Stop, Look, and Listen #55
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past 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. I also keep a record of my daily reading and listening on the ‘Notes’ section of this site.
Content warning: Racism.
Five things to look at
For her Angle, Anchor, and Voice newsletter, Ezgi Basaran revisited the mid-2000s debate about the future Islamisation of Turkey, in which secularists invoked Malaysia as a paradigm for what that might look like, and how both countries instead now emblemise Islamism’s wider shift from religiosity to managerialism and consumerism.
Joshua Tait wrote for his To Live Is to Maneuver newsletter about a 1986 conservative symposium in Chicago, where paleoconservative delegates’ criticisms of then ascendant neoconservatism as inauthentic in its ideological and (non)religious lineages prefigured future divides in and trajectories of the American right.
Writing for New Lines Magazine, Hassan Hassan and Kamran Bokhari traced the weakening of Iran and its proxies that emboldened the US and Israel to directly strike the country, noting a potential precedent for the Iranian regime’s future in the way long-term military pressure culminated in Iraq’s rapid collapse after the 2003 invasion.
Amel Mukhtar reported for Vittles on the campaign to save Ridley Road indoor market in Dalston, East London, and how the site’s importance as a cultural and economic hub for the local Afro-Caribbean community has animated traders and supporters to fight back against landlord Larochette Real Estate’s efforts to evict them.
For his DigressionsImpressions newsletter, Eric Schliesser explored Thomas Hobbes’ notion of friendship as an unevenly distributed, even destabilising feature of a ‘state of nature’, and how Carl Schmitt’s distinction between political friends and enemies by contrast evinced his incomprehension of how interpersonal confederation works.
Five things to listen to
On the Called to the Bar podcast, host Ntina Tzouvala and guests Zohra Ahmed and Nasia Hadjigeorgiou compared Britain’s overseas bases on enclaves carved out from former colonies like Cyprus and Mauritius with the US’s global network of leased military sites, their evolving usage, and scope for resistance against their presence.
Dave O’Brien interviewed Christine Grandy on the New Books Network about her book Race on Screen: Audience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain, and how British filmmakers and broadcasters drew upon audience research to legitimise racism on screen, while taking the opinions of minority audiences far less seriously.
Matt Seybold was joined by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on the American Vandal podcast to discuss ‘Muskism’ as an evolution of neoliberalism towards state-corporate partnership in pursuit of technological superiority, as well as its contradictions, including the equally sovereigntist pushback against this level of oligarchic hegemony.
On the International Crisis Group’s Hold Your Fire! podcast, host Richard Atwood and guests Shewit Woldemichael and Alan Boswell reflected on three years of civil war in Sudan, the ideological leanings and military strength of the rival Sudanese army and Rapid Support Forces, and the role of external actors in perpetuating the conflict.
Emily Wither presented this episode of the BBC World Service’s Assignment programme on real estate investors’ visions for turning Albania into a luxury tourism destination, and how these could potentially jeopardise the country’s biodiversity, and exacerbate longstanding land ownership disputes that followed the fall of communism.
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