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.
On 21 April 1930, a fire broke out in the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, a wretched, segregated prison where more than 4000 men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year...
Anouar Brahem first heard jazz when he was studying the oud at the National Conservatory in Tunis in the 1970s. He was astonished that a youthful music of humble origins had evolved in a matter of decades into an art of extraordinary sophistication, through successive waves of innovation; Arabic music struck him as ‘caught in some sort of conformist conservatism in comparison’. He wanted to meld the traditions of the oud with other influences, and to create a vernacular modernism, like the jazz musicians he admired.
America’s wartime transformation, and the emergence of the national security state, has cast a long, seemingly infinite shadow over peacetime. Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether Trump can be stopped, but whether the system as a whole can be overhauled. ‘We have elevated the president to the position of a demigod, and then when he turns out to be Donald Trump, we’re shocked,’ Andrew Bacevich said to me. ‘But since Roosevelt we have vastly enhanced the power and prerogatives exercised by the president, and his ability to execute the nuclear war plan is just part of the package. Why have we entrusted this one imperfect individual with the power to blow up the planet?’
In 1962, Richard Abrams, a 32-year-old pianist on the South Side of Chicago, formed a rehearsal group called the Experimental Band. Its purpose was not so much to perform as to provide a laboratory of artistic research and development for young black musicians and composers working in jazz, or what Abrams preferred to call ‘creative music’. Abrams had been electrified by the free jazz revolution launched a few years earlier by Ornette Coleman. As Abrams saw it, the liberation from chord-based improvisation that Coleman had brought about was only a first step. Creative musicians would have to invent new structures to replace the old ones; they would have to re-examine their relationship not only to music, but to sound. Freedom, Coleman's gift, was also a challenge, even a burden: as exhilarating as free jazz was, the hard work of building on its liberties had only begun.
What, then, explains the paroxysms of Republican anti-racism in the face of Charlottesville? The purpose was not to expunge white supremacy from American life, but to expunge its naked expression, which Trump, to their embarrassment, has been reckless enough to encourage. Since the Nixon era, Republicans have understood that the party’s plans to favour the white ‘silent majority’ depend on coded language that everyone understands but which can be plausibly denied.
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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