This is not a book about films in the conventional sense. It is a book about the conditions under which films become legible, forgettable, weaponised, or necessary.
Across essays that move between review and reportage, festival and platform, myth and documentary, Narendra Pachkhédé reads global cinema as a moral technology of the present. He follows the contemporary attention regime, the coercions of watchability, the choreography of awards and public virtue, and the quiet ways propaganda teaches a society what to feel plausible. The question is not only what we watch, but how we have been conditioned to watch: how viewing is trained by ideological settings, how sensibility is numbed by repetition and spectacle, how attention is corralled into habits that feel like choice.
This is a book about the world of cinema and its assemblages. It attends to cinema’s extended life in media ecologies: streaming interfaces and festival circuits, platform logics and institutional gatekeeping, the politics of narrative and the global circulation of stories. It returns repeatedly to the politics of reception, where a work is domesticated or rejected, where controversy polices a field, where filmmakers bond, quarrel, protect, and betray, and where institutions decide what counts as witness. Cinema, here, is not only an art form but a system of mediation that defines the political terms under which stories are consumed.
The book crosses geographies and film worlds, tracing how nations dream through genre and how history is refashioned into culture, suspended between memory and forgetting. From the seductions of nostalgia to the endurance of Béla Tarr, from Korean modernity’s neutralised ruptures to Palestinian cinema’s custody under pressure, these essays insist that cinema is never only an image. It is an argument about reality, and a rehearsal for what a public can bear to know.
The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing asks a simpler, harsher question: why do some stories become global vigils while others vanish into the feed? It is a book about how we come to believe what we believe, and what cinema has to do with that failure. It is also a wager that, by looking closely and naming the terms of looking, one can still be a form of care.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a writer, essayist, journalist, critic and curator working at the intersection of literature, cinema, political theory, anthropology and global intellectual history. His work examines the cultural and historical conditions through which power, normativity, and moral responsibility are…
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This work consists of a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people. It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population. In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination. Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens. In the domains of uncivil society and traditional society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so that different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people. In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle.
Il s’agit d’une brève tentative d’orienter l’étude de l’État néocolonial en Afrique à travers une évaluation de la manière dont il gouverne son peuple. On soutient que l’État produit différents modes de contrôle étatique en déployant différentes politiques sur différentes parties de la population. De cette manière, il peut combiner une règle véritablement démocratique à l’image de l’Occident sur certains tout en soumettant la majorité à des formes coloniales de domination. Les subjectivités politiques importées de l’Occident et son obsession du discours sur les droits de l’homme sont largement réservées à une sphère de la société civile dans laquelle le droit d’avoir des droits est conféré aux citoyens. Dans les domaines de la société incivile et de la société « traditionnelle », le droit aux droits n’est pas respecté par l’État, de sorte que différentes subjectivités, y compris régulièrement la violence, régissent la manière dont les problèmes politiques et leurs solutions sont abordés à la fois par l’État et par le peuple. En conséquence, des subjectivités politiques distinctes prévalent dans la conceptualisation de la résistance populaire dans chacun des trois domaines, et il devient difficile de rallier des préoccupations et des conceptions aussi différentes au sein d’une lutte anticoloniale nation
Technology is one of the central elements of contemporary human life. The world as one knows it today is a space increasingly mediated by technological interventions, be it in the field of contemporary cultural expressions or political, organizational forms. Social media has played an important role in this transformation. Gone are the days when social media was merely a conduit for conversations. Today, it is a diverse field of operations spanning advertising mechanisms, branding processes and even direct commercial exchanges between users: the prime focus of this particular book.
Direct user-to-user trading through social media within an institutional form is a relatively new dimension in the dynamic world of social media. Yet, just like every other form of innovation within the paradigm of market relations, social media commerce or social media trading has also created newer and diverse alterations in how individuals interact with the existing socio-political fabric within which they exist. This book analyses these alterations and critically investigates the role of Capital in creating them.
The book analyses real-world interactions, interviews and observations through the theoretical framework provided by Marxist political economy and social theory. It draws upon the theoretical scope provided by Marx’s dialectical methods of social analysis and uses it to unearth the effects that trading and commercial activities performed through virtual communities have on society and individuals.
The book explores the challenges Palestinian filmmakers confront to develop a cinema that gives expression to the national narrative. The research is based on collaborative work to research and screen Palestinian films involving Film Lab Palestine, Sheffield Palestine Cultural Exchange and Sheffield Hallam University as part of the Creative Interruptions research project (https://creativeinterruptions.com/palestiniancinema/). We explored the political, economic and cultural factors that impact on Palestinian film production and some of the barriers encountered in profiling and screening Palestinian films in Britain.
