Reposted from Cedar Lounge Revolution:

Comrades and Friends,

We gather here today to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the Easter Rising, and to celebrate the vision of an independent, democratic, progressive Republic that motivated the men and women of the Irish Volunteers, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army in 1916. We remember too the lives of all those who for two centuries have struggled, fought, and so often died for that same aim. We especially remember our comrades who gave their lives in recent decades. However, our presence here today is not simply an act of commemoration. It is a statement about the present and the future even more than it is about the past. It is a political act. Our presence here today symbolises our ongoing commitment to the struggle to build a democratic, secular, socialist unitary state on our island – a Republic.

What do we mean when we talk about building a Republic? We do not simply mean a state without the institutions of monarchy. We mean a state where, in the words of Padraig Pearse, “the people will be lord and master”. In other words, a country where government is run by, and in the interests of, the plain people of Ireland. A government of and for the working class. But a republic is about much more than who controls the state, and republicanism is a social as much as a political philosophy. The revolutionary republican tradition to which The Workers’ Party belongs originated in the eighteenth century in the era of the American and French Revolutions. Republicanism meant replacing the government of a privileged few by a government of the many. It meant replacing a society of privilege with civic equality. These were social as well as political revolutions. The republic we now seek to build is a republic where economic power is in the hands of the working people who actually create the wealth, and not in the hands of a small percentage of bankers, property speculators, industrial and commercial capitalists, landowners and crooked politicians. It is a society of equals, where a person’s gender, colour, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, disabilities or background no longer matters. Society – in education, in the media, in healthcare and elsewhere – will reflect the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, and not the needs and the greed of capitalism. This is the republic as we understand it: not just the absence of a monarch or simple territorial unity, but a truly free and equal society where capitalist exploitation has ended, where the economy functions in the interests of the working class, where sectarianism has been overcome, and where the working class holds political power.

It is clear that Ireland, north and south, is very far from being such a society. In both parts of our island, there is massive and structural inequality, a situation made worse during recent decades by Thatcher and her successors in the north, and Haughey and his successors in the south. Across Ireland, successive governments have followed the same policies, sacrificing public investment and public services; industrial planning and development; manufacturing; and productive and high-skilled jobs in favour of high finance; property speculation; low skilled, low paid jobs. They have used public money to provide subsidies for the multi-nationals, big businesses, banks, speculators, and the rich through tax cuts and privatisation. For example, in the south, half a billion euros a year are handed over to private landlords by government bodies for housing. Why is this money being put into the pockets of wealthy individuals rather than being used for the public good? This money would be better spent creating jobs through the building of sustainable and high quality public housing that would last for decades, but the ideology of capitalism and the corrupt links between the political establishment and speculators ensures this will not happen. We have seen a government in Dublin introduce a budget that punished the working class and the least well off in society – such as the unemployed and the disabled – while at the same time actually leaving the wealthiest in society better off. There is little reason to hope for much different from a Fine Gael-led government.

At the same time as it slashes and burns the public sector, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition speaks to us of the Big Society. What does this actually mean? It means taking duties that central and local government have been doing perfectly well and paying the private sector more money to do them less efficiently. Just this month, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive was forced to cancel the contracts of one of its private sub-contractors because of the poor quality of its work and overcharging. The Big Society is a con, the same old Thatcherite policies cloaked in the rhetoric of that contradiction in terms, compassionate conservatism.

But what of the Northern Ireland parties – can we expect more from them than from the coalition in London? Now, in the middle of an election campaign, they would certainly like us to believe so. They would like us to believe that they are no longer the same sectarian parties of the past; they would like us to believe that they have the policies to meet the needs of our people, to improve public services, to create a united society, to protect us from the cuts, and to create economic growth. They might as well expect us to believe in the Easter bunny.

The sectarian carve up of the spoils of government at Stormont has not fundamentally altered the nature of the big political parties. This was obvious from the so-called Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration cooked up by the DUP and their partners in Provisional Sinn Féin. Here was a strategy supposedly designed to overcome the problem of sectarianism that did not mention reconciliation once. Rather than address the issue of creating a common identity and a common sense of citizenship among our people in Northern Ireland, its authors sought to consolidate the concept of separate but equal, to entrench the sectarian division. Just as in 1798 or 1916, the struggle against sectarianism remains at the forefront of the revolutionary struggle. Religion has no place in politics. We in the Workers’ Party adhere to James Connolly’s argument that socialism has no religion – it is simply human. Sectarianism has not gone away, and it is the duty of all republicans, all socialists, all progressives, and all democrats to fight it in all its manifestations. We cannot rely upon political parties and a political system dependent upon sectarianism to tackle sectarianism. It is time we moved to the democratic process – to the task of building a truly democratic Northern Ireland, one in which we move beyond sectarianism. Nor are we blind to the issue of religion in the south. We continue to push for the secularisation of the education system and the clearing out of the remnants of religious doctrine from state institutions and state-funded bodies in the Republic. In both states, a secular, integrated education system is an essential first step, but only a first step. We in the Workers’ Party are offering an alternative to the perverted sectarian politics of unionism and nationalism at this election.

