This morning, I am buying yet an other book whose basic content I know from other sources (usually Mediapart and some of its journalists whose intellect is truly impeccable). I only need this book as a reference, a source readily available for me or others. In this case, I am thinking about Angela and Muthi. I may well send it to them. They may need the views of a brilliant foreigner like ENZO TRAVERSO. The title of the book? The end of Jewish Modernity. It would complement their quest for socialism. Were it only because so many European Jewish thinkers of the 19th and 20th century ventured in a huge search for equitable socio-political modes of government. Traverso contends that “… Jewish modernity has exhausted itself while the mainstream has undergone a conservative turn.” (from the back cover page of the book). I have not started it yet. I only hope it is informative.
This is the site for the article in question. Traverso is interviewed by Joseph Confavreux, whom I trust to be one of the most astute cultural journalist and critic I know today. Traverso has such streamlined ways of enlightening us through the history of Europe and America, that a lot of the fog surrounding my own understanding of the Palestinian conflict is dissipating.
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Yesterday was the deadline Gwylène had given me to deliver my text for Ensemble 15. I decided to not make it an illustration of what Munesake’s existential effervescence could look like! I simply wrote a sentence or two on each of the topics raised by the photographs on the page.
Here is the text:
Table-scapes: multifunctional props designed – in Ensemble 15 – to both, carry 3D artifacts [in this case representations of cityscapes] and offer visitors an open surface where to consult documents, write comments or gather around – why not with the artist(s)?
Question-Relay: mode of dialogue designed to prioritize active listening over cross-talking. Audience members are invited, in a game of musical chairs, to sit in one of two designated seats, take a question, answer it and return to the listeners circle.
Gentrification: a mode of urban development which, left in the hands of private investors, favors luxury habitat over affordable housing. The economic impossibility for working populations to live where or close to where they work is a most disturbing sign of gentrification.
Elevated Common: an accessible public space, urban or not, (re)designed to remain well above rising waters, and destined to accommodate general socioeconomic needs for shared community activities, to facilitate belonging, in a collective spirit of citizenship, to …
Charleston Soul Food Culture: one of the prime victims of gentrification in a city built, fed and emotionally shaped by enslaved African-Americans. Soul Food restaurants in town are, one at a time, succumbing to high rent, luxury tourism, a general hostility to the vernacular and self-inflicted indifference.
Urban Farming: an updated way for urban environments to augment nature in their neighborhoods: existing parks, empty parcels, abandoned industrial sites become opportunities to grow fruits and vegetables an even raise fish, in a spirit of circular economy. Buy Local!
Martha Lou: In Charleston, a food institution serving Low Country specialties “to the world”, as the owner herself wrote on the public notice she pinned on the closed door of her condemned restaurant, after 37 years of steady service. She was 91 . She died three months later.
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An other approach to the Palestinian conflict can be found in Greek tragedy as Kenan Malik proposes in the Guardian today.
“The Oresteia begins with the return home from the Trojan war of Agamemnon, the leader of the triumphant Greeks. He is brutally murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in furious revenge for his having ritually sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia on the eve of conflict to placate the gods.
To avenge his father, Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, kills Clytemnestra. Pursued by the Furies, ancient deities whose role is to exact vengeance for major sins, he seeks refuge in Athens. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, convenes a jury to try Orestes. With the jury split, Athena votes in favour of acquittal, and in so doing opens up the possibilities of a world beyond that governed by the Furies.”
This makes me feel so much that l would love to read a good, digestible version, in French or English, of this trilogy. But, I cannot do everything!
The autobiography of Angela Davis is fascinating enough for me right now! I realize that what she discovered when she was a teenager (as far as racism in Birmingham and in her daily experiences in the late fifties and early sixties), I discovered 10 or fifteen years later, in my mid-twenties, when I arrived in the States. By that time, she had been launched in her political struggles, and we then shared the same daily news of the struggle, of ‘the Movement’. She was active and I was an avid observer and eater of news. It did not take me too long, despite my very reactionary education and politics, to understand that I was on the wrong side of politics and history! I veered way left and never turned back.