posts by Joshua Mostafa

Joshua Mostafa is an Anglo-Bengali expat, who, with his Susanne, lives in the Blue Mountains with their various children and other animals, where he works for a digital publishing company, and writes stories, essays and poems. He is a nondenominational libertarian socialist. http://joshuamostafa.info/

Gillard’s priorities: education and refugees

The media’s focus on personality over policy – and in that shrinking proportion of the time in which policy is discussed, the endless speculation on how events will be perceived, and how ‘narratives’ will ‘play out’, rather than the actual impact of policies on people – makes for a lack of serious analysis that results in an intellectual impoverishment of the public sphere. As Jeff Sparrow predicted on this blog, the elevation of Julia Gillard has been greeted with a rush of ink and pixels attempting to define her character, rather than analysing her record, to gauge the kind of policies we might expect.

My usual response to this topic would be to discuss the ways in which, as the demands of capital and the relentless ideology of corporate media hem in the scope of democratically elected politicians to differ substantially from each other, personality and identity become the surrogates for real political debate. Celebrating Australia’s first woman prime minister is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves about how much difference it makes. For myself, growing up in the UK under a Thatcher government erased any illusions I may have had – as the anonymous writers of the The Coming Insurrection put it, ‘patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men’. In the 2008 Democratic primaries in the US, Clinton’s tough talk of ‘obliterating’ Iran was an attempt to deflect sexist stereotypes and prove that she had – as her loyal follower James Carville put it – the ‘testicular fortitude’ to be an effective commander-in-chief. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 28-06-2010, 8 user comments

Our synthetic future – where politics and science collide

Synthetic red blood cellsIn the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media.

The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the original – the ineffable master plan, the solemn and mysterious ways in which He moves. In fact, the comparison between this human achievement and the processes that led to the existence of the human species would be better understood in the reverse. Not just human evolution, but the series of events that led to the conditions in which the emergence of life was possible – the distance of the Earth from the sun, the gravitational pull of the moon steadying our orbit – are contingent on an interplay of factors of immense complexity. This cosmic dynamic, if we are to anthropomorphise it, would be more aptly described as whimsy than as work; or, the better to appreciate its radical difference from human activity, as the kind of explosive creativity we witness in storms and volcanoes. What we have done in synthesising life is to copy the effect of that play by means of diligent work. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 26-05-2010, 1 user comment

Jesus vs Christ

It is said that popular culture is becoming increasingly infantilising. JK Rowling made it acceptable for adults to sit on the train reading a book about magical boarding schools, infused with the nostalgia of books from our own childhoods (Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising), but the process was already well underway when Hedwig and Hagrid were first put to paper. As the average age of the cinema-goer decreases, so the market-enslaved Hollywood studios grind the common denominator of characters, themes and jokes lower with each summer season. Films for the very young are the exception, since filmmakers must cater to both their ostensible audience and the parents who accompany them. I remember the songs in their soundtracks from my own youth, and the cultural references and allusions are often, sadly, more diverse and engaging than in films supposedly for grown-ups. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 31-03-2010, 1 user comment

Hope, change and predator drones

This week I'm going to Melbourne for the launch party of the second issue of another literary journal, where I'll be reading an excerpt from my story 'Meeting the Colonel', set in a fictional dictatorship somewhere around the Hindu Kush, in a loosely real maravilloso style. I blush when it read it now, with its awkward narrative structure and thinly veiled polemicising – it’s been two years since I wrote it, and I haven’t been writing fiction for much longer than that. (Does one hate ones old work less with time? I hope so.)

A more serious problem for a politically motivated storyteller is the danger of being overtaken by events; as with fashion, twenty years distance is interesting, two years is merely outdated. Many things have changed. Most significant for the ‘war on terror’ was the regime change in Washington. Obama’s inauguration had a profound symbolic resonance beyond the borders of the USA, as eulogised by reggae singjay Sizzla in Black Man in the White House. Expectations were high around the world that a new, benign American foreign policy would replace the bloodshed and turmoil of the Bush years. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 18-03-2010, 7 user comments

Taking the fifth?

We all remember the end of last year for the dismal outcome, at Copenhagen, for concerted international action to deal with the world’s problems. Just a few weeks before, however, another meeting took place. In November last year, the International Encounter of Left Parties met in Caracas. At that meeting, Hugo Chávez, in typically theatrical style, declared that it was time ‘to convene the Fifth International, and I dare to make the call, which I think is a necessity’.

What would a Fifth International look like? More of the same Trotskyist rhetoric, or something new and radical that, while rejecting the neoliberal consensus, does not tie itself up in dogma, recognising that all theory is contingent – that nineteenth-century critiques of capital, however brilliant for their time, are not the be-all and end-all? ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 24-02-2010, 2 user comments