̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - protest

Did the Sixties dream die in 1969?

ta385 — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Sixties are generally remembered as an era of freedom, innovation and visionary experience. It’s the period, after all, that gave us ̽��ֱ��Beatles, the Summer of Love, the civil rights movement, the Woodstock Festival and the Apollo 11 Moon-Landing. Scores of autobiographies, hagiographies and cultural histories have helped to further embellish this iconic status by presenting the Sixties as the crucible of the Hippie ‘dream’, a loosely defined, youth-led attempt to establish an alternative, harmonious, post-war world. It’s a glorious story, but one that tends to end in tragedy.

At ‘the end of the Sixties’, or so the story goes, the Hippie dream ‘dies’. It’s brought to a crashing halt in the latter half of 1969 thanks to the terrible murders perpetrated by Charles Manson and ‘the Family’, the deaths attributed to the so-called ‘Zodiac Killer’ and the violence at ̽��ֱ��Rolling Stones’ concert at the Altamont Speedway. These events appear to hold up a dark mirror to the positive social and cultural advances of the preceding years.

While this narrative may suit the matrix of popular culture and nostalgia that constitutes the Sixties, it bears little resemblance to the historical actuality of the 1960s. ̽��ֱ��decade did indeed usher in a wave of progressivism and it also had its shadow-side, but such negativity was not limited to its final days. If anything the darkness, so to speak, was present from the start and across the 1960s it hovered particularly close to the decade’s much-vaunted counterculture.

Assassinations, nuclear tensions, globalised conflict, civil unrest, the growth of apocalyptic religious groups: the 1960s were suffused with violence, anxiety and a sense of looming doom. A fraught and difficult decade, the 1960s left a social, cultural and economic legacy of which still exerts a powerful influence on the contemporary world.

̽��ֱ��Sixties, by contrast, continue to exist in a bubble of comforting misremembrance, regularly offering up another anniversary, exhibition or reunion tour. Altamont and the Manson murders were of course very real events with a terrible human cost, but they have both become part of a narrative of disaster that helps to shore up this exceptionalism. What else are we to expect from such a supernova of an era as the Sixties than a spectacular curtain fall?

Imagining the disastrous end of both the hippie ‘dream’ and the wider countercultural project is ultimately a tool of celebration. If only Manson and the Family, hadn't appeared, the unique work of the Sixties would have carried on and given rise to a beautiful future.

For those invested in the period’s nostalgia industry, framing the sixties as a kind of cultural Shangri-La, a lost world that we strive to return to is, surely, better than acknowledging the pedestrian reality of how the 1960s actually ended. That’s the real horror: the slow, inconsequential shift of a dynamic counterculture into adulthood, suburbia and ‘proper’ jobs (the 1970s, in other words). Although misleading, this vision of flower power ending in blood-soaked catastrophe retains its grip on the public imagination. Case in point, the recent release of Quentin Tarantino’s Manson-era epic Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019).

̽��ֱ��end of the 1960s did not mark the ‘death’ of the Hippie ‘dream’. As the 1970s took hold, the countercultural impetus merely recalibrated and flowed in different directions. That has not stopped contemporary culture from obsessively revisiting and repeating the events of 1969, as if they signal some kind of terminus, yet to be fully understood.

Meanwhile, the world of the early twenty-first century continues to plough headlong into its own deeply troubling period of postmodern politics, creepingly malevolent soft power and weaponised ‘fake news’. When we live in such interesting times, why dwell on the illusions and disillusions of the 1960s and its double?

Fifty years ago protests took place across reasonably well-defined battle lines against clearly identifiable targets. Now, in today’s sphere of edited reality and policies that change as fast as they can be tweeted it's difficult to pinpoint where the source of power is, let alone how to protest against it. To navigate this type of situation it's important to understand the mechanics at play – how representations are manipulated and how agendas are embedded in seemingly innocuous narratives. This is what the 1960s can teach us.

By interrogating and unpacking the link between the decade and the era, the 1960s and the Sixties, we can observe, in process, the forces that transform recent history into modern myth. It's also useful to be shocked by how much things have changed. If you are curious, look into the details of the Manson case and think about what it meant in 1969 to ‘follow’ someone. What you find might make you spend a little less time on Twitter.

