Jeff Sparrow

In The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist, Kate Fullagar invites us to rethink the British empire of the eighteenth century, understanding it not as the inexorable outcome of economic and technological superiority but as a more tenuous – even tentative – project, contested at its centre as well as its edges.

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project – an initiative funded by the Works Project Administration under the New Deal – provided employment for some 6000 jobless writers. Today, as stunned authors in Australia and around the world come to terms with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, that experiment deserves reconsideration.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

Yet labour’s role in the establishment of neoliberalism in Australia marked both the union movement and the ALP, leaving both of them shells of their former selves.

pro-refugee sentiment within Australia has tended to find institutional expression in particular pockets of liberal sentiment – one of which has been the infrastructure of Australian literature. That’s the context for Boochani’s book, a text that emerges from a scaffolding of literary activism that it itself helped facilitate.’

On first encounter, oral history seems both straightforward and innately subversive, an approach to narrative history that offers unmediated access to an…

In this excellent new book, [Horne] identifies Robeson as a neglected precursor to the modern Civil Rights movement. ‘[Y]ou cannot fully appreciate how the Jim Crow system came to an end without an understanding of the life of Paul Robeson,’ he argues. ‘[I]t was only with Robeson’s fall that King and Malcolm could emerge as they did; the undermining of Robeson created a vacuum that these two leaders filled.’

‘Between the World and Me brings a deep engagement with an African American canon usually entirely excluded from the (white) public debate.’ Jeff Sparrow reviews Ta-Nehesi Coates’ new book on contemporary America and the visceral experience of racism.

Seveneves is not, it should be stressed, a conservative book. There is nothing in it comparable to, say, the long diatribes about the moral necessity for military dictatorship that lard every Robert Heinlein novel. But nor does Stephenson’s enthusiasm for science coincide with the gee-willikers liberal optimism of Golden Age science fiction.

As the authors of Inside Australia’s Anti-Terrorism Laws and Trials note, it is relatively common for those accused of terrorism to plead guilty, partly to obtain a reduction on the huge sentences that such charges carry, but also because a guilty plea will lead to an improvement of the conditions they are already enduring, in the context of a trial that could stretch out for years.

Understandably, James wants to rescue Marley from the kitsch images of bong hits and tropical holidays, re-situating him as a political player emerging from a particular historical setting. But Marley’s social significance cannot be disentangled from his art. If, as A Brief History of Seven Killings suggests, Marley came to embody a sense that ‘there was this once time when we could’a do it’, it was, first and foremost, through his music.

In 1950, ASIO’s Canberra office could record only two telephone lines from the Soviet embassy at any time. By contrast, in a single month in 2013, according to Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency acquired data from more than 3 billion calls and emails. Perversely, the staggering gulf between then and now makes ASIO’s history more relevant than ever. We do not (and cannot) know what the secret organisation does today, but its record allows us to extrapolate.

Bringing so much writing by an important but under-appreciated Australian poet into the public arena is a major achievement, for which both editor and publisher should be congratulated. It is, however, regrettable that the new volume diminishes Harford’s work with an editorial framing that feels unpleasantly gendered.

Jeff Sparrow’s book was written and published within nine months of the shootings, and so provides a contemporaneous picture of the extreme right in 2019 in a world where things are rapidly changing. The immediacy of the book means that it is a journalistic investigation of why the shootings occurred – but is also a call to arms for anti-racists and anti-fascists in the face of the threat of right-wing violence, both in Australia and overseas. With the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe and right-wing concern about ‘antifa’, Sparrow’s book, alongside works like Mark Bray’s Antifa, is a useful guide to the problems that anti-fascists and anti-racists are up against, as well as how they are to be confronted.

“It is not just that the left and right consider each other repellent,” observes Jeff Sparrow in Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. “It’s also that they find each other almost incomprehensible.” Trigger Warnings and The Death of Truth are notable contributions to what has become a deluge of books and articles trying to explain how we arrived at this point. They offer different diagnoses, but share some basic assumptions. Both propose that the peculiarity of contemporary discourse is, to a significant extent, a product of the culture wars.’

In writing No Way But This Sparrow seeks to reanimate not only the ghost of Paul Robeson but those of his family, friends and comrades. In other words, this book has an avowedly political goal. It revives Robeson as a model of integrity and bravery – someone who, despite the precarity of his social position, risked his life and career for the ideas of workers’ rights, black liberation, anti-colonialism and international socialism.