The Manifesto with No Name
Postscript No. 9 | Ramsey Alsheikh on the eros of activism
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Ramsey Alsheikh and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Cathy Li’s essay “THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD! THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD!”
We met Ramsey our freshman year at Dartmouth taking Arabic classes. We ended up on a study abroad together in Rabat, Morocco in the summer of 2023 and became good friends. Ramsey’s reputation for the polemical and his 6’7” frame precede him. He is the former president of Dartmouth’s Palestinian Solidarity Coalition and the outgoing opinion editor of The Dartmouth.
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Below we discuss the eros of activism, brain-rotted manifestoes, and Ramsey’s relationship to the political imperative through memes, fiction, and law school.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
ELAN At the beginning of college, you were known for your propositional, manifesto-like op-eds. How do you view those now?
RAMSEY Laura Ingraham came to campus last week, and we were sitting in this igloo on the Green as a protest. We covered it in a bunch of flags and banners. I wrote an op-ed as a kind of manifesto in a moment of anger against the Dartmouth Political Union (DPU) for hosting her as a speaker. My argument was that the DPU claims to be about hosting dialogue, but it’s mostly about their own status: that’s why they bring all these high-profile speakers who mostly represent the status quo. It’s a way of bolstering their own image while repeating the same arguments over and over again. And I tied Herbert Marcuse into it. I thought I was very smart for doing that [laughs]. I presented it as a criticism of this rhetoric of “dialogue,” which has very much been at the center of a lot of campus discourse since the Palestine protests. I think that frustration — that nothing’s happening even while we desperately want things to happen — is what leads to manifesto-like thinking.
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