[RSS] Left-wing journal of ideas covering world politics, global economy, movements, theory, history, culture and more.
Susan Watkins: Which Feminisms?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/109/susan-watkins-which-feminisms
The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?
Mike Davis: The Year 1960
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/108/mike-davis-the-year-1960
Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.
Melissa Myambo : Africa's Global City ?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/108/melissa-myambo-africa-s-global-city
Global-city status is the new grail of competitive modernity. Can the hipsterfication model spearheaded in Brooklyn’s dumbo district be replicated in the harsher conditions of downtown Johannesburg—and if so, at what price?
Jacob Collins: Thinking Otherwise
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/108/jacob-collins-thinking-otherwise
Politico-philosophical profile of Jacques Bouveresse, close friend and colleague of Bourdieu, examining the relation of his large, idiosyncratic body of work to the French philosophical traditions it explicitly disavows. Can thinkers as divergent as Wittgenstein, Musil and Kraus be mobilized to provide a coherent and countervailing ‘Kakanian’ tradition?
Marco D'Eramo: Geographies of Ignorance
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/108/marco-d-eramo-geographies-of-ignorance
De-exoticization of the faraway in the age of inter-continental travel, matched by growing blanks in the map of national space. Marco D’Eramo on the selective epistemologies of globalization.
Alexander Clapp: Romania Redivivus
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/108/alexander-clapp-romania-redivivus
After 2017’s mass anti-corruption protests, Alexander Clapp sets Romania’s <em>sui generis</em> political system in the context of its longue durée. Peculiarities of Iron Guard fascism and Ceauşescu’s West-oriented, Kim Il-sung-inflected Communism, deep state and external influence, crumbling infrastructure and Europe’s most vital cultural scene.
Charnvit Kasetsiri: Ben Anderson 1936–2015
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/107/charnvit-kasetsiri-ben-anderson-1936-2015
Affecting tribute to the author of <em>Imagined Communities</em>, tracking a friend’s life from birth in pre-war Yunnan to exclusion from Suharto’s Indonesia, area studies at Cornell to delvings into popular Siam, recovery of the international context of Filipino revolt against Spain, and final return to Java.
Roberto Schwarz: Antonio Candido 1918–2017
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/107/roberto-schwarz-antonio-candido-1918-2017
Pioneer analyst of a Brazilian literary space, Candido surveyed Western cultural centres and their contending theories, not simply to measure up local experience, but to test them against it. Portrait of a gifted teacher and literary critic, subtle master of his country’s complex ex-colonial condition.
Régis Debray : Civilization : A Grammar
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/107/regis-debray-civilization-a-grammar
Cameos from the motley, tangled lives of history’s major spatial divisions are woven with reflections on the Americanization of French culture, revealing the grammar of hegemony—imprint, impress, imperium—behind the rise, rule and fall of civilizations.
Cengiz Gunes: Turkey's New Left
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/107/cengiz-gunes-turkey-s-new-left
Can the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the most successful left-wing force in Turkey’s history, avoid the fate of its vanquished predecessors? Cengiz Gunes describes the party’s trajectory, its roots in Turkish socialism and the Kurdish national movement, and the distinctive political appeal with which it has sought to overcome the tensions between them.
Daniel Finn: Erdoğan's Cesspit
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/107/daniel-finn-erdogan-s-cesspit
As the AKP’s crackdown on political dissent continues and Erdoğan’s autocratic ambitions become ever more apparent, his Western apologists lament the fall from grace of a man—moderate and liberal-minded—who never existed.
Marco D'Eramo: The Not So Eternal City
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/106/marco-d-eramo-the-not-so-eternal-city
Angry and witty in equal measure, a blistering native account of Rome’s fate at the hands of avaricious developers, insensate priests, neo-liberal ex-communists and stupefied tourists: corruption, dilapidation, fossilization, Disneyfication and—now, above all—cementification of Europe’s oldest capital.
Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre : Enrichment, Profit, Critique
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/106/luc-boltanski-arnaud-esquerre-enrichment-profit-critique
Responding to Fraser, Boltanski and Esquerre extend their comparative analysis of capitalist valorization types, adding to their original trio—standard form, asset form, collection form—another type, the trend form, and arguing that today’s ‘integral capitalism’ encompasses all four.
