CreativesNow - Autumn/Winter 2020

CREATIVES

NOW

AUTUMN/WINTER 2020 NON-FICTION + POETRY + DESIGN + REVIEWS + INTERVIEWS +

CULTURE EMERGENCY I CAN'T BREATHE DECOLONIALISATION CANCEL CULTURE RE-VISIONING

FRONT COVER Beeple PAIN 3:31 AM · May 30, 2020·Twitter Web App INSIDE COVER Beeple NATURAL REBOOT 2:44 AM · Mar 14, 2020·Twitter Web App OPPOSITE PAGE Beeple PERFECT ENEMY 3:42 AM · Mar 20, 2020·Twitter Web App BACK COVER Beeple not again.

4:06 AM · Sep 11, 2020·Twitter Web App

CREATIVES NOW AUTUMN/WINTER '20

CULTURE EMERGENCY CULTURAL COMMENTARY + FREEDOM

various contributions from current pupils, staff and alumni, on the matter of intellectual freedoms and censorship - throughout issue

POETRY + VISION

student writing created in SPACE and ECA workshop with Andrew McMillan

DESIGN + BEEPLE

work of graphic designer Beeple featured throughout issue + his views on personal work and Creative Commons

REVIEWS + BOLTON FILM AND MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVALS INTERVIEWS + POET + CURATOR + MUSICIAN

interviews with Andrew McMillan on poetry, place and pandemic, Stephen Welsh on decolonialisation of museums and Liam Maloney on the foundations of house music

EDITORIAL TEAM

Ib Ali, Fin Littlefair, Miss Lord, Anuj Mishra, James Roberts

Beeple OPT-OUT 2092 4:39 AM · Jun 27, 2018·Twitter Web Client

CULTURE DEAR EMERGENCY READER Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will improve your education. Culture will bring communities together. Will it?

It is perhaps a given that an arts and culture journal might aim to foreground good taste and to prescribe what is culturally worthy, either implicitly or overtly. In this edition of CreativesNow, instead, we would like to open a conversation with you, and here’s our provocation: is culture really good for you?

This might seem like a ridiculous question, not least because the purpose of this magazine is to engage with arts and culture. Let's shift that purpose slightly. Let's say that the objective of this edition is to examine what it is to engage with arts and culture critically, as active participants, rather than passive recipients of culture.

Let's be critical and discerning about our cultural diet.

The patterns of our day-to-day lives have been disrupted by a global pandemic; as we live through those days, we have had no choice but to stop and consider how we once did things, the merits of those previous habits, and to wonder if we will be able to pick up, or even want to pick up those ways again.

During this time, we have witnessed global events that have sent seismic shocks throughout society. The murder of George Floyd, in May of this year, incited protests across the world, raising a powerful call to transform access to systems of political power, cultural representation and education. The intersections of race, class and gender, snarled in traditions of systemic exclusion, are now squarely in focus. And, it is an exciting moment of potential for positive change.

If culture is to be a force for good in our communities and our lives, we need to urgently address our own shortcomings when it comes to inequality of experience.

Who gets to mould arts and culture in this country?

Who moulds your cultural experience at school, at home, within your friendship groups? Do you participate in moulding and shaping your personal experience of the world? We need to consider who is represented, how they are represented and who controls the narratives that we live by.

The pages ahead are full of articles, interviews and reviews – ideas shared by current pupils, alumni and staff. Throughout the edition, there is focus on censorship and matters of intellectual freedom, ideas of moderation and the impulse to ban culturally sensitive materials.

Protection of freedom of speech is typically part of the pushback when forms of expression are challenged. It was a good thing, when, in 1967, the Lord Chancellor could no longer censor plays; state censorship is certainly undesirable. However where would we be without moderation to deal with the fantasies people broadcast via the social media mouthpieces they are afforded?

How do we reach a consensus on what is appropriate public fare? Social media giants have small human moderation departments and algorithms insensitive to nuanced arguments – do corporations have a social responsibility to throw money behind greater human moderation? Without the funnel of mainstream media and epistemological agreement, fake news and insidious misinformation spiral out of control. What does this mean for our society and world?

On a slightly different track, what if observations made on social media are insensitive – not wrong but confrontational. Should that opinion be 'cancelled'?

Should the person the opinion originated with be cancelled? Can either the person or the idea, be, in fact, cancelled?

Some of the commentary pieces in this edition touch on forms of artist and cultural cancellation, contemplating if art is meant to transcend humanity or merely reflect it. Is art meant to be moral as represented by the person who made it? What is culture for? Can morally ugly people make beautiful things? Might we recognise and manage the information that the maker had questionable beliefs and yet we do not have to eviscerate the beauty they created?

Other articles explore iterations of the relationship between popular music and moral panic. Frank Zappa’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 1986, to discuss the censorship of lyrics, is well worth a watch. Does Zappa’s claim, ‘they’re just words’, stand up now?

A number of articles note popular responses to the shock of new art forms, for example, niche urban musical genres, breakaway architectural design and the political positioning of early 20th century Avant Garde artists. They examine responses to disruption of tradition and point to a seeming lack of interest in lives of those that have to live around the challenged power structures.

Interviews in this edition take on identity politics specifically contemporary forms of masculinity, COVID19's impact on the music industry, and decolonialisation of cultural organisations and education. Reviewers report back from Manchester Literature Festival and Bolton Film Festival.

The next edition will focus on three big questions: How might we ensure that all young people have good access to high-quality education as online learning becomes more important? How might we learn from the natural world to reimagine learning environments that better respond to the needs of both people and the planet? How might we challenge systemic racism by redefining heritage to ensure that future generations engage with a more inclusive story of our past?

We welcome pupil, staff, and alumni contributions to this future edition and will publish a call for articles in the New Year.

We hope you enjoy the read!

the editorial team

Beeple STILL STANDING 4:57 AM · Nov 5, 2020·Twitter Web App

LANGUAGE AND POWER / moderation of social media

There is manipulative strength in what would ordinarily be weak rhetoric here.

At the time of writing, America is in an excruciating state of inertia, awaiting the ballots to be counted in the remaining key states. “STOP THE COUNT!”, posted on Twitter from Donald J. Trump’s account on 5th November 2020, seems very like a toddler tantrum: use of imperative, capitalisation (often used to denote shouting), an exclamatory declaration. In fact, in Child Language Acquisition studies, with reference to Halliday’s seven functions of language, we might speculate that Trump’s demand meets a regulatory desire to tell people what to do. However, perhaps even more worryingly, it could be argued that it is far more instrumental in its function: he is expressing his needs in a manner that does not befit his office.

Trump seems to have no issue violating Grice’s maxim of quality – he regularly lies or misrepresents the truth, as attested by the mural in New York’s Soho which features 20,000 of Trump’s lies, colour-coded according to topic and all fact-checked by the Huffington Post. 'The Wall of Lies' – as it has been unceremoniously named – spans 100ft and is a testament to Trump’s dedication to untruths.

'STOP THE COUNT!' MS SIGRIST

Twitter’s character limit constrains its users to careful vocabulary selection and portrayal of thoughts and opinion in a concise manner. It has also allowed the 45th President of the United States of America an immediate and direct voice to his followers. The ‘Make America Great Again’ – #MAGA – mantra and simple coding of complex situations as ‘mad’, bad’ and ‘sad’, via this medium, encapsulate his leadership of the country. Whilst other public figures adhere to their marketing training carefully, it seems that Trump’s online voice is very much untrained and unrestrained. It is, however, worth considering that this apparent naif use of the medium might well be by design.

Trump’s use of Twitter not only promotes his own voice, but galvanises it; by retweeting statements, headlines, or even opinions which support his ideologies, he further positions his audience as desired. His narrative is simple, clear and emphatic. It is repeated.

There is manipulative strength in what would ordinarily be weak rhetoric here; his office is 'great', his detractors 'bad'. These capital 'truths' surface from the flux and imprint themselves on the reader.

The lexis is at once low order - enabling access to all levels of readership - whilst also offering greatness. There are some important dots to join here in relation to the voting demographic. Trump's bias is evident and unashamed and it is clear that in terms of personal power, Trump will do all he can to sustain it.

During the election, Trump made statements via Twitter such as: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election.

We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” This egregious and grammatically questionable statement uses synthetic personalisation to create apparent collective agreement: “We,” against “they,” and “them,” focusing on a sense of divide, a principle activity of his presidency. The fact that the original Tweet had a spelling error where the President had used “Poles” instead of “polls” did not go unnoticed before editing and, perhaps, adds an additional layer of amusement to the entire proceedings.

Trump’s trademark simple sentences, ready use of caps lock and exclamations, rhythmically punctuate his Twitter feed, and, whilst it could appear that Trump is downwardly converging for effect, it may also just be possible that this is actually the full extent of his linguistic capability.

Advances in technology have accelerated language change across the world. Twitter was founded in March 2006. Its focus on creative use of language due to restricted character count, has established it as a platform that allows users to engage with each other about current affairs and topics of social interest, in a constant proliferation of information. Much of the meaning made here leaves only a fleeting impression.

In the days clustered around the US presidential elections, Trump’s Twitter feed was overrun by warnings put in place by Twitter. They include statements such as, “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter has ensured that misleading or manipulative broadcasting is clearly signposted so that users may be more informed about their daily social media diet. This has left Trump further enraged, claiming, “Twitter is out of control…” (6th November).

Clearly, social media is only as good as moderation and despite Trump being called his false claim that had won the election (4th November), it is clear that his spurious claims will continue – possibly until Trump’s instrumental needs are met – but will they ever be?

WRITING / MASCULINITIES AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW MCMILLAN

REVISIONING POETRY FIN LITTLEFAIR

I had the pleasure of sitting down (virtually) with esteemed poet Andrew McMillan. The interview took place via the Zoom conferencing system that we have all come to both love and hate. We were served well by this technology, and a flowing conversation ensued, exploring key themes in Andrew's work including the topic of masculinity. The conversation was elevated by moments of reference to Andrew's work.

We also discussed Andrew's new book, pandemonium, out next year, the role of religion in his poetry, and where poetry is headed as we march ever more boldly forward. Some of the conversation is transcribed, here.

McMillan is a poet from Barnsley and currently a senior lecturer at the Manchester School of Writing. He has published two collections of poetry, playtime (2015) and physical (2018). physical was decorated with The Guardian’s First Book Award – being the first ever poetry collection to do so. The collection was also voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association in 2019. Year 12 pupils were recently introduced to Andrew and his work via a SPACE enrichment session and writing competition led by him – Re-Visioning Poetry.

