Subjects Archives: Culture

  Interview with Salim Lamrani, French professor, writer, and journalist, specialist on the relationship between Cuba and the U.S., and author of the recently published book Cuba. Ce que les médias ne vous diront jamais (Paris: Editions Estrella, 2009). You have just published a new book about the treatment the communications media give to Cuba. […]

  Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays both on the defensive, theism is again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline.  This follows from the very meaning of “atheism.”  Only those who used “atheism” as a term of abuse meant by it the exact opposite of religion.  Those who professed themselves […]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a writer, teacher, historian, and social activist, is Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at California State University. You have been deeply involved in Indigenous peoples’ activism in the United States.  What is the current situation of Indigenous people in the US economically and politically? Decolonization is a difficult and long-term […]

  For Gabriel Péri and d’Estiennes d’Orves, as well as Guy Moquet and Gilbert Dru The one who believed in heaven The one who didn’t Both loved a beauty Imprisoned by soldiers Which climbed the ladder? Which stood guard below? The one who believed in heaven? The one who didn’t? What matters the name of […]

  The essential point of M. Shahid Alam‘s book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening the book to the inscription in the frontispiece.  From the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, “You have the light, but you have no humanity.  Seek humanity, for that is the goal.”  Alam, […]

I studied with Howard Zinn at Boston University. He was my dissertation advisor, mentor, friend, tennis partner and a pillar of support for me during the eight grueling years when I fought a civil rights battle with Harvard University. Zinn’s passage is a great loss to all who knew him directly or indirectly, including the millions of people in America and around the world who were impacted by his revisionist American history written from people’s rather than elite’s point of view, his exemplary peace activism, as well as his literary works. The “old solider of the left,” as he was once described by the New York Times, was a hero of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement who spoke at thousands of rallies and sit-ins against the war in Vietnam, as well as America’s invasions of Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., always at the forefront of American peace movement.

“The Iranians have always figured out how to beat the system. . . . Even Iranians who are opposed to this government, even Iranians who are opposed to the Islamic Republic, don’t really wanna return to being a client state of the United States.” — Hooman Majd

  Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain, by Kevin Cummins, is a book of photographs of Manchester’s music scene over the last thirty years, with weighty prose by the likes of Paul Morley and Stuart Maconie, participants and witnesses all.  It was published in autumn 2009 in London by Faber. The photos […]

  A young boy sits on rusted tank tracks in the desert bordering Iran and Iraq.  His head is bowed, and he’s sobbing.  A few yards away, a dozen bearded men gather around a Shiite cleric.  The men weep as the cleric recounts the story of a fearless martyr killed during the Iran-Iraq war.  He […]

  Farzana Shaikh.  Making Sense of Pakistan.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.  ix + 274 pp.  $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14962-4. Farzana Shaikh offers a scholarly and erudite study of the competition to define and establish a “national” identity for Pakistan.  The author argues that contested visions of the religious nature of the postcolonial state […]

  The Sixth Annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, Barnard College, 5 November 2009 The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations.  Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises […]

  Judith Butler’s lecture is preceded by Eduardo Mendieta‘s introduction. A certain problem emerges between religion and public life when public criticism of Israeli state violence is taken to be anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.  For the record, I would like to make clear that some of those criticisms do employ anti-Semitic rhetoric and do engage anti-Semitic […]

  pen: $1.59 backpack: $28 used textbook: $60 dinner at home: $0.50 uc tuition fee increase: $1929 being unable to afford a college education: priceless there are some things that money can’t buy don’t let higher education be one of them Royce Choi is a student at UC San Diego. | | Print  

  “[I]t may be surprising to learn that faculty salaries are not a major component of the total costs at most universities.  For instance, at my institution, Eastern Michigan University, faculty salaries make up only 24 percent of total expenses.  So where is the money going?” — Howard Bunsis Conclusion: Yes, these are bad economic […]

  If we examine the status of women strictly from the socioeconomic perspective, this portrayal of reunification [as the silencing in which traces of the East German social, cultural, and ideological framework were erased and replaced by the Western capitalist social, economic, and cultural framework] seems apt.  Indeed, scholars persistently describe the reunification as a […]

  Abstract: This dissertation is an in-depth study of the structures, actors, and policy communities associated with U.S. public diplomacy toward Iran.  Since 2006, the U.S. government has spent more than $200 million for its Iran-related public diplomacy via State Department “democracy promotion” programs, National Endowment for Democracy, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.  These […]

  “I thought as soon as we hit the ground, we would immediately start changing things and making it better for the people, but, during the entire time I was there, we rarely did any kind of humanitarian aid missions.  They have a lot of social issues that they are dealing with, like poverty and […]

  In 1992, I was a thwarted, guilt-ridden and depressed revolutionary, living underground with my lesbian partner and two-year old daughter in St. Louis.  I was part of a tiny group that had gone underground at the beginning of the 1980s, responding to the collapse of the mass movements after the end of the Vietnam […]

  Click on the image to watch excerpts from Bassidji. In 2000, 16 years after my arrival in France, I decided to go back to live in Iran for a while to gain a better understanding of my country. In 2002, a combination of circumstances gave me an opportunity to attend a ceremony of national […]

  Listen to the 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture delivered by Sara Roy at the University of Adelaide on 11 October 2008: Download the text of the lecture in PDF: <adelaide.edu.au/esml/transcripts/2008/ESML-BY-Sara-ROY-2008.pdf>. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.  Trained as a political economist, Roy has […]