Daily Archives: May 28, 2023

Pride Anthems at WHBPAC June 2nd at 8PM

The Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center (WHBPAC) Director of Marketing and Communications Heather Draskin announced their programming of Pride Anthems as a wonderful way to kick-off Pride Month in the Hamptons. Ms. Draskin said, Pride Anthems is a great performance. What it is going to be is the kick-off of Pride-Month, here in the Hamptons. The kick-off will be the festivities June 2, at 8 PM with Pride Anthems at the WHBPAC. Director Draskin credits Executive Director Julienne Penza-Boone for spearheading the effort to bring Pride Anthems to WHBPAC.

Heather Draskin explained Pride Anthems is a musical journey of the past fifty years featuring music from folks like Donna Summer, Queen, George Michael, and Madonna with all those songs that are significant to the Pride Legacy. Then, Ms. Draskin added how important this show will be because There is a storytelling component about the fight for LBGTQ+ Equality, and its all performed by Broadway Stars, Broadway performers. It is a show for all ages, and Everyone comes together in song and celebration. It will demonstrate where the community has come from.

The show showcases the story of the fight for LGBTQ+ equality and how it is linked to the music that evokes the struggles, heartache, and liberation of queer lives then and now. The show commemorates the legacy and power and power of the Stonewall Riots.

The Stonewall Riots or uprisings, occurred after an anti-gay violent action by the NYC police at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969. Patrons of the other lesbian and gay bars and neighborhood street people reportedly fought back. Many consider this event to be the watershed event, of the gay liberation movement of the 20th century. It was a very emotional two days that jump-started in motion, an energy that grows to this day.

The power of awareness hit the zeitgeist those two days of June 1969. Intense sacrifices of those pioneers have definitely had a phenomenal positive long-term effect. Both here is the U.S.A. and around the world.

The performers scheduled for Pride Anthems are Natalie Joy Johnson, Kevin Smith Kirkwood, and Jon-Michael Reese. They perform under the supervision of Musical Director Brian J. Nash. Heather Draskins also mentioned, Pride Anthems will be a brand-new performance. The show is having their World Premire on May 24th. The WHBPAC performance will be the second performance. Draskin added, Pride Anthems is part of a nationwide tour. What makes this special is that a portion of the proceeds will benefit Pride Lives, and the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center. The center is scheduled to open June 2024 in Washington D.C.

Tickets are still available at the website (www.whbpac.org ) or at the box office, or online. As Director Draskin also said, I want to point out that it is for all ages. It is going to be a fun and uplifting evening of entertainment. This will be the WHBPACs first foray into LGBTQ+ programing. That is why we want a great kick-off to all pride festivities. We are working to make the WHBPAC an inclusive space for the community.

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Pride Anthems at WHBPAC June 2nd at 8PM - Hamptons.com

When I sat down with Eric Huntley on 13 April 2023 it was under the auspice of interviewing him about the new community garden that he has establishedalong with filmmaker and organizer Sukant Chandanin the London borough of Ealing, just minutes away from where he and his wife, Jessica Huntley, ran their bookshop and publishing house. However, it was impossible to contain our conversation to just the Jessica Huntley Community Garden. It would also have been a huge missed opportunity. Eric and Jessica were pioneers of Black literary publishing in twentieth-century Britain, alongside so much more. While running the Walter Rodney Bookshop and Bogle-LOverture publications, some of the first ever Black-owned enterprises of their type, they were also founder members of the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association; helped form the Black Parents Movement in 1975; organized the 1981 Black Peoples Day of action march; and established the Supplementary School Move in the community. And that is just the list of activities listed in Whats Happening in Black History? III (2015).

During our wide-reaching conversation, Eric went right back to his earliest political activities in the 1940s of then British-Guiana, all the way through to 2023, where the 93-year-old community organizer and former-publisher is still working tirelessly to bring about radical change in British society.