Our conversation opened amicably - the first item on the table was Andrew’s hometown, trends in northern fraternities between towns like Bolton and Barnsley, and whether The North - perhaps more accurately 'th' North' – lends itself to artistic inspiration.

Do you think there are any aspects of the north which lend themselves particularly to inspire art?

AM

In the north, on a very practical level, because the transport infrastructure is so poor outside of the cities - say for example how it takes twice as long to get to Sheffield from Manchester as it should by train - that means that you get pockets of artistic creativity which are almost self-contained. These little hubs have found identities; say for example how Manchester has a very distinct style of music, or the prevalence of the spoken word poetry scene in Newcastle or Durham.

There is something about the need to almost be self-sufficient or to be self-starting, because arts funding is so often concentrated on London or dotted around the north - there is a DIY culture to northern art.

from PROTEST OF THE PHYSICAL iv drunk man to the drunker woman where you from Barnsley Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarnslie

I was interested to hear about the local references Andrew makes in 'The Protest of the Physical', a long form poem which is the backbone of his collection, physical. Specifically, I wanted to know more about a rather unusual listing of pub names: 'The Closed Since the Smoking Ban', 'The Wheel’s Reinvention', 'The Glass Still Half-Full ' – were they real? If not, where did the ideas for the names come from?

AM

The thing with that poem is that it really came from an inability to write so it is made up of fragments - a piece of collage. One of those fragments was the pubs I could remember visiting in Barnsley and how they would change their names [...] It just struck me that, if you put them in a certain order, they almost begin to tell a story. Although a couple are made up for comedy value, I guess.

Andrew began his career as a lecturer at the age of only 24. He continues to lecture now, as he steps into his thirties. I wanted to know what it would be like to work with young people in such educational settings when you are young yourself.

AM

When lecturing at Liverpool I was much closer in age to the students. What it did was just kept me engaged and keeps me fresh in terms of what's happening with poetry. It made me take my own work much more seriously because if you're spending all week critiquing your students work then it means you hold yourself to the same standard, and interrogate it in exactly the same way.

Following conversations about growing up, we arrived at the topic of masculinity. Hold on, things are about to get profound.

Have you had a positive relationship with masculinity?

AM

How much time do we have?

Masculinity Is a complex thing, but I am convinced that it is essentially living at the heart of virtually every problem that we are facing today - safely setting the pandemic aside. A lot of this stuff that we are reckoning with socially comes out of toxic masculinity. In a school like mine – a rough school - you learned how to speak to the teachers, in case you got beaten up, but you also learned to speak to the other kids who might want to beat you up. It became useful as a way of observing masculinity.

It took me a long time to settle down into a true sense of myself and particularly because at that time, when I was 15 or 16, the only real gay role models were sort of late night chat show hosts, like Graham Norton or from the sitcom, Will and Grace. You were presented with a sort of queer masculinity which I thought wasn't necessarily me, but that I somewhat felt I had to embody. Now, I enjoy moving in those spaces where the archetype doesn't necessarily fit -like I enjoy going to the gym now.

What is particularly interesting from my perspective as a poet is watching the reaction of masculinity as the world, quite rightly, changes around it, and therefore what masculinity must perform in order to reassert its power.

Perhaps masculinity isn’t a set of principles or attributes, but more the existence of a set norm for men – or people – to live up to?

AM

It's all performative and it's all inherited. And we know that because fashions shift. So, some of what has been considered hyper-masculine at times, in terms of dress and stuff, would today be considered hyperfeminine, e.g. heeled shoes for men in positions of power in the 18th century. It's interesting to see the form which masculinity has adopted in these post-industrial spaces, so places like Barnsley or Bolton.

The traditional notion of what it was to be a man was associated with economic "bread-winning" in the household. So, where that has somewhat fallen away there is a displaced desire to take up space in other ways - so potentially to physically take up space – in terms of physical size - to attempt to bridge that gap.

In post-industrial spaces we have this generation of young men who are growing up in a world where the world around them is moving on in terms of discussion of masculinity and femininity, of gender roles and gender identity and stuff like that. But, the education they are receiving, in terms of the people who surround them at home and at school, has not changed. So, we have this group of young men who are prepared play in a world which doesn't exist anymore.

How do you view the ongoing impact of trad-masculinity?

We should be careful to distinguish the impact of the idea of masculinity from the actions of men, here.

AM

Illustration by Nathalie Lees

Masculinity is an incredibly interesting thing.

While obviously women are implicated, in terms of physical and emotional abuse, in terms of equality of opportunity, trans people are leading victims of popular understanding of gender roles because of masculinity's demand for a "tyranny of binary". But, in terms of men, men and women, we see this really old juxtaposition where men are still leading in terms of heads of states and occupying two thirds of all management roles. On the other hand, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 40 and most suicides are men. Men are also three times as likely to become drug or alcohol addicted.

So, there is this disparity where something goes wrong for men, and it's strange because we aren't looking at a gap between perception and reality but a gap between reality and reality.

At this stage, the conversation grew into a discussion on the anti-feminist and misogynistic views which fester in certain areas of social media. I raised the idea that some young boys, and people broadly, can be obsessed with the idea that feminism is a man-hating rather than egalitarian movement.

AM

I think that there is a group of men who are effectively being radicalised by members of a kind of alt-right community. For instance, we have seen the birth of this so called “incel” movement and this movement of young misogynist men, who really are being radicalised by the internet. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the internet.

So, are you saying these are men who are being left behind by the discussion of things like gender identity? That their position is challenged by change and there is little to help them to stabilise I sense of who they are amidst that change?

AM

We have to leave room for things like feminist education, gender education and LGBTQ education because this generation of young men is vulnerable to falling into this void which will only ever be filled by nefarious people, who are members of things like the alt right and such groups, because this void is something which comes from problems created by capitalism. I'm not a Marxist or anything like that - but the fact is that economic hardship, joblessness and things like that will always be created by capitalism; it’s a problem with capitalism. In turn, capitalism will always try to tell people that the problem is not that, it is something else.

For this generation of young men, if they are not educated in these things, then that may be ideas they find within the young misogynist movement and et cetera.

It's a scary thing which can only be solved by proper education of people about the nature of the world that they're going to enter into. Otherwise, these disenfranchised people will always exist, and always latch onto these kinds of things.

Following this, we returned to focus on 'Protest of the Physical' - and particularly, the secular nature of it. As part of this conversation I pointed out he makes one reference toChristianity by observing a train passenger's reading material: “I saw a book on the train / C.S Lewis’ / Mere Christianity we will all be cured of our sin / at whatever cost to us at whatever cost to him'.

AM

So I'm an atheist, but I, and I think this is a similar experience for many people who are from a Protestant English background, went to church sometimes and I went to Sunday school but as more of babysitting thing for my parents. What fascinates me about religion is the way that masculinity and male desire sort of slot into it. Also something I was interested in was this sort of “secular divinity” in terms of the body, and what happens if the body is not being used to serve God. Can you get that transcendent experience that one would usually get from religion from the people around you - transcend the everyday in a kind of secular way. That’s why Protest of the Physical is a kind of "hymn to the other”.

AM

I also find it fascinating about how that early part of the New Testament is all structured around homosocial – not homosexual- relationships, in terms of the fact that Jesus is a man who is surrounded by a posse of men, who all follow him around and they do really sincerely love him; then we see there is betrayal in that group and we witness almost the theatre of male relationships.I find it fascinating in particular how we have gone from celebrating that to having a legacy of homophobia in the Church, in particular the Catholic Church, and the fact that we developed to that that from those stories – fascinating in how it became twisted, almost.

I observed that there is often celebration of intimacy between two people in Andrew's writing, and that he explores thes connections delicately.

AM

Something that I explore in this poem is similar to the Romantic notion of the sublime, but I was more interested in the notion of the bodily sublime. Is there something about the body which could be so sublime that you effectively have a transcendent experience - indeed that space, in the majesty of human interaction - is a space where some people find God. Where you can be so attracted to something or someone, but also be terrified of what that means, which is exactly the notion of the sublime.

from PROTEST OF THE PHYSICAL II I didn’t know it would be the last love is giving everything too easily then staying to try and claw it back

It was truly a pleasure to speak with Andrew, and, to hear thoughts on some of the ideas which are most prevalent in our world today, articulated by a man who has discussed them in an award-winning fashion, was a gift.

PANDEMIC & PLACE

POETRY

MEMORY exercise - routine journeys PRIOR TO LOCKDOWN, moinuddin master The monotonous and monochromatic hustle to the citadel of higher learning is one that occurs, rain or shine, gale force wind or hail.

Yet, it floated down: a cloud of colour, a rainbow of respite in a field of clones.

A miracle of buoyancy and gravity amalgamated: a dance of resultant vectors - a prism of colour, that changed Iridescent shades of crimson, cyan and primrose.

OBSERVING A MOMENT OF CONNECTION MEMORY EXERCISE - Recollect a fleeting moment between two people, JACOB SIDOLI A glint of anger in his eyes; stillness sullied by invasion - a tirade of worthless noise.

In May and November SPACE enrichment sessions, Year 12 students spent an afternoon exploring our current context through creative writing exercises with Andrew McMillan.

The session drew from Manchester Writing School's WRITE Where We Are NOW project led by former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

Here are two examples of work from excercises thst used poetic language to explore personal experience, memory and the ordinary. N.B. The examples are draw from students' working notes.

Earlier this year, the names of those killed by racism and police brutality were written along Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. George Floyd was killed on this street in front of Cup Foods after being accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill. The site of his death has been converted into a large shrine. Black Lives Matter protests shook the US in the wake of Floyd's death. Protests across the globe followed..

PHOTOGRAPH BY LESHON LEE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JUNE 6 2020

LITERATURE / BANNED BOOKS

THE HATE U GIVE SAMMY GATENBY-BROWN (alumnus, 2018)

Queries over whether national discourses of educational success work to include or exclude children from minority ethnic backgrounds are now prominent. Nevertheless, recently, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, now adapted into an acclaimed film, has received backlash from US school districts since publication. Told from the perspective of black teen Starr Carter, who is the sole witness to a police shooting of her childhood friend, the novel depicts police violence and racism within modern America. Fiction depicting police brutality against black people instantaneously receives pushback. The Hate U Give was banned by school officials in Katy, Texas for its ‘inappropriate language’ and in 2018 the Fraternal Order of Police in Charleston, South Carolina stated that the book is ‘almost an indoctrination of distrust of police’.

