Gareth Evans
“... time was not a single river but something always branching into every possible outcome; time was a tree growing at infinite speed to produce infinite branches, so that there were many pasts and more presents and this very moment is begetting many futures.”
Rebecca Solnit, writing about the Merced River, Yosemite, USA
Place: London, Tate Britain and Parliament Square; Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran... centres of power and then where power acts; centres of resistance... Time:…
If ever there was a time for peace, it must surely be our troubled, traumatised own. And yet, if it were instigated, the fundamental question remains: who might benefit from this dreamt-of peace, and would any agreement resolve the underlying causes of conflict or merely satisfy the current global managers of economic and political power?
Given that this review is being written the day after 125 Iraqis were killed by US strikes in the Iraqi city of Samarra, while dozens died in…
If protest is to achieve anything, it should offer both a means and an end in itself. That is to say, the act should serve the location and situation in hand and, ideally, should energise those participating to further actions. Ordeal is not hugely conducive to spirited resistance.
If this all sounds either obvious or prescriptive, the point is only made because of the fundamental role media responses play in determining the success or failure of any act. So much of the time,…
“...The rebels search each other out. They walk toward one another. They find each other and together break other fences.” Part of the scene-setting statement from the latest volume to claim space on the shelf marked “new world order, resistance to”. Have we been here before? And yet... sometimes a book, a film, an action, grouping or artefact feels like a step shift, feels like it embodies a significant new dimension of thought or relevance.
With this 500 page “brick” of a book,…
Cultural resistance is, it seems, in the air at the moment. There's been British novelist Nicholas Blincoe, calling for a cultural boycott of Israel by disrupting Israeli folk-singer Noa's performance at a London music festival; the theatre producer who decapitated a marble statue of Baroness Margaret Thatcher as a protest against global capitalism; and George Michael, challenging US foreign policy in the pop charts, an attitude also adopted by a host of high-level-artistic figures in the US…
Could it be that cities get the literary detectives they deserve? What does Ian Rankin's Rebus tell us about contemporary Edinburgh, or even Colin Dexter's Morse about Oxford's dreaming spires?
Well, it's time to add a new name and metropolis to the pantheon, and this guy is distinctive in that he manages to occupy an unlikely middle-ground when it comes to attitude and inclination.
Jean-Claude Izzo's complex creation, the Marseille-dwelling Inspector Montale, is a bon viveur…
A familiar subject by now for this slim new volume in the sharp, intelligent publisher's personal and polemical strand FOCI (Focus on Contemporary Issues) it maybe, but Open University social scientist Tim Jordan's exploration of alternative ways of being, interacting, protesting and resisting is heartfelt and wide-ranging.
Employing a global reach, he considers the actions of groups as diversely motivated as eco-activists, squatters, anti-vivisectionists, neo-fascists and anti-…
In his novel Slowness, Czech writer Milan Kundera makes the astute remark that we slow down to remember and speed up to forget. If this is true then, according to Norwegian Social Anthropologist Eriksen, we might be in danger of becoming an amnesiac species sooner rather than later, due to our fixation with acceleration.
His thesis here is simply and lucidly put: the exponential growth in “time-saving” communication technologies is leading paradoxically to less time being…
Oscar Wilde famously observed that he couldn't look at a map without it present among the nations, while Sir Thomas More invented the word with his 1516 treatise on the ideal society, compounding Greek words to mean not a place, literally nowhere.
The small matter of geographical non-existence didn't stop More however. In fact it was a prerequisite in his picturing of the perfect island community. And ever since that first named outing, utopia has spread across the world and beyond,…
