R.I.P. Ousmane Sembene
Some very upsetting news today: Ousmane Sembene passed away last Sunday, aged 84. A great loss for Senegal, for Africa, and for fans of films and literature everywhere.
Some very upsetting news today: Ousmane Sembene passed away last Sunday, aged 84. A great loss for Senegal, for Africa, and for fans of films and literature everywhere.
Over on his blog, poet and novelist Alain Mabanckou (Mémoires de porc-épic) announces that he has joined the faculty of the French department at UCLA as a tenured professor, starting in the fall. He also mentions that he will spend this summer translating Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation into French.
The latest New York Review of Books includes a thoughtful review by Pankaj Mishra of Martha Nussbaum’s new book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Here’s a snippet:
Describing the BJP’s quest for a culturally homogeneous Hindu nation-state, Nussbaum wishes to introduce her Western readers to “a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today’s world.” Nussbaum claims that “most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter.” She hints that at least part of this myopia must be blamed on Samuel Huntington’s hugely influential “clash of civilizations” argument, which led many to believe that the world is “currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America.”
Nussbaum points out that India, a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, doesn’t fit Huntington’s theory of a clash between civilizations. The real clash exists
within virtually all modern nations —between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the… domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.
She describes how Indian voters angered by the BJP’s pro-rich economic policies and anti-Muslim violence voted it out of power in general elections in 2004. Detailing the general Indian revulsion against the violence in Gujarat [during which Hindu mobs lynched 2,000 Muslims] and the search for justice by its victims, she highlights the “ability of well-informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality.”
I’m going to have to get a copy of Nussbaum’s book when I return to the U.S. in the summer. You can read Mishra’s review in full here.
Great, great news: Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the 2007 Orange Prize for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. She is the first African to take home the British award, established twelve years ago to honor the best writing by women. The Guardian has an audio interview of Chimamanda, as well as a reading from her novel. The news has made my day.
Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Just in time for Reading the World, Critical Mass has begun a series of posts in which writers recommend books from around the world. Hisham Matar (In The Country of Men) puts in a few words about one of my favorite novels of all time: Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. See what Hisham had to say about it here.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, one of my favorite novels this year, is this month’s Slate book club selection, and the site’s Meghan O’Rourke, Katie Roiphe, and John Burnham Schwartz discuss the novel in this podcast.