darkmatter

Despite indications of a movement towards recession, some businesses in Ireland have continued to thrive. During the last fiscal year Bridgestock Ltd. increased its profits before tax by over 600% on an annual turnover of over 6.1 million. Bridgestock is one of the country’s largest privately run ‘direct provision’ centres responsible for accommodating over 20% of the 6,844 asylum seekers dispersed across the State.In marked contrast, asylum seekers housed in these centres have continued to live precarious lives on a weekly allowance of €19.10 for adults and €9.60 for children, which for a single adult amounts to about 3% of the national average industrial wage. This amount was established in 2000 and remains unchanged despite inflation. Given that over 49,100 asylum seekers have passed through this system since then, the numbers who have lived a socially excluded, marginalized existence since this system was put in place, are by no means insignificant.

Of the many strange permutations that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has thrown up perhaps none is stranger than that by which the distinctions between Left and Right which orientated Western metropolitan politics since the time of the French Revolution have seemingly collapsed in relation to the ‘Muslim question’.

On stage at a recent gig in New York, Gil Scott-Heron complained that the designation of February as Black History Month (BHM) was just another example of black people getting short changed: having oppressed them for centuries through slavery and exploitation, the system now conspires to cut short their heritage celebrations by consigning them to the shortest month of the year. Though only half-serious, Scott-Heron’s rye musings are indicative of a certain scepticism with which some have come to regard ‘minority’ history months.

In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference (2007)¹ Slavoj Žižek repeatedly asserted that liberal multiculturalism – and its ‘politically correct’ premise of respecting the other’s difference – is hegemonic. When asked questions about this position from the floor, he stated insistently that it was an ‘empirical fact’ that liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and challenged anyone to prove otherwise. I am writing this response as a way of taking up his challenge.

Call for Papers - Special issue of International Journal of Žižek Studies http://zizekstudies.org/

Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma ash.disorient@gmail.com and Valerie Hill v.hill@coventry.ac.uk

On the 30^th of October 2007 Judith Butler gave the annual British Journal of Sociology lecture at the London School of Economics. It was called, ‘Sexual Politics: the limits of secularism, the time of coalition’.

  The shambolic, illegal occupation of Iraq by Western powers has resulted in countless deaths (murder) of civilians.

The ‘war against terror’ is as much an info-war as it is one involving death and destruction.

Enter Wikipedia into the affray. It’s an amazing resource. While controversy exists over the accuracy of its contents, a more interesting question is how it contests the authority of conventional (expert) knowledge. Moreover, what Wikipedia reveals is the politics of knowledge itself. A significant example is how the contents of a page about Iraqi “resistance” has been edited to “insurgency“.¹

Before rehearsing those wonderfully myopic arguments about the internet as a space of unlimited freedoms beyond censorship, it’s worth bearing in mind the corporate nature of social networking sites like Facebook. Though you might not consider the ethics of corporate responsibility to be at the cutting edge of anti-racist politics today, surely it’s essential to take a clear position in these new media culture wars. There’s an email petition here.

The failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow in late June were strange and shocking. They were so spectacularly inept and bodged that one has to question both whether they were intended to cause apocalyptic loss of life and their connections to an international al-Queda ‘plot’. Most shocking however, were the rapid revelations in news coverage that the key suspects were thought to be doctors who had worked for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Within days of the attacks, the British government had called for greater surveillance and regulation of all overseas professionals working in the NHS. A response that played to the renewed moral panic about immigration controls that accompanied the vilification of the doctors in the tabloid media. In the blogosphere, the responses ranged from ‘I told you so’, to ideological critiques of socialised health care, to the stark and fundamental question ‘…does this now make you think twice before you go to the doctors?’

Yet another post about Big Brother (BB) racism, but the last one you’ll ever need to read…

1. Was Emily Parr calling her fellow housemate a ‘nigger’ a racist expression? Yes…and stop asking such dumb questions. Regardless of whether with malicious intent , or just “speaking carelessly” as CH4 inanely put it, the term ‘nigger’ is steeped in a history of symbolic violence. Emily “nigger-is-a-friendly-term” Parr lives in a white fantasy land believing that this word can be inoffensively expressed to fellow contestants.

While it is a relief to us all that the British National Party failed to make significant gains in last Thursday’s local elections in England and Scotland, it’s disturbing to find a growing acceptance of the Party amongst political commentators. Often hedging their discussion with Thatcher’s remarks on the ‘oxygen of publicity’ or misquoting Voltaire on freedom of speech, pundits of all political persuasions have scrabbled to find reasons to condone or excuse the BNP’s successes in 50 local wards, and their presence in over 700.

If you surf the net you’ll eventually come across the buzz over the one laptop per child initiative. Simply put, it’s a scheme to make very low cost, open-source software based wireless laptops available to the children of the so-called ‘Third World’. Clearly, such a venture cannot alter core structural neo-liberal global inequalities, but should opening up technology to the economically improvished be welcomed?

Techno-utopianist Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the non-profit olpc, seemingly is aware of the limits of such a project. Even he admits it is not able to address basic issues of survival, such access to clean water.

This is a short article on racism and mental health in The Guardian (2 April 2007). The author succinctly argues that the continuing high levels of psychotic illness in people of African and Caribbean origin in the UK is of epidemic proportions and asks why nothing is being done about it.

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.

Article by Richard Keller from the Journal of Social History (12/22/2001)

A collection of papers of the Creating Collectivities/Doing Transnational Politics panel presented at the European Social Forum ESF 2004, 16th Oct, Alexander Palace, London. Organised by Feminist Review in collaboration with SCONVEGNO, NextGenderation, BSA Race Forum, and the Torina SambaBand

Contents

1. Nirmal Puwar (Feminist Review, U.K) - An Introduction to the Panel
2. Amal Treacher (Feminist Review, U.K) - Working Together: Pulling Apart
3. Firdous Azim (Naripokkho, Bangladesh) - Feminist Struggles in Bangladesh
4. Chiara Martucci, Sveva Magaraggia & Francesca Pozzi (SCONVEGNO, Italy) - Crossing boundaries: identities in movement