There's a striking absence of prominent working-class voices in the British media, especially those belonging to the younger generation. And there is a gross underrepresentation of working-class characters in films, TV shows and literature: a 2014 LSE survey of creative industries found that only 10% of authors, writers and translators come from backgrounds typically associated with the working-classes, whilst in the category of visual media (including TV and film) for directors, arts officers and producers the figure is as low as 3%. Certainly there are anomalies (Sally Rooney's Normal People and Francis Lee's God's Own Country being two striking examples) but the general picture is undoubtedly bleak. And yet, there’s little public outcry. If you are poor and British, the likelihood is you feel under-represented and that no-one gives a shit. And while the left have been happy to tolerate this, the right have been able to take advantage by making a series of jingoistic appeals, the undercurrent of which is: if they won't fight your corner, we will. [read full essay]
Motherhood is the space of impossible choices, the space of incommensurable care. It is no wonder that the political stakes of thinking motherhood are so high and that the literary and historical forms that it engenders are fragmentary, historical, ahistorical, messy, philosophical, utopian, capacious and careful (none of these impulses should be seen as incompatible or contradictory – motherhood is the space of contradictory feelings). Writing about motherhood at this particular juncture of financial austerity, political turmoil, hard borders and imminent climate disaster is a reminder of the ways in which social reproduction is being intensified in unsustainable ways in the present. It should also be seen as part of a desire to denaturalise female generosity, to acknowledge pregnancy not as an inevitable stage of female identity. [read full essay]
Amid the aftershocks of another monumental reordering of the world with digital technologies, revisiting nature through walking and reading can be a way of reconstructing perception, and reimagining the self through observation and imagination. Three books: Out of the Woods by Luke Turner, Mothlight by Adam Scovell and Lanny by Max Porter, all explore this organic catalyst for reflection. They offer a new type of dérive through looking closely at what is at hand at a moment when skewing typical modes of perambulation around a city or place conjures images of cars veering onto footpaths. Each of the three books also delivers a different perception of the quintessential British walk and uncovers some of its complex and illusive meaning. [read full essay]
In his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points to Franz Kafka as the most illuminating writer on the neoliberal style. The Trial, he argues, is the perfect representation of post-Fordian bureaucracy, where Josef K's quest to reach ultimate authority and solve the mystery of his arrest is an endless endeavour of delays and postponements. ‘The big Other,’ Fisher writes, meaning the authority figure with the answers K craves, ‘cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials [. . .] engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is.’ [read full essay]
In Marshall I saw my shadow self. In Mike Davis I recognised my angrier part, the undertow that tugged with my Marshall part, the loving part. These were the two souls dwelling in my breast, dwelling in my feeling and thinking about cities as well. I was more dystopian than utopian. Funnily enough, this is what I wanted to discuss with Marshall, who’d become a friend. We’d agreed to see each other, to talk about a letter he’d sent me about an article I’d sent him. [read full essay]
In Heidegger's view, what was happening to the Jews in the 1930s was not so much the administratively planned extermination of a people, but more their historically determined self-destruction, for which they had only themselves to blame. 'When what is essentially “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense fights against what is Jewish, the high point of self-annihilation [Selbstvernichtung] in history has been reached; assuming that the “Jewish” has everywhere completely seized mastery, so that even the fight against “the Jewish”, and it above all, falls under its sway.' That said, the struggle for supremacy had been anything but a level playing-field. At the end of the decade covered by the first period of the Notebooks, while the war in Nazi-occupied Europe was still raging, Heidegger offered this lament: 'The Judaism of the world, spurred on by those who were allowed to emigrate from Germany, is intangible everywhere and does not need to engage in warlike acts in spite of their display of power, whereas we [Germans] are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our nation.' [read full essay]
The titles chosen as Review 31’s Books of the Year are a diverse bunch, reflecting our contributors’ varied literary tastes. Their recommendations include three translated works: the ‘dreamlike, shape-shifting territories’ of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels Trilogy; Caterina Pascual Söderbaum’s literary memoir of family trauma, The Oblique Place, and a comprehensive and ‘dizzying’ new Spanish-language edition of Roberto Bolaño’s collected stories. Our selection also features Sulaiman Addonia’s ‘timely and fierce novel about survival, conflict and immigration’, Silence is My Mother Tongue; Will Eaves’ powerful and stylish Murmur; the ‘light but forceful prose’ of Sally Rooney’s Normal People; a comic novel in the shape of Rob Palk’s Animal Lovers; and Amy McCauley’s ‘ferociously good, brilliantly original’ poetry collection, Oedipa. [read full essay]
In some ways, authentocracy’s more obvious and cynical manifestations are already beginning to lose some of their power. The continued emergence of unambiguous nativism, which has only accelerated in the year since Authentocrats was completed, is perhaps beginning to render authentocracy’s various strategies of hedging and ventriloquy obsolete. Two years ago, a figure like Richard Angell was dutifully reporting what he heard from the doorstep and tearfully imploring the left to listen to their natural constituency; now he happily appears on panels with Melanie Phillips and Brendan O’Neill. The sensible adults who beat their breasts over Corbyn’s unelectability in 2016 are, in 2018, debating whether ethnic diversity poses a threat to the West at Spiked front events. Ethnonationalist creeps like Goodhart are increasingly recognised for what they are, and increasingly less coy about it. Kennedy’s work, in this book and elsewhere, is partly responsible for this, of course. With any luck Authentocrats, with all its piss and vinegar, will help to abolish the thing it diagnoses, and its usefulness as an immediate political intervention will be short. [read full essay]
The assimilation policy, which was predicated on the assumption of white superiority and black inferiority, proposed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be allowed to ‘die out’ in answer to what was seen by the settler culture as the ‘Aboriginal problem.’ In order to facilitate this so-called solution, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were separated from their families and placed in homes like Moore River where the principle aim was to indoctrinate the children so that they would assimilate into and eventually be absorbed by the white culture. In short, they would be ‘bred out’ of existence. The practice of child removal, which began in the early 1900s and continued until the early 1970s, has had a devastating effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as a whole and led the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report, Bringing Them Home (1997) to conclude that the principal aim of eradicating Aboriginal culture constituted a cultural genocide. [read full essay]
A prominent first-person narrative strategy employed from Dante to Proust works in such a way that by the time the character’s story comes to an end, they’re ready to become the writer who will then relate the story we’ve just read. Dante the pilgrim becomes Dante the poet; Marcel becomes Proust. Their stories begin as soon as they cease. This is not so in My Struggle, in which the pilgrim and the poet are identical; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Karl Ove Knausgaard. His struggle is less to get to the point where he can now finally write My Struggle than it is to actually write it, which he is in the process of doing throughout all six books. [read full essay]
