nomadlab writes "Granma has translated an interview with Eduardo Galeano that was printed in the April 10th edition of La Jornada.

the entire text can be found at

Granma International

here is an exerpt:

[Argentina and Uruguay] are countries overwhelmingly populated by immigrants, and here it’s interesting to note that that’s the basis of a universal perplexity, given the magnitude of a crisis like the one being suffered by Argentina, which is a veritable tragedy. There is universal perplexity because people don’t understand how such a thing could happen in a white, well-nourished country without a demographic explosion. The event in itself calls into question the theories of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and other "ologists" who, for example, identify underdevelopment and poverty with social explosions — things they say occur in obscure regions of the planet, regions condemned by destiny to suffer poverty because of the color of their skin, as a result of a miscegenation that did not bear good fruit. But contrary to those racist interpretations of human misfortune, episodes like this one in Argentina appear, and they can’t understand how it could have happened."

The journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East seeks critical essays for a special issue entitled “Comparative (Post)colonialisms: The Literary Issue.” We are interested in papers that explore comparative perspectives on postcolonial literature and theory, that critically examine the hegemony of colonial languages within postcolonial studies, and that investigate how postcolonial theory might be enriched, critiqued, nuanced, or exposed through the perspectives of non-colonial (indigenous or “lesser taught”) languages, comparative literature, or area studies. How does the field of postcolonial studies as currently constituted in the academy contribute to the linguistic, cultural, or institutional dominance of English? What kinds of texts, discourses, or practices elude, or are repressed by, this framework? What “blind spots” are revealed in postcolonial theory from the perspective of texts or traditions not in a colonizer's language? What ideological or strategic roles do specific languages play in texts, institutional contexts, politics, or history?

Please submit essays of between 5,000 and 12,000 words (note and reference inclusive), by September 15, 2002. Essays should be formatted in Chicago style and use the Library of Congress transliteration system for romanization, without diacritical marks. We prefer electronic submissions to Waïl Hassan (whassan) and Rebecca Saunders (rasaund), though essays may also be submitted in hardcopy to Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Department of English, Box 4240, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4240. Relevant books for review are also welcome.

The second issue of The Red Critique, an online Marxist journal of analysis of the contemporary, is now available at:
Red Critique

Kimberly DeFazio, "Urban Post-Theory, Class and The City"

Julie Torrant, "Family, Capital and the Left Now"

Ranganayakamma, "Are Marxian Categories Adequate to Understand 'Gender' and
'Caste' questions?"

Jennifer Cotter, "The Guardian of Profit"

Rob Wilkie, "'Destiny' is the Articulation of Class Power"

We invite classical Marxist critiques of the contemporary for our next issue. Please see submissions guidelines on our website.

The journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory is aiming to publish a symposium on the theme of 'Marxism and the Fantastic', and we are looking for papers interrogating this topic in any fruitful way. We are open to consideration of 'the fantastic' in psychological terms, but we are particularly interested in discussions of the non-real, the fantastic in arts and literature.

Marxist theory has long engaged with modernist movements such as surrealism. In addition, there is already a body of Marxist theory engaging with science fiction, as exemplified in the work of Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson and Carl Freedman. However, there is as yet no body of Marxist work which systematically engages with "the fantastic" more generally conceived, either perceiving science fiction as a subset of the fantastic, or opposed to it. We would like to make a start at filling that gap.