Global Affairs
Can the Market Speak?
The market, we are told, has moods and desires, is ‘jittery’ and ‘sends a message’. We are told to listen and anticipate its every move, preempting adverse ‘verdicts of the market’ through shrewd political decision-making. In his short (81-page) essay, ‘Can the Market Speak?’, Campbell Jones investigates the conceptual assumptions that underlie the idea that the market has intentions, consciousness, and the ability to speak to us. Yet, argues reviewer Mark Bergfeld, by solely focussing on the personification of the markets, Jones reveals a contradiction in capital’s attempt to paint the markets as behaving rationally: The supposed rational actors inside of the markets are themselves guided by “the invisible hand of the market”. In other words, underlying the very rationality of the market one finds irrationality and superstition.
Exchange of Glances: Florence and Baghdad
In his new book, ‘Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science’, German art historian Hans Belting re-examines the dual use of perspective, as a transformative device of depiction in Western Art and as a form of geometrical abstraction in Middle Eastern Islamic art. While the theory of perspective was first formulated in eleventh-century Baghdad by Ibn al-Haithan (Alhazen), it was in Florence that its potential as a mirror of the human gaze was fully explored. However, writes reviewer Jerry Brotton, in re-evaluating the origins of perspective in Western art, Belting stays clear of clichéd arguments about how Arab and Islamic thinkers ‘got there first’ in the discovery of perspective. Instead, he asks the more profound question of why Alhazen developed the visual principles of perspective but did not translate them into an artistic theory. Central to his answer is the recognition that, on Alhazen’s account of vision, images were thought to originate in the imagination, not the eye: In other words, they could not be made visible because they did not occur in the external world.
American Foundations and the Politics of Philanthropy
In his book ‘Foundations of the American Century’ (Columbia University Press 2012), Inderjeet Parmar provides a wide-ranging study of the influence American philanthropic foundations have exerted on world politics and the ‘soft power’ that comes with cultural hegemony. The mutual penetration of state and society, notest Parmar, is ‘so deep and comprehensive – physically, politically, ideologically, psychologically, and organizationally – that it is almost impossible to say where one ends and the other begins’. Parmar’s book succeeds, writes reviewer Houman Barekat, because he studiously avoids the trap of implying an unmediated vertical relationship between the philanthropies and the political and economic elites whose goals they ultimately served. Nuanced and well-researched, Parmar’s study provides a healthy antidote to simplistic critiques of US ‘elites’, while bringing out – through case studies of Indonesia and Chile – how the initiatives of ‘philanthropic’ organizations dovetailed with and complemented those of the American state.
Right to the Olympic Village
Most visitors to London’s Olympic Park will need to enter through a narrow passageway next to Westfield Stratford City, a gigantic retail and entertainment venue. The Olympic park itself is not accountable to any of the London boroughs and councils within which it is located. Combine this decline of the idea of public space with the curious opening skit that featured ‘James Bond’ and the Queen, and the idea of the Olympic Games as a celebration of the human body and spirit takes on more than a whiff of, as Lewis Beardmore puts it in his review of David Harvey’s ‘Rebel Cities’ – ‘the sinister securitisation and spatial control surrounding the emplacement of the Olympic Games in East London’.
River of Smoke
River of Smoke follows Sea of Poppies, as the second instalment of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. Whereas the first book illustrated the rich details of opium production from its harvest to its packaging in earthenware balls for shipment, this second volume follows the path of the opium to its trade in Canton. The heterogeneous world of the Indian Ocean trading community is again clearly illustrated, with discursions into botany, painting, and the varied food available in each port. The subaltern can indeed speak in these books: characters who are of the “elite” are not the focus, rather those lower on the ladder, more directly affected by all aspects of the drug trade. As in Sea of Poppies, much of the dialogue is in various dialects — in this book, the pidgin of the Canton trading port — thus weaving a rich tapestry of the cosmopolitan diversity of colonial ports at the time. After production and trade, asks reviewer Katrina Gulliver, will the final book in the trilogy focus on opium’s end users?
A Plea for Multireligious Self-Confidence
Nilüfer Göle’s book “Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe”, recently translated as “Islam in Europe: The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism”, makes a strong case that Islam must be acknowledged as having become part of the fabric of European modernity. As reviewer Mohammed Khallouk points out, the experience and lifestyle of a generation of young Muslim women in Europe occupies a central place in Göle’s argument. While the values they adopt in their personal lives may differ from those of their (non-Muslim) peers, their non-confrontational fusion of Western modernity and Muslim spirituality showcases what a self-confident multireligious Europe might look like.
Offense Taken
When do images and words become so powerful that they warrant punishment, or should be considered morally reprehensible? In this essay, Bruce Fleming, Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, reflects on the policing of speech and the increasing polarization of public debate in the United States. In an unlikely pairing, he contrasts Sarah Palin’s ‘America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag’ with John Searle’s ‘Making the Social World’. What could a political memoir and mission statement of a presidential wannabe have to do with a scholarly work by a Berkeley philosophy professor? Read more to find out.
Tales From a Dystopic Camelot
In his book ‘Mumbai Fables’ (Princeton 2010), Gyan Prakash unfolds the rich tapestry of the city’s cultural history. From the grand colonial architecture to more recent land reclamation projects, he traces the spatial dimensions of the city and their cultural meanings. Like all great cities, Mumbai has more than one fable in its story. But for all of Mumbai’s historical glamour, the situation of shanty-town dwellers is not overlooked — even though reviewer Katrina Gulliver has some doubts about whether the plotline of a comic book (to which Prakash devotes considerable space) is the right literary device.
Interview: Humphrey Davies on Egyptian Writing
Leading Arabic-English literary translator Humphrey Davies, who has lived in Cairo for the past 35 years, paints a picture of contemporary Egypt through words and graphic narratives. Speaking to Sophie Roell, co-editor at FiveBooks and contributor to TheBrowser (which commissioned the interview), Davies explores the political dimension of everday life in pre-2011 Egypt by looking in depth at five recent books by Egyptian writers: Alaa Al-Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building’, Ahmed Alaydi’s ‘On Being Abbas El Abd’, Khaled al-Berry’s ‘Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise’, Khalid Al Khamissi’s ‘Taxi’, and Magdy El Shafee’s ‘Metro’.
Rage, Time, and the Politico-Religious Revenge Banks
In his recent book ‘Rage and Time’ (originally published as ‘Zorn und Zeit’ in 2006), Peter Sloterdijk, best-known to the English-speaking world for his ‘Critique of Cynical Reason’, published in the 1980s, tells a compelling story of the mediations, exploitations, and translations of rage through, and into, the great religious and political ‘cosmologies’ of Western civilisation. ‘Rage and Time’, according to reviewer Francisco Klauser, is a powerfully written book about the sociopolitical ordering, coding, and accumulation of rage; a book which, in sum, acknowledges and investigates the role of rage as one of the driving forces of human history. However, while Sloterdijk’s narrative is rich in suggestive power, his analysis of the upcoming sociopolitical challenges in the 21st century remains essentially incomplete — the future of rage has yet to unfold.
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