A letter shared by the family of a deceased former New York police officer alleges that the officer, the New York City Police Department and the FBI played a role in the murder of the powerful civil rights leader Malcolm X. The outspoken antiracism activist and former spokesman for the Nation of Islam died on… Read More Deathbed Letter From Former Cop Claims NYPD, FBI Helped Kill Malcolm X
The following conversation took place in December 2020. On the occasion of Jairus Banaji’s latest publication, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew B. Liu spoke to contextualize his work within a multi-decade trajectory of history, theory, and labor organization, across Europe and Asia. We noted the particular significance of an original intervention… Read More “Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
The Allied victory in the First World War was won on the back of the labour of non-combatant ‘coolies’, whose deployment allowed for swift mobilisation across fronts. A new book narrates the story of their struggles on the battlefields and of their neglect. Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921… Read More Book review: The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
‘And then again there are such as consider it virtuous to say, “Virtue is necessary”; but at bottom they believe only that the police is necessary’: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Indian Governments past and present have used a colonial-era law to charge many more ‘seditious’ men and women, most recently during the farmer… Read More Chakshu Roy: Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law
The war in eastern Ukraine, rumbling into life once more after the collapse of an unsteady ceasefire, has created a widening breach between Russia and the west, with relations now worse than they have been in decades. In Russia, the hardening of the domestic consensus behind Putin has been helped along by the media’s increasingly strident nationalism, and by a… Read More Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev – Putinism and the oil-boom years
While Mary Wollstonecraft earned her place at the table for pioneering women in Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party (1974–9), she would not be everyone’s ideal guest. She has a reputation as an acerbic killjoy. She deemed novels to be the ‘spawn of idleness’. She did not embrace women in sisterhood but censured them for their… Read More Book review – Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics
The sudden demolition of a memorial in the Jaffna University Campus in northern Sri Lanka to remember Tamil civilians killed during the LTTE’s last stand against the Sri Lankan Army in 2009 has brought attention to the simmering and yet unaddressed issues of post-war ethnic reconciliation, justice and accountability, as well as a political resolution of the… Read More Nirupama Subramanian: Why a demolition in Jaffna recalls Sri Lanka’s unaddressed Tamil question
War and all of its brutality is attention-grabbing and memorable. Recollections of war and conquests tend to stick around and take up the spotlight in historical records. However, a war-centered narrative paints an incomplete picture of human history—and human nature. While there is a popular opinion in the anthropological community that war is an evolutionary,… Read More Historical anthropologist challenges conventional wisdom about human nature and violence. By April M. Short
This month marks the centenary of a remarkable (and successful) peasant protest in Uttarakhand. The British had inherited from native maharajas a system of forced labour known as begar, which they imposed on the peasantry. Under this system, villagers were compelled to carry the loads of British officials and European travellers, and also provide them… Read More Shekhar Pathak: A hundred years ago, a fiery speech in Uttarakhand escalated the protests against forced labour
45,500 years is a long, long time. It is nearly 23 times as long as the distance between the point at which you are reading this article and the birth of Jesus Christ. It is roughly 9 times as long as the distance between the present day and the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization. And, according… Read More MATTHEW ROZSA: This 45,500-year-old cave painting of a pig may be the oldest known work of art
