Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  A policeman measures the distance between a woman's knee and the bottom of her bathing suit. Washington DC, 1922. Library of Congress, USA. Think of France banning burkini and the headscarf, for example. 

An excerpt from a new book    Global Middle East - Into the Twenty-First Century

The man who called black people “coons, referred to Muslim women as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, Jews as “stingy” and women as “hot totty”, demands politics be “civil and kind.”

Gender and Empire Essential readings

From the first half of the 20th century in Egypt Collecting Cairo's Discarded Images

Egyptian Novelist Salwa Bakr dares to say it aloud on revolution's successes and failures

Sex Power Violence #MeToo A verso free ebook

"... Look at  Moonlight  — it’s about being stigmatised, being gay and black and poor. Fassbinder was always interested in the lives of outsiders and immigrants from the very beginning. He showed how we are all under the tyranny of values that are not even our own.” The muse and the monster: Fassbinder's favourite star on surviving his abuse

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im...

Who's killing civilians in Syria?

I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my previous book  Desiring Arabs  in the context of post-1967 Arab intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost disappear, in the framing of the problem of “...

Angela Davis's speech Restoring King "There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr. "

Photos from pre-1979 Iran Culture and Imperialism

In  Ways of Seeing ’s final episode, Berger discusses how the goddesses of art became the models of contemporary advertising, and suddenly it was no longer only men looking at images of women lustfully. Advertising tells us that buying a product will transform us by showing pictures of those who have already been transformed by it – these are people we should aspire to be like or be with. An image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. “This state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour,” Berger says. “Glamour is supposed to go deeper than looks, but it depends upon them, utterly,” he says. Why we still need John Berger's Ways of Seeing

Women's resistane in Syria

Class in more intersectional than intersectionality

"Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers." — Naomi Klein

Liberal crap Putting the blame on those who did not vote.  Clinton is not a friend of women; she is part and parcel of a criminal state. A state that implemented reactionary policies on wages, working conditions, commodification of women, imperialist policies towards women in the Middle East and elsewhere through killing by drones and IMF adjustment prgrammes, corporate lunder and exploitation, support of theocracies that oppress women... She is not a friend of women. Nor is Mother Theresa a friend of the poor. Those who have been staunch defenders of the status quo wanted a continuation of the very same neoliberal injustice at home and abroad. The 50% or so who did not vote are fed up with the dictatorship of the two-party system. Conversely, those who wanted the status quo, the affluent and the rich support and backed Clinton to the hilt. Paraphrasing Brecht, the liberals wish they could dissolve the people and elect another. Richard Seymour: " This is part of a genre ...

Winter , chapter 2 from Banquet of Seaweed by Haydar Haydar