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Through its focus on secular Muslim public intellectuals in contemporary France, this book challenges polarizing accounts of Islam and Muslims, which have been ubiquitous in political and media debates for the last thirty years. The work of these intellectuals is significant because it expresses, in diverse ways, an ‘internal’ vision of Islam that demonstrates how Muslim identification and practices successfully engage with and are part of a culture of secularism (laïcité). The study of individual secular Muslim intellectuals in contemporary France thus gives credence to the claim that the categories of religion and the secular are more closely intertwined than we might assume. This monograph is a timely publication that makes a crucial contribution to academic and political debates about the place of Islam and Muslims in contemporary France. The book will focus on a discursive and contextualised analysis of the published works and public interventions of Abdelwahab Meddeb, Malek Chebel, Leïla Babès, Dounia Bouzar and Abdennour Bidar – intellectuals who have received little scholarly attention despite being well-known figures in France.
Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960) was not only a major twentieth-century historian, a pioneer of ‘scientific history’ who gave his name to a particular form of history-writing, but an important public intellectual. He played a significant role in public affairs, as an influential adviser to the British Foreign Office during the First World War and later as an active Zionist. This article offers a new perspective on his life and work by providing, for the first time, as comprehensive a bibliography as is currently possible of his voluminous writings: books, scholarly articles and contributions to periodicals and newspapers, including many hitherto unknown, and some published anonymously. The annotation includes not only bibliographical information but explanations and brief summaries of the content. The introduction gives an account of Namier’s life and an assessment of his significance as a historian and thinker.
This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.
sixteen works of fiction and five non-fiction books. He is also a journalist, broadcaster and public intellectual who has cultivated a misanthropic public persona, as indicated by the title of a collection of his weekly columns for the Independent , Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It ( 2011 ). Jacobson has written many different kinds of books: from academic studies to campus comedies; from travelogues to psychodramas; from social-realist novels to dystopian allegories. Although much of his work revolves around questions of Jewish identity, male sexuality and the nature
reviews and commentary in newspapers and journals, to participating in television and radio debates and ad-hoc literary discussions at festivals and live events. Assuming the role not of reclusive writer but of public intellectual, A. S. Byatt has never disappeared neatly under cover of fiction, but has taken every opportunity to communicate her enthusiasm for all matters literary – and indeed beyond. Readers
) to propose that Foucault’s interview-work exceeds the function of the paratextual, constituting a distinct domain of his practise as a philosopher and public intellectual. In fact, Foucault’s interview practice is, according to Deleuze, of primary importance to understanding his work overall: ‘[t]he complete work of Foucault […] cannot separate off the books which have made
public intellectuals and has a large following throughout the world, but he has also been an extremely polarizing figure throughout his career. He was born in Saft at-Turab, Upper Egypt, in 1926. His family background was modest and his father died when he was two. Beginning his education in a village Qurʾanic school, he went on to study Islam and the Arabic language, achieving a
family story (Gillon 1952). Their elder brother, Colin, became the state prosecutor of Israel, who famously brought Israeli soldiers to justice for their criminal responsibility in the Kafr Kassim massacre of Arab villagers. Max Gluckman was, in my view, a public intellectual, who throughout his career reached beyond the academic world to speak, especially in many often-controversial radio broadcasts, to very wide audiences. In the 1940s he made it a major goal of the RhodesLivingstone Institute (RLI), under his direction, to translate ‘the knowledge gained through
14 Partisan reviews Beyond the need to earn a living there were, George Orwell reckoned in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, four great motives for writing prose: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, the desire to see things as they are and, his own main reason, political purpose.1 Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland, edited by Mark O’Brien and Felix Larkin, is the first comprehensive survey of its kind of outlets for Irish public intellectuals and journalists who shared Orwell’s reasons for writing. Whilst some of these periodicals championed
withering judgements on the Catholic Church in Ireland by two of the country’s most important public intellectuals, Fintan O’Toole (a former assistant editor of the Irish Times) and Roy Foster (the Oxford-based historian). As far as both of them are concerned the Irish Catholic Church is at death’s door and will soon cease to have any meaningful role in Irish life. O’Toole in his weekly columns campaigns for a liberal secularity, while Foster has provocatively suggested that such has been their demonstration of individual conscience and judgement that Irish Catholics have