General

adrin neatrour writes – Intruders in Paradise: Ghobadi’s film uses a milieu and a state of affairs that has become familiar from TV news coverage of Africa and the Middle East: the tent cities of refugees. Ghobadi shows the wounds of his people, but what he points to are the subtle but no less damaging dislocations of the psyche. As the title implies Turtles Can Fly is a fable.
Turtles Can Fly – Bahman Ghobadi – 2004 – Iran – Iraq – France: Soran Ebrahim; Avaz Latif
 
Intruders in Paradise
 
To probe and tease out the object of his concern Ghobadi’s film uses a milieu and a state of affairs that has become familiar from TV news coverage of Africa and the Middle East: the tent cities of  refugees. These have become such a normalised backdrop to the pictures from disaster and war zones that I for one haven’t given them real thought.  I see the familiar images of serried rows of tents and food doled out from the back of trucks.  Focusing on the manifest physical conditions that characterise the camps, the compression, the unemployment, the lack of infrastructure and amenities, the reliance on food and medical aid etc ,  I think that at least these people have shelter and food:  they’re surviving. What I haven’t thought through are the deeper, less apparent but no less real psychic costs of the refugee camps: the consequences of smashing most  of the normative linkages that give shape to people’s lives.    Except in paradise and hell we exist in and through time.

Ghobadi’s film takes place at a very specific moment: 2003 – three weeks before the US invasion of Iraq.  Ghobadi as a Kurd with compassion for his people has produced his film from within the people  – a refugee camp on the mountainous Iranian border area of Iraq.  Turtles Can Fly is a drama played out in a real camp with the inhabitants in the cast.  The film has a core documentary aspect which in itself gives the film authenticity in relation to the hard and harsh conditions which people endure.  But it is not these conditions per se, the privations and the risks they engender that are Ghobadi’s main concern here – graphically illustrated as they are.  Turtles Can Fly is about what happens when a people’s relationship with time is broken.  It is a statement about living in alienating timelessness: about the consequences of lives lived outside the past, outside history and without a sense of the future.  Lives in which all the landmarks physical and psychic are all in an eternal present – in a way a sort of paradise.  Ghobadi shows the open wounds of his people, but does so with dignity and without indulgence.  What he points to are the subtle but no less damaging dislocations of the psyche.  As the title implies Turtles Can Fly is a fable.

The refugee camp is a deterritorialised location – wherever it is  – Dafur, Jordan, or in this case Kurdistan where the people have fled from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  The deterritorialisaton is not just dislocation of place, of spacial and personal relationships.  The camp exists in an alientated relationship to time.  The camp is outside history in the sense that it exists outside the stream of time, it is a world in brackets.  Psychically it is world of old men and children. They with no future: they with no past.   It is a world locked into an everlasting omnitemporal present.

Whilst the old men sit and watch TV waiting for the news of the American liberation, it is in the domain of the child where Ghobadi locates his story.  The children who are the subjects of the movie stand not in opposition to a world that is structured according to social privilege – as in Bunuel’s Olvidados –  but in opposition to a world that is governed by time, by memory of the past and anticipation of the future.  Both the children and the rolling breaking news programmes of the satellite tv channels watched by the old, occupy a continuously evolving present. Outside history.  The main character is called Satellite, a boy of precocious ability and the natural leader of the band of children, one of whose skills, which is much in demand, is the installation of satellite tv equipment.  

Children are generally natural inhabitants of the now, the present, the everlasting summers of a certain notion of Paradise which can be understood as a sort of infantile conceit.  The camp children released from the constraining bonds that tie them to the social fabric, revel in the liberation of an unending present.  To the children the wreckage and destruction of war is a world in which they are at home.  Their present consists in playing in the hulks of blown up tanks and the splintered artillery pieces.  Collectively they have no memory that these were the instruments of the destruction of their communities: for the children they are wondrous toys and dens in a real adventure playground   As children they are happy to earn money collecting and selling unexploded land mines. It is all part of the fun. When the mines detonate and the children are killed or lose limbs, the memory is marked in and on their bodies but is absent from consciousness.  As children of the camps their condition is to live outside the stream of time. 