However, Thomas herself explains this as a misunderstanding, stating that there is ‘the assumption that it’s an antipolice book, when the fact is it’s anti-police brutality’. The importance of the discussions raised by Thomas’ novel is now further amplified by the tragic death of George Floyd. A roll call of deaths due to racism and police brutality were emblazoned along Chicago Avenue, the site of Floyd’s death, this summer.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained global prominence this summer, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Due to this renewed determination in the fight against racism, particularly police brutality within the United States, there were many news outlets providing anti-racist reading lists for those wishing to better their allyship. During this time, Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first black British author to top the UK’s best-seller list, since its inception in 1998, with Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race. Similarly, Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize with her novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019. Consequently, there seems to be an elevated desire for literature from the perspective of PoC authors.

Books about race relations have consistently been censored due to their content, variously deemed too violent, too sexually explicit or for use of derogatory language therein. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings has had thirty-nine public challenges or bans since 1983. The autobiographical work chronicles the author’s early childhood, from age 3-16, including experience of rape and encounters with racism. Most complaints are made in relation to graphic scenes of molestation, violence and because Angelou disturbs the earth of traditional values.

The Alabama State Textbook Committee banned the novel because they determined it incited ‘bitterness and hatred toward white people’. America’s history of slavery and segregation, depicted by POC authors, has always been under the attack of censorship, from Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Both novels are Pulitzer Prize winning, and yet Walker’s novel was successfully banned in 2017 from Texas State Prisons for explicit language and graphic depictions of violence.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

MAYA ANGELOU I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings A notable pattern across the novels mentioned in this article, infamous for both their censorship and the calibre of the freedom narrative they relate, is that they are all written black women. Intersectional positions require careful consideration too. It is easy to presume a blunt response will solve a complex matter. The matters these novels portray relate on going realities that affect black communities. It is also not just a matter of protecting voices from censorship, it is a matter of reviewing and improving the educative systems that seen to side-line and silence voices that diverge from the dominant narrative. It is a matter of educating educators and recalibrating educative focuses for equality, diversity and inclusion.

‘Diversify our Narrative’ and ‘The Black Curriculum’ are both groups attempting to expand the fictional canon of schools throughout the US and UK.

CANCEL CULTURE FIN LITTLEFAIr

Those looking to shepherd large groups of people often seek to affect them emotionally. The principles of crowd psychology are incessantly and intentionally brought to bear on the masses - via mass media - to influence their desires and to direct behaviours towards specific actions.

Further, we find ourselves in an Internet Age where, despite the democratic potential of self-publishing, we witness volatile patterns of behaviour on social media, guided by emotion and the power of the hashtag. Moral panics, whipped up into media frenzies to keep the public eye off the political ball, are a welldocumented phenomenon. Public opinion is often unified in voice via digital platforms, even if the source of an opinion is not apparent. Despite lack of an agreed epistemological basis, snowballed opinions can gain dangerous momentum.

Digital vocalisation is often mistaken for affirmative action. We live in the age of Cancel Culture. A signature feature of this social media phenomenon is to target particular opinions and render those responsible for authoring them, near-totally unable to exist within the ecology of social media. Those 'cancelled' struggle to participate on these platforms without being plagued by reminders of what they have done to deserve 'cancellation'. Some of the methods within cancel culture might be considered fairly benign; overt bullying behaviour is somewhat moderated, nevertheless, thousands of accounts chiming in to state their disdain has an intense cumulative effect. It is not fair to say that Cancel Culture is benign.

The reality of the world we live in is that it is teeming with issues which come with their own spectra of opinion. Not all aspects of these opinions are favourable – indeed, some are utterly deplorable – but because they are distasteful, that does does not necessarily invalidate them. Objectively, we must discuss why it is not profitable to think in those ways. Cancel Culture, fundamentally, stands in the way of those necessary discussions..

ANIMAL FARM

When debate cannot be held, alienation occurs: division between parties without language to mitigate the distance. When alienation occurs, hate fosters. Whilst cancel culture has been effective in combatting sexism, racism and any other type of abuse or harmful wrongdoing to others by boycott, its scorched earth policy is problematic. Cancel culture has infiltrated the very fabric of our society, so much so that some people are afraid to learn, engage, and speak up.

Although, in many examples, the principles that call attention to problematic behaviour have been sound – guided by convincing and moral arguments – we cannot ignore the fact a call to cancel often forms a bandwagon of keyboard warriors that apply cancellation without concession, often undermining the valuable arguments they have adopted as they do not understand the nuance of them.

An example: the Summer 2020 cancellation of esteemed Harry Potter author, J.K Rowling. Although highly problematic, it seemed that Rowling’s position was not fully understood by the majority of people who engaged in her cancellation. As such, not only was her view not fully examined, but the legitimate complaints surrounding it were lost in the noise. We should consider that people who would subscribe to a view not unlike those cancelled, feel increasingly 'left behind' each time a view they are allied with is 'cancelled'.

It is perhaps not the individual's duty to educate the next person, but in that sense, should they then have purchase on blocking a discussion in which we can learn and develop greater cultural understanding? If they cannot be debated, are progressive ideals simply debunked as virtue signalling? The irony here is that 'the woke' continue to deal in divisive human behaviours that entrench bipartisanship, turning away from cultural democracy.

CHRISTIAN STAPLETON & FREDDIE HIGHAM According to it’s writer, George Orwell, Animal Farm reflects events leading up to and beyond the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Stalinist era. Partially due to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was a critic of Joseph Stalin and against Stalinism. At this point Soviet Union had mutated into a dictatorship, Stalin ruled through an enforced reign of terror.

Orwell described Animal Farm as a satire against Stalin in a letter to Yvonne Davet. He also stated in a magazine that Animal Farm was his first real attempt "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". The book’s original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, but U.S. publishers decided to drop the subtitle when it was published in 1946, with only one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime keeping it. Other subtitles such as "A Satire" and "A Contemporary Satire” were used. The title Union des Républiques Socialistes Animales for the French translation, which abbreviates to URSA, the word for "bear", a symbol of Russia, was also considered by Orwell.

When originally published the book was panned, receiving a lot of hate. A review from the New Republic in 1946 described the book as ‘puzzled’ and ‘dull’. ‘The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying, in a clumsy way, things that have been said better directly’ was comment in the paper. The article stated, ‘Part of the trouble lies in the fact that the story is too close to recent historical events without being close enough.’

Animal Farm has been banned in many countries around the world.

This is likely due to the messages embedded in the narrative that were especially controversial at the time the novella was published.

Orwell's work explores the activity of politicians to consolidate wealth and power for a ruling elite, while gradually eroding civil rights and liberties to consolidate this power. Orwell, as in 1984, warns readers about the methods of manipulation and propaganda that governments use to control the population.

Animal Farm was published in the rise to the Cold War, drawing communist leaders like Stalin (whom the character Napoleon is based on) into the frame of cultural analysis. All of the novella's characters represent either specific political leaders or classes of people. Snowball relates Leon Trotsky (openly cynical of Stalin and leader of the Bolshevik party), Old Major represents Lenin onetime revolutionary who became head of a one party Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union), Boxer represents the working class and Millie represents the middle class.

Orwell novella is a challenge to dictatorships and political elitism.

As a fairy story carries brutality to teach children about the realities of the world at large, Orwell's allegory provides the same opportunity for adults with just enough distance for truths to be explored rather than dictated.

COMMENTARY / cancellation & erasure

TO GLOSS AND TO GLOSS: Control of the Dual Narrative of Exiles in the Modern World THOM NONELEY (alumnus, 2016) When - as in recent months - we see barbarous temper flare, in protest against the landings of strangers’ boats on familiar shores, it is imperative that we observe the peculiarly embryonic position of refugees in their host cultures. The peculiarity is twofold; at once it reflects the destruction of a group’s historical autonomy, and its besiegement in the present.

PHOTOGRAPHY: archive image included in theinertia.com artical 'How American Surf Culture Was Built on a History of Indigenous Erasure', December 2015

the past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled. theodor adorno

To dismantle an existing identity has, sadly, a wealth of historical precedents. The sadistic image of book-burnings is a thread which runs through the histories of displaced peoples. Lutheran Salzburgers, expelled from the city in 1731, saw their scriptures destroyed, and the Moslawi, returning home after the Fall of Mosul, found their libraries razed. The archetype is almost numbingly commonplace. In the extreme, the viewer can dissociate, possibly entirely, from the visceral brutality.

Its counterpart is far more recondite. When Theodor Adorno wrote “the past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled”, there had already been decades of Jewish settlers in Europe and North America.

European Jewry, in response to the germination of a hatred which would come to bear its bitterest fruit from the 1930s onwards, found itself crossing borders, from state to state, hemisphere to hemisphere.

By 1941, the now rather large Jewish diasporas in NYC were classified as ‘enemy aliens’. Denied access to political authority (stories of Tammany Hall reveal much regarding this), Jews in exile across the globe have similarly lost a degree of autonomy in representations of themselves and their pasts.

The author Will Self quotes his American Jewish mother as saying that “English Jews are like the English - but more so”. What stronger testament to the ruthlessly esemplastic power of mainstream society is there? Through assimilation, a group is coerced into surrendering autonomy. This denial does not manifest itself in the news-reel footage of book-burning, but rather in an ‘always already’ absent present.

Perhaps we owe more to Derrida for his ‘rehabilitation of ghosts as a respectable subject of enquiry’ than we often give credit for.

Besides, there is a case to be made that the immigration records housed in the national archives of the UK and USA are themselves redacted texts. The perversion is rooted in that tens of thousands of those fleeing persecution, pogrom, and Pale were turned away at several points due to anti-Semitic calumny.

As today, Middle English afforded the word ‘gloss’ polarities of meaning. Chaucer’s Merchant, having told his ribald tale, apologises to the, perhaps, more demure pilgrims, “I kan nat glose, I am a rude man”. He confesses his impotence in regulating his own text. The idea of reduction remains today - to gloss over.

But there exists, amongst several extinct definitions, the word’s obverse meaning - to extrapolate. The sense that a narrative has been drawn out, exposed, laid bare as if supine on an examination table, is prevalent in our assessment of communities in exile. Adorno eulogises ‘background’ as being hauled along on “the triumphal automobile of [...] statisticians”.

The narrative stories of refugees are ripped apart by this binary ‘glossing’ - at once both absent and present, at once both reified and negated.

If it is that émigrés are divorced from their narrative autonomy, or rather, that it is swamped by the dominant narrative, what does this signify? There seems to be a need to keep the opposing rhetorics of isolationism and assimilationism at arm’s length.

