Bøger af Anis Shivani

From a position of relative consensus on immigration after passage of the landmark 1965 law, both liberals and conservatives have gradually veered off toward a punitive neoliberal direction, with dire repercussions for immigrants, amounting to a veritable holocaust. Locked into an increasingly abstract inhumanity, the current stalemate threatens to undermine the very foundations of American citizenship. It is, at the moment, the greatest blight on our nation's human rights record. This book proposes a fundamental reset toward the largely self-created immigration "problem," a mess of bureaucratic making if ever there was one, and advocates the rational approach of unrestricted movement of all people, the recognition of all immigrants as "persons" with full constitutional rights, and not only an end to punitive treatment of immigrants but an end to the inherent racism of the federal immigration bureaucracy. With valuable contributions from leading immigration, citizenship, and human rights scholars John S.W. Park, Kevin R. Johnson, and David Brotherton, this book offers a radically different perspective on the history of our immigration policy, and its present and future, derived from an uncompromising human rights vision that leaves no person out of the jurisdiction of constitutional empathy. Activists, lawyers, scholars, and readers in general interested in understanding the roots of our immigration debacle and a path free of political posturing on either side, will find much to take away from this deeply researched and historically nuanced short book.

Most political analysts were taken by surprise by Donald Trump's success during the campaign and even more so by his eventual win. The author of this book consistently predicted victory for Trump over Hillary Clinton, should the Democratic party fail to nominate Bernie Sanders, which is precisely what happened. Removing the analysis from matters of personality and contingency, this book seeks to identify the larger institutional and economic changes that have resulted in a rank political outsider such as Trump taking complete power in Washington and sidelining the liberal opposition in every branch of government. Is Trump a fascist, an authoritarian populist, a right-wing extremist, or someone who fits into an established pattern of American conservatism? Was identity politics the biggest loser in the election? What is the future of the Democratic party's appeal to and patronage by the financial class, and what happens when the other party is able to shear off, by demagogic appeals, a large part of the coalition that needs to hold if the meritocratic/neoliberal vision of the financial class is to achieve electoral success? Is there any chance that the Democratic party will undertake philosophical reform and go back to its original base from before the neoliberal ascendancy? Does neoliberalism explain everything that happened in this election, or are there residual factors outside this explanatory framework? How did the press, and the establishment in general, get it so wrong on so many counts throughout the last two years of buildup to this election, and what chance is there for accountability and course correction according to the facts on the ground? What is the Trump coalition? What is Trumpism? What should we expect from this movement, and what should we not? These and other crucial questions have assumed life-and-death importance for the body politic, especially for embattled minority groups feeling betrayed and abandoned by establishment politicians and intellectuals who failed to see the truth of what was going on in the country. These questions are addressed with stimulating clarity and vision in this book of essays that unfolds in real time along with the surge of populism on both left and right in the historic election campaign. The next chapter in American politics is only beginning. This book provides a sound intellectual platform from which to interpret and anticipate the direction of events in the age of Trump.

Confronting American Fascism is a fifteen-year chronicle of lost opportunities amidst the plethora of crisis situations that neoliberalism thrives on; in probing what was missed and when and why, the reader can perceive an explanation for our present predicament, when a genuine democratic socialist was maneuvered out of a nomination that was rightfully his and a neoliberal avatar suffered a predictable catastrophic defeat at the hands of an authoritarian populist shading over into fascism. In this book there are many glimpses of how we moved from a fascism that was seeking constitutional cover in the Bush years to one that no longer requires such plausibility. This book charts the decline of our democracy, moment to moment during these historic last fifteen years, as the pace of change accelerated to the disadvantage of everyone but the elite, and many people who used to have a tentative hold on opportunity found themselves left out-all this amidst escalation of rhetorical obeisance to the cultural dignity of marginalized others. Extreme inequality is new for us, and this book seeks to explain the stages in its creation, ending in a radical cynicism that leaves little room for democratic optimism. The underlying tendency ought to be toward an anarchic/Marxist form of highly diffused liberalism, because scarcity should already be a thing of the past, but the abstraction that is capital today is making this natural movement forward impossible. This book suggests that there has been a continuous economic crisis for the last fifteen years, going along with the continuous political crisis. The acute form of the crisis in 2007-2011 was not resolved in any helpful way; instead, the norms that had created this overt rupture were further established as permanent policy. Renewed commitment to neoliberal principles has all but guaranteed further instability in the future. In the cultural realm, politically correct discourse does not engage in constitutional confirmation of every person's legal rights but diminishes opposition to the reigning philosophy by conceptualizing each group as a discrete unit without reference to others. To the extent that the ideal of global cosmopolitanism has vanished, we now share a much more negative view of globalization, whose evolution this book traces; the ceaseless crises we have faced in the last decade and a half erode cosmopolitanism in any of its forms, and leave us all fragmented, scattered, impotent consumers lacking full bearings. Unlike a book composed at a static moment, this book unfolds over a substantial period of time, responding to each crucial event in turn, so that the reader can see the evolution of our public responses, the slow shift in reassessments of our common ideologies. All the principles the Bush regime established remain fundamentally unquestioned, and we do not anymore, as a culture, have the power to resist this force, because of the slow death of liberal/humanist intellectual perception. The essays in this book are jolting, as we experience again the shock that we felt as we witnessed events unfolding against the norms Americans have been trained to expect. Confronting American Fascism shows how the growing disconnect between the elite and the people prevents functioning along a trajectory of reality and truth; problems offer their own eminent solutions, yet nobody is interested in taking them up. Neoliberalism, this book shows, has recently been on a path to regroup, strengthen, and reorganize under the banner of populism, while there has been no renewed social contract on behalf of equality, employment, economic justice-or even basic dignity. It is easy to lose the thread of the larger story that has been developing since the turn of the millennium; the author of this book never got over his initial shock, and thought it best to tell our collective story by preserving that impact.

