One constant source of hope for the enslaved African Americans is the prospect of a blissful afterlife that the Christian doctrine offered. While the first generation of black slaves in America brought with them their native religious beliefs and practices, they were soon replaced by Christianity. The white slave owners instilled in their slaves the…
Does Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed accurately describe life in real plantations as documented by historian Lerone Bennett?
Octavia Butler sets her novel, Wild Seed in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and US slavery. In the story, Doro gathers “his people” on farms and plantations along the eastern seaboard. In what ways are Doro’s fictional communities similar to the real plantations described by historian Lerone Bennett (chapter 4 of Before the Mayflower…
How does neo-Marxist or post-Marxist theories of ideology differ from the classical Marxist tradition?
In a recent BBC online poll for finding the greatest thinker of the Millenium, Karl Marx came first. That Marx beat Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking among other leaders in their fields amounts to a big statement of Marx’s relevance in the new millenium. The relevance of the results is magnified when we…
Farid Esack’s concept of the “clash of fundamentalisms”
In the reading titled In Search of Progressive Islam Beyond 9/11, author Farid Esack makes several valid observations. At the outset, he admits that the word ‘progressive’ is very hard to define due to elements of subjectivity and scope. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other…
Umar Faruq Abdallah’s and Tariq Ramadan’s views on the relationship between culture and religion in Islam
One of the misconceptions in the Occidental discourse on Islam is that the latter is a monolithic entity. Islam has spread far and wide across the planet. It has a significant presence from China in the East to Spain and Northern Africa toward the West. And through this broad range, there is considerable diversity and…
Why does Amina Wadud think that the Qur’an can be read in a more women-friendly way?
In the article written by Amina Wadud, titled Quran, Gender and Interpretative Possibilities, we see one of the emerging trends in contemporary Islamic discourse. That beyond the commonly understood and accepted fact of ‘the text’ being of revelatory nature, one has to take into account other socio-historical circumstances of 7th century A.D, in order to…
Hemingway’s ‘Hero Code’ in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ and ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’
Ernest Hemingway, alongside Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, is a shining beacon of the American literary scene. He mastered both the novel as well as the short story forms. The scope of this essay is two of his short stories – Hills Like White Elephants and A Clean Well-Lighted Place. The two stories…
Does the British education policy uphold class privilege over competitive pressures of globalization?
British society is one of the most stratified in terms of social class. In contrast to the United States, where politicians at least pay lip-serve to the notion of a class-less society, class divisions are woven into the fabric of the nation’s social, political and economic institutions. Barring occasional rhetoric from Labour benches, Realpolitik considerations…
Movie Analysis: George A Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead
The Night of the Living Dead rightly remains as one of the horror classics. The movie stands out from others of its genre for it contains scenes explicitly showing dead people coming back to haunt those who are alive. Directed by George A Romero in 1968, the movie was not a product of any of…
The problem of slavery in today’s world
One of the convenient myths being perpetrated is that slavery no longer exists in modern societies. As the experience of black Americans clearly shows, attaining nominal legal recognition as freed people need not translate into real, meaningful independence. The condition of black Americans before 1861 and in the decades after it were not drastically different….