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.
In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote:
The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo.
It’s hard to tell from this poem, published when Oppen was in his...
France has been struggling with its image abroad on several counts. First, there’s the rise in anti-semitism and the corresponding exodus of French Jews. Second, there is Le Pen’s success in the first round of the presidentials two years ago, which still sends a chill through the most rosy-cheeked francophiles, whether they’re British trenchermen or Latin American...
“Teachers tell worrying stories which depict the veil as the beginning of selective opposition to the curriculum. This might, for example, include a Muslim student’s refusal to do gym or discuss certain areas of natural science, or to countenance teaching on the Holocaust, and then shade off into abuse or physical violence after a classrom session on the Middle East. Teachers are also clear that the wearing of religious symbols tends to exacerbate the divisions over heated issues such as Palestine.”
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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