On May 18th, Slavoj Žižek, Mamdouh Habashi, Samir Amin, David Harvey and Zygmunt Bauman participated in a roundtable entitled “Meaning of Maghreb?” during the Decolonization: New Emancipatory Struggles conference in Croatia. Largely focused on Egypt (the moderator explained the “unexpected” uprisings had caught them by surprise, necessitating its inclusion in the discussion), Samir Amin kicked off […]
Why Now?
April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Perry Anderson in The New Left Review: The odious cast of the regimes in place [in North Africa and the Middle East] has persisted unaltered for decades, without triggering mass revolts against them. The timing of the uprisings is not to be explained by their aims. Nor can it plausibly be attributed just to novel […]
‘The New Arab Narrative’
April 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Is the new narrative of Arabs and north Africans simply “replacing the long held ‘Arab Exceptionalism’ narrative, which held sway for decades and argued that Arabs because of sociological and cultural reasons are ‘immune’ to democracy and democratization”? This new all-encompassing story imposed on the “so-called ‘revolution’ and more broadly the Arab world is being constructed […]
Edward Said’s Orientalism Revisited
January 15, 2010 By 1 Comment
The Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, has put out a short PDF of critical responses to the late Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis. This is the quick view of the PDF from a close collaborator who studies Said’s work closely and knows the Institute:
MUSIC BREAK / JUAN TIZOL
November 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Juan Tizol was a trombone player, but a composer too (and a borinqueño of course). Here’s he doing his now classic tune, “Caravan,” with the Duke. This film was recorded in 1952. Ellington and Tizol first performed the song together in 1937. I’m running like a headless chicken, so not posting much. I’ll have more […]
