Ali Alizadeh

Is today’s Marxism yet another vogue – perhaps in tandem with the current popularity of self-proclaimed democratic socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – destined to be supplanted, in due course, by another, more trendy woke ideology? Or is the Marx of our time a potent, powerful continuation or resurrection of the vision and thought of history’s most dogged revolutionary?

I shall begin my exploration of this new book about one of modern poetry’s most emblematic figures by referring to…

Balanced and measured though he is, McPhee is aware that the French Revolution is too vital and controversial an event to be subordinated entirely to a historian’s caution. And it is his less cautious, more assertive comments and explanations which make this book not only a great source for learning about the Revolution, but also, perhaps more interestingly, an intervention in the debates surrounding the Revolution’s causes, conduct and consequences.

‘It’s my argument that, in dramatising and deprecating acts of direct physical violence – however menacing their perpetrators and however innocent their victims – a work such as this war novel and, perhaps by extension, many others associated with other genres in which grisly violence is central, such as horror and crime fiction, suppress the much more prevalent, far more significant instances of symbolic and structural violence that underpin and regulate our supposedly non-warring, peacetime societies.’

‘Capitalism has nothing to fear from an identity-driven struggle of any kind. As long as resentful white male poets feel entitled to assume the identities of the marginalised in a quixotic battle against political correctness, and as long as the marginalised wage their own equally quixotic battles in defence of cultural authenticity and identity fetishism, nothing will change.’ Ali Alizadeh on the Yi-Fen Chou fracas.

The Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies articulates, with precision and clarity, the book’s argument and content. This is a book specifically about doing value or essaying – from a Latin root, which comes to English via Old French, meaning ‘weighing’ – the matter of literature from the perspective of cultural studies.

According to Rancière, modern democratic politics and modern non-classical arts are two manifestations of the same new, revolutionary social space. In this space, sensibility or sense perception (aisthesis in Greek: the origin of the word aesthetics) is shared and distributed across social divides, providing the impetus for both a new egalitarian politics and a new democratic regime of artistic appreciation and practice, which Rancière has called the aesthetic regime of art.

The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc blends fiction and nonfiction in its reconstruction of Jeanne’s life, not to offer a new conclusion about the warrior, but to urge us to view her otherwise than through the lens of her canonisation. The fictionalised exploration of Jeanne’s homosexuality may raise the ire of those who would consider themselves the guardians of a chaste legend; it is also essential to Alizadeh’s insistence on the maid’s humanity.

Alizadeh is an acclaimed poet and academic, and a self-confessed ‘unashamedly political writer’… In Transactions, he uses extreme examples of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and the unrestrained exercise of power to expose the inequities of the capitalist system and shock the reader out of his or her complacency.