Tag Archives: Arts and Culture

My work placement experience at Europe’s biggest Chinese film festival

Shanshan Wu, MA Film and Screen Media student, shares her experience of studying at Birkbeck and finding a work placement. 

For the past four months, I have been doing my work placement at ‘Odyssey: a Chinese film season’, hosted by the non-profitable organisation UK-China Film Collab (UCFC). Thanks to Birkbeck and the placement host, I am leading the marketing team of Europe’s biggest Chinese film festival.  

A New Start 

After finishing my bachelor’s and my first master’s degrees in Filmmaking in Australia, I went back to China for work, and became a tutor of film training courses for young people. Then I realised I wanted more – I wanted to know more about the cinema market, film distribution, film curating, and, of course, film festivals. The world of cinema is so vast, and I wanted to expand my vision to different areas of the film industry in different parts of the world. 

Becoming a Birkbeck Student 

When researching film programmes in London, Birkbeck was my top choice. Its perfect location in the heart of Bloomsbury was a selling point, but so was its well-designed course modules in MA Film and Screen Media, which offered a wide range of options – from film curating to memory studies – all introducing and exploring cutting-edge topics and debates in the field. One of the things that interested me the most was the chance to do a work placement at a film or media related organisation. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to get hands on experience in the film industry to help start student’s careers. International students like me are often underrepresented in the professional circuit, so these kinds of opportunities are extremely precious to us.  

Securing the Placement 

For most of our fellow students, our tutors would listen to their work placement needs, and then match them with suitable placement hosts. I went through the same process, but I had also started looking for placements of my own accord too – I was really keen! My tutor, Dr Dorota Ostrowska, was so understanding and helpful in this process. When I said that I had been offered the voluntary Lead of Marketing role at ‘Odyssey: a Chinese cinema season’ film festival, she carefully considered the details. She wanted to make sure the work matched with my needs and really would be a beneficial placement for me. After the consideration, all the paperwork was signed, and the placement was secured!  

A Rewarding Journey 

Odyssey: a Chinese cinema season was held from May 10 to June 10.  With more than 60 films screened both online and in-person, and audience numbers over 2600, it is the biggest Chinese film festival in Europe this year. My placement has now ended, and I have learned so much and met so many great colleagues and friends.  

I’m so grateful to the festival and to the Birkbeck tutors for the support and insight they gave me on this journey. I now understand in detail the process of holding a film festival and discovered a new interest in film marketing and film distribution, which I had never thought of before. I’m sure this is just the beginning of another journey for me, and I can’t wait to explore more wonders of cinema.

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The Unfortunate Persistence of Being

As the discussion over the meaning and significance of statues wears on, Gaynor Tutani, who is currently completing a PG Diploma in Museum Cultures discusses the current Black Lives Matter Movement and how cultural institutions can engage with history and encourage more inclusion within the industry. 

Perpetual Histories

I have been here before,
You have been here before,
We have been here before.
How long will we have this same conversation?

I am tired. I used to feel the pain.
Now, almost, I do not feel!
I saw the knee heavy on his neck, everyone saw it,
but the knee is always on our necks.
We carry it daily.
It’s on my SKIN,
Engraved on my Bones,
And flows through my Blood.

I am Black. I am African,
You are African too,
Evolution says so.
But somehow my Black is an outcast,
To be feared, hated and killed.
Not only a physical death.
No, the deeper death,
One that TAKES my spirit, hopes and dreams.

Regardless, I fight. I push.
I continue to BE. For there is pride in my being.
There is pride in knowing my history and who I am.
I am more than Black!
My life matters, I am human,
Just like you.

Jean Joseph, A Good Outlook, 2010, Mixed Media on Canvas

Jean Joseph, A Good Outlook, 2010, Mixed Media on Canvas

How do I feel about the Black Lives Matter movement? What does it mean to me as a Black woman and a British citizen with African origins? These are a few questions that have been playing in my mind following the passing of George Floyd. It has not been easy to digest his horrific death, and so, I have not really found any answers to my questions. Today we all call for change, but how is this change going to come about or is it even possible? I ask this because Floyd was one of many Black men that have died at the hands of White police. There have been women too, yet their stories do not receive the same attention. This is not to say that their deaths and lives were less important, but it highlights the fact that it is prevalent within the United States of America. I believe that this is why it bothers me, knowing that his story is yet another devastating headliner of perpetuated terror.

Historically Africans and those of African descent have suffered extreme injustices due to an adopted persistent backwardness based on geography and melanin. While the racists’ systems of slavery, segregation and apartheid have ended, we cannot deny their lasting imprints and legacies within our current political, socio-economic and cultural societies. Deep psychological traumas continue to affect Black people – inherited from their ancestors, termed by Dr Joy DeGruy as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Although she coins it “Slave Syndrome”, I believe that the crippling impact of trauma should be considered with regards to all western encounters with Africa and its diaspora. This includes colonisation and its destruction of Africa as a whole. Therefore, when I think about these histories and the Black resistance movements that occurred – such as the Civil Rights Movement in America and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, both in the 1960s –  it is disheartening  that in 2020 a movement called Black Lives Matter is even necessary to counteract current racist systems.

Nonetheless, despite this dim reality, I am encouraged by the movement’s momentum and the level of scrutiny currently on equality and social justice. But I am also concerned that this focus on racism is an unsustainable banner.

How long will the discourses continue without positive, tangible change? How do we end this perpetual cycle of action and reaction? As a keen student of history and a cultural facilitator, I believe that museums and other cultural institutions can make lasting contributions and be an example of the change we need, via a true engagement with our society. One that does more than tick the boxes of inclusion and diversity, but actually acknowledges our society’s unique cultural fabric and how it came about. We have to honestly discuss controversial topics such as racism and its intricate connection to our lives. I believe that art can inspire and change people’s perspectives and understanding of their world. Consequently, museums and curators should do more to address difficult issues within their curation and programming.