The Huntleys legacy in Britain has been well-documented, commendably in Margaret Andrews book Doing Nothing Is Not An Option: The Radical Lives of Eric & Jessica Huntley (2014). After arriving in London between 1957-58, they started Bogle-LOverture Publications in 1968 out of the front room of their house at 141 Coldershaw Road in Ealing. The bookshop followed in 1974. It wasnt long before neighbors officially complained to the local council that the Huntleys were lowering the standard of the street by operating a business in a private house, and thus they were forced to look for a commercial premises. They ended up finding a place just off West Ealing high-street, that would later be named the Walter Rodney Bookshop after the Guyanese intellectual who was assassinated in 1980.

Rodney is integral to this story. When I asked Eric what the impetus was for founding the publishers, he first told me the anecdote that often gets repeated: Eric and Jessica were close with their Guyanese compatriot, both ideologically and socially, and when his writing and lectures were banned by the Jamaican government in 1968, the Ealing-based couple decided to publish his collected speeches in the book The Grounding with my Brothers. But then Eric corrects himself. While that was certainly true, his first foray into publishing came in Guyana over a decade earlier.

Guyana was still under the yolk of British colonialism when Eric was living there. He was a member of the anti-colonial Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) who ran as a pro-independence group, although Eric is modest about his role: Jessica and I didnt have any skills, we were working class people. Most of the people in the leadership of the party were middle-class doctors and lawyers and so on [1]. In 1951, while working as a postman in the village of Buxton, Eric saved up for a flatbed duplicating machine, I produced an unofficial journal for the Post Office Workers Trade Union using that equipment. We literally starved that month. Three years after, in 1953, the security forces seized the machine on one of their raids looking for contraband literature.

1953 was a turning point for the Guyanese independence movement. The PPP won a mandate from the public to govern, yet months later the colonial British regime suspended the constitution then conducted a widespread, violent crackdown against the PPP and anti-imperialist groups. As was common all over the world at that time, the British Empire wanted to nullify the upsurge in communist popularity that was permeating amongst the population and specifically cited concerns over the influence of communism as justification for their actions.

Marxist-thought was indeed popular amongst Eric and his comrades. He notes that communist ideas first found their way into the Guyanese zeitgeist through the soldiers who had gone abroad to fight in World War Two then returned home with battered copies of various Marxist texts. Some of these soldiers had been inculcated by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), with whom Eric had a very short-lived relationship when we first arrived in Britain (he recounts how he and his fellow Caribbean communists had a meeting at CPGB headquarters on Farringdon Road, London, but never returned after they were kicked out mid-discussion at nine in the evening: we had just from the tropics where we were our own masters, Eric recounts, the night was young and when you start talking politics you go into the morning!).[2]

Communist organizing in Guyana begins to pick up pace after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Eric recalls how delegates from the PPP begin to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union and bring back ideas and books that were disseminated through lectures and study groups. Excluding Andrews biography, the foundational role that Marxism plays in Erics thought and life is often dismissed in the literature written about the Huntleys, even though he was keeping company with the likes of Marxist scholars C.L.R James and Walter Rodney, and facilitating the International Book Fair of Radical Black & Third World Literature in the 1980s. Eric stresses this point to me: Our teacher was what was happening on the ground here. We took a Marxist outlook which I havent lost and forms the basis of my world view.

However, he does highlight that Marxism, in particular the Eurocentric variety popular in 1950s Britain, sometimes felt alien to the newly-arrived Caribbean diaspora:

We came from the colonies with a Marxist perspective, [although] you left home without any consideration for the color of your skin and only you became aware you were Black when you came to England. And therefore the politics, the way you viewed the world, changed completely. We never really read Marxist books when we came here. In the colonies, that was all we had. In England, the racism, the issue of ESN (Educationally Subnormal schools), SUS [laws] became more important.