Both have enough gravitational pull to wash the tide over any competing accounts. If anything at all, it must guide us to a need for societal and artistic preservation - else the history of the refugee is consigned, yet again, to oblivion.

The Merchant, pictured in the illuminated Ellesmere manuscri pt of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Manuscipt created c. 1400-1410; tale written at end c.14th. © MS EL 26 C 9, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

lgbtq+ COMMENT / film

RUSSIAN CENSORSHIP OF ROCKET MAN hadley stewart (ALUMNUS, 2014) Rocketman tells the story of Sir Elton John’s rise to fame. Tiny Dancer, Your Song, and many other of John’s famous songs are woven into the script that sees Taron Egerton incarnate the singer, bringing his upbringing, musical success and offstage personal challenges to the big screen. The 2019 film received two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor and Best Original Song, as well as an Oscar for Best Original Song. Rocketman was also nominated for a Grammy Award and several British Academy Film Awards nominations. Yet despite the numerous accolades, it was the censoring of the film’s depiction of John’s sexuality that drowned out his music.

Russia has been at the centre of controversial policies when it comes to the right of its LGBTQ+ citizens for years, so it was perhaps unsurprising that the country would censor parts of Rocketman. Upon the release of the film in the country, scenes involving kissing and intimacy between two men were removed from the film, alongside any other positive references to Elton John being a gay man.

Although being gay is not illegal in Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s government continues to push for policies that limit the freedom of expression of LGBTQ+ people. The country’s so-called “anti-gay propaganda” law has been used to fine and imprison LGBTQ+ people for doing anything that might be viewed as “promoting” a sexuality or gender identity that does not conform with Russian conservative values.

Elton John described the censorship through an Instagram post as a “sad reflection of the divided world we still live in and how it can still be so cruelly unaccepting of the love between two people.” John is arguably one of the most famous gay men in the world, who alongside a successful career in the music industry, has championed LGBTQ+ rights at a time when very few people in the public eye were talking about these issues. He also founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which helps to fight the stigma against people living with HIV and raise awareness of the condition across the world. Consequently, those who have criticised Russia’s censorship have pointed to the fact that John’s sexuality would not have come as a surprise to the film’s audience, and scenes depicting his relationship with other men were to be expected.

The censoring of scenes from Rocketman demonstrates the influence that political policies can have over the Arts.

The voices of LGBTQ+ people continue to be silenced across the world, resulting in their stories being distorted or disregarded altogether. Irrespective of Russia’s censorship, the fact that a gay man’s story was told in a biopic with a wide-reaching audience remains a positive thing for LGBTQ+ people. The representation of LGBTQ+ people on the big screen remains somewhat limited and their stories are often seldom told by people from within their own community. The popularity of Rocketman and the universal themes evoked in the film enable an international audience to empathise with John’s personal journey. It will have gone some way to open up conversations about sexuality on a global scale, which will contribute to the slow shift in attitudes towards greater equality for LGBTQ+ people.

Taron Egerton as Elton John and Richard Madden as his lover and manager John Reid in Rocketman PARAMOUNT PICTURES/ALAMY

CULTURAL HERITAGE AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN WELSH

DECOLONIALISING CULTURE ANUJ MISHRA Globally, there has been pressure upon European museums to return objects taken from other countries for some time. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd has caused the calls for the decolonisation of our cultural institutions and need to compensate to grow even louder.

Many of the UK’s most prominent museums paint a heavily idealised picture. of their inventories We, as visitors, are often under the impression that the objects on display were somehow fairly acquired and brought to museums as a means of preservation and education. The truth is that, all too often, the objects we see in museums across the UK were taken, without permission, from colonies of the British Empire.

The British Museum alone holds a vast number of objects of great cultural significance from around the world. Some of the most well-known are The Elgin Marbles, The Rosetta Stone, and The Benin Bronzes. All of these artefacts have disputed ownership.

Stephen Welsh is an independent curator, previously a curator at the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, and the Manchester Museum.

He has worked on the repatriation of sacred objects to the Indigenous people of Australia, and the general decolonisation of museums.

I spoke to Stephen about the importance of decolonisation and the need for museums to be respectful and culturally aware. Stephen, above all, emphasised the need for museums to be totally honest about the provenance of their artefacts, and the history of Empire itself.

One of your major projects during your work at the Manchester Museum was the repatriation of 43 sacred ceremonial objects to the Indigenous people of Australia. What has the mainstream response to your work in decolonisation been?

How has it changed throughout your career?

SW

At the beginning of my career, almost 15 years ago, repatriation of sacred objects was extremely uncommon. One notable example had been the return of a holy relic to the Sioux indigenous people of America by the Glasgow Museum, which was probably the one of the only instances of the return of sacred objects prior to our project.

The response to our returning these sacred ceremonial objects was really positive, which goes to show how far we have come even in the last 15 years. Perhaps, back then, a project like this would have garnered more negative press and would have been met with a sense of nervousness. Now, younger people recognise the need to return these items which were taken without permission, and don’t necessarily belong here.

Since then, most museums have been committed to the return of ancestral human remains to their places of origin; however, the return of objects remains relatively uncommon. Moving forward, it’s important that we provide better support for smaller museums who haven’t had the resources to carry out this type of work.

Back in 2010, David Cameron famously said: “If you say yes to one [repatriation] you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty”. Of course, objects ‘owned’ by museums have become part of the cultural fabric of the country, even the Crown Jewels aren’t necessarily British. What would you say to in response to the former prime minister? Where does it end?

SW

What a wonderful opportunity that would be! Say the British Museum were empty, we, as people of this country, would be able to fill it with things that represent us. We could work in our communities, and with others across the world who we are connected to. In a way, this would probably be more ethical and appropriate to our own needs.

In reality, that isn’t going to happen of course. What we find is that people actually want their culture to be represented in museums, but along with that they want us to be honest about the history of the British Empire and how these objects were procured. Ideally, the aim is that if a community or country expresses an interest in having an object returned, we do our best to build trust and support them.

There really isn’t a queue of thousands of communities asking for their objects to be returned. In fact, most museums will already have a record of the objects that they shouldn’t really have. Museums aren’t going to become empty overnight.

The success of the repatriation I took part in at the Manchester Museum was based on the work of my predecessor: Dr George Bankes, the Keeper of Ethnology for the Manchester Museum, and an Old Boy of Bolton School. He identified these sacred objects with the help of indigenous communities, and respected their wish for the objects to not be displayed to the public. This made it extremely easy for us to organise the repatriation at the request of the objects’ owners.

Protesters throw a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour, during a Black Lives Matter protest rally, in Bristol, England, Sunday June 7, 2020, in response to the recent killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, USA. PHOTOGRAPH: Ben Birchall/PA via AP News

With the recent prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there have been numerous questions raised over public statues of figures connected to slavery and colonialism, a notable example being that of Edward Colston in Bristol. Many calls have been made for these to be put into museums, do these objects really belong in museums?

sw

Edward Colston made his fortune in the trade and transportation of African people as slaves. Much of his wealth was donated to charities in his home-town of Bristol, where many buildings and streets bear his name. A statue of him, which ignored his role in the slave-trade, was torn down by protesters for the Black Lives Matter in June 2020.

When working with sensitive objects, such as these, it is extremely important for us as museums to work alongside communities with regards to what they feel is appropriate.

During my work as a curator during the establishment of the International Slavery Museum in 2007, we were faced with numerous difficult questions over the display of sensitive objects. We aimed, above all, to be totally honest about the history of slavery and the wealth that was drawn from it.

With one particular artefact, a Ku Klux Klan outfit dating from the 1920s, we worked closely with the black community of Liverpool not only over how we should display it, but whether we should display it at all.

While there were many who held the belief that the object was far too horrific to be displayed, many members of the community were actually keen that the artefact should be displayed, in order to be completely open about the brutal racism and prejudice of the time.

In the case of the Colston statue, it is for the people of Bristol to decide. It is likely that it will end up in a museum, but again, its display will require involvement from the black community, who in many ways still live with the impact of slavery.

How have you gone about rebuilding trust in museums from minority ethnic groups, who in many cases have a personal connection to colonialism as well as exhibits procured during the colonial period?

sw

The major shift that we, as museums, have undergone in the 21st Century is to actively go out into communities to ask questions. It used to be the case that museums thought they had all the answers, and were happy to hear from people, as long as they came to us. Now, we are the ones asking questions with the aim of building trust in museums through transparency.

The movement known as Rhodes Must Fall began with a protest action at the Uniersity of Cape Town on 9 March 2015.  The discussion around decolonising our education system has been recharged by the recent spate of Black Lives Matter protests.

Museum curators and staff are, for the most part, white. We are working hard to diversify our interactions with minority ethnic groups, and building relationships with people where they are, instead of expecting them to come to us. This has also meant using methods developed by teachers and social workers to build connections with people.

What is your response to a belief held by some that cultural artefacts have been ‘better preserved’ by Western countries than they could have been by their countries of origin?

SW

Back in the colonial era, this was used as a justification for the removal of objects in the first place. This logic persists today, especially with reference to sites such as the Buddhas of Bamyan, which was blown up by a terrorist group in 2001.

I would say that we ourselves have a lot to learn with regards to the care of objects. Museums can be too confident in the technology at our disposal. In my time, I have seen many objects which have suffered a lot of unintentional damage as a result of the way the museum itself has treated them.

Even the transportation of objects across different climates can have a detrimental impact on them. Think about how an object would react to being moved from a sunny, tropical country like Nigeria to the UK, where it’s damp and dark. What ends up happening is that museums have to spend large amounts of money on machines to maintain the ideal conditions, or else the object will suffer.

We have a lot to learn from other cultures about the way in which they care for objects, which are often unfamiliar to museums in the West. Examples would include the numerous Buddhist and Hindu temple sculptures which are kept in museums, and of course people of these faiths react to these objects in an entirely different way to others would.

Some of my work in Manchester Museum was in relation to a large sculpture of the Buddha from Myanmar, which was brought to Britain in the Victorian Era. When we had it on display, Buddhists would come to leave offerings for the statue, which really alerted us to the importance that the object had for people of that faith.

Where there are places of historical interest under threat, we should always aim to protect them, but that doesn’t mean we have to take them away. Returning to the Buddhas of Bamyan, which have been restored since their partial destruction – we always have the option to conserve and repair objects where they are.

A petition calling on the Government to “include Britain’s colonial past in the compulsory curriculum” has garnered almost 270k signatures. Will museums have a role in decolonising education?

SW

Museums are a huge resource for schools, and will play a vital role moving forward, if the curriculum is to be successfully transformed. It will be extremely important for museums to help support schools in their transition to teaching these sensitive periods of history.

