Race & Class recent issues

Englishman

Sivanandan, A. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s

Harcup, T. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

From 1971 to 1976, Chris Searle was at the centre of a number of events in the East End of London that, nearly four decades on, continue to resonate. This article uses a combination of reminiscence, reflection, contemporaneous and retrospective accounts, and engagement with the writings of Searle himself, to explore the meanings of the ‘Stepney Words insurrection’ and the creation of the Basement Writers. The article is informed by ideas of critical literacy, including Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, and argues that community publishing can be seen as an expression of working-class agency and active citizenship within an alternative or ‘plebeian public sphere’.

Teaching tough kids: Searle and Stepney

Davis, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

The template for Chris Searle’s teaching career, his development of a working-class pedagogy and his concept of critical literacy, was set in his very first teaching job, at Sir John Cass School in Stepney, East London. Here he engaged with the lives and imaginations of all the children, encouraging them to write out of their own experience and imaginatively extend it to the lives and struggles of others, whether in their immediate neighbourhood, across the UK, or globally. The writings, published as a series of booklets, Stepney Words, became a national cause célèbre, leading to Searle’s dismissal, a student strike and his reinstatement. Searle’s pedagogy — which he terms critical literacy — goes beyond the concept of child-centred radical progressivism in education, to class-conscious, communitarian education. Critical literacy exposes and deals with the issues that shape the world in which the students have to live, helping them to make sense of it in their own terms. It is a genuine, unforced fusion of the personal and the political.

Chris Searle: Funk Brother number one

Scott, J. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

The working-class pedagogy, or ‘resistance education’ of Chris Searle; his identification of linguistic colonialism; his practice of critical literacy as embracing the lives, experiences and imaginations of his students; and the massive body of work, from Stepney Words onwards, in which he has set this down, comprise an unparalleled resource for radical educationalists seeking to develop the practice — and theory — of critical literacy and working-class pedagogy. Yet, while concepts such as linguistic colonialism have been elaborated to furnish the careers of more high-profile intellectuals and academics on the cultural Left, that same cultural Left, in its concern with a self-limiting identity politics, has sidelined the challenging, revolutionary implications of Searle’s approach and methods. In the process, Searle has been left ‘standing in the shadows’, much like the musicians who originally crafted the Motown sound — the Funk Brothers — and made that phenomenon possible.

The pitch of the world: cricket and Chris Searle

Westall, C., Lazarus, N. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Part of Chris Searle’s wide-ranging contribution to Race & Class — and the subject of this article — is a body of cricket writing that exposes the crippling imperial legacies of the game but still insists on its potential for the future, particularly in England; a future Searle understands as emerging from the country’s working-class, multi-ethnic, inner-city communities. Searle is indebted to C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) and, like James, sees cricket as a site for the expression, playing out and (sometimes) the imaginary resolution of social relations. Searle also follows James in arguing that, because of the game’s sociality, the politics of cricketing performance must be assessed in terms of the relationship between players and their communities. In this context, he has analysed the significance of figures like Devon Malcolm, England’s Jamaican-born fast bowler, and Brian Lara, the world-record holding West Indies batsman. Notably, Searle’s academic and personal contribution has been ‘Towards a cricket of the future’, as one of his own pieces is entitled. He has also helped lay the ground for a critique of the globalised televisual spectacle that is, increasingly, the international game of cricket.

More than words: Chris Searle's approach to critical literacy as cultural action

Lankshear, C., Knobel, M. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

This article discusses what seem to us to be some of the key features of Chris Searle’s approach to language and literacy education within school classroom settings in England, as portrayed in his own writings and reflected in work done by his students and published in numerous compilations from Stepney Words (1971) to School of the World (1994). We understand his work as a sustained engagement in critical literacy, underpinned by an unswerving belief that being a literacy educator serving working-class communities is inherently a political, ethical and situated — material and grounded — undertaking. Throughout his school teaching life, Chris Searle took it as axiomatic that working-class children should learn to read, write, spell, punctuate and develop the word as a tool to be used in struggles — their own and those of people like them, wherever they may live — for improvement and liberation. Literacy education for working-class children must proceed from, maintain continuity with and always be accountable to the material life trajectories and prospects of these children. It can only do this by maintaining direct contact with their material lives and their situated being within their material worlds.

