There is a section on God of Small Things as bourgeois dining room chit chat exotica in my Critique of Exotica book - the chapter on Naxalites. The Postcolonial Exotic book I think you mean was by Huggan.

Lal salaam

I can’t remember the name of the guy who did a study of this type of literature–the book was something that had Postcolonial Exotica in the title and an African reproduction of Tin Tin–but he pointed out that the rhetoric of books like The God Of Small Things also accommodates the tourist gaze–all those lush Keralan vistas etc. They’ve got the western reader in mind. All those bloody Holy Cow and Biryani on the Boat paperbacks occupy every hotel and pavement bookstall. How do we assess someone like Dalrymple in all of this, though of course he’s not a revolutionary? Just got me thinking about tourism in general and what you were saying about the circulations of these representations, trinkets etc. Tourism is deeply ingrained with particular ways of looking, though that can be messed with.

Thanks for taking part in my radio show and doing nicely despite the lo-tek conditions and my bumbling questions and blather. But it was Base FM http://www.basefm.co.nz not George, though we’re in the same building.

Oh and by the way, I saw another Che mash-up with the subject Sanjaya from this season’s American Idol.I’ll try and remember to track it down again and send it to you.

What was the website for the ‘mutiny/uprising’ event later this year?

Lal Salaam. Jx

I have been reading books like Red Barcelona; Social Protest and Labour Mobilisation in the Twentieth Century in the mean time. This was the book that, amongst other things, totally bashed the trendy Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona, the author of which claimed that the Barcelona artsy fartsy avant garde was political. (You, Hutnyk, said you got into verbal conflicts about this enduring “myth”, that the artsy fartsy avant garde was inherently political; this book offers sensible evidence explaining that it really wasn’t political.).

I can assure you I am not reading my books so as to write my own revolutionary tour guide. You will probably say that these books (the academic as well as the hypish one about Picasso) are nothing but nostalgia for a revolutionary movement/moment in Spain that is long gone. But if we do not inform ourselves of this history, how can we revive or understand protest in the present (the anti-Terror War group I am going to talk to)?

It is this denial of ones own history, or rather this insistence on it being just that, history, “been there done that”, that encourages Western people to give up on the home-front and indulge revolutionary tourism in the 3rd world.

I travel to Barca exactly because it’s so decidedly NOT third world, because it quite literally markets itself as European, and this Europeanism is an integral part of its repertoire against the rest of “backwards” Spain.

I am fighting my own battles at home, I promise. I have just successfully won a long drawn-out institutional battle against the Social Services of Amsterdam and am preparing yet another battle against them at the EU level, possibly having to battle the EU Commission itself in the process. Not because I believe in institutions, cos I don’t, I just want to be a thorn in their side. I am certainly not running away from my social responsibilities at home. What does this mean, that I am institutionally battling the EU while living in the EU and traveling to another “country” that embraces the EU while all academics I’ve read claim that the EU undermines its nationalistic struggles? (Why would I travel to the third world with such issues at hand?!)

To give you just one obvious, liberal, duuuh! kind of example: reading about the language-struggles of the Catalans (and how these were and are put at the service of what I still consider to be the Barca cultural/touristic-industries’ elites’ bourgeois tax-evasion project under the guise of nationalism), has given me new insights into contemporary and even future language-battles in the Netherlands. And this insight is much more than just a collection of smart one-liners in the defense of multilinguism or affirmative action that I can now toss around at home. Rather, it’s about going there and seeing this in practice in society at large (whereas in the Netherlands the same practice is delegated or condemned to either the private domain of the closeted-home where “we” don’t have to see it, or the devalued domain of the ghetto). There are many more examples I could give.