Stop, Look, and Listen #49
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 that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warning: Murder.
Five things to look at:
Adrian Daub reflected for his In The Which House newsletter on the Hollywood sword-and-sorcery films of the early 1980s, their aesthetic combination of nerdish fantasy and bodybuilding cultures, the diversity of their themes, aspirations, and targeted audiences, and their spectacular but confused presentations of gender.
For his Unexpected Delirium newsletter, Ian King examined the mounting crisis at Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, with bills going unpaid, players leaving, and the stadium decaying, and the culpability of both owner Dejphon Chansiri and English football’s authorities for this perilous state of affairs.
In this post for her Angle, Anchor, and Voice newsletter, Ezgi Basaran contended that the misremembering of the millet system and its alleged role in the decline of the Ottoman Empire has distorted Turkish political discourse, resulting in a fear of too much pluralism in a polity that has persistently lacked enough.
Gagandeep Singh has written for New Lines Magazines about the legacy of the assassination of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar leader in Canada in 2023, allegedly at the Indian government’s behest, and its role in fuelling a new wave of Sikh diasporic activism and tensions with their Hindu counterparts in the country.
Ken Opalo discussed Ethiopian underdevelopment for his Africanist Perspective newsletter, and how the advantages and strategies that helped Ethiopia maintain its sovereignty amid European colonisation of Africa in the 19th century rendered the state complacent over the need for it to modernise and adapt in the 20th.
Five things to listen to:
In parts one and two of this episode of the It Was What It Was podcast, Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper revisited Red Star Belgrade’s victory in the 1991 European Cup, framing the success of its hugely talented pan-Yugoslav set of footballers against worsening ethnic conflict and the country’s looming breakup.
On BBC Radio Four’s Screenshot programme, Ellen E. Jones, Mark Kermode, and guests discussed the evolution of the police procedural on film and television, the relationship between documentary and fiction in the genre’s evolution, and the extent to which it can challenge the underlying inequalities within policing.
Eric Gordy reflected for his East of Ethnia podcast on Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik’s ban from holding public office in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and how by successfully cultivating ethnic tensions and separatist sentiments, he helped create a patronage network that no longer needs him to operate effectively.
Mark Leon Goldberg spoke to Jennifer Hadden on the Global Dispatches podcast about the declining influence of non-governmental organisations in world politics since the 2000s, as they compete with each other for scarcer resources amid worsening persecution by increasingly authoritarian states.
On this episode of the Leading Labour podcast, Izzy Conn and guests explored Michael Foot’s political career, his unconventional route to eventually becoming Labour leader in 1980, his struggles to keep an increasingly polarised party together, and ultimate landslide defeat in the 1983 UK general election.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
The Making of the Political Economy of Post-War English Professional Football
English professional football had long functioned as a closed political economy, but changing circumstance after the Second World War resulted in its partial opening up.
Love Lies Bleeding
This 1980s-set erotic thriller transforms the conventions of the genre through its same-sex couple protagonists, queering the world of bodybuilding it takes place within.
New Labour on Desert Island Discs
Labour politicians who appeared on the Radio 4 show between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s used their musical choices to try and tell stories about their politics and personal lives.