Stop, Look, and Listen #14
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 warning: Racism.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
Fantasy worlds and futures.
Towards a just transition.
Africa in its global contexts.
Genealogies of the American right.
Thinking with one’s forebearers.
Fantasy worlds and futures
A broad selection of recommendations on representations of alternative and future worlds across a range of genres and media.
Recommendations:
Ellen E. Jones and Mark Kermode explore the terrain of the British dystopia on BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot programme. They discuss the extent to which Britain has a particular, longer standing tradition of producing dystopian fiction, rooted in post-imperial decline and epitomised by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and George Orwell’s 1984. They also examine iterations of dystopia on British screens, including the 1968 BBC TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics, 1995 film Welcome II The Terrordome, and new release The Kitchen, and the way, though ostensibly set in the near future, address contemporary concerns over issues such as media, race, and urban change.
- sets out the different categories and genres of futurism in this post for his The Future, Now and Then newsletter. He distinguishes between pundits who makes predictions freely and with minimal consequence; professional futurists whose analysis is more substantial and consequential, but is also in part beholden to the interest groups they are financially reliant on; ‘Cassandras’ who offer much more pessimistic predictions, with the hope of preventing them from coming to pass; and science fiction, which openly embraces the future setting’s opportunities for fantasising and fiction.
This instalment in Fantasy/Animation’s ‘Footnotes’ series sees Christopher Holliday and Andrew Sergeant turn their attention to puppetry. They discuss puppetry’s historical roots as a medium for the fantastic, its place in the development of stop-motion animation, and whether puppetry can be folded into a broader category of animation, and what that means for the definition of animation itself.
In this article for Jacobin, Marta Zboralska examines the early engagement between art and computers in the late 1960s. She considers how a group of internationalist artists in Yugoslavia, who organised the series of ‘New Tendencies’ exhibitions in Zagreb, deviated from the anti-modernist orthodoxy dominant in the Soviet bloc to instead embrace cybernetics, geometric patterns, and abstraction. Zboralska also explores their connections and parallels with artists in Britain similarly blending computing and art, albeit not always with so overtly political an approach.
Ewan Gibbs and
write for Jacobin about Alistair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, whose film adaptation by Yorgos Lanthimos is now showing in UK cinemas. They argue that Gray’s science fiction satirisation of class, gender, and imperial hierarchy was rooted in his native Glasgow in which it is set, but that it has a universal significance in its depiction of the modern condition that ensures its continuing relevance three decades later and survives Lanthimos’s relocating of the film’s setting from Glasgow to London.- , Lawrence Ware, , and Al Baker discuss Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast. They examine the key motifs of his work, including absence of clear plots, slow pacing, strong fantasy elements, and heavy allegorising, and explore the reasons for his success in appealing to both child and adult and to domestic and Western audiences. They also consider the place of new release The Boy and the Heron within his oeuvre, and its significance as quite probably his final ever film.
Towards a just transition
A number of pieces of writing about the politics and processes of transitioning to less environmentally harmful forms of industry, and the questions of justice and competing interest groups they involve.
Recommendations:
- writes for NOEMA about the political challenges posed by energy transition. He highlights the environmentally damaging extractive operations, often occurring within the Global South, involved in obtaining minerals required for cleaner energy production, as well as the alternative, which is lowering consumption by an overall increasingly prosperous global population.
In this post for the EJIL: Talk! blog, Laurence Doering explores the vast number of environmental disputes that often go unreported on and unanalysed because they are resolved through the far more opaque process of private, commercial arbitration. He lays out the multiple forms these disputes can take, including post merger-and-acquisition disagreements, breaches of industry standards, and failures to decommission facilities properly.
Rebekah Diski writes for the London Review of Books Blog about Tata Steel’s plans to replacing coal-burning furnaces at the Port Talbot steel plant in Wales, which will result in the loss of 2,500 jobs there within eighteen months. While highlighting the highly environmentally damaging nature of steel production, Diski rejects the idea that this move is driven by an overly zealous approach to cutting carbon emissions, given the UK government’s poor record in this area. She also questions the possibilities for a just green energy transition, given the excessive faith placed by relatively progressive parties like Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US on private investment in delivering it.
In this post for London School of Economics’ United State Politics and Policy blog, Dean Lueck, Julio A. Ramos Pastrana, and Gustavo Torrens examine American party polarisation over environmental issues. They explain that while green policies drew bipartisan support in the 1970s, there has been a drastic realignment since then, with Republican politicians increasingly taking the side of polluting industries in environmental disputes. Lueck et al highlight that this polarisation is underpinned not only by geographical differences between the party’s base support, but also through political funding, with Democrats receiving more from environmental issue groups and Republicans from polluting industries, and correlates closely with their voting records in Congress on environmental affairs.
Africa in its global contexts
On the way external actors intervene in and interact with sporting, military, religious, and environmental affairs in Africa.
