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Leili Golafshani, ‘Iranian Exilic Memoir,’ A Review of Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening; Azar Nafisi, Reading ‘Lolita’ in Tehran; Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad.
Shirin Ebadi. Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. New York:Random House, 2006; Azar Nafisi. Reading ‘Lolita’ in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2004; Azadeh Moaveni. Lipstick Jihad: Growing Up Iranian in and American in . New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Generally speaking, in the past decade or so, there has been an unprecedented [...]
Jena Woodhouse, ‘The Sapphic Mystique,’ A Review of Marguerite Johnson, Sappho.
Marguerite Johnson, Sappho. (Bristol Classical Press, 2007). Who exactly was Sappho? While sufficient data has yet to surface to provide a definitive answer to this question, Sappho, a lyric poet of Mytilene (Lesvos, which in Greek is spelt with ‘v’ not ‘b’) in the sixth century BCE, continues to exert an almost unprecedented fascination on [...]
Elinor Jean, ‘The Innovation of Henryk Grossman’s Marxism,’ A Review of Rick Kuhn, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism.
Rick Kuhn, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007.) In many ways, the second half of the title says it all: the recovery of Marxism. Henryk Grossman (1881–1950) was a Marxist theorist and academic, who made an important contribution to the recognition and development of Marx’ economic theory. In [...]
Marie Porter, ‘Motherwork: Complex, Frequently Ambiguous and Beyond the Control of the Mother,’ A Review of Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood.
A Review of Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). Andrea O’Reilly is a well-known and influential scholar within the multidisciplinary area of maternal research. The work of Toni Morrison and her portrayal of motherhood, mothers, and mothering is the focus of this book, which is essential [...]
Meredith Rose, 'Outside the Emerald City,' A Review of Rory McCarthy, If Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated'
Rory McCarthy, Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New . London: Chatto and Windus, 2006. In a poignant scene, Rory McCarthy describes a visit he made to Osama bin Zayed primary school in Falluja. The word Falluja now carries the indictment of time and history, like Guernica or Dresden, the site and [...]
Deborah Jordan, '‘Lovers and Political Movements’, A Review of Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story
Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007). Jeff Sparrow’s Communism: A Love Story is an engaging intervention into historical and literary global debates about love and activism, and is a new development in Australian biography. Written with an enviable talent for dramatic narrative, Sparrow will find a new generation of readers [...]
Victoria Kuttainen, ‘Trauma and Transit/ions,’ Review of Gillian Whitlock. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit.
Gillian Whitlock. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.) Trauma as a, or the hot-topic of the 1990s has been widely commented upon. In critical discussions of literature and cultural studies, its signatures of belatedness, fractured testimony, and repetition became doxas of a critical academic language primed to the [...]
Review of Klaus and Knight: 'To Hell with Culture'
The thirteen essays in this collection are concerned with representations of anarchism and anarchists, but also with their misrepresentations. As Heather Worthington notes in the second essay in the collection, ‘anarchy’ originally meant ‘without a leader, or ruler’; in a modern sense it ought, therefore, simply to mean ‘society without a government’. ‘Anarchy’, however, has [...]
Review of Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe
Vintage, 2005, reviewed by Humphrey McQueen A spectre is haunting Dead Europe – the spectre of post-Communism. Post-Communism isn’t the only ghost in this, the third fiction by the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas. His new novel implies that after the breaching of the Berlin Wall, all manner of ghouls were let loose, taking flight with [...]
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Review: Defending critique and criticizing its defenders