The Executive’s budget plans for the next five years reveal the reality behind the talk of fighting cuts – the big parties’ strategy is one of privatisation and cuts, and an almost religious belief that economic salvation can be found by turning Northern Ireland into a tax haven for multi-national corporations, a Lichtenstein on the Lagan. We need only look at the south to see the truth – a cut in corporation tax is not the answer to our economic problems. Nothing can replace sustainable, high-skill, high-wage, productive jobs as the beating heart of a healthy economy. We have had enough of call centres and fly-by-night investors who pocket government grants then move elsewhere.

The state has the capacity to initiate real economic change. No-one who has witnessed governments worldwide save capitalism from itself in the last few years can seriously now question the economic power of the state. The Assembly parties wish to keep the state bound in the chains imposed on it by Thatcher, Regan and their descendants. The Workers’ Party wants to smash those chains, to revitalise the economy with the state’s power, and to put the levers of power to work for the working class, and not for the bourgeoisie. Our presence in these elections is a reminder that there is an alternative – socialism is the alternative. Between now and May 5th, the members and supporters of the Workers’ Party must concentrate our efforts on getting that simple message to as many people as possible.

The basic idea that lies at the heart of our politics, that lies at the bottom of our republicanism, our socialism, is very simple: People should control their own lives and be able to build a future that works best for the many, not for the few. That was the principle that motivated the revolutionary democrats in America, in France, and in the United Irishmen. It was not for nothing that Pearse called his last work before the Easter Rising The Sovereign People. Can the people of Ireland really say that we are sovereign, that we are masters of our own destiny today? In economic terms, it is clear that the answer is increasingly “No”. Too many important decisions continue to be made in London or Brussels. At one level, we need only look at our ports and airports to see our young people forced once more into emigration. And again, as before, we are told by elements of the political establishment that their departure is necessary. The return of large-scale emigration when so much wealth was given away in tax cuts and in corrupt deals is not so much an outrage. It is a crime against the entire Irish people.

Last year, we spoke about the 30 billion euro that was then the minimum for the bank bailout, the equivalent to the Irish state’s tax take for the year. The running total will likely soon reach over 70 billion euro, and experience gives us every reason to believe that that figure will increase. Some of this money will come from the so-called IMF bailout, for which we are supposed to be grateful. Grateful that the future of generations has been mortgaged to protect the interests of banks and speculators at home and abroad. Grateful that public assets will be sold cheaply to speculators. grateful that wages, benefits and public services will be devastated at the behest of the boot-boys of international capitalism. Grateful that the living standards of workers will be seriously worsened, an outcome enthusiastically welcomed by a political and social establishment still in thrall to our own form of neo-liberalism. We are not grateful. We are angry, and we will fight back.

The results of the general election demonstrated that the people are angry. However, the anger of the people must be channelled in the right direction to be effective – a near majority for Fine Gael shows that so far that has not happened. We welcome the election of an unprecedented number of left TDs, and the Workers’ Party will work in alliance with others to lead the resistance against the cuts. Our people can choose a different path to that laid out by the IMF and its local cheerleaders, as the people of Iceland have done. All that is required is the political will. This is why the Workers’ Party some months ago launched the We Demand Democracy campaign, which is calling for a referendum on the bank bailout and on the economic policies demanded by the IMF. Building the campaign for a democratic judgment on the economic future of the Irish state is among our key tasks in the months ahead.

There has been much talk of sovereignty of late, and not all of it has to do with the IMF. It is often claimed that the continued campaign of violence by those who have rejected the wishes of the people regarding the Good Friday Agreement is justified on the grounds of sovereignty. For us, that issue is simple. The people of Ireland have rejected violence, and have lain out the way they wish unity to take place: namely, by consent. This has long been our position. The only valid republican struggle in these circumstances is one to persuade the inhabitants of Northern Ireland that a united and independent people is the way forward for all of us on these islands. The forthcoming visit of the British Queen to the Republic has also provoked some debate. This speech began by laying out our understanding of the republican tradition.

We stand here proudly as the heirs of those who stormed the Bastille and made themselves citizens, not subjects. We stand here as revolutionaries for whom monarchy, aristocracy and inequality are anathema. We stand here as people who live in the real world. As socialists, we see beyond mere figureheads or symbols and act according to the underlying realities of class society. We reserve our anger for those who really hold power, who launch the wars for oil, who break promises on human rights at Guantanamo, who continue to seek to isolate and destroy socialist regimes like Cuba 50 years after the Bay of Pigs, and who seek to deepen the exploitation of the Irish working class. So we will protest against Bush or Blair, Obama or Cameron. We will struggle against the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. We will fight the cuts introduced by the powers that be in Dublin, Belfast and London. We will keep our focus on what matters, on what affects the political and economic conditions of the working class, north and south.

Comrades, we have our goal towards which we are striving – a republic where the working class is truly sovereign. That means creating a society that has overcome sectarianism and embraced secularism; a society that believes that wealth should be redistributed from the top to the bottom, rather than the other way round as has been the case in recent decades across Ireland; a society where socialism can be built. The emancipation of the working class requires a militant party of and for the working class. We go from here today to continue our long efforts to build that party, through elections, trade union activity, community activism and other forms of agitation. Socialism is the alternative. Let’s build that alternative.

