Matthew Carr's Blog, page 38
March 13, 2016
Europe’s Porous Borders: Leonidas Cheliotis and the logic of ‘punitive inclusion’
Think of borders in the 21st century and you immediately think of walls, barbed wire fences, razor wire, checkpoints, quasi-military border patrols on land and sea, surveillance cameras, sensors and a panoply of high-tech paraphernalia whose essential purpose is to … Continue reading →
March 12, 2016
The Archbishop’s Fears
One of the most depressing and inane themes in the great British ‘debate’ about immigration is the idea that there is no debate about immigration. It’s a refrain emanating mostly from the right, which has been replayed for years like a stuck record. … Continue reading →
March 8, 2016
Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’ : Repression with a human face
Many years ago Franco Solinas, the scriptwriter for Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, was asked by an interviewer why the French colonel Mathieu – a pragmatic exponent of torture – was portrayed as ‘ too much of … Continue reading →
March 6, 2016
Hope I die before I get old
There was a time when living longer was considered to be a desirable goal, and rising life expectancy was regarded as a metric of social progress. In those not so distant times, ‘developed’ capitalist societies and already existing socialist societies … Continue reading →
February 28, 2016
Karl Schlögel’s Moscow
There have been many books, both fiction and non-fiction, written about Stalin’s purges, but there is nothing quite like Karl Schlögel’s monumental Moscow 1937, which I’ve just finished. As the title suggests, the book is a portrait of Moscow in the … Continue reading →
February 26, 2016
Darkness in Trumptown: Breaking News
FIONA BRUCE: And now we cut to the White House to hear our political editor Laura Kuenssberg cover Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. Laura, can you tell us what’s happening? KUENSSBERG: Well Fiona, we are really witnessing some extraordinary scenes … Continue reading →
February 20, 2016
Kamel Daoud and the Rape of Europa
I’m a big fan of the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which I read last year. It was a brilliant deconstruction of L’Etranger, which movingly and provocatively imagined the voice of the Arab colonial subject that was missing … Continue reading →
Kamel Daoud and the rape of Europa
I’m a big fan of the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which I read last year. It was a brilliant deconstruction of L’Etranger, which movingly and provocatively imagined the voice of the Arab colonial subject that was missing … Continue reading →
February 18, 2016
Cruel Britannia: Light Unto the Nations
This week, while our valiant prime minister was ‘battling for Britain’ amongst the bloodsucking Euro-hordes in Brussels, the Home Office approved the deportation of a 92-year-old South African widow who is blind in one eye. These two events are … Continue reading →
February 17, 2016
The Big Short
Broadly speaking, there are three types of political or socially-engaged cinema within Hollywood. The first category belongs to movies in which the politics are implicit rather than overt, but can nevertheless be detected or interpreted in the underlying ideological, cultural or racial assumptions … Continue reading →
