Subjects Archives: Literature

  • Samandal: Picture Stories from Here and There

      What is Samandal?  Samandal is about comics, a trilingual publication dedicated to comics from the region and abroad that comes out quarterly in Arabic, English, and French.  All the comics in Samandal are published under a Creative Commons license.  And how does Creative Commons change commons?  To answer that, we need to look at […]

  • The Chair Not Taken

      A tale of politicians, seats, and struggles in a parliament far, far away. . . . Script, Design, and Animation by Zach Cohen.  This video is his final project at the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Israel.  Click here to view other works by Cohen. | Print  

  • Iran Sanctions: An Obsession Explained in Five Acts and a Poem

      Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma.  To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]

  • Greece: Explosive Debt

      A time bomb of interests on the debt, threatening to explode the edifice of Greek economy propped up by an IMF package. Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.  This cartoon was featured on the home page of Rebelión on 16 June 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | […]

  • Two, Three, Many 1960s

    The global Sixties began in Tokyo on June 15, 1960, with the death of Michiko Kanba, an undergraduate at Tokyo University.  On the night of her death she had joined a group of fellow university students at the front of a massive demonstration — 100,000 people deep — facing off against the National Diet Building. […]

  • The Fine Old English Gentleman

      The Fine Old English Gentleman New Version (To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners) I’ll sing you a new ballad, and I’ll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate; When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev’ry mistress, pimp, […]

  • Ikhras: Exposing House Arabs and House Muslims

      Logo designed by Carlos Latuff About Ikhras “Ikhras” is classical Arabic for “Shut Up,” which is “Inchab” in Iraqi, “Sakkir Boozak” in Levantine Arabic, or “Intam” in the Arabian Peninsula.  Ikhras was inspired by the Arab and Muslim “activists” and “representatives” that hijacked our identities and name for their own self-aggrandizement and in furtherance […]

  • Israel’s “Operation Make the World Hate Us” Enters Bold New Phase as Jerusalem Post Editor Releases Video Mocking Dead Flotilla Activists

      “Israel does not need enemies: it has itself.  Or more precisely: it has its government,” writes The New Republic‘s Leon Wieseltier in a bitingly titled column, “Operation Make the World Hate Us: The Assault on the ‘Mavi Marmara’ Was Wrong, and a Gift to Israel’s Enemies.” It’s not just an Israeli government initiative.  Operation […]

  • Reading Bourdieu in Algeria

      Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments.  Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.  282 pp.  $35.00 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 978-0-8032-1362-3. Pierre Bourdieu is unequivocally one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century, having influenced a strikingly wide range of […]

  • The Mural Speaks

    The Rachel Corrie Foundation andBreak the Silence Mural Project co‐presentThe Mural Speaks Come celebrate the completion of this dynamic, interactive mural at a free event at 6:00 p.m., Saturday, May 8 at the Labor Temple building, corner of State and Capitol, downtown Olympia.  The Mural Speaks event is more than a mural commemoration; it’s a […]

  • It Is Deep (don’t never forget the bridge that you crossed over on)

      Having tried to use the witch cord that erases the stretch of thirty-three blocks and tuning in the voice which woodenly stated that the talk box was “disconnected” My mother, religiously girdled in her god, slipped on some love, and laid on my bell like a truck, blew through my door warm wind from […]

  • A Difficult Love Affair? On the Relation between Marxism and Theology

    Abstract: From the moment Marx and Engels became involved with the League of the Just, Marxism has always had a long and often difficult relation with theology and the Bible.  Some of the leading figures of the twentieth century were no exception — Althusser, Adorno, Gramsci, Lefebvre, Eagleton are just a few.  And in our […]

  • Mashaei Rocks the Haus

    A Tehran Bureau correspondent in Germany reports on the IranHaus celebration of “cultural dialogue” held at the International Conference Center in Hamburg on 14 March 2010, featuring Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei.  “A number of young Iranians were there,” the sight of whom the pro-Green Tehran Bureau correspondent found “very disheartening.”  According to the correspondent, Mashaei, “the […]

  • Ghazal for Iranians Who Don’t Hate Arabs

    To Rom, and Parichehr Today I met Iranians who don’t hate Arabs. They smiled and said “hey, selam,” even knowing I was Arab. They didn’t have green eyes, yet they seemed to bear up pretty well without them, and they don’t fault Arabs, not all of us, at least, for Nahavand, and the bloody flare-up […]

  • Israeli Socialism and Anti-Zionism: Historical Tasks and Balance Sheet

      A talk delivered at the conference “The Left in Palestine/The Palestinian Left,” School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 28 February 2010 This talk is dedicated to the memory of my late friend and comrade, the Arab Marxist Jabra Nicola (1912-74). The terms “Right” and “Left” as used in Israel are misleading: they do […]

  • Sans-Culottes

      Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.  x + 493 pp.  $45.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978- 0691124988. Michael Sonenscher begins, “This is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” (p. 1).  Actually, there are no revolutionary sans-culottes […]

  • The Impact of Grey Literature on Climate Projections

    Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

  • Spring Thunder Anew

      The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day, The black man calls you Naxalite today. But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow. — Excerpt from the Telugu poem ‘Final Journey: First Victory’ by Sri Sri 1 It has been a long and tortuous route.  Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist […]

  • A Dream

      In a deserted place in Iran there is a stone tower, not very high, without any door or windows.  In its only room (whose floor is dirt and whose shape is a circle) are a wooden table and a bench.  In this circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing, in letters […]

  • In the Tropical Forests of Sumatra: Notes from Climate Change “Ground Zero”

    Introduction by Geoffrey Gunn It is probably a cliché to observe that tropical rain forests host the greatest known concentrations of bio-diversity on the planet.  Together, the three great global equatorial biozones are central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Indonesian archipelago, including southern Sumatra Island, and the even more remote tin-rich offshore island of […]