The narcissism is staggering. The infantile posturing simply terrifying to witness. These are the people we have sent out into the world to report on it. Confused, lost, and reduced to simply making pictures that sell, for stories that are edited thousands of miles away, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that not a single person in this list of ‘luminaries’ has anything to say about any of the communities, and conflicts they covered. These series of articles – and we see them every few weeks – perpetuate a false understanding and a false ideal. And these photographers are all willing participants in this game. Details »
The Spinning Head
A Photographer Confronts His World
The Military-Literary Complex by Elliott Colla Or How Our Stories Are The Only Stories
A massive new project to create a ‘canon’ of the Iraq was in the works and recently published with much fanfare. It received support from The National Endowment for the Arts—“in coordination with all four branches of the Armed Forces and the Department of Defense,” the Veterans Administration, the Library of Congress, the Southern Arts Federation, The Writer’s Center, Random House Books, and the Boeing Corporation….
The Military-Literary Complex.
Even now, even after all the evidence in front of us, even after over a decade of lies, obfuscation, and narrative narcissism – the fundamental nature of most any writing coming out of the West about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia – there are people who attempt to defend the embed model of journalism. Details »
Diaspora
On the Side of the Road – OFFICIAL TRAILER from Naretiv Productions on Vimeo.
True that the people were forcibly evicted, and it is true that official histories have been re-written to write them out of memory and documentation. But where did they go? And why have we ‘disappeared’ their histories, voices and experiences?
The Palestinian diaspora – a mirror to the one that once was the proud heritage of the Jewish people – spreads from Latin America, to the Middle East, and South East Asia. And though there are no multi-million dollar, corporate sponsored, celebrations, memorials, museum, or vigils that commemorate, the Nakba lives within millions of people. The Palestinian diaspora is perhaps one of the strongest and least known in the world today.
I am often asked why Israel, and why not spend more time worrying about some other crisis and conflict. This question is always only asked by apologists for Israel. And though there are many reasons for why Israel first, there are a few that are very obvious. First, it is the Palestinians who have worked hard, day and night, to make it an issue for the world’s conscience and concern. I can list dozens of intellectuals, writers, artists, activists, politicians, and others who have tirelessly spoken out about their dispossession and suffering and convinced, through evidence and reason, the just nature of their struggle. I think of Darwish, Said, Abu-Lughud(s), Suleiman, Bishara, Haddad, Ashrawi, Habibi, Bargouti, Abunimah, H Sharabi, Shamas, Nusseibeh, Khalidi, Karmi, and so many more. And so many friends who echoed their arguments – Ahmed, Zinn, Barsamian, Chomsky, Judt, and others….So the Palestinians have earned the concern of the world, and they have spent decades arguing it in any and every way possible. The other reasons are obvious: this is an American funded military occupation and repression, this is a remnant of an era of colonial arrogance and brutality we are trying to close, this is a metaphor for the continued repression and erasure of people’s histories who are still trying to discover that ‘dawn’ Faiz so eloquently spoke about.
Palestine is not a place, nor a people. It is an ideal that embodies within it the struggles for hundreds of millions of people around the world, and it captures the anger, disappointments, frustrations and determinations of most all of the post-colonial world whose dreams of emancipation today lie mostly in ruins. As goes Palestine, thus goes most of the rest of the still-struggling world.
I have written about this documentary before. In a post called The Greatest Denial – Israel And The Erasure of The Past, The Present And Any Future, pointing out that:
The refusal to speak, teach, discuss or even recognise the Nakbah as it is referred to by the Palestinians, remains the single more important obstacle to any chance of hope in the region. This refusal underpins the disdain and violent disregard with which the occupied Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are treated – their rights, their grievances and their very humanity, disregarded as relevant or even equivalent. It underpins the now infamous conviction that this was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ so that the Zionist enterprise need not have to confront the injustices – injustices that were well-known to the founders of the enterprise, it was being constructed on. In fact, the refusal to teach or acknowledge the Nakbah is tied to this need to see this land as empty and without people.
The fraud of the peace-process – one that has enriched war criminals such as Tony Blair – is consistently given life when it appears that the Palestinians may begin to take matters into their own hands. The purveyors of this fake peace process – like the diseased war criminal and mass murdered Tony Blair and his money making scams that have murdered hundreds of thousands, continue to sell us a dead horse that today can’t even be taken seriously as a corpse. At least not by those who have the most to lose. We are today returning to the realisation that this battle will have to be fought – in the streets, in the corridors of power, and in the minds and hearts of the tens of millions of Europeans and Americans who fund this occupation, who collude in its violence and brutality, and who chose to pretend that it is Israel that is in fact under threat, and not accept the reality that since 1948, and for some years earlier, a hapless, helpless people have had everything stolen from them and continue to lose more each and every day. The battle for history is the battle for lives when it comes to this conflict. To repeat it, again and again and again, is critical.
Can non-Europeans think, and if so, can the non-European be allowed to speak?
Hamid Dabashi makes an argument that should have been made much earlier. So indeed, why are all the incredible voices emerging from South Asia, China, Africa and elsewhere always and consistently missing from any discussion about philosophy and society?
Can non-Europeans think? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.
As Dabashi argues:
Why is European philosophy “philosophy”, but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic – an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures – they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row…..
The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is “philosophy” and their particular thinking is “thinking”, and everything else is – as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying – “dancing”.
Anyone who has read a modicum of writers from Asia and Africa will remain stunned at the ignorance of European thought. It is an ignorance that also colors and taints so much of journalist and photojournalistic works where entire generations of thinkers – philosophers, historians, intellectuals, writers, poets, activists and what have you, are completely missing. Its as if these regions and those people simply do not think, write, argue, debate, challenge, inform, and illuminate. It is as if we here have nothing to learn from them there. Or dare I say, as if we here may only be able to get it right by listening to those others there. Details »
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