Nancy Fraser: A New Form of Capitalism?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/106/nancy-fraser-a-new-form-of-capitalism
Does an expanding circuit of commodities whose value is indexed to their rarity and antiquity suggest that capitalism is secreting a novel ‘economy of enrichment’? Replying to Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in NLR 98, Nancy Fraser argues that Marx’s Holy Trinity of profit, interest and rent remains key to a taxonomy of contemporary commodification.
Catarina Martins: The Portuguese Experiment
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/106/catarina-martins-the-portuguese-experiment
The coordinator of Portugal’s Left Bloc traces her trajectory from theatre to the political stage. The prominence of women in the party’s leadership, the social achievements wrested so far from the grip of the Portuguese establishment, and the prospects for extending those gains or seeing them reversed by Brussels and Berlin.
Daniel Finn : Luso-Anomalies
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/106/daniel-finn-luso-anomalies
How and why has Portugal differed from Spain since the downfall of their respective dictatorships in the mid 70s? The course of political and economic development since the Revolution of 1974 was contained, and its current discrepant outcome: a conventional social-democratic government obliged to break with Euro-austerity under the pressure of a pact with the radical left.
Owen Hatherley: Comparing Capitals
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/105/owen-hatherley-comparing-capitals
In a time of fashionable talk of ‘global cities’, Göran Therborn has produced an antithetical panorama of the capital cities of the world, across all six continents, as centres of political power—combining a sociology and iconography of their lay-outs, buildings, monuments, from DC to Cairo, Brussels to Islamabad. Owen Hatherley reports and assesses his findings.
Patricia McManus: Happy Dystopians
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/105/patricia-mcmanus-happy-dystopians
Fears of mass culture generating visions of rule not by fear, but by the narcotics of conformity and abolition of privacy, in the fiction of Huxley and Eggers—‘total sociability’ resistable only by figures of the doomed individual. The fading even of high culture as notional refuge in the passage beyond the <em>Brave New World</em>.
Tom Hazeldine: Revolt of the Rustbelt
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/105/tom-hazeldine-revolt-of-the-rustbelt
The historical geography of Ukania’s referendum on the EU, pitting London and Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, against every region of England outside its pampered capital. The North as fulcrum of the victory for Leave, the accumulating reasons for its disaffection with the Westminster establishment, and the carry-through of its rebellion into the electoral upset of 2017.
Julian Stallabrass: Memory and Icons
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/105/julian-stallabrass-memory-and-icons
Fate of the photographic icon of war in the age of embedded journalism and the digital camera: why so few images of the conquest of Iraq are recollected, and so many of the fall of the Twin Towers pre-selected? The importance of counter-narratives for fixing meaning to shots of fighting or suffering, and the latent possibilities of the democratization of image-production today.
Perry Anderson: The Centre Can Hold
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/105/perry-anderson-the-centre-can-hold
How did Emmanuel Macron become President of France virtually overnight? What are the likely consequences of his rule? The long epoch of collusive alternation between Centre-Left and Centre-Right, and its abrupt ending; the realities of Le Pen’s Front National, and the riposte of Mélenchon’s La France insoumise. Has neo-liberalism finally arrived in force in Paris, and if so what are the implications for Europe?
Joshua Rahtz: The Soul of the Eurozone
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/joshua-rahtz-the-soul-of-the-eurozone
The character, career and intellectual output of Europe’s most consequential politician, Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble—longest-standing member of parliament in his country’s history, superintendent of national reunification and drill-master of continental austerity, obliged to serve in the shadow of a muddle-through mediocrity.
Jennifer Quist : Laurelled Lives
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/jennifer-quist-laurelled-lives
What literary credentials are required for consecration by the Swedish Academy? How Western liberalism reproduces itself in a set of standardized ideological and cultural preferences underlying the ostensible cosmopolis of Nobelists.
Rohana Kuddus: The Ghosts of 1965
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/rohana-kuddus-the-ghosts-of-1965
Half a century after the massacres that wiped out Indonesian communism, and twenty years since the arrival of electoral democracy, how far does the legacy of Suharto’s New Order live on? Under a smothering canopy of reaction—and accommodations to it—seedlings of hope and progress in the world’s fourth-most populous society.
Gopal Balakrishnan : Counterstrike West
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/gopal-balakrishnan-counterstrike-west
Conceptions of a revolution from the right in the era of European fascism, and an activist overcoming of conservative dejection at the fate of the West. Political and philosophical imaginings of an alternate capitalist modernity, capable of settling accounts with decadence and Bolshevism.