Based in New Delhi, Zakia Nizami Soman is one of the founder members of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan(BMMA), a movement of Muslim women across India struggling for their citizenship rights. In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, she talks about the BMMA’s work and reflects on the daunting challenges facing Muslim women in India today. […]
Subjects Archives: Marxism
Neoliberalism as Hegemonic Ideology in the Philippines
Paper delivered at the plenary session of the 2009 National Conference of the Philippine Sociological Society held at the PSSC Building on 16 October 2009 Why does the ideology of neoliberalism still exercise such influence in the Philippines despite the challenges it has faced from both the Asian and now global financial crisis? This paper […]
The Lures and Perils of Gender Activism in Afghanistan
The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, 2009 I feel both honoured and gratified to be offering the 7th Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture. This gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Tony for his unwavering support and friendship over the years. When I […]
Gathering Rage Revisited
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 […]
Sexuality and the National Struggle: Being Palestinian and Gay in Israel
Rauda Morcos has every right to hate the press. On July 2003, the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahronot interviewed Morcos about her poetry but also announced to the world that she was a lesbian. Following the public outing, Rauda Morcos’ car windows were smashed, the tires punctured, and she received countless threatening phone calls and […]
Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality
Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (Raw Nerve Books) came out in July 2008. The book presents an unprecedented compilation of critical articles by scholars and activists, which address the manifold ways in which questions regarding ‘race’ and racism are silenced in queer politics and theory. Out of Place was very well received. […]
Say NO to the New Racist, Sexist and Homophobic Dominican Constitution
The government of President Leonel Fernández, with the support of the powerful Catholic Church and the far right (known as the Nazionalistas), will soon adopt a new constitution that will set the country back decades. The new constitution is part of a ruling class attack on working people in a desperate attempt to preserve the […]
In and Out of the Working Class
Play now: Doug Henwood: What I think I like about your work is that you don’t romanticize the working class. Your story of the town you grew up in, the community that is very stratified by ethnicity, race, and religion — this is not an innocent, dynamic working class that we would like to […]
Adiós Mercedes Sosa, the Voice of the Voiceless under Dictatorship
Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, one of the most celebrated voices of Latin America, died on Sunday, 4 October 2009, at the age of 74 after a long illness, according to the announcement by the hospital where she had been under intensive care since 18 September 2009. Nicknamed “La Negra,” she won the hearts and minds […]
Unstable Equilibrium
I don’t want to serve. . . . I think that in fighting in the cinema, through our movies, for a freer, more authentic expression, with weapons that can include joie de vivre and comedy, we are waging the same war as those who fight on the barricades. — Dušan Makavejev (1971) Infamous Yugoslavian […]
A Message on Hezbollah and Homosexuality
In its last Tuesday issue [22 September 2009], Al-Akhbar carried a short news story about “Helem,” an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of homosexuals in Lebanon, which soon became an organization to combat all forms of discrimination. The news story covered Helem’s protest against the “International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association” conference […]
Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men
Maria Charles and David B. Grusky. Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men. Stanford University Press, 2004, 400 pp. $US 55.00 hardcover (0-8047-3634-0). There is a substantial body of literature showing that, across time periods and nations, men and women have tended to do different types of work. While many studies suggest that […]
Dismantling the Prisonhouse of Nations: A Socialist Prison Reform Proposal (SPRP)
The USA: Prisonhouse of Nations The United States deserves the title, the Prisonhouse of Nations:1 The US imprisons more of its citizens than any nation in the world. As of midyear 2008, over 2.3 million US citizens were behind bars and the prison population continues to expand as a result of the growing inequality and […]
Give ‘Em Hell
In my video work, entitled Give ‘Em Hell (2008), I abruptly reveal today’s situation regarding migration in the UK. During the course of several days in the summer of 2008, I positioned protest banners on the streets of London and secretly recorded the unfolding scene with a hidden camera from the opposite side of […]
UC Workers Strike as Faculty, Students Boycott Classes
University of California faculty, students, and workers rallied against state budget cuts and unfair labor practices at 10 campuses and five medical centers from San Diego to Davis on September 24. As a boycott of classes to protest teachers’ unpaid days off (furloughs) and students’ double-digit fee increases unfolded across the state, members of the […]
Spinoza and the Claims of Modernity
Travis L. Frampton. Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, Limited, 2006. 262 pp. $150.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-567-02593-7. Brayton Polka. Between Philosophy and Religion, Vol. I: Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. 276 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-1601-2. Brayton Polka. Between Philosophy and […]
Do the Innocent Have a Right Not to Be Executed?
While supporters of Troy Davis, including Bob Barr and Pope Benedict, were overjoyed that the US Supreme Court ordered the Georgia district court last month to determine “whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes petitioner’s [Davis’s] innocence,” the ruling may still bode ill. Newly-appointed Sonia Sotomayor […]
Religion for Radicals: An Interview with Terry Eagleton
Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room. Nathan Schneider: Rather […]
Class War
US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009. Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]
Other Inscriptions: Sexual Difference and History Writing between Futures Past and Present
Joseph Andoni Massad. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 . xiv + 453 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-50958-7. With Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad makes a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on sexuality. He merits praise for boldly tackling the problematic of knowledge in a world that continues to be unevenly carved […]