̽��ֱ��year 1969 is held up as the end of an era, but fifty years on are we still buying into a dangerous myth? Counterculture expert James Riley delves into the darkness of the Sixties to sort fact from psychedelic fiction.

̽��ֱ��1960s were suffused with violence, anxiety and a sense of looming doom

James Riley

Dr James Riley

̽��ֱ��author

Dr James Riley is Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College. His book, ̽��ֱ��Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties was published by Icon Books in 2019.

James will be speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge on 6th November 2019.

This is an extended version of an article published in Horizons issue 39.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library unveils the rich histories, struggles and hidden labours of Women at Cambridge

sjr81 — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 10:27:39 +0000

Opening to the public on Monday 14 October, and curated by Dr Lucy Delap and Dr Ben Griffin, the exhibition will focus on the lived experiences of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the ongoing fight for equal educational rights, recognition, and inclusion in university activities, and the careers of some of the women who shaped the institution – from leading academics to extraordinary domestic staff and influential fellows’ wives.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will showcase the history of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the persistent marginalisation they were subject to, and the ongoing campaigns for gender justice and change since the establishment of Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, the first residential university establishment for women in the UK. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore rarely seen collections from across the ̽��ֱ�� and colleges. Through a mix of costume, letters and audio-visual material, the fascinating and little-known stories of individual women will be illustrated.

Dr Lucy Delap, exhibition co-curator and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, said: “From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

"Though Girton College was established especially to give women the opportunity to study at the ̽��ֱ��, there were still many barriers that women faced – the first female students were required to ask permission to attend lectures, were not allowed to take exams without special permission, and usually had to be accompanied by chaperones in public until after the First World War. It was still not until 1948 that Cambridge began to offer degrees to women – the last of the big institutions in the UK to do so.

“Through ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide we hope to illustrate an all-encompassing picture of the incredible fight for gender equality within the ̽��ֱ��, while portraying the fascinating journeys of some of the militant, cussed and determined women of our institution too.”

Visitors to the exhibition will learn of the deep opposition and oppression women faced, including the efforts made to keep women out of student societies, the organised campaigns to stop women getting degrees, and the hostility faced by women trying to establish careers as academics. Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrate the violent opposition to giving women degrees during the vote on the subject in 1897, as does the note written by undergraduates apologising for the damage that had been done to Newnham College during the riot of 1921.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will also reveal the creativity and courage of the women who defiantly resisted such opposition to establish lives and careers within the ̽��ֱ��. Resistance included: the signing of the 400 page petition demanding women’s degrees in 1880, which will be displayed over the walls of the exhibition; setting up new student societies for women; and finding opportunities for women to lecture.

Sometimes, resistance meant finding ways of avoiding the rules that discriminated against women – between 1904 and 1907, Trinity College Dublin offered women from Newnham and Girton the opportunity to travel to Dublin to graduate officially and receive a full degree. ̽��ֱ��robes of one of the graduates, which have been stored for many decades, will be displayed in the Women at Cambridge exhibition.

Dr Ben Griffin, exhibition co-curator and Lecturer in Modern British History at Girton College, added: “By telling the story of women at Cambridge, this exhibition also tells the story of how a nineteenth-century institution, which served mainly to educate young men for careers in the church, transformed itself into a recognisably modern university devoted to teaching and research.”

̽��ֱ��Rising Tide is a culmination of exhibitions, events and displays exploring the past, present and future of women at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Curated by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library in collaboration with students and staff, the events programme, pop-up exhibitions and displays will run at the Library and across the city. Women at Cambridge is the centre-piece of the programme and will launch on Monday 14 October, and run until March 2020. Entry is free.

One hundred and fifty years since the first women were allowed to study at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will be sharing the unique stories of women who have studied, taught, worked and lived at the ̽��ֱ��, in its new exhibition ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge.