This has been my mission as a curator and co-founder of EARTHworks a curatorial duo that organically formed with my partner, Jean Joseph (a visual artist and cultural facilitator; @artmaroon). Together we have hosted and organised exhibitions, talks and events that delve into similar topics such as race, culture and history. Currently, we are working in partnership with arc Gallery to realise an exhibition that investigates the complexities of colonisation. Reading from scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop and Mandivamba Rukini, just to mention a few, the project draws upon theories of existentialism, as a means to discuss notions of identity. It aims to highlight how cultural institutions and those working within the arts can address uncomfortable narratives. In short, the exhibition comprises an academic interrogation of how history has shaped the lives of Black and Brown people, which sometimes is not included within museum exhibitions dedicated to people of colour.

The above comment is not an attack on museums. There has been an improvement within their structures, but I believe more can be done, especially within the operational field. There is a significant shortage of Black and Brown curators and general programming staff within museums. Although there has been a rise in exhibitions for/dedicated to people of colour, the fact that these showcases are not directed or led by those they claim to represent is problematic. Therefore, even though many museums have been working on decolonisation agendas within their operations, the extent to which these methods are effective are minimal if the decolonisation does not involve those that have been colonised by the very imperialist structures of museums.

Further, discussing issues of decolonisation within museums, Tristram Hunt, (Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum ) in his newspaper article on restitution and repatriation of previously looted collections within museums, argued that it was not possible to decolonise or return some artefacts due to the fact that losing them would be to disregard museums’ historical ties with empire. As a result, he contends that to “decolonise is to decontextualise” since the rise of empires was closely linked to collections.

Consequently, Hunt urges museums to find the right balance when dealing with their collections and the historical narratives behind them. In a way Hunt’s argument shows the reluctance of the West to relinquish its colonial hold. He proposes better museum practices and claims that the V&A has made procedural progress. However, his current idea of loaning artefacts to their countries of origin is condescending. Why should they borrow what rightfully belongs to them? Hunt’s solution does not solve the problems or issues pertaining to restitution, which I believe can be resolved if there was a commensurate staffing of people of colour within museums and galleries. Their voice, experiences and knowledge are paramount when deciding how these collections can be returned or respectful partnerships be formed with their countries of origin.

As a Black cultural curator, and being aware of the historical race debate within the arts and cultural scene, I am in support of the Black Lives Matter movement as a vehicle to address social injustice. If change can be achieved at all, I believe that it can, and should, start with productive conversations within museums and heritage institutions.

Gaynor Tutani is a student on the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Cultures in the Department of History of Art, and an independent curator. You can read more about her work and encounters with art and museums here: https://fambaneni.tumblr.com/

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(Art) History Matters

Dr Sarah Thomas, from the Department of History of Art, shares her experience of museum curation in Australia and discusses how we should interrogate the ‘hidden histories’ that underpin current debates. 

In 1993 when working as a curatorial assistant in a public gallery in Sydney I was involved in a project which I’ll never forget. Yamangu Ngaanya. Our Land Our Body was an exhibition of paintings by a group of Aboriginal artists from a remote desert community in Warbuton, Western Australia. The dazzling canvases, derived from ancestral ‘Dreaming’ stories that were traditionally painted onto the body, were accompanied by forty-five Ngaanyatjarra men and women, most of whom had never visited a city in their lives and who had travelled to Sydney by coach over several days and nights. Besides the paintings they also brought with them sixteen tonnes of red sand from their land, which over the course of several days was dispersed over the gallery floor. What had been a standard ‘white cube’ interior was radically transformed into a space for ceremony: over several days and nights separate groups of women and men prepared and performed Dreaming ceremonies, filling the space with traditional song, language, dance, swirling dust, bodies painted in ochre, the smell of smoke and sweat. This was not what an art historical training had prepared me for: ‘performance art’, ‘installation’, and ‘body art’, even ‘painting’, were all wildly inadequate terms for what I observed over the course of that week.

I am reminded of this moment by the global repercussions recently of the Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests. The Australia I grew up in was deeply racist, and it remains so. Sadly, despite years of protest, public and scholarly debate, and a government apology in 2008 for the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families by national and state agencies, Indigenous Australians remain the most incarcerated people on earth. Leading Aboriginal artists have long been highly critical of Australia’s colonial past, and the pervasive hold it has on the present. Daniel Boyd, for example, critiques the nation’s foundational myths by reworking white Australian imagery, from heroic depictions of Captain Cook (statues of whom are currently the subject of heated debate) to encounters between Aboriginal and European settlers. I included Boyd’s painting We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2007) in an exhibition I curated in 2015 called Colonial Afterlives, which brought together the work of contemporary artists from former British colonies including Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, Canada, New Zealand, as well as Australia.

: Colonial Afterlives exhibition catalogue cover. Image by Christian Thompson, Trinity III, from the Polari series, 2014. Christian Thompson is represented by Sarah Scout Presents (Melbourne) and Michael Reid Gallery (Sydney and Berlin).

Colonial Afterlives exhibition catalogue cover. Image by Christian Thompson, Trinity III, from the Polari series, 2014. Christian Thompson is represented by Sarah Scout Presents (Melbourne) and Michael Reid Gallery (Sydney and Berlin).

Over the past decade, I’ve been researching the European representation of enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries across the Caribbean, Brazil and antebellum America (the subject of my book, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in an Age of Abolition). More recently, I’ve been talking to museum professionals and scholars across the UK about how their institutions might publicly acknowledge the cultural legacies of slavery. The work of UCL’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership project has uncovered a wealth of data about slave-owners at the moment of British emancipation in 1833, when a grant of £20 million (40% of Britain’s national budget) was paid in compensation, by British taxpayers to slave owners. My research draws on this work, focussing on the impact of slave-owners as art connoisseurs, collectors and patrons on the early history of British art museums.

