Robert Fisk, journalist and author of The Great War for Civilization, has died. Here he is, talking about that book. For those interested in anti-imperial politics and modern history, especially in terms of the Middle East, this is well worth your time.
Category Archives: Recommended Reading
1938
CLR James the year The Black Jacobins was first published.
FA20: Haitian Revolution
WORKING
Haitian Revolution
Historiography
CLR James, The Black Jacobins
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World
Gerald Horne, Confronting Blak Jacobins
Film
Gillo Pontecorvo, Burn!
Lydia Bailey (1947?)
Edward Halperin, White Zombie
doc. Egalitè for All
doc. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
Visual Arts
Kimathi Donkor, Caribbean Passion: Haiti 1804
Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture
Black Dawn (film)
Drama
Aime Cesaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe
Orson Welles, Voodoo Macbeth
Eugene O’Neill, Emperor Jones
CLR James, Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Play in Three Acts
Novel
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World
Madison Smart Bell, All Soul’s Rising (Haitian Trilogy)
Leonora Sansay, Secret History, or The Horrors of Santo Domingo
Nalo Hopkins, Midnight Robber
Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder
Syl Cheney-Coker, Sacred River: A Novel
Politics/Theory/Anthropology
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood
Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti
Stewart Lee and Caspar Friedrich
The Possibility of an Island
If I have a job in the Fall, I’ll probably teach this dystopian novel by Michel Houellebecq:
Houellebecq is an interesting writer with a certain degree of notoriety. To me he also looks a lot like Antonin Artaud after years of drug abuse and electro-convulsive therapy:
Organize
The last Democratic president urged his party to embrace the audacity of hope. For him, hope was an airy thing: a feeling rooted in the faith that our future can be built on reason and goodwill alone. But offering real hope to the American people is a material project. Hope depends upon the deconstruction of an economic system that leaves too many Americans wondering if they have the resources and capacity to make it through today and a privileged few free to build themselves a better tomorrow.
Osita Nwanevu, “Don’t Mourn Bernie Sanders’s Candidacy, Organize”
Journal 1
“All the Plays and Interludes, which after the Manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to encrease among us, were forbid to Act; the gaming Tables, publick dancing Rooms, and Music Houses which multiply’d, and began to debauch the Manners of the People, were shut up and suppress’d; and the Jack-puddings, Merry-andrews, Puppet-shows, Rope-dancers, and such like doings, which had bewitch’d the poor common People, shut up their Shops, finding indeed no Trade; for the Minds of the People were agitated with other Things; and a kind of Sadness and Horror at these Things, sat upon the Countenances, even of the common People; Death was before their Eyes, and every Body began to think of their Graves, not of Mirth and Diversions.”
–Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
No Distance (225/310/425/485)
Bill Duke directed this adaptation of Chester Himes’s 1958 crime novel A Rage in Harlem.
Charles Portis
Charles Portis. 1933-2020.
Pie (225/310/425/485)
Not a huge fan of network news in general but this is worth looking at.
