Stop, Look, and Listen #10
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
Content warnings: Violence; Murder; Genocide.
First things first: Happy New Year! My very best wishes to all of you, and to your loved ones, as we enter 2024.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
Christmas traditions.
Representing violence.
New York, Christmas 1975.
Constitutional crises.
American historical myths.
Christmas traditions
On the multiple narratives attached to the Christmas, both personal and collective, and their origins, adaptation, and possibilities for reinterpretation
Recommendations
Tess Gallagher Clancy of
writes for Future Church about what it means to consider the possibility that Mary bore Jesus not of an immaculate conception but as an illegitimate pregnancy, and how that might prompt us to re-evaluate the meaning of Jesus’s arrival in light of disregard for Palestinian life in the present.- writes for her Unmapped Storylands newsletter about borrowed festive traditions, and about the role of both food and literature in sustaining often painful memories and truths, as well as their power to overcome the deep-seated divisions they reveal.
On this episode of the Backlisted podcast, hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, along with producer Nicky Birch, are joined by poet Clare Pollard to talk about Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and its multiple adaptations. They discuss how a plethora of stage productions of the novella emerged almost immediately in the wake of its initial success, with Dickens himself also partaking in an effort to further monetise one of his most famous works. They then shift focus to the multiple adaptations of the story made for film and television in the 20th century, from straight adaptations like the 1951 version featuring Alistair Sims as Scrooge, to 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, and the different ways in which these have remained true to aspects of Dickens’s original work.
…while in this post for her Not Peer Reviewed newsletter,
explores A Christmas Carol’s treatment of the roots and consequences of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s parsimony, and the nature of his transformation. She then switches focus to adaptations of the novella, and in particular the 2019 BBC miniseries of the same name, explaining why its ramping up of the darkness of the tale with additional sordid detail does not result in a more profound message than that of the original novella or other versions.- discusses animated film Klaus for her Review Roulette newsletter. She explores its imagination of an origin story for Santa Claus, and its usage of the common Christmas theme of childhood innocence to more strongly challenge many of the accepted realities of the adult world.
Representing violence
On the way violence has been defined and depicted, in legal documents, literature, and film in colonial and postcolonial spaces, from the former Ottoman Empire, to Francophone Africa, to Australia.
Recommendations:
- interviews Ilkay Yilmaz about her book Ottoman Passports Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 on ’s ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ channel. They discuss how Ottoman security policy developed in the context of an increasingly internationally coordinated response to anarchist terrorism, and the deployment of securitised discourse to justify restrictions on mobility that targeted particular ethnic groups like Armenians and particular social groups like vagrants.
- reviews Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani‘s 1962 novel Men in the Sun for his Pen>Sword newsletter, discussing its allegorical depiction of the intergenerational impacts of the Nakbah and of statelessness on its cast of characters, and its ongoing significance in wake of the ongoing killing and displacement of Palestinians by Israel’s armed forces.
Annie de Saussure interviews George MacLeod about his book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film and Testimony After the Cold War on
’s ‘French Studies’ channel. They discuss the way Francophone African writers and filmmakers have engaged with, subverted, and challenges reader and viewer expectations regarding dominant representations such as the child soldier, the Islamist terrorist, the genocide survivor, and the celebrity humanitarian – as well as the positionality of scholars writing about images of violence.Writing for his Everything Is Horrible newsletter,
reviews The Royal Hotel, a film about a pair of female American backpackers in Australia, its treatment of the theme of misogyny and its collective maintenance, and its avoidance of common genre tropes in presenting this world.
New York, Christmas 1975
Two extremely evocative, and very different, accounts of New York around Christmastime in 1975.
Recommendations:
In this post for his First Rough Draft of History newsletter,
reflects on working as a cab driver in New York at Christmas in 1975, and the working-class customers who made up most of his fares on Christmas Day itself.On the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast,
and discuss the 1975 LaGuardia Airport bombing, in which 11 people were killed. They situate the attack, which remains an unsolved case, within the broader malaise of the 1970s, as the US’s international entanglements came back to haunt it, and more specifically within New York’s status as a hub for terrorism in this period, as radical and diasporic political organisations used the spectacle of violence to try and achieve their objectives.
Constitutional crises
On looming threats to the constitutional order in Britain and the US in 2024, and how they might be countered.
Recommendations:
- writes for his Law Dork newsletter about the importance of the Supreme Court acting swiftly and decisively on cases relating to Trump’s eligibility or not to stand for the American presidency. He argues it is vital that those seeking to uphold democracy in the US use the tools at their disposal - including legal ones - to meet the threat he poses to it.
- writes for his The Empty City newsletter about how many instances of supposed constitutional crisis in the UK are really the constitution functioning as it should in setting limits upon executive power and resolving contests between different sources of authority, but wants that a genuine crisis may arise if the government passes – as it is threatening to – legislation that flagrantly breaches international law.
American historical myths
On the ways in which aspects of America’s past have been sanitised and romanticised to elide some of the cleavages at the heart of the nation’s history.
Recommendations:
- writes for her Unintended Consequences newsletter about the myths and meanings attached the story and legacy of Pocahontas: her presence in the embellished accounts of John Smith; her death in mysterious circumstances prior to returning from Britain to America; her posthumous veneration even as White settlers violently forced indigenous Americans from their territory; and the Powhatan tribe’s thus far frustrated efforts to bring her remains home.
- writes for his Civil War Memory newsletter about the pernicious mythology surrounding post-Civil War reconciliation in early 20th century America, and the way apparent evidence of this phenomenon in primary sources overlooks the political and economic contexts which motivated apparent gestures of rapprochement amid continuing grievance.
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