In other words, it sometimes felt like the issues facing the Black diaspora in England at that time had nothing to do with [the] Marxism that they had been reading about in their homelands. Eric even suggests that making these issues too party political could be a hindrance to change: There was more political value out of our struggle if we concentrated on [specific] issues [], with SUS it was much easier to come together. Which is also why Eric and Jessica, in spite of all their organizing efforts, never attempted to form a political party in England. Forming a party meant attempting to reconcile too many differences within the community, and that is without considering the angle of personal belonging too, we didnt really see ourselves as residents here, and settled, to form a political party. It didnt enter our thoughts, Eric told me.

Bringing together the community was central to the vision of the Huntleys Walter Rodney Bookshop. Even before it moved to the commercial premises at Chignell Place, the bookshop was a hub for the migrant community of Ealing: The bookshop became a virtual advice center where persons called for advice on a wide range of issues, wrote Eric in 2015. People came for addresses of solicitors in the event of being arrested on being being a person preparing to to commit an offense (SUS), accommodation, social and welfare issues. Maybe unsurprisingly, Eric also mentioned how they would often host visiting writers, activists, and throw parties. These events brought the Huntleys close to the international anti-imperialist movements of their time, especially the Grenadians.

Bogle-LOuverture publications was just one of three Black-owned publishers operating at that time in London, the others being New Beacon Books established 1966 by John La Rose, and Allison & Busby established 1967 by Margaret Busby and her partner Clive Allison. Rather than seeing each other as competitors, they often collaborated with one and other, coalescing on multiple fronts, including organizing the aforementioned International Book Fair of Radical Black & Third World Literaturewhich ran for over a decadeand founding Bookshop Joint Action, created after a spate of racist attacks on Black and Asian community bookshops in the seventies. The Walter Rodney bookshop itself was defaced on multiple occasions.

Throughout our conversation, I was enthralled by how much the Huntleys had achieved in such a short space of time and with so little financial support. When I expressed this to Eric he was, in what was a common trait of his, fairly self-effacing about it: Today if you have an idea, the first question theyre going to ask you ishow are you going to manage? Where are you going to get the money from? We never started off like that! Once you had an idea, you went ahead and somehow put it into practice. In order to publish their first book, they printed posters and greeting cards and sold them to raise the funds; when they first opened the bookshop, friends who worked in offices would liberate stationary from their workplaces and supply it to them.

It has been in this revolutionary, almost punk, spirit that Eric and Sukant Chandan, a collaborator and fellow Ealing resident, have founded the Jessica Huntley Community Garden, commemorating Jessica who died in 2013. Erics environmental work began in 1995 when he started the quarterly magazine Caribbean Environment Watch. But the community garden, in its own way, is closer to to replicating the dynamics of the now-defunct bookshop. The pair hope it will become a gathering place for local people to discuss their issues, as well as find some joy. It is a fitting legacy [for Jessica]. To put our communities into the center ground, literally, to put them into the center ground in this beautiful way, Chandan remarked. In West Ealing, like in many other areas, gentrification is marginalizing people further, so this is about bringing the people at the margins to the center.

Eric added to this his concern with the effects of the pandemic on peoples social lives, particularly young people. While on a simpler note, he affectionately remembered Jessicas love of gardening: Jessica herself loved flowers. When we first came to the country we were unaware of what the flowers and vegetation was like. We kept a lot of the weeds in the garden, once they flowered, to us they were fine, they were flowers. We didnt realize that as far as the English are concerned they are weeds. So we found ourselves keeping a lot of weeds in the garden.

There seems to be a lot of hope bound up in the new community garden and hope is a word that begins to reoccur frequentlymuch to Erics own jocular amazementat the close of our conversation. You hope at the end of the struggle you can show some progress, remarks Eric. A lot of ground work has been taking place across various ages and were seeing it coming out now. Look what the The Guardian [has published]. [] This is not a miracle. Eric here was referring to the The Guardians recent investigation into itself called The Cotton Capital, exposing the newspapers link to the Atlantic slave trade.

