Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His books include Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World and Mother Country, a memoir. His essay collection, Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination, was published in March.
T he only time I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, a few years ago, I kept thinking about Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hôtel (1973), a slim volume of meditations, 27 in all, organised from A to Z – a segment per letter, plus one for good measure. Sorrentino took his cue from a line in Rimbaud’s Illuminations: ‘And the Hôtel Splendide was built in the chaos of...
Y ou might think you’re looking at an advent calendar, but there is no Nativity in this stunning set of paintings from the church of Däräsge Maryam in northern Ethiopia. The church was built by order of Webe Hayla Maryam, an energetic Amhara warlord, in the 1850s. By then Webe’s conquests had taken him as far as Tigray and the Red Sea port of Massawa in his bid to become...
The Immigration Bill, introduced today, contains draconian provisions for rooting out unauthorised migrants and a proposal to charge foreigners using the NHS. Whatever message it sends to unauthorised migrants, it waves a dingy flag at migrants in general. Does it matter what they think or how they wave back? Listening to migrants is not a core priority for scholars and number-crunchers in Europe, where an array of statistical work is done on immigration. Economists and social planners want to know whether it’s harmful or handy, a strain on housing stock and public services or a boon to host countries. Development researchers want to know how much wealth it transfers to the global south. The examination is endless; in the process migrants undergo a full battery of tests, but they’re seldom asked to describe their own symptoms.
Portraits – likenesses of living persons – began to appear in China about 2500 years ago. The tradition may be long, but the breadth and scale of the genre are even more striking, especially when portraiture is asked to perform broader duties than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ‘portrait...
The sad truth about the vessel that went down off the coast of Lampedusa last week is that there will be others like it, and the loss of life – nearly 300 dead or missing in this case – may well be as bad. It’s tasteless to spin the event as an argument against borders, or to use it to make the opposite case for fully militarised frontiers with forward arrangements of the kind EU states have already tried out in ‘sender countries’ (Gaddafi’s Libya, Mauritania). The fact remains that borders are places of contention; and rights are a scarce resource which people will risk their lives to access. The EU is a champion of universal rights; it would like to see its rights regime exported to all corners of the earth, but Brussels is a long way from Mogadishu or Asmara.
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and resilient reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, and its repressive measures, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention...
Jeremy Harding discusses the politics of migration.
Elaine Mokhtefi talks to Jeremy Harding about her time working in Algeria in the 1960s when she met Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
In his latest book Heaven on Earth art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. He talks to LRB contributing editor...
Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz look back at their pieces for the LRB reporting from North Africa and the Middle East.
Jeremy Harding examines the work of Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keïta and the lively collaboration between himself and his sitters in the years before Mail’s independence.
Jeremy Harding talks about the politics of migration and the battle at Europe’s borders.
‘In olden times, which is when God was deciding what blessings he would give to the countries he was creating, after a long while he finally got to Angola and he asked Gabriel his angel to...
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