Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics
reviewed by Elliot Murphy
Richard Seymour’s latest book, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, is a damning account of some of the most virulent media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. His main intention here is to chart the rise of Corbyn; or rather, the rise of the institutional and popular forces which allowed him to win the Labour leadership campaign so decisively. This is ‘the first time in Labour’s history that it has a radical socialist for a leader.' Corbyn was... [read more]
Doug Henwood, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency
reviewed by Tom Reifer
2016 has been a US Presidential primary season unlike any other, with the rise of self-declared democratic Socialist, though really just an honest New Dealer, US Senator Bernie Sanders, running as a Democrat and a series of right wing ideologues, notably New York billionaire Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, having secured the required delegates for the Republicans, a party that Noam Chomsky recently called the most dangerous organisation in world history, what... [read more]
‘I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and of liberty.’ David Getsy came across this line in Jean Coteau’s The White Book (1989) as a teenager and it is one that has remained central to his understanding of what it means to be queer. Getsy is the editor of a new anthology just published by the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press in their Documents of Contemporary Art series. Queer gathers 80 documents around this theme as it relates to contemporary art practices and... [read more]
‘I decided my name should be Juliet when I was ten,’ Juliet Jacques confessed in her inaugural blog post for the Guardian that inspired Trans: A Memoir. She then ‘swiftly buried’ this thought, one that lurked in the back of her mind and returned forcefully at 17. By day, Jacques didn’t stick out in her London suburb. She was an avid football fan and a good student as she privately explored who Juliet might be. On festive occasions when the rules of masculinity relaxed, an evolving... [read more]
Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
There are two things you might not associate with the communist avant-garde of the 1920s: a taste for comedy and a taste for all things American. You would be wrong. Owen Hatherley’s The Chaplin Machine is an exploration of this seemingly unlikely conjunction, of a world where Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, and Lenin are all being thought and brought together. Hatherley aims to recover this strange utopian moment, in which constructing socialism involved a turn to the potentials of comedy to... [read more]
Linda McDowell, Migrant Women's Voices: Talking About Life and Work in the UK Since 1945
reviewed by Lucy Popescu
Since 6 April 2016 all skilled workers from outside the EU who have been living in Britain for less than 10 years need to earn at least £35,000 a year to settle permanently here, even if they have lived here for years contributing to the UK culture and economy. Some jobs, such as nurses, are exempt. Under the new rules those who have come to work in Britain from outside the EU will be deported after five years if they fail to show they are earning more than £35,000.
According to the... [read more]
The White Stones (1969) is, for me, a daily book. That is not to say that I read it over breakfast. But I think of some words from this great work of philosophical lyricism every day, as I go about my business in a provincial English city sixty miles from the one in which they were written: waking to ‘the sky cloudy / and the day packed into the crystal’; going to work with ‘a set rhythm of / the very slight hopefulness’; noticing ‘a thickening in the words / as the coins themselves... [read more]
The thread that runs through Yann Martel’s new novel is surprising and enigmatic: the Iberian rhinoceros. The rhinoceros, or the concept of a real-life rhinoceros living in Portugal, appears throughout the novel’s three parts. It is linked with mystery, religion and that most Portuguese of words, saudade. Martel’s first of three sad and widowed men, Tomás, first notes of the sad disappearance of the rhinoceros:
Despite its ungraceful appearance, he has always lamented the fate of the... [read more]
Tara Forrest, Realism as Protest: Kluge, Schlingensief, Haneke
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
A maxim routinely asserted by politicians when confronted with a future that does not simply perpetuate the present state of things is that one must be realistic. As the German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge observes: ‘Public opinion is very strongly determined by people who … furnish themselves in reality as if in a tank or knight’s armour.’ This realistic predisposition to the status quo is reinforced by a mainstream media that blocks any capacity to conceive of how reality... [read more]
KM Newton, Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic
reviewed by Helen Tope
George Eliot’s sweeping, panoramic novels of 19th-century life form an integral part of the British literary canon; it is hard to think of a writer more ‘establishment’ than Eliot. In Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic, KM Newton goes about the business of challenging the critical view of George Eliot as a conservative figure. Instead of seeing her work as mired in Victorian conventionality, Newton proposes a radical re-interpretation,... [read more]
