IV517 - February 2018

In the Brazilian state of Ceará, (on the North East Atlantic coast of the country, the eight largest in the country, whose capital is Fortaleza) indigenous peoples were silenced for centuries; first by genocide and slavery, later by a prohibition against speaking their original language and a prohibition against official marriage with anyone except white or freed black people. This reached the point that, in 1863, an official document was published, under pressure from the economic interests of the dominant elite and with symbolic force of law, which established that “there were no more Indians in the state”. Recent anthropological studies, however, revealed 14 indigenous peoples in 25 localities in Ceará, part of the 305 peoples that inhabit Brazil.

A rising tide lifts all boats.” That’s a common and understandable metaphor in economic contexts. But also a dangerous and misleading one, if it avoids posing crucial questions. Will the tide lift all boats equally? Aren’t some boats much bigger than others? And who even owns a boat, and who does not?

More than six months after the horrific fire in London’s Grenfell Tower, which in mid-June 2017 killed 81 and wounded countless more in mind as well as in body. the ruins of the 20-story block still stand as a potent symbol of social injustice in one of the richest areas in Britain. And this neighborhood’s domination by wealth has undoubtedly influenced many aspects of the investigation into that unspeakable disaster.

IVP517 PDF magazine available to download
IVP517 PDF magazine available to download here

YC: There is much talk of a sort of "cold war" between Iran and Saudi Arabia. How does it manifest itself concretely?

To defeat populist-nationalist forms of communal authoritarianism in India, we have to fight against more than just communalism.

This is the second article in a series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) here at the TNI.

In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. told a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff retreat:

“I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights… [W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” [1]

“Times’s up” and #MeToo have transformed the discussion on sexual harassment, abuse and assault in the halls of politics, the entertainment industry, and workplaces all over the country. But the issues aren’t new — quite the contrary. Sexual exploitation and rape have been features of American culture from colonial times. The legal doctrine — slaves were property — codified rape as one more right of the slaveowners and his overseers. The evidence was plain to see, yet accounts of indigenous and African-American women were irrelevant. Although the Civil War ended with the destruction of the slave system, within a decade Radical Reconstruction was shut down and the rape of Black women became a reassertion of power over not just the woman as an individual, but over her community.

“We must accept to live African, it is the only way to live dignified and free.” —Thomas Sankara, former President of Burkina Faso (1949-1987)

“The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.” —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who has died aged 94 in London on 3 January 2018, was an organic intellectual working at the interstices of race, class and imperialism. A skillful essayist and gripping orator, he chiselled powerful idioms and imagery which travelled across his writing, and from his speeches to his writing, and back again. His prose was crafted not so much to be read quietly, as recited aloud.