Going in by the front door: Searle, Earl Marshal School and Sheffield

Davis, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

The pattern of Searle’s later teaching career and continuing development of a child-centred, working-class pedagogy, or critical literacy, proved even more controversial than at Sir John Cass school. He was appointed to the head-ship of the 80 per cent non-white Earl Marshal comprehensive in Sheffield in 1990, a year before the first Gulf war. But his refusal to exclude pupils, his determined attempt to involve the local communities, Yemeni, Pakistani, white working-class, etc., in the life of the school and his encouragement of pupils to confront the issues raised by the war — which affected many of them directly — and his bending of the National Curriculum to these ends earned him the wrath not only of the more conservative elements on the local education authority but of shadow Labour education secretary and Sheffield MP, David Blunkett. Attempts made to close Earl Marshal were successfully resisted; Searle was fired, but not before the publication of a number of collections of pupils’ writings, including Lives of Love and Hope, by female pupils and based on family experiences.

Earl Marshal School: towards an inclusive education

Gurnah, A. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

For five years in the early 1990s, as the Conservative government attempted to drive through the new educational policies heralded by its Education Reform Act of 1988, a comprehensive school in Sheffield was the site of a bold experiment in progressive education. Located in a working-class, inner-city area, Earl Marshal School was ethnically highly diverse, with students from Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni and Caribbean families; white students made up less than 20 per cent of the student roll. With Chris Searle as headteacher from 1990 to 1995, these students, aged 11 to 16, were exposed to a very different kind of schooling from that envisaged by the government — with its newly introduced national curriculum, competitive league tables between schools and authoritarian system of inspections carried out through the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Instead, Searle refused to exclude students for misbehaviour; did not sheepishly follow the national curriculum; was not over-impressed by OFSTED; sought student democracy; and involved the local community in the affairs of the school. Inevitably, he drew fire from OFSTED, from other headteachers, from the local education authority (LEA) and even from David Blunkett, the Sheffield MP who from 1994 was Labour’s shadow secretary of state for education. In the end, they were able to unseat him, depriving Sheffield of the benefits of his ideas. The headteacher who opposed the permanent exclusion of students was himself, as he puts it, ‘permanently excluded’ from the job that he loved and lived for.

Mozambique diary

Davidson, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Between 1977 and 1979, Chris Searle taught in the newly liberated Mozambique. His diary of working in a secondary school was published as We’re Building the New School! (London, Zed, 1981) and we reproduce here excerpts from its foreword by Basil Davidson, writing in January 1980.

A British anti-imperialist lion in the Grenada revolution

Jules, D. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

In 1979, the New Jewel Movement (NJM), under the leadership of Maurice Bishop, took power in Grenada in a bloodless coup. With a political vision conjoining socialism and black power, the revolution in Grenada immediately drew the hostility of the US government, which began a programme of destabilisation. The leadership of the revolution sought to develop a highly participatory approach to political and economic decision-making that would enable the country’s workers and peasants to actively shape Grenada’s development. With popular education a priority, Chris Searle came to Grenada to teach. But he soon was invited to contribute to ministerial discussions, devising national education policy and creating a publishing house. He also helped to write Maurice Bishop’s speeches. In 1983, the US government took advantage of division and conflict in the leadership of the NJM to mount an invasion, ‘Operation Urgent Fury’, which restored to Grenada a regime more favourable to US interests.

