Jeff Sparrow

The Portraitist’s Dilemma

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 ten...

Pencil Leaners

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...

May You Live In Radical Times

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...

Goodbye to All That: The End of Neoliberalism?

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.

Fascist Creeps

‘For once, the person that will be called a fascist is an actual fascist.’ In the manifesto disseminated before his murderous attack on Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, Brenton Tarrant proclaims openly the political tradition to which he belong...

A Place of Punishment: No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

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

The Texture of the Past: Australian Lives

The Artist as Revolutionary: Remembering Paul Robeson

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 ar...

Racism and the Dreamers: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

'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 rac...

Moon Made of Cheese: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

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 enthus...

Not entirely innocent: Inside Australia’s Anti-Terrorism Laws and Trials

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...

If it no go so, it go near so: A Brief History of Seven Killings

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 f...

Conceptual slippage: The Spy Catchers & Dirty Secrets

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

Render it barely: Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford

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 Ha...

Public Gatherings

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 jo...

Godwin is Dead

"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...

What Ghosts We Might Rise: No Way But This

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 braver...