I've been asked to speak about "How to confront Empire?" It's a huge question, and I have no easy answers....
Transcription of Arundhati Roy reading and Ms. Roy and Howard Zinn in conversation, Lensic Performing Arts Center Santa Fe, New Mexico, 18 September 2002
What links Arundhati Roy and Edward Said is what demarcates anti-Americanism, that peculiar empire of the one-eyed, from reasoned political opposition to US policies. Real, not gestural, politics must worry about the breadth...
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient...
Novelist Arundhati Roy had challenged the "sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice" of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in a spirited essay late last year. But did her own algebra go awry?
Several people have sent me copies of Arundhati Roy's piece condemning the American imperialists and equating the bombing of the World Trade Center with the 1984 toxic leak that killed 2000 in Bhopal...
Arundhati Roy's simple-minded demonization of the American monster is pure Occidentalism, or Said in reverse, which only helps to undermine the political self-scrutiny without which a democracy cannot work.
