brought attention to the same practice in other countries, including the United States, where, as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, indefinite detention is “now firmly in place” for […]

On the evening of February 7, Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of DC public schools and the public face of the opaquely funded StudentsFirst, addressed an audience of some four thousand people at the Paramount Theater in Oakland.  The lecture was divided in three parts.  First, Rhee introduced herself and described her leadership of the DC […]

“No genuine democratic nationalist movement in the world has ever asked for any imperialist intervention.” — Aijaz Ahmad Aijaz Ahmad is a Marxist critic in India.  Prabir Purkayastha is a member of the Delhi Science Forum.  Video by NewsClick (15 February 2012).  See, also, Prabir Purkayastha, “Why Syria Matters: Interview with Aijaz Ahmad” (27 November […]

“But see how quickly the slave of yesterday is straightening his back, how the spark of liberty is gleaming even in his half-dimmed eyes” (Lenin 1905 [1963]: 541). Lenin and freedom — it is perhaps a jarring juxtaposition for many.  Was not Lenin the harbinger of what is occasionally called the most dictatorial and authoritarian […]

“We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’  We’ve got to fight until we overcome.” — Malcolm X “A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt.  A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On the […]

People in the United States may not be as rabidly anti-immigrant as we’ve been led to believe. An article posted on the Center for American Progress website in December, “The Public’s View of Immigration,” summarizes five recent U.S. opinion polls.  Authors Philip E. Wolgin and Angela Maria Kelley find that while the media and the […]

Speech at the Occupy Oakland Rally, 28 January 2012 “This Land!  Don’t you feel it?  Doesn’t it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them — as if it must be clinging to their corpses — some authenticity. . .” Those are the words of […]

a This is the full-text of the introductory remarks made by the author at the Fourth Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy on 20th January 2012 at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. I woke up this morning to the chirping sounds of the swallows.  Arundhati Roy seems to have brought in those love-birds that […]

One state or two?  Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements?  Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism?  The questions — regarding vision, strategy, and analysis — produce sharp cleavages on the Left.  Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be.  And they remain […]

With the war in Iraq now officially over and the Occupy Wall Street movement less visible, life in New York was expected to return to normal.  Instead, several recent passersby in Manhattan’s financial district have reported seeing thousands of deceased Iraqi civilians taking up residence at Zuccotti Park.  The park served for two months in […]