Subjects Archives: Media

  • Trance (Langston Hughes: In Translation)

    (for Hafiz) The stillest fall of all is the fall from grace.  No louder than a feather falling in a forest, and yet we fall.  There are many ways to kill a man.  Gun and knife will work well but to make a man irrelevant will also do, and what better way to ignore an […]

  • 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 […]

  • Bassidji and Me

      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 […]

  • Terminal Stage

      “Would it not be better to administer euthanasia?” Enrique Lacoste Prince is a Cuban cartoonist based in Havana. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

  • Rethinking Afghanistan and Iran

      Dear Friends, The Defenders will be co-sponsoring an event this evening with the Richmond Peace Education Center.  It’s a Teach-In, Richmond’s contribution to the Oct. 17 national day of actions against wars and sanctions.  This event consists of a film screening and presentations by local activists and individuals concerned about the militarized path the U.S. […]

  • A Nobel Prize for Evo

    If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native, and his having delivered on his promises.

  • The Impossible Union of Arab and Jew: Reflections on Dissent, Remembrance and Redemption

      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 […]

  • This Is Asia

      “This is really a simple picture, and yet it explains so much of what Asia is today.  It looks at developing Asia as a whole region, from China and India to places in-between, and breaks the overall GDP down into two main shares: the black line is the export share and the red line […]

  • 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 […]

  • October 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education

      We have the power to stop the catastrophic budget cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs — but to save public education in California requires coordinating our actions on a statewide level. We invite all UC, CSU, CC, and K-12 students, workers, teachers, and their organizations across the state to participate in and collectively build the […]

  • Honduras Coup Regime Suspends Constitutional Rights, Closes Media, Threatens Brazil: Will Obama Administration Break Its Silence?

    Washington, D.C. – The Honduran de facto regime suspended constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, including freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, for 45 days on the eve of mass protests planned to mark the three-month anniversary since the coup d’etat against President Manuel Zelaya took place.  The regime has also shut down Radio […]

  • Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan

      Asia Society’s exhibition Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan (10 September 2009 through 3 January 2010) brings to New York some of Pakistan’s most significant, provocative, and influential artists in the first US museum survey exhibition of contemporary Pakistani art.  Hanging Fire is curated by Salima Hashmi, one of the most influential and well-respected […]

  • UC Walkout

      On Thursday, September 24, an unprecedented coalition of UC faculty, undergraduates, grad students, postdocs, lecturers, and staff will engage in a system-wide walkout.  As UC Davis graduate students and lecturers concerned with the quality of all UC students’ education, we write to clarify the reasons for this walkout as we understand them. This summer, […]

  • We’re Number 37

      Come one, come all Down to the hall We’re gonna make noise We’re gonna bust balls We’re gonna disrupt We’re gonna jump in the fray I got a list of all the things that we’re supposed to say We’re gonna get real rowdy Have a barrel of fun But we’re the USA, so by […]

  • 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 […]

  • Elections in Honduras

      Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.

  • 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 […]