From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

Lucy Delap

Girton College

Domestic staff of Girton College, 1908

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Shelley’s Peterloo poem took inspiration from the radical press, new research reveals

ta385 — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 06:00:00 +0000

This is the conclusion reached by Philip Connell, a senior lecturer in Cambridge’s English Faculty, who has identified new links between the two men and their writing. His findings, first published in the Times Literary Supplement (full study in Review of English Studies, 1 September 2019), shed new light on the meaning of a poem which has become a powerful inspiration for protest movements from the Chartists to the modern Labour Party.

Connell says: “Richard Carlile was not only an important eyewitness to the massacre, he also provided one of the most radical responses to appear in the English press, by arguing that the murderous actions of the Manchester authorities justified revolutionary violence. This changes how we read ̽��ֱ��Mask of Anarchy. It brings Shelley's poem much closer to Peterloo. It also explains why Shelley urged the working people of England to 'Rise like Lions', while arguing so passionately that protest must remain peaceful.”

Until now, it has been assumed that Shelley’s principal source of information about Peterloo was Leigh Hunt’s moderate, middle-class reformist newspaper, the Examiner. But Connell has found compelling evidence to suggest that Shelley also engaged with a far more uncompromising response to the massacre which took place on St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819.

Connell’s research indicates that while Shelley was living in Italy in 1819, he received one or more issues of the radical periodicals, Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register and ̽��ֱ��Republican, both of which were edited by Richard Carlile in London. ̽��ֱ��most likely supplier of this material is Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock. On 21 September, Shelley wrote to Peacock: ‘I have received all the papers you sent me, & the Examiners regularly … What an infernal business this of Manchester! What is to be done? Something assuredly.’

Connell identifies close links between the Shelley–Hunt circle and Carlile, as well as circumstantial evidence that Peacock was well-placed to lay his hands on Carlile’s controversial publications. ̽��ֱ��study also suggests that Carlile and Shelley had some contact in the period before and after Peterloo. In the Republican for 24 September, Carlile printed Shelley’s Declaration of Rights, a rare single-sheet fly bill originally produced in Ireland in 1812. This is likely to have happened following some form of communication, probably involving other members of the Hunt circle in England.

Connell argues that there are significant echoes of Carlile’s writings in the Mask of Anarchy which are at least as compelling as Shelley’s debts to Hunt’s Examiner. Most striking perhaps is the similarity between Carlile’s vision of the Home Secretary’s mask concealing ruthless bloodlust (‘you […] have thrown off your mask and set the first example of shedding blood’) and Shelley’s sinister personification: ‘I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh’. Viscount Castlereagh was Leader of the House of Commons at the time and supported his Government’s repressive actions which led to cavalry charging into a crowd demanding parliamentary reform, leaving 18 people dead and 700 injured.

“Several instances of shared imagery and language suggest that Shelley drew on Carlile’s prose in his visionary reimagining of the massacre”, says Connell. “Immediately after describing Murder having ‘a mask like Castlereagh’, Shelley wrote that ‘Seven bloodhounds followed him’. This echoes Carlile’s language in articles which I believe Shelley read. Carlile published several descriptions of the Manchester Yeomanry as bloodhounds and Castlereagh and his fellow government ministers as ‘those men who could direct their bloodhounds to attack and destroy a peaceable meeting’.”

Another telling similarity, Connell argues, lies in the emphasis that both Carlile and Shelley place on women. ̽��ֱ��Times newspaper condemned the ‘female Reformers’ present at the start of the meeting on St Peter’s Field as delusional and this account found its way into Hunt’s Examiner. By contrast, Carlile praised these women. In particular, he honoured Mary Fildes, the ensign of the Manchester Reform Society, who appears prominently in his commemorative print, standing on the platform holding a flag (image attached).

In a similar vein, Shelley’s Mask gives a central role to an allegorical female figure in arresting the progress of Anarchy. He wrote of ‘a Maniac Maid, / And her name was Hope, she said: But she looked more like Despair’. She later ‘lay down in the street, / Right before the horses’ feet’, only to be saved from ‘Murder, Fraud and Anarchy’ by a quasi-divine intervention.

