Contemporary London Research Articles

The Frenchman Who Invented London: Élisée Reclus’s Geographies of the Cité Mondiale, 1860–1879

The French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) dedicated several hundred pages to London. Addressing different audiences and adopting different tones accordingly, he produced travel guides, geographic treatises, and meditations (posthumously published) that recounted contemporary London in various ways. This article examines Reclus’s reflections on the city, serving as both a companion for Anglophone readers exploring Reclus’s work and an invitation to view London through new eyes—that is, those of a foreign traveller whose conflictual, yet affectional, relationship with London may still describe that of many today. As this article shows, globalisation, progress, environment, and social habits are recurrent themes in his accounts: at times they are approached with considerable scientific rigour, and at others, they immersed in a romantic indefiniteness articulated by way of a frenetic expressive tempo.

“Eene schoone engelsche troupe”: William Durham and His Company of Travelling Performers in Ghent (1713) and Germany (1724–1728)

Abstract Relying on information contained in Prosper Claeys’ Histoire du théâtre à Gand (1892) and in notes bynineteenth-century German theatre historians, the present essay seeks to partially reconstruct the repertory of William Durham, the (largely forgotten) manager of a troupe of wandering actors, who performed at Ghent in 1713 and in various German cities between 1724 or 1725 and 1728. No particulars are available about his performances at Ghent, which appear to have been a combination of acting and rope-dancing. Contemporary play-bills, on the other hand, reveal the diverse nature of three pieces which Durham produced in German-speaking areas: (1) Das durchlauchtigste Müllermädchen, possibly an adaptation of aseventeenth-century English comedy by John Fletcher and William Rowley; (2) Genovefa, a play about the legendary eponymous character, whose story had been widely circulated in Europe; and (3) Der transmetamorphosirte Arlequin, a Harlequin-Faustus Hauptaktion, which may have taken its cue from a spate of popular harlequinades on the contemporary London stage. Although the scanty available evidence does not allow of any firm conclusions about his international standing, Durham may have been the exponent of a ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ theatre bridging the gap between various dramatic traditions.

(Re)moving exclusions: School exclusion reduction in Glasgow and London

AbstractSchool exclusion reduction in Scotland—and especially in the city of Glasgow—has received substantial media and policy attention in recent years. In London in particular, multiple governmental agencies have explicitly expressed a desire to replicate the exclusion reduction which recently occurred in Glasgow, often citing the connection between school exclusion and violence as a key motivating factor. In this paper, after presenting the statistical trends in school exclusions in Scotland, England, Glasgow and London, we mobilise original interview data to (1) explain how school exclusion reduction occurred so rapidly in Glasgow between 2007 and 2019, and (2) explore whether a similar reduction in exclusions could occur in contemporary London. We apply a theoretical framework to these issues which derives from Peters’ work on policy coordination, allowing us to compare the conditions in Glasgow and London for well‐coordinated pan‐city exclusion reduction. Building on previous research which has contrasted national school exclusion policies in Scotland and England, we conclude that policy conditions surrounding school exclusion in the two cities differ substantially. There are substantial barriers to significant exclusion reduction in London, relating to both city‐ and national‐level factors. There barriers include competition between different agencies working in relevant policy spaces; the fragmentation of the city's education system; the need for better incentivisation of inclusion by Ofsted and the Department for Education; and particular challenges to reframing the issue of school exclusion in London.

Refusing recovery, living a ‘wayward life’: A feminist analysis of women’s drug use

Drawing on cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, this essay reads one woman’s life with drugs and resistance to drug treatment as a feminist act of refusal, a ‘wayward life’ in Hartman’s terms. Wayward lives are those that refuse dominant forms of servitude and push open alternative ways of being. Although living in a different time and location to the young black women in Hartman’s book struggling to survive after emancipation in the United States, we see the woman (Kim) in our study in contemporary London, United Kingdom, employing similar acts of cramped resistance in a world that treats her as ‘pathological’ and ‘criminal’. We explore the ways in which Kim resists the law, the tropes of pathology that profess to know her, and the abstinence-based treatment systems that seek to change her. Importantly in following Hartman, we are not dismissing her struggles or romanticising her drug use, but rather looking to assemble a picture of her life that captures its admixture of daily trials and challenges, fleeting triumphs, pleasures and acts of resistance. Here we are making room for the kind of embodied and intimate political work that often gets left out of discussions of more formal anti-prohibitionist activism and organisation.