16 Days of Activism Campaign Against Gender Violence

As part of the Global 16 Days to End Violence Against Women Campaign, Sibeal and Global Women’s Studies, NUIG, are holding an evening celebration at the Crane Bar on the 26th of November, further details found here. Tickets for this event cost €10 and all proceeds go to the Galway Rape Crisis Centre – an outstanding organization. The Global Women’s Studies group is also hosting a one day conference on the theme of Women in Action – Active Genders on the 27th of November and two further events in December.

These are great events, with some really serious and important issues being addressed. I’m looking forward to hearing the speakers on Saturday after a night out on Friday.

The Linen Hall Library, Belfast, is currently showing a selection of its collection of political posters from the 30 years of conflict and peace process in Northern Ireland. Troubled Images showed briefly in 2001 and has since been a traveling exhibition, in the United States and elsewhere. Having begun with a civil rights flyer given to librarian Jimmy Vitty in the 1960s, the Linen Hall’s collection of political material is an invaluable historical archive of the ‘Troubles’. It is also, however, a record of the way in which politics spawned varieties of visual polemic, as the conflict’s escalation occasioned more visceral means of persuasion and politicization than subtle argument. Belfast is depressingly famous for its murals, graffiti and use of graphics in expressing varieties of tribal politics, and given recent attempts to repackage the city’s history of violence as a kind of kitsch, the exhibition might seem a somewhat more respectable supplement to bus tours of the Falls, Shankill and ‘Peace Line’. A few tourists were indeed browsing the exhibit with a mixture of curiosity and incomprehension when I visited, though not too many given recent events and Australia’s recommendations to tourists.

The 70 posters hung in the narrow stairwell of the Library’s Fountain Street entrance certainly provide an interesting cross-section of the politics of Northern Ireland. The exhibition is wide-ranging, with posters from a range of parties, including the Alliance Party, UDP, IRSP, UUP, RSF, SDLP, and Women’s Coalition. Some posters rely on their image to do the talking. Sean O’Toole’s Remember Derry (1974), for instance, uses the stark white of 13 skulls on a pure black background to recall Bloody Sunday. In one 1960s poster Ian Paisley looks every bit the charismatic preacher, orating under the holy cross of a Union Jack bearing the legend ‘For God and Ulster’. Image and politics merge in such figures. The exhibition nicely represents the overlap between murals and poster politics in Danny Devenny’s iconic outline of a gun-toting, faceless RUC officer wearing an orange sash. Originally a mural in South Derry, Sinn Féin quickly redeployed the image in their campaign to have the RUC disbanded.  There are some audaciously inventive images here. Robert Ballagh’s 1989 poster for the Irish National Congress celebrates the centenary of the French Revolution by reworking Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People with a tricolor, and an Easter Lily – thus linking the Irish republican movement to the European tradition of democratic struggle.  Cedric Wilson’s Unionist Solidarity (1986) poster brazenly mimics the Polish mass movement, with interesting (and weird and not entirely clear) political parallels resulting. A Workers’ Party poster (Say No to Mass Unemployment, 1986) echoes the mass protest against the Anti-Anglo Irish Agreement outside Belfast City Hall (where Paisley delivered the Never, Never, Never, Never speech) but with a hell of a lot less people!

Photographs are also deployed, mostly to make graphic statements about the human cost of the conflict. Most horrifying is a 1978 Northern Ireland Office poster following the La Mon House Hotel bombing. Accompanying a photograph of charred, limbless remains the word ‘murder’ is repeated 12 times, once for each fatality. The poster does not request information. Instead, the image asserts the criminality of the offence and its horror, refusing any ideological content. This is, of course, a deliberate, artful strategy. The exhibition allows the viewer to see images such as these in context with other, competing political images; each side’s accusations of atrocity out on show. In this way, Troubled Images confirms that brutality has been a near constant in much of the visual and verbal rhetoric of Northern Irish politics. On the first floor of the Linen Hall show is a militarily precise heraldic illustration of Long Kesh, with Orange lodge-style blazons and bunting, celebrating the UFF loyalist ‘POWs’ held there. Easily overlooked, this piece is by loyalist murderer Michael Stone. That chilling fact, if nothing else, shows how politicized images have underpinned much of the politics of the last thirty years. Whatever your individual political convictions, these posters show the way in which polemical images intervened in the daily mental life of people, shaping (or warping) language and perspective for good and ill.

See here for exhibit times and duration. It’s free. Some of the images can be viewed here.

Hissa Hilal in Sha'er al Million

News of a young Saudi woman physically attacking a member of the Morality Police who apprehended her for walking with a member of the opposite sex is doing the gleeful rounds here. In Saudi Arabia “ikhtilat” – the mixing of unrelated men and women  - is forbidden by law, with social spaces being policed by the Ha’ia who have the right to stop and question couples. Women in Saudi Arabia are notoriously oppressed: forbidden to be in public without a male guardian, unable to drive, or vote, and encouraged to remain in the home, as their submission and invisibility safeguard “traditional values”.

This new story is not the first instance of violent resistance. In 2007 two girls pepper-sprayed members of the morality police who “tried to offer them advice” about being inappropriately dressed. They were effectively cautioned after apologising. It remains to be seen if this young woman will be charged with an offence, as authorities are refusing to provide further details about the incident.