Despite these convergences, Shelley and Carlile took very different positions on the question of violence. Connell says: “Carlile vigorously defended violence as a legitimate response to the massacre yet while Shelley urges the ‘Men of England’ to ‘Rise like Lions’ he also betrays a deep anxiety about the possible consequences of working-class revolution. Shelley’s exposure to Carlile’s outraged militancy helps to explain his insistence on peaceful resistance.”

Reference

Connell, P., ‘A voice from over the Sea’: Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press.’ ̽��ֱ��Review of English Studies (1 September 2019); https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz029

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ̽��ֱ��Mask of Anarchy, the most celebrated literary response to the Peterloo massacre – which has its bicentenary on 16 August – drew on accounts of the tragedy written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile.

This changes how we read ̽��ֱ��Mask of Anarchy. It brings Shelley's poem much closer to Peterloo

Philip Connell

Manchester Library Services (public domain)

̽��ֱ��Peterloo Massacre by Richard Carlile (1819).

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Opinion: How free are we really?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:11:02 +0000

Freedom. A word redolent with benevolence. We like the idea of being “free”. We are outraged at the thought of being “un-free”. It is often presented to us as a polarity: free expression, free choice and democracy, on the one hand – and repression, censorship and autocracy on the other. We are to guard the former from the latter.

But is that all? What is the “freedom” we are told about, think about and experience? What does it consist of? What uses do we put it to or – perhaps even more importantly – not put it to?

In the advanced capitalist polities of the West, we are repeatedly told that freedom is the defining value of our time, that it is a precious possession to preserve by almost any means, even a measure of un-freedom, say, in the form of increased surveillance or accelerated militarisation. As such, it is a word that is put to many dubious uses including, of course, the now familiar idea of “bringing” freedom and liberty to a “recalcitrant world”, as David Harvey puts it. He asks:

If we were able to mount that wondrous horse of freedom, where would we seek to ride it?

Where indeed?

Freedom ‘thingified’

Has “freedom” turned into one of those buzzwords honoured more in the invocation than in its exercise? A talismanic utterance commandeered for various agendas including offering a reinforcing platform to the rich and the powerful, even when some of those people are responsible for squashing free expression and academic freedom – and worse – in their own states?

Would you like dignity with those? PROistolethetv, CC BY

“Free speech” – rather than being the nurturing and encouragement of real courage and the opening up of the imagination to new possibilities – is in danger of becoming one of the great banalities of our day, trotted out much more by the establishment for explaining its more degraded moves than a channel for producing meaningful dissent that could lead to material alternatives for the majority.

As something “thingified” – to borrow a word from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism – freedom isn’t seen as a practice which requires constant, vigilant exercise on all our parts. It becomes, for example, something that must be transmitted through teaching from an already free West to the un-free zones of the world. Here’s US president, Barack Obama, addressing the British parliament about the “Arab Spring”:

What we are seeing in Tehran, in Tunis, in Tahrir Square, is a longing for the same freedoms that we take for granted here at home … That means investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt – by deepening ties of trade and commerce; by helping them demonstrate that freedom brings prosperity.

Freedom friendship: Obama addresses the UK parliament.

Once again then, freedom carefully channelled through the checkout lane.

Gregarious tolerance

It’s often assumed that science and rationalism are “free” while religion and faith are not. Yet some of the most uncritical acquiescence to the regimes of our day comes from science and many scientists in their collaboration with the privatisation of knowledge by big corporations who determine what questions get asked and what gets funded.

More often than not, what must be opposed is not just the openly repressive or oppressive (that of course, must be done – and is done by people who show astounding courage in their daily lives under harsh conditions: Saudi bloggers, women seeking education in Afghanistan, Irom Sharmila on hunger strike for a decade against army atrocities in India). What we must all guard against is rather more subtle and creeping.

We may have to recognise that the greatest danger to our exercise of freedom is lapsing into habits of thought where we acquiesce – where it becomes easier to think of the way things are as the way things ought to be, or will always be.

Speaking of intellectuals who shy away from the task of speaking difficult truths, the late Edward Said deprecated what he called “a gregarious tolerance” for the way things are. This gregarious tolerance is rife in our society and more tragically, more inexcusably, in our universities and among our intellectuals where one of the biggest assaults on independent thinking – increasing tuition fees, bloated managerial salaries, greater corporate presence in research funding – is failing to provoke a collective resistance.