There’s no doubt that such ‘hidden histories’ are troubling. The toppling of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston on 7 June was not simply a spontaneous action born out of collective rage, but one with a long and more complex history of thwarted community attempts to acknowledge publicly Colston’s role in the slave trade. Madge Dresser points out that when the statue was erected in 1895 (over 170 years after the subject’s death), it coincided with the building of monuments which glorified the Confederacy in the United States, and others in Britain and across its Empire, which: ‘similarly extolled the virtues of British imperial figures whose relationship with colonised people of colour ranged from the paternalistic to the genocidal’. Historian Nick Draper is right when he says: ‘Historians need to be realistic about their reach and influence. But for more than 30 years scholars have worked towards an adequate post-colonial account of Britain’s history as a colonising and imperial power.’ He cautions: ‘We have tried to establish an evidence base that can be drawn on by all parties. The hegemonic view of British exceptionalism, its unique commitment to liberty and its glorious imperial past, has been challenged, but it has survived. Had we collectively succeeded, then some of the paths not taken would have been pursued. The binary of leave it alone/tear it down might have been avoided’. There is a sense of disappointment in this statement, as if historians themselves have in some sense failed in their attempts to challenge the status quo. But it is this ‘evidence base’ that is so vital to what we do as art historians as well, and why in our teaching we often speak about ‘authoritative sources’ and the importance of primary archival research.

Australia has a longer history of grappling with its colonial (British) past. As a curator in a big state art museum in the late 1990s, I was part of a generation that began to question the traditional separation in collection displays of ‘Aboriginal art’ and ‘Australian art’, interrupting Euro-centric chronological displays by introducing works of contemporary Indigenous artists, such as Boyd. (European visitors had no doubts about what constituted ‘Australian art’: they headed straight for the Aboriginal art collections.) My first sustained encounter with Aboriginal art and its makers in 1993 was profound, and its complexities and contradictions have stayed with me over the course of my career and feed now into my teaching. In Britain, museums are starting to engage more directly with the deeper implications of empire (see, for example, The Past is Now: Birmingham at the British Empire, 2017), but there is still much work to be done.

Art historians today are attentive to the complexities of social context, and careful to avoid the simplistic dualisms that newspapers, politicians and much social media commentary thrives on. Public statues have garnered attention across the world as lightning rods for heated and often bitter debates about national identities, yet the very fabric of our cities and countryside  – street names, public buildings, museum collections, archives, country houses, to name just a few examples – is steeped in the residue of history. This reminds us that colonial business is unfinished, its legacies are raw; history is now, and it matters.

 

Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in Museum Studies and History of Art in the Department of History of Art, and Director of the Centre for Museum Cultures. In Autumn term 2020, she will be teaching the seminar ‘Slavery and Its Cultural Legacies’ as part of the MA Museum Cultures and MA History of Art.

 

 

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Patrick Modiano, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is a paradox

Akane KawakamiThis post was contributed by Dr Akane Kawakami, Senior Lecturer in  20th and 21st-century French and francophone literature in Birkbeck’s Department of Cultures and Languages. It was originally published on The Washington PostDr Kawakami’s books include A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions

Patrick Modiano, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, is a paradox. He writes bestsellers but shuns the media. His novels sound autobiographical, yet his declared subject is a historical period that ended just before he was born. His style is clear and simple, but it masks complex time frames, unreal scenarios and a narrator who often seems to know little about the story he is in charge of. He is a household name in France but almost unknown outside his own country. This is one reason why the recipient of this year’s literature prize may come as something of a surprise to the world at large, if not to his faithful and numerous Francophone readers.

Even for those of us who have been reading and loving his books for several decades, this honor establishing him as a “grand man of letters” seems somehow not to fit the media-shy author. Can it really be that this recluse — famously inarticulate on the French literary program “Apostrophes” and always reluctant to give interviews — has been dragged into the limelight to be given the greatest literary accolade of all?

Modiano himself has always played down his own achievements, as well as the status of his chosen medium, the novel. In 1975, after four successful novels, Modiano — in a rare interview — claimed that the novel was an “anachronistic” genre that had ”slipped away” from public view. His heroes are known for slipping away, too; they’re shadowy, furtive figures modeled on himself (they tend to be tall, dark, shy and not good at interviews). In story­lines that are reminiscent of classic detective novels, his heroes set off on their searches into the past, trying to solve mysteries rooted in the period of the Occupation, Modiano’s avowed obsession.

Modiano_Missing PersonThe Occupation of France by the Nazis during World War II — along with the collaboration of many French nationals and the murder of French Jews — is a dirty pocket of French history that was not much discussed following the Allied victory. After Charles de Gaulle inaugurated the Fifth Republic, the general tendency was to stop talking about les années noires. It was only authors of a later generation — such as Modiano, whose guilt was inherited rather than personal — who proved able to explore this painful period. His first novel, about an anti-Semitic Jew who leads a colorful and surreal existence during the war, was published in 1968. Missing Person, published in 1978, is another highlight, about an amnesiac detective who goes on a hunt for his own identity during the Occupation. Honeymoon (1990), the story of a young Jewish woman who disappears in 1942, is also a gripping read.

Modiano’s novels are usually built around several time frames. They might start off in the 1980s, go back to the 1960s to evoke his youth and then suddenly shelve down into the 1940s to reveal a crucial link between a friend of his deceased parents and the woman he is dating in the present. Or the link will not be crucial; it will simply be a case of what might have been, the possibility that one ephemeral life that was extinguished during the Occupation might have brushed past another who has happened to survive.