Ghobady’s moral fable concerns what happens when there is a rude intrusion through the  portals of this infantile Never Never  Land. A disturbance in paradise caused by forces marked by time, by the past and the future, in the form of a brother and sister. The woman child, Agrin carries the past with her. She is both a personal and collective history of collective brutalised treatment and personal trauma.  Her death in the opening sequence and the chain of events that precipitate her suicide break the spell of the eternal present the veil of enchantment occupied by Satellite. Agrin’s armless brother has the gift or curse of foresight which enables him to see the future: which gift  forces Satellite to recognise the limitations of the rolling news present and recognise that existence is the stream of time. 

There are scenes in the film which is never sentimental which have a heightened poignancy in particular the relationship between the armless brother and the child of his sister.  But the weight of Turtles Can Fly bears down upon time and the demands that time make upon us to understand what is happening.  In the scenes where Satellite comes together with Agrin and her brother, you can feel the claim that the past and future make on the present.  Claims which if unmet lead directly not to paradise but to hell.

 As the film ends we and Satellite see the arrival of the American soldiers.  It is time  to understand that the days in  paradise are over.  It is time for time to get real  to relink the past and the future through the present.    
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A World Within Ear Shot by Tom Jennings
Film review published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 8, April 2007.A World Within Ear Shot  by Tom Jennings 
 
[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 8, April 2007]
 
 
Babel, directed by Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu
 
This third collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga concludes Iñárritu’s depiction of contemporary collisions of fate, upping the stakes from class divisions in Mexico City (Amores Perros, 2000) and suburban US ruminations on the meaning and value of existence (21 Grams, 2003) to Babel’s worldwide web of violent correlation. Here a Berber peasant family are framed as terrorists when an American tourist is accidentally wounded, derailing her husband’s attempt to salve their unhappiness, while back home their two kids and illegal nanny fall foul of border police after attending a Tijuana wedding. Interspersed with these escalating disasters, a well-off Tokyo deaf-mute juggles frustrated teenage sexuality, grief at her mother’s suicide and the neglectfulness of her father – whose generosity, it transpires, originally set the story in motion. Drawn in by acute cinematography and sympathetic performances, the deft manipulation of narrative fragments and jumbled timelines prompts the viewer to ponder contrasting worldviews and life-chances.
 
These diverse melodramas across the planet are woven with the pointed McGuffin of power from the barrel of a gun; common threads being desires and conflicts associated with love and family. Then, disparities of wealth and mobility massively influence both the scale of fulfilment that can realistically be sought and the consequences of mistakes and misfortunes. So, when a subsistence lifestyle encounters modern Third World realpolitik, embryonic imaginings of a fuller, safer future are stillborn. Meanwhile, the neo-colonial service economy vampirises its serfs in a callous class apartheid; whereas the relatively affluent are blind to the human costs of what they take for granted. Insulated by consumerism, their self-obsession allows them neither to connect meaningfully with each other nor avoid trampling over the less fortunate upon whom their comfort depends.
However, the miscommunication hinted in the biblical title flows not from faulty translation between cultures or linguistic systems, but the contradictions of underlying social and political subtexts – the conceptual frameworks shaping our understanding and action. Events hinge on the characters’ negotiations of the corresponding institutional discourses which regulate lives and constrain potential, yielding misery for rich and poor alike – the texture of which varies considerably, with outcomes more tragic for those whose interests are marginalised most. Babel may be scarcely able to capture the deep structures of power radiating globally through social fabrics, but such ambition is rare in a mainstream cinema preferring simplistic conspiracies and cartoonish heroics. It’s also much subtler than the fluffy liberal marketing hype suggests – though the latter hoodwinked the critics who, in seeing only pretension, merely confirmed their own.
 
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Pearls Before Swine, by Tom Jennings. Review of The Hive of Liberty: The Life and Work of Thomas Spence (edited by Keith Armstrong), published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 6, March 2007Pearls Before Swine  by Tom Jennings 
 [published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 6, March 2007]
  
Tom Jennings welcomes renewed interest in 18th century Tyneside radical Thomas Spence 
Newcastle in the late 18th century was a hotbed of radical political associations (e.g. Constitutional Club, Independent Club) and dissenting church sects. It was also a thriving centre for printing (French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat visited regularly and launched The Chains of Slavery there) and grassroots education. One notable beneficiary of and contributor to this climate of ferment and potential was Thomas Spence (1750-1814), an indefatigable enemy of exploitation and oppression who expounded lower-class insurrection and seizure of the land. The newly-formed Thomas Spence Trust’s The Hive of Liberty introduces his life and work; with the latter scarcely in print over two centuries but now largely reproduced on their website. The pamphlet includes various perspectives on the man, his ideas and their significance – including his virtual disappearance from history and patronising appropriation by authoritarian Marxism – together with extracts from his writing and the responses of others over the years.
 
