Author Archives: Kenan Malik

THEM GODDAMN REDS

May 7, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I have been running a series of extracts from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (the previous extracts are here and here). One of the great novels of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of one family, the Joads, tenant farmers from Oklahoma, who are forced off their land by the banks, pushed into migrating to the promised land of California, and the even greater wretchedness they find in their Utopia. In this third extract, the Joads […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: america, capitalism, great dedpression, john steinbeck, the grapes of wrath, working class

DEREK WALCOTT INSIDE THE RUINS

May 4, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In March, the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott died. Central to his work was a reckoning with the legacies of colonialism, but from a perspective that today is often derided, even seen as reactionary by some. Walcott insisted on placing the Caribbean and Caribbean writing within a much wider intellectual tradition, insisting that Homer and Dante and Shakespeare belonged to him as much as they did to any European. What is called the ‘Western canon’, he was adamant, was his […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: colonialism, derek walcott, poetry

THE CHANGING FACE OF HARLEM

April 30, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Harlem was not always synonymous with African Americans. In the late-nineteenth century, it was home to a predominantly Jewish community – in his book When Harlem Was Jewish, historian Jeffrey Gurock estimates that almost 200,000 Jews lived there on the eve of the First World War. By 1930 that had fallen to just 5000. ‘Harlem’s era as a landmark on the Jewish map of New York was over’, Gurock observes. The reasons for the transformation were many and complex – […]

Categories: Photos, Race & Immigration • Tags: america, gentrification, harlem, harlem renaissance, jews, new york, photography, racism

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #17

April 27, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . What the war on terror looks like Loulouwa al-Rachid & Peter Harling, Synaps, 27 March 2017 Clausewitz famously described war as the continuation of politics by other means. Iraq, however, challenges this definition, given the triumph of petty short-termism over any coherent political endgame. All players involved seem to be wagering that […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

NEVER SAY THIS IS THE FINAL ROAD FOR YOU

April 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This week marked the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto had been established by the Germans in 1940 in the Muranów district of the Polish capital, imprisoning some 400,000 Jews, virtually all of whom were eventually killed, either in concentration camps, through hunger and deprivation, through executions, or in the final destruction of the Ghetto. The uprising began on April 19, 1943, after German troops entered the Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Some 750 fighters […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: arnold schonberg, holocaust, jews, paul robeson, warsaw ghetto

AN ELECTION BUT NOT A CONTEST

April 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the upcoming election in Britain. It was published under the headline ‘The Foregone Conclusion of Britain’s Election’. This could, and should, have been a vital election, the focus for a great debate about the kind of post-Brexit Britain people want, a fierce contest over issues from austerity to immigration. But the void where an opposition should be means that little of substance will be debated. . To […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: brexit, british elections, british politics, conservative party, jeremy corbyn, labour party, theresa may, ukip, working class

THE EPIC OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

April 16, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The early decades of the 20th century were a golden age for Mexican muralists. Murals were seen as a means of intertwining public art and radical politics in the new revolutionary Mexico. The two leading figures of the movement were Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. I have written previously of Rivera’s magnificent Detroit Industry murals. At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I spoke last week, I found, in the basement of the Baker Library, one of Orozco’s […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: art, jose clemente orozco

FREE SPEECH AND UNSAFE SPACES

April 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the transcript of a talk I gave on ‘Free speech on campus’ at a conference entitled ‘Forever Young?’, exploring questions about universities, shifts in generational attitudes and the meaning of adulthood. The conference was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, on 8 April 2017. . In February 2015, Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan journalist at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago Law School, having been invited by the French Society. It was […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, identity politics, laura kipnis, left, moral autonomy, offence, radicalism, safe space, self-censorship, students, therapeutic society, trigger warnings, universities

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB

April 6, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . The myth of the ‘lone wolf’ terrorist Jason Burke, Guardian, 30 March 2017 Few extremists remain without human contact, even if that contact is only found online. Last year, a team at the University of Miami studied 196 pro-Isis groups operating on social media during the first eight months of 2015. These […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics

THE SMELL OF ROT FILLS THE COUNTRY

April 2, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a second extract from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (the first extract is here). Steinbeck’s novel tells the story of the Joad family who, like millions of other Americans in the 1930s, having been thrown off their land by the banks, migrated to California. But here, too, the bitter rationality of the market not only denies them a living wage, but lets food rot even as thousands starve. Long before the idea of migrants conjured up images […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: america, capitalism, great depression, john steinbeck, the grapes of wrath, working class

G’DAY AUSTRALIA

March 30, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a short shout-out to event organizers and others in Australia. I am coming in August to speak at the Bendigo Writers Festival. The exact details are still being sorted out, but I am very much looking forward to it. I am happy to speak at other events or venues, too. So, if you are interested in organising an event or talk, do get in touch.

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: australia, talks

IDEOLOGICAL VIOLENCE AND SOCIOPATHIC RAGE

March 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This article was published in the Observer on 26 March 2017, under the headline ‘How can we distinguish violence driven by ideology from sociopathic rage?’ What Khalid Masood wreaked on Westminster last week was depraved and shocking. It was not, however, another 7/7. The attacks on the tube and a bus by four suicide bombers on 7 July 2005 were relatively sophisticated; the bombers had been commissioned and trained by al-Qaida and their actions carefully choreographed. Wednesday’s attack was, in […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: ira, islamic state, james harris jackson, jihadism, khalid masood, racism, terrorism, westminster attack, white nationalism

THOU SHALT NOT GIVE OFFENCE

March 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from the Afterword to the new edition of my book From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed From The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. This extract looks at the free speech debates around the Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo. You can buy the book from most bookshops, or from Amazon or from the Book Depository. In December 2009, about nine months after From Fatwa to Jihad was first published, Index on Censorship, one of the world’s foremost […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: charlie hebdo, danish cartoons, france, free speech, index on censorship, islam, jytte klausen, liberal hypocrisy, liberalism, muslims, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #15

March 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . It’s not all relative Alan Jay Levinovitz, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 March 2017 The notion of ‘truth as disrespect’ powers the current assault on facts. Trump and much of his base reject the truth-making mechanisms of academic culture by appealing to anti-elitism, and sow uncertainty via indignation and cultural pride. Why […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

THE VOID WHERE AN OPPOSITION SHOULD BE

March 16, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the crisis of the Labour Party and of UKIP. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until the month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published on 24 February under the headline ‘Britain’s absent opposition’. On Thursday, storm Doris lashed Britain with ferocious winds and driving snow. That same day, England’s main opposition parties faced a […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: british politics, conservative party, eu referendum, jeremy corbyn, labour party, left, ukip, working class