Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue: == Looking back at 1975 Emergency == DOCUMENTS: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks Books of Note: * (Coverpage Artwork credits: Robert Delaunay, Rythmes, 1934) https://mainstreamweekly.net/article15907.html
It’s a breakthrough moment for a language long left out of the global literary conversation. By Iqbal Bhat It’s not often a novel written in Kashmiri reaches the global stage. But on June 16, that changed. At the Himal Southasian Fiction Fest, a big announcement was made. The 1975 novel To Each Their Own Hell by Akhtar Mohiuddin won… Read More For the First Time, a Kashmiri Novel Crosses Borders, Wins Global Spotlight
Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle issue #19, 1991 As late as 1979, Guy Debord could write about his 1967 book of theory, which is entitled The Society of the Spectacle: “There is no a word to be changed . . . . [Since 1967] the spectacle has done nothing but meet more exactly… Read More Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Ellen Wayland-Smith admires how Is a River Alive? places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we regard as mere backdrop to human activity. Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. 2025 IN RELIGIOUS COSMOGONIES, anthropologist Mircea Eliade argues in his 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, the natural world… Read More What Would It Take to Re-Sacralize Nature?
We have previously written about the debates over the political relevance of the Enlightenment today, drawing on Antoine Lilti’s critical review of the histories of Jonathan Israel. We present the English translation of his essay, which has import far beyond any disciplinary boundaries: Viewpoint Magazine David A. Bell: The Uses and Abuses of Enlightenment: AV lecture; January 2025 ***… Read More How Do We Write the Intellectual History of the Enlightenment? Spinozism, Radicalism, and Philosophy
Kieran Setiya reviews Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy IS THE FORM of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph… Read More The Politics of Apoliticism
DOCUMENTS: BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks:
Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.”… Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that… Read More Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
George Orwell Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the… Read More Politics and the English Language (1946)
NB: India After Gandhi is a history of India after independence, but it must be said that Ramchandra Guha is among a small circle of scholars to have done singular service to the Indian and global public with his extensive and meticulous research on Mahatma Gandhi’s life. It is gratifying that his work has been… Read More Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi’ – Gujarati translation launched in Ahmedabad
After the truth-shower 