Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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‘A Tale of Two Launches’: an arts-based, autoethnographic inquiry into decolonising art therapy in the context of (post)colonial Australia
Get PDFThis article is an arts-based, autoethnographic account of the deep learning experience of launching an innovative art therapy text, Art Therapy in Australia: Taking a Postcolonial, Aesthetic Turn, for two different Australian contexts and audiences: Indigenous colleagues on Wathaurong country at the Institute of Koorie Education (IKE), Deakin University, and the art therapy community on Darug country at Western Sydney University. This article extends the (post)colonial and aesthetic concerns of the book as we reflect on and respond with artmaking and writing to an immersive ten-day retreat with Indigenous colleagues at IKE and seek to respectfully engage with First Nation ways and knowledges. The accounts offered here become a microcosm of the problematics of ethically encountering difference, in a landscape still shadowed by colonial violence.
 
The Wages of Fear: Fear and Surrender in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Get PDFIn early modern times fear played a central role in combat. Victory often belonged to the side that best managed the moral economy of the engagement. If the balance of power obviously played its role, the management of the combatants’ emotions could be equally decisive in the outcome of the engagement. Men of war therefore sought to fight their own fears, through prayer, alcohol or harangues. On the contrary, they tried to instil fear in their opponents through threats, summonses or terroristic strategies. Fear was so decisive that states come to criminalize it, charging certain unfortunate officers with cowardice and treason
NARA Escape and Evasion Reports
Get PDFThis Research Note gives a brief introduction to the series of Escape and Evasion reports held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Making up a rich source base, these documents can be used to explore the operational history of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), the history of MIS-X, escape and evasion planning during the Second World War, diplomatic history, and social history. In addition, they offer a very compelling story of the relationships that flourished between aircrews and European civilians during the war
The Spirit and the Letter: Medico-Literary Uses of Translation (Lombroso and Nordau)
Get PDFTaking as a corpus two famous works of the late nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo di genio (1882) and Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892), I would like to focus on a particular type of translation which could be qualified as ‘medico-literary’. This translation is based on a double phenomenon of adaptation and transposition which exemplifies what philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls a ‘capture’: an ‘operation by which representatives of the so-called hard sciences’ annex ‘a notion or a problem culturally charged with meaning’. The medico-literary translation indeed serves a clinical reading of literature, which supposes the passage of poetic or figurative language to be a symptomatic and often literal one
Review: Jeremy Coleman, Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity (The Boydell Press, 2019)
Get PDFIn his remarkable 1851 polemic, Opera and Drama, Richard Wagner characterized Paris as ever-hungry, impatient for the new, and as a city where an ambitious young artist might thrive; indeed, as the ‘great devourer of all artistic tendencies’. But such an image also suggests that the city might just as easily chew up and spit out a young composer. It is not surprising that Wagner, at this point living in Zurich, had such contradictory feelings about the French capital. Opera and Drama was written in the aftermath of what Jeremy Coleman, in his fine, detailed study of the composer’s fraught relationship with the city, characterizes as his ‘second assault’ on Paris. Having fled the aftermath of the Dresden Uprising of May 1849, in which he had been implicated, Wagner was now a political exile. Like Odysseus searching for Ithaca or perhaps condemned, like the tragic hero of his own 1843 opera, The Flying Dutchman, to journey the earth for eternity until the spirit of music finally redeems and releases him, Wagner needed a new home, and so it was that he heard the Sirens of Paris calling. While lodging with the composer Franz Liszt in Weimar, the pair plotted the city’s conquest, and, as Coleman describes, drew up plans for ‘nothing less than the future of art in the wake of political failure’
Review: Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures, ed. by Nicholas Freeman (MHRA, 2017)
Get PDFIt is probably safe to say that, with the exception of a few anthologized lyrical poems, Arthur Symons is best known for his critical rather than his creative work. And no wonder, for his criticism was instrumental in the theorization of that curious formation known as decadence: his 1893 essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, later expanded and retitled The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), was among the first attempts to unify what he called those ‘little separate cliques [of] brainsick young people’ – mystical poets, naturalist fiction writers, painters in the style of Japonisme – into a coherent tradition. To the extent that he staked a claim for decadence as a serious movement worthy of critical study, Symons remains the unofficial patron saint for our research endeavours in Volupté and elsewhere
Military Identification: Identity Discs and the Identification of British War Dead, 1914-18
Get PDFFollowing the ratification of the 1906 Geneva Convention, in August the British Army approved the design for its first identity disc which was designed to assist with the identification of dead or wounded soldiers. A 1914 decision to produce the discs from compressed fibre rather than from aluminium resulted in an inability to identify thousands of soldiers during and after the First World War and it remained a problem despite the introduction of the double identity disc in 1916, created at the insistence of Sir Fabian War, founder of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This article reflects upon the development of the British identity disc system between 1906-1916 and considers why so many soldiers became ‘unknown’
The Ecology of Suffering: Thinking with the Elements in Decadent Literature
Get PDFHow should one seek out a suitable place to suffer in the world? What would a city built for sorrow look like? And what sort of elemental conditions or precise ecosystem would it need for the right amount of melancholy to thrive? In 2019, the American poet and essayist Anne Boyer published a literary meditation on her cancer diagnosis in The New Yorker. In it, she detailed the blueprints of a space for communal grief that she had dreamed up long ago:
Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined architecture of sadness: gargoyles made of night sweat, moldings made of longest minutes, support beams made of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on.
Boyer writes how she took pleasure in envisioning how this gathering of distraught bodies might enrage societies at large because it would expose the exquisite, rotten truth – that suffering is what is shared – and something in this idea, with its prodding of ugly societal ethics and its excessive indulgence in the luxuries of sadness, feels potently decadent. If fin-de-siècle European writers and artists had contributed to a decadent handbook of suffering, what advice might it have included? What maps would they have drawn up, and where would they have told us to go? 
Bridging Art-Therapy and NVR: The Ramla Model for domestic resistance to violence, forming a resistance laboratory
Get PDFAfter two decades of using traditional methods of art therapy to try to help children who suffer from severe mental and behavioral problems, the author concludes that the results are not sufficient. The possibility of expanding the treatment portfolio to include NVR (nonviolent resistance to violence) theory and techniques is explored. This paved the way to establish a ‘resistance laboratory’: an integration of NVR and art-therapy, which allows parents and children to experience a shared positive interaction within one session. Thereafter, most parents gain the ability to resist their own fears and cope with the aggressive child behavior. As a result, the child experiences a boost in her sense of both safety and wellbeing. This often has a positive effect on the siblings. The intense balanced combination of NVR and art-therapy increased the chances of successful treatment outcomes