Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His LRB podcast series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here.
In August 1943, Jean-Pierre Grumbach, a former soldier in the 71st artillery regiment in Fontainebleau, arrived in London. Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew from Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for...
Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of which candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) American pressure, or the ‘international community’, to end the occupation. This time the question was which party leader could be trusted by...
In December, Okwui Enwezor wrote to me from Munich. He had leukemia. ‘What I miss most,’ he said, ‘is the noise of life humming out there. It’s much too quiet here.’ He died last Friday, aged 55. Since then it’s felt very quiet, both for those who knew him personally, and for the many people who admired his work as a curator and writer. Okwui had a deep, booming voice, and a purposeful one. When he spoke, you listened. It’s hard to imagine not hearing it.
In an interview with a French journalist, Joseph Jarman compared the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the avant-garde jazz quintet to which he belonged, to ‘a cake made from five ingredients: remove one of the ingredients and the cake no longer exists.’ Jarman, who died earlier this month, at 81, after a long illness, was the ingredient that made the band one of the most aesthetically adventurous groups of its era: he put the 'art' in Art Ensemble.
In the spring of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy...
Adam Shatz is joined by Muhammad Shehada and Jehad Abusalim to discuss the ongoing crisis on the ground in Gaza, the economic and political vision of the Board of Peace, and the role of the National Committee...
Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in Lebanon, Israel’s strategic objectives in the region and Hizbullah’s relationship to the the...
Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict...
Adam Shatz is joined by Loubna Mrie and Omar Dahi to discuss the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the future of the country.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the...
In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon and the recent assassinations of Yahya Sinwar and...
In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. ...
Enzo Traverso talks to Adam Shatz about his new book on the history of revolutionary passions, images and ideas, from the rebellion of self-liberated slaves in Haiti in 1791 to Stalin’s top-down...
Claire Denis and J. Hoberman join Adam Shatz to talk about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
Adam Shatz, the LRB’s US editor, talks to Sindre Bangstad and Reza Zia-Ebrahimi about the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, from its origins in the high tide of French colonial expansionism...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which...
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