One of nineteen children, Spence’s self-education started with his Glassite (dissident Presbyterian) parents,  impoverished Scottish immigrant netmakers. Characteristically ahead of his time, he published an educational tract with a new phonetic alphabet to encourage literacy among the poor while working as a teacher on the Quayside. Active in local debating clubs, he gave a talk (later called ‘The Real Rights of Man’ or ‘Spence’s Plan’) to the Newcastle Philosophical Society after the colonial war in America started in 1775, having been the first to use the term ‘the rights of man’ (in a 1782 tribute to Jack the Blaster, an ex-miner cave-squatting at Marsden Rocks, South Shields). He later distributed Thomas Paine’s book of that title, stressing its flaws concerning the private ownership of land – the abolition of which he asserted was fundamental. Regrettably, the Newcastle freethinkers were intransigent in supporting bourgeois property rights; Spence even being cudgelled by his friend, engraver Thomas Bewick, over the issue.
Unable to make headway up north, Spence moved to London and by the time of the 1789 French revolution was busy agitating, educating and organising – though again too extreme for groups such as the London Corresponding Society. Travestying conservative Edmund Burke’s characterisation of ordinary people as ‘the swinish multitude’, Spence called his regular broadsheet Pigs Meat. He also minted hundreds of coins and tokens bearing cartoons, attacks on politicians of the day and general radical mottoes. This propaganda method combined with bill-posting and wall-slogan blitzes proved much more difficult for the authorities to quell than his stream of books and pamphlets, which included The End of Oppression, the proto-feminist The Rights of Infants, and several works about fictional utopias  ‘Spensonia’ and ‘Crusonia’ – sequelising Defoe’s popular Robinson Crusoe in revolutionary directions.
Paranoia about the English masses emulating their French counterparts yielded many Acts of Parliament suppressing freedom of speech from the 1990s onwards, when Spence endured severe beatings from government agents and periods of imprisonment, with or without trial, on charges of seditious libel and high treason for distributing his own and Paine’s work. When at large he ran a bookshop (‘The Hive of Liberty’ in Holborn) and stalls selling printed matter along with the drink ‘saloup’. Affinity groups and their missionary work disseminating Spence’s Plan organised via ‘free and easy’ pub gatherings to avoid surveillance, with lectures, debates, songs and poetry. After his death in penury in 1815, supporters expanded their grassroots activity despite relentless suppression – a law even being deemed necessary in 1817 to explicitly prohibit “societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists”.
 
Of course Spence (and most early agrarian socialists) could not tackle questions of industrial development and capital accumulation in complex societies. Static universal principles ignoring historical process in the oppositional politics of the time usually derived from millenarian religious traditions, overcompensating for feudal ideologies of ‘divine rights’ with naïve redemptive faith in rationalist enlightenment. Nevertheless the pragmatic emphases on local, bottom-up control, federalism and direct democracy resonated loudly among the rabble but appalled the contemporary great and good and later leftist intellectual aristocrats alike – who were naturally also contemptuous of his trust in the potential integrity of the common people. The sensitivity to issues of colonial encroachment, land use and ecology, and the social positions of women and children similarly resonates across the centuries; while the perennially unhelpful unhinging of righteous idealism from concrete struggle haunts us still.
Purportedly bringing The Hive of Liberty “up to date”, Newcastle artist George French concludes that: “the Spencean project has failed … we can no longer rely on solidarity, association or community action … The only oppositional space left to exist is in our own heads and … personal action”. Oh, really? Presumably intended to provoke debate, such defeatist sophistry would certainly have Spence spinning in his grave. Whereas the refusal of elitism, twisting of popular culture, and enthusiasm for grass-roots intercourse and the irrepressible anti-hierarchical power of dialogue, humour, and shared enjoyment in spaces collectively created amidst worldly misery remain indispensable – but only given the humility and empathy to resist jaded delusions of intellectual grandeur. As he put it: ‘Can tyrants hinder people from singing at their work, or in their families? Sing and meet and meet and sing and your chains will drop off like burnt thread.’
 
