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The renowned writer describes coming of age during the violent Mexican Revolution and living as an openly homosexual man in a brutally machista society. Salvador Novo (1904–1974) was a provocative and prolific cultural presence in Mexico City through much of the twentieth century. With his friend and fellow poet Xavier Villaurrutia, he cofounded Ulises and Contemporáneos, landmark avant-garde journals of the late 1920s and 1930s. At once “outsider” and “insider,” Novo held high posts at the Ministries of Culture and Public Education and wrote volumes about Mexican history, politics, literature, and culture. The author of numerous collections of poems, including XX poemas, Nuevo am...
Memmi examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world. As outspoken and controversial as ever, he initiates a much-needed discussion of the ex-colonized and refuses to idealize those who are too often painted as hapless victims.
This anthology presents Albert Memmi’s insights on the legacies of the colonial era, critical theories of race, and his own story as a French writer of Tunisian and Jewish descent, allowing readers to appreciate the full arc of one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.
Written in 1957, when North African independence movements were gaining momentum, The Colonizer and the Colonized studies the enduring legacy, political as much as psychological, of colonisation throughout the world. Albert Memmi depicts colonialism as a disease of the European but crucially he demonstrates that colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized, providing penetrating insights into colonial inheritance and resistance that remain as relevant today. One of the great works of twentieth-century political thought, The Colonizer and the Colonized speaks to experiences in the Global South as well as European countries such as Britain and France, who are still struggling with their imperial pasts. In revealing the mechanisms of colonial oppression, it also highlights the origins of all oppression of one group by another. This edition includes introductions by two of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century: South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Albert Memmi's controversial statements about racism and his call to each of us to devote ourselves to its eradication--futile though this effort will be--are straightforward and lucid, yet also powerful and universal. In this remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of contemporary life, Memmi investigates racism as social pathology--a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility. Book jacket.
Written in 1956 when Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and soon after the Algerian war had started, this book describes the inescapable bonds between colonizer and colonized. Born in Tunis, Memmi is one of the colonized, but as a Jew, he identified culturally with the colonizer. He moved to France in 1956 and draws on his experience to analyze vividly how colonizer and colonized are mutually dependent, and ultimately both victims of colonialism. “The Colonizer and the Colonized [is] now regarded as a classic description of the inner dynamics of racism and colonialism, a work that in its economic and political sophistication, its sober perceptions of the interdependence of...
Collection of 14 essays by the authors translated from the French.
In this book, written after The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew, Albert Memmi writes, “It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular intonations. The Jew is not oppressed as a member of a class, which distinguishes him from the proletariat, for example. Nor is he oppressed as a member of a biological group, which distinguishes him from Negroes or women. He is affected as a member of a total, social, cultural, political and historical group. In other words, the Jew is oppress...
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In this memoir and extended meditation on Jewish identity and anti-Semitic stereotypes written in France in the early 1960s, Albert Memmi paints a portrait of himself as a secular Jew. The book has been compared to Rousseau’s Confessionsbecause of its meticulous self-examination. Written only 15 years after the end of the Nazi occupation and just over a decade after the establishment of the State of Israel,Portrait of a Jew is a snapshot in time as well as a work of psychology and sociology. It both questions prevailing myths about the Jews of his time and describes the reality Memmi sees. Its sequel is The Liberation of the Jew. Portrait of a Jew and The Liberation of the Jew “form a wh...