When my agent and I shopped my book about Israel’s migrant workers and African refugees around, we got a lot of those, “We love it but it’s not right for us” and “This is an important book that needs to be published. But there’s no audience for this.” But perhaps the most common response was, “Where are the Palestinians?” (More…)
We live in the age of lists. The range of culture available to us is staggering, the cost of consuming it less than ever before. Confronted with such overwhelming abundance, we long for the means to impose order upon it. And that’s why we scour the Best-Ofs compiled by anyone with a trace of expertise for guidance. (More…)
Five years of on-the-ground research. Almost three years of writing and rewriting. And my book about migrant workers and African refugees in Israel just won’t sell. What gives? I’ve spent three years addressing everything, with the help of an excellent literary agent who has developed and sold some very big books. (More…)
The back cover and spine of Punk: An Aesthetic are almost entirely white, with a clean, black typeface. Seen from a distance on a bookshelf, it could be any modern art book. But the front cover — punk cartoonist Gary Panter’s illustration of the singer for The Screamers — is another matter (More…)
There’s always one or two at every metal gig I go to in London. Amid the sea of white faces there are always one or two black fans standing out from the crowd. The question I want to ask is “What are you doing here?” Not because I don’t think black people should be into metal, but because I want to know what drew them to heed metal’s call. (More…)
The Islamophobia Industry begins with a quote from the 1949 musical, South Pacific: “you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught.” The implication, which runs throughout Nathan Lean’s new book, is nonetheless a hopeful one. (More…)
Are you prepared for a zombie apocalypse? It seems like everyone has something to say on the topic. From box office hits like 28 Days Later to video games and zombie walks, over the last decade the meme has displayed an especially widespread appeal. How do we explain it? Is it just a silly trend, or is it a sign of something more complex? (More…)
Souciant contributor Keith Kahn-Harris’s The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg is part of a “crowdfunding” model of book publishing by the U.K.-based Unbound. Through Unbound, readers decide which book projects they want to see completed by financially backing it chapter-by-chapter. (More…)
Enter the name “Anne Frank” in Google News. The results will surprise you. Over 5,000 entries are listed; 5662, to be precise, if you look at the stories under ‘Anne Frank’ of Pakistan still critical, in CanIndia, the Canadian-Indian community paper. For a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, who died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, that’s a lot of press. How do we explain it? These aren’t just archival listings. This is hard news. (More…)
Intizar Husain is repetitive. A small set of themes and phrases are the motus animi continuus of his oeuvre. Repeated locutions are marked by their colloquiality: khave se khava chilta tha (“shoulder rubbed against shoulder,”) which he uses to signify bygone spaces, ye ja vo ja (“now here and gone,”) marking sudden departures of idiosyncratic individuals in the past. (More…)
We’re in familiar territory. Newsweek‘s recent cover story, Muslim Rage: How I Survived It and How We Can End It, is unsurprising given the ferocity of recent anti-blasphemy protests. Terrified, Western media have spent the past fortnight asking “Why are Muslims upset?” and, in reference to the Benghazi killings, “How can this happen in a country we helped liberate?” (More…)
Today marks the one year anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street – a time when Angela Y. Davis’s latest collection, The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues, seems especially poignant. As Robin D. G. Kelley points out in the book’s introduction, Davis has been a powerful spokesperson for and presence in the Occupy movement. (More…)