I express some cynicism about both The Guardians investigation and the downturn in a coherent revolutionary-left resistance to the problems of contemporary capitalism. Eric is thoughtful and respectful of my youthful impatience: Sometimes you need a magnifying class [] but the movement is taking place. He gives the example of todays young environmental activists, who despite being sons and daughters of the middle-class, have made some extraordinary sacrifices and faced heavy repression for decades. They came down on them like a ton of bricks, Eric points out. But now, he suggests, the tide is turning against the big polluters.

Generations sometimes react differently to the same issues, but it doesnt mean the struggle has disappeared. Chandan reminds us that these days, for better or worse, much of life is taking place online. That said, the community garden itself then becomes a statement, an antidote to the world of online class conflict, seeking to rebuild a different kind of public forum where local people can drop by and discuss existing issues with each other. Who knows what will emerge from these dialogues, but as Eric is always keen to remind us, doing nothing is not an option.

[1] In truth, the couple were clearly revered by the PPP leadership. Eric was a member of the partys general council and a campaign manager in 1953. Jessica was requested to run as candidate for the constituency of New Amsterdam in Guyanas 1957 general election. While Jessica failed to win her seat, the PPP were again victorious.

[2] Andrews (2014) writes that Jessica and Eric also campaigned for the CPGB candidate for Hornsey, G.J. Jones, in the run-up to the 1959 UK general election.

Rohan Rice is a writer, photographer, and translator from London. You can find his work at: https://rohanrice.substack.com/

First published on Freedom News

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The illuminating influence of Eric Huntley - Peoples Dispatch

Yup, I still want to dress like Sofia Richie.

Since her classic and timeless sense of style seemingly blew up overnight, I couldnt tell if it was just a phase. I wondered if people would be on to the next it-girl within a few weeks. However, given the current zeitgeist that is steering even the trendiest of fashion people towards quiet luxury and elevated staples, Im convinced that Richie is here to stay.

My favorite thing about Richies style is that it plays into the quiet luxury movement without being too minimal. She finds a way to evade overly trendy pieces while still having fun with her wardrobe. She knows when to bring color and unique elements into play with elegance. With that being said, Im ready to shop her wardrobe. Im convinced that I can do it without breaking the bank so below find the 31 Nordstrom finds that you absolutely must shop if youre like me and want to dress like Sofia Richie.

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Want Sofia Richie Style? Try These Cheap Nordstrom Finds - Who What Wear

Amid the zeitgeist of diplomatic rapprochement and normalization in the Middle East which has recently seen Saudi Arabia and Iran mend ties and Syrias Bashar al-Assad welcomed at this months Arab League summit the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas took a step forward to repair its own regional relationships.

In mid-April, a delegation of senior Hamas officials, led by Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal, traveled to Saudi Arabia under the guise of a religious pilgrimage. Yet being the first visit of its kind in more than a decade in which ties between Hamas and Riyadh had been unraveling, the political significance was unmistakable.

Some analysts framed the visit as a product of the breakthrough diplomatic agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which was brokered by Beijing in March. That, however, may be overstated given that there have been a string of similar gestures in recent years, such as Meshaals 2021 television interview on the Saudi network Al-Arabiya and the release of Hamas-affiliated political prisoners jailed by the Saudi government.

Nonetheless, the new atmosphere generated by the Saudi-Iran accord certainly offers a more conducive environment for Hamas-Saudi reconciliation. Moreover, the visit raises important questions about the impact of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement on Palestinians more broadly, especially given that the United States and Israel have made major efforts to bring Riyadh on board the Abraham Accords the normalization project initiated by the Trump administration in 2020 and carried on by President Joe Biden ever since.

Although the recent rapprochement does not have direct implications for the Palestinians vis--vis Israel, it could ease some of the pressure that has mounted in recent years by ending the period of regional polarization and reversing the momentum of the Abraham Accords. The question is: will the Palestinian political leaderships take advantage of this moment?

