Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Rayya El-Zein has written about how the framework of neoliberal orientalism has built a fantasy about  the Arab rapper . She explained that Western mainstream media are “eager to imagine Arab youth in non-threatening modes of resistance that are directly related to American culture. The rapper speaking truth to power is a very easy character for audiences to imagine; at the same time, he is a totally benign figure that caricatures authoritarian regimes as all the same bad guys.” El-Zein has argued that when the West focuses on creative youth, it does not have to understand how Western powers are complicit. After the Arab uprisings (Part 1) After the Arab uprisings (Part 2)

Social structuring in pre-capitalism "may look as an anomaly to a contemporary eye. But it is an anomaly only because we tend to take such notions as national space, nation, class and citizen as given, as the 'natural' way of social existence. Once one poses the question on the conditions and prerequisites that made these notions come to existence, i.e. once one poses the historicity of such notions, the pre-capitalist categories cease to be anomalies. The coming into age of an enlarged identity: the nation, has not done away with the need to exclude others, it only redefined otherness on grounds that look "natural to contemporary eyes, belonging to a common culture or speaking a common language, thus excluding 'others' from the right to compete for jobs and opportunities within the national space. The non-dominance of capitalism on social formations imposes severe restrictions that prevent carrying a final assault on many forms of pre-capitalist social org...

Very good! "It is fair to say that what these essays achieve is the denigration of the very concept of agency, something at the very heart of the postcolonial project. In obscuring the effects of social circumstances, in denying — implicitly or explicitly — the role of structure, the theorists under consideration whisk away what makes political praxis distinctive as a volitional act. For what is political agency if not a form of practice aimed at the structures of power within which it is embedded? Whether it aims to reproduce them, as in ruling-class strategies, or seeks to transform and undermine them, as is the case with subaltern classes, political agency is defined by its relation to these fields of power. But with Spivak and, in particular, Guha, it seems that it is the simple exercise of will that enables the actions of their protagonists to serve as political agency — even those actions are an acquiescence to their subjugation. Our reading confirms the observation made...

Does the FN has an economic strategy?

"I'm uncomfortable with how close the mainstream LGBTQ movement in the West has aligned itself with both capitalism and the military. For example, as an Arab man, how can I celebrate legislative changes in the United States that allow gay men and women to serve in the military, when this same institution is responsible for things like the Abu Ghraib prison torture, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continued drone strikes? But there’s hope. There are queer Arab movements, both in the Arab world and in the Western world, who are working to make a space for themselves within the mainstream LGBTQI movement—Qaws, a queer Palestinian movement, is one that comes to mind in its efforts to challenge the Israeli government’s pinkwashing of the occupation, while building positive bridges of solidarity between movements in the West and the East."  — Saleem Haddad , author of Guapa

" Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class." (BBC online) The invention of 'heterosexuality'

Sadly, last Friday Mark Fisher took his own life "The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a  priest’s desire  to excommunicate and condemn, an  academic-pedant’s desire  to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a  hipster’s desire  to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle  not  to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other....

Capitalism and gay identity

Etienne Balibar: laïcité or identity? and ... the lastest on the identity crap

Headlines on foreignpolicy.com, 26 August 2016 "BAN THE BURQA?:  Eight in ten Germans favor banning the burqa in public spaces."  " THE BURKINI'S WILD RIDE:  A judge in France ruled that municipalities cannot ban women from wearing a certain kind of swimwear." Culturalization of social antagonisms, identity politics, etc .

"When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem." — Arundhati Roy ( see extract from her book here )