But things certainly seem astir in Saudi. There’s the recent opening of the first co-educational University in the country, the King’s firing of a cleric who criticised the university for not segregating the sexes and his shocking photo alongside women with uncovered faces (and even a few strands of saucy hair). Yet, despite the monarch’s progressive leanings, the situation is unlikely to change in Saudi as the populace remains extremely conservative and tribal attitudes toward women’s rights make open protest or even dissension dangerous. Yet women are fighting back. Hissa Hilal, the runner-up on One Million Dollar Poet (a kind of recitative Gulfi Pop Idol), may not have won the competition but her poetry, as well as her gender, created the kind of media excitement and controversy reserved for religious iconoclasts. Her criticism of religious fanaticism was forthright, as was her pragmatic explanation for wearing niqab: “Covering my face is not because I am afraid of people. We live in a tribal society and otherwise my husband, my brother will be criticised by other men…I am hoping my daughters won’t have to cover their faces and they’ll live a better life.” Hilal is ambitious and angry: her verse is as much a response to oppression as the nameless young woman fighting back when the state expected her to be shamed and quiescent. More power to them.

Illustration by Nino Jose Heredia

On the 19th of April this year President Obama sent a warm message to Benjamin Netanyahu celebrating the continuing friendship between Israel and the USA that dates from mere “minutes” after the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948. That ‘strong, unbreakable bond’ extends to the USA’s continued support for Israel in spite of international outrage at its illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, the humanitarian crimes against the people of Gaza, its attacks on Beirut and Lebanon, and a catalogue of human rights violations, war crimes, and, of course, the contested legitimacy of the Israeli State itself. But whilst Obama stressed the historic significance of this “happy day” for Israel, Hillary Clinton alluded to the ongoing difficulties of establishing equality and peace in the area. Peace in the Middle East, notwithstanding the committment to Israel, needed to include “Palestinians, and all the people of the region security, prosperity, and the opportunity to live up to their full God-given potential.”

The  Israeli celebratory dinner in Washington (which included the culturally disputed hummous) must have been a self-congratulatory affair. But Israel’s independence celebration has a sombre flipside,  the Palestinian anniversary of Nakba on the 15th of May. Nakba day – “the day of catastrophe” – marks the official dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their land. In May 1948 at least 80% of Palestinians were ejected from their homes, many more lost their lives in the conflict leading up to the creation of Israel and many more died in the violence and poverty which is the Nakba’s legacy. This year Nakba day seems to have been strangely muted in the Western press, with one feature on the  BBC that I could find, though there was a demonstration at Downing Street. Few commentators made mention of the historical dispossession that Israel is founded on. The myth that “Palestine was a country with no people for people with no country” (a phrase originating with an English clergyman, it’s worth noting) seems to have accepted by much of the media, resulting in a strangely foreshortened view of politics and imperialism in the Middle East, where Arab nationalism seems only to have become a problem in the last twenty years.

This amnesiac tendency means maintaining Nakba Day is even more important today. When the mass media is fundamentally disinterested in the experience of disempowered and disinherited peoples the articulation of counter-history becomes a cultural necessity. It remembers, and confirms, the obscured violence upon which the Israeli state is built. That Nakba day represents a real threat to the perceived legitimacy of the Israeli state can be seen in recent attempts to suppress its public commemoration. Imperialism would conveniently forget, erase and purge from this atrocity from memory.

Yet Nakba day, unlike many anniversaries, commemorates an ongoing dispossession, the consequences of which are economic, political and ideological as well as measured in human lives. Remembrance and solidarity with the Palestinian catastrophe acts as a direct call not merely for restitution, justice and peace but for the international community to reassess what constitutes moral order in a global perspective. Recalling the tragedy reaffirms a continuing need for justice.

Thanks to Cedar Lounge Revolution for putting this up.

