For some among us, there comes a time when we realise our teenage convictions were somewhat misguided. We discover that our parents’ dusty beliefs are not so terribly ill-conceived, having a much sharper understanding of the modern world than we had previously imagined. Luckiest are we who grasp this while still young, before our parents’ departure.
Category: Culture
Anyone who has read me knows full well that I can’t bear the identitarian politics bandwagon and increasingly I’ve been arguing this is a middle class issue. This is a personal monologue and will need refining over time but for the time being this is what I think it’s all…
It is more likely that an increased understanding of the Empire will result in wide-spread ambivalence rather than outright revulsion. Its significance should provoke a healthy kind of intellectual dissonance by diminishing the current critical trend of ethical and ideological absolutism. We should be impressed by its feats and repulsed by its failures, and feel fascinated by, but unsentimental about, the triumphs and transgressions of its leaders.
No matter how advanced we regard our society; no matter how ignorant we perceive our forebears; no matter how comfortably we enjoy our lives, one of the most devastatingly cliché human questions still haunts us, and becomes ever harder to answer: who are we?
The current hyperbolic preoccupation with race in the Anglosphere has provided an opportunity for some to link caste to race as though they are cognate phenomena of oppression. The depiction of Brahmins as the epitome of whiteness at the apex of the Indian caste system, is actually generated from within the same western framework that treats race as a salient difference.
The Covid-19 virus has thrown the creative and cultural industries into a grim crisis. Since lockdown the only access we have to culture has been online: Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook Live, Amazon Prime, Spotify are all the platforms where I currently consume and appreciate culture in lieu of going out…
“Are you seriously still teaching it?” Years ago, when I taught in Brixton, I had a conversation with my Teaching Assistant – a wonderful woman of black Caribbean descent, who supported me in everything I did as a class teacher. I trusted her and so I finally went to her…
The liberal-leaning Mother Jones website recently published an article under the headline “Racial resentment is down since 2016”. The article, written by Kevin Drum, argued essentially that white Republicans were ‘triggered’ by the sight of a black man, Barack Obama, in the White House which caused racial resentment to rise.…