Whether or not you agree with Lady Gaga’s estimation that American women are “fighting for their lives” following Trump’s win, the timing of the Republican nominee’s victory and The Handmaid’s Tale‘s spring 2017 premiere seems well-timed.
John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organization in England 1640-1650, (Verso, 2016; reviewed in Portside Culture, November 30, 2016) weighs in with his recommendations about some of the best fiction in English dealing with radical movements and the revolutionary experience.
The Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan is the Nobel committee's first literature prize to a musician, an almost revolutionary break with tradition. Dylan’s originality as a surrealist lyricist was elevated by his engagement with profound social and political themes.
Michelle Obama Calls Out Donald Trump. A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall (Live at Town Hall 1963). The Trump Electoral Drag. The Universe: Now With 10 Times More Galaxies. will.i.am as Donald Trump.
One of the newer fields of academic study is called "Affect Studies," described by Maggie Doherty as the "humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted" In this review, she explores how two authors use ideas generated by this field to explore the political life of feelings.
Two startlingly realistic books by black female authors offering rich, contrasting and brilliantly wrought views of racial conditions for affluent and impoverished African Americans.
Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.
Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.
The last posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens's essays we are likely to see, the book under review shows the incomparable polemicist moved from being a practicing Trotskyist (though he never practiced enough to get good at it) to cosying up to the Washington neocons.
The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.
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