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Beetham Gardens by Miquel Galofré
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“Institutionalised homophobia exposes the hollowness of our aspirations to “first world” status. It punctures the Trini delusion of cosmopolitan...”
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“There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we...”
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Treated myself to a banana split for breakfast before my last day of school and oh my god it was too good - banana filled with...
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The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how...
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“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is...”
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Word x 100 !!! Via @imanisublime #PR #cancer #truth #woc
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Homosexuality has a long history in Africa, says anthropologist Patrick Awondo, contrary...
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“I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting...”
If I were to offer a small criticism of Bonds of Empire, then, it is Rush’s acceptance of this supremacy of Britishness over alternative cutural forms. This also influences the language she uses when describing historical events: passive word choices remove the horrors and violence of the colonial encounter. The title Bonds of Empire itself, which suggests linkages and an echo of fraternity, might be equally understood to refer to “bonds” in the financial sense: a debt to the Mother Country where ownership over local development and self-determination are directed by foreign cultural ideals, or what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital. That is how empire works, as imperialism socialises those it makes war on and conquers their inner world — their “biopolitics.” Empire enforces itself inside the minds and cultures of ex-colonies. Hence when Rush writes of decolonialisation she masks the process of neocolonialism and the personal politics involved in such a relationship. Her tale omits the cultural disciplining that such “bonds” demand as payment for success, and presents them instead as free choice; what’s more, as the best choice for all. I would venture that such choice eroded authentic forms of Caribbean self-determination and independence, rather than the other way around.
Empire is based on the theft and accumulation of wealth. This power tries to hide its tyranny by claiming to leave behind positives — in many ways, Rush implies that independence and democracy were such gifts. This is problematic because of what it hides: entrenched poverty; wealth in the hands of a few; private enterprises and public industries still run on a plantation mentality, with their surpluses leaving the country. It is quite clear that the populations of the urban slums of the Caribbean and ex-colonies further afield refute the notion that “bonds of empire” have done anything to transform poverty. Instead, one might argue that Britishness and bonds of empire have helped entrench global class inequalities
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/28-november-2011/best-of-british/
Noam Chomsky (via cultureofresistance)
Also interesting in the context of how States have moved away from providing free education over the last decade
(via revolucion94)
Jon Stewart.
Chris Wallace.
Media Criticism.
So what’s your proof again about the ‘partisan agenda’ and what I do? That’s the embarrassment. The embarrassment is that I’m given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does.
Very good
ournalist Chris Hedges discusses his recent book Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it, he charts the dramatic rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion. Hedges argues we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.
(via mlq3)
(via liberationfrequency)
“I haven’t read Owen Jones’ new book, Chavs, which is garnering rave reviews in the press, but we know the problem that it addresses. Briefly that, in the last generation or so, there has been a conscious effort on the part of the ruling class to obliterate class as a political-ideological category, and a basis for political action. And, concurrent with this there has been a rise in more or less explicit forms of class chauvinism, some of it expressed in the obnoxious ideologeme, ‘chavs’. Only an era which has revived Victorian attitudes concerning ‘respectability’ and the ‘deserving poor’, in which poverty is habitually pathologised and ‘wealth creators’ extolled, could we have a flesh and blood Etonian of royal pedigree in Number Ten. Over the last dozen or so years, there has been a substantial rise in inegalitarian political attitudes, a drop in support for redistribution and, confluently, a more modest but real drop in the number of people who think of themselves as being ‘working class’.”
Developing this perspective enables Althusser to unmask ideological factors underlying a number of conceptions of subject. Among his favorite targets are the autonomous subject, the humanist theory of man, and the discourse of the imaginary. Althusser holds that the primary act of ideological interpellation is to fix “individuals” in place as subjects for a certain “meaning.” The creation of subject in and through discourse (i.e., in philosophic systems, literary representations, psychological theories etc.) produces a subjectivity subjected to certain meanings and explanatory paradigms which control the relationship individuals form to their experience. This is the most significant ideological operation because its function is to close the subject off from the perception and movements of contradictions.