Review: Forward Groove: jazz and the real world from Louis Armstrong to Gilad Atzmon By CHRIS SEARLE (London, Northway Publications, 2008), 278 pp, {pound}14.99

Ellison, M. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Tributes

Croft, A., Prescod, C., Bourne, J., Reilly, D., Pulsifer, G. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Bibliography of publications

Searle, C., Webber, F. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Gaza

Sivanandan, A. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Civilising the Irish

McVeigh, R., Rolston, B. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Taking Norbert Elias' work on the concept of civilisation as their cue, the authors explore the long history of the 'civilising process' in Ireland, showing how a dichotomy between the civilised and the barbarians is central to English colonialism there. Examining comparative examples such as the colonisation of North America and Australia, justifications of the violence of the colonisers are surveyed to show their reliance on the idea of civilising a racially inferior people. That inferiority can be demonstrated, in different contexts, by a nomadic lifestyle, a lack of industriousness or a different religion. 'Civilisation', it is argued, is the process of rendering colonial subjects fit for purpose, first by transforming resistance into subjecthood and, finally, recruiting 'natives' as actively co-opted citizens. This process is examined in depth in the Irish context, with particular focus on the early conquest, the seventeenth-century Plantations and the eighteenth-century Famine. The symbolic ritual humiliation that continues to be imposed on nationalists in Northern Ireland — for example, compulsory poppy-wearing — shows that the Irish are still required to prove their 'civilisation'.

Palestinian resistance and international solidarity: the BDS campaign

Bakan, A. B., Abu-Laban, Y. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Israel's recent war in Gaza ('Operation Cast Lead') has both exposed Israel's defiance of international law and provided the occasion for increasing support for an organised transnational boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The BDS movement is aimed at challenging the Israeli state's illegal military occupation and a host of corresponding repressive policies directed at Palestinians. However, the BDS campaign, and in particular the call for an academic boycott, has been controversial. It has generated a counter-response emphasising, variously, the goals of the movement as ineffective, counterproductive to peace and/or security, contrary to norms of academic freedom and even tied to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Utilising a Gramscian approach, and drawing from Charles Mills' concept of 'racial contract', we examine the history of the divestment campaign and the debates it has engendered. We argue that the effectiveness of BDS as a strategy of resistance and cross-border solidarity is intimately connected with a challenge to the hegemonic place of Zionism in western ideology. This campaign has challenged an international racial contract which, from 1948, has assigned a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, while absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression and stateless. The BDS campaign also points to an alternative — the promise of a real and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Dean Baker's war of position

Scott, J. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

The US economist Dean Baker, along with his colleagues at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has for the last decade been waging a Gramscian 'war of position' against neoliberal orthodoxy in the US. With the collapse of the housing market bubble (which Baker predicted) and the ensuing global economic crisis, his analysis has had more of a hearing in the mainstream. According to Baker, the internationalisation and deregulation of financial markets has been a mechanism for redistributing upwards the benefits of labour productivity growth and led to a hugely overblown financial sector prone to self-deception, criminality and highly speculative short-term profiteering. An alternative can be found, argues Baker, in Latin America's rejection of neoliberalism.

Tea -- midwife and nurse to capitalism

Kemasang, A.R.T. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Tea is and has for long been so ubiquitous a part of daily life, in the UK particularly, that its true significance remains almost invisible. Yet, as this article shows, it has nonetheless been of unprecedented importance in the historical, social and economic development of Britain, from the eighteenth century onwards, and not only as a major plantation-grown commodity of colonial trade. Indeed, its knock-on health benefits, as a counter to alcoholic alternatives and insanitary water supplies, were of primary importance to the growth and maintenance of the early industrial working class — and hence to the very development of Britain's early industrial and colonial supremacy.

British radicals

Seabrook, J. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

How are the dissenting voices of the past — pilloried and persecuted in their own time — later domesticated and neutered in order to embellish the myth of inevitable progress to today's best of all possible worlds?