Iron Curtain: A Love Story by Vesna Goldsworthy

Reviewed by: Iron Curtain: A Love Story by Vesna Goldsworthy Damjana Mraović-O'Hare VESNA GOLDSWORTHY Iron Curtain: A Love Story New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 336 pages. MILENA URBANSKA, the main character of Vesna Goldsworthy's Iron Curtain: A Love Story, is a child of privilege. An offspring of one of the two founders of a politically restrictive Soviet satellite state, Milena's life in the 1980s is marked by indulging in foreign pop culture, designer clothes, and trips abroad. Despite having a "dismal" attendance record and average performance, she is recognized as the top college student. She and her boyfriend, a child of another high-ranking state politician, are considered the Diana and Charles of her country. Milena claims that she is a rebel, both against the system and, consequently, her father, but her trespasses amount to decadent parties, sullen moods, and verbal outbursts to her parents. Milena is misunderstood and unhappy—she claims—and yet her discomfort is rather generational than political. When Milena complains about the constant lack of toilet paper in public bathrooms, she laments that she had to "waste another handkerchief. I like the touch of silk, but it was a pity always to have to throw these things away." Milena, though, changes when Misha, her Charles, kills himself playing drunk Russian roulette after serving only a few weeks of mandatory army service. Milena did not stop the game in which she also participated, and the guilt transforms her into a dedicated student and, later, a successful translator. The second change is instigated by Jason, a visiting British poet for whom she translates at a literary conference: an intense and brief love affair is followed by plans to continue their life in London. Expectedly, when Milena finally reaches the West, nothing lives up to its promise, while Jason's ultimate betrayal can be avenged only by asking for help from those against whom Milena supposedly initially revolted: her motherland and her father. The decision to acknowledge the political power of an eastern country, however, is ironic: the novel opens in December 1990, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Milena's happiness is unattainable, regardless of politics. In her third novel, the well-established Goldsworthy revisits some of the themes she has previously discussed in her fiction and academic work, notably the ways in which the West and the East perceive each other, as well as questions of identity and freedom. Her Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is an essential contribution to Balkan studies; Gorsky (2015) follows a Russian oligarch living in contemporary London but is inspired by The Great Gatsby; Monsieur Ka (2018) is about Anna Karenina's son in post-World War II Britain. Iron Curtain, although "just" a love story, is Goldsworthy's finest novel so far: it is nuanced, funny, and relevant in a world that seems to be actively working on a new Iron Curtain. Damjana Mraović-O'Hare Carson-Newman University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Prophet against Empire? William Blake in Australia

Since the posthumous revival of William Blake (beginning in the 1860s, consolidated in the twentieth century), his identification with England, and more particularly with London, has been complicated by his appeal to cultural groups that are themselves ambivalent, at best, in their relationship to empire. While scholarship has increasingly attended to Blake’s dialogues with and receptions outside the Anglosphere, the radically countercultural artist and son of a hosier has simultaneously been assimilated into the iconography of mainstream Englishness. This has been nowhere more evident than in England itself, where he is quoted by politicians of all political persuasions and has been made the subject of blockbuster exhibitions in major institutional venues. For example, the trailer for the 2019–​20 Tate exhibition projects Blakean imagery onto iconic scenes and sites of contemporary London, updating and appropriating Golgonooza for the age of the London Eye. At the same time, and in ways somewhat truer to his own practices, Blake has been celebrated as a kind of patron saint by London-based small presses and outsider artists and writers. Beyond England, complex and sometimes inapposite ideological allegiances have been contracted on his behalf from the nineteenth century onwards. In this essay, we turn to the reception, reproduction, and revisioning of Blake in the settler colonies of Australia, and we find a Blake whose work, mediated through a range of editorial and curatorial lenses, proves unexpectedly amenable to conflicting Australian desires both to affirm cultural fealty to England and empire and to refuse it.

