Tag: romanticism

YE ARE MANY – THEY ARE FEW

July 13, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley 200 years after his death, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 10 July 2022, under the headline “Long gone, but speaking clearly to our age – Shelley, the poet of moral and political corruption”. “Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by, Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky; And shall no patriot tear the veil away Which hides these vices from the face of day? Is public virtue dead? – […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties • Tags: freedom struggles, mary shelley, peterloo, poetry, queen mab, richard holmes, romanticism, shelley, the masque of anarchy, working class

THE MEANING OF HERITAGE IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY

March 30, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my keynote address to the Interpret Europe conference on ‘Heritage and Identity’ held in Kőszeg, Hungary, 23-26 March 2018. The skeleton was discovered in 1903 at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, in south-west England. He became known as Cheddar Man, and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of Homo sapiens ever found in Britain. In the 1970s, radiocarbon dating suggested that he lived around 10,000 years ago, shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aya sofia, christianity, clash of civilizations, cordoba, cultural diversity, cultural heritage, culture, diversity, enlightenment, hagia sophia, herder, ibn rushd, identity politics, islam, istanbul, multiculturalism, romanticism, unesco

SILENCE, ROMANTICISM AND THE DEBATE ON INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

October 2, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the New York Times on the debate about Indigenous rights in Australia. (I cannot publish my NYT articles on Pandaemonium until the month after they are published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘The New Voice for Indigenous Australia’. Nothing prepares you for your first sight of Uluru. Amid the vastness of Australia’s arid ‘red centre’, there is something wondrous about this monumental slab […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: australia, culture, indigenous rights, noel pearson, racism, recognition, romanticism, uluru, uluru statement

WHAT VOICE FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA?

September 11, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the debate about Indigenous rights in Australia. It was published under the headline ‘The New Voice for Indigenous Australia‘: The debate about Indigenous peoples seems – at least to me, an outsider – to take place on only two registers: on one hand, silence; on the other, a romanticization of indigenous life. It may seem odd to speak of silence in a nation where the issue of […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: australia, colonialism, indigenous australians, indigenous culture, noel pearson, racism, romanticism, uluru, uluru statement

AGAINST THE CULTURAL TURN

September 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the talk I gave on Saturday in a debate on ‘Interculturalism’ at the Lector in Fabula festival in Conversano in Italy. The starting point of this debate is the failure of multiculturalism. It has become fashionable today to criticise multiculturalism. The trouble is, many of the criticisms are as problematic as multiculturalism itself. And I say that as someone who’s been a critic of multiculturalism for more than 20 years, from well before it was fashionable to be […]

Categories: Multiculturalism • Tags: culture, herder, identity politics, immigration, interculturalism, left, multiculturalism, romanticism, universalism

WHO IS APPROPRIATING WHAT?

September 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last week the novelist Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It did not go well. She addressed the question of ‘Fiction and identity politics’ (apparently the organizers had originally asked her to talk about ‘community and belonging’, but she had submitted to them a different topic), providing a robust critique of identity politics and of the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’. Beginning with a story about colleges attempting to ban the wearing of sombreros as an […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, free speech, herder, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, romanticism

AWAY WITH THE GATEKEEPERS!

April 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for Al Jazeera English on the the controversies over ‘cultural appropriation’ and what they reveal about the degradation of contemporary campaigns for social justice. It was published in AJE under the headline ‘The bane of cultural appropriation’. Another week, another controversy about ‘cultural appropriation’. The latest has been the furore over Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks. The Bieber furore followed similar controversies over Beyoncé’s Bollywood outfit, Kylie Jenner’s cornrows, Canadians practicing yoga, English students wearing sombreros and American students donning […]

Categories: Free Speech, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, herder, identity politics, justin bieber, racism, romanticism

