Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Interpreting "This is America" by Childish Gambino Warning: there is no ass shaking, knickers or even Eurovision trash.

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific

There have always been Marxists in Labour but it has never been a Marxist party (or even, by some definitions, a socialist one). Its 2017 general election manifesto was social democratic in nature, vowing to reform rather than replace capitalism. But in his speech, McDonnell couched the party’s pledge to renationalise “water, rail, Royal Mail and energy” in more radical terms: “It’s a significant development as a result of the new exploration of the ideas of Marx.” John Mcdonnell and the rebirth of British marxism?

The invention of sexual indentity and its imposition on the Other. "American and European missionaries of liberalism, that is, those who imagine that the global community of the future will be led by a secular cleric, [have sought] to proselytize their value system and model of social and political order to all Muslims whom they seek to save and rescu e from their despotic system of rule, failing which, the missionaries would at least want to rescue Muslim women and increasingly male (and female, though less attention is paid to the latter) Muslim 'homosexuals' from Islam's misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance. This act of proselytization aims to convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted. As Talal Asad put it, the liberal mission is to have the Islamic tradition 'remade in the image of liberal Protestant Chiristianity.' Muslim resistance to this benev

Transcript of Bashar al-Assad's victory speech, 2020

Are we the baddies?

"There is no "core" or "periphery" to the global operation of capital and the military forces that sustain it. The ruling elites in the US, the EU, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are as much the beneficiary of the system they violently uphold as those who are disenfranchised by it are dispersed in these very places.  Racism  is a mere ideological veneer to the hardcore economic logic of colonialism and imperialism. Predatory capital is colour-blind and gender-neutral. It abuses white and coloured labour identically and it makes no difference to its maddening logic if you are a Donald Trump or a Saudi prince, an Egyptian general, an Indian entrepreneur, a Russian oligarch, or a Chinese businessman. Those who are abused and maligned by the selfsame system are as much among the poor of the US and Europe as they are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Colour and gender codification of power is a mere false consciousness to the economic logic of power and domi