Antisemitism as racism
This is a recording of the “Antisemitism as racism” panel with myself, Dr Dave Rich and Professor Dibyesh Anand at the University of Westminster on 11th May 2023.
Tag: Racism
Imperial boomerang: what Hannah Arendt actually said
“Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that racialisation and territorial expansion – two practices inherent to imperialism – laid the foundations for European fascism. Totalitarianism in Europe was an outcome of what Arendt termed the ‘imperial boomerang’. Similarly, poet and theorist Aimé Césaire argued in Discourse on Colonialism that Hitler ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures […]
Paul Gilroy: from raciology to planetary humanism
“when the water is lapping up the road, I don’t know that people are going to be fretting so much about their whiteness. Maybe they will. Maybe the appeal of a racial war has its own psychic magnetism for some folk. But I would like to think that in the teeth of the emergency, if […]
Fetishizing Brexit’s working class rage
“Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the ‘folklore’ of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social […]
It’s anti-Muslim racism, not Islamophobia
“In late modernity, authoritarian movements have arisen again that seek to ideologically combine an organic and holistic natural-social order, a purified nationality, a primeval mysticism, and a belief in a superlative civilisation that was created by an ancestral community of blood.” (Bhatt, 2000: 589) Post-9/11 sections of the British Left have championed the term ‘Islamophobia’ […]
Demystifying left antisemitism
Much of the British Left comprehends antisemitism as the exclusive property of the Right: either as a phenomenon of the far Right (fascists) against Jewish people, or as a false accusation by the Israeli Right and its allies against the Left to silence political criticism of Israel, or as an ironic bedfellow of the Israeli Right to justify its existence […]
Expounding racial hatred before and after the Brexit vote
In this post I present, first, a brief overview of the current period in Britain vis-à-vis racism and hate crime; second, the limitation of a dominant academic understanding of racism; and third, a historical exposition of the nature of racism which offers explanatory power for our contemporary era. I. Hate crime post the EU referendum Britain’s […]
Brexit’s inevitable racism
“‘History’ has to be renegotiated and resignified in order to (re)create a sense of the past appropriate to the particular conjuncture and the political project for the future. […] in the case of English nationalism, the events selected include those which evince a sense of external threat over which ‘the English people’ triumph, especially events […]
Cultural victory over children’s human rights? The ritual circumcision turn
My deliberation on the question of the ritual circumcision of male minors on this blog (Scandinavia’s ritual circumcision debate: a socialist response and Ritual circumcision of male minors, and the political befuddlement of Eric Lee) started with a comment that I’d read by Frank Furedi, in which he tosses into a wave of European anti-immigration, anti-gay, and anti-abortion reactionarism: […]
Privilege theory: a political impasse?
On the 1st May 2014 (International Workers’ Day) I attended a session titled “Intersectionality” at the launch event of the Free University of Sheffield. The strap line to the session – “checking our own privilege” – was a more accurate descriptor, since the session itself advanced privilege theory rather than explored intersectionality. Ideas on intersectionality […]
Anaemic On A Bike 