book review

Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2021). 164 pages Marcello Musto’s anthology of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation[1] is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the concept through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts. Additionally, Musto’s introduction to the anthology[Read More...]

‘Revolution and Counter Revolution ‘printed by Foreign Languages Press  in November 2021  and written by Pao Yu Ching  is a most analytical work  .It stands amongst the major achievements in modern times summarising the positive strides made by China under Mao from 1949-78 and how those objectives were inverted 360 degrees after 1978 after Deng Xiaoping. With intrinsic details she[Read More...]

Through his stories and novellas, Bharat Dogra makes it possible—the confluence of political sociology and literary imagination. Bharat Dogra, A Day in 2071: A Collection of Stories and Novellas, Saptarishi, New Delhi, 2022, pp. xiii+246, price: Rs. 399/ I have been reading Bharat Dogra’s essays and columns in a spectrum of newspapers and magazines for quite some time. What fascinates me[Read More...]

The author Steven Pinker’s blinkered perspective in Enlightenment Now is limited to critiquing what remains of an academic leftism often accused of a reflexive anti-Western bias. Pinker’s advocacy of rationality and science in itself adds little to the mainstream recognition of human intellectual advancement since the 18th century Enlightenment. Over the centuries, the main opponent […]
The post A Blinkered Reality first appeared on Dissident Voice.

“Aemilia Lanyer As Shakespeare’s Co-Author” by Mark Bradbeer presents a detailed case that a woman of colour and feminist poet, Aemilia Lanyer, was an important co-author  of William Shakespeare, and hence made a big contribution to a body of works that are foundational to English literature and the English language that is spoken by over 1 billion people in India,[Read More...]

To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark. — Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) The memoir, N, by James Henry Harris, Distinguished Professor of […]
The post N-: the Day-Glo Elephant in the Room first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Redundant Author: Bitan Chakraborty Translated from the original Bengali by Malati Mukherjee Published by Readomania, New Delhi May 2022, Paperback, Page 102, ISBN: 978-93-91800-38-3 “Redundant” as a word addresses excess. For something to be “redundant,” it must be superfluous. In the context of Bitan Chakraborty’s novella Redundant, we absorb excess through the exploits of one of the central characters, Shubho,[Read More...]

In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright1 to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an […]
The post Common Sense in the Form of Theory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

BOLLYWOOD, TOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND – LITERARY ESSAYS ON INDIAN FILMS – By Somdatta Mandal, Pencraft International, New Delhi, 2021. Pages 344, Price: Rs.1200 Somdatta Mandal recently retired from her position as Professor of English and Chairperson of the Department of English, Viswa Bharati, Santi Niketan where she was very active in organizing seminars, panel discussions and conferences on subjects linking[Read More...]

French economist Thomas Piketty’s latest West-oriented book “Time for Socialism” is about worsening wealth inequality in an ever worsening global climate crisis. His solutions for Western economies include a just and progressive income tax, wealth taxes, carbon taxes, and economic justice for the poor and the young. Because capital begets more capital he argues for a  big grant to 25[Read More...]