A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012)

In his choral novel Capital (2012), John Lanchester charts the intersecting trajectories of the residents of Pepys Road, an ordinary-looking street of South London, even as the 2008 financial crisis hits. More than the spectacular crumbling of global finance, this realist novel focuses on the property boom which heralded it. This paper contends that this street-level view of one of the centres of the world-system, which contrasts with dystopian, gothic and apocalyptic literary imaginations of London, enables the author to encode the most insidious effects of global capitalism on urban life, and the ways in which real estate speculation fundamentally disrupts the social fabric of the city. This downscaled narrative of contemporary London, which foregrounds houses as central characters, thus does not emphasise the collective ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai) but the divorce of space from affect and the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a common space, thus suggesting the splintering of London into ‘fortified fragments’ (Harvey), in other words, the suburbanisation of the world-city.

Baghdad in My Shadow (2019): a Political Thriller in a Multireligious Europe

Abstract This article presents the Swiss-Iraqi director Samir Jamal Aldin and his thriller Baghdad in My Shadow (2019) and puts it into a context of the re-negotiation of identities in a culturally diverse Europe. The director’s intention is presented as a wish to deal with taboo issues related to gay rights, women’s emancipation, and religious fundamentalism within an Iraqi community in contemporary London. The film is analysed with the help of (1) theories analysing tensions between liberal-secular and religious-fundamentalist standpoints, and (2) theories about film viewers’ engagement, amplifying audiences’ emotions and thoughts about complex societal issues. The film could be said to advocate a standpoint of dynamic secularism promoting individual rights. The article argues, furthermore, that Samir as a Swiss-Iraqi filmmaker encourages thick viewing through his thriller format and invites the audience to a deeper emotional and intellectual understanding of liberal principles, honour culture, and hybrid identity positions in contemporary Europe.

Ethnic conflicts and the power of collective identity in Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

AbstractLonglisted for the Booker Prize 2018 and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, Guy Gunaratne's debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), depicts a cultural conflict unfolding in contemporary London. Set off as the result of a killing of a white soldier by a black Muslim boy, violent riots force Yusuf, a son of immigrants from Pakistan, to recognise his migrant background and question his sense of self and belonging in the city. At the same time, for Nelson and Caroline, immigrants of a different time, the events evoke the memories of the past that haunts them and prove that the cultural divide they witnessed decades ago still prevails. By following the narratives of these characters and depicting violent ethnic clashes, the novel captures the driving forces of blind ethnic brutality on the one hand and the loss of a meaningful sense of self on the other. Drawing on Vamik Volkan's studies on large‐group psychology and collective trauma, this article analyses the power of the collective identity—be it a nation, an ethnicity, or a religious movement—in times of crisis and examines its influence on a personal sense of self. In Our Mad and Furious City illustrates the many ways in which the impact of the shared cultural identity not only generates cultural conflicts but can also lead to displacement and identity crises. This article explores the intricate ways in which Gunaratne's transcultural narrative depicts these age‐old yet contemporary issues.

