Category Archives: Culture & Books

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

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

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

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

HOW HANIF KUREISHI GAVE ME A VOICE

January 26, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the personal significance of Hanif Kureishi, was my Observer column this week. It was published 22 January 2023, under the headline “Hanif Kureishi helped liberate British Asians from their imposed identities”. We had been messaging each other on Boxing Day, trying to fix a date for a drink. Then all went silent. I assumed that Hanif Kureishi was too busy enjoying himself in Rome. Only later did I discover that he had had a fall that had left him almost paralysed […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: fatwa, hanif kureishi, islamism, muslims, my beautiful laundrette, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

RACISM REBRANDED

January 19, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from my book Not So Black and White, prefaced by an introduction to the themes of the book. It was published in the Observer’s New Review on 8 January 2023. (I have not put in the links; you can find the references in the book.) “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” So wrote Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, in his 1952 masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks. He was making an argument about […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik, Not so Black and White, Race & Immigration • Tags: alain de benoist, alt-right, bat ye'or, douglas murray, ethnopluralism, far right, generation identity, great replacement theory, grece, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, muslims, nouvelle droite, racism, white decline, white identity

USING DIVERSITY TO EVISCERATE DIVERSITY

January 12, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on a controversy over an image depicting Muhammad,, was my Observer column this week. It was published 8 January 2023, under the headline “An art treasure long cherished by Muslims is deemed offensive. But to whom?” It is a beautiful painting found in a 14th-century Persian manuscript, the “Compendium of Chronicles”, a history of Islam. It shows the Prophet Muhammad receiving his first Quranic revelations from the angel Gabriel. Christine Gruber, professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, describes it […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, blasphemy, censorship, depicting muhammad, diversity, hamline university, islam, muhammad, religious freedom

NEW POETRY FLOWERING ON THE STEM OF THE OLDEST

November 3, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 October 2022, under the headline “TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed”. He promised “a new start”. I made no comment. What should I resent? No, not a response to the Tory leadership chaos but lines from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. This month marks the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece, one of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: antisemitism, christianity, modernism, optimism, pessmism, poetry, ralph ellison, the waste land, ts eliot, virginia woolf

PICTURING ANOTHER WORLD AND OUR WORLD

October 20, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the photography of Chris Killip and Graham Smith, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 October 2022, under the headline “To romanticise or demonise – not the only ways to frame working-class lives”. An old man walking between rows of terraced housing and, behind him, the sky erased by the huge bow of a ship being built. A teenager picking coal on a beach. A man manoeuvring his horse and cart around a car dumped […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: chris killip, darren mcgarvey, graham smith, lynsey hanley, photography, poverty, poverty safari, seacoalers, susan sontag, working class

THE THRILL OF THE ACTUAL

September 22, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the virtual and the actual, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 18 September 2022, under the headline “The web has expanded the reach of art but nothing beats standing in front of a Picasso”. It is more than 30 years since I saw Pablo Picasso’s Guernica face to face, as it were, in Madrid’s Prado Museum, shortly before it was moved into the Museo Reina Sofia, where it still hangs. Painted in 1937 in furious protest at […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: andre malraux, art, digital art, guernica, moma, pablo picasso, painting, virtual museum

TO SAY THE UNSAYABLE

August 18, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Salman Rushdie and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 August 2022, under the headline “Where Salman Rushdie defied those who would silence him, today too many fear causing offence”. “A poet’s work,” one of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses observes, is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” “And if rivers of blood flow from […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, censorship, fatwa, free speech, islam, muslims, offence, peter mayer, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

BENEATH THE SKIN OF OUR OBSESSION WITH WHITENESS

August 11, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the contemporary obsession with whiteness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 August 2022, under the headline “Beneath the skin of our obsession with whiteness lie deeper fears about our place in the world”. It is Viktor Orbán’s worst nightmare: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” It is the opening line to Mohsin Hamid’s new novel The Last White Man, a line that deliberately echoes […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: critical race theory, derrick bell, franz kafka, identity politics, mohsin hamid, racism, ta-nehisi coates, the last white man, viktor orban, white identity, whiteness