The Hive of Liberty: The Life and Work of Thomas Spence (edited by Keith Armstrong, with introduction by Joan Beal; 40pp, ISBN 1 871536 15 4) is available priced £5 (+£1.50 p+p) from the Thomas Spence Trust, 93 Woodburn Square, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE26 3JD; see also: http://www.thomas-spence-society.co.uk
 
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Premature Ejaculations, by Tom Jennings. Music review of Hip Hop Is Dead, by Nas (2006) published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 4, February 2007.Premature Ejaculations  by Tom Jennings 
 
[music review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 5, March 2007]
 
 
Tom Jennings interprets Nas’ provocation that ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’ in terms of the limited liberal horizons of civil rights
 
Twelve years after Illmatic – his definitive new-school rap debut – the eighth Nas release declares the party over. Hip Hop Is Dead (Island Def Jam) finds the genre’s pre-eminent wordsmith continuing in the combative mood following a celebrity beef with Jay-Z (New York’s other street lyricist superstar) which energised Stillmatic (2001) through to the superb autobiographical Street’s Disciple (2004).* However, his consistent output of ghettocentric quality is persistently misperceived by subcultural elitists deaf to the effective musical marriage of hip-hop tradition and cutting-edge populism and blind to the vision’s integrity in mobilising observation and personal resonance to chronicle and critique the anguish and aspirations of the contemporary US inner-city Black poor. Now mature enough to question the evolutionary status of this profoundly influential cultural movement, Nas challenges its adherents to similarly transcend self-importance in response.
The album opens with no-nonsense potted summaries of rap’s ‘hoodrats clawing their way to fame and fortune, couched in the favoured gangsta condensation of capitalism-as-crime: “From crack-pushers to ‘lac pushers, and ambushers / And morticians to fortresses / Case-dismissers, laced in riches, caked ridiculous / From nickel-and-dimin’ to trickin’ them diamonds” (‘Money Over Bullsh*t’). The bravado segues into admitting its protagonists’ culpability for the artistic price paid: “Hip-hop been dead, we the reason it died / Wasn’t Sylvia’s fault or ‘cause MCs’ skills are lost / It’s ‘cause we can’t see ourselves as boss / Deep rooted through slavery, self hatred” (‘Carry On Tradition’); and “Heinous crimes help records sales more than creative lines / And I don’t want to keep bringing up the greater times / But I’m a dreamer, nostalgic with the state of mind” (‘Can’t Forget About You’). The title track nails it: “Everybody sound the same / Commercialized the game / Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business / They forgot where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed”.
The pivotal ‘Black Republican’ then juggles Jay-Z: “I feel like a black republican, money keep comin’ in” and Nas: “I feel like a black militant, takin’ over the government”, followed by “Can’t turn my back on the ‘hood, too much love for them / Can’t clean my act up for good, too much thug in ‘em / Probably end up back in the ‘hood; I’m, like, ‘fuck it then’.” Implicitly recognising that individual advancement neither resolves class contradictions nor fulfils hip-hop’s emancipatory potential leaves the set oscillating between honouring the Black traditions which nourish struggle and reasserting underclass self-confidence in developing agendas expressed in their terms. With intricate wordplay literate in urban provenance, Black Arts and contemporary reference, Nas echoes Rakim’s cool philosophical cadence and 2-Pac’s passionate arrogance grounded in Panther politics. Beyond their mystical paranoia, though, he senses that the project is constitutionally incapable of breaking on through – despite the muscular, sensuous beats and brooding intelligence here representing living disproof of the title. Still, Hip Hop Stalemate would hardly inspire as an alternative.
 
