I can’t be the only one who has, in recent weeks, found myself reaching for my dog-eared copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional re-telling of the 1665 great plague of London – an epidemic that killed around 100,000 people. Defoe...
Karl Marx is said to have remarked of a French socialist that if he is a Marxist, then I’m certainly not. In a similar vein, it would appear that Giorgio Agamben is no longer an Agambian-or perhaps he’s been misreading him(self) lately. The Italian...
Contrary to their claims, the New Atheists do have a creation myth. It goes something like this: emerging from darkness into the light, Enlightenment thinkers cast off the shackles of religion and, in so doing, ushered in an age of reason. For the likes of...
In 2012, Perry Anderson identified a growing body of literature that, rather than being Sinology proper, sought to answer the question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ It ‘consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China,’ he wrote,...
In 2012, Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and was widely criticised by western writers who accused him of accepting and working within the bounds of China’s state censorship program. He had a duty, they argued, to speak out against the...
