Pandaemonium

NOT SO BLACK AND WHITE

April 13, 2022 by Kenan Malik

. Here are details of my new book, Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics, bublished by Hurst and available from the usual places. In Britain: Bookshop, Waterstones, Book Depository, Blackwell’s, Amazon, Foyle’s, etc. Or, in America Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, Amazon, Tattered Cover, Schuler. Or Australia: Angus & Robertson, Amazon, Dymocks. Or, best of all, order it at your local independent bookshop. This is the blurb from the Hurst brochure: […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik, Not so Black and White

POOR HOUSING IS A POLITICAL CHOICE

May 11, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why good housing is not utopian, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 May 2023, under the headline “If you think decent homes for all is an impossible dream, take a look at Vienna”. Why shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It’s a rhetorical question that has provided the justification for the transformation of housing policy over the past half century in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s “property-owning” revolution in the 1980s. “I want […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: council housing, home ownership, housing, nimbyism, nye bevan, property owning democracy, social housing, thatcherism, vienna housing

DIANE ABBOTT AND A BLACK AND WHITE WORLD

May 4, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about Diane Abbott’s views on race and the Holocaust, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 April 2023, under the headline “Diane Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’”. In 1996, Diane Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. The NHS, she argued, should be employing local people, not importing them from abroad. It’s a familiar claim, though […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: antisemitism, bernie grant, channel migrants, diane abbott, holocaust, identity politics, immigration panics, racial categories, racism, robert jenrick, universalism, white privilege, whiteness

CASTING CLEOPATRA IN BLACK AND WHITE

April 27, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate around Netflix casting a black actor as Cleopatra, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 April 2023, under the headline “When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn’t categorised by the colour of her skin”. In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”. “All Africa,” he wrote, “is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny… And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Race & Immigration • Tags: afrocentrism, ancient egypt, ancient greece, black identity, cleopatra, egypt, hellenistic world, identity politics, jada pinkett smith, martin bernal, netflix, racial categories, racism, shelley haley, white race

WHICH ELITE REALLY RUNS BRITAIN?

April 20, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Matthew Goodwin’s book on the “new elite”, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 April 2023, under the headline “This obsession with a ‘new elite’ hides the real roots of power”. In 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: barbara ehrenreich, c wright mills, catherine liu, elite, liberal elite, liberalism, matthew goodwin, new elite, pmc, rwanda deportation scheme, virtue hoarders

“NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE”

April 13, 2023 by Kenan Malik

It opens with birdsong in the dark. It ends with brightly lit blank screen. In between, we look out from a helicopter, flying across London before arriving at the destination we know we have come to see, yet dread seeing, the burnt corpse of Grenfell Tower, around which the camera circles, again and again. Steve McQueen’s new short film Grenfell is more memorial than documentary. There are no people in it and no words. Its heart is the building, blackened, blistered, mute […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: capitalism, elite, free market, grenfell fire, justice, peter apps, poor, steve mcqueen

ROTTEN FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE

March 30, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the state of the welfare state in Britain, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 26 March 2023, under the headline “From the cradle to the grave, there is something rotten in the state of welfare”. From the cradle to the grave. Once that phrase was a description of the ambition of the welfare state. Now, it is an illustration of how far that old vision has frayed. An illustration, too, of the extent to which […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: benefit sanctions, childcare, inequality, jeremy hunt, life expectancy, poverty, state pensions, welfare state, workfare

AN ECHO OF BRITAIN’S SHAMEFUL PAST

March 23, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the historical echoes of current British asylum policies, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 19 March 2023, under the headline “‘Stop the boats’ does echo the language of the 30s – but those words were English”. It has become a familiar political pas de deux. One side draws an analogy between some current policy or practice and 1930s Germany, as if Nazis provide the only measure of moral degradation. The other side uses outrage at […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: aliens act 1905, antisemitism, channel migrants, gary lineker, immigration policy, internment camps, jewish refugees, louise london, nazism, rwanda deportation scheme, stop the boats

VERMEER AND THE INVOCATION OF THE HUMAN

March 16, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the beauty and significance of Vermeer, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 12 March 2023, under the headline “Vermeer’s luminous interiors gave us a new way into the inner worlds of others”. There is a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead in which the main character, John Ames, a pastor, walking to his church, comes across a young couple in the street. “The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Human • Tags: amsterdam, art, gilead, harold bloom, human mind, humanism, inner world, marilynne robinson, rijksmuseum, vermeer

A TALK AND AN INTERVIEW NOT SO BLACK & WHITE

March 12, 2023 by Kenan Malik

A talk and an interview in which I discuss my book Not So Black and White. The talk was at the University of Kent’s Centre for the Global Study of Empire, on 7 February, 2023. The interview was with Zoe Williams on a Guardian Live broadcast 31 January, 2023.