Mounted Police at the Tuition Fee Protest. SomeDriftwood.

We need to guard against turning “freedom” into a weapon of smugness, cultural certainties to be wielded against apparently lesser cultures rather than a tool constantly sharpened through speaking truth about and against power. When freedom is seen as a “thing” – a value to be worshipped rather than as a practice – it atrophies into something that shores up power and the status quo ordained by it and as such becomes its opposite, an ossified, rather toothless idea.

Frederick Douglass. Wikimedia commons.

Freedom as an idea and practice, of course, also has a very different history or histories when we think of struggles against power from below. That sense of freedom was perhaps best articulated by remarkable former slave and anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass, in his famous speech commemorating the West Indian emancipation. After noting that those “who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”, Douglass famously declared:

̽��ֱ��whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

Maintain the rage

There Is No Alternative – Margaret Thatcher’s beloved TINA – is now being carried forward through Cameron and Osborne’s austerity regimes. An unfree, repressive, autocratic and despotic idea if there was ever one, but using “freedom” as its logo, the claim there is no “alternative” immediately narrows down “freedom” to consumer choice and business transactions at the expense of all other rights.

Cameron, you’ll note, saw no irony in feting Xi Jinping, an unelected ruler from an autocratic regime, and spouting platitudes about human rights. China in many ways represents a capitalist wet dream: a constrained population offering up wage labour without meaningful rights but “free” to consume what they can afford.

Meanwhile as we’ve seen with the hysteria over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, his once rather widely accepted ideas about social and economic justice are shrilly denounced as dangerous extremism which must be rooted out immediately – no free flourishing of alternatives there. Protest and anger? Bring out the demonising smears, the batons, the legislation, the water cannons.

How then to be free? Face them down. “Indignez vous”, as the French campaigner, Stephane Hessel, put it. Stay indignant. Protest, undermine, challenge and change. Douglass again, famously: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This is an edited version of a talk delivered by the author at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Priyamvada Gopal, Lecturer, Faculty of English, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Priyamvada Gopal (Faculty of English) discusses freedom as a practice rather than a value to be worshipped.

Jonathan Potts

Manchester protest (27 September 2014)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Flashmobs and flamenco: how Spain’s greatest artform became a tool for political protest

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 14:46:28 +0000

Flamenco is perhaps Spain’s most alluring cultural phenomenon, characterised by the stereotypes of sun, passion and tumbling black hair. Political protest and social activism are less likely to come to mind when thinking of flamenco, but for some performers it has always been a powerful tool for voicing political protest.

Never more so than today. Spain has suffered immensely in the global economic crisis – especially Andalusia, the southernmost region of the country most associated with flamenco. Neoliberalism has taken its toll on the Spanish people, who are suffering one of the highest levels of unemployment in Europe. In 2011, this led to the infamous 15M (indignados) protest movement that mobilised millions of citizens across the country to challenge policies of austerity following the banking crisis.

On the back of this movement, the flashmob group Flo6x8 has rebranded flamenco as a powerful political weapon. This anti-capitalist group has been well publicised for its political performances that have taken place in banks and even the Andalusian parliament. Using the body and voice as political tools, the group carries out carefully choreographed acciones (actions) in front of bemused bank staff and customers. These performances are recorded and then posted online, attracting a huge number of views.

Through explicitly political lyrics, Flo6x8 denounces the banking crisis and the austerity measures resulting from European bailouts. By claiming public, capitalist spaces the performers give a powerful political message that challenges the status quo. But these performances also break with typical gendered stereotypes in flamenco. ̽��ֱ��exotic, seductive and “oriental” image of the female dancer is turned on its head. Instead the female dancers in these performances become powerful, political figures.

̽��ֱ��group believes it is repoliticising flamenco, returning to its historical origins. Nowadays flamenco is closely associated with the world music industry and tourism. Yet the origins of flamenco tell a different story. Flamenco was born among socially marginalised communities such as Gypsies, miners and other disadvantaged Andalusian groups. Lyrics from the 18th and 19th centuries tell tales of poverty and social hardship.

