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]
Terrance Hayes likes to describe his background as ‘very American’. His mother, who works as a prison guard, had him when she was 16. He grew up in South Carolina, before attending Coker College on a basketball scholarship. It was there that he started writing poems. In 2014 he was awarded a McArthur Fellowship and in 2018 he was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. I was able to meet Hayes when he was promoting his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a keenly insistent sequence penned in the news-scream fever-dream which followed the 2016 American election. We chatted in the corridor of his hotel, while he ate a croissant. In this book’s examination of America and its many assassins, Hayes’s modus operandi is to be unrelenting in his ‘posing of poets’ questions to history’; we discuss some of them here. [read full interview]
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]
Told with light-hearted élan yet contained in a magisterial mould, Minoo Dinshaw’s Outlandish Knight charts the life of Steven Runciman (1903 - 2000), a figure who was both a chronicler of the past – as a renowned historian of the Byzantine Empire – and a witness to the age in which he lived. A schoolfriend of George Orwell and an early love interest of Cecil Beaton, he partied with the Bloomsbury set as well as with royalty. To read this biography is not simply to learn about Runciman’s life but to step back into it: through the dashing, ludic style which saw him shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Dinshaw expertly captures the essence of his subject. In a coffee shop in Hammersmith we chatted about Runciman and also discussed Dinshaw’s next project, a book about the interlocking lives of two political moderates during the English Civil War. [read full interview]
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]
This is the first in a new series of interviews by Review 31: we will be placing interviews with two authors side by side, allowing the correspondences in their work to come to the fore. For the first instalment, we have a twin interview with poets Sarah Howe and Layli Long Soldier. Sarah Howe is a British-Hong Kong Chinese poet who lectures in poetry at King’s College London, and whose collection Loop of Jade won the 2015 TS Eliot Prize. Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet from Dakota who teaches at Diné College in the Navajo Nation. Her collection Whereas is a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which was not read aloud or delivered with any tribal leaders present. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017.
We’ve chosen to place these women’s work in dialogue because of their use of found poetry derived from legal texts, their differing subversions of imperial epistemologies, and their writing of the Umbrella Movement and Standing Rock protests, respectively, from afar. Here, Review 31 examines the modes these two remarkable women have employed to confront the utterances of oppressive states. [read full interview]
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]
