Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
Not a member yet
1742 research outputs found
Sort by
‘I Came Up Here to Build a Bridge’: Capitalism and the Representation of Military Leadership in Zulu (1964)
Full text linkThis article will offer an examination of the link between cultural representations of military authority and capitalist ideology through a textual analysis of the British film Zulu (1964) and its narrative depiction of leadership during the Battle of Rorke’s Drift – the most prominent action of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and one which has accrued a certain mythic status in modern cultural history, becoming, for many, a ‘synonym of British heroism. The central aim will be to interpret how this heroism is explained to the film audience and the political implications of the text’s ability to communicate ‘the ideology of leadership’.
 
‘Stop and Search’: How the Militarised Space of Belfast’s Past is Navigated by Feminist Film-makers
Full text linkThis article provides a comparative case study of feminist filmmaking strategies deployed to address issues around the militarised space of Belfast during the conflict, often known as The Troubles. This article makes specific reference to scenes from Pat Murphy’s formally experimental film Maeve from 1981, which contains key moments of gender-based harassment and violence between two sisters and British military personnel in Belfast. Analysis is also provided of the author’s own short film New Threads, which uses elements of BBC archival video of Belfast in 1976 and extracts from a book of first-person accounts of lesbian lives in the 1970s and 1980s to depict LGBT+ lives in a subversive manner
Book Review: Art Psychotherapy Groups in the Hostile Environment of Neo- Liberalism: Collusion or Resistance? Edited by Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn (2022)
No full textThis book contains a lot to think about. Reviewing it has taken me a long time because it concerns a discussion of many important issues in my life and my work. It unpacks the challenges of working and living in a world dominated by austerity politics. In particular, the book looks at the impact of austerity on art therapy and art psychotherapy groups. Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn explain how their experiences of political activism enabled them to work together on editing and shaping their book. It is unusual and yet welcome to me when therapists discuss the effects of the political world on their theory and practice
The Bow and Arrow Versus the Atom Bomb: Air Defence in Scotland 1945-1955
Full text linkThis article proposes that the development of Britain’s air defence system in the 1950s should be viewed concurrently with that of her nuclear deterrent. Faced with a new threat from the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, Britain began engineering a new generation of anti-aircraft weapons. Using Scotland as a case study, the strategic relationship between air defence and nuclear deterrence will be explored in the British transition from a defensive to an offensive stance, and orientation toward American nuclear technologies in the late 1950s
Soviet nuclear munitions in Czechoslovakia: 1965-1991
Full text linkUnder a Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty signed in 1965, the rapidly developing missile forces and air force of the Czechoslovak People’s Army (Czech acronym and hereinafter ‘ČSLA’) were to be strengthened with the addition of nuclear munitions. These were to be used to support planned operations on the so-called Czechoslovak Front. Operation JAVOR consisted of the construction of three nuclear depots, which were manned by special units of the Soviet Army. A new agreement between the CSSR and the USSR was entered into in 1986, extending the existing conditions of storage. Fundamental changes were brought about in 1989 by the Velvet Revolution and the end of the Cold War
(Re)writing Wilde’s Last Years: From David Hare’s The Judas Kiss to Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince
Full text linkIn his last days Oscar Wilde experienced a dramatic and yet magnificent fall, which turned his social failure into eternal literary fame, translating ‘Oscar Wilde’ into a cultural icon, into a paradigm of otherness to be performed and reproduced in a number of different rewritings. In the present study I will focus on David Hare’s 1998 play The Judas Kiss and Rupert Everett’s 2018 film The Happy Prince. Hare’s The Judas Kiss, narrates Wilde’s days immediately before the arrest and after his release from Reading Gaol; more specifically Act 1 – significantly entitled ‘Deciding to Stay’ – takes place at the Cadogan hotel in between the second and third trials, while Act 2 – ‘Deciding to Leave’ is set in Naples and recounts his last days with Bosie. Everett’s The Happy Prince recounts Wilde’s last ‘gutter’ days as a pariah and exile, first in France and then in Italy, rewriting Wilde starting from those years and experiences which are usually excluded from conventional film narrative portrayals of him. Hare’s play and Everett’s film portray the alterity of a writer, whose liminal position can function as a lens through which to read and deconstruct our own (success-obsessed and self-centred) age
Bergamot and Cedar
Full text linkIn the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde declares that ‘No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved’. His aestheticist credo, namely that art owes no fealty to truth, takes on the form of a decadent historicism in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889): Seeking to realise ‘an artistic desire for perfect representation’ is not new: queer decadents such as Wilde, Simeon Solomon, Vernon Lee, or Michael Field employed a ‘decadent historicism’ to excavate queer ancestors and create a ‘defiant homoerotic aesthetic’.[1] Their quest to unearth genderqueer people in history and see themselves mirrored and legitimised often entailed ‘faking and appropriating history in the face of contravening empirical facts’[2] to represent what cannot be proved but is nonetheless ‘true’. Neo-Victorian fiction, and steampunk, with its playfully anachronistic retro-speculation may likewise reclaim and reimagine queer stories in the Victorian past, drawing inspiration from decadent queer aesthetics. In warping the nineteenth century, ‘the era in which the modern terminologies we use to structure the ways we think and talk about sexuality were invented’[3] and the ‘homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history’, indeed emerged ‘as a species’[4], steampunk may not only re-make the past meta-historically in its own (queer) image, but become, as one steampunk puts it, ‘more true because it’s not’.[5]
This short story endeavours, in a creative-critical exercise, to ponder how steampunk may reimagine alternative genealogies in which Victorian LGBTQA+ identities are represented fully and positively in line with contemporary ideals of pride, rejecting the repressive ‘inversion’ pathology of fin de siècle sexology and queer fatalism alike. Whereas queer decadents’ historicism often codified a queer experience characterized by loneliness, pain, and tragedy, steampunk may rewrite a queer history of the closet and reframe queer experiences through its retro-speculative fantasy for today’s audiences. This story especially engages with Dustin Friedman’s thesis that aestheticism opened spaces between art and the queer aesthete that offered ‘partial freedom from preordained metaphysical, social, and biological orders’ in and through which queer decadents ‘could resist a hostile social world by developing an autonomous sense of self’, allowing them to ‘tarry at the very limits of what is thinkable in one’s culture’,[6] and attempts to re-think queer decadent relationships with Orientalism and Japonisme to de-centre Euro-centric gendered hegemonies.
[1] Joseph Bristow, ‘Decadent Historicism’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3.1 (2020), 1–27, p. 8
[2] Ibid., p. 10.
[3] Holly Furneaux, ‘Victorian Sexualities’, Literature Compass 8/10 (2011): 767–775 p. 769.
[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 43.
[5] James Carrott, ‘Vintage Tomorrows: James H. Carrott at TEDxSonomaCounty’, 2013. Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT9WWyAFHpE, (Consulted 24.08.2023), 8:05-8:10.
[6] Dustin Friedmann, Before Queer Theory. Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), p. 5, 2, 4