The highlight of today’s programme is without a doubt the session where Eliot Weinberger is joined by “Tariq Ali, Ahdaf Soueif and Pankaj Mishra, to they talk about revolutions – from the 60s all the way to the Arab Spring, and the endless battles being waged against the state and imperialism.
Tariq Ali is the iconic 60s revolutionary and “Marxist” who needs no introduction. He raised the question “What Is A Revolution?” recently and argued that mass uprisings on their own do not constitute a revolution.
He writes that “members of a crowd become a revolution only when they have, in their majority, a clear set of social and political aims.”
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling “The Map of Love” and political and cultural commentator. In her columns for the Guardian, she writes about the Arab Spring and how it’s impact on Egypt.
In a column last year she dwells on what happens when a novelist “cannot or will not remove” herself from a situation and adds how In Egypt before the revolution: “novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction.”
Author and literary and political essayist Pankaj Mishra’s books include “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West.” Writing in the New York Times last month, he wrote that the future doesn’t hold the possibilities of “far-reaching transformation that galvanized” writers such as Bolaño.
Adding that Trotsky was right in one respect: “The writer chronicling political events in fiction is most effective when participating in a historical process or movement. No such tonic immersion is available to most contemporary writers, who, as sequestered as ever, must strive alone to transcend the general impoverishment of the political imagination.”
Catch the revolutionaries on the Main Stage from 5:30 – 6:30pm.