MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
What a Womad wants
GEORGE FOGARTY asks why the great music of the colonised isn’t accompanied by an equally great political discussion
(L) Haitian- American Leyla McCalla (R) Palestine’s original rap outfit DAM
[Mike Massaro ZFM] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Womad Festival
Chartlon Park, London
THE Womad Festival, now in it’s 42nd year, has always had a political edge. Indeed, the showcasing of artists predominantly from the majority world in the heartlands of their former colonisers could hardly avoid the traces of that relationship, and is pregnant with commentary on it, regardless of the extent to which it is explicitly articulated.
But explicitly articulated it often is, and a spirit of joyful defiance — of coloniality, of chauvinism, of borders and boundaries of all hues — is in many ways a defining characteristic of many of the acts here.
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