Gaia Books

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The Historic 1965 Cambridge Union Debate, Reimagined.

Following critically acclaimed runs in New York City, London, Chicago and Los Angeles, the american vicarious’ radically staged production of the historic debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. is reenacted at Wilton’s Music Hall.

The Debate

‘Is The American Dream At The Expense Of The American Negro?’

This was the question on February 18, 1965, when an overflow crowd packed the Cambridge Union to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin— the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement—and William F. Buckley Jr., America’s most prominent conservative intellectual.

The stage was set for an extraordinary confrontation: Baldwin’s call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley’s defence of the American establishment. Their exchange laid bare the deep divisions at the heart of American democracy—divisions whose echoes continue to shape our present.

In restaging this debate, the american vicarious returns Baldwin and Buckley’s words to public conversation through the voices of contemporary artists. Sixty years later, the arguments remain piercing, the stakes undiminished, the questions still demanding our attention.

I‘m sitting at the stalls in F10.

After the event, we‘ll meet at Wilton’s Bar to share impressions of the play.

Salam,

Discussions of the Arab world, particularly the Gulf States, increasingly focus on sectarianism and autocratic rule. These features are often attributed to the dominance of monarchs, Islamists, oil, and ‘ancient hatreds’. To understand their rise, however, one has to turn to a largely forgotten but decisive episode with far-reaching repercussions—Bahrain under British colonial rule in the early twentieth century.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined Arabic literature as well as British archives, Omar AlShehabi details how sectarianism emerged as a modern phenomenon in Bahrain. He shows how absolutist rule was born in the Gulf, under the tutelage of the British Raj, to counter nationalist and anti-colonial movements tied to the al-Nahda renaissance in the wider Arab world. A groundbreaking work, Contested Modernity challenges us to reconsider not only how we see the Gulf but the Middle East as a whole.

We‘ll continue with our 2026 reading list:

3-Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—Bangladesh
4-The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julia Lovell
5-Rickshaw Boy by Lao She—China
6-The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
7-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—Colombia
8-How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
9-Heart of Darkness by Polish author Joseph Conrad—Congo
10-The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
11-Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi—Ghana
12-Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Enjoy Bahrain!

Namaskar,

One of the first science-fiction utopian stories and one of the first feminist utopias by celebrated pioneering feminist, educator, activist, and Bengali writer Rokeya Hossain.

As a pioneering work of science fiction and feminist utopian literature at the turn of the century, Sultana's Dream is strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, war, industrialization, and the exploitation of the natural world, speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much as its own. At a time when British colonialism was using the treatment of women in India as justification for colonial intervention there, Hossain's story, in imagining a world in which men rather than women are kept inside, positions her protest against Islamic patriarchy within a larger feminist vision that takes on Western as well as Islamic forms of gender hierarchy. Her novella Padmarag is similarly utopian in its depiction of a women-run school and welfare center, and is both feminist and anti-colonial in its outlook. In both these works, Hossain seizes the critique of gender roles in India away from Western commentators and turns it against British interference, while also enlarging the critique to take on the problem of gender more broadly.

We‘ll continue with our 2026 reading list:

4-The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julia Lovell
5-Rickshaw Boy by Lao She—China
6-The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
7-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—Colombia
8-How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
9-Heart of Darkness by Polish author Joseph Conrad—Congo
10-The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
11-Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi—Ghana
12-Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Enjoy Bangladesh!