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik, Not so Black and White • Tags: centre for the global study of empire, guardian live, kenan malik's books, talks, university of kent, zoe williams

A CATHEDRAL, A MOSQUE, HISTORIES AND MYTHS

March 9, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversies surrounding Córdoba’s mosque-cathedral and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, was my Observer column this week. It was published 4 March 2023, under the headline “Mezquita and Hagia Sophia: two sacred symbols and the culture wars that belie their complex history”. Córdoba’s mosque-cathedral is one of the most glorious buildings in Europe. I was last there 30 years ago, but the memory is still vividly etched in my mind. I remember walking through the Courtyard of the Orange Trees. Then, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, History, International • Tags: al-andalus, byzantine, christianity, constantinople, cordoba, cordoba mezquita, cordoba mosque cathedral, erdogan, hagia sophia, islam, istanbul, spain, turkey

THERE IS NO RELIGIOUS TEST

March 2, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over Kate Forbes’ socially conservative views and the SNP leadership race, was my Observer column this week. It was published 26 February 2023, under the headline “Politicians have the right to strong religious views. But not to be shielded from scrutiny”. “Secularism now means a ban on religious people in public life.” “We seem to have ushered in a kind of reverse religious test.” “Does her faith and her refusal to renounce any elements of it effectively debar […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Politics • Tags: christianity, free church of scotland, gender recognition act, hate crimes, humza yousaf, kate forbes, scottish national party, secularism, snp, social conservatism, unwoke, woke

REWRITING COLONIALISM

February 26, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This review of Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was published in the Observer, 19 February 2023. In 1857, in the wake of the “Indian Mutiny”, a British officer, Lt George Cracklow, described in a letter home what happened to captured rebels. “The prisoners were marched up to the guns… and lashed to the muzzles,” he wrote. “The guns exploded… I could hardly see for the smoke for about 2 seconds when down came something with a thud about 5 yards […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: british empire, colonialism, indian mutiny, john stuart mill, nigel biggar, racism, slavery

WHEN CRITICISM BECOMES SEDITION

February 23, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the new climate of censorship in India, was my Observer column this week. It was published 19 February 2023, under the headline “India enjoyed a free and vibrant media. Narendra Modi’s brazen attacks are a catastrophe”. In January, the BBC broadcast a two-part series, India: The Modi Question, which looked forensically at the role of Narendra Modi in fomenting the Gujarat anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in which at least 1,000 people were killed. Now the prime minister of India, Modi […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: bbc, bjp, censorship, free press, free speech, gujarat riots, india, narendra modi, rss

PREVENTING LIBERTY NOT RADICALISATION

February 16, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Britain’s “Prevent” policy, was my Observer column this week. It was published 12 February 2023, under the headline “Prevent doesn’t stop radicalisation, and the Shawcross plan will just make it worse”. Which poses the greater threat: Islamist or far-right terror? That has become the focus of much of the debate around William Shawcross’s Review of Britain’s Prevent anti-terror strategy published last week. Most people with knowledge of the issue accept that while far-right terror is the fastest growing threat, Islamist terrorism remains the […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: academic freedom, censorship, counter-terror policing, deradicalisation, muslims, prevent, racism, radicalisation, shawcross review, surveillance, william showcross

SIX BOOKS

February 12, 2023 by Kenan Malik

The Week asked for my six favourite books. These are my picks. Though, to be honest, even if I had a choice of 60 books, it would have been difficult to know which ones would make the cut. The Black Jacobins by CLR James (1938) A seamless synthesis of novelistic narrative, factual reconstruction and polemical argument, The Black Jacobins helped transform both the writing of history and history itself. It was a “history from below” long before the phrase was […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: books, clr james, dostoevsky, ep thompson, the black jacobins, toni morrison, val wilmer, victor serge