Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

The book, Underworld, the Mysterious Origins of Civilization, by Graham Hancock, has some fascinating chapters about Dwarka, in the state of Gujarat on the Kathiawar Peninsula by the Arabian Sea. There, a team of marine archaeologists, led by S. R. Rao, discovered a very large submerged site. Dr. Rao has led excavations of a vast number of important Indian sites, including many Indus Valley sites.

Graham Hancock and his wife, Santha, traveled there in 1992. Though British, he was not a stranger to India, having spent part of his childhood in Vellore, in Tamil Nadu. Santha’s family background is Tamil.

Hancock describes the Indian concept of cyclical time and the four yugas or four ages: the Krita Yuga, which is the “golden” age; the Treta Yuga, in which virtue has begun to decline and is less perfect than before; the Davapara Yuga, in which there is dishonesty…

“Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought” – CaixaForum Barcelona (July 25-October 28, 2012)

I find this to be a compelling image that speaks to the relationships between body, mind, and space. It forms part of an exhibition currently at CaixaForum in Barcelona. I have loosely translated from Spanish the following text found on CaixaForum’s website (http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/nuestroscentros/caixaforumbarcelona/cartografiascontemporaneas_es.html):

The exhibition presents maps generated by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century who interrogate and question systems of representation. They are cartographies of physical and mental spaces that generate new meanings and new insights about different types of spaces (heterotopias, utopias, invisible or virtual). Thus, we become aware of the prevalence of the simulacrum of reality, of our difficulties to represent the contemporary world and notions of ideology and power implicit in the act of representing.

“Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing thought” shows how artists have subverted cartographic language, from the map of the world of…

CFP-edited book on Marxism and Urban Culture

Submissions are invited for an edited book on Marxism and Urban Culture that has received initial interest from an international publisher known for their strength in Marxian-themed series and titles.

While all abstracts using a Marxian framework to approach culture in urban contexts are welcome, it is anticipated that submissions will conform to one of two subtypes reflecting the division of the book into

Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s fifth novel to be featured in my personal blog, For the Desk Drawer, is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated in the context of the Great Terror in Soviet Russia orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. In the sequence that constitutes the ‘defeat-in-victory’ trilogy (preceded by Midnight in the Century [1939] and succeeded by The Long Dusk [1943-5]), the novel intersects in several subtle ways with Serge’s other books. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a chronicle of the Moscow arrests and show trials in the 1930s that pulls in a myriad of characters as well as the overbearing appearance of ‘the Chief’, Stalin himself. It does so by offering at least two intersections to aspects present in Serge’s earlier novels. First, it offers a set of intersecting elements linked to…