In Dora Bruder (1997), Modiano gave up fiction and tried to re-create the real life of the heroine of Honeymoon, relating the few facts he had recovered about her movements in 1941 to his own wanderings through the Parisian streets as an adolescent in the 1960s, and to his walks in the 1990s. Gaps in his knowledge evoke the poignancy of the subject, as, in the end, Modiano has to concede that he still knows almost nothing about the girl, except that she was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and ended her days in Auschwitz.

Modiano tells all this in a limpid, almost classical prose that belies the ugliness of the events and facts. His writing is extremely readable, which is perhaps the reason for both his popularity in France and his relative lack of academic recognition (his novels are taught more in English-speaking universities than in French ones). Yet his clear writing eases the reader through instances of formal experimentation that would not be out of place in a Paul Auster novel: bewildering shifts in time, multiple appearances of “Patrick,” who may or may not be the author, and apparently real settings transformed into strange, hallucinatory spaces.

Light is something Modiano is good at describing, and many of the scenes in his novels are almost cinematic in their visual impact. Modiano co-wrote the screenplay of Lacombe, Lucien (1974), directed by Louis Malle, and has carried on to make more films, such as The Son of Gascogne (Pascal Aubier, 1995) and Bon Voyage (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 2003).

His prose also achieves a difficult feat, which is to get French readers to face, time and time again, the unspeakable acts of betrayal and cowardice perpetuated during the Occupation. The detective novel framework, the clear style, the diffident narrators — all this makes it deceptively simple for readers to occupy the narrator’s seat in Modiano’s novels. The narrator of Missing Person introduces himself saying, “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace.”

The joy of reading a Modiano novel is to slip into that silhouette, to make the journey through the decades of French history and then — sometimes, suddenly — experience all the horror of the past at the same time as the immunity conferred by its distance.

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Can creative writing be taught?

Helen-Harris-Jul-2014-0366-smaller-versionThis post was contributed by Helen Harris (MA Oxon), associate lecturer in creative writing in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. Her new novel, Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart will be published by Halban Publishers on 13 November.

Creative writing lecturers are used to the scepticism – occasionally tinged with downright hostility – with which some people react when they reveal their profession. “Do you really believe you can teach someone to write?” Well yes, personally I believe that with patience and imagination it is possible to teach anyone to do anything.

What is more disturbing is when a successful writer who also teaches creative writing loudly announces – as Hanif Kureishi did earlier this year – that creative writing courses are “a waste of time.” Cue uproar. Even as he spoke, creative writing courses were proliferating in universities up and down the country.

What is perhaps even more puzzling is that this scepticism seems to be shared by a number of students who enrol on creative writing modules. Some of them insist to me, for example, that the marking of their coursework must be subjective, that their friends thought it was brilliant and if I have not given it the high mark it so obviously deserves, that is just because my taste does not coincide with their friends’. Reminding them that all the coursework is second marked has little effect; creative writing is an imprecise individualistic business they seem to believe, certainly not an exact science with its own measures and its own criteria.

I could not walk into the classroom, certainly not at 7.30pm on a wet and windy November evening, if I didn’t believe I was teaching my students anything worthwhile. But what do I think I am actually teaching them?

For the past three years I have been delivering an introductory creative writing module which is part of Birkbeck’s BA English: “Writing Fiction”. My students are second to fourth year undergraduates. I begin the module by outlining what I believe I can – and what I can’t – teach them. The “can’t” list is actually quite short. I can’t teach them what to write; the story comes from them. Similarly, just as they all speak in their own voice with their own accent and vocabulary and mannerisms, the voice in their writing will be their voice. I tell them that within a few weeks I will be able to identify which student has written which piece of coursework even without names attached.

What I believe I can teach them is essentially craft. I run through the list of topics we cover in the first term – character, beginnings, plot, dialogue, point of view – and I explain that I am here to instruct them primarily in technique, not in how to write but how to write better. It is, I sum up cheerily, not much different from plumbing. (My all-time favourite student feedback form read roughly as follows: “I was a bit taken aback when Helen said at the beginning she would be teaching us to write in the same way that you might be taught how to assemble an IKEA bookcase. But as an approach I found it worked.”)

Of course it’s not quite like assembling an IKEA bookcase (something of which I am incidentally incapable.) But my students – and I expect most creative writing students – finish their course with a deeper understanding of what makes good fiction and how it works. Some of them lament that the way they read has changed; they fear they have lost the simple pleasure of enjoying a ‘good read’ without watching carefully to see what the writer is doing and how he/she is doing it. I tell them that this is in fact an encouraging sign of their progress.

front coverThe last session of the year was payback time. My new novel Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart will be published in November. Over the year, we have spent many evenings workshopping their writing. For our final class I put my money where my mouth is. I emailed them the first chapter of Sylvia Garland’s Broken Heart and asked them for critical feedback in our evening workshop. They set about the task with evident relish. As I listened to their feedback – “Is this really Jeremy’s point of view here or is it actually Sylvia’s?” “You told us not to include too much descriptive writing but you’ve got loads” – I could tell how much they had learnt over the year about writing fiction. And although I may have winced a couple of times, I am confident some of them will go on to write their own novels one day.

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Twitterfiction can work, but David Mitchell’s story is a bit of a flop

BiancaLeggettThis post was contributed by Bianca Leggett, a research student in the Department of English and Humanities. It was originally published on The Conversation.

When an author who insists he is “not really a social media animal” writes a Twitter story, we should at least raise an eyebrow. When that same author goes on to say he wrote the story at his publisher’s instigation, we might question what the point is in reading on. You wouldn’t catch a novelist promoting his new book of poems by announcing that he never really liked poetry but, you know, he thought he’d give it a go.

But then, David Mitchell is an author who can afford to take risks. Since the publication of Ghostwritten in 1999, Mitchell has won, not only a succession of awards and a huge and ardent readership both within and far beyond academic circles. I can think of no other author who has won a Richard & Judy Book Award and also been the subject of two academic conferences and an essay collection.

