Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
Not a member yet
1742 research outputs found
Sort by
‘Play Ground’ An Art Approach to Working in an Aboriginal Community School
Get PDFThis article reflects on an art approach referred to as ‘Play Ground’ that evolved over six years in four Aboriginal pre-schools in regional NSW, Australia. It focuses on one of the pre-schools and proposes a culturally sensitive, collaborative play space that allows for individual and group expression within the safety of the art therapy setting, reaching beyond the work with the children, including teachers, families, and Community.
Art therapy theory and processes, my art practice, and a reflective psychodynamic orientation guided my thinking and helped in navigating uncertain terrain and in understanding the continuing traumatic social framework of this school and community in the aftermath of colonisation. Western psychological knowledges offer a way of understanding the work, however, the author embarks on an ongoing search for a meeting place and point of exchange and learning in the intercultural space, within the socio-historical context of this Aboriginal Community School. Winnicott’s idea of ‘potential space’ (1971), as an intermediate area of experiencing, is embedded in Play Ground but also brought alive in the encounters and knowledge sharing between cultures - in the classroom, the staffroom, ‘under a tree’ - and may offer a between-worlds area of reverie and place of meeting.
Keywords: Aboriginal, intercultural, trauma, clay, play, uncertaint
The Disbandment of the Southern Irish Regiments – 1922
Get PDFThe disbandment of the Southern Irish Regiments of the British army occurred in July 1922 due to the creation of the Irish Free State and the effects of the so-called ‘Geddes Axe’ on the British army. Special arrangements meant that officers and men who wished to continue their service in the British army were able to transfer to other regiments and there were very few compulsory redundancies. This saw limited public concern about these regiments. The preservation of those regiments associated with Northern Ireland was, however, the subject of extensive lobbying and James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, showed considerable ability in negotiations which ensured the survival of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Royal Irish Fusiliers
Finishing Touches: Clothing and Accessories as Tokens of Cruelty and Evil in Rachilde and Barbey d’Aurevilly
Get PDFIn decadent fiction, evil is manifested through perversion, a taste for torment, and the creation of sexual, gender, and moral transgressions. In Rachilde’s and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s works, manifestations of evil and demonstrations of femininity are co-constructed. Each short story in Barbey’s Les Diaboliques (1874) foregrounds a different femme fatale whose beauty is perhaps only rivalled by her talent for cruelty. In each story, these women deceive, kill, and seduce with their good looks, or use their sensuality to captivate their male prey. The three stories that I focus on in this article, ‘Le Rideau cramoisi’ [The Crimson Curtain], ‘Le Plus bel amour de Don Juan’ [The Most Beautiful Love of Don Juan], and ‘Le Bonheur dans le crime’ [The happiness in crime], stage a cross-fertilization between appearance and cruelty that is comparable to another major piece of French decadent fiction, Rachilde’s well-known novel La Marquise de Sade (1887) in which the protagonist, Mary Barbe, is a young and fashionable misanthrope whose distaste for men and mankind is often sartorially determined. Her peculiar beauty and extravagant garments operate as a repository of tools and weapons that she uses to harm, torture, and humiliate the men around her
Huw J. Davies, The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War, 1750-1850
Get PDFSoldier Stories: The Irish in the Army from the Late Nineteenth Century to the First World War
Get PDFBy drawing on soldiers’ writings and their broader cultural representations, this article enables new ways of seeing Irish soldier identity as socially and politically mobile. Using Lady Butler’s famous ’Listed for the Connaught Rangers: Recruiting in Ireland (1878) as its starting point, it explores the Irish soldier’s positioning from the late Victorian period to the First World War. Analysing narratives of William Butler, John Lucy, Francis Ledwidge and Patrick MacGill, alongside fictional and visual representations of Irish soldiers, it is demonstrated how Irish soldierly identity was responsive and shifting during this period of complex political and social change for Irelan
Decadence, Decolonization, and the Critique of Modernity: An Introduction by the Guest Editor
