NLR 26

article
Mike DavisPlanet of Slums

Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

document
Benny MorrisOn Ethnic Cleansing

Interview with the path-breaking historian of the Nakba, who bluntly defends the centrality of ethnic cleansing to the Zionist project. A glaring light on the realities of Israeli state-building, with or without the mask of ‘peace process’.

articles
Achin VanaikRendezvous at Mumbai

The fourth World Social Forum, in the neoliberal capital of the global South. Soaring elite consumption, widening inequality and anti-Muslim pogroms of Shining India, with the New Hindu Right set for fresh electoral victory.

Perry AndersonThe River of Time

Perry Anderson responds to Fredric Jameson’s ‘Politics of Utopia’ in NLR 25. Lessons for the glacial political present from Bloch and Adorno, Fourier and Lao Tse—and conditions for the renewal of utopian energies.

Franco MorettiGraphs, Maps, Trees - 2

After ‘Graphs’ (see NLR 24), maps: geography, or social geometry? Literary spaces plotted as competing fields for industrialization, peasant rebellion, state formation. The second of Moretti’s three essays conceptualizing patterns of genre and history, form and force.

Edgardo CozarinskyLetter from Buenos Aires

New Wave Argentine cinema—documentaries from the badlands, taxi boys on roller-skates, escrache protests—thriving after the crash of 2001, in the diary of an émigré practitioner.

reviews
Headscarf Hysteria

Emmanuel Terray on Bernard Stasi, Laïcité et République. The French political establishment’s vapours over school-girl head-dress.

A Futurist Ark

Tony Wood on John Bowlt et al., eds, Nikolai Khardzhiev, A Legacy Regained. Matchless archive of art and writings from avant-garde Russia, and an old man at the mercy of the West.

A Practical Utopianism?

Michael Rustin on Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized. A Brazilian alternative to both free-market and social-democratic orthodoxies—experimentalism as transformative political practice.

The Age of Warring States

Gopal Balakrishnan on Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648. Recasting the origins of the modern state system within the matrix of emerging capitalist relations.