While the big news re: India in the Western press is a Facebook skin lightening application, Tariq Ali writes about the deafening silence on the recent state-sponsored murders in Kashmir:
When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran. On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. (Via.)In a grad seminar, way back in 1999, I remember commenting that I thought Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind was very compelling but it ultimately tells us a lot more about anticommunist liberal intellectuals than it does about communist intellectuals. A decade later--and in grad school again/still--I stand by the analysis, especially after reading Tony Judt's recent blustery reflections in NYRB.
US Intellectual History, the blog, refers us to Thomas Bender's scribbling on the need for engaged history that offers important big picture narratives to the public:
In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives. Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship.Three small objections. First, when you have to note that "[t]his was obviously a good thing," just who is your imagined audience? Second, I think this thumbnail sketch of the "cultural turn" commits a few sins: conflating movements for ethnic studies and women's studies with the cultural turn; ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of many cultural historians and their various understandings of the relationship of state, society, and the market; and missing the point. Third, it's not a good look when you make this point in a short essay with sixteen footnotes referring us to twenty-three sources and everyone you cite--as far as I can tell--is white. Oh, sorry. Is that identity politics?
Ludic Despair gives a history of the sentient vehicle genre that actually ends up explaining a lot about the gendered underpinnings of popular sci-fi as a whole:
I was particularly duped by the blurb that appears on the top left [of the book cover]: “What happens to a man when a woman is the boss—even in the 21st Century?” This is a wonderfully ambiguous statement, and one that requires us to assume the place of a teenage boy buying this book back in 1965. Does this statement mean: after 2000 years of bossing men around, what if women are still in control EVEN in the 21st Century? Or does it mean: what if EVEN in the future masculine techno-utopia of the 21st century, women somehow find a way to take over and become “the boss?” Either way, it’s a great example of the hilariously unexamined sexism that modern men like to pretend they don’t find funny anymore. As almost all sci-fi is about dreams of male autonomy, the blurb should probably read: What happens to YOU when teachers, moms, and girlfriends still get to boss guys around even after high school? (Via.)
Which brings us to the best cultural critic of our day:
