The place of transversal LGBTQ+ urban activisms

This special issue on placing LGBTQ+ urban activisms seeks to affirm the plurality of LGBTQ+ activisms and expand the geographic lens to consider places that have been side-lined as sites of LGBTQ+ political ferment. In this article I reflect on the ways that the collection also gestures towards the importance of ‘connective’ LGBTQ+ urban activisms, complicating existing theorisation that has primarily focused on transnational relations. Approaching it through the particular space and time of London during the Covid-19 pandemic, I interpret the collection as a call to explore the knowledge that becomes available – and the praxis that is foregrounded – when we examine the connective dimensions of LGBTQ+ urban activisms. Bridging feminist, queer and urban studies, I conclude by arguing for the particular analytic lens that emerges when ‘place’ is brought into critical tension with ‘transversal politics’ as a way to think about both those connective LGBTQ+ urban activisms that already exist and those which are urgently needed.

Small Business in Distress:

The character of postwar small business associations in Greece was indelibly stamped by the authoritarian democracy that was constructed between 1945 and 1967. The integration of Greece in the process of European economic unification in the early 1960s was the fuse that sparked the accumulated frustrations into strong collective action, leading some tradesmen and artisans to question the political status quo and identify with centrist and left wing parties. This socio-political ferment led to the renegotiation of petit-bourgeois identity and attempts to link it to a new political context.

Mykola Khvyl’ovyy, Dmytro Dontsov, and the Transgressive Symbiosis of Communist and Nationalist Visions for a Revolutionary Ukrainian Literature

Despite the tense geopolitical situation in interwar Eastern Europe, Ukrainian litterateurs at first elided the physical and ideological boundaries guarded by state authorities on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Cultural leaders on the far right and far left, separated by a chasm of fear and loathing, nevertheless read andresponded to one another’s works. In some cases, representatives of the two sides shared common influences, beliefs, and aesthetic ideals, and even took the risk of signalling their admiration for the theories and creative accomplishments of sworn enemies in the opposing camp, favourably invoking “foreigners” to serve opposing agendas. Amid the relative openness, fluidity, and experimentalism that characterised the first (i.e. pre-Stalinist) half of the interwar period in Ukraine, few regarded nationalism and socialism, or even Bolshevism, as mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, there were synergies and points of contact between the two. Examining the public interaction of the Communist writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyy (1893–1933) and the nationalist literary critic Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), I argue that the Ukrainian cultural and political ferment of the 1920s was transgressive in two senses. Firstly, it cut across the political boundaries of party membership and citizenship that divided Ukrainians into Soviet and non-Soviet, socialist and nationalist. Secondly, it defied expectations of ideological purity and loyalty at a time of growing but not yet insurmountable hostility. The result was a symbiosis of right and left-wing agitation, in both Soviet Ukraine and south-eastern Poland, for a revolutionary, anticolonial, and modernist Ukrainian literature.

ringl + pit and the Queer Art of Failure

In 1929, in the midst of the artistic and political ferment that was Weimar Berlin, the young photographers Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern formalized their personal and creative affinities to create Studio ringl + pit. Their collaboration, which would continue for the next four years, produced groundbreaking portraits, still lifes, and a handful of print advertisements that were celebrated for their inventively formal daring. In line with their training with Bauhaus photography master Walter Peterhans, ringl + pit's pictures were meticulously constructed and technically perfect, but they were also uniquely imprinted with the artists' characteristic blend of the playful, the strange, and, in multiple senses of the word, the queer. In this essay, Auerbach and Stern's adventurous approach to photographic experimentation is explored within the context of their correspondingly adventurous inclination to defy bourgeois conventions in their personal lives. In concert with the aesthetic synchrony that inspired their creative collaboration (such that, for its duration, they disavowed individual authorship in favor of the collective moniker “ringl + pit”) they were also lovers, a fact which, until now, has not been integrated into scholarly engagement with their work. Passionate photographic explorations, their work consistently privileged play, discovery, and intimacy over such conventional markers of success as money or fame. In this light, ringl + pit's audaciously anticipatory collective body of work might be said to adhere to the delineations of what Jack Halberstam has described as a “queer art of failure.”

Nathalie Sarraute

A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalia Sarraute (1900–1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. This book is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian émigré in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man's literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable. The book explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.

“Qu’il étoit maître chez lui” (He is the master of his house)

Arguing against traditional liberal narratives of the linear development of unfree labor, this chapter explores the politics of the counterrevolution by examining the way in which the master and servant acts of 1802 enhanced patriarchal government and the authority of male household heads over their dependents in the wake of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. It also shows how these new legal strategies to enforce subordination among marginal peoples took particular aim at French Canadians during a period of intense political ferment and rebellion in the colony. These amplified existing perceptions of French Canadians as seditious others. It explores the ramifications of these acts in terms of the practices of ordinary plebeian families, in which their broader meaning for reinstantiating hierarchy and subordination was challenged. The master and servant legislation aimed to circumscribe various freedoms, including the freedom to choose one’s sartorial presentation, an aspect of liberty that was consciously fostered as an element of political freedom.

The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.

Of International Law, Semi-colonial Thailand, and Imperial Ghosts

I argue that contextually reading two disputes involving Siam—Cheek v. Siam (1898) and the Temple of Preah Vihear (1962)—proves that both private law and public international law are structurally rigged against ex-semi-colonial nations. Nineteenth-century Siam was a political ferment known variously as a semi-colonial, semi-peripheral, non-colonial, or uncolonized polity. Siam bargained under imperial shadows her political independence by the tactical grants of concession contracts, as well as by negotiating treaties with competing European powers. In the post-colonial Temple of Preah Vihear case, colonial stationery—maps, photographs, and communiqués—as well as imperial customs offered evidentiary support to Cambodia, an ex-colonial state, against Thailand. In the early twentieth century, while authors picked Cheek v. Siam as a precedent for the law of international claims, textbooks offer the Temple of Preah Vihear case as a precedent on the form of treaties and estoppel. Conclusively, these two cases allow us to locate, if not exorcise, the ghosts of empires in Asian legal history, exposing, at the same time, Judge Koo’s Orientalization of customary international law.

The BBC: A Brief Future History, 2017–2022

This chapter discusses the two main challenges faced by public service television in Britain: one political, the other cultural; one external, the other internal. First, the political challenge: the inconvenient fact that people currently reside in a kakistocracy — ruled not by the best people, but by the worst. As with Brexit, as with Trump, as with all the ‘fake news’, as with the whole political ferment, people find themselves mesmerized and horrified as they lurch dazed and confused towards the BBC's Centenary year of 2022. The second challenge concerns the culture that seems to have taken root within the BBC over the past few years. Any length of time spent in the BBC's written archives shows that what's ended up on air for most of the past 95 years or so has usually been the result of a complex negotiation between individual personnel with hugely varied opinions and prejudices.