THE STRUGGLE FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE

November 11, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the keynote lecture I gave at the annual conference of the Riksantikvarieämbetet (the Swedish National Heritage Board) in Stockholm this week. The theme of the conference was ‘The Struggle for Cultural Heritage’. ‘The ministry of symbols.’ That’s how Mélanie Joly, the new Minister of Canadian Heritage in Justin Trudeau’s recently elected administration in Ottowa, this week described her portfolio. What kind of symbols? Not the ones promoted by the previous conservative government of Stephen Harper, but, in […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Multiculturalism • Tags: aya sofia, cordoba, cultural diversity, cultural heritage, culture, diversity, enlightenment, hagia sophia, herder, identity politics, multiculturalism, romanticism, unesco, will kymlicka

HISTORY, MORALITY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

April 19, 2015 by Kenan Malik

The Quest for a Moral Compass is now out in paperback. And, to accompany the new edition. I am publishing a number of extracts from the book. This extract, from Chapter 19, ‘Confucianism, Communism and the Clash of Civilizations’, sets out many of the themes of the book against the background of the changing balance of power between China and the West. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass in most bookshops, through Amazon or from my Pandaemonium bookstore. From […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: china, chinese philosophy, clash of civilizations, confucianism, herder, history of moral thought, jiang qing, martin jacques, morality, romanticism, samuel huntington, universalism, west

HOW HUMAN IS CULTURE?

December 8, 2013 by Kenan Malik

As a coda to my exchange of letters with Peter Singer on ape rights, here is an edited (and slightly extended) transcript of a talk I gave at ‘Do You Humans Own Culture?‘, a discussion on apes, humans and culture based around primatologist Andrew Whitten’s research, organized in 2002 by the Royal Society and the British Academy. The other participants were Andrew Whitten himself, Patrick Bateson and Caroline Humphrey. The key themes here of how we should conceive of the […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: ape culture, apes, culture, enlightenment, franz boas, human agency, human nature, michael tomasello, romanticism

THE MAKING OF THE IDEA OF RACE

February 17, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I questioned the idea that the modern roots of the idea of race lie in the Enlightenment. The relationship between race and the Enlightenment is, I argued, far more complex than much contemporary discussion allows for. It was the transformation of Enlightenment attitudes through the course of the nineteenth century that helped mutate the eighteenth century discussion of human variety into the nineteenth century obsession with racial difference. This is the […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: cuvier, enlightenment, herder, positivism, race, racial science, romanticism, samuel morton, thomas huxley

SCIENCE, MYTH AND HISTORY

December 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is the third in a series of extracts that I have been running from my book Strange Fruit. The extracts tell the story of ‘Kennewick Man’ and explore what the debate around a 9000-year old skeleton reveals about current ideas of culture and race. The first extract looked at questions cultural ownership, the second at the issue of race. This third extract links the two in a discussion of the relationship between science, myth and history, and the way […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, clovis, creation myths, human origins, indigenous culture, jonathan marks, kennewick man, native americans, paul martin, racial science, racism, romanticism, vine deloria

‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’

May 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This! seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. (The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full.) The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Multiculturalism • Tags: alain benoist, alain finkielkraut, black culture, charles taylor, cultural diversity, enlightenment, france, herder, identity politics, isaiah berlin, multiculturalism, native son, nouvelle droite, racism, richard wright, romanticism, tariq modood, walter benn michaels, will kymlicka, yugoslavia

ALL ANIMALS HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY PAST. ONLY HUMANS MAKE HISTORY

October 26, 2011 by Kenan Malik

It has long been known that different groups of chimpanzees have different cultural habits. Now, new research has revealed the degree of behaviour plasticity among orangutans, plasticity that gives rise to cultural differences between different groups, each possessing behaviours specific to that group, and each passing on such behaviours from one generation to another. For many, the empirical discoveries about ape cultures are important not just because of what they tell us about the mental abilities of the Great Apes, but […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, culture, enlightenment, human agency, human nature, michael tomasello, romanticism

NO CONTACT

June 25, 2011 by Kenan Malik

The Prime Directive. As any self-respecting Trekkie knows, it is Star Trek‘s most important ethical rule. And possibly the most stupid. ‘Thou shalt not interfere with the natural evolution of another culture by giving primitive peoples technology or knowledge beyond their years.’ Or as Starfleet Regulations put it: As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: anthropology, brazil, culture, ethics, george stocking, herder, levi-strauss, modernity, progress, racial science, romanticism, star trek