France: voices of the banlieues

Bouteldja, N. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Two interviews carried out at the October 2008 Forum Social des Quartiers Populaires in the Paris suburb of Nanterre reveal some of the political activism taking place, respectively, among French Muslim women and with immigrant elders from former French colonies. In the first case, the issue is raised of whether the wider women's movement will recognise a specifically Islamic feminism. The second interview draws attention to a struggle to recognise memories and experiences that have been largely neglected.

Review: Latin America and Global Capitalism: a critical globalization perspective By WILLIAM I. ROBINSON (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 412 pp

Harris, J. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Review: Africa Writes Back: the African writers series and the launch of African literature By JAMES CURREY (Oxford, James Currey Publishers, 2008), 352 pp

Wolfers, M. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Review: Bad Samaritans: the myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism By HA-JOON CHANG (New York, Bloomsbury, 2008), 288 pp

Kam Hei Tsuei, — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Review: Urban Outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality By LOIC WACQUANT (Cambridge, Polity, 2008), 342 pp. A World of Gangs: armed young men and gangsta culture By JOHN M. HAGEDORN (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2008), 216 pp

Clement, M. — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Index to Volume 50

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Books received

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Obama: the new contours of power

Harris, J., Davidson, C. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Barack Obama's election as US president marks a historic cultural shift in US political life, and is a major victory for progressive forces. But what is the nature of the broad-based alliance that placed him in the White House, how was it forged and from what did it derive its strength? The global economic crisis has shockingly exposed the bankruptcy of hitherto dominant and unfettered neoliberalism and opened the way for setting a genuinely progressive social and economic agenda. This article analyses the challenges that face the new administration and the balance of progressive forces that could make a profound and lasting difference to US society.

Post-national Europe -- without cosmopolitan guarantees

Hansen, P. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

For some years, a growing crowd of 'cosmopolitan' Left-liberal scholars and intellectuals have been taking aim at the nation state, holding it responsible for numerous grave problems facing Europe and the wider world, ranging from growing anti-immigrant sentiments to the absence of a counterweight to US neoconservative unilateralism. In this view, 'more Europe', as in more supranational EU integration, is said to be the key solution, paving the way for a progressive, human rights-based 'cosmopolitan Europe' capable of transcending the vices of national self-interest. This article offers a critique of such an EU-based cosmopolitan promise, focusing primarily on asylum policy. Since there has been an increased EU involvement in asylum policy in recent years, it makes for an ideal context to discuss and 'test' the cosmopolitan 'more Europe' thesis. It is argued that, while there are as many good reasons to remain critical of the nation state as there are injustices committed in its name, recognition of this fact cannot be allowed to spill over uncritically into the nowadays fashionable contention that progress will automatically result from diminishing national sovereignty and the shift of policy-making to the EU level. As the case of 'Europeanised' asylum policy demonstrates, there are no guarantees whatsoever to that effect.

Sweden: detention and deportation of asylum seekers

Khosravi, S. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants (including asylum seekers) in Stockholm between 2004 and 2006, additional interviews with police officers, deportation escorts and staff at Swedish detention centres and some fieldwork in Tehran in June 2005 and August 2007, this article examines the impact of Sweden's more restrictive asylum policy since the beginning of the decade. From a condition of `deportability' to incarceration in detention centres and then removal from Sweden, asylum seekers have been increasingly criminalised — their confinement and removal being seen as mechanisms for preserving national security. Focusing, in particular, on the techniques used by the detention apparatus to `humanise' and `rationalise' the confinement and expulsion of asylum seekers, it is argued that a discourse of `caring' and `saving' works, in effect, as a disciplinary mechanism that presents asylum seekers as responsible for their own detention and deportation.