Recommendations:
Luke Feltham writes for
about sports-washing during the African Cup of Nations, currently taking place in the Ivory Coast. He highlights the nefarious practices of tournament sponsor, the French petro-giant TotalEnergies, across the continent and the way football serves to distract from these activities. He also discusses the broader history of sports-washing in Africa, including Zaire’s hosting of the 1974 ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ heavyweight boxing match George Foreman vs. Muhammad Ali, as well as the intersection between the African Cup of Nations and contemporary sports-washing in Saudi Arabia, where a number of the tournament’s highest profile stars now play their club football.Nadia Awad writes for the London Review of Books Blog about the ongoing civil war in Sudan between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto head of state. She highlights the appalling humanitarian consequences of the conflict, the role of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as sponsors of the warring parties, and the way disinterest both among Western politicians and publics is inhibiting much needed international support for bringing the war to an end.
Lucy Ash presents this episode of BBC World Service’s Heart and Soul programme, examining the spread of the Russian Orthodox Church into Kenya. It looks at the roots of this development in the Russian church’s close relationship with the Kremlin, the hostility of both to the establishment of an autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine in 2019, and Russia’s broader expansion of its hard and soft power in the continent. The episode also highlights the challenge this move poses to the traditional authority of the Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, and the range of motives facing Kenyan Eastern Orthodox priests and parishioners in choosing their allegiances in the dispute.
This piece in
by Marian Ansah, Steven Vanden Bussche, and Bram Logger looks at the flooding of Africa’s fuel market with low-quality products that fall foul of European domestic standards and are harmful to the environment and public health. They also examine the efforts made by Netherlands to address the issue, and the limitations of individual or even collective action by European states in doing so.
Genealogies of the American right
On the roots of different political and intellectual strands feeding into the contemporary American right.
Recommendations:
Adam Smith is joined by William Hitchcock and Sarah Churchwell on the Rothermere Institute’s The Last Best Hope podcast to discuss the impact of fascism on interwar America. They look at the areas of convergence but also drastic distinctions between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the corporatist economics of European fascist states – despite the conflation of the two by some of Roosevelt’s critics and opponents. They also examine the fascist potentials, but also ultimately limitations, of organisations and movements like the Ku Klux Klan, the German American Bund, and America First, and of individuals like Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlan, and Charles Lindbergh. Finally, they address the vexed question of whether Trump and his supporters should be considered fascist, and whether the underpinning conditions of American democracy’s ultimate robustness in the 1930s still hold today.
Clay Cane is the guest on Slate’s A Word podcast with Jason Johnson, discussing his book The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump. They talk about how the space for serious Black politicians within the Republican Party has shrunk over recent decades, and how during the Obama presidency, and then with the rise of Trump, the likes of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice have been supplanted by a generation of Black Republicans willing to openly deny the existence of racism and affirm White supremacy for their own personal advancement.
On the 5-4 podcast, Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamishiri, and Michael Morbius host the first of the show’s mini-series on the Federalist Society. This episode lays out the organisation’s history, beginning with a movement in the early 1980s of conservative law students concerned by what they saw as a disconnect between the conservative turn in broader American public opinion epitomised by the election of Ronald Reagan and the overwhelmingly liberal hegemony in American law schools and the legal system more broadly. They explore how the Society immediately made close connections with right-wing funders, lawyers, and politicians, and was fuelled by grievance over events such as the 1987 failed nomination of Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court and Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election win. They also explain how the Federalist Society effectively became the Republican Party’s judicial wing, and a clearing house for ideologically committed conservative court nominations at a state and national level.
Writing for his Unpopular Front newsletter,
examines recent revelations regarding internal communications from the right-wing American think tank the Claremont Institute’s anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion campaign. Ganz focuses on the derogatory ways correspondents discussed even putative allies, and the crude essentialism underpinning their thinking behind a cloak of challenging political correctness. He also warns of the danger of businesses retreating from DEI under a Trump administration better prepared to more fully implement a racist agenda next time around.
Thinking with one’s forebearers
Finally, three marvellous pieces of writing in which authors frame their experiences and their political and intellectual journeys in relation to those of their parents and grandparents.
Recommendations:
Paul Apostolidis writes for New Lines magazine about the parallels and distinctions between the experiences of Greek migrants to the US, such as his grandfather, during the early twentieth century, and contemporary migrants from Mexico with whom he has done extensive fieldwork. Apostolidis cautions against drawing overly schematic comparisons, given the extent of violence and abuses of their rights that Mexican workers in the US face, against which the prejudice and exploitation that his own antecedents faced places. Nonetheless, he also stresses the value of also recognising similarities as a basis of common understanding and the building of solidarity between different groups.
In this post for his Kültürkampf newsletter,
reflects upon the legacy of a generation of Muslim ‘boomers’, who benefited from increased opportunities for education and social mobility, moved from rural to urban areas or in many cases to the West, and moderated their religious practices in the process. He explores the implications of this for their children, who have frequently grown up somewhat caught between the moral certainties of their faith and the greater freedom but also challenges of choice in a liberal, secular society.In this post for her Bothering Mi Ancestors newsletter,
muses on the writing process and the purpose of a newsletter itself. She does so in dialogue with her late father’s younger self, through his own journal entries and their reflections on writing, work, and their value.
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