Alongside tiresomely predictable ‘I-told-you-so’ music press taste parades, insider critiques of Nas’ obituary similarly misfire in citing the rude health of southern states ‘Crunk’ – whose synthetic sonic minimalism re-energises grass-roots dance credentials yet rarely showcases lyrical craft or consciousness (ditto rave-friendly UK Grime). However, the Dirty South boasts Atlanta’s Ludacris – the genre’s greatest ever humorist – and Outkast’s sophisticated reverse-colonisation of pop, among many vital signs of hip-hop life. Major label rap poets elsewhere regroup independently under corporate radar – witness Talib Kweli’s triumphal return to fundamentals Right About Now (Koch, 2005) – while Dead Prez hope to preserve the audience gained for their outspoken radicalism (Sony’s sabotage notwithstanding) with more modest, regular and collectively-oriented niche production, promotion and distribution on the trail blazed by Paris, Public Enemy and The Coup. Whether underground or mediated, this is one hell of a hyperactive corpse.
In a Village Voice piece reproduced on the Anarchist People of Color website (www.illegalvoices.org/knowledge), Greg Tate contextualises the conundrum in assessing the political implications of hip-hop’s commercialisation over three decades. Its viral spread – first infiltrating American youth, then, crucially, via industrial dissemination abroad – decisively shifted the conditions of possibility for a global lower-class discourse on poverty and powerlessness, which can no longer simply be silenced by repression and fragmentation. On the downside, merged media’s cultural pincers commodify Black style for middle-class fashionistas while hypnotising local core communities with hyperreal fantasies of superhuman prowess to conceal the intensifying subhuman treatment meted out by the state – tactics requiring the active collusion of rap aristocrats in exchange for egos bloated with pieces of silver.
                Nevertheless, such uneasy, conflicted recuperations are always inherently prone to rupture – however many times they tell us there’s no alternative. In this case the fault lines trace the troubled history of US race reform since the Second World War, with the classic liberal compromise of civil rights the palliative for a working-class generation of revolutionary Black militants framed and massacred by the government’s COINTELPRO. Before residual resistance was mopped-up in narcotic flood and economic drought, the meritocratic rhetoric of dual spiritual/worldly uplift doubtless seemed viable, but street dreams of respectability surely unravelled with Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, 9/11, New Orleans, and Iraq – voting Democrat being as inconsequential as Million Man Marches and  millionaire MCs. As Tate specifies: “If enough folks from the ‘hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin?” No, but a popular movement to dismantle structural dispossession and enslavement – which Nas’ poetry and hip-hop’s unifying language could significantly contribute to – has yet to re-emerge. Until then, politically speaking, it’s not dead … only sleeping.
 
* see my ‘Beautiful Struggles and Gangsta Blues’, Variant magazine, issue 22 (2005). Further extensive discussions of the grass-roots relevance of urban music can be found in Variant 17, 20 and 25 (also at www.variant.org.uk).
 
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Riodemption Songs, by Tom Jennings. Review of Favela Rising, published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 3, February 2007.Riodemption Songs  by Tom Jennings 
 
[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 3, February 2007]
 
 
Favela Rising, dir. Jeff Zimbalist & Matt Mochary, 2006
 
 
Tom Jennings is disappointed at Favela Rising’s focus on its founder’s personality rather than Brazilian Afro-Reggae’s grass-roots potential
 
Screened on cable/digital More4 on January 24th, the Oscar-nominated Favela Rising documents the development of the Afro-Reggae cultural movement in Vigario Geral, one of 600-odd illegal shanty settlements (favelas) perched precariously among the hills behind Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach which together house over 20 million inhabitants in desperate poverty. They have experienced forty years of barbaric repression, with massacres repeatedly perpetrated by a brutally corrupt military police controlling and profiting from the drugs trade while battling the shadow criminal dictatorships within. The 1993 Afro-Reggae newspaper and videos chronicling police violence were followed by music workshops, weaving a powerful syncretism of African drumming, hip-hop, dance, martial arts, politics and spiritualism. Original member José Junior (JJ) explains: “Nothing could be left up to outside authorities … It was the beginning of a new consciousness … We are destroyed people infected by idealism. Shiva is the Goddess of destruction and transformation. We are a Shiva effect”.
                Initially resourced by begging, borrowing and stealing, long-term funding from a US charitable foundation (1997) and an international record deal with Universal (2001) helped the group expand – all income being ploughed back (likewise any profits from Favela Rising itself). With thirteen programmes now in Vigario, the support of Rio city council is facilitating the spread into neighbouring favelas. However, “movement has to come from the community itself … we’d be applying our solution to their problems. If we become McDonalds, putting one everywhere, we’ve lost the essence” (founder Anderson Sà). Afro-Reggae’s integrity and inspiration in preaching unity among the favelas quickly led to immense local enthusiasm, with drug soldiers crossing over and their leaders showing respect and even tacit, if fitful, protection in the war zone: “Why [do we] take these risks? Because … our ideology won’t allow us to live passively, in comfort” (AS).
 