Sweden: HIV/AIDS policy and the 'crisis' of multiculturalism

Bredstrom, A. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

This article examines shifts in the ways that immigrants were framed and depicted within Swedish HIV/AIDS policy discourse from 1985 to 2005. In particular, it examines whether, when and how immigrants were linked to understandings of risk and safety in sexual relations. Whereas, at first, immigrants were rather marginal to this discourse, they later held a central position. Moreover, there was a shift in how ethnicity and 'race' were conceptualised by the Swedish authorities — a movement away from cultural pluralism towards neo-assimilationism. Throughout this time, cultural differences, often defined in terms of different attitudes to gender and sexuality, were focused on as defining the boundaries between 'immigrants' and 'Swedes'. But, whereas the pluralist approach favoured respect and tolerance for these differences, the neo-assimilationist approach that replaced it argued that immigrants ought to assimilate to the more enlightened sexual values of Swedishness, in order to better prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS infection.

Germany: constructing a sociology of Islamist radicalisation

Dornhof, S. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

A major academic survey of Muslims in Germany seeks to measure and describe their attitudes to integration, religion, democracy and violence in order to identify the 'problem group' of those who are at risk of radicalisation into Islamist extremism. Yet the design of the survey and its categories of interpretation tell us more about the assumptions of the researchers than about the cultural, religious or political life of Muslims in Germany.

Europe: crimes of solidarity

Fekete, L. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

In response to increasing activism in support of migrants and asylum seekers across Europe, EU governments are seeking to criminalise acts of solidarity, in a number of different ways. Laws against the assisting of illegal migration — originally intended to target traffickers — are being deployed against those offering humanitarian support, such as accommodation or healthcare. And politicians who take a public stand in defence of migrants and asylum seekers face threats of prosecution. At the same time, criminal sanctions are increasingly being used against those who protest against deportations on planes and those who seek to rescue migrants stranded at sea.

Review: Gilberto Freyre: social theory in the tropics By PETER BURKE and MARIA LUCIA G. PALLARES-BURKE (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2008), 261 pp. Paper, {pound}19.90

Arocena, F. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Review: The Darker Nations: a people's history of the Third World By VIJAY PRASHAD (New York and London, The New Press, 2007), 384 pp. Cloth $26.95, Paper $19.95

Camp, J. T. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Review: Left of Karl Marx: the political life of Black Communist Claudia Jones By CAROLE BOYCE DAVIES (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2008), 311 pp., $22.95

Harlow, B. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Review: Blood and Rage: a cultural history of terrorism By MICHAEL BURLEIGH (London, Harper Press, 2008), 545 pp. {pound}25.00

Newsinger, J. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Review: Burundi: biography of a small African country By NIGEL WATT (London, Hurst Publishers, 2008), 224 pp. Paper, {pound}15.99. Cloth, {pound}50.00

Wolfers, M. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Review: Scholars in the Marketplace: the dilemmas of neo-liberal reform at Makerere University, 1989--2005 By MAHMOOD MAMDANI (Dakar, Senegal, CODESRIA, 2007), 296 pp. . Let the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neo-liberalism By ISSA G. SHIVJI (Dakar, Senegal, CODESRIA, 2006), 305 pp

Harlow, B. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:31:18 PDT

Besieged in Britain

Brittain, V. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

The effects of the war on terror in restricting civil liberties have been widely documented; its exacerbation of Islamophobia less so. But one shocking development has remained invisible — the rounding up, imprisonment and indefinite house arrest of a number of Muslim men resident in the UK, in a situation analogous to Guantánamo. Held for years without charge, under restricted regimes of twelve to twenty-four hour curfews, with virtually no access to the wider world and kept in ignorance of the alleged evidence against them, the impact on them and their families has been devastating. Many had come to Britain as refugees seeking a safe haven; some have been driven into madness, some have attempted suicide, some have left their families and returned voluntarily to regimes where they may face imprisonment and torture. The mental and physical health impacts on the men and their families, of an inhumanity that beggars belief, masked under the bureaucracy of 'control orders', 'SIAC deportation bail' and torturous legal processes, is here unveiled.