May 9th this year marks the fiftieth non-birthday of the contraceptive pill. Licensed rather more swiftly than the unpleasant, sometimes dangerous side-effects of its high dose hormones would warrant, the Pill’s ability to prevent pregnancy seemed like a miracle for women and society. Introduced on the cusp of the sixties, oral contraceptives have been credited with not only the liberalization of sexual attitudes, but also accelerating women’s liberation. Time magazine has run a substantial piece by author Nancy Gibbs that gives a good analysis of the changes made by the legalization of the oral contraceptive. Gibbs is clear that the Pill was not the key to a new feminist consciousness, but was instrumental in altering women’s lives at a practical level that catalyzed pre-existent feminist movements. As historian Elaine Tyler May claims, “the revolutionary potential of the Pill could never have been achieved without the opportunities that came about because of women’s activism.” So the synthetic hormones helped, but the change in social attitudes, economic activity, reproduction and education had all begun long before Enovaid. Market forces also contributed to its creation, given the huge profit offered to pharmaceutical companies. But the Pill’s female supporters – Katherine McCormack and Margaret Sanger recognized that “birth control is the first important step [a woman] must take towards the goal of … [becoming] a man’s equal”. These were not utopian leftists: Sanger’s proposed eugenic uses for it show the political, as well as the economic, stakes of contraception. From its inception the Pill was about power, control, and access – contraceptive freedom and coercion.
In practice, the Pill did not become the dominant means of contraception for at least a decade, but its convenience and effectiveness altered women’s experience of both sexuality and reproduction. It allowed a degree of autonomy previously unobtainable without significant sacrifice. The capacity to delay or avoid pregnancy all together allowed women to take advantage of work and education more freely than at any time previously, as well as enjoying heterosexual sex without the crippling anxiety associated with unwanted childbirth. Economically it gave the individual and the family increased mobility and flexibility to work in the public sphere. Again the rise of women in the workplace was a post-war phenomenon, but one which was confirmed by the Pill’s innovation. Research suggests that contraceptive rights, neatly symbolized by the Pill, have been the most important innovation for women’s economic and social status, linked to increased investment in education, perceived well being and participation in civil society. What could be more empowering than assuming economic responsibility and equality (in theory at least) with men?
In the Republic, where access to the Pill is a relatively recent and hard-won right, its anniversary seems even more relevant. A recent article in the Irish Times generally celebrates the Pill’s effects on society, whilst introducing a note of caution over long-term use. Praising the Pill’s ability to give women a liberating responsibility over reproductive choices, the article notes the disparity between the Republic, where doctors prescribe it, and countries like France, where nurses and pharmacists can provide it. The double standard applied to women’s reproductive rights lingers on; as seen in the USA, where you are more likely to get Health Cover for Viagra than for the Pill. Despite the fact that in the south, and to a lesser extent in Northern Ireland, bureaucracy and medical constraints still apply, what the Pill represents has changed society irrevocably.
Of course the Pill is not instant feminist liberation: its commercial availability in countries such as Saudi Arabia coexists with profound gender inequality and oppression. Feminism too is increasingly suspicious of the Pill, with mistrust of its hormonal intervention in women’s bodies going as far back as The Female Eunuch. The success of oral contraception has not translated to an equivalent for men (May quotes one scientist explaining that “the psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome”; well indeed). Recent bourgeois feminism has been much given to lamenting the horrors of choice created by the Pill: the paralysis of when or whether to procreate, with whom, how many times, the internecine bitchery of working versus stay-at-home motherhood and sitting in judgment on the choices of working class women. It’s ironic that glib lifestyle politics threaten to overshadow an innovation capable of liberating working class women from economic and social marginalisation. Issues of contraceptive coercion often masquerade as moral responsibility, and attitudes toward the Pill crystallize many class conflicts as well as more obvious gender conflicts. In marking its 50th anniversary it would be salutary to reclaim the Pill not as part of a bourgeois “moral property” (as a former French Minister for Health described RU486) but as a means of empowering mass solidarity, economic freedom and equality.

In July 2008 Barack Obama toured the Middle East in a preemptive move to engage support for his presidential campaign. For voters, Obama’s tour of the Middle East signaled a candidate committed to change and who recognized America’s ongoing interests in that region. However Obama’s visit did not open a new dialogue with previous enemies but rather proclaimed the invincibility of America’s friendship with Israel, and confirmed support for Western-backed regimes such as those in Afghanistan. This tour was received somewhat differently in the Arab world. The Saudi Gazette noted that Obama did not visit an

‘Arab country that would demonstrate that Muslim opinion matters to him.  Not just …      Muslims who lost family members to American firepower, but Muslims who are eager for         normal relations with the United States.’

Rebarbative scepticism notwithstanding, Obama’s nomination seized Middle Eastern imaginations. Obama’s liability in the States, his seeming otherness –multicultural, multiracial background, religious background – made him an object of curiosity and even of cautious hope to some in the Middle East.

Political opinion in the Arab World is far from uniform. Governments may attest political alliance, but the populace often decry and demonize the actions of this world power. 2009’s Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey confirmed a persistent antipathy toward the United States, albeit one which has softened somewhat. 77 percent of respondents showed  a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” attitude toward the United States, down from 83 percent in 2008.  Yet the appetite for American culture in Arab nations is insatiable. The perceived power and prestige associated with America maps onto its literature, which comprises part of many undergraduate degrees.

I want to question the paradoxical status of American Literature in an Arab University through a discussion of teaching American Literature in Qatar University during the presidential campaign of Barrack Obama. As Marwan Obediet has noted, Arab students connect the values and power of America’s international power with its literature and thus make value judgments which are syntheses of both aesthetic and personal politics. I will briefly touch on the ways in which political, religious and gender ideologies effect the study of literature.  Teaching English Literature in colonial eras was arguably concerned with imperialist dominance through the elevation of a transcendental ‘literary’ canon. English education conferred status in, reproducing a body of knowledge found in the colonizing power and displacing the reading subject’s identity. Edward Said has reflected on the alienating process of this form of knowledge, and the distorted self-image created in students. Yet the study of literature in the contemporary ‘post-colonial’ Middle East is a radically different context from the twentieth-century of Said. American Literature carries an ideological freight in the Middle East which is marked by current politics in a fashion that English Literature no longer is.

Qatar’s Education System: Islam and American Values

American Literature is a compulsory course ar Qatar University. This  course raises questions about cross cultural communication,  belief, and a structural discrepancy between the university as an Islamic institution and the university as a locus for critical thinking in general.

