Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order. On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.
Peter Green died last week at the age of 99. His many books include a Life of Alexander of Macedon, a history of the Hellenistic age, an account of the Sicilian expedition and translations of Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Ovid and Juvenal. Born in England in 1924, he spent the second half of his life in the US, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Iowa.
Slave Play, which ended its West End run at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, is a play by Jeremy O. Harris about three Black people who are sexually disengaged in their interracial relationships because of anhedonia from racial trauma. Desperate to feel something, they sign up for ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ to enact ‘slave play’ sexual fantasies with their partners.
Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Antinomies of Realism (reviewing which, Michael Wood observed that ‘Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does’).
What next? Is Netanyahu betting on a Hizbullah overreaction? Is he trying to open a second front and to drag the Iranians – and the Americans – into war? Are the attacks part of his effort to return Donald Trump to the White House, or is he simply trying to stay in power with a show of military force? The war in Gaza has made him more popular than ever, in spite of mass protests in favour of a ceasefire.
Brasília National Park, 16 September 2024. Photo © Eraldo Peres / AP / Alamy
Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia.
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died yesterday at the age of 76. When his early book The Little Mountain (1977) was translated into English in 1988, Edward Said – contrasting him with Naguib Mahfouz – described Khoury in the LRB as a ‘politically committed, and, in his own highly mobile modes, brilliant figure’. A journalist, publisher and ‘highly perceptive critic’ as well as a novelist, Khoury ‘forged (in the Joycean sense) a national and novel, unconventional, postmodern literary career’. He had also been ‘a political militant from his early days, having grown up as a 1960s schoolboy in the turbulent world of Lebanese and Palestinian street politics.’