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Drama Critiques’ Database

Drama Critiques’ dataset was produced as part of Mylène Maignant’s PhD project at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) between 2018 and 2022. Her research aims to explore the reception of contemporary London theatre (2010 to 2020) by analysing a large corpus based on the reviews written by two distinct groups of theatre critics: the journalistic one on the one hand, and the digital one on the other hand (bloggers). By relying partly on the data made available by <em>Theatre Record</em> (<a href="https://www.theatrerecord.com/" target="_blank">https://www.theatrerecord.com/</a>) and by automatically extracting the content of 28 blogs, we built a corpus constituting more than 40,000 theatre reviews. Only 36,000 are open access, as some of the bloggers have not given their authorisation yet. The purpose of this data collection consisted of exploring the similarities and differences between these two literary communities. We were interested in better understanding the cultural discourse both journalists and bloggers construct. Given the amount of data, we relied on digital technologies to investigate this field. Using various digital techniques, such as computational linguistics, sentiment analysis, and Geographic Information Systems, we conducted a number of different analyses to map this cultural phenomenon. If some publications have already tackled the literary theme of English digital theatre criticism, none of them have examined it from a computational perspective. Drama Critiques’ dataset is then the first corpus which not only offers so many contemporary reviews based on journalists and bloggers’ publications, but which also proposes a study of its content (<a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6799656" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6799656</a>). Repository location: <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6799656" target="_blank">10.5281/zenodo.6799656</a>.

Between the Oche and Treble-Twenty: Darts as a “Way of Life” in Contemporary London

ABSTRACT This article serves to answer the question, “What sustains the continued relevance of darts for working-class men in postindustrial Britain?” Darts remains a deeply popular activity and increasingly popular spectator sport in contemporary Britain, with common associations with the social clubs, working men’s clubs, and pubs of industrial Britain. This article addresses the continued place of darts within the context of the deeply destructive process of structural economic change that has transformed the country’s economic, social, and physical landscape and has deeply altered forms of working-class spaces of leisure from pubs to social clubs in long-standing neighborhoods. The author argues that darts is a medium that acts as a form of bridging between the periods of industrial and postindustrial Britain so as to continue working-class modes of socialization and relations that have been altered with the shift to postindustrialism. Darts acts as a mode of orientation and direction—a “way of life”—that mediates and enables a connection between industrial and postindustrial Britain. Moreover, the continuation of playing darts allows for the continuation of spaces of kinship and socialization for working-class men within profound gentrification and the transformation of London into a “Global City” dictated by financial capital. This basis of this article is derived from interviews and observation conducted at a series of amateur darts events across Greater London in January 2016. This article allows for a consideration of the role of leisure and sport within continued institutions and memories of class.

New Information on Sor and Gil Blas

A contemporary London newspaper report clarifies the extent of Fernando Sor's contribution to the operatic drama Gil Blas. This letter is an addendum to Erik Stenstadvold, "Fernando Sor on the Move in the Early 1820s" Soundboard Scholar, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.56902/SBS.2015.1.7.

Shades of Black: Contemporary London Black women’s presentation dilemmas negotiating racist colonial legacy and Black affirmation

This study traces a brief history of the inequalities faced by Black women concerning beauty and the body, before exploring the lived experiences of ten London Black women. The interviews explored women’s lived experience of three different beauty practices: 1) skin lightening; and/or 2) hair straightening to fit with a white aesthetically pleasing ideal; and 3) body modifications, specifically buttock enhancement, reflecting a growing trend that resists the normative thin white ideal by celebrating (and surgically enhancing) the curvaceous female Black body. Four intertwined themes emerged from the analysis: racism, identity, social capital, and self-esteem.

Playground as meaning-making space: Multimodal making and re-making of meaning in the (virtual) playground

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic ‘meaning-makerspace’ where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of ‘makerspace as mindset’, where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from ‘Playing the Archive’, an ‘Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’ funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s–1960s, the project involved ethnographic research in two contemporary London primary school playgrounds, working with children aged 7–11 as co-researchers. A range of multimodal methods were used with the children to gain insights into their play, including iPads as filmmaking devices, chest-mounted GoPro cameras, voice recorders, drawings and mapping of playspaces. The research highlights that contemporary play exists not only in physical playgrounds, but increasingly in globalised ‘virtual playgrounds’ such as video games and social media. While these playworlds may at first appear separate, we identified ways in which virtual play intersects and inflects activity in the physical playground. We argue that play should therefore be seen as a series of ‘laminates’ drawing variously on media culture, folklore and the children’s everyday lived experiences, re-mixed and re-mediated inventively in the playground.

Hope’s Work

AbstractThis article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.

"Who generates this city"? Socialist strategy in contemporary London.