Mitchell’s novels are typically of a genre which Douglas Coupland termed “translit”, made up of a vast number of narrative threads which are interlaced across space and time, sometimes extending into the realm of supernatural or futuristic. The reader is challenged to “join the dots”, not only revealing a skillful patterning at work in Mitchell’s writing, but also an ethical message about the interconnection — and interdependence — of all life. Twitter, itself a vast dot-to-dot playing out across time and space, ought to hold some promise for an author of Mitchell’s inventiveness.

The Right Sort, which began on July 14 and just culminated, is one such dot. Tweeted in a succession of twice-daily bursts for a week which leaves the reader hanging, it is itself a kind of teaser. The story is apparently set in the “same universe” as Mitchell’s upcoming novel The Bone Clocks, but until readers get a look at the novel when it comes out in September, we won’t know quite where in that universe it fits.

It’s 1978 and Nathan Bland, a sensitive teen struggling with his parents’ divorce, is being dragged to a “soirée” by his mother. On reaching the strangely out-of-the-way house, he is abandoned to the company of Jonah, a boy with a strange confidence and peculiar turn of phrase. Nathan’s senses have been skewed by the valium he sneaked from his mother’s supply that morning. This gives some elasticity to our reading of his following narration as it turns more macabre and fantastical. If the story begins by recalling Mitchell’s most straightforward novel, Black Swan Green, it soon steers us into darker territory, a place in which time begins to behave in a thoroughly unsettling manner.

In interview, Mitchell has gamely suggested some of the literary possibilities of Twitterfiction which he has tried to harness in this story. He has spoken of the creative possibilities of the “straitjacket” form of 140 characters, citing the famously obscure Oulipo movement as a parallel. The “pulse-like” quality of each Tweet, meanwhile, allowed him to mimic Nathan’s valium saturated perceptions.

Fair enough, but none of this suggests that Mitchell has actually read any Twitterfiction, nor really begun to appreciate some of its unique possibilities. He’s been missing out.

Ideally, tweets should be able to stand alone or be read together with equal fluency: Teju Cole’s sharply satirical Seven short stories about drones or Jennifer Egan’s futuristic spy story Black Box achieved this.

Twitter’s rhythm best suits a description of the present or imagined future and can be turned in on itself, as Cole and Egan use it, to question the direction in which we are moving. Hurtling by in a fragmentary form, tweets remain potentially intimate and can accumulate power by being played out over time. Jonathan Gibbs’s beautifully written @365daystory was being told over the period of a year and described the story of one woman’s life from birth to death. The project has now been handed over to new authors, suggesting another of the possibilities which Twitterfiction has opened up: collaborative authorship.

The noise surrounding Mitchell’s story suggests it has been well received, but appreciated in the manner we gulp down a taster at an ice cream stand. We were going to buy the full-sized portion anyway, but a little free sample has generated our good will and whetted our appetite. The Right Sort is a rich short story in itself, but remains, in essence, a Twitter story for people who don’t like Twitter. Its multiple cliffhangers frustrate more than they delight and will surely have confirmed for many first time Twitterfiction readers what they already suspected: that they’d rather curl up with a book.

The Conversation

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Why Remember Shoulder to Shoulder?

This post was written by Dr Janet McCabe, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, and Vicky Ball, De Montfort University

Helena Bonham-Carter and Carey Mulligan recently marched through the corridors of Parliament agitating for female suffrage. It made the news. Not the protest. But because it was the first time that a commercial film had been shot inside the Palace of Westminster. In recreating what women did in that constitutional space to get the vote 100 years ago Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, brings that historic campaign back into public consciousness. While the struggle for emancipation shaped the political landscape in Britain in the early 1900s and changed irrevocably the position of women in society, it is a story that hardly ever makes it on to our screens; and it has been 40 years since we saw the suffragette movement last dramatized for television.

2014 marks the fortieth anniversary of the BBC miniseries, Shoulder to Shoulder, which focused on the activities of the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia (1898-1918). It consisted of six specially written plays and it came about through the collaboration of three women, the actress Georgia Brown, filmmaker and feminist Midge Mackenzie and TV producer Verity Lambert. A sense of the public service remit pervades the series as Shoulder to Shoulder dramatizes particular events of the early suffrage movement, albeit from a decidedly socialist perspective. Its importance as a landmark BBC drama documenting the history of feminism and the emergent public voice of women is unquestioned. That said, the series seldom gets repeated and has never been released on DVD. This neglect prompts us to ask: why is such a politically important drama about women’s history still buried deep in the BBC archive?

Shoulder to Shoulder first aired on Wednesday 3 April 1974 at 9pm on BBC 2. It seemed an inauspicious start. Competing as it did with the extensively praised documentary series, The World at War, on ITV, and the popular ‘fly-on-the-wall’ series, The Family, on BBC 1. A quirk of scheduling has perhaps contributed to the amnesia, with the suffragette drama squeezed out of our collective TV memories as we recollect instead the ambition of the multi-award winning World War II series (still on television screens somewhere) and one of the first ‘reality’ shows in the history of television, which documented the everyday life of the Wilkins, a working-class family from Reading. What defined these shows at this moment in British television culture when BBC and ITV dominated was a focus on stories rarely told: ordinary people caught up in history; or those who had scarcely been given representation or a public voice on television before.

It is well known that Emmeline Pankhurst was alive to the importance of capturing the media to help shape her political message; and some of the W.S.P.U.’s preoccupations—with the media, penal reform and direct action—chimed in with Britain in the early 1970s. The IRA bombing campaign (with the Price Sisters on hunger strike in Holloway prison—and forcibly fed), industrial strife and economic crisis meant that the series carried more than a whiff of controversy.

