Pandaemonium

IT’S NOT ME. IT’S THE MONSTER

March 8, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Globalization and neoliberalism. They’ve become the explanations du jour for the decimation of industries and the devastation of lives, for falling wages and slashed public spending. And there is, of course, truth to the claim. But capitalism was chewing up and spitting out its victims long before the market was globalised or liberalism became neo’d. One of the great novels of the Great Depression, of the wretchedness of poverty in 1930s America, was written half a century before those words […]

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

GRASPING DIVERSITY, EMBRACING DEMOCRACY

March 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

© Art Projects International; Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International, New York . This is the keynote talk I gave at the 2017 Karlsruhe Dialogues on ‘The Pluralistic Society and its Enemies’ on 4 March 2017. It was entitled entitled ‘Can Diversity Embrace Democracy? Can Democracy Acknowledge Diversity?’ If there are two issues that define contemporary political debate, they are those of diversity and democracy. From the migration crisis to radical Islam to multiculturalism, fears about the consequences of […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Politics • Tags: Class, cultural diversity, democracy, diversity, edmund burke, europe, identity politics, left, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #14

March 1, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . Trump’s America and the Pakistani dream The Herald, 16 February 2017 In an ironic twist, rather than us becoming like Americans (as is the dream of almost every upper middle class and upper class Pakistani), it is the Americans who are becoming and looking a lot like us: prejudiced, xenophobic, vulnerable. . And as […]

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BRITAIN’S ABSENT OPPOSITION

February 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the results of the Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland by-elections in England, and their meaning for national politics: As party leader, Mr Corbyn has been a disaster. He is opposed by a majority of Labour members of Parliament, and has signally failed to win popular support outside the party’s base. Yet the party’s problem goes much deeper than its leadership. At the heart of its crisis lies the question: […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: british politics, labour party, working class

A LITTLE ALTERNATIVE READING

February 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

To accompany my essay on the ‘decolonizing our minds’ debate at SOAS, the Observer asked me to compile a (very) short ‘alternative’ philosophy book list; alternative in the sense of being broadly non-European and consisting of works or authors of whom people may not have heard but nevertheless are significant in the history of ideas. Being limited to just six books necessarily makes the list arbitrary, but I have tried to find a selection that spans both history and geography, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: al-ma'arri, chinese philosophy, clr james, ethics, frantz fanon, ibn rushd, islamic philosophy, jonathan israel, mo tzu, philosophy, toussaint l'ouverture

DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?

February 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus’. ‘Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare’, declared the Times. The Daily Telegraph, too, was outraged: ‘They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that […]

Categories: Academia, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: decolonising, diversity, enlightenment, frantz fanon, identity politics, jonathan israel, kant, kwame anthony appiah, locke, racism, radical enlightenment, soas, toussaint l'ouverture, university, whiteness

REVOLUTIONARY ART, BUT A MESS OF A SHOW

February 16, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The great works of Russian artists of the early 20th are among the most thrilling and inspiring in the history of art. But they are also so well known to have become almost a cliché. Any show of revolutionary Russian art has to balance a number of different issues. It has to reveal why the works of art are so thrilling. It has to accommodate many of the different schools and perspectives – from neo-realism to neo-primitivism, from rayonism to […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: alexander rodchenko, arkaidy shaiket, art, bolsheviks, boris ignatovich, kazimir malevich, modernism, russian revolution, russian revolutionary art, soviet union, stalin, vladimir tatlin

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #13

February 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . Scholars behind bars Jonathan Zimmerman, New York Review of Books, 23 February 2017 Americans also need to acknowledge that some tendencies in liberal education have closed minds rather than liberated them. The freewheeling, take-no-prisoners discussions in Bard’s prison program are in contrast to many campus classrooms, where rules of political decorum inhibit honest conversation. […]

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WHY UPDATE FROM FATWA TO JIHAD?

February 9, 2017 by Kenan Malik

My book From Fatwa to Jihad was first published in 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Eight years on, I have just published an updated version with a new Afterword. Why? In 1989 the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had come as a great shock, both in Britain and globally, and its consequences reverberated through both domestic and international politics in the two decades that followed. Much was written about it. Yet, there had been little […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: assimilationism, charlie hebdo, free speech, From Fatwa to Jihad, islamism, jihadism, kenan malik's books, radicalization, rushdie affair, the satanic verses

NOT POST-TRUTH AS TOO MANY ‘TRUTHS’

February 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Fake news. Alternative facts. Post-truth politics. Three issues that dominate much current discussion, all connected to new anxieties about how we can distinguish truth and falsity, and all seemingly linked to the election of Donald Trump as US President. Trump’s election victory was, for many, fuelled by a wave of fake news. His proclivity to lie, for instance about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, has been reframed by his advisor Kellyanne Conway as the acceptance of ‘alternative […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: alain de benoist, alt right, alternative facts, donald trump, enlightenment, fake news, far right, identitarian movement, identity politics, left, post-truth, postmodernism, relativism, truth, universalism

OUT NOW!

February 2, 2017 by Kenan Malik

. The new edition of From Fatwa to Jihad, with an Afterword (and a new subtitle) is published today. You can read an extract from the new Preface, and watch two Faculti videos I made about the original edition. You can buy the book from most bookshops, or from Amazon. Patrons of Pandaemonium who contribute more than $5 a month get a free copy. I will be in touch! . ‘Gripping… The Rushdie affair has shaped all our lives. This book […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: british politics, charlie hebdo, free speech, From Fatwa to Jihad, islamism, kenan malik's books, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

THE WONDROUS EYE OF MALICK SIDIBÉ

January 29, 2017 by Kenan Malik

He was blind in one eye through a childhood accident. But what a wondrous eye was the other! It is almost impossible to miss a Malick Sidibé photo. Black and white and suffused with life. Sidibé, who died last year, was born in 1935 or 1936 (he was not sure which) to a peasant family in what was then French Sudan. ‘We knew nothing of the outside world’, he was later to say. ‘We were enclosed in a capsule. It […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: mali, malick sidibe, photography

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #12

January 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . When truth becomes a commodity Daniel T Rogers, Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 January 2017 The reorganization of society and the social imagination along market lines, which has accelerated so rapidly, reaches a kind of culmination. But in this reconstitution of truths as market commodities, the invisible hand working to sort things out is […]

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LA FRANCE ET L’ANGLETERRE AU BORD DE LA CRISE DE NERFS

January 22, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The French journalist Ilana Navaro has made a superb four-part radio documentary series for France Culture on social policies towards immigration and integration in France and Britain. Entitled La France et L’Angleterre au born de la crise de nerfs (‘France and England on the edge of a nervous breakdown’), the documentary visits a ‘theological cafe’ in Paris and the Cambridge Muslim College, a sharia council in Birmingham, Goutte d’Or, an area in the 18th arrondissement in Paris with a large […]

Categories: International, Multiculturalism • Tags: assimilationism, britain, france, ilana navaro, integration, islam, multiculturalism, sharia

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

January 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Here are five poems that won’t be heard at Donald Trump’s inauguration, but perhaps should be. Five poems about America written across the span of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, five poems that seem particularly meaningful now. The first, ‘Let America be America again’, is by Langston Hughes, one of the great figures of twentieth century American literature, and a titan of the Harlem Renaissance, much of whose work was, as it is in this poem, unpicking the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: america, claude mckay, james baldwin, january gill o'neill, langston hughes, michelle boisseau, poetry