Me: Personally, I’m reading Stendhal and Alain Badiou, but I’m getting a bit tired of the latter now. I thought Small Island, Andrea Levy, was pretty good, but I’m still waiting for my summer “blow me away” book.

Film -
You: Dogville, if you missed it.

Me: Cronenberg Night, our house, Wednesday.

In keeping with the class I am putting together, my first round of books on the docket have that distinctive postcolonial flavor to them. A few fictions and literary memoirs I plan to revisit:-
-CLR James Beyond a Boundary and Minty Alley: the raceínícricket classic and a quirky novel about class in the West Indies
-Albert Memmi A Pillar of Salt and The Colonizer and the Colonized: semi-autobiographical tale of a Jewish lad in WWII Tunisia, mapping new terrains of double-consciousness that combines well with his readable psycho-cultural theory classic; both are translated from French
-Sara Suleri Meatless Days and The Rhetoric of English India): truly masterful personal history of upper middle class femininity in postcolonial Pakistan, the richness of which grows on me with each reading; serve alongside a tiny portion of her dense literary theory powerhouse

The preoccupations of Empire Week continue (for some of us at least), and here are a couple imperial history books I have been meaning to read:-
-David Scott Conscripts of Modernity: argues via examinations of the colonial and postcolonial histories of the Caribbean that tragedy is a more appropriate literary mode than romance for narrating the era of decolonization and thinking past the shortcomings of postcolonial states
-Catherine Hall Civilising Subjects): based in part on an examination of missionaries in colonial Jamaica, Hall demonstrates the extent to which race (both the ëisland raceí of the ëexceptionalí British themselves and blackness in the post-emancipation era) remained a crucial component of British imperial and domestic consciousness

For a little more fun:-
-Greil Marcus In the Fascist Bathroom: Marcusí astute and politicized music journalism from Johnny Rotten to Cyndi Lauper and Gang of Four to Prince
-Roy Moxham The Great Hedge of India: a wacky British librarian presents in the form of a detective story his hunt for the relics of a customs barrier wrought of prickly pear bushes

As for movies, a few things that are verified netflickable (in no particular order):-
Cotton Comes to Harlem (early ëblaxploitationí gem), Joint Security Area (plays well alongside some of Mantoís partition stories on the theme of arbitrary borders), Dog Day Afternoon (from one hot summer to another), Ab Tak Chhappan (latest great Bombay police-crime flick, picks up where RGVís classics Satya and Company leave off; thanks to Rajeev for this suggestion in the first place), Soy Cuba/I am Cuba (a truly incredible and nuanced set of linked pieces funded by the Castro government) and Do the Right Thing (perhaps the best summer movie ever)

And a trio of top basketball flicks, because the Heat lost and both Larry Brown and Tim Duncan are Sith Lords: Cooley High; Cornbread, Earl and Me; He Got Game