True, the flamenco we know today owes much of its legacy to the commercial theatres (cafés cantantes) of mid-19th century Spain. But its political side has come out during times of social upheaval. Republicans during the Spanish Civil War sang ideological messages. And singers of the 1960/70s such as Manuel Gerena and José Menese challenged the Franco regime in pursuit of democracy and equality.

Fandangos republicanos sung by Manuel González “El Guerrita”.

I want to say with passion, this fandango that I sing, Spain is Republican. And this is from the heart, down with the law and tyranny.

Flo6x8 see themselves as the continuation of this political legacy, where flamenco becomes a catalyst for social change as can be seen by this anti-austerity flashmob in the Andalusian parliament in June 2014.

Flo6x8 anti-austerity protest at the plenary session of the Andalusian parliament in June 2014.

̽��ֱ��controversial new gag law introduced by the Spanish government in 2015 has restricted the activities of Flo6x8. Yet members remain committed to flamenco as a political weapon against continued social and economic inequalities in Spain.

Confronting racism

̽��ֱ��history of flamenco has also been used to promote tolerance. Flamenco is said to have links to Spain’s Islamic past a period when Christians, Jews and Muslims allegedly coexisted in peace (convivencia). Although criticised by some as a utopian myth, convivencia carries a message of tolerance for today. Many argue that flamenco emerged from an amalgamation of cultural influences in southern Spain: Arabs, Jews, Gypsies, African slaves, Andalusian underclasses and so on. ̽��ֱ��belief, then, is that flamenco is born of intercultural dialogue.

However, Spain’s relationship with its Islamic past is problematic. In some quarters it is celebrated – in others it is shunned. Since the 1980s, increasing immigration into Spain, particularly from Morocco, has complicated matters. Like in many countries across Europe, racial tensions and Islamophobia have increased. Here flamenco has been used to confront racial tensions and promote tolerance.

In 2003, the dancer Ángeles Gabaldón and her company premiered the show Inmigración (Immigration), which was also broadcast online to more than 50,000 people. Inmigración raised awareness of the humanitarian issues surrounding migration across the Strait of Gibraltar: human trafficking, migrant deaths, immigrant sex work and racism.

̽��ֱ��show, which featured a multiracial cast, sought to raise awareness of the social reality of immigration – and, interestingly, also presented Spain’s own history of emigration before it became a country of immigration. But the most powerful element of Inmigración was how the past and the present were joined together in musical performance. Flamenco was combined with musical styles believed to have originated in Islamic Spain that now exist in North Africa.

̽��ֱ��cast included Jalal Chekara, a Moroccan performer who has lived in Spain for many years. He is known for his collaborations with flamenco musicians, promoting tolerance through the musical re-imagining of a shared cultural history.

Since 2003, the situation across Spain and Europe has deteriorated. ̽��ֱ��current migrant crisis is maybe the most difficult challenge facing Europe and Inmigración is perhaps even more relevant today than when it was first performed. It shows the capacity of flamenco as a form of social criticism that can give power to the powerless and voice to the voiceless.

Joshua Brown, a lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Chapman ̽��ֱ�� and Juan Pinilla, flamenco singer and writer in Granada, assisted with research for this article. ̽��ֱ��author will be appearing at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Matthew Machin-Autenrieth (Faculty of Music) discusses flamenco and its use as a tool of social activism.

Flamenco and the politics of resistance: flashmobs and immigration in Spain

CB Shoots

Flamenco

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How people power saved Bloomsbury from destruction

sjr81 — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 10:12:47 +0000

‘A Case Against Destruction, A Case for Celebration’ looks at how the people of Bloomsbury drew, wrote and celebrated their way out of plans to demolish a seven-acre site that was home to more than 600 people – and reflects on how a community’s resolve 40 years ago might influence planning policy and protest today.

Using original 1970s illustrations by artist Albany Wiseman, as well as contemporary photographs of the streets saved from the wrecking ball, the exhibition reveals how the area has changed – and remained the same – in the intervening decades.