Qatar exemplifies the Arab world’s complexity of relationship with America. An oil-rich Gulf state, in 2009 Qatar became the world’s wealthiest country per capita. Since independence from Britain Qatar has formed close political and economic relations with the United States. Its proximity to Iraq made it a key base during the Iraq war, and America continues to have a military presence. Qatar University is the state University, founded in 1973, and responsible for the education of the majority of the country’s small population. University classes are segregated by gender, and the student population is predominantly female.

The University’s educational policy is based around Islamic principles, with a core curriculum designed to emphasize ‘Qatari, Arabic and Islamic identity.’  Its remit thus is twofold –to educate and develop key skills in its students and to simultaneously inculcate Islamic values in the context of a pan-Arab community. This pan-Arab vision is reflected in the University’s students, with around 30 different nationalities represented in the undergraduate body. National diversity makes the classroom context much more varied given the cultural difference between students. Yet this is counterbalanced by a shared religion. That American Literature is a compulsory course in a University committed to Islamic values at once complicates the selection of Literature to be taught and raises questions as to the role of the university in habilitating cultural values in accordance with political outcomes.

Qatar’s educational system has undergone a series of reforms designed to improve its academic standards, and to introduce specifically Western structure into its schools and Universities. This includes the privatization of the school system and increased usage of English, rather than Arabic as the mode of instruction. .As Frantz Fanon noted, ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.’ For many Qataris, and many Arabs resident in Qatar, this is a source of profound cultural anxiety. Qatar’s bilingualism is indicative of a cultural bifurcation that begins in school and is intensified at tertiary level where many instructors are American. The ‘special relationship’ between Qatar and the United States is encapsualted by the 2003 creation of  ‘Education City’ by minister Sheikha Mozha. This comprises a ‘state-of-the-art campus’  offering degrees from several U.S. universities including … Georgetown University’s …School of Foreign Service, Texas A&M University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Carnegie Mellon University.’ The development of tertiary education is synonymous with the import of  American university ‘brands’ into the Qatari market. The high status given to American institutions complicates Qatar’s educational market, appearing  a form of educational colonization at variance with Qatar’s Arab-nationalist aspirations. Courses such as ‘the Problem of God’ at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service explicitly challenge Qatar’s Islamic tradition. Qatar’s educational system is arguably not merely colonial but divisive.

The centrality of American-style education and the governmental tolerance for ‘anti-Islamic’ pedagogies coexists with the country’s rapid assumption of Western, specifically American, consumerist habits. The explosion of American shopping brands, fast food and entertainment culture instantiate the attraction of American exports. Yet despite the burgeoning of such lifestyles, Qatari society remains fundamentally resistant to Western democratic ideology. Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’ is helpful in unpacking the paradox of this Gulf state’s relationship with the United States. Economic affiliation is mutually beneficial to both Qatar and America, and the States finds in Qatar a ready market for much of goods. Though Qatar may ‘buy into’ American capitalism, the power relationship is neither simple nor unidirectional. American power is manifested in several forms which produce varying and paradoxical responses. America’s ‘soft power’ resources are its culture; political values; and foreign policies. The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict distances Qatar from American foreign policy and its growing involvement in the Arab League demonstrates a degree of political autonomy missing from other Gulf  countries. It is popular cultural and commercial goods, which seem America’s strongest form of soft power, as Qataris partake of America’s commercial productions. However there is a discrepancy between the resources that might stimulate cultural attraction and actual changes in behavior: this is what Steven Lukes calls ‘the vehicle fallacy’  – or the confusion of products with power. The allure of consumerism might seem evidence of American power but it fails to penetrate or effectively alter the conditions – mental, social, religious and otherwise – of Qatari society. The study of literature at University is perceived as distinct from popular culture. The power of Literature, and its role in a compulsory curriculum produces a very different response to the pleasure of consumerism. With these preliminary remarks in mind I will briefly outline students’ one approach to teaching American Literature I have pursued.

Reading American Literature in Qatar

The American Literature course I designed for Qatar University replaced an outdated syllabus based around canonical male figures. American Literature had last been taught as an optional course in 2003, and was reintroduced as a compulsory component in 2008. As non-American faculty, I felt that my own distance from the American Imperialist worldview offered the students an hegemonic literature. I wished to emphasize the role of ‘American Literature’ in the difficult and complex creation  of the United States of America as a nation with its own cultural myths and ideologies. To this end, the first class brainstormed what students associated with ‘America’ as a concept. Unsurprisingly the students produced a welter of terms from popular culture, of brand names and TV shows. But they also associated it with key concepts, such as freedom and democracy. Further discussion opened up the disparities in the student body: for some students America was a symbol of meritocratic potential, a place where one could make one’s fortune and find oneself. For others, ‘the land of the free’ was, to quote one ‘completely ironic…to me, it is the greatest prison on earth.’