""Defiant, deft, bound to the imagination and the practice of the poet's craft, Anis Shivani's Confessions has given us much to appreciate. This startling work resists the easy spectacle poetry, and even confessions themselves, often offer the heart. Instead, Shivani's lucid perceptions expose, darkly, and incandescently, too, the aches and auguries of that which is spoken and unspoken through language. These inseparable collisions of ecstatic and ordinary life, the world and the word, intellect and instinct, are visceral in discovery and intimacy. We, too, become fortunate travelers hurtling inside the prowess of Shivani's polyphonic acts. Confessions is the voice of an expansive mind, deeply conscious and deservedly celebratory of its own free textures and countries." - Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Mule & Pear and Lighting the Shadow"--

What is it like for a cat to observe and live with humans? How does a cat experience human beings in their various modes of existence, from early sedentary societies at the dawn of civilization to the throes of empire in ancient Rome or Victorian England, or in cultures that seem dark and mysterious to us now, such as the medieval witch-hunts or Egypt in the period when felines were worshipped? With its wise, wily, and wonderfully perceptive protagonist-the cat who ceaselessly adapts himself, changing his voice, demeanor, and ideals according to the temper of the times-this novel is a brief history of human civilization as much as it is a history of feline evolution. The cat is the most fascinating of human companions because it opens up a surreal window into the human soul. The protagonist of this crafty, seductive, mesmerizing novel convinces you that there are many more windows into understanding the nature of our own perception-via the cat's all-knowing gaze-than we ever realized. What we think of as history is often reduced to stale chronology and progressive linearity; but the cat in this novel provides a profoundly circular, unknowable, mysterious dimension to the idea of human history.

All we hear about are lawlessness and violence, without social history or political context to fill out the picture. THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES gives us a portrait of Pakistan, and Muslims in general, struggling to reason their way into a better future. Paranoia, self-hatred, delusion, insecurity, serfdom, surveillance, and denial have been some of the prevalent psychological motifs of the last decade; it's important to step outside their journalistic confines and move into the lyrical borderline where responsibility follows a two-way street and causes and consequences become muddled and merged, and this is what the book seeks to do. The old securities everywhere are gone; identities are switched and tried on and abandoned faster than ever; the media landscape saturates individual consciousness, and makes lies out of centuries of tradition and heroes of plastic idols. THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES daringly enters this phantasmagoric cauldron, where appearance and reality have seamlessly blended, to complicate the picture even further, to turn all we think we know about Islam and Pakistan on its head. The "e;truth"e; will never set you free, is the ironic signature of the original voice defining this collection. These new stories from Shivani (Anatolia & Other Stories), many set in Pakistan, parse the disconnect between public and private behavior, and the desires that must be muted in order for people to survive. In "e;Love in a Time of Communication,"e; Javed, a young worker at General Tires in Karachi, tries to get his parents a phone line while dreaming of love for himself. Social mores come into play often, such as in "e;The Abscess of the World,"e; which follows David, an American student, to Karachi to feed his fascination with Islamic law, while his Pakistani roommate at Princeton, Agha, looks to leave his past behind and work on Wall Street. In "e;The House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road,"e; the course of young Abid's life, full of A-levels study, dreams of Oxford, and first love, contrasts sharply with that of the family's young servant girl who has become pregnant. "e;The Censor"e; traces the constantly changing rules about what is or isn't permissible on the public airwaves; numbered paragraphs offer first-person accounts such as "e;The new rules of kissing are, it's allowed if it's done Indian-style.... But no American kissing."e; Shivani is a perceptive writer who puts his finger on the contradictions his characters navigate to survive daily life. --Publisher's Weekly

Soraya is a series of 100 sonnets which take the exuberance of sound as the beginning (and end) point of meaning: it is a driven experiment in the baroque potentialities of sonic texture, poetic "technique" both provoked to the extreme and deconstructed in its very creation.