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Columns by Mike Marqusee

Not pop as we know it: flamenco and the quest for authenticity

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, Feb-March 2010 This article has appeared in a revised form on The Guardian’s Comment is free website. Flamenco is a name widely known but a music little understood, at least beyond its Andalusian heartland. Forget about Hollywood images of flounces and castanets. Even the bravura solo guitarists and dance… Read more

Busting the straitjacket

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, December-January Rolling back the new ‘common sense’ of spending cuts may seem like a difficult job, but it’s not impossible, says Mike Marqusee It’s now clear that cuts in public spending, and resistance to them, will be the stand-out issue in domestic British politics during the coming years. The… Read more

Neither a business nor a cause

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, August-September 2009 Cricket emerges as the world’s first, modern organised team sport in the late 18th century, and is indelibly marked by that early origin. Its fate was intertwined with the political and economic revolutions of the era, and was shaped from the outset by a paradoxical mixture of… Read more

Thomas Paine: restless democrat

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, June-July 2009 “This interment was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help but feel most acutely.” The occasion… Read more

The real thing

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, April-May 2009 [‘Contending for the Living’ is Mike’s new column for Red Pepper.] Something special took place in Durban in February and though the media have rushed past, we should pause. In solidarity with the people of Gaza, dockworker members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union… Read more

A light from Durban

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 8 March Something special took place in Durban last month when dockworkers, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. It was an intervention from below in global politics, driven not by national, ethnic or religious affinity but by… Read more

A lovely, worldly quirk

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 9 February In 1420, a genuinely epochal event took place on a small, isolated, previously uninhabited island in the Atlantic, some 360 miles west of Morocco. That year, the Portuguese fleet – the most advanced in the world at the time, thanks to Prince Henry the Navigator – located Madeira…. Read more

Life-changing happenstance: discovering India

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 25 January 2009 will be marked by the usual crop of anniversaries. Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 200 hundred years since the death of Tom Paine, forty years since Woodstock, and on a micro-scale, thirty years since my first visit to India. A life-changing event for… Read more

Israel in Gaza: Beyond Disproportionate

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 11 January Marching amid the 50,000 protesters in London bearing witness against the Israeli offensive on Gaza, I spotted a hand-made placard inscribed with the words of the radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the… Read more

Sacrificing to the fiscal god

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 3 January 2009 It’s now been confirmed that Britain’s GDP fell by 4.75% over the last year, much more than the 3.5% shrinkage forecast by the Treasury as recently as March. Since the onset of recession, 8.5% of all manufacturing jobs have been lost and 3.8% of jobs in finance… Read more