Some museums are even taking active roles in advocating for the decolonisation of the curriculum and also for a diverse curriculum which well represents modern-day Britain. Going back to my own school days and learning about the cotton industry, which was so important to the development of the North West, we were told where the coal came from but never where the cotton came from. If we’re going to learn about the coal miners, we should learn about the enslaved people of the Americas who were growing the cotton.

It’s about being completely clear in our approach to education.

ABOVE: Cover artwork for Berrar Darker ‘Be Like Me’ and BELOW, a selfportrait of the artist from alumnus Harry G. Ward (class of 2012) The cover art is based on JC Leyendecker's early 20th century painting of a soldier relating tales of war to children. FAR RIGHT. Leyendecker's The Hero's War Story was the front cover of the US Saturday Evening Post, May 10, 1919

musical subcultures / regulations

UK DRILL: Policing the Product of Circumstance

charlie derrar / berrar darker (alumnus, class of 2012)

Digga D , image: Woeman 9 October, 2019

Artists who push the boundaries of societal convention are often the cause of debate. A key factor that seems to stir the pot of creative censorship is when artists and styles seem to spring from nowhere. New genres, subgenres and scenes can burst across platforms overnight and disrupt what we have become accustomed to. Often, however, these grassroot trends have been seeding for some time and information about their origins just takes time to catch up with the sound. In some instances, the scene hits and meets with controversy first, the sound and the impulse of the creators lagging. Heavy Metal, Punk, Grunge, Rock ‘n’ Roll, House, Drum ‘n’ Bass and Garage (to name a few) all started off as new, ground-breaking genres which shocked people but then were absorbed into the ecology of popular music.

Arguably the ‘biggest’ genre over the past 40 years has been Hip-Hop. Nielsen music (the industry-standard information and sales tracking sector) released a mid-year report highlighting Hip-Hop as 2020’s current most popular genre, with Drake as the most streamed artist. The genre spans breakbeat in the 80s, the ‘Golden Era’, the rise of Gangsta Rap in the 90s, commercial club rapping and Grime in the 2000s, and, growing from there, Lofi, Trip-Hop, Cloud Rap, Mumble Rap and many other niche genres, all fuelled by the expanding technological age and digital streaming platforms (DSPs).

Hip-Hop artists have both been subjected negative notoriety and have courted controversy. Similarly, debate has emerged around the new scene that’s sweeping the UK and gaining traction across the world: Drill. Drill began in Chicago in the early 2010s and is still a young genre in terms of established understanding. UK Drill is sonically quite different from its American counterpart, as it harnesses the energy and flow of Grime, but has similar roots. Both forms have emanated out of low-income inner-city areas in the grip of crime.

The lyrical subject matter of the genre tends to relate the artists’ immediate life situations, quite acutely presenting the difficulties, tension and conflicts of their circumstances.

Drill has emerged from the underground into the mainstream with breakthrough stars reaching the UK top 20 and garnering millions of views on YouTube. It is commonly produced in underground studios by unsigned, independent producers. These producers are often kids young enough to be revising for their GCSEs. Within the scene, popularity of artists and tracks builds as the music bursts from geographical area to area, as others are drawn to the performance activity in their area.

Encounters with the law, you know?

I had to focus on growth, you know?

Now all these people come forward, you know?

I still walk a thin line between music and road’ - Headie One

After a scene is established and generates income, a trend follows: it very quickly gets attention from mainstream media platforms who condemn it and the censorship debate is revitalised. Rappers within the genre often walk an ambiguous line between criminality and artistry. For instance, Headie One’s 2019 album ’Music X Road,’ alludes to the fact that he has not yet given up his criminal ties for a legitimate career in music. The social ambiguities of the genre are probably set to continue until enough money is generated by some producers and artists to sustain legitimate business models. Perhaps when enough time has passed, we’ll hear strains of the currently condemned songs in the background of adverts.

UK DRILL: Policing the Product of Circumstance CHARLIE DERRAR / BERRAR DARKER This is a genre that speaks of the socio-cultural experience of its producers. It foregrounds what it is like to live in areas of social deprivation in the UK and largely speaks in the unmitigated voices of those that live in them. But let’s also consider the genre as expression of applied aspiration. What if we view the genre as both a pressure value of expression and a solution arising from within a social issue? The social deprivation and the anti-social behaviours endemic in this situation existed long before the genre in question was even conceived, long before all of the genres mentioned in this article were conceived. Consider the personal backgrounds of say, political activist Malcolm X and musical outfits that are now household names: NWA, Wu Tang Clan, Roll Deep, So Solid Crew. Consider the untapped potential in underfunded communities. Will we encourage it to flourish or throw up barriers to Drill or encourage its expression?

Economic inequality – the wealth gap, house prices and gentrification, homelessness, destruction of youth centres and the consistent underfunding of artistic spaces are just some of the UK’s contemporary maladies. It perhaps begins to become obvious why these ‘vulgar’ and ‘unacceptable’ forms are popular if we consider the detail of the context of deprivation. Art is often an outpouring of personal expression and a reflection of what the artist sees, hears, feels and thinks. If you grow up in a context that is misaligned with middle-class tastes, it is most likely that your articulations, artistic or otherwise, will not be palatable to a middle-class audience. Without glossing over personal responsibility to law and order, if we censor musical expression like Drill are we also averting our eyes from difficult social issues?

You see, you wouldn’t ask why the rose that grew from the concrete had damaged petals.

On the contrary, we would celebrate its tenacity.

We would all love its will to reach the sun.

Well, we are the roses - this is the concrete - and these are my damaged petals.

Don’t ask me why. Thank God... ask me how!

- Tupac Shakur

LITERATURE / BANNED BOOKS

THE HUNGER GAMES henry miller-stenton

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a dystopian novel written from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen. In this futuristic setting, North America as we know it today has been destroyed. The new, postapocalyptic nation of Panem is run by a powerful dictatorship. In order to control its citizens, the government holds an annual event called the Hunger Games wherein twelve boys and twelve girls from Panem’s various districts are forced to fight to the death in a televised spectacle. According to Collins, The Hunger Games was written to spark discussion about themes such as severe poverty, starvation, oppression, and the effects of war. The characters, mainly children, are put in extremely morally complex situations and constantly forced to choose between death and self-preservation.

The Hunger Games has been banned in in a range of countries over the years since its publication. In The Hunger Games, the main focus of the novel is the 'good-guys'' quest to break out of the closed regime of the 'big bad' government. The government is emphatically bad, cartoonishly so. They are also eventually overthrown against the odds. The act of censoring this novel falls in line with Louis Althusser's supposition that the bourgeoise will take issue with the glorification of rebellion against oppressive governments. Althusser argued that the bourgeoisie maintain power by using both repressive state apparatus (coercive power like the police and the army) and ideological state apparatus: institutions that spread bourgeois ideology and ensure that the proletariat is in a state of false class consciousness.Despite its popularity and commercial success, many have challenged this book, perhaps frightened by the power it might have on its readers.

In 2014 anti-government protestors in Thailand used a symbol of resistance from the book (a raised hand with three middle fingers pressed together) to express solidarity with people oppressed by government rule. According to news reports, at least seven people were arrested in connection to this event. Critics have also accused The Hunger Games of being anti-ethnic, anti-family, and violent, and of having offensive language, occult/satanic references, and references to overt sexuality. Collins has never directly responded to banning attempts, but has stated that the book raises important themes that should be talked about publicly.

ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC / MUSIC AND SOCIETY AN INTERVIEW WITH LIAM MALONEY

FOUNDATIONS OF HOUSE JAMES ROBERTS

Liam Maloney is an associate lecturer at The University of York's Comtemporary Music Research Centre. His areas of research include: house music, electronic music, sampling, contextual recommendation, music and emotion and music and everyday life. Liam runs the Foundations of House project and recently led Sixth Form sessions focused on the sociocultural evolution of House Music as part of SPACE enrichment. Liam often acts as the musical and technical director of School's major theatrical productions.

What spurred you on to pursue music?

LM

I had zero interest in music as a kid, like absolutely nothing, my mum and dad had it on in the car but there wasn’t anything that grabbed me, so I came into it in a really weird way. I ended up doing some background music for primary school, and went to my uncle’s studio- he used to write jingles for skysports- he used to do all the IDs for them- and I went to his studio with all the flashing lights and keyboards and fell in love with the process of making stuff rather than the process of listening and creating stuff, and ever since then I’ve just gone point to point through production rather than music. I’m not interested in music anymore, just the way people listen- that’s my thing.

What do you believe is the most notable way that corona virus has shaped and changed the music industry?

LM

Wow. So obviously the shift to digital and the idea that we don’t really own music anymore was a massive change in the music industry, particularly for artists and creatives. People were still listening to music all the time but it meant that artists weren’t selling their music in the same way that they used to, so since that point there has been a big shift for artists making money via live performances rather than off of album sales. As a consequence of that, the album format sort of died and people just pushed out single releases as and when they had got something. With covid kicking in it means that it is no longer feasible for people to gig, so there’s been quite a significant impact on low and mid ranking artists. People who can’t rely on streaming revenues. So the impact has been absolutely awful!

Do you believe the emergence of virtual festivals and mainstreaming of electronic music will crush the negativity surrounding the genre, diversifying its fan base and fundamentally making it more popular?

LM

No, not in the slightest. A lot of the controversy surrounding EDM is typically drug culture and issues surrounding consent as well, there's quite a predatory atmosphere at a lot of live EDM shows, so it might squash that to a degree, but I don’t believe virtual concerts will become a norm. We have been streaming concerts for years regardless so I don’t think people will give up going to live gigs, and when you have those negative environments issues begin to arise again.

ABOVE: Liam Maloney LEFT: The Stonewall Inn. In the Y12 F0H session, Year 12 explored the often marginalised narratives of disco and house music, taking in house music’s stylistic features as reflective of wider sociocultural developments. Taking its cue from disco, house is often seen as a purely evolutionary musical development, when in fact the seeds of house music were sown with the Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall, and gay liberation.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Liam Maloney

As we move into an age where technology becomes the norm, and is producing music of a much higher quality, do you believe that acoustic and non electronically produced songs will become obsolete?

LM

No I don’t think anything will become obsolete in that regard, I mean there’s a reason we hold music so dearly in that regard I mean there’s a reason why Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is the best selling vinyl record, people still love it. Yes we might have to start the remastering process for certain formats, but the thing that’s actually quite concerning are these little monsters (shows Amazon Echo). The thing that is going to start happening again is that we are going to start listening in mono as we are only listening to one sound source, so that stereo becomes obsolete. I think people will keep pouring over it like we do with deluxe editions and remasters, squeezing all the old properties that we have got.

