Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"... 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

One should add the folowing: even if we don't talk about the responsibility of the Western imperialist states in laying the foundation/condition of what is happing now in parts of the Arab world, one should at least mention the responsibility of those very same states in selling instruments of death right now to states like Saudi Arabia and Israel.  One also should mention the complicity of the people in the US, Britain, France, Germany, etc for allowing the sale of arms.  Disavowal

The future of universities

"How the Syrian civil war has transformed Hezbollah"

The mysterious masked women of Iran

Sullenly clenching His embalmed fists, He peered through a crack, Just pretending to be dead. He wanted to remember all those Who carried him out. I turn to our government with a plea: To double, And triple the guard at the grave site So Stalin does not rise again, And with Stalin, the past. And later, the main point of the poem: We removed Him From the mausoleum. But how do we remove Stalin From Stalin’s heirs? — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

China and the US: Destined for war?

"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

Tunisia This has existed for many years , if not decades, especially in the capital and in the big coastal cities, but the Daily Mail has just discovered it.

The value of Capital

Photography St Petersburg, Russia

Keynes, civilisation, and the long run

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

Depth and substance vs shallowness

How did the West usurp the rest? Abstract: Traditional explanations of the “ rise of the West ” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the con- junctural and contingent aspects of Europe ’ s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European develop- ment, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “ West ” and “ East ” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the short- comings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists ’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these proble...

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the...

"Brexit reinforces Britain's imperial amnesia"

Eurocentric modernism

" 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...

  A few interesting things in this narrative ,   but why does it avoid to mention the global capitalist system as the context?