Said's Political Humanism: An Introduction

What distinguishes Said as a humanist, and what are the core features of his thought? I cluster them into three categories – his political humanism, commitment to modernism, and anti-systemic theory – while mainly focusing on the first. Said’s main project after 1967 is to connect culture to imperial practices and humanism to political domination. In the process of delineating this crucial relationship, I show how Said ends up inflating the significance of culture in imperial affairs. He wrongly presumes that the domestic culture of countries that have empires is necessarily imperial (that empire permeates all domestic culture), and that metropolitan resistance to empire only emerges after decolonization. I critically and historically engage him on both counts and argue that Said advances those positions because he assumes that all imperialism is settler colonial (a distinct and deeply intensive variety of empire). I then show what a materialist understanding of the relationship between ‘culture and imperialism’ that utilizes class and capitalism as key categories looks like

Who Owns Frantz Fanon's Legacy?

The Wretched of the Earth is Fanon’s most radical and influential book: it expresses the contradictions and revolutionary possibilities of the whole conjuncture of decolonisation. Yet it has been marred by a postcolonial reception that is blind to Fanon’s socialism and class analysis, and turns Fanon into a prophet of violence – while ignoring the real theoretical deficiencies of his work

After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century

By the time of his death in 2003, Edward Said was one of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century. Said's work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and noted cultural critic, Said redefined the role of the public intellectual. This volume explores the problems and opportunities afforded by Said's work: its productive and generative capacities as well as its in-built limitations. After Said captures the essence of Said's intellectual and political contribution and his extensive impact on postcolonial studies. It examines his legacy by critically elaborating his core concepts and arguments. Among the issues it tackles are humanism, Orientalism, culture and imperialism, exile and the contrapuntal, realism and postcolonial modernism, world literature, Islamophobia, and capitalism and the political economy of empire. It is an excellent resource for students, graduates and instructors studying postcolonial literary theory and the works of Said

Fiction of the New statesman, 1913-1939

This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.</p

Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939

Fiction of the New Statesman is the first study of the short stories published in the renowned British journal theNew Statesman. This book argues that New Statesman fiction advances a strong realist preoccupation with ordinary, everyday life, and shows how British domestic concerns have a strong hold on the working-class and lower-middle-class imaginative output of this period

Israel's Colonial Siege and the Palestinians

If there's one short phrase that can describe Palestinian reality under Israeli occupation today, it is this: enduring under permanent siege, without surrender. My aim in the following is, first, to defend the accuracy of this statement. Since the Oslo Agreements of 1993, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has developed into a colonial siege, gradually atomizing and strangling Palestinian economy and society. Compounded by international boycott, poverty levels are now between 70 per cent and 80 per cent, with extreme and unprecedented levels of unemployment and rising dependency on food aid. Second, although Israeli policy is mainly to blame for this drastic worsening of Palestinian living conditions since 1993, the Palestinian national secular elite is far from blameless. They have, in fact, played a junior yet pivotal role in bringing this new regime into being. By legitimizing their people's continued dispossession and domination by Israel, they have ended up corrupting Palestinian national aspirations for justice and self-determination. With no alternative left project in sight, religious fundamentalism was destined to carry the mantle of an abandoned nationalism and drastically increase its own popular political constituency. Third, siege and capitulation also eventually generated mass resistance. As with the first Intifada of the late 1980s that led to Oslo, Palestinians again revolted in popular protest against colonization and national denial. And with the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, resistance was re-legitimized. This time round, though, conditions were much worse: social power and political leverage were in even shorter supply. Suicide bombing expressed growing Palestinian captivity and despair, and armed struggle replaced an earlier emphasis on mass political participation. I examine these new forms of resistance and scrutinize their prospects of achieving decolonization under continuing conditions of siege, Hamas-Fatah factionalism, and an absence of unified strategy