scholarly journals ‘An Epic Tale of England’: Atmospheric authentication of nationalist narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110657
Author(s):  
Robert Shaw ◽  
Michael J Richardson

Kynren is an outdoor spectacular pageantry performance which tells a tale of England, drawing on myth and history, to make several claims about Englishness and Britishness. It does so in the political wake, first, of constitutional crises in the UK centred around Brexit; and second, of debates around heritage, empire, race and nation which have been driven by responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. These themselves are manifestations of broader, global trends in which populist movements have attempted to reassert state-legitimacy through nationalism, heritage and culture. This paper explores, how Kynren affectively presents and discursively performs a narrative which puts place and landscape, and specifically the place and landscape of the peripheral region of County Durham in which it is located, at the heart of nation. We argue that the ways in which this narrative is authenticated performatively through the spectacular affective atmosphere of Kynren show how and which nationalist narratives resonate most readily in popular culture.

Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eko Wahyono ◽  
Rizka Amalia ◽  
Ikma Citra Ranteallo

This research further examines the video entitled “what is the truth about post-factual politics?” about the case in the United States related to Trump and in the UK related to Brexit. The phenomenon of Post truth/post factual also occurs in Indonesia as seen in the political struggle experienced by Ahok in the governor election (DKI Jakarta). Through Michel Foucault's approach to post truth with assertive logic, the mass media is constructed for the interested parties and ignores the real reality. The conclusion of this study indicates that new media was able to spread various discourses ranging from influencing the way of thoughts, behavior of society to the ideology adopted by a society.Keywords: Post factual, post truth, new media


2021 ◽  
pp. 019251212096737
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Baldini ◽  
Edoardo Bressanelli ◽  
Emanuele Massetti

This article investigates the impact of Brexit on the British political system. By critically engaging with the conceptualisation of the Westminster model proposed by Arend Lijphart, it analyses the strains of Brexit on three dimensions developed from from Lijphart’s framework: elections and the party system, executive– legislative dynamics and the relationship between central and devolved administrations. Supplementing quantitative indicators with an in-depth qualitative analysis, the article shows that the process of Brexit has ultimately reaffirmed, with some important caveats, key features of the Westminster model: the resilience of the two-party system, executive dominance over Parliament and the unitary character of the political system. Inheriting a context marked by the progressive weakening of key majoritarian features of the political system, the Brexit process has brought back some of the traditional executive power-hoarding dynamics. Yet, this prevailing trend has created strains and resistances that keep the political process open to different developments.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Nick Henry ◽  
Adrian Smith

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172098670
Author(s):  
Stephen Farrall ◽  
Emily Gray ◽  
Phil Mike Jones ◽  
Colin Hay

In what ways, if at all, do past ideologies shape the values of subsequent generations of citizens? Are public attitudes in one period shaped by the discourses and constructions of an earlier generation of political leaders? Using Thatcherism – one variant of the political New Right of the 1980s – as the object of our enquiries, this article explores the extent to which an attitudinal legacy is detectable among the citizens of the UK some 40 years after Margaret Thatcher first became Prime Minister. Our article, drawing on survey data collected in early 2019 (n = 5781), finds that younger generations express and seemingly embrace key tenets of her and her governments’ philosophies. Yet at the same time, they are keen to describe her government’s policies as having ‘gone too far’. Our contribution throws further light on the complex and often covert character of attitudinal legacies. One reading of the data suggests that younger generations do not attribute the broadly Thatcherite values that they hold to Thatcher or Thatcherism since they were socialised politically after such values had become normalised.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199423
Author(s):  
Anne M Cronin ◽  
Lee Edwards

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.


BDJ ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 230 (3) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Tanaka Kadiyo ◽  
Victoria Mellish

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