From Mehmet Ali to Mubarak: a history of Egyptian nationalism.
Time to ditch the paper: the Leftover Left and the newspaper.
Trotsky’s killer in Santa Fe Haagen-Dazs.
Andrew Coates reviews Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals.
Celebrate People’s History
May 17 – 29, 2010
Opening Night
Monday May 17th at 5.30pm
Eastside Gallery at the Linwood Community Arts Centre
Corner Worcester Street and Stanmore Road
Christchurch
Contact:
otautahianarchists(at)gmail.com
Images can be made available for media/press by request, or preview some of the works here: http://www.justseeds.org/subjects/celebrate_peoples_history_1/
DETAILS HERE.
Following on from my YIVO special, here are some more Yiddish archival treasures. Below the fold, the usual round up of newly available radical material.
Our focus today is the Yale Judaica collection. Below are some exhibitions. Clicking on the images enables you to see them in context.
And You Shall Tell Your Children, Passover Haggadah exhibition:
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Kibbutz Haggadah |
Illustrated Yiddish Books:
These illustrated books date from the post-revolutionary period, the golden age of Soviet Yiddish, when Russian plebian culture and Jewish folk culture, avante-garde graphics and radical politics, all worked together powerfully. -P.
Avant-garde Maquettes (1929):
Avant-garde maquettes for Jewish-Communist wall posters in Yiddish (1929): Leaf One
Ink and watercolor manuscript, possibly a mock up for publication, consisting of two leaves (28 x 19 cm.) mounted side-by-side in a contemporary mat. This poster contains the phrase “Proleṭarier fun ale lender, fareyniḳṭ aykh!” [Proletariat of all lands, unite!] and large lettering with the words “Arbeṭ un ḳulṭur” [Labor and culture] across an illustration of a hammer and sickle topped by a red star.
Avant-garde maquettes for Jewish-Communist wall posters in Yiddish (1929): Leaf TwoThis poster has the heading “Ḳegn Goṭ un shṿindl” [Against God and swindle] above a paragraph urging Jews not to be duped into the backward religious practice of attending high holiday services. It is signed אמכא–Amkha, a deliberately misspelled version of the Hebrew word עמך — Amkha [Your People].
No time for proper posting, but have a look at
This is wonderful: Karl Marx’s Capital in lithographs, by Hugo Gellert, from 1934, reached via Hak Mao. Gellert illustrated Max Eastman’s The Liberator too. 
Below the fold, From the Archive of Struggle, no.31. I think this edition is almost completely stolen from Entdinglichung.
From here:
Agusti Centelle (1909-1985) was considered one of the foremost photojournalist during the Spanish Civil War. Called “Spanish Robert Capa”, he was one of the great image-makers of the Republican resistance during the war. Originally working in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia, He exiled himself over the Pyrenees to the Bram refugee camp when his side lost. There in Bram, under extremely difficult conditions, he continued to photograph. When he returned into Spain, he hid several thousand negatives to protect the identities of the revolutionaries from Franco. Only forty years later after Franco died, Centelles returned to France and reclaimed many of his negatives.
His most iconic photo was shown above. Taken in Barcelona on 19 July 1936, it shows the republican forces barricading behind the dead horses. Like Picasso’s anguished horse in Guernica, dead horses and soon-to-be-dead revolutionaries showed the chaos, violence, conflict and suffering unleashed by the civil war. The photo was titled, “Assault Guards in Diputacio Street. Barcelona”. Like Capa’s Loyalist Militiaman, the photo has long be accused of being staged. An exhibition at Centro Cultural Conde Duque in February 2008 confirmed that suspicion by showing the contact strip from which the final work was taken. The image was indeed the best composed and the most convincing of the entire photo-op.
See his other photos here.
From The Kate Sharpley Library: The 19th of July is the anniversary of the Spanish Revolution of 1936. To mark the date, here’s a review of “Durruti in the Spanish Revolution” by Abel Paz, anarchist historian, who has sadly died recently.
The libertarian socialist tradition
New blog: Big Flame, on the history of this UK radical group of the 1970s.
Andre Gorz, or the Ecological Demand, by Serge Audier at Principia Dialectica.
Anarchist Studies: Perspective 2009. On the legacy of Murray Bookchin.
Poster art, folk song and historical memory
More from BCNDesign: The everyday comes to Santa Coloma: Local things for local history. Graphic design in 1930s Spain.
History Today: The Mexican suitcase. British volunteers and Republican posters.
Rio Wang: Russian poster design and the war on coca-cola. Carlos Gordel and the zorzal.
George Szirtes: Fado da Tristeza.
The extraordinary anti-Nazi photo-montages of John Heartfield.
Scoop Review of Books: Kiwi Compañeros: NZ’s anti-Franco volunteers. See more in TNC‘s comment here. Which led me to these two great older posts: Fieldtrip to the International Center for Photography (Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Francesc Torres and poster art). ¿Viva la Insurgencía?: The Spanish Civil War and the Legacy of the Totalitarian International Brigades. There’s plenty more TNC posts on memory and archives and on Communism.
Watch Land and Freedom at A Complex System of Pipes.
From the archive of struggle, no.14 (below the fold) (more…)
Art News
Artium Presents the Exhibition Dark is the Room Where We Sleep, by Francesc Torres
“Whilst doing only what is possible is healthy and reasonable, it is also dreary, and life is short anyway. Maybe for these reasons I am determined to win the Spanish Civil War”. These words were uttered by the Catalonian artist Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948), talking about his installation Dark Is The Room Where We Sleep, which has provided the title for the exhibition presented at ARTIUM. He went on to explain what he meant by his statement. Winning the war “consists, no more and no less,” he declares, “of preventing people from mistaking those who are in the right historically for those who are not. It involves never putting the innocent and the tyrants in the same basket. It consists of recovering the victims of a sinister regime so that everyone may know that they were indeed the victims and, once the fire is out, abandon weapons.”
one city: Painting as an act of compassion
“Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought…Painting is…the mind realizing itself in color and space.” – Robert Motherwell
On Friday May 1st, the ID Project Arts Group went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of Robert Motherwell’s paintings from his series of “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”. He made over one hundred and seventy of these paintings which were a lament for the people and the culture that died in the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell, who was only 21 at the time the Civil War broke out was struck by the realization “that the world could, after all, regress.”
Orwellia
Cervantes on Orwell on Jura
The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father “could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father’s time on Jura recognise how essential she was.”
George Orwell wrote 1984 on Jura. Did you think about him much?
Yes, particularly when I went up to Barn Hill. The people there now are the same people who rented the house to Orwell, so there’s that continuity. The house is unchanged since he was there. I found it oddly moving – which is not like me. The consciousness of how ill he was and how driven he was to work under those circumstances, what a grim time it was in the post-war period.
Obituaries
José María Martínez Castillo, ‘Koke’
1926 Cabredo- 2009 London
Word doc from Children of ’37
Paul Larkin on Jack Jones, Martin McGuinness and Bob Doyle.
Below the fold: anarchist history from Australia, Pittsburgh, Russia and Italy, council communist texts on-line, Karl Korsch, Franklin Rosemont… (more…)
Robert Capa’s “Mexican” Suitcase. photo © Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Gerda Taro, Air Raid Victim in the Morgue, Valencia, 1937.
Highbrow
Lowbrow
Churchillian
Activist
Obituary
IISG: Today in History Entdinglichung La Bataille Socialiste Bob From Brockley Radical archives Christie Books Criticism etc Histomatist
Poumista 