Geography Archives: Colombia

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 […]

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 […]

I took a good look at Obama in the famous “Summit Meeting”. Sometimes he was overcome by tiredness, he unwillingly shut his eyes but, at times, he slept with open eyes. The Cartagena Summit was not a meeting of a trade union of misinformed presidents, but a meeting among official representatives of 33 countries of […]

A trend is taking hold across Canada of working class resistance to the capitalist crisis and attacks by governments and corporations on workers’ rights and the social wage.  Library workers in the city of Toronto and transit and university workers in Halifax recently went on strike, as did daycare workers in Quebec.  Workers at Air […]

Terror, political persecution, arbitrary detention, and militarization have long dominated Colombia.  State-mediated killings now run into the tens of thousands.  More than four million rural inhabitants have been displaced from sustenance-providing land.  In the face of seemingly endless suffering, however, there is now a better chance for peace in Colombia. Having recently announced that its […]

Cory McCray, Founder of the Young Trade Unionists, and George Hendricks, Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) Rep and Vice President of the Young Trade Unionists (YTU) If you head down to the IBEW Local 24 Union Hall Auditorium on W. Patapsco Avenue in Baltimore on the first Tuesday of any month, you’ll encounter a meeting of […]

Give me a page and I’ll give you a monument, leaning haphazardly like a staggering drunk, a lopsided photograph, a mirror tilted forward to the feet; like an off-center catwalk, brown paper bag strut in an empty alley way, stale six am whisky breathing on cold marble steps. I’ll sing you a jingle slurred to […]

For as long as Wall Street has stood for greed and unearned profits there have been those who have stood against it. In 1890, the leader of the Knights of Labor railed at “the control of our financial affairs by the bulls and bears of Wall Street.”  Six years later, a spokesman for New York […]

Despite the cars, the cabs, the buses, despite the feet shuffled together on subways, the screaming on the sidewalks and the bar-music blaring out of doorways — this is also a city of silence — the silence of a woman with an outstretched hand, clasping onto the smooth round beads of a rosary tangled around […]

  Daphne Berdahl.  On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany.  Edited by Matti Bunzl.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  xx + 166 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35434-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22170-4. On the Social Life of Postsocialism; Memory, Consumption, Germany is a posthumous collection of Daphne Berdahl’s essays, written over the course of […]

It is becoming widely acknowledged that the leading ideas of some of the most prestigious late-20th-century economists (such as Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers in the American government) are outmoded and that a new paradigm of economics is needed.  Part I of this essay will focus on two issues which we think it has to […]

  James Rodger Fleming.  Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.  Columbia Studies in International and Global History Series.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.  Illustrations. xiv + 325 pp.  $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14412-4. In Fixing the Sky, James Rodger Fleming traces human efforts to control weather and climate from ancient […]

  Rating Agency: “Don’t take it wrong, but some companies are paying me to come here to tell you that you have no future.” Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 14 July 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | […]

Iran is a different case because the country already had a revolution in 1979.  Even those Iranians who are in the opposition called for reform within the system rather than revolution.  It is not a climate of fear that explains the survival of the Islamic Republic but the absence of revolutionary fervour.  No state can […]

The notion of the “west”, like any such construct, has various associations depending on who is using it, where and in what circumstances.  Many people (especially in other parts of the world) tend to associate the “west” with military campaigns and foreign interventions by Nato and its leading states, the United States and Britain.  More […]

  “Friends, if you are a citizen/resident of the US, we would greatly appreciate your signature on this declaration rejecting the unilateral sanctions imposed against Venezuela this Tuesday by the US State Department.  This is a grave and dangerous move by Washington to justify further aggression against the Venezuelan people.  We need your solidarity. Please […]

Two months after the disasters of March 11, most of the rhythms of everyday life have returned to Tokyo.  Although dimmed city streets remain as daily reminders of the critical nuclear situation 140 miles north, the university campuses that were deserted over an extended spring break have refilled.  Although the earth still shivers, the anxious […]

7,500 Political Prisoners in Lockdown Colombia: students, campesinos, environmentalists, lawyers, researchers, trade unionists, human rights defenders . . . imprisoned under judicial farces Areito Imagen is a collective of artists.  This poster was published on the collective’s blog on 25 April 2011, in solidarity with Joaquín Pérez Becerra.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi […]

On May Day, remember: 60% of the trade unionists who are murdered in the world are murdered in Colombia by paramilitary tools and the armed forces and national police of the government. Solidarity is urgently needed. Areito Imagen is a collective of artists.  This poster was published on the collective’s blog on 28 April 2011.  […]

On behalf of the American University Anthropology department, I am deeply honored to welcome you all to AU, and to the Latin American Solidarity Coalition’s “Conference to Build a Stronger Movement to End US Militarism and the Militarization of Latin America.” It’s exciting personally to be involved in such an important event — after all, demilitarization of the Americas is now more important than ever — and I sincerely hope that we can continue this relationship and work to increase AU’s involvement with the event in the years to come, not only because it would save us money on the facility fees, but more importantly, because there is a deep thirst among AU students to become more engaged in this kind of solidarity work and because, I believe, the AU community can contribute to it in important ways. This conference is a perfect fit with all of the best aspects of this university, and those aspects — the dedication to community involvement, to social action and public intellectualism — always need reinforcing.