With the emergence of a more diverse set of sub-genres within electronic music, do you believe that some of the traditional genres, such as house, are being lost?

LM

No I don’t, I think that if anything we have seen a sort of resurgence. Arguably in the more popular end of stuff, when disclosure came out they were making like classic sort of Chicago house stuff, and we have seen a giant resurge in disco. It has become hip again, it’s cool. If anything there is a very rose tinted view of what dance music was and it’s all coming back. Rave is back! We have rave beats and house music coming back.

90s Techno is still waiting for a resurgence to happen. I don’t think disco has ever been this big. If you look at dance music history, now is the biggest time because all those genres are up and running on the internet, you have audiences able to directly access whatever audio form they want so they can directly engage with incredibly specific choices in what music they listen to. The emergence of EDM is reintroducing genres that have maybe been forgotten about over the years.

How has ‘future house’ shaped the world of house music?

LM

That is one where I can’t give any definitive answer. I think future house has had big impact in Asia, like Japan and Korea, there seems to be a big shift into those tonalities with people like Makros, but I don’t think that future house has ever really gone very far- it isn’t really at a point where it is big enough or defined enough as a genre to really offer something back into the conversation yet.

How was working alongside groups as influential as pendulum- has it shaped you more as a musician in any way?

LM

That’s a bit of a past life- back when I used to do a lot of live drum and bass stuff. I think arguably it pulls back the curtain of fame and this plot that there is some sort of unique and important artist where as realistically, there’s tonnes of people doing millions of things out there and some just seem to hit it big.

There are some really interesting people I’ve met in that scene that are arguably infinitely better than the big artists but there was something about the big artists that seem to catch people’s imagination. So if anything it’s maybe appreciate smaller, independent producers more as a consequence.

What advice do you give to young and aspiring producers with regard to being noticed and gathering a following? And the age old question: do you believe that producers should use pre-made presets and samples in their music, or instead should try to create their own, original sample library?

LM

So the whole digital revolution changed the way stuff worked. It used to be you built a demo and sent it off to various labels with the hopes you struck lucky at some point, where as now, the way people seem to gain any sort of notoriety is through networks more than anything else- personal networks. Eventually you produce enough stuff that one little label starts to pay attention to your soundcloud and then if you have that under your belt you can begin to slowly work the way up the ladder towards success. Do what you think you should be doing- be as honest as you can! Preset Jockeys are inherently lazy- it’s a great tool for learning, but how can you ever truly establish yourself from anyone else if you aren’t creating your own unique sound!?

popular music / regulations

BLURRED LINES: The most controversial song of the decade? james roberts

Music is a key medium of cultural expression. The strains of a song might carry harsh connotations of repression and be used to incite rebellion. Conversely, melodically and lyrically, through peaceful words, music might establish contemplative solitude. Lyrics are not the only vehicle through which the expressive intention of music is felt, but we might perhaps consider them the least ambiguous articulation of a pop song's focus and tone.

If melody and lyrics are both medium and message, musicians hold considerable power in their hands. Some musicians enjoy a sphere of influence larger than that of many political leaders. With this understood, abuse of such a political (with a small 'p') platform is as unacceptable as it is inevitable.

Robin Thicke’s 2013 song 'Blurred Lines', featuring Pharrell Williams, abused this very privilege. Not only did the song promote the objectification of women, it also trivialised the matter of sexual consent.

Between 2009/10 and 2011/12 there were an estimated 78,000 victims of rape per year in England and Wales - 69,000 females and 9,000 males (Home Office and Office for National Statistics, via The Guardian 11/01/13). Nevertheless, there was considerable lagtime before Thicke's song lyrics were queried.

To my astonishment, some of the largest radio stationsin the UK gave considerable airtime to a song that, at the very least, seems to encourage the predatory behaviours associated with rape culture. Composition, marketing, release and airtime of this record failed to take into account the impact the lyrics could have on rape victims, and the influence it may have on those inclined to believe that such acts are can be mitigated by claiming the lines in an encounter are blurred. Even worse, perhaps the impact of the record was taken into account; as we well know, controversy is an effective marketing tool.

Williams' initial rebuttal to the plethora of complaints, on the ground of lyrical interpretation not connotation, refused any idea that his song, and singing style might convey any deeper sinister meanings. He later refuted his first statements, saying: “I realised that we live in a chauvinist culture in our country [...] I [realise] that there are men who use that same language when taking advantage of a woman, and it doesn’t matter that that’s not my behaviour. Or the way I think about things. It just matters how it affects women. And I was like, Got it. I get it. Cool.”

I hate these blurred lines, I know you want it.

Sadly, there was nothing “cool” about the greater affect Robin Thicke’s lyrics had on the wider audience. Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) banned the song from all campus events in line with their ‘End Rape Culture and Lad Banter’ campus policy. In the States, student unions took to the streets to campaign for an end to the trivialising of rape culture. Meanwhile, English universities, including the University of Bolton, formed a firm and resolute decision that this song, along with its face value connotations, were not to be given airtime on their premises.

Despite the façade of victory, the initial damage of this song cannot be undone. The song is out there, and others like it. To just point a finger at Thicke and Williams would also be to disregard those culpable in pop-music in general. The prominence of such cultural expression - despite prominent criticism - perpetuates “lad banter” that prides itself on crossing lines that it is unacceptable to cross.

Unfortunately, music labels, producers and artists seem far more interested in sales than moral responsibility.

IBRAHIM ALI & JAMES ROBERTS SHARE HIGHLIGHTS FROM BOLTON FILM FESTIVAL 2020 2019

STORY Jolanta Bankowska

From the moment we wake, to our last thoughts at night, we are shrouded in a cloud of technology. Taking a reductionist art form and applying it to a whole world problem, Story gives a frighteningly accurate and profoundly astute insight into a world stripped of individuality. This fantastically minimalist piece questions our own control and creativity in a world dictated by technology from which we cannot escape …

2020

THE BUTTERFLY CAGE Hélèna Serra, Maxime Sabisik

A mother’s grief for her lost son finally comes to an end as she is presented with an opportunity to bring him back. This beautifully psychedelic work invokes a sense of detachment for its viewers, as they watch the collapse of a fundamentally fractured family under the weight of sorrow. Theyare left with little hope to construct a future out of pieces that no longer fit together

2018

SEOULSORI

KIM Kyoung-bae

2020

ALEX & MR FLUFFKINS

Adeena Grubb, Andy Biddle This short, sweet, satirical piece expresses the crippling affect of the pandemic on both physical and mental health. It relates digression back to our animalistic ancestors’ way of life. Its accessible style conveys, in melancholic undertones,that life will never truly return to how we once knew it.

Seoulsori’s abstract approach encourages us to imagine and expand the box in which we all live, encouraging engagement within our own culturesto seek a state of equilibrium between the past and the future. It’s rich colour, soulgrabbing music and vicious portrayals of atypical culture combine to form a work unlike any other. The film throws focus on the loss of individuality even amongst the most aware of our society.

FILM REVIEW 2020

RE-ENTRY

Ben Brand

Based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel, Re-Entry presents a unique take on a big theological debate: where do we go after death? The production’s immersive and vivid cinematography, combined with an intense soundtrack makes this piece a sensory masterpiece. The viewer is left as perplexed as they may have been to begin with.

2019

FILTERFACE - DOUBLE TAP TO LIKE Will and Carly

This intensely satirical piece explores loss of human identity and individuality, through the medium of dance. It focuses on the importance young people place on the desire to look picture perfect, hiding their most natural features behind filter.s ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’ is a growing phenomenon related to social media validation, and degradation of young people’s social confidence.

2016

CAUTIONARY TALES

CHRISTOPHER BARRETT & LUKE TAYLOR This short film had a very clever concept, devised and directed by Us creatives Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor. On a basic level it is about the lies parents tell their children in order to make them behave, and that this is a contradiction in terms.

This heart-warming story is accentuated by the main character, played by Ross Hatt, a natural pick for the role. Also, the well-chosen soundtrack, perfectly reflects the tone and themes of this film. Overall, this film lbrings cheer.

2020

ANY INSTANT WHATEVER

Directed and animated by Michelle Bard this short-animated film is for those of you who enjoy philosophical ideas about time, movement and change. The film is centred around a man on a chair and revolves around this one room until everything has broken down into one blend of different colours, patterns and textures. The more times you watch this film the more you start to understand it.

2019

POMMEL

PARIS ZARCILLA

A short film focused on the relationship between two young brothers, the pressures they face at home and how this affects them outside. Both boys, talented at gymnastics soon see a gap in their abilities, leading to a rivalry and one sibling feeling alienated. Pommel written and directed by Paris Zarcilla, is the crescendo of all these problems in a short time frame and either the potential devastation they can cause or the unbreakable bonds it creates.

art & political censorship

DEGENERACY: Departure from Tradition Presented as Counter Culture HARVEY GOODWIN All modern art was considered degenerate by the National Socialist German Workers Party. German museums were purged of modern art, with over 15,550 works removed. A selection of these were put in a show in Munich titled ‘ Entartete Kunst.’ Famous works of modern masters were chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. The exhibition was designed to inflame public opinion against modernism.

The Nazi's planned removal of these pieces was coordinated by Josef Goebbels via Adolf Ziegler, the head of Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste ( Reich of Visual Art). The project was a six-man commission to remove all arts deemed modern, degenerate or subversive and to create one museum which helped support the ideologies of the Nazi party. A main reasons for removal of art works from public view were that they preserved Jewish spirit; removal helped to reposition Jews as the enemy to the German state. Art works were banned if they were expressionistic, abstract and especially if they were made by a Jewish artist. If the art work didn’t portray Hitler’s heavily-shaped ideologies, present Hitler as a strong leader who was making Germany great again, or demonstrate what Nazi Germany should be like, it was vetoed. For example, it was considered essential that those pictured in an art work were of the 'Aryan race' with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Most of the 'degenerate' art was burned by the Nazis, to stop any illegal books or arts being used by underground movements within Nazi occupation. It is estimated that over 5,000 books were burnt by the Nazi party. The Nazis also hid many artistic masterpieces for post-war re-sale. Some of these were found after the war in the Austrian Alps.

