Earlier this year, walking the south side of Whitechapel High Street in London’s East End I passed an advertisement for the cinematic release of the film The Infidel. Staring at me from a poster on the side of a bus stop was the film’s hero Omid Djalili. A curious figure he’s presented as cultural confusion embodied.
The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: ‘How does social transformation begin?’ But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation but the seemingly ‘insignificant occurrences of people’s daily actions’.
For those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares ‘…nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog…’.
Paul Gilroy carries a lot of symbolic weight. In our transnational academic milieu, Gilroy’s status as a superstar professor overdetermines his writing, forcing a peculiar disjuncture between the character of his project and the expectations of his eager audience. While Gilroy speaks of a poststructural cultural politics, he is too often forced into the position of custodian or leader that sometimes rubs up uncomfortably with his analysis…
When District 9 was released…the film was an immediate box office hit…This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished…that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa.
Review of: Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Glave, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2008.
William Allan, The Slave Market, Constantinople, 1838, National Gallery of Scotland
Around about the time when digital torture porn from Abu Ghraib established racialised sadism and hardcore sexual violence as the aesthetic co-ordinates of contemporary western imperialism, someone…
Back in the day (well, the seventies and eighties at least), one of
the more puzzling aspects of the 36 bus ride from Lewisham to
Paddington was the nature and frequency of the sectarian banter
aboard. ‘Blubber…
Courting angst is always an unsettling business but rarely more so than when the flirtation is a salve for other types of meaning. In an age of short termism, where the quick fix is king, there’s something almost quaint about…
Review of: Kester Aspden (2007) Nationality: Wog – The Hounding of David Oluwale, London: Jonathan Cape
This is an important, even ‘must-read’ book for anyone interested in the history of crime in the UK, especially if that crime has…
Review of: Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. London: Duke University Press.
Review can be read at anti-babel. (Due to copyright restrictions, this article can only appear on the reviewer’s own website).
Review of: Infidel: My Life (2007), Free Press.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has hurled herself violently into the eye of the storm with her polemical pronouncements on the threat of political Islam, the dangers of multi-culturalism and the need for…
A Review of: N. Ali, V. Kalra & S. Sayyid (eds) (2005) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. London: Hurst.
In Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, the last sentence of the book urges that we must seek “a reconciliation between reality…
Review of: Gautam Malkani (2007) Londonstani, HarperPerennial; and Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (2006) Tourism, Vintage.
With last year’s protests surrounding the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane the debate on authenticity and representation yet again reared its head. It seems a…
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote that “the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies” by which he meant that the experience of visiting a U.S. city itself is one that is produced directly by…
I blame Yinka Shonibare MBE. I would never have got into a row with the director of the Musee de Quai Branly over ‘the colour’ of his workforce if it hadn’t been for the British Nigerian artist. In fact I…
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…
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…
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…
Update: for a more developed reading of East is East, see my book Multicultural Encounters (2006: ch. 6)
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East is East has been hailed the British comedy hit of 1999. If the media response is anything…
