The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: This is just incredible: #Chomsky and Judith #Butler are calling on the Trump administration to sponsor and arm a militia in Syria
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2018/04/this-is-just-incredible-chomsky-and.html
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/23/a-call-to-defend-rojava
Art et Liberté: Egypt’s Surrealists | by Charles Shafaieh | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/03/art-et-liberte-egypts-surrealists
In March 1938, the Egyptian poet and critic Georges Henein and a small group of friends disrupted a lecture in Cairo given by the Alexandria-born Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, who was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Six months later, Henein, along with the Egyptian writer Anwar Kamel, the Italian anarchist painter Angelo de Riz, and thirty-four other artists, writers, journalists, and lawyers, signed the manifesto “Vive l’Art Dégénéré!” (“Long Live Degenerate Art!”) that would inaugurate Art et Liberté, a short-lived but influential artists’ collective based in Egypt that is the focus of an illuminating exhibition currently at the Tate Liverpool, in Britain, covering the years 1938–1948. Printed in Arabic and French, with a facsimile of Guernica on its reverse, the declaration was a direct challenge to the previous year’s Nazi-organized exhibition “Entartete ‘Kunst’” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”), which presented art by Chagall, Kandinsky and other modern artists, largely Jewish, that the Nazi Party deemed decadent, morally reprehensible or otherwise harmful to the German people.
Internationalist in orientation and opposed as much to fascist-endorsed art as to the Egyptian academy’s own nationalist-minded aesthetics that resurrected ancient symbols in the name of “Egyptianness,” the group declared that it was “mere idiocy and folly to reduce modern art… to a fanaticism for any particular religion, race, or nation.” Surrealism—in its rejection of tyranny in any form and by championing uninhibited freedom of expression—was a fitting counterpoint that the group believed could also be harnessed to bring about social change.
Cashing In on Céline’s Anti-Semitism
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/12/cashing-in-on-celines-antisemitism
Potier told Gallimard that the first French reprint of Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets in nearly eight decades should be done in the spirit of education, rather than in one of sensation; he proposed that the original texts should be accompanied by in-depth exegesis, and put into context by interdisciplinary scholars and historians. Potier had in mind, perhaps, the very scholarly “critical edition” of Mein Kampf that enabled the recent reissue of Hitler’s work in Germany for the first time since the war.
Antoine Gallimard, accompanied by the Jewish writer and historian Pierre Assouline, who is writing a preface to the new edition, politely refused. For them, Céline’s texts belong to literature and do not need more than a literary critic’s preface and notes. In their eyes, the French-Canadian edition, which has notes by a Céline expert named Régis Tettamanzi, is sufficient.
Although it is very unlikely that the French government will seek to ban the book, a growing chorus of prominent voices—among them, historians, politicians, and Holocaust survivors—have already threatened legal action against Gallimard. One of them, the well-known Nazi hunter and French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, deemed Gallimard’s project “unbearable.” Other voices, though, argue that it is better to reprint the work with the addition of critical context than to let people access the plain texts online, where illicit versions are available.