This fascinating film expertly blends edgy digital video techniques, sharp editing and pacing, and the saturated colour and energy of the Latin American new-wave – a winning formula for independent festival hype and MTV-friendly urban-style commodification, and a labour of love for US co-directors Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary. Yet, despite their reservations, the narrative neglects wider grass-roots perspectives, centering on the messianic figure of Sà and his rhetoric of “respectable, hard-working” favelistas: “Now all the favelas must start to move for the first time. We must all begin to show that we are able. That we can lift our own arms. That we can raise our heads” (disclaimers notwithstanding; e.g. “What we create and destroy doesn’t end with me [JJ] or Anderson. It is passed through the generations. All life is a karmic process. Our actions will be infinite”). Sure, the film-makers couldn’t sidestep their hosts’ agendas, being completely dependent for safe passage – but the resulting deficiencies highlight the limitations of documentary activism, and positively invite recuperation by capitalism and its neoliberal state handmaidens.
 
In ‘Slumsploitation’ (Mute magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2006 – also at www.metamute.com), Melanie Gilligan persuasively details the promotion of ‘favela chic’ in Brazil’s booming media – with populist President Lula’s culture minister Gilberto Gil (himself an internationally-renowned musician) courting foreign investment for electoral legitimacy and to shortcircuit resistance. While colonising the bootstrap entrepreneurialism of the ghettoes, the governing Workers’ Party policies also continue to starve them of infrastructure and plan intensified assaults on their security and autonomy in line with IMF/World Bank ‘structural adjustment’. Translated onscreen, the hackneyed Hollywood Manicheanism of evil drugs gangbangers versus heroic charisma celebrates talent transcending humble roots – erasing history, class, economics, oppression and collectivity. True, this may satisfy fashion-conscious better-off youth, reinforcing the desirous exoticisation which betrays their distanced complicity with the status quo. But whether assimilating or critiquing its mediated representation, Favela Rising and Gilligan both inadvertently downplay the lived significance of the street-level phenomenon to its immediate audience.
After all, Brazil’s 1960s/70s military dictatorships incarcerated thousands of leftists, whose militancy heavily inflected the rise of prison networks and drugs cartels originally as self-organised welfare and defence institutions. Similarly, even if Afro-Reggae proclaims itself “directly against the drug armies” (SA), the proliferation of gang member sympathisers suggests far more complex intercourse. The longer-run resonance of its bottom-up, practical, expressive formations simply can’t be judged from above and outside – which should already be crystal-clear from the contradictory persistence of US hip-hop despite its magpie aesthetics, get-rich-quick artists, corporate debasement, choruses of detractors, and generally dishonest co-optation into sundry elite discourses. Further, as the performances in the film demonstrate, this new genre itself draws strongly on other popular Brazilian musics (samba, capoeira, baile funk, etc) which themselves have little explicit political potential – the production of superstar egos being incidental.
 
As in other times and places, the shifting tectonics of culture provide incomparable food for thought and action, knitting together and/or dividing suffering populations according to specific circumstances, and circumscribing what can be achieved. Salutary examples of radical struggle often turn out to hinge on the room to manoeuvre furnished by the imaginative renewal and creative singularity of cultural patterns which are constitutionally opaque to conventional political analysis. In the present context this doubtless includes the magnificent Abahlali baseMjondolo shack dwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa (see Richard Pithouse’s crucial ‘Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Towns’, also in Mute 2:3), or the recent insurrections in Oaxaca, Mexico, reported in Freedom. So, what will transpire in the favelas is (to understate) uncertain. But not for nothing did philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggest, in characteristically global terms (‘Knee-Deep’, London Review of Books, 26:17, 2004), that “The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germ of the future”.
 
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