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Last night, on one of the UK TV channels, a new three-part drama was broadcast called, 'Occupation' which deals with the lives of several fictitious British soldiers in Iraq and their families during the years following 2003. Iraqis feature as background fauna except where they rise to being love-interest (as in 'white man attempts to rescue educated brown woman from nasty fanatical brown men, only to find that it is a fruitless mission'). Technically, it is very well-written and the acting was superb. It is posing as a critique of government policies in relation to the invasion, destruction and occupation of Iraq.
However, while appreciating the drama and the sentiment, several matters occur to me:
1) Powerful elites of white - or 'Honorary White' artists and journalists seem to monopolise all sides of the argument in the public space of the West. [Btw, I use the term, 'white' here politically rather than cod-anthropologically, as (though the West ... (more)
15th June 2009
Alina Mirza, the Artistic Director of Glasgow-based arts and film production company, Heer Productions, has been awarded the British Muslims House of Lords Honour Awards 2009 for Arts and Culture! The award will be presented to Dr Alina Mirza at the House of Lords, annual honours dinner reception on 2nd July 2009.
Dr Mirza co-founded Heer Productions in 2004 and under its banner has pioneered many innovative projects including the internationally acclaimed First European Pakistani Film, Media and Arts Festival - Pehlee ... (more)
1) When people, as did one of the Labour Council Leaders in Yorkshire after the Euro-election result, talk about the need to address the problems and concerns of the 'white working-class', they seem to forget that most of the black population of this country (and most of the population of this country and of every industrialised country) are also working-class and that the same problems are besetting them and have done for decades. These problems are largely the result of unbridled capitalism - the same pathology that has landed the world economy - and specifically the UK economy - in the latrine. Divide and rule is the maxim and the strategy. Let's not be fooled again.
2) I am sickened by the sound of Yorkshire accents spouting racist or ignorant nonsense. I was born in Beverly, East Yorks. (yes, I know, where Philip Larkin of the 'We Want Enoch!' tendency lived) and was brought up for a good period in the north and east of England and in general I associate northern accents ... (more)
One admires the courage of this writer, who has exposed the Camorra in a passionate and excruciatingly detailed account of the hegemonic, cold-bloodedly economic and deathly apparatus through which exemplify and exert power in Italy, the EU and globally. He's had to go into hiding. May the good spirits of the world be with him.
This is the full version of my comment on the occasion of teh 20th anniversary of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in relation to his novel, 'The Satanic Verses'. An excellent article by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent newspaper recently drew on this statement:
‘The Rushdie Affair’ was a wholly negative phenomenon. An ingratiating cyclopaedia drawn straight from Mediaeval Frankenreich, ‘The Satanic Verses’ was crack cocaine for bigots. The affair empowered both Islamism and liberal imperialism and set up the ongoing ‘straw man’ dualism in which globally writers of Muslim origin perpetually are expected to display loyalty to one or other of these extremist positions and in their work to essentialise, exoticise and otherwise limit their freedom of expression. It also initiated the hilarious fashion for fatwas at the drop of a hat! All novels are political, but entirely predictably this book became a political football in a game in which the only ... (more)
It's very exciting that Two Ravens Press is going to publish my next nove, 'Joseph's Box' on 31st July 2009! Watch this space...
