Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“In the mainstream media Russia is a blank screen on which the West gazes transfixed at its own visions.” How the country ended up with Vladimir  Putin

 A review “Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here. A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.” Dreamworlds of Catastrophe