A syllabus of errors: Pope Benedict XVI on Islam at Regensburg

Coury, R. M. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Islam at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2006 are examined here in terms of the traditions of Orientalism on which he draws and the political functions that they serve. The Pope portrays Islam as tending to irrational violence, in contrast to a Christianity based on a rapprochement between faith and the spirit of Greek philosophical inquiry, a rapprochement that is taken to be the foundation of European identity. This article examines the falsehoods, misrepresentations and weaknesses of the Pope's arguments and locates his understanding of Islam within broader intellectual patterns. It argues that his remarks reflect, more particularly, the specificities of his personal formation and the contemporary needs of the Roman Catholic Church.

Zionism and Oriental Jews: a dialectic of exploitation and co-optation

Ein-Gil, E., Machover, M. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Some recent accounts have sought to present Mizrahim —Jews whose origins are in Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa rather than in eastern and central Europe — as fellow victims of the Zionist project, along with Palestinian Arabs. On this view, Zionism is an essentially Ashkenazi (European Jewish) project. Here, a more complex account of Mizrahi identity in Israel is presented, showing how Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries, despite being regarded as culturally inferior and treated as colonisation fodder by the Zionist leadership, were nevertheless successfully co-opted to the Zionist project. The Mizrahim continue to face socio-economic disadvantages in Israel but these are predominantly a reflection of class barriers and are fundamentally distinct from the national oppression of Arabs.

Jacks and diamonds -- some aspects of race on the London Victorian stage

Waters, H. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Embedded within the popular drama of the nineteenth century are not only concepts and attitudes towards `race' that still have influence today, but also a skewed take on genuine historical episodes and movements, including the development of colonialism. Focusing on one little known popular melodrama and locating it in the history of its time reveals a network of connections that span the British abolition of the slave trade, the importance of Brazil to the development of Britain's economy, the role of the London merchants and, of course, a clearly developed racial hierarchy. At its pinnacle stood the emblem of popular patriotism, the British Jack Tar.

Catching history on the wing: a conference report

Institute of Race Relations — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

On 1 November 2008, the Institute of Race Relations held a conference, 'Catching history on the wing', in London, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its formation. We publish here a report on the conference, which included contributions from Lee Bridges, Victoria Brittain, Ruqayyah Collector, David Edgar, Liz Fekete, Arun Kundnani, Herman Ouseley, Colin Prescod, A. Sivanandan and Salma Yaqoob.

Catching history on the wing: conference speech

Sivanandan, A. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

On 1 November 2008, the Institute of Race Relations held a conference, 'Catching history on the wing', at the National Union of Teachers building in London, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its formation. We publish here the text of A. Sivanandan's speech to the conference, reflecting on the lessons of the Institute's history for today's political struggles.

Reviews: The Umma and the Dawla: the nation state and the Arab Middle East By TAMIM AL-BARGHOUTI (London, Pluto Press, 2008), 240 pp. Paper $23.10

Hagopian, E. C. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: Poems from Guantanamo: the detainees speak Edited by MARC FALKOFF (Iowa City, IA, University of Iowa Press, 2007), 84 pp. Cloth $13.95. The Guantanamo Files: the stories of the 774 detainees in America's illegal prison By ANDY WORTHINGTON (London, Pluto Press, 2007), 352 pp. Paper {pound}16.99

Britain, V. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: patriotism in the time of terror By NANDITA HAKSAR (New Delhi, Promilla & Co. / Bibliophile South Asia, 2007), 348 pp. Rs 450

Kundnani, A. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: Socialist Joy in the Writings of Langston Hughes By JONATHAN SCOTT (Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press, 2007), 264 pp. Cloth $39.95

Searle, C. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: After Abolition: Britain and the slave trade since 1807 By MARIKA SHERWOOD (London, I.B. Tauris, 2007), 246 pp. {pound}20.00

Reilly, D. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: Chinese Whispers: the true story behind Britain's hidden army of labour By HSIAO-HUNG PAI (London, Penguin, 2008), 262 pp. {pound}8.99

Bourne, J. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST

Reviews: The Dialectics of Globalization: economic and political conflict in a transnational world By JERRY HARRIS (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), $29.99

Targ, H. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:50:49 PST