Vast amounts of stolen Nazi art was also found in the Altaussee Salt mines, one of the largest Austrian mines which lies beneath a mountain in Salzkammergut. Over 6,000 paintings and masterpieces such as Michelangelo’s Madonna, and priceless works by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer were found by US soldiers in May 1945, as World War 2 drew to a close. These arts were largely forgotten to the general public under Nazi control. Without the soldiers' find, some of the most important treasures of European culture would have been lost. The men who found the stash - referred to in the media as the ‘greatest treasure find in history’ - were named 'The Monuments Men.'

Manchester literature festival CHRISTIAN STAPLETON

Kae Tempest ON CONNECTION

Kae Tempest is a musician and poet. Their new non-fiction publication is an essay on creativity's power to connect. Anyone who has seen Tempest live has likely witnessed their talent for sparking connection. They set up the idea of connection and how to connect as a paramount concern for an alienated age in conversation with Max Porter at Manchester Literature Festivals headliner event.

If we give as much as we expect to take from a novel, a poem, an image or an album (or a conversation, or a relationship), it has a greater chance of becoming profound. As readers, we feel this happen when something speaks directly to our experience and we feel the words burning themselves into us [...] you may forget the exact words, but you carry a relationship with the text through your life. You may think this was entirely because of the quality of the text, but it was also about the quality of your reading. ― Kae Tempest, On Connection

In the early phase of the conversation with Porter, Tempest conceded that the choice to write a non-fiction book was due to Faber & Faber commissioning the project, and lockdown providing an advantageous set of limitations through which they could work with intention. The idea of creative restraint is one that then became a very interesting point of discussion.

Tempest suggested that a sense of formal tension greatly benefits their work – ‘restriction gives me something to push against’. They also raised the question, ‘is form particularly important for something to be a novel?’ We are often taught the importance of form and structure to our writing but it is important to test our own ideas against the limitation of form.

Tempest also explored the emotional experience of performance, relating to the digital audience their experiences of panic attacks on stage at gigs, and the repercussions and opportunities mental health matters open up for writing. They consider mental health is a subject that needs to be more commonplace within the characterisation of protagonists in stories.

Nick Hornby just like you

He never told Cassie that they were different. It was too important to her that they were the same.” ― nick hornby, just like you

In Just Like You, Hornby narrates one half of the novel from the point of view of a working-class black man in his early 20s and the other half from the point of view of a 42-year-old middle-class white mother. He set this romance squarely in times of BREXIT, dramatising differences in class, race and generation.

In his talk, Hornby spoke about putting himself and his past experiences into his characters as a means to create more compelling and realistic roles with complex nuanced emotions. Hornby also spoke about the importance of minor characters as an art form in themselves. He illustrated this by imagining them as the smaller background trees painted upon a vast canvas. Their inclusion pads out the world the writer is attempting to build, linking back to the more authentic and realistic feeling discussed before. Hornby also touched on the topic of identity politics and the effect which it can have on writing, providing different cultural and geographical perspectives of life to deepen the world of the book's draw.

Topically, Hornby also discussed the impact of contemporary phenomena and events upon literature.

He suggested we might anticipate a pandemic style becoming more or less popular and also a the rise of new genre surrounding BREXIT.

architecture

MIES VAN DER ROCE / AGAINST ESTABLISHED ORDER ADAM HALL (ALUMNUS, 2018)

Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, (27 March 1886 – 17 August 1969) is one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, known for his role in the development of the most enduring architectural style of the era: modernism. Born in Aachen, Germany, Mies' career began in the influential studio of Peter Behrens, where Mies worked alongside other two other titans of modernism, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

For almost a century, Mies' minimalist style has proved very popular; his famous aphorism "less is more" is still widely used, even by those who are unaware of its origins.

The master plan of the Illinois Tech Mies Campus (pictured right) was one of the largest projects Mies ever conceived and the only one to come so close to achieving complete realisation. The campus encompasses 20 of his buildings, the greatest concentration of Miesdesigned buildings in the world.

Mies' academic buildings stood in sharp contrast to the patrician campuses of the past. His buildings embodied twentieth-century methods and materials—steel and concrete frames with curtain walls of brick and glass. His buildings were both magisterial and harmonious, and they set a new aesthetic standard for modern architecture. The sleek urbanism of Illinois Tech’s campus became a reflection of the school’s technological focus; it also evoked the openness of the Midwestern prairie—an oasis in the midst of a major city.

interrupting traditional mapping of public spacE encourages freer forms of community behaviours.

OPPOSITE & RIGHT: Use of Dada-style collage and Giorgio de Chirico's surrealmetaphysical landscapes as artistic play to disturb the design of traditional civic space. From Adam's current architecture portfolio.

Mies was not ignorant to the traditional civic planning of Chicago as context to this development, but resistant to the conciliar operations of a dominant culture. For this reason, his architectures cannot be reduced to purely formal structures disengaged from the contingencies of place and time. Culture is the cause of built form, making architecture but an instrument dependent on socioeconomic, political, and technological processes. Mies’ opposition to existing cultural manifestations, led him, and many others to establish unreasoned order. Interrupting the traditional mapping of public space encourages freer forms of public behaviours.

POUND & FASCISM: PRESERVING THE CANON LUKE CAVANAUGH (alumnus, 2018)

William Roberts' The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel is a typical portrayal of the Parisian intellectual scene of 1915, or at least typical of the way the artists within it saw themselves. The café in which they sit is packed, with women crowded in doorways just to hear the artists sat around the table speak. Wyndham Lewis, the Canadian-born writer and artist, sits in his distinctive wide-brimmed hat, and to his right sits Frederick Etchells, holding a copy of the Vorticism avantgarde Manifesto, BLAST!.

But drawing our eye in the foreground of the picture, hands lightly clasped and legs folded, reclining at leisure and gazing whimsically at the waiter, is Ezra Pound. The American Poet Carl Sandburg was to later write that ‘All talk on Modern Poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere’. He was a cultural monolith, popping up across the literary history of the 20th century as sometimes artist, other times literary agent, oftentimes editor and always a key figure in any anecdote. It was he that edited The Waste Land and encouraged the styles of Hemmingway and E.E. Cummings. He orchestrated the publication of Ulysses and defined cultural movements of Vorticism, Cubism and Imagism. Indeed, Ernest Hemmingway compared the notion of a poet of the early twentieth century not being influenced by Pound as akin to passing through a blizzard without feeling its cold.

But Pound was a man of contradictions. He was, to borrow from Daniel Swift, ‘a racist who held that the summit of human truth was to be found in African myth, Chinese philosophy and Japanese plays’, a staunch constitutional American who spent the Second World War broadcasting Fascist radio from Italy. He praised Hitler, worshipped Mussolini, disparaged the Jews, and advocated Eugenics. Immediately after the war he was captured, held in Pisa, and then tried by the Americans for treason. While awaiting trial, he was kept in a six by eight foot ‘gorilla cage’ for three weeks in the baking sun, suffering a breakdown and then being transferred to St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington to await trial. There he was found by his doctors to be ‘abnormally grandiose […] expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness and distractibility’. Declared unfit to stand trial on grounds of insanity, he spent twelve years in the hospital, and would not be released out into the world until 1958.

Ending the story here would paint Pound as a fallen intellectual, a genius with insane political views. But Ezra Pound is a figure at the centre of the perennial debate raging about whether a writer’s work can be separated from their ethics. It is a question that has been quite rightly addressed in light of the killing of George Floyd, and the subsequent protests that have called for a reassessment of who we choose as our cultural icons. In some ways, Pound suffered the ultimate censorship for his views, institutionalised and separated from the outside world.

But his list of visitors throughout his stay reads like a who’s who of twentieth-century art: E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and William Carlos Williams to name just a few.

commentary / LITERATURE luke cavanaugh The artistic world at large refused to shun Pound, and he even won the Bollingen Prize (a national poetry prize awarded by the Library of Congress) for his Pisan Cantos. Despite his intellectual and literary prominence, and his defining impact on the cultural history of the twentieth century, Pound’s story is a cautionary tale. His imprisonment, an imprisonment resulting from hate speech and Fascism, was not enough to censor his tongue or his words. His peers, in spite of his beliefs, refused to turn their backs on him. Certainly, Ezra Pound continued to produce fantastic poems, and impact the literary world long after his arrest. But at what cost?

JAMES JOYCE: THE DUBLINERS JAMES STEVENS (alumnus, 2018) James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) could be considered a rather simple collection of short stories. Fifteen in total. It provides a naturalistic account of daily life in the second city of the British Empire. Dublin life is presented from four different perspectives: youth, adolescence, maturity, and public life. Despite this, the realist work was rejected by fourteen publishers and revised no less than eighteen times before its eventual publication, after being frozen out for almost a decade. This naturally leads us to ask: which of Joyce’s topics was deemed so offensive that it caused publishers to refuse his novel access to the public domain?

The answer, it seems, intrinsically lies in Joyce’s title; it was the Dubliners themselves, painted with a ‘scrupulous meanness’ (Letters,5/5/1906) that proved unpalatable for a number of the novelist’s publishers. Joyce’s intention for Dubliners was to uncover Ireland’s ‘rich history’ in a ‘city [which] seemed to [him] the centre of paralysis’ (Letters, 5/5/1906). Trapped in everyday routine, many of Joyce’s characters are imperfect, unpolished, and fundamentally human. There are stories of ‘wives that ‘hoped [their husbands] wouldn’t come in drunk’ (Dub, p.96), tales of ‘laughing and joking’ (Dub, p.101) in public houses, and observations of raucous men whose bodies ‘ache to do something, to rush out and revel in violence’ (Dub, p.86). That being said, what also drives Dubliners are the echoes of institutional corruption.

Echoes that are only heard through the observations and utterances of characters in each story.

“Dear Stannie Please send me the information I ask you for as follows: Ivy Day… -- Can a municipal election take place in October?

A Painful Case -- Are the police at Sydney Parade of the D division? Would the city ambulance be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident?

After the Race -- Are the police supplied with provisions by government or private contracts?”

(Letters 24/9/1905) Over the course of a near decade, Dubliners was slowly transformed from a blistering, incendiary observation, into a text that became slightly more palatable for Irish audiences; a text that did not completely shatter a fragile Irish consciousness that had been built up by the Irish Literary Revivalists such as: W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, and Lady Gregory Augusta. Dubliners became a collection of lukewarm stories that critics regard as ‘one of the stepchildren in Joyce’s [catalogue], receiving less attention that its more important siblings’ (Missing Pieces, p.443).