This essay, based on a “militant ethnography” of the attempts of the small radical grassroots activist group, Our London (a pseudonym), to mobilize a collective oppositional politics through activities around an election campaign, engages critically with E. Laclau and C. Mouffe's arguments on discourse and collectivity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). I argue, on the basis of my findings, that while their model does provide insights that help describe the process of building collectivity from among disparate perspectives and identities, we need to go beyond a focus on discourse alone and consider the ways politics is shaped by material contexts. This is necessary if we are to understand the continued appeal of class politics as well as the difficulties in mobilizing collectivity in highly unequal and fragmented cities. From an activist perspective, the essay also highlights how developing a conception of collective interests and a critique of overarching systems of exploitation can be important in building political unity.

Nobodies and somebodies

This article draws on ethnographic research to examine the bureaucratic matrix of temporal, material, and legal scales that come together to constitute the rehousing process for a group of rough sleepers seeking passage out of homelessness in contemporary London. Further, it explores the ways in which different bureaucratic technologies mediate the relations between the rehousing hub’s staff, its homeless clients, and local housing authorities, paying particular attention to the way these economies solidify the already asymmetrical power relations that existed between the homeless and those employed to manage them. For the homeless, this process is constituted by a spatiotemporality of confinement and seemingly endless waiting that shunts them into the margins of citizenship, caught between being a nobody and a somebody. Thinking through contemporary debates in political theory, this article approaches the rehousing process (or failure thereof) not as a linear pathway but as a constellation of disciplinary and bureaucratic procedures within which exceptional structures of sovereignty and neoliberal governmentality intersect. Applying these ideas anthropologically, I demonstrate how this intersectionality works to continually shape and reshape the existential realities, possibilities, and aspirations of the hub’s homeless clients.

Eviction, Gatekeeping and Militant Care: Moral Economies of Housing in Austerity London

ABSTRACT This article uses the lens of moral economies to examine the everyday experience of eviction, precarious housing and grassroots activism in contemporary London. Situated within a context of ongoing austerity measures, it explores how divergent, conflicting and overlapping moral economies of housing emerge both within the state and at its margins, as local authorities struggle to reconcile contradictory obligations to both uphold property relations and offer a duty of care to tenants. The article shows how being precariously housed is experienced as a series of disorientating advice and support encounters in which the right to state assistance is contested by low-income tenants, state housing officers and community activists. It contends that these encounters are surface-level expressions of a deeper underlying struggle over the political and moral status of housing, in which the unresolved tension between housing as a home and housing as a commodity shapes contested visions of economic justice.

When private property masquerades as public space: the shifting face of publicness in London’s city squares

"Access to space is fundamentally related to social status and power...changing the allocation of space is inherently related to changing society" (Weisman, 1992)&#x0D; &#x0D; In contemporary London, a pattern has emerged whereby private corporations create and take ownership of public space, but the type of publicness they promote is conditional. In private-public space, private property masquerades as public land with rules of inhabitation often impenetrable, unknowable until they are broken. International owners activate networks of relations beyond the local; I question how private-public space fits with local communities, and how these networks shift notions of authenticity and inauthenticity in relation to public belonging. There is a specific focus on the public square as a form of private-public space, because the city square has a long-established spatial identity that embodies notions of publicity. The public square stimulates and contains public life, and neoliberal dynamics of ownership and management threaten public assemblages. Private-public squares do not fit into the majority of theories that have been developed on place, public space and private dynamics, but they are exemplative of a type of space increasingly prominent in Britain. I focus on four private-public squares in London to examine what can be learnt when a format of space is reproduced under incompatible conditions. How do these spaces work on a quotidian level and how does this intervention in public life shift urban identities and behavioural paradigms? The basis of my research is to examine concepts of publicness and privateness and how they apply to private-public squares in London, whilst utilising the practice of photography, observation and inhabitation to gain empirical ethnographic evidence. My research intends to assemble a toolkit to facilitate understanding about pseudo-public space, rather than ascribe fixed meanings to a subject which requires specificity.