Review: Gustave Kahn, The Solar Circus, trans. by Sam Kunkel (Michigan City, IN: First to Knock, 2023)

Given the vast number and variety of contributions Gustave Kahn made to the French literary and artistic fields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is surprising he is not better known in France or elsewhere. Kahn was an exceptionally multi-faceted author and critic who, among other achievements, had a major impact on free verse in France and the development of the French Symbolist movement in the 1880s and 90s. In the early twentieth century, Kahn was a significant influence on F. T. Marinetti, the Italian founder of Futurism. During the 1920s and 30s, Khan played a major role in the French Jewish cultural renaissance. This prolific writer published more than 1600 articles, books, and poems during a fifty-year period from 1886 to his death in 1936, and his art criticism is still read to this day

Said, bhabha and the colonised subject

Homi K. Bhabha’s introduction to his collected essays, The Location of Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as one marked by disorientation, with the ‘posts’ of postmodernism, postcolonialism and postfeminism on the one hand and the sense of restless movements, a moving back and forth, ‘here and there’, that has unhooked contemporary critical theory from fixed and primary organisational categories, and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation”.1 The central proposition established in this opening is the argument that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference

Give me loving words dear Mother /

Mode of access: Internet.From the Thomas A. Edison Collection of American Sheet Music

Between Critical and Uncritical Understandings: A Case Study Analyzing the Claims of Islamophobia Made in the Context of the Proposed ‘Super-Mosque’ in Dudley, England

Research highlights how usage and claims of Islamophobia tend to be simplistic and without nuance. Using a case study approach, this article considers the claims of Islamophobia made in relation to the proposed Dudley ‘super-mosque’. Setting out a narrative of the ‘super-mosque’, this article draws upon primary and secondary research to consider the claims and discourses of the major actors in the Dudley setting: the Dudley Muslim Association, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, the far-right especially the British National Party and the English Defence League, as well as individual political figures. Considering each in detail, this article seeks to evaluate the extent to which each of the actors and the claims of Islamophobia made against them might be valid. As well as exploring claims of Islamophobia within a ‘real’ environment, this article seeks to critically engage the opposition shown towards the mosque, the way in which the opposition campaigns were mobilized and engineered, and how the ideological meanings of Islamophobia was able to be readily utilized to validate and justify such opposition. In doing so, this article concludes that the claims and usage of Islamophobia was weak and that a more critical and nuanced usage of the term is urgently required