The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.
In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.
The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.
The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.
“Never has it been more certain that our victory depends principally on our own actions. Tell no lies, claim no easy victories . . .” —Amílcar Cabral On the centennial of Amílcar Cabral’s birth, and fifty years after his passing, Claim No Easy Victories brings to life the resonance of his thought for today’s freedom movements. World-renowned revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the anticolonial independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral’s legacy stretches well beyond the shores of West Africa. His profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the Black liberation movement in the United States and the English-speaking world spans the ages—and is only growing in an era of renewed anti-imperialist internationalist struggle. In this unique collection of essays, radical thinkers from across Africa, the United States, and internationally commemorate Cabral’s life and legacy and his relevance to contemporary struggles for self-determination and emancipation. Claim No Easy Victories serves equally as an introduction or reintroduction to a figure and militant history that the rulers and beneficiaries of global racial capitalism would rather see forgotten. Understanding Cabral then and now sheds light on the necessity of grounding radical change in the creation of theory based on the actual conditions within which movements develop. The depth and dimension of Cabral’s theoretical ideas and revolutionary practice of building popular movements for liberation are assessed by each of the authors and critically reanimated for a new generation of freedom fighters. The book features contributions by: Kali Akuno, Samir Amin, David Austin, Jesse Benjamin, Angela Davis, Bill Fletcher Jr, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, Lewis Gordon, Firoze Manji, Asha Rodney, Patricia Rodney, Olúfémi Táíwò—and others.
We inhabit extraordinary times: times in which we are acutely aware of the intensity of what revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon called “the glare of history’s floodlights.” The velocity and scale at which the revolt against police murder that began in Minnesota after the death of George Floyd on May 25th and moved throughout the US, and then other parts of the world, was astonishing. It was impossible to predict, but then, in retrospect, it is George Floyd’s death becomes a nodal point: calling for action as well as rethinking and self-clarification. Thinking about this moment with the world revolutionary Frantz Fanon, we need to be aware of continuities and discontinuities — or, as he puts it, opacities — between the ages, his and ours. Fanon is always speaking to us, but often in ways we cannot hear. We have to work to listen to him and to understand the new contexts and meanings in relative opacity. It is this constant dialogue that helps illuminate the present and enable ongoing fidelity to Fanon’s call in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth the necessity to work out new concepts to confront one of Fanon’s greatest concerns, the betrayal of the revolutionary movement. In this pamphlet we consider how Fanon’s idea of liberation is connected with “the rationality of revolt.” The practice of engaging Fanon not only with revolt but with the reason or rationality of revolt connects with Fanon’s idea of how this liberated humanity is a product of a new consciousness of collectivity open to rethink everything.
94A6325 is the compelling coming-of-age memoir of Dr. Kirk “Jae” James, a Black male, Jamaican immigrant, and father, chronicling his nearly decade-long experience (3,268 days) within the New York State carceral apparatus. The narrative is anchored by his arrest on April 13, 1994, when he was 18 years old, charged under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. The story details his survival in infamous facilities such as Rikers Island, the maximum-security adolescent prison “The Cat” (Coxsackie), and Wyoming, where he fought to maintain his humanity while facing overwhelming fear and anxiety.
The book powerfully illustrates how legislative actions like the 13th Amendment, “tough on crime” rhetoric, the 1994 Crime Bill, and the 1996 Immigration laws acted as contemporary black codes and slave catchers, perpetually dehumanizing and criminalizing Black and brown populations. Jae endures three denials by the Parole Board while simultaneously fighting a six-year battle against a mandatory deportation order.
Drawing inspiration from mentors and comrades—including revolutionaries and activists like George Jackson and Pops—Jae transforms his time in prison into a quest for knowledge and self-actualization, culminating in earning an Associate Degree and winning his 212c waiver hearing against deportation in 2002.
More than just a survival story, 94A6325 serves as a vital first-person account and a call to embrace Abolition. The author, now a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU, shares his journey as essential knowledge needed to confront the historical violence and systemic white supremacy woven into American democracy, urging readers to imagine a world without human cages, grounded in abundance and love. The story officially ends with his release on March 25, 2003.
This book is the first part in a series, with this one focusing on his incarceration from 1994 to 2003.
he COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities. This pamphlet explains how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism.
Edwards not only captures how people of African descent have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, but also the historical, sociological and structural roots of the inequalities that affect vulnerable groups across the world, tied to what she has described as the architecture of the global economy linked to race and gender. She represents a refreshing voice in our time and part of a Caribbean radical tradition in the spirit of Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James, from her native Trinidad, as well as Guyana’s Walter Rodney and Andaiye.
