[Before I post the whole article, I want to bring this passage in front, where the most interesting stuff are mentioned in the ending:

"There are three interrelated power blocs in Pakistan. Of these the US lobby is the most influential, the most public and the most hated. It is currently running the country. The Saudis, who use a combination of wealth and religion to get their way, are second in the pecking order and less unpopular. The Chinese lobby is virtually invisible, never interferes in internal politics and for that reason is immensely respected, especially within the army; but it is also the least powerful outside military circles. In Cold War times, the interests of the three lobbies coincided. Not now. The War on Terror has changed all that".]

Tariq Ali does not want to write in plain English that the Americans are “running the country”  - literally  everything and control the military.  I am bit surprised why Tariq Ali does not mention A.Q. Khan.

The full text below: (more…)

["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, link]

There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.

Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.

Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’

As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:

the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.

The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.

It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting
mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.

The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched

as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:

Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.

D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to

recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.

The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.

That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:

At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.

Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its
main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.

Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.

That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.

By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101

Latest issue from Le Monde on The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine . I re-post un-edited articles below. All the three articles [Israel faces up to its past, Judaism is universal and Judaism is universal]

Israel faces up to its past

By Eric Rouleau

With access to 60 years of official archives, Israel’s new historians have shed light on old myths. As a result, a new generation of writers, academics and artists is able to look afresh at the country’s past.

In the 1980s in Israel a new generation of men and woman who had not lived through the Holocaust or the creation of their country came of age intellectually and embarked on a remarkable period of change. This change is indicative of how Israel’s intelligentsia has gradually matured to a point where it is now able to judge the country’s past without hang-ups, and free itself from the myths and taboos propagated by the country’s leaders. (more…)

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What is so frightening about Engdahl’s vision of the world is that it is so real. Although our civilization has been built on humanistic ideals, in this new age of “free markets”, everything– science, commerce, agriculture and even seeds– have become weapons in the hands of a few global corporation barons and their political fellow travelers. To achieve world domination, they no longer rely on bayonet-wielding soldiers. All they need is to control food production. (Dr. Arpad Pusztai, biochemist, formerly of the Rowett Research Institute Institute, Scotland)

 The crescent and the cross

Review by Simon Kuper

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

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Never enough to repeat again and again and AGAIN! Cedric Robinson’s book:

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
A short but in-depth book review by Errol Lawrence:

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A review article of Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their enemies.

Reviewed by Timothy Brennan (more…)

The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa
EDITED BY Scott S. Reese (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 314 pp. Price HB 101.00. ISBN 90–04–13779–3.

This collection of eleven essays comes out of the first colloquium organized by the new Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought (ISITA) at Northwestern University in 2001. It is the second in Brill’s series ‘Islam in Africa’ that Professor John Hunwick and Knut Vikør edit; the series now has six volumes already published, all of which are substantial works and expensive (all usually well over $100). But all are, too, essential volumes in my opinion for any serious library. (more…)

Religious Values & the Rise of Science in Europe
EDITED BY John Brooke AND Ekmeleddin hsanolu (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture ‘Series of Studies and Sources on History of Science, 13’, 2005), 258 pp. Price HB $40.00. ISBN 92–9063–140–6.

Reviewed by Anna Akasoy, Warburg Institute

In his famous The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber presented the idea that the peculiar ‘work ethic’ of Protestantism contributed significantly to the rise of science and technology in western Europe and ultimately to the formation of the world as it is today. About Islam, Weber did not have much good to say. In his Economy and Society the Muslims appear as followers of a warrior cult.

Even though researchers have been challenging these theories for many years, they appear to be quite persistent and are still frequently evoked in present-day debates. This collection of articles, edited by John Brooke and Ekmeleddin hsanolu, is another contribution to a more balanced and differentiated perspective in the debate around fruitful or negative relations between religion and science. After a short introduction by John Brooke (pp. 5–14), the book begins with an introductory essay by John North (‘Western Science, Jews and Muslims,’ 15–30); a section on Lutheranism and Copernican astronomy (Peter Barker, ‘The Lutheran Contribution to the Astronomical Revolution: Science and Religion in the Sixteenth Century,’ 31–62; Charlotte Methuen, ‘On the Problem of Defining Lutheran Natural Philosophy,’ 63–80; Anne-Charlotte Trepp, ‘ “Nature” as Religious Practice in Seventeenth-Century Germany,’ 81–110; Kenneth J. Howell, ‘Styles of Science, Calvinism and the Common Good in the Early Dutch Republic,’ 111–30); Galileo (Paolo Ponzio, ‘Patristic Theology in the Copernican Letters of Galileo,’ 131–43; Mariano Artigas, Rafael Martinez, William Shea, ‘New Light on the Galileo Affair,’ 145–66); Newton (Rob Iliffe, ‘Persecution Complexes: the Religious Structure of Newton’s Philosophical Conduct,’ 167–83); and Islamic history of science (Ekmeleddin hsanolu, ‘The Introduction of Western Science to the Ottoman World: a Case Study of Modern Astronomy (1660–1860),’ 185–228; Sonja Brentjes, ‘Pride and Prejudice: the Invention of a ‘Historiography of Science’ in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires by European Travellers and Writers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ 229–254).