Lacking a state of their own, the Palestinians have always been highly dependent on the regional environment and reliant on external backing for their political cause. As such, the Palestinian liberation movement has, for decades, been forced to carefully navigate the Middle Easts complex politics and avoid antagonizing possible sources of support and hostility. Sometimes, however, the regional environment is so fraught that it makes this impossible.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud after signing a joint statement on the restoration of diplomatic relations, with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang in the background. (Mehr News Agency/CC BY 4.0)

Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was such a moment. Caught between two important backers of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which also hosted sizable Palestinian communities, Chairman Yasser Arafat found himself in an unenviable decision-making position.

Arafat ultimately tried to strike a sort of balance, opposing the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq in favor of a regional diplomatic effort an equivocal stance that was read by the PLOs Gulf allies as a betrayal, given Kuwait was a clear victim of Iraqi aggression. The cost for the Palestinian community in Kuwait, and Palestinian politics more broadly, was catastrophic, as hundreds of thousands were forced to leave the country and the PLO experienced the worst diplomatic alienation in its history.

The 2011 Arab uprisings and the ensuing regional competition between rival ideological camps was another instance in which uninvolved political actors were pressured to choose sides. That is particularly true of the bitter hostility between the Saudi-Emirati alliance and Iran, which divided the Middle East and North Africa (as well as other regions like the Horn of Africa) in a localized cold war that exacerbated conflicts in multiple countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.

With Tehran providing support to the Syrian regime and several substate actors and the Saudi-Emirati bloc moving into closer alignment with Israel, the balance for Palestinian groups like Hamas became untenable, and their regional relationships suffered. Even Hamass relations with Tehran were initially unsettled after the Palestinian group chose not to support the Iran-backed Assad regime against the Syrian opposition. Eventually, Irans financial backing and military support to Hamas resumed.

The decision by Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations with Iran is important in this regard for two reasons. First, it reduces the violent polarization and competition in the region. While that is far likelier to be felt in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, it does take the pressure off of Palestinians as well.

This is meaningful both for the Palestinian political leaders who were forced into uncomfortable positions that threatened their material support, and for the Palestinian communities living in Arab countries that often bear the brunt of those decisions as witnessed in Kuwait after 1990 and Syria after 2011.

Ebrahim Raisi, current president of Iran, at Naja headquarters, April 30, 2019. (Tasnim News Agency/CC BY 4.0)

The reduced tensions also free regional powers from having to choose sides among the rival Palestinian factions. It was therefore unsurprising to see Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas hosted in Saudi Arabia at the same time that the Hamas officials were in the country, as Riyadh intended to make a show of balancing its relationships.

Furthermore, the Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran accord is a clear sign that Riyadh and its allies are acting more independently of their longstanding partnership with Washington. This current period of multipolarity and middle-power assertiveness could be beneficial for Palestinians; U.S. hegemony in the Middle East has clearly not served Palestinian interests well, and a shakeup in the regional order could provide new opportunities.

The second reason the Saudi-Iran rapprochement is important for Palestinians is its relationship to the parallel Arab normalization process with Israel. Given that the Palestinians were the collateral damage of this process or more likely, at least from Israels perspective, a target of it the derailment of further normalization is a positive result for them.

The Saudi decision (and that of the UAE, which restored relations with Iran in 2022) is particularly important because it defies the rationale and narrative of the Abraham Accords, which oriented around rallying a regional bloc to confront Iran. This, along with the overarching imperative to safeguard Americas security architecture in the Gulf, had provided the motivational basis for entering into those accords.

Indeed, one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Abraham Accords is that it lacked a core achievement. Despite being framed as peace deals, they ultimately amounted to the formalization of diplomatic relations between non-warring states. Furthermore, an agreement that is based on coalition-building for the purpose of enhancing security must ultimately compete with alternatives aimed at achieving the same purpose.