Shoulder to shoulderBut maybe it was its feminism that lay at the heart of why Shoulder to Shoulder has been forgotten then and why we should remember it now. At the cast and crew reunion held at Birkbeck last Thursday both Siân Phillips and Angela Down, who play Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst respectively, admitted to knowing little about these women before making the series. While Phillips was politically active and involved in the trade union movement, she had no formal education about the Suffragettes.

She wasn’t alone.

Midge Mackenzie spoke often of how the project grew out of her experience of filming the Golden Jubilee of Women’s Suffrage in 1968, when she discovered the story of how women won the right to vote had been ‘almost successfully erased from the history books. The women who fought for the vote had vanished from our history,’ she wrote. ‘Their writings were long since out of print and their newspapers buried in archives’ (Shoulder to Shoulder 1988; ix). In good documentary fashion Mackenzie filled her book, which one feels was a response to the betrayal she somehow felt at having men write the TV series, with women’s voices—original experiences as expressed in the words of those taking part, from diaries, letters, memoirs, speeches, as well as newspaper reports and the Suffragettes own publications, Votes for Women and The Suffragette.

The series, like the book, focused on the militant campaign; but these Suffragettes were by no means the only campaigners demanding enfranchisement. Shoulder to Shoulder (like all history) is a product of its time and, for example, it doesn’t address the contribution of other dedicated Suffragettes like Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to Parliament, or Charlotte Despard, an Irish-based campaigner and Sinn Féin activist, for as Irish revolutionaries it probably was not the right time for reassessment as the troubles in northern Ireland still raged. And the non-violent, but constitutionally minded, Suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett, barely got a look in either. But then committee work and letter writing is far less televisual than the drama of arson campaigns and bruising clashes with the police. What is rescued and recovered is not random, but the fragility of remembering the complexity of our history adds to ignorance and concealment.

But this is no excuse to forget Shoulder to Shoulder. Margaretta Jolly, Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, offered a useful intervention at the symposium that followed the screening, when she spoke of using the Suffragettes to ‘measure new feminisms’ and of the importance of passing these stories onto the next generation, however difficult and contested. What the act of recovery from this entanglement of ‘official’ history and personal stories, public speeches and oral testimonies, teach us is that the fight for equality didn’t end with enfranchisement—despite what postfeminism would have us to believe.

Remembering Shoulder to Shoulder isn’t only about reclaiming our stories, but about who has the power to tell them. Even within the production of the series there was a feminist struggle (of sorts) between an ideal and a challenging of power from the margins—Mackenzie, and shattering the glass ceiling and able to change the script but from the inside—Lambert.

Remembering the earlier fight for emancipation happened in the early 1970s at a time when a new feminism was struggling over questions of inequality, images of woman as Other and the culturally awkward position of women within the public sphere and their right to speak. Forty years and we remain preoccupied with similar questions. Reconnecting voices and the experience of women and women’s history across time and space is crucial.

Shoulder to Shoulder thus reminds us why the struggle still matters.

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Michael Gove should not kill the Mockingbird

This post was written by Dr Anna Hartnell, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. It was originally published in the Guardian.

‘Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbours give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”

This poignant moment from the last few pages of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, records the instant where a girl, about nine years old, finally recognises the humanity of her childhood bogeyman. This is a coming-of-age story, unusual for the fact that it charts the development of a female protagonist, Scout, and explores issues around racial violence, rape, and social marginality in the depression-era deep south of the United States. It has stirred up controversy across US school districts since it first entered the classroom in 1963.

Michael Gove’s decision to remove this book – along with a number of other American classics such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which similarly explore political persecution, social exclusion and the oppression of the weak – from the English literature GCSE syllabus, is not just parochial and regressive, it also fails to recognise the dynamics that make up modern Britain. It fails to understand that a large part of the value of reading literature lies precisely in the kind of empathic leap Scout makes at the end of Lee’s novel, one that enables her to see herself through the eyes of an “other” and so more fully comprehend her own identity.

To Kill a Mockingbird is arguably itself limited by the vision of a white liberal, but it tends to strike a chord with young people because its voice is faltering and uncertain and wide open to just the kind of debate that makes teaching literature about ethics and politics as much as it is about language and form.

However, schoolchildren in the UK are now going to be given a “more traditional” syllabus made up of largely British texts penned prior to the 20th century. Such a syllabus harks back to the myth of a “pure” origin for English literature, uncontaminated by the unintended consequences of empire, and ignoring the multicultural, multilingual and multinational space that Britain is today. Gove and his colleagues at the Department for Education are fantasising about a nation unencumbered by racial or cultural difference, or calls for greater social and economic equality.

This fantasy recalls an earlier moment in British imperial history when the colonial government in India decided in 1835 that education, conducted up to that point in native languages, would henceforth happen in English only. This narrow linguistic agenda ironically contributed to the reality of “literatures in English” – those other English voices that bear witness to the fact that the nation’s literary tradition does not have an uncomplicated beginning in medieval England.

At a time when the right is on the rise across Europe, immigrants are under attack from right and left, and the UK’s criminal justice system increasingly resembles the disastrous US model – which has seen the mass incarceration of black people under what many characterize as a new system of racialized control – the DfE’s decision plays into a poisonous atmosphere. There are of course other literary texts that are equally relevant for GCSE students; they need not be Anglo-American or indeed all be post-1900. But pre-20th century English culture should not dominate the syllabus: Gove’s attempt to wind the clock back overlooks the myriad identities of the children now populating British schools.

As Scout opens her narrative she reveals that her family can trace its lineage back to Simon Finch, a man from Cornwall who was persecuted as a Methodist and duly left England for the New World. There he acquired slaves, thus substituting one form of oppression for another. This knotty and discomforting genealogy that binds Englishness to empire and slavery and their fractious legacies of racism and inequality seems to be too thought-provoking for Gove’s deeply conservative vision of English literature. Our children should not be prevented from discovering it.

