Stop, Look, and Listen #2
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warning: Murder; Genocide and ethnic cleansing; Racism; Sexual violence.
This week’s edition arrives with you a day late. There’s been a lot happening this mid-October, most of it awful (as well as some excellent writing and podcasting on it).
Escalating violence in Israel and Palestine
Since last weekend, the news cycle has been dominated by Israel and Palestine, firstly as a surprise incursion by Hamas into southern Israel was accompanied by its brutal kidnap, murder, and wounding of Israeli civilians, and then as Israel launched a disproportionately intense bombing campaign against Gaza in response. The latter has been accompanied by genocidal language from Israeli government and military officials, anti-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and what can only be described as collective culpability from Western leaders in effectively pre-sanctioning and then apologising for war crimes. It has been a horrendous sequence of events, the death toll from which is in the thousands and escalating.
As to why Hamas launched the initial attack, these pieces by Yair Wallach for The Guardian and Amjad Iraqi for London Review of Books provide valuable historical insight, as does this excellent interview by Isaac Chotiner of Tareq Baconi of the Palestinian Policy Network for The New Yorker. I’ll end this section with this challenging question posed by Baconi:
This is the first time I have been interviewed by The New Yorker, and it’s happening because Israelis were killed. What happened when Palestinians were killed in the thousands, just in the fifteen years that I’ve been covering Hamas? And so, when we really want to think about what this driver of violence is—and the pictures that have been coming out are sickening—we need to understand that colonial violence instills dehumanization both in the oppressor and in the oppressed. And it’s completely out of mind. It’s mind-boggling to me that Israeli protesters go out to protest for democracy in an apartheid regime. The only way they can hold that contradiction is if they accept that Palestinian lives are absent or expendable. And so we have to understand this violence, which, again, is heart-wrenching, in that context.
Responding to the violence
The initial outrages and Israel’s indiscriminate aerial bombing campaign have produced a great deal of thoughtful and painful reflection, not least among left-wing Jews in the diaspora on what the necessary political and moral responses to it are. I recommend:
David Klion for n+1 on the parallels with the aftermath of 9/11.
A charged debate in Dissent magazine about how to mourn Jewish lives lost in the conflict, with an initial piece by Joshua Leifer, a response by Gabriel Winant, and a further response to him by Leifer.
John Ganz’s post in his own newsletter Unpopular Front, outright rejecting the politics of nationalism.
And most movingly, this piece by Arielle Angel for Jewish Currents, on the question of shared struggle and the lessons that can be drawn from Exodus.
I’ll end this section with this quote from Angel:
I know that I have many friends, and that Currents has many readers, who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life.
War crimes elsewhere
Increasing normalisation of violence against civilians as military tactic is not limited to Israel and Palestine, as this report by Olivia Katrandjian and Siranush Sargsyan for openDemocracy on the Azerbaijani assault against ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrates. So too does this analysis by Alexandra Lily Kather and Yousuf Syed Khan for OpinioJuris of the usage of starvation and sexual violence as methods of extermination in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
International law and protection of the displaced
Processes of bordering and expulsion are deeply rooted in colonialism and its legacy. This is a key theme of a wide-ranging interview by Eleanor Paynter of E. Tendeyi Achiume for the Ufuhama Africa podcast, recorded earlier this year. Achiume was the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance between 2017 and 2022. A specific example of this is the way that, in the early 1970s, Britain deported residents of the Chagos Islands archipelago of the Indian Ocean, to make way for the establishment of an American military base on one of the islands. Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands is representing the Chagossians in their campaign to secure their return home; he discussed the case in this interview by Mark Leon Goldberg for his Global Dispatches podcast.
Feminism and foreign policy
In 2014, Sweden’s then new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Margot Wallström, announced the introduction of a ‘feminist foreign policy’ – an initiative subequently replicated in a number of other states (though recently controversially dropped by Sweden itself). Susan Markham and Stephenie Foster have worked to introduce such a framework to American foreign policy, both while working within and outside of the US government. They have co-written a book on the topic, Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice: An Introduction; Markham was interviewed about the book by Rebecca Turkington for the New Books Network podcast. The intersection of foreign policy and feminism, with a particular emphasis on comparison between the British and Swedish cases, historically and in the present, was also recently explored by Emma Lundin and Charlotte Lydia Riley for their Tomorrow Never Knows podcast.
The global far right, yesterday and today
I have in the past week read some always enlightening, sometimes funny and sometimes terrifying, journalistic and academic investigations of the far right, historically and contemporarily. They are illustrative of its continuously evolving forms, and its capacity for both capturing apparently mainstream institutions and wielding transnational influences:
Arctic and Nordic affairs
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a significant impact further north, where it shares land and maritime borders with current NATO members and future applicants. These regional fallouts have been valuably discussed with regards to:
The Baltic Sea region, on Aarhus University’s New Nordic Lexicon podcast.
The Arctic region, in an discussion between Eric Paglia and Katarzyna Zysk for the Polar Geopolitics podcast.
1990s Hollywood cinema
I recently published a post on the 1993 film Demolition Man, released 30 years ago this month:
If you enjoyed it, you may also enjoy the following, on the topic of 1990s Hollywood cinema and its politics:
This episode of Jamelle Bouie’s and John Ganz’s Unclear and Present Danger podcast, on the 1995 film 12 Monkeys.
The latest instalments in the ‘Erotic 90s’ series of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast, on the ‘Lolita’ trope in late 1990s American film and culture – here, and here.
E. Vaughn Joy’s post on the usage and subversion of genre in the 1998 film The Truman Show for her Review Roulette newsletter.
Race and representation on British screens
If you look at my bookshelf, which is quite extensive as I came through the classic film studies tradition, I have dozens of books on the French new wave, German new wave, New Hollywood cinema, and British social realism. Of these dozens of books and collections, how many are on the British urban genre? None. Until now.
That new book is Clive Nwonka’s Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film. He was recently interviewed about it by Aamna Modin for The Guardian, in which he addressed the reductive way in which this genre is often spoken about, in terms of whether it offers positive or negative representation of Black Britons.
The dynamics of race and representation on British screens is also the subject of Noah Berlatsky’s recent post for his Everything is Horrible newsletter on the Caribbean-set BBC detective series Murder in Paradise, in which he explores the question as to which crimes can be legitimately redressed in the programme, and which ones hide in plain sight.
Digital money
The founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, is currently on trial facing multiple charges following its collapse last year. The case, and its implications for cryptocurrency more broadly, have been covered by recent episodes of Slate magazine’s What Next: TBD series – here, and here. Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s biography of Friedman, has also recently been enjoyably reviewed by Jacob Bacharach for The New Republic.
On the issue of money in the digital era more generally, I’d also recommend listening to Bernardo Batiz-Lazo’s interview of Rachel O’Dwyer, about her new book Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, for the New Books Network.
History of political thought
Finally, some recommendations on the history of political thought in the 1960s and 1970s, across the political spectrum, and its contemporary relevance and applicability:
This episode of What’s Left of Philosophy podcast, on E. P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’.
This post by Chris Dillow, for his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, on John Rawls’s conception of ‘reflective equilibrium’.
This post by Kevin M. Kruse, for his Campaign Trails newsletter, on Richard Nixon’s former strategist Kevin Phillips, author of the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, who died last week.
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An overwhelming collection of clearly excellent recommendations for me to follow up... 👍