The regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi is richly deserving of a definitive overthrow and Criticism &c. is in firm sympathy with the Libyans who are attempting—against long odds—to achieve one. The pathetic intervention of Britain, France, Italy (Libya’s fomer colonial master and present neo-colonial patron) and the U.S., with the blessing of the sclerotic Arab League, […]
Allen Willis, pioneering African-American filmmaker and Marxist-Humanist, passed away in February. He led a long and extremely productive life and was involved in radical politics since his youth in Washington, D.C. He lived in Chicago for a time in the 1930s (where he was active in the Revolutionary Workers League) before moving to San Francisco, […]
I recently came across an entry on Georges Henein in Multicultural Writers Since 1945: an A-to-Z Guide. The author is Cristina Boidard Boisson, an academic who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Henein and Surrealism at the University of Cadiz in 1993. The entry is quite good on Henein’s biography, however the break with Breton in […]
The HathiTrust Digital Library has made available full-text scans of sixteen pamphlets published by News & Letters between the years 1960 and 1984. Among them are several classics which have never received the audience they deserve, including Workers Battle Automation (1960) by Black autoworker Charles Denby and American Civilization on Trial (1963), published as an […]
Paresh Chattopadhyay has published an interesting article in the latest issue of Science and Society, the theoretical journal long associated with the Communist Party. In “On the Question of Soviet Socialism,” he replies to an extremely hostile review of Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union by David Laibman, the journal’s current […]
To mark André Breton’s birthday, I am sharing a brief excerpt from Anna Balakian’s biography, André Breton, Magus of Surrealism. Balakian was the first American scholar to study Surrealism (her Literary Origins of Surrealism was published in 1947) and despite the fact that she was an academic, she can be characterized as demonstrating a strongly […]
The New Yorker‘s print issue of February 7, 2011 contains another of poet John Ashbery’s translations (“Cities”) from the forthcoming W.W. Norton edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (see my previous post for an earlier appearance of a translation). The publication date looks like it has now been pushed back to May. Surrealism is strongly anticipated […]
I have just come across a recent interesting article on Henein and the Egyptian Surrealists in The Journal of Aesthetic Education (Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2010). The author is Patrick Kane. A translation of Henein’s manifesto can be found in Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, as well as selections […]
The massive ongoing uprising in Egypt provides us with an opportunity to recall an almost forgotten group of revolutionaries and artists—the Egyptian Surrealists. Robin Kelley and the late Franklin Rosemont included them in the book Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (reviewed earlier on Criticism &c.), but I recently came […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available two pieces by Raya Dunayevskaya on revolt inside the U.S.S.R. at the close of the Stalin period: “‘Russia, More Than Ever Full of Revolutionaries…’” (1954) and “The Revolt in the Slave Labor Camps in Vorkuta” (1955). The first appeared in Correspondence, the second in one of the first […]
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