With the onset of the pandemic, the second Black Lives Matter movement, and the economic crisis, theatre as an art form and an industry is in a period of crisis and rebuilding.
Subjects Archives: Media
Media, Communications, and Literature
Katherine Angel, ‘Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent’
Katherine Angel’s intervention into post-feminist discourse fits the script of recent events and sits at what’s hopefully the tail end of post-feminist discourse, otherwise known as ‘the sex wars’.
Review – Misbehaving
A new edited volume emphasises that the personal is political and highlights the power of spectacular direct action, says Alice Robson
Cuba libre to be COVID-libre: Five vaccines and counting
This pandemic has affirmed that public healthcare needs cannot be adequately met under a profit-based system.
Why the U.S. shouldn’t play games with cyberwarfare as its power declines
Two major cyberhacks—of ‘SolarWinds’ and ‘Microsoft Exchange Server’—have affected a whole range of computer systems worldwide. Both are supply chain hacks, meaning that they appeared to be routine software upgrades for particular components in these systems instead of inserted malicious codes.
Facebooking While Brown: Indigenous man in Arizona imprisoned for Social Media “shock-talk” about #BLM protest
Reed has been held in federal pretrial detention without bail for ten months after a prior high school acquaintance reported him to the police for a different satirical social media post about planning a protest or ‘riot’ at the courthouse that never actually happened.
Murder of Daunte Wright ruined Derek Chauvin show trial
The Black-murder-by-cop next door to Minneapolis shows the world the dehumanization that is built into the white supremacist DNA of settler-colonialism will continue to produce crimes against our collective humanity.
Support the Tropes
How media language encourages the left to support wars, coups and intervention.
Judge Preska terminates all Zoom access to Donziger trial in effort to limit public access, say lawyers
U.S. trial judge Loretta Preska has denied all Zoom access to the upcoming contempt trial of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger in a widely condemned move that his lawyers say is designed to limit public access to an unprecedented one-sided trial run by a private Chevron prosecutor.
American interregnum
Both the pandemic and the response to it represent the irrationality and destructiveness of capitalism. The crisis of care was already evident before the outbreak of Covid, but was greatly exacerbated by it.
Rosa Luxemburg and postcolonial criticism
Her understanding of oppression was bolstered by personal circumstances: female in an overwhelmingly male public sphere, Jewish in a climate of vicious antisemitism, Polish at a time when Poles suffered national oppression, and an individual who lived with a disability.
How Bellingcat launders National Security State talking points into the press
For a self-proclaimed citizen journalism outfit, an alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds, including high-level positions in military and intelligence agencies.
Western media incite anti-Asian racism when they join in Cold War against China
Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media.
BAR Book Forum: Catie Coe’s Book, “The New American Servitude”
Senior care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility.
With Nicaragua, scary Covid projections are more newsworthy than hopeful results
One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.
Dialectical ecology
“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.” Thus reads one of the Hopi prophecies which echo throughout Philip Glass’s haunting soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982).
“We will protest for as long as possible”
Farmers from Uttarakhand and northwest UP–several of whom have taken part in the farm protests–say that the state-run mandis, though flawed, are essential for their survival.
Ministry for the Future with Kim Stanley Robinson
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson joins Money on the Left to discuss his Modern Monetary Theory-inspired “cli-fi” novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020).
Fuck mindfulness workshops
We need to return to the summer of BLM uprising.
Social reproduction and a just post-COVID world
After over a year of suffering, death, and profound transformations of everyday life, International Women’s Day 2021 is an opportunity to take stock of the COVID-19 crisis so far and craft visions for a future centred on the value of social reproduction.