Being required to study American Literature provoked antipathy. It also emphasized the distance between my Western liberal presuppositions, and the belief systems of my students. If the study of Literature in English is tarnished by Orientalism, the political instability of the Middle East threatens to create conditions for Occidentalism – a perspective which occludes literary value and to refuse the understanding of a culture on its own terms. To mitigate the moral rejection of the literature the syllabus increased concentration on historical / political contexts, and the diversity of identities to be represented. The course opened with the conquest of the Americas and the rhetorical uses of literature in justifying colonialism. America’s historical status as colony was one which helped students grasp the notion of historical change, to reconceptualise America as land itself subject to occupation.

I witnessed the production of unease due to certain subjects and the way in which aesthetic values were negated by moral judgments. The ‘liberating’ potential with which arts professors often credit their subject-matter is compromised by contexts of reception and study. Problems with American literature is partly due to alien attitudes celebrated, promoted, examined and decried in American Literature. There is a strong  antipathy to many core themes of American Literature; such as self-determination, sexual liberation and gender equality. Students interpreted the literature as being simply ‘against our culture’. The perceived permissiveness of American Literature is not confined to students; Layla Al-Maleh has noted that Arab or muslim teachers implement ‘a self-imposed censorship…[in which] highly controversial subjects are quickly excluded.’ As students united ‘by their Muslim faith’ this encounter was productive of sometimes intense discomfort and indeed conflict. The erotic content of Whitman’s Song of Myself was particularly difficult – to compromise on the content would lose the revolutionary aspect of Whitman’s verse and would distort literary history. Emphasizing American historical contexts assisted in justifying the inclusion of literature that might be sensitive to attack.

The politics of reading, interpretation and criticism is a loaded activity. As a Western Professor, I too have my values and beliefs. Like my students I believe in the validity of those beliefs. Like most academics of my generation I am aware of the negative and disempowering effects of colonial assumptions in teaching literature in once occupied countries. Professors should attempt to engage a type of non-coercive knowledge,  not proclaiming the superiority of American values, but enabling understanding, knowledge and critical thinking. The required nature of the course produced a certain resistance in the students’ approach, actively detracting from America’s strong ‘soft power’ appeal. I attempted to encourage students to think of the class as a triangulated encounter between themselves, myself, and literature. However, rather than neutralizing the political content of literature, I encouraged students to trace the defining myths of the American Dream from Emerson to Whitman and Fitzgerald. They were to assess the rhetorical success of literature in mobilizing desire, interest, admiration and literary skill through close analysis of the texts. Rather than conduct the cultural encounter as one of objectivity, we attempted to contextualize and to analyze the rhetoric and imagery of literary texts alongside our own acknowledged positions.

The semester’s coincidence with Obama’s campaign for the presidency was felicitous. The American Dream – that nexus of idealization, self-belief and energy located in the individual – was vividly mobilized by Obama’s rhetoric. Obama’s international profile and the discourse surrounding his ethnicity and beliefs made him of great interest to the students. He embodied the attraction as well as a renovation of American values. The proximity of much of the political rhetoric to the literary works and to the themes of the course meant that students were able to connect the traditions of literature to present identities and see how literature and language is used to reflect and provoke change in a country.

By having students analyze the literary aspects of Obama’s acceptance speech  in 2008 students were able to appreciate its literary and rhetorical strategies. Having already read Emerson students were able to re-evaluate the power of speech rhythms and oratory in the creation of America’s national literature. The evangelical quality of Obama’s speech focused attention on the way political language utilizes transcendence in a way similar to sermons. Obama’s designation of his nation as a ‘place where all things are possible’ marked the highest point of his aspirations. This vision of the nation returned the students to their discussion of Harold Bloom on Emerson as ‘the prophet of the American Religion’. Obama’s representation insisted on the transformative power of hope and aspiration – ideals which students responded very positively toward. In speaking toward the ‘enemies’ of America, the students recognized the way in which rhetoric drew up divisions to assert its boundaries. In drawing on the narrative of oppression and exclusion of African Americans from the power Obama’s assumption of the voices of the excluded, specifically that of the underprivileged women, touched on issues of gender and the role of self-representation that the course had taken as a key theme, through an early class on Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley.

This led to a revitalized conception of the role of literature in culture, but also to a realization of how historical conditions affect the literary or rhetorical representations of an age. Obama’s acceptance speech used for practical criticism which attempted a historically sensitive reading of American Literary Culture. Through the appeal of a figure of soft power, the students were able to more sympathetically read the national mythology in a speech which celebrated the nation through the vision and strength of its individual members.

This explicitly political approach was a new one for the students who were previously accustomed to a more traditional, and less critical or participatory pedagogic method. Students were initially cautious about expressing their opinions due to the contentious nature of political discussion in a country with limited citizenship. Being able to discuss American politics became a means of developing critical thinking,  partly due to the  University as a site of special dispensation, and because of the adversarial reflex American literature produced. Rather than passively consuming a cultural commodity, American Literature as field of study ironically created a transfer of power to the students.  Resistance became reflexivity as students understood complexity of factors and appreciated the aesthetic or formal qualities of American literature more.