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Our favourite diarists

Ahead of the Arts Week event ‘Stranger than Fiction‘ about London Diarists on Wednesday 21 May, Birkbeck academics share who their favourite diarists are, and why. Please use the comments section to tell us about your favourite diarists.

Book M
Sue Wiseman
, Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature

Austin Street signMy favourite London diarist is Katherine Austen. Next time you go to Shoreditch consider stopping for a moment at Austin Street, next to St.Leonard’s church. You will be where much of Austen’s diary-notebook, ‘Book M’, was written in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Some of London’s most celebrated diarists, such as Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, were writing during the Restoration, when Austen was writing hers. Like Pepys, Austen was a successful and enterprising Londoner, but her voice and concerns add a new dimension to our understanding of Restoration scribbling. Austen had a substantial house in Shoreditch, an area that mixed poor houses, orchard and newly enclosed land. She notes her accounts in ‘Book M’ and is clearly prosperous, but she is pious and almost superstitious too. However, she also had strong views, railing against the ‘abominable rudeness’ of ‘Mr. C’ (he owed her money) and complaining that sending her son to university simply meant that he learned ‘ill-breeding and unaccomplishments’ at his Oxford College. As a young, rich, widow she worried about whether or not to marry again. ‘The world may think I tread upon Roses’, she wrote, but ‘they know not’.

I came across Austen’s ‘Book M’ in the manuscripts room at the British Library. Intrigued by the ‘M’ I ordered it up. My attention was immediately caught by a prose passage concerning ‘a Fall off a Tree where I was sitting in contentment’. The description of the fall was followed by a poem in which she claims that spirits, ‘the crew of Beelzebub’, were responsible for the accident. (You can read the passage and poem here.) Why had Katherine Austen gone from Shoreditch to Essex? Did most seventeenth-century women climb trees for fun? What made her think that the tree was inhabited by ‘revolted spirits’? Was it? I wanted to know and read on slowly, stumbling over her handwriting.

Tillingham_small

Churchyard at Tillingham

By the end of the day I knew that she had fled to Essex to avoid the plague. She comments that plague ‘is not yet’ in ‘my house’, but it is a race against time. She notes ‘Aug 28th 1665: on going to Essex … the day before I went there . . .was dead that week 7400.’ Soon after this the scene of the diary shifts to the village of Tillingham, Essex. She does not record what she thought and saw as she left the safety of her house to travel East through the poor, plague-racked eastern suburbs to ford the Lea and escape. But it may be that the plague travelled silently with her. For a mysterious physician and suitor that she took with her on her journey died while she was there and is buried in Tillingham churchyard (see here for a walk in Tillingham). Austen survived to return to London and pursue her many plans.

I left the Manuscripts Room that day excited but sad. How could this fascinating writer ever get the readers she deserved? Luckily it turned out that several other people had been at work and now there are two editions of ‘Book M’, one for easier reading and the other for scholarly detail.  Maybe someone will find books ‘A’ to ‘L’. I hope so.

Diary at the Centre of the Earth
Dennis Duncan, Lecturer in Modern Literature and Culture

My favourite London diarist is still writing today. In fact they’re a current undergraduate at Birkbeck. Actually, it’s one of my personal supervisees. This feels like an awkward confession. I have never discussed with him the fact that I read his diary. It always seems like an inappropriate digression in the context of the supervision session, like a psychoanalyst asking a novelist patient to sign their book. But let it be known henceforth that I have long been an admirer of Dickon Edwards’s online Diary at the Centre of the Earth.

Edwards describes his diary as ‘sporadic and slightly celebrated’, although there is characteristic modesty in both these descriptions. The Diary at the Centre of the Earth has been maintained since 1997, making it one of the longest-running internet diaries around, and it’s more than a little celebrated (indeed it contributes a fair few entries to Elborough’s London Year). Edwards’s delicate prose elegantly captures the life of a twenty-first-century flâneur, partaking of, and sometimes contributing to, the cultural life of the capital. It has its dandyish moments – Edwards is quite at home with the Soho in-crowd, and his writing has the precision of the Wildean bon mot. Yet for the most part this precision is gentle rather than ostentatious. Diary at the Centre of the Earth describes an attempt to experience London, in its brash, brand-conscious, contemporary configuration, through the aesthetic sensibilities of an earlier age. Its sentences are shot through with a wistfulness at the difficulty of maintaining the illusion.

There is, of course, another more specific pleasure in reading this diary, which comes about when Edwards describes his studies at Birkbeck – a subject he addresses frequently. Here, for me, is the thrill of an intimate association with the narrative – places I inhabit every day, courses I’ve taught, texts I know inside out – caught in the diarist’s lens, assigned a place alongside other, more decadent staples of Edwards’s unfolding life story.

The cat is out of the bag now. Perhaps next time we meet for supervision we’ll make small talk about the parties and private views Edwards has attended most recently. But I think I’d prefer it if we don’t; I’d prefer simply to admire the diary from a distance, to glimpse Edwards’s life – at least his life beyond the purview of a personal supervisor – only through the careful charm of his prose.

The Brixton Diaries
Joe Brooker, Reader in Modern Literature 

The Colour of MemoryGeoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory (1989), began life as ‘The Brixton Diaries’. In 1986 Dyer was commissioned by the New Statesman to write about life as he and his friends were experiencing it in South London. In a note to the revised edition of his novel (2012), Dyer recalls that it was hoped that the diary would have ‘an interest that was more than local and personal’. But what had been a factual writing commission subtly became a fictional writing project: ‘Gradually I saw a way of using and shaping the material in a slightly different way, in a form that would deploy it to better, more personal ends (I invented a sister for myself, or for my narrator, rather) and, hopefully, more lasting effect’.

