darkmatter

Stevie never said, ‘California, just like i pictured it’, so beyond Baywatch, the OC and one too many films, there’s not a whole lot to go on as LAX looms large in the after dinner sky. Virgin Atlantic, appropriately, securing its patch of quasi-virgin terrain. Waiting in line to be questioned, fingerprinted and processed, and not a Pakistani cricketer in sight. Mind you when you hail from a land where chapati flour is now synonymous with bomb factory in the minds of many, we’re all suspects in the eyes of the law, especially when it comes fully holstered and with an itchy trigger finger.

Review of Gayatri Gopinath (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public, Duke Unvirsity Press.
Welcome to Gayatri World, a place of many myriad shining surfaces in which the globe is shrunk wrap into theoretically dazzling snippets of books, films and music. Like the infamous, ‘Its a Small World Ride’ at Disney World, Gopinath’s book collapses all geography under the guise of public culture.

Our first own blog post…

Currently, this site is still undergoing beta-testing - isn’t anything designated web2.01 these days in perpetual beta? The site’s working (more or less!) and we thought it’s better to go live now.

There are still a few technical issues to test out, but Registration and Newsletter Subscription are fine to use. Of course, if you find something that doesn’t appear to work, please drop us a line via the Contact page. For further info, see the About page.

Emphasizing the haunting remnants of emptied out architecture and unused spaces, Coventry Ritz listens to the days when social scenes were produced in the British post-war period by South Asian workers who bought and programmed cinemas. Voices of people remembering are layered with archive images and a visual portrait of the crumbling Ritz as it stands today (before being demolished) to etch, in our imagination, where life, politics and film once mingled. This film is a reflection on the methods of looking back ‘now’ to ‘then’.

This is a review of Matt Wray (2006) Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, Duke University Press.

Coming to prominence over the last decade, the critical study of whiteness has proven a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of race and racism. Aimed at identifying and decentring the hitherto unnamed axis of racial normativity, the field of whiteness studies has helped to construct interpretations of race that highlight its equal significance to both the racialized and racializing. While, as Matt Wray rightly argues, scholars of whiteness have been adept at dealing with questions of white power and privilege, they have been less successful when tackling ideas of whiteness defined not by supremacy, but relative disadvantage. It is in his desire to explore such non-dominant conceptions of white identity that Wray has written this historical sociology of ‘poor white trash’.

A list of essential cricket books to read while watching the World Cup:

C.L.R. James (2005)[1963] Beyond a Boundary, Yellow Jersey Press, New Ed. Press

Ashis Nandy (1990) The Tao of Cricket, Penguin Books

Mike Marquese (2005) Anyone But England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket, Aurum Press

Michael Manley (2002) A History of West Indies Cricket, Andre Deutsch

Ramachandra Guha (2003) A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, Picador

Rahul Bhattarcharya (2005) Pundits from Pakistan: On tour with India, 2003-04, Picador

There are many glib pronouncements that we have entered into a ‘Big Brother State’. Rather then think of surveillance as a panopticon of disciplinary enclosure, it has penetrated the mobilities of everyday life - what Deleuze has named as societies of control.

The war on terror is increasingly materializing itself as a virtual power of super-surveillance. This short video animation entitled ‘Stop the Big Brother State’ succinctly highlights recent key transformations of neo-liberal democracies.

Celina De León highlights blogging as a racialized space in a recent article of USA located ColorLines - the national newsmagazine on race and politics

Is ‘adopting’ a ‘Third World’ baby the ultimate charitable act for white western superstar celebrities?

Madonna’s acquisition of a baby from Malawi appears to pale into insignificance in comparison to the enthusiasm of actress Angelina Jolie. She has adopted babies from Cambodia (2002), Ethiopia (2005), and has recently filed to adopt from Vietnam.

Well, finally Jolie’s dedication has been recognised in the film world…

For a more serious take on this issue, see the Celebrity Colonialism article

Professor Mahmood Mamdani makes a well argued critique of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the continuation of the ‘civilising mission’ in Dafur in the LRB

In a recent talk at the the LSE it was interesting to see how many in the audience were antagonistic to Professor Mamdani’s argument about the continuation of bigotry under the cover of blasphemy in the West’s critique of Islam. There seemed to be very little space for the ‘middle ground’ that he was advocating. The response to the talk seemed to say a lot about the continual denial of bigotry, racism and eurocentrism in liberal western modernity - in left-liberal as well as right wing political positions and arguments.

‘Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of
Multiculturalism’ [PDF file] - published by Policy Exchange

Has anyone read this recent report? It was quite high profile in the media. It might be useful to discuss further given that it represents one clearly articulated attempt to critique any form of multiculturalism and ‘politics of identity’ and defends some notion of shared ‘Britishness’- an increasingly problematic trend.

See Jovert vol 1.2 1997 for a review of the following texts on Fanon:

“Finding Fanon: Critical Genealogies,” conference held at New York University, October 11-12, 1996.

Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essav on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995. Softcover $17.95 / Hardcover 62.95.

Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White, eds., Fanon: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996. 350 pgs. Softcover $23.95.

Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Eanon and Visual Representation. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. 212pgs. Softcover $18.95.

Review of Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed) (1998) Franz Fanon - Critical Perspectives, Routledge.1

Since his untimely death at the age of 36 in 1961, the Martinician-born psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon has become something of a looming spectre in radical Black politics. From Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power militancy to Homi Bhaba’s postcolonial poetics, Fanon’s name has been constantly invoked in charged debates or to animate wider political and intellectual concerns. Unsurprisingly, his writings still stir antagonisms but with a recent collection of essays on Fanon, the metropolitan academia in the US and to a lesser extent, Britain, exhume a contentious legacy.