Get PDFWhat would it mean to decolonize decadence? To ask the question is to consider the relationship between disparate but intertwined critiques of modernity. For writers in late nineteenth-century France such as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, for example, ‘decadence’ captures a particular critique of urban modernity. These were writers who exhibited a ‘profound scepticism about modernity and progress’, and were ‘disgusted by overcrowding, poverty, and rampant commercialism, what Huysmans described as ‘the caliphate of the counter’. Decolonizing critiques, however, developed out of the anti-colonial movements that lead to political decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of newly independent postcolonial national cultures, as well as continuing efforts at cultural decolonization, including the development of postcolonial theory, and theorizations of coloniality and decoloniality. These are all critiques of modernity differentiated by their origins and ends, but which nevertheless cast doubt, each in their own ways, on the project of Western civilization, its myths of progress, imperial expansionism, imposed temporalities, and enthralment to commodity capital. But to consider what it would mean to decolonize decadence is also to imagine modernity from starkly different viewpoints, from a stance of alienation within the West, from standpoints that experience Western hegemony as alien, and from innumerable perspectives that otherwise navigate colonial rule, imperialism and its aftermath, settler colonial myths, or the development of national cultures outside, but in relation to the West
Review: J. B. Bullen, Rosalind White, and Lenore A. Beaky, eds, Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World: The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022)
Get PDFAbout a week before I sat down to read Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World, an edited version of William Michael Rossetti’s ‘séance diary’, I had a Zoom appointment with an Indigenous Two-Spirit tarot reader for an ancestral reading. The first thing to note is that, despite my Zoom working fine a couple of weeks earlier, when the Zoom call began, I couldn’t hear a word the tarot reader was saying. We tried again and again; nothing worked. Eventually, frustrated, I said that I had to bow out, and the reader called me on my cell phone and asked if I had been ‘blocked’ lately, turning technological difficulties into something metaphysical and, you’ll note, my ‘fault’. The person also said that the night before a ‘maternal figure holding a white lily’ had appeared to them, trying to communicate with me, then they asked if my mother had ‘passed’. When I said no, they quickly changed gears and said that sometimes living people appear in visions in order to communicate with other living people. I begin this review with a personal anecdote because William Michael Rossetti’s séance journal is full of these moments: for believers (such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning), certain words and names and images resonated, suggesting contact from the spirit world. For non-believers (such as Robert Browning, apparently), all spiritualists were scam artists preying on vulnerable people who missed their loved ones
Ireland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and History
Get PDFThe First World War is a major event in world history and in Ireland’s history as well. This article demonstrates how myth, memory and history became intertwined in contemporary understandings of Irish participation in the conflict, as well as in subsequent scholarly writing. Through examples including recruitment statistics, policy decisions, the war at sea, memorialisation, unionism and Northern Ireland, and the Irish Revolution, this article demonstrates that a triangular relationship between myth, memory, and history has pervaded our understanding of the history of the war itself. A critical appreciation for how and when these phenomena intersect is therefore needed for a better understanding of Ireland and the First World War – and how we as historians continue to write its history today
Vernon Lee: Decadence, Morality, and Interart Aestheticism
Get PDFThis collection of essays ensued from ‘Vernon Lee 2019’, an international conference held to mark the centenary of Lee’s return to her Italian home, Villa Il Palmerino, after enforced exile during World War I. While Lee emerged as a significant writer in the heady atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism and decadence, she continued to publish extensively throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and her death in 1935, she produced a wealth of new material in a variety of genres including travel writing, novels, philosophical and aesthetic treatises, and compilations of supernatural fiction. As the new century dawned, she also became politically active; in the years leading up to World War I, her polemical pacifist articles appeared in the periodical press and she wrote an important anti-war morality play, The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915). In Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and The Beautiful (1913), she took criticism in exciting new directions, focusing on the developing field of ‘psychological aesthetics’; experimented with literary analysis in The Handling of Words (1923); and consolidated a lifelong interest in musicology in Music and its Lovers (1932).