Linking pedagogy to politics was risky, but in this context produced very positive results. The University’s role as a cultural institution made students more conscious of the saturation of their culture with American elements, but also to reassess the various forms of American culture . Edward Said’s work has called into question the very possibility of a non-political scholarship. Pedagogy also is implicated in the critical task of ‘drawing attention to realities of power and authority that make texts possible’. American Texts read by Arab students partake of and are affected by the political situation between America and the Muslim world. Obama makes another crucial speech today, June 3^rd,  in Cairo, which continues to affirm his commitment to the Middle East. Whatever the rhetoric, Obama’s presence in the Middle East confirms that America will continue to matter to Arab readers in the foreseeable future.

Both writers were provocative in their subject matter and style. Sedgwick’s preoccupation with the homosocial and homosexual male behaviours was groundbreaking; effectively kickstarting queer studies in the university, and whilst the latterday manifestations of that field have often been methodologically slapdash and often crass parodies of academia, Sedgwick was a formidable and stimulating intellect. I read ‘Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire’ (1985) and ‘Epistemology of the Closet’ (1990) whilst studying the nineteenth-century novel. And whilst those novels didn’t entrance me, Sedgwick’s writing did. Her work traced the contours of hidden desire in seemingly anodyne canonical works that I was too bolshy to be interested in at the time.  Her overt cameraderie for  homosexual men was also a rare and sympathetic trait in scholarly work, extending study of sexuality into masculinity’s invisible forms. Her observations on homosociality were amongst the most important for subsequent theorists, dissolving notions of straight(hah!)forward heterosexuality with her ‘universalizing view’ of sexuality where  ‘apparently heterosexual persons…are strongly marked by same-sex influences.’ That is, we never know what we’ll do next and sometimes we aren’t clear about why we’re doing certain things. Our responses to people, society and culture are bound up with our sexual desires and trying to detangle these desires into one form does not allay the force of those imperatives.  Following her work on male desire she was diagnosed with breast cancer and wrote about the result her mastectomy had upon her own construction of gender. Sedgwick, like the best academics, was motivated by issues that impacted on her life and which she felt deserved critical attention that would illuminate difficulties, make subsequent encounters clearer, less painful.  I kept meaning to read one of her later works, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003) but never got round to it. I will now.

Ballard was another controversialist. I read his ‘Drowned World’ (1962) and ‘The Concrete Island’ (1974) while a teenager but failed to get het up about the more famous works. These two works failed to fit into my emergent grasp of genre, being part science-fiction but somehow more sordid, leaner and a lot nastier. In short, more interesting. (Even than Ray Bradbury, I must admit.) Ballard’s early work has proved horribly prescient, in its environmental, psychosexual and economic dystopias. His fixation on the horror of alienated, affectless individuals trapped in faceless structures has been called ‘disaster capitalism’ – a byproduct of what Edward Luttwark calls the unregulated  ‘turbo- capitalism’ of the 1980s.  Ballard’s extension of Kafka’s bureaucracy rightly identified the power of capital to penetrate and transform individuals, even as it dehumanized them. Ballard too used his illness (prostrate cancer) as subject matter for his final work. His publisher had recently announced that a work provisionally entitled Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life would be forthcoming in the near future.

Blog for fair pay

This is particularly ticklish subject for me having discovered that my co-workers are being paid a nice slice more than me. This is, I suspect, partly due to the fact that I’m an ol’ single woman who obviously needs nothing (other than a husband and a sprog, of course, though I would prefer a publication right now) and who will put up with cr*p. Hmm. We’ll see about that. Working in the Middle East doesn’t help, given endemic sexism and a total absence of equal opportunities legistlation.  The government’s policy of Qatarisation means that the pay scale for nationals is well above that for foreign workers. Add in the racial hierarchy and you have a heady mix of prejudice and inequality.

It’s not like the West is the glittering palace of equity anyhow.  In the UK working women earn around 17% less per hour than their male counterparts.  Stateside, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act is heinously overdue.  Even more depressing is that women’s lower pay is often ‘naturalised’ by commentators and employers who claim it is a product of women’s reproductive role, their desire for part-time or job-share, and lesser participation in the world of work. Or, that we’re just plain unambitious – but if we are we’re unnatural ‘b*tches’ who need to be taken down a peg or two. Grrr.

In education,  the Shouty Boys of academe get better pay packages while their female colleagues earn less (around 11% less) and still fail to make it to the highest ranks of their profession despite the supposed ‘feminization’ of university learning.  The ‘rewards’ of the Ivory tower never were gold suits and Crystal, but a decent standard of living should be every citizens’ right. Cherie Blair recently remarked that the global economic crisis  might prove a opportunity for women in business: apparently when the world markets are collapsing “people are more prepared to take a chance and give a woman a chance” . Blair’s peculiar perspective casts women into the overlooked saviours of consumerism, intervening to save the suits from themselves and turning the boardroom into a softer, “more diverse” environment. No grubby questions about cash, though: the lovely ladies of Cherie’s economic fantasy simply bestow their fragrant knowledge out of sheer christian love – not ruthless economic appetite. Sigh.  Given the elusiveness of basic pay equity throughout the boom years of capitalism, Blair’s prediction seems remarkably maldroit. I suspect that the recession simply offers another opportunity to exploit women’s labour,  and to make sure they’re bloody grateful for being let into the world of work.  We can’t have them getting too uppity, after all…

AND FURTHER: – This from the New York Times. The economic downturn camouflages sexual discrimination.