Why Gaza matters, Alibaba's struggles, the fire next time & The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter
Thank you for reading Chartbook. Please continue subscribing for the full newsletter!
Raha Raissnia, Untitled, 2013.
Born in Iran a decade before the 1979 revolution, as a child Raissnia watched her father photograph the revolution before the family were exiled to France and then America. She produces films, drawings and paintings that test the boundaries separating each medium, attempting to introduce the musical too. The effect is an unstable attempt — using the technologies of film, including projectors she modifies herself — to capture moments, to seize pasts before they vanish, to tell us that the world is in motion and can feel deathly still. At BOMB magazine, Jeanne Liotta writes:
There is nothing silly in Raissnia’s dark and complex 2D works—oil and gesso, wood, charcoal, and ink are in dynamic conversation with the photographic and architectural, taken from her own film material via image transfers. All devoid of color, all moody tones and shadows, murky then sharp, all shifting depths, edges in motion, dissolution, dispersion, and gathering storms. A perfect foot peeks out from under a smoldering robe. A huddled form lies crumpled on a mattress framed by scaffolds and stairways to the infernal depths. If this were music it would be industrial.
This is the free version of Top Links. To get the full Top Links feed with lots more material and analysis, please click here:
Destroying Gaza
By the end of 2023 perhaps as much as 80 percent of Northern Gaza was damaged. The place has been deliberately devastated.
Source: FT
The wrong theory of inflation
This could scarcely be more politically important, since the distributive struggles over the politics of counter-inflation are sustained by contrasting claims about inflation’s causes: the pay of workers or the profits of commodity suppliers. Who should take the hit to reduce inflation? Economic orthodoxy has said the former, even amid cost of living crises.
National economics in China
Can China localise? Yes it can!
Net zero, fast
Subscribers only.
Problems in Chinese tech
Subscribers only.
Dear Reader,
Glad you are enjoying this Top Links. Chartbook Newsletter is fun to write. And I’m delighted it goes out for free to readers around the world. But it takes a lot of work! What sustains that effort are voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. As a thank you, several times per week, paying supporters of Chartbook Newsletter receive an email like this, jam-packed with fascinating images, links and reading, as well as longer analytical essays. This free email is just some of that content. If you would like to receive the full Top Links in future, click here to join the supporters’ club:
Raha Raissnia, Untitled, 2013.
Why Gaza Matters — a long view on the geopolitical and ideological centrality of the Strip to the wider region
Subscribers only.
The fire next time
Proletarians now
Chinese thought
Wang Hui has long symbolised what’s missing in a binary between pro-Western and pro-state Chinese thinking. Outside the sometimes-narcissistic Western imagination, the spirit of dissent in China (and Wang was present at Tiananmen) has much more often sought to claim indigenous resources for its differences with the CCP leadership. One question, then, is whether those resources should be drawn from distant (say, imperial) traditions or Maoist — or other revolutionary — currents ostensibly soiled by later market reformers. Often hailed as an emissary of a “New Left” in China, Wang Hui’s work has been about threading this needle of tradition and modernity, seeing how Chinese thinking has melded the two, in search of a modernity different from the Western form by digging into Chinese intellectual history and stressing submerged continuities (his grand arcs, evolutions of three central concepts, might remind readers of Arthur Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, that now-unfashionable mode of Western intellectual history). The New Left Review has this excellent essay from 2010 on Wang Hui’s 2004 magnum opus. As of a few months ago, the book is available in translation by Michael Gibbs Hill, published by Harvard University Press. These are the contents:
And now for something completely different…
Subscribers only.
Raha Raissnia, Two hand-painted collages, 2013.