The Brixton Diaries had recorded facts from his real life, whereas the novel takes liberties: introducing invented characters, but also clouding the Dyeresque narrator himself in fiction and leaving him nameless and unidentifiable with the author. In a late twist, it appears that the entire narrative is to be taken as written by a character who has appeared in the third person throughout it. The move renders the novel a teasing paradox, a metafictional circle in the key of Calvino or Borges. But we note that Dyer, in retrospect, presents the shift from diary to novel as a move to a more personal mode of writing. It seems that the Brixton Diaries sought public resonance, as reportage from a riot-scarred area of London during Margaret Thatcher’s third term of office; whereas their metamorphosis into fiction somehow allowed Dyer to write a more truly subjective account of the times.

In any case, The Colour of Memory’s roots in diary are unmistakable. The novel recounts the events of a year in Brixton, around 1986-7, essentially in chronological order. It is divided into sixty chapters which count down from 060 to 000. This device lends the book an obscure suspense, but as Dyer admits, suspenseful narrative was not his forte nor his aim: ‘The book did not start out as a novel (and, for anyone expecting a plot, never adequately became one)’. Each small vignette – involving the theft of the narrator’s car, a party, or a trip to Brixton market – could just about claim to include narrative, and certain tendencies grow through the book, notably the fear of crime which culminates in a mugging. But by most standards, The Colour of Memory is distinguished by the absence of narrative, or at any rate of any plot that soars beyond the plausible. The novel’s fascination is with the texture of life, unmomentous yet constant.

This fascination sometimes takes the idiom of photography: the book declares itself to be ‘like an album of snaps’, in which ‘what happens accidentally, unintentionally, at the edges or in the margins of pictures – the apparently irrelevant detail – lends the photograph its special meaning’. Dyer’s book was thus a rarity: an English novel that not merely relayed but formally embodied the advanced continental ideas of the time, in this case those of Roland Barthes’ late work on photography Camera Lucida (1980). In its hospitality to contingency, it also stands as an ambiguous text, between the genres of personal journal and narrative fiction. The Colour of Memory invites us to think about the common ground occupied by the novel and the diary: that less public and celebrated genre that has so often nourished fiction.

(Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature will hold a day conference on the work of Geoff Dyer on 11 July 2014.)

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Women on screen aren’t allowed to grow old erotically

Professor Lynne SegalThis post was contributed by Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies. It was originally published on The Guardian’s Comment is Free.

Diane Keaton recalled her mother’s advice – “don’t grow old” – as useless, however pertinent for Keaton’s chosen career as an actress. It’s a truism that interesting roles for older actresses are hard to come by. While signs of physical ageing are routinely played down in leading male actors, who regularly take roles as still vigorous and desirable characters (whether heroes or villains), the opposite applies to older actresses, if they are allowed to appear on screen at all.

Are things changing? It was Keaton herself who seemed to herald a shift when she played in the popular 2003 film about love in later life, Something’s Gotta Give. At the time she expressed astonishment at being offered the role of romantic heroine, at 58, despite being partnered by Jack Nicholson, already a decade older. Yet, in Hollywood, the films that portray older women as desirable remain sparse, with Meryl Streep one of the precious few still allowed to play a romantic lead. Meanwhile, when not excluded, one of the notable ways that older actresses make it on to the screen is playing a character with dementia: Judi Dench in Iris (2001), Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006), Streep in The Iron Lady (2011), Emmanuelle Riva in Amour (2012).

However, if cinema remains grim and forbidding territory for older actresses, television is finally starting to offer them more. To be sure, the majority of shows remain youth obsessed, and older women – with The Golden Girls a striking exception – remain perceived as beyond playfulness and sexual passion.

Still, with a third of our population over 50, and 10 million over 65 – and half of them women – the media has had to give a little. Now along comes the second series of the BBC’s Last Tango in Halifax, with its portrait of the late-life romance of two septuagenarians, Celia and Alan. The channel is planning something similar for next year with Grey Mates, involving a friendship network of pensioners, starring Alison Steadman, Stephanie Beacham and Russ Abbot – all in their mid-60s.

Noting the success of Last Tango, I have been pondering what it tells us about attitudes to bodies, old and young. Celia and Alan may be in the throes of romance, but we typically see them, particularly Celia, in her overcoat. The dynamics of their romance are mostly played out in the kitchen or the countryside, with warm smiles and hugs. There is no reference to their sexual concerns, and the bedroom stays off limits. This is all the more striking because their adult children’s affairs mean there is a continuous focus on sex.

Last Tango upholds one of the last taboos around sex, ageing and the body. Intentionally or not, it suggests that though in love, these oldies are past sexual concerns. Yet our culture has little problem presenting older men’s sexual desire. Nor do older men refrain from eagerly proclaiming this, whether in empirical surveys or in their own words. Much of the most esteemed writing by men mourns not the passing of sexual passion, but possible difficulties in its performance. Whether in the work of Ireland’s illustrious poet WB Yeats or America’s celebrated novelist Philip Roth, older men’s chief fear could be summed up as that of a creature sick with desire, but fastened to a dying animal – the threat of penile failure.

Older women’s erotic life, however, is barely registered, save in certain genres of pornography. In the wake of Germaine Greer or agony auntsIrma Kurtz and Virginia Ironside, the most influential women’s voices tackling old age tend to suggest they are contentedly post-sexual, “free at last” from erotic passion.

Given the complexities of desire, I am sceptical about this apparent gender contrast. I see the media’s endless production of eroticised, young female flesh as feeding a sense of shame attached to older women’s bodies. Any eroticisation of our aged female bodies remains taboo and this is one reason older women, in huge numbers (70% of us over-65s) live alone. Tackling our sexual yearnings, or registering our bodies with anything other than disgust, would indeed be radical. I wait to see it.

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