Hence, reaching an agreement with Iran as the principal adversary is more likely to achieve a better result than escalating tensions through a confrontational posture, which would have put the Gulf states in the crosshairs of Iran and its proxies with few ironclad guarantees of help from the United States or Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the UAE Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain attend the Abraham Accords Signing Ceremony at the White House in Washington, USA, September 15, 2020. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)

If anything, the rapprochement with Iran is a demonstration that the Arab states, including the UAE, have been exposed to the limitations of normalization with Israel and the growing unreliability of the United States as a security partner. This realization became acute after both Gulf states suffered a series of Iran-sponsored attacks on their infrastructure and commercial interests between 2019 and 2022, with barely any response from Washington.

This was no doubt a wakeup call for the Gulf states, which began seeking a less-confrontational approach to Iran and other regional adversaries. With Iraq and Omans help, reconciliation talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran began in 2020. In January 2021, the Saudi-UAE alliance lifted its blockade of Qatar. A few months later, the Gulf states began diplomatic overtures to Turkey. By the summer of 2022, the UAE and Iran had exchanged ambassadors, with Saudi Arabia following suit in the spring of 2023.

At the same time, the Abraham Accords stalled. No new agreements were forged after Trump left office in January 2021. Sudan has vacillated on its early declaration to join the process; and countries like Oman, which appeared like possible candidates, have enhanced their laws prohibiting any dealings with Israelis.

Even the UAE, which spearheaded normalization with Israel from the Arab side, has appeared more conflicted of late. The Emirates has used its chair on the UN Security Council for the 2022-23 term to support Palestinian positions and criticize the current Israeli governments policies. While it is unlikely for the UAE to reverse its formal ties with Israel, its enthusiasm for this process may be waning.

Ostensibly, all of this is a positive development for Palestinians. Normalization was being used by Israel to undermine Palestinian leverage, marginalize their cause regionally, and pressure them to capitulate to Israeli demands. The Saudi-Iran agreement contrasts sharply with the Abraham Accords, both in substance and effect.

Yet taking advantage of this change is another story entirely. Political fragmentation has denied the Palestinian liberation movement a singular address since 2007 and made regional engagement more complicated.

The PLO/PA under Abbass leadership has also proved a poor steward of Palestinian diplomacy: despite three decades of failure, Abbas has doubled-down on the strategy of relying on the United States to deliver a peace deal with Israel, while remaining wedded to the defunct Oslo Accords. Indeed, it was this agreement signed in the 1990s that allowed the Gulf states to more openly engage Israel, and has provided the ongoing context of cooperation that made the Abraham Accords possible.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank city of Ramallah, September 3, 2020. (Flash90)

This one-track strategy on the part of the PLO/PA has taken regional support for granted rather than actively cultivating it. As a result, the PLOs regional relationships have eroded, its once-strong diplomatic infrastructure has collapsed, and the Palestinian diaspora in the Middle East has fallen by the wayside, denying the liberation movement key sources of support, vitality, and leverage, including vis-a-vis the Arab regimes. The PLOs aging, corrupt, and bureaucratic leadership are no longer a source of inspiration for the people of the region as they were in the movements revolutionary heyday. Although the Arab street remains overwhelmingly sympathetic and supportive of Palestinians, it is not because of their leaders efforts, but in spite of them.

Hamas, on the other hand, more closely resembles the PLO of old and has proven itself somewhat better at navigating the regional landscape. While holding firm control in Gaza, its core diplomatic and political leadership are located outside of the occupied territories, where they are not subject to Israeli domination. And unlike the post-Oslo PLO/PA, Hamas does not have a built-in source of financing from a bloc of international donors a structure which makes the PA not only complacent and unaccountable, but subject to Western and Israeli conditionality.

Hamas still has to be more adept at responding to the vicissitudes of regional politics. But its strategic position is not precluded, like the PLO because of its Western-dependence, from maintaining relations with a diverse cross-section of allies, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Still, as long as Palestinian politics remain divided and dysfunctional hindered even more by the complete absence of democratic national elections, and a restructuring of systems of governance and decision-making the advantages that have opened in a changing regional context will likely pass the Palestinians by.

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What will Saudi-Iran rapprochement mean for the Palestinians? - +972 Magazine