CHRIS SEARLE hears the ordeal of the Palestinian people in the improvised musicianship of a UK jazz trio
The reactionary basis of identity politics
ALEX HALL is intrigued by a left-wing account of the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics
CLEAR THINKING: International Red Aid propaganda poster in Russian and Uzbek language: "Wrest eight innocent young negroes out of the hands of the American bourgeoisie!" American policeman is depicted in front of the Nazi swastika with baton raised against food rioters
[Russian State Library/CC] 
DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
MICHAEL STEWART applauds a fun send-up of the substandard Agatha Christie whodunnit
LEO BOIX reviews a novella by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, and poetry by Peruvian Giancarlo Huapaya, and Chilean Elvira Hernandez
BRENT CUTLER unpicks the cryptic clues of a book within a book within a murder mystery
Reviews of the Neil Charles Quartet, the Freddie Hubbard Quintet, and the Olie Brice Quartet
Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics
Kenan Malik, Hurst, £20
EVENTS have not gone as Kenan Malik would have liked since about the 1960s and definitely not since the late 1980s and the Salman Rushdie affair. As an anti-capitalist activist, journalist, academic and broadcaster, the disarray and ineffectiveness of the left has been a major concern.
The problem has been the disappearance of class-based solidarity in favour of identity-based solidarity, and although he left the left (or perhaps, as he might put it, the left left him) he now explains the intellectual threads which brought the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics.
Today’s “culture wars” are the present tail-end of this phenomenon. This book is a remarkable help in untangling some present threads and themes, although it doesn’t quite give us Ariadne’s thread out of the Labyrinth.
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