Category Archives: Race & Immigration

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION (PART 2)

January 3, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This year marks the centenary of the beginning of the Great Migration, the exodus of six million African Americans from the US South to the northern cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is marking that anniversary with an exhibition that brings together all 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s epic portrayal of the exodus. Lawrence was one of America’s most important twentieth century painters and his Great Migration series is perhaps his most […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, jacob lawrence, the great migration, usa

ISLINGTON WOMAN AND WHITE VAN MAN

December 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on British politics and public attitudes to immigration published last month in the International New York Times under the headline ‘A Collision with “White Van Man”‘. Rarely can such an unremarkable photo have such heavy political repercussions. Last Thursday, a senior Labour Party member of Parliament, Emily Thornberry, tweeted a photo of a terraced house in Rochester, Kent. It showed three flags of England draped across the facade and a white van […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, immigration, labour party, racism, ukip, working class

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

December 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Beginning in 1915, some six million black African Americans from the South joined an exodus to the northern cities – Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and many others. This was the Great Migration. It was the result both of the conditions in which African Americans found themselves in the South and the labour needs of Northern employers. After post-Civil War Reconstruction, white supremacy had largely been restored across the South, enforced though the Jim Crow laws. It was a segregated […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, black culture, black identity, harlem renaissance, jacob lawrence, modernism, robert hughes, the great migration, usa

THE WRONG KIND OF PANIC

November 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

As a coda to my preface to the book on European Populism and Winning the Immigration Debate, here is the talk I gave to the discussion about populism at the European Parliament last week, organised by the European Liberal Forum and Fores. The context of this discussion is not just the rise of groups such UKIP in Britain, the Front National in France, the Sweden Democrats, but also the panic about it within mainstream circles. And if there is one […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, europe, immigration, left, populism, racism, ukip, working class

POPULISM: WHAT, WHY, HOW?

November 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my preface to a new book on European Populism and Winning the Immigration Debate. Edited by Clara Sandelind, and published by the European Liberal Forum and Fores, the book brings together many contributors including Matthew Goodwin, Mikael Hjerm, Andrea Bohman, Jamie Bartlet, Meindert Fennema, Sjoerdje van Heerden and Sarah de Lange. It is launched today at a roundtable discussion at the European Parliament and available free online from the ELF or Fores. Preface to European Populism and Winning the Immigration […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: europe, front national, identity politics, immigration, left, populism, racism, ukip, working class

POPULISM IN EUROPE: THE BOOK, THE DEBATE

October 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I have written the preface for a new book on European populism and winning the immigration debate. Published by the European Liberal Forum and Fores, other contributors include Clara Sandelind, Matthew Goodwin, Mikael Hjerm, Andrea Bohman, Jamie Bartlet, Meindert Fennema, Sjoerdje van Heerden, Sarah de Lange and many others. The book will be launched next week at a roundtable discussion at the European Parliament. It will be available free online from the ELF or Fores. I will publish my essay […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: europe, europe union, immigration, populism

AS I WAS SAYING ABOUT UKIP…

October 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The debate abound UKIP swirls unabated after its success in winning the Clacton by-election from the Conervatives, and in almost winning Heywood and Middleton from Labour. There remains considerable confusion about the nature of the UKIP phenomenon (the clarifying work of academics such as Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford has been useful here). There is even greater confusion over how to challenge it. I have been writing about UKIP and immigration for a while now. So I thought I would pull together […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, immigration, populism, racism, ukip, working class

HATREDS, OLD AND NEW

October 9, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on anti-Semitism in Europe published in the New York Times in August under the headline ‘Enough Hate for Everyone’. (I cannot post the full versions of my New York Times articles on Pandaemonium until a month after the original publication.) A few years ago, I was a guest on Start the Week, a BBC radio discussion show. Among the other guests was the novelist Eva Figes, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-muslim hatred, anti-politics, anti-semitism, dieudonne, europe, eva figes, identity politics, israel, muslims

TIME TO UNFENCE OUR VIEW OF MIGRATION

October 6, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist at LSE’s Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, and the author of Illegality, Inc: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. He recently published a post on the LSE politics blog which described how immigration border fences feed the very problem they supposedly address. I am delighted to be able to republish it on Pandaemonium. Ruben Andersson It is time to unfence our view of migration Migration panic is upon Calais yet again. Amid […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: borders, britain, european union, fortress europe, immigration, immigration controls, refugees, ruben andersson, spain, use

EXHIBIT B AND THINKING FOR ONESELF

September 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Rushdie’s critics lost the battle – they failed to prevent the publication of The Satanic Verses. But they won the war. Policy makers and arts administrators came broadly to accept the argument that it was morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures, and that every community possessed the right to be consulted over how it may be depicted. So I wrote in ‘Arts for whose sake?’, the keynote essay in Beyond Belief – Theatre Freedom of Expression and Public […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Race & Immigration • Tags: behzti, exhibit b, free speech, index on censorship, offence, racism, rushdie affair

THE MANY MYTHS OF IDENTITY, THE MANY WAYS OF BEING ME

August 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the essay on Britishness, patriotism and identity, published last month in the New York Times under the headline ‘On Britishness and Belonging’. How times change. Last week I was at the Lord’s cricket ground in London – the ‘home of cricket’ as England cricket administrators like to boast – to see England play India. I was born in India. Yet, I was cheering on England. Thirty years ago I certainly would not have been. […]

Categories: Britain, Kenan Malik, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: britain, britishness, cricket, englishness, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism, sport

ANTI-POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF HATRED

August 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times, published under the headline ‘Enough Hate for Everyone’. A few years ago, I was a guest on Start the Week, a BBC radio discussion show. Among the other guests was the novelist Eva Figes, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a fierce critic of Israel. Israel, she suggested, would have built gas chambers to exterminate the Palestinians but for the fear it would ‘be found out’. What astonished […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-muslim hatred, anti-politics, anti-semitism, eva figes, identity politics, israel, muslims

FROM THE ARCHIVES: BETWEEN CAMPS

August 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Continuing to plunder the archives while I am away, this is the third in my series of old book reviews on the theme of race, identity and difference. It is a review of Paul Gilroy’s Between Camps and Yasmin Alibhai Brown’s Who Do We Think We Are?, first published in the Independent on Sunday, 11 June 2000. . Review of Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (Allen Lane, 2000) and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Who Do […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: black identity, britishness, diaspora, englishness, frantz fanon, humanism, identity politics, paul gilroy, racism, yasmin alibhai brown

HOW I’VE COME TO PASS THE CRICKET TEST – BUT NOT TO BE A PATRIOT

July 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the New York Times, on ideas of Britishness, belonging and identity. (We had to cut the essay slightly because of the space available; I will publish the full version next month.) How times change. Last week, I was at the Lord’s cricket ground in London — the ‘home of cricket’, as England cricket administrators like to boast — to see England play India. I was born in India. Yet I was cheering on England. […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: britain, british asians, cricket, cricket test, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism, sport

THERE BE MONSTERS

July 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The philosopher John Gray, in his review of my book The Quest for a Moral Compass, claimed that I ‘airbrush, Soviet-style’ all ‘repugnant and troubling elements of rationalism’ that I ‘prefer not to know’ about ‘sleazy side of rationalism’, such as racial science or the history of slavery. It is a strange claim given that the thread that runs through virtually all my work has been the paradoxes of modernity, and the contradictions within rationalism and liberalism. Hence two books of […]

Categories: History, Human, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, blumenbach, buffon, edward tyson, great chain of being, kenan malik's books, linnaeus, racial science, scientific classification