Among the articles dealing with science in the West, Trepp’s and Howell’s articles deserve to be singled out because of their methodological and terminological reflections, which could also be adopted by researchers who deal with other historical or religious spheres. Trepp, for instance, substitutes ‘natural science’ for the wider term ‘nature’ as the object of ‘culturally determined projections, values and practices’ (p. 82). To assess the interactions between an individual’s scientific and theological concepts, Howell suggests a ‘tripartite division between “consistent with”, “motivated by”, and “integrated into” ’ (p. 112). Iliffe, in his interesting article, endeavours in a similar way to explore the complex connections between Newton’s scientific and his alchemical and theological writings.

An intriguing feature of this section is that the authors who deal with Lutheranism approach similar problems from different angles and come to opposed results (Barker highlighting the role of Lutherans in spreading Copernicus’ works, others arguing that these events were more complex), a phenomenon which has been skilfully pointed out in John Brooke’s introduction, where the different arguments are summarized and compared.

The section on Islamic studies includes contributions from two outstanding representatives of the recently growing, but still rather limited, interest in science in the Islamic world in early modern times. Ekmeleddin hsanolu deals with the introduction and gradual acceptance of Western astronomy in the Ottoman world since the mid-seventeenth century in a short, but pioneering survey (a revised version of an article published in 1987). In this comprehensive overview, he includes a rich collection of original material and fascinating insights into how Ottoman writers accommodated Islamic astronomical traditions, religious ideas and the new ideas coming from the West. This is a very valuable contribution to the history of intellectual contacts between the Ottomans and the early modern West and offers intriguing glimpses of Muslim perceptions of the political and technological rise of Western Europe. It covers an almost entirely neglected area in the history of Islamic science and should also be of great interest to those primarily concerned with astronomy in the West.

Sonja Brentjes, in a brilliant article that deserves to be read by every historian of Islamic science, describes how Western authors have shaped the image of the barbarian Turk and the cultivated Persian and laid the foundation for persisting trends in the historiography of science. She presents a complex analysis of three case studies, contrasts the statements of Western authors with her own findings regarding Ottoman science, and points to a number of reasons for the rise of those images, which are clearly a distortion of the reality of science in the early modern Islamic world.

By and large, this is a fascinating collection of articles, some of which are truly excellent and very readable. They explore new areas and material and appeal to a larger audience, whereas others will be read only by those interested in the specific subject. In particular, the two articles on Galileo might have been better published in a journal or a volume dedicated to this author. Historians of science should applaud the fact that this volume combines articles on both Christian and Islamic religion and science. This has become common in medieval studies, but publications on later centuries too often focus on one cultural milieu. Regrettably, the third religion on the European continent, Judaism, has been almost completely left out. Furthermore, the articles in this volume are largely self-contained and do not connect with each other’s ideas. Some of the articles in the section on Lutheranism compare Luther’s impact with that of Melanchthon, and Lutheranism with Calvinism and other religious trends of that time, yet the opportunity for a profound comparative perspective, in particular between Christianity and Islam, is missed. Only the two articles on Islamic history of science combine aspects of East and West in an interesting way.

The variety of topics, historical and cultural contexts, and analytical perspectives, would have required an ambitious and original framework to hold these pieces together in a single, coherent book. Unfortunately, the framework as expressed in the title remains weak and inconsistent. The authors offer interesting insights into relations between religion and science, yet the question of human values and religious values in particular, is almost nowhere addressed in any depth. Most authors dismiss the notion of an immediate impact of religion—in the sense of a set of doctrines—on scientific developments (as proposed by Weber) as too general, or they do not raise such questions in the first place.

John North’s article might have served the purpose of defining the general scope of the book. Yet, unlike most other articles, it offers only rather kaleidoscopic glimpses into various examples of transmission of science. Over the past twenty years a number of great scholars (e.g. Thomas Glick with his comparative study on Islamic and Christian Spain) have dealt with intellectual exchanges between the different religious groups in the Middle Ages and in early modern times, but their research has been completely ignored in this article.

Finally, there are several technical shortcomings that should probably be blamed on the publisher. The production of the text is rather unsatisfactory—the articles are not carefully edited and contain a number of typos and syntactic lapses. Also, readers interested in more than one article would have been helped by an index.