Whilst publishers took issue with Joyce’s outing of Dublin’s people, politics, and institutions, the writer remained adamant that it was ‘never his fault’ the ‘odour’ of corruption and talk of ‘pits’ the h[anged] round [his] stories’ (Letters, 23/06/1906). It is no secret that Joyce was ultimately left dysphoric with the changes he was forced into making in order to publish his work. This can be noted in Joyce’s infamous, scathing letter to Grant Richards, the eventual publisher of Dubliners: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

(Letters, 23/06/1906) Without being able to write with the true ‘scrupulous meanness’ as intended, censorship has unquestionably affected Dubliners both on a textual and symbolic level. Moreover, Dubliners was not the only text of Joyce’s to face backlash and rejection; Ulysses (1922) faced lawsuits in America over its obscenity and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) relied on favours from Ezra Pound to publish his novel in The Egoist, over the course of 25 instalments.

French, Maralyn. “Missing Pieces in Joyce’s Dubliners”, in Twentieth Century Literature, 24(4), Winter 1978, 442-472; Joyce, James. Dubliners (London: Penguin Classics, [1914] 1993); Joyce, James. The Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 1975).

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

ABOVE & RIGHT: from Ben Schwartz 's Wikileaks Archive Project

LITERATURE / bANNED BOOKS

SPYCATCHER: THE IRONIES OF CENSORSHIP

‘In a free society,’ Lord Goff said, ‘there is a continuing public interest that the workings of government should be open to scrutiny and criticism.’

SAM WARBURTON (alumnus, 2018)

Spycatcher is the memoir of Peter Wright. Wright worked for MI5 and rose to the position of Assistant Director. Following his retirement, he wrote Spycatcher in the 1980s. The book contains a series of explosive allegations that Britain’s security services acted unlawfully. Among the most controversial are claims that MI5 conspired against Prime Minister Harold Wilson and that a former chief of MI5 had, in fact, been a Soviet mole.

The book was immediately banned in the UK. However, Wright successfully published the book in Australia and the USA. UK newspapers began to publish summaries and extracts from Spycatcher. The UK government took action and was able to prevent this for a time. Ultimately, the government failed. After a lengthy and costly legal battle, the UK courts finally refused to grant any further injunctions. As a consequence, extracts from Spycatcher became widely available in the UK. Spycatcher illustrates three truisms when it comes to banned books.

Firstly, the UK government’s response to Spycatcher demonstrates that differing motives can underlie attempts to censor. There are two broad reasons why a government may wish to censor. Firstly, to prevent the relevant material from coming to light. Secondly, to punish the individual who has defied the existing socio-political order. At the outset, the government’s doomed quest to ban Spycatcher was likely motivated by both of these considerations. Yet, the government continued its expensive pursuit long after the book’s revelations had been published across the globe. In choosing to ‘fight on’, the government seemed motivated solely by a desire to punish Wright for his alleged treachery.

Thus, censorship moved from being content focused to author focused, driven by what Nietzsche described as a ‘witches’ brew’ of negative emotions such as resentment, fear, anger and jealousy which form the basis of the human desire to punish.

Secondly, the government’s failure highlights the simple truth that systematic censorship is an increasingly futile objective in the modern world. The forces of globalisation overcame the UK government’s attempt to ban the book. Spycatcher’s revelations had already been published worldwide and copies of the book were frequently smuggled into the UK. The cat was out of the bag and there was simply no point in rigorously pursuing censorship. Several decades later, the rapid dissemination of material online may well make systematic censorship impossible.

These developments may be welcomed as enabling the democratisation of knowledge. They may also be feared as the spread of genuinely extremist, violent material is now difficult to control.

Thirdly, Spycatcher demonstrates the irony of censorship. As the UK made increasingly public attempts to ban Spycatcher, demand for the book soared globally. Two million copies have been sold worldwide and Wright died a millionaire. Controversy quite clearly generates publicity. It seems highly likely that far fewer people would have been made aware of Wright’s allegations if the government had simply done nothing. Thus, not only is censorship nearly impossible in the modern world, but persistent attempts to censor and ban may well have a deeply ironic effect.

Lord Griffiths, chairman of the Security Commission, said: ‘The balance in this case comes down firmly in favour of the public interest in freedom of speech and a free press.’ But he said that a member or former member of the security services could publicly disclose his concerns only as a last resort.

Attorney General v Guardian Newspapers Ltd (No 2) [1988] UKHL 6 (13 October 1988)

Beeple STILL LIFE 4:11 AM · Oct 11, 2020·Twitter Web App

SCIENCE/ RESTRICTED FACTS

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS A MARGINALISING FORCE DR TURNER

THE DANGERS OF MONOLINGUISM IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING When writing is banned there is a legitimate outcry.

Censorship is an act of violence on the written word, a deliberate act to silence. But what if your work wasn’t censored, it was just ignored? Is that wrong?

For a scientific discovery or theory to be accepted it first has to be published and sent out for peer review. In this process a panel of fellow scientists in the field consider the importance of the work and the accuracy and reliability of the results submitted.

The work then is then published and is open to consideration by the whole scientific community. It might also be discussed at conferences and meetings or presented in poster format. If it is considered important enough it might be summarised in a popular magazine or on a news website. What all these communication forms have in common is the use of English as the dominant language.

This hasn’t always been the case. The original language of science was Latin which worked well in writing although quirks in pronunciation by different nationalities caused issues in person. If we travel back to the beginning of the 20th century the dominant language of science was German although there was an even split of publications between English, French and German. The two world wars eroded the influence of German with some countries banning publications in German altogether.

Gradually, English took its place and the big English speaking scientific nations are notoriously lazy when it comes to other languages.

So publication language can effectively exclude the work of some scientists from the historic record. The jet stream was detected by the Japanese meteorologist Oishi in the 1920s. His work was hardly noticed as he published his findings in Esperanto. Instead our understanding of this important weather phenomenon is credited to military pilots in WW2. There is a comedy to this particular oversight, Esperanto is a language that has no national or regional origin and was entirely devised by a Polish ophthalmologist. However this monolingualism in publication can have far more serious consequences.

our view of science reported through the lens of the English language is at best, limiting, and at worst, deadly.

In 2004 Chinese scientists reported a deadly strain of flu which was affection bird populations across Asia. Reports were also made of the virus switching hosts, with pigs also becoming infected with the same flu strain. Pigs are known to be susceptible to human viruses and humans and pigs often live side by side in many parts of the world.

This pointed to the possibility of the virus again jumping host and infecting humans. This was the first reporting of what would become the H5N1 bird flu pandemic, and it was ignored for nearly 7 months. It wasn’t ignored due to censorship, because the science was in any way poorly conducted or insignificant. It was ignored due to bias, even structural racism. This important report was written in Chinese and published in Chinese language journals.

It is easy to minimise the issues this raises. To suggest perhaps that scientists should just get better at speaking English, or use technology to publish in English. But this misses the point, our view of science reported through the lens of the English language is at best, limiting, and at worst, deadly.

Beeple i miss people.

11:48 AM · Oct 24, 2020·Echofon

SCIENCE/ RESTRICTED FACTS

THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES: SCIENCE & BELIEF SYSTEMS MR TEASDALE Darwin was well known, not just as an eminent scientist but also as a popular author. He had built a career on empirical research and observation. Much of the content published was gathered on his 5year voyage aboard the ship, The Beagle, but he had spent the 20 years following the voyage engaged in intellectual enquiry and further experimentation to explore his ideas further. Despite his status and painstakingly thorough research and preparation, some of the critical responses to Origin were so extreme they caused Darwin to raise the idea that he might be martyred. Why was it that such a thoughtful, well-evidenced account provoked such controversy and fury?

One of the key objections to the theory that Darwin was proposing was his complete integration of humans into the natural order. This altered the position of humankind from being central to everything to merely incidental; humans were just another species that had been on the earth for a a short period of time and would likely pass into extinction at some point in the near future. Many people concluded that this shifting of the position of mankind equated to a loss of human dignity. People are more willing to accept narratives that paint them in a positive light, it is easy to see why this change would not be embraced.

Origin did not eliminate the role of god. However, acceptance of the theory did require acceptance of the loss of a directly intervening god. The observable changes in species over time could be explained by the different probabilities of survival between individuals. The creator added no explanatory power to the theory and could be moved in or out of the argument without affecting it.

This apparent reduction in the role of god created problems for theologists and believers.

In October 1859 Charles Darwin published ‘On the Origin of Species’ (Origin), the book set out his idea of ‘natural selection’. The idea states that species show natural variation, this variation results in differing chances of survival between individuals, those which are better suited to a particular environment are more likely to survive. Over time this results in species changing, some species becoming extinct and new species forming. He claimed that the process has resulted in the collection of species that we see on the planet today. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Darwin’s publication; it has famously been argued that “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” (Dobzhansky, 1973). However, as Darwin had expected, the book proved extremely controversial at the time of publication and received a hostile reception from some parts of society.

Darwin’s theory was in stark contrast to the prevailing views of the time. The Churches’ teachings stated that God had presented Adam with a complete collection of living things, this was a view that had popular acceptance amongst institutions and the public. However, ‘Transmutation’, the changing of species from one form into another was far from a new idea. Indeed’ Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin had written about the idea in 1794 and French scientists, most famously Jean Baptiste Lamarck, had discussed the idea at the start of the 19th Century.

For scientists, one of the main problems with Darwin’s theory was the evidence used. An extraordinary theory requires extraordinary proof, they debated whether the evidence he presented passed this test. It is important to remember that the laws of genetics had not been established when Origin was published. Gregor Mendel’s key paper on plant hybridism was published in 1866 but was not well known until 1900, well after Darwin’s death. It was not until the 1920s that the two pieces of work were synthesised together.

Without this understanding of genetics, and the mechanism of inheritance Darwin could observe natural selection but could not fully explain it. Furthermore, the large gaps in the fossil record limited how much it was possible to prove about species that had lived in the past. Some of Darwin’s ecclesiastical contemporaries questioned whether his theory was derived from a sufficiently rigorous empirical approach or whether it was simply one possible interpretation of an unprovable past.

The publication of Origin presented ideas that were highly disruptive to established thinking, caused great controversy and led to international debate. However, most of the scientific community were won over relatively quickly; within 20 years of publication almost every naturalist, a significant number of the general public and even some of the more liberal clergy had come to support the idea of evolution. This is a testament to the strength of the evidence that Darwin presented, the clarity of this writing and the enthusiasm with which he wrote about his ideas. Despite being over 160 years old, many lessons can be learned from ‘On the origin of the Species’ about how to present an extraordinary idea.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius (March 1973), "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher, 35 (3): 125–129, JSTOR 4444260; reprinted in Zetterberg, J. Peter, ed.

(1983), Evolution versus Creationism, Phoenix, Arizona: ORYX Press