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Diary of (Not) Excavating a Mass Grave in El Salvador
Exclusive extract from Óscar Martínez's A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America for the Nation -
Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan
Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 -
China's Twentieth Century: A reading list on Chinese history, culture and politics
All this week the Verso blog will be focusing on contemporary struggles in China to celebrate Verso's publication of Wang Hui's China's Twentieth Century and Tsering Woeser's Tibet on Fire
Authors
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Arundhati Roy
“Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading." -
Benedict Anderson
“Everything Anderson wrote was boldly original, challenging assumptions by uncovering a neglected or suppressed voice.” – Guardian -
Ellen Meiksins Wood
“Meiksins Wood is a rare breed-an academic with the soul of a storyteller.” —Morning Star
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Wang Hui
Wang Hui is a Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua... -
Tsering Woeser
Tsering Woeser is a poet, essayist and blogger, and one of the Tibetan movement’s most prominent... -
Hsiao-Hung Pai
"Pai's important contribution is her unrelenting focus on the different fates that await rich and poor."—Gregor Benton
Events
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March 23, 2016
London
Foyles
Verso and Compass present: Our London
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March 18, 2016
London, United Kingdom
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Culture Now: Jodi Dean at the ICA
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April 20, 2016
London, United Kingdom
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Guardian Live: Seymour Hersh in conversation with Paul Johnson
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May 19, 2016
Khalili Lecture Theatre,, SOAS
Khalili Lecture Theatre,, SOAS
The City of London and the Global Power of Finance
Blog
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Race and Social Theory: Towards a Genealogical Materialist Analysis
Cornel West's "Race and Social Theory: Towards a Genealogical Materialist Analysis" first appeared in The Year Left Vol. 2: Towards a Rainbow Socialism - Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender, edited by Mike Davis, Manning Marable, Fred Pfeil, and Michael Sprinker, and published by Verso in 1987.
(Cornel West, 1988, via The SCI-Arc Media Archive)
In this field of inquiry, sociological theory has still to find its way, by a difficult effort of theoretical clarification, through the Scylla of a reductionism which must deny almost everything in order to explain something, and the Charybdis of a pluralism which is so mesmerized by 'everything’ that it cannot explain anything. To those willing to labour on, the vocation remains an open one. - Stuart HallWe live in the midst of a pervasive and profound crisis of North Atlantic civilization whose symptoms include the threat of nuclear annihilation, extensive class inequality, brutal state repression, subtle bureaucratic surveillance, widespread homophobia, technological abuse of nature and rampant racism and patriarchy. In this essay, I shall focus on a small yet significant aspect of this crisis: the specific forms of Afro-American oppression. It is important to stress that one can more fully understand this part only in light of the whole crisis, and that one’s conception of the whole crisis should be shaped by one's grasp of this part. In other words, the time has passed when the so-called ‘race question’ can be relegated to secondary or tertiary theoretical significance. In fact, to take seriously the multi-leveled oppression of peoples of color is to raise fundamental questions regarding the very conditions for the possibility of the modern West, the diverse forms and styles of European rationality and the character of the prevailing modern secular mythologies of nationalism, professionalism, scientism, consumerism and sexual hedonism that guide everyday practices around the world.
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China's Twentieth Century: A reading list on Chinese history, culture and politics
The New York Times this week reported that labour struggles in China have multiplied over the past year since the countries economy started to slow down. While this may have been news to many in the western media, used to running stories reflecting on the "Chinese model" of development, and the staggering years of double-digit GDP growth, for the left this was less suprising. Organisations like the China Labour Bulletin have been charting and mapping the waves of labour unrest in China for years now. But, this does raise the spectre of how we see China and it's position in relation to global capitalism.
This week on the Verso blog we'll be highlighting the Verso books in this reading list that cast a critical look at China's history, politics and culture.
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Rodolfo F. Acuña receives the John Hope Franklin Award
Diverse: Issues in Higher Education has awarded the 2016 Dr. John Hope Franklin Award to Rodolfo F. Acuña, founding chair of California State University Northridge's Department of Chicana/o Studies, and author of Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles, among many other books.
(via Rudyacuna.net)
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The Rio 2016 Olympics and the Mega-Event Machine
Earlier this month, Jules Boykoff, author of the forthcoming Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, spoke at an SXSW panel on The Rio 2016 Olympics and the Mega-Event Machine. We present his remarks below.
I come to you from two very different backgrounds: the first is as an athlete who played at a fairly high level and really loves sports and wants it to do everything it can possibly do. I also come to you as somebody who spent August to December in Rio de Janeiro, observing how the Olympic City is changing on the ground.I went with a real interest in talking to actual people, not just the people running the show, but people who were living favelas and being displaced by the Olympics.
The Olympic Games are in a period of immense flux. Many of the big promises about upticks in jobs and development are being cast into major doubt. These are a set of rainbows-and-unicorns assurances that have been bought with a bucket of Bitcoin. This is a real shift in the way we’ve been talking about mega-events, in the media and in the public sphere.