Exhibition curator Janet Hall, an MPhil student of Architecture and Urban Design at Cambridge, said: “This area of Bloomsbury came so close to being completely destroyed; it was only the combined efforts of a community of local people, artists, friends, neighbours and councillors that saved it from almost certain destruction.

“Feasibility studies had been carried out, and full plans were drawn up. Had the Bloomsbury plans gone ahead, historic buildings including residences belonging to the Peabody Trust – one of the earliest housing associations in the capital – would have been lost for good.”

Despite fierce local opposition from councillors, including future Health Secretary Frank Dobson, Bloomsbury was the preferred choice of Edward Heath’s Conservative government and Whitehall mandarins who wanted to site the new British Library opposite the British Museum - in the face of strong evidence that such proximity was wholly unnecessary for the vast majority of future British Library users and researchers.

Eventually, after a long and vocal campaign against the demolition of Bloomsbury’s historic buildings, the Heath government bowed to local pressure and chose to site the new British Library building on derelict land and railway sidings – at its current home in St Pancras.

Today, the word protest is often associated with various forms of violence or disorder, but during the 1970s the community in Bloomsbury understood it in a different light. In response to the plans made for the demolition, the Bloomsbury Association was formed. ̽��ֱ��association’s first chair George Wagner wrote multitudes of letters to various newspapers, the British Museum, national libraries, councillors and members of government on behalf of the association. Local residents organised concerts, created a local mascot ‘BuBu’, hung out their Bloomsbury Bloomers, and began the annual summer Bloomsbury Fair which happens to this day.

These were acts of fun, creativity and friendship. Although people were disappointed about what was happening to their home, they took positive actions throughout their protest and even in their victory continued hoping and planning the future of this area through the Bloomsbury Association planning sub-committee.

Hall believes there is an increasing importance in understanding this type of community engagement in terms of planning and suggests looking at the past in this way illuminates the risks that face London and other areas of the country today. ̽��ֱ��proposition of siting the British Library in this area brought about many in-depth studies both for and against the plans, and it is these records, this detail of information, that lets researchers see what was protected, how it was protected and what this enabled.

“There are too few occasions within urbanism that a community’s actions have led to a better architectural/urban solution,” said Hall. “ ̽��ֱ��situation in Bloomsbury is particularly unusual because the solution found was not the alteration of a proposed project but its total relocation and total conservation of an area. ̽��ֱ��public influenced to a lesser extent the architectural scale, but more significantly affected decision making on a wider-urban scale from their local level – an ambition laid out by the 2011 Localism Act.”

̽��ֱ��exhibition ‘A Case Against Destruction, A Case for Celebration’ can be seen at 1 Pied Bull Yard, WC1A 2JR between 1-6pm on weekdays until July 27. Admission free.

̽��ֱ��story of how ‘one of the last villages in London’ was saved from demolition to make way for the British Library is the subject of new research and an exhibition which opened in Bloomsbury this week.

This area of Bloomsbury came so close to being completely destroyed.

Janet Hall

̽��ֱ��Bloomsbury Association

Poster designed by the Bloomsbury protest group

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“Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving”

amb206 — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year the radical feminist group Femen turned its attentions away from Europe to North Africa, targeting vast swathes of the Arab and Muslim world with its uncompromising messages. Up until this point the protestors, who dub themselves as “sextremist”, had focused their activities on Europe and primarily on issues affecting white European women.

Emerging in the Ukraine around five years ago, Femen made its name with its own brand of attention-grabbing publicity. Images of its topless protests, nipples blurred, appeared in media throughout the world and, to some extent, conformed to passively-held assumptions of what “radical feminism” might look like. In other words, it knowingly plays up to feminist stereotypes in the quest for publicity.

Femen argues that the female body can re-assert itself, and the meaning attached to it, through anti-patriarchal messages scrawled on bare breasts. ̽��ֱ��group seeks to challenge norms by inverting the hyper-sexualised signal that exposed breasts typically send. Whether you believe in its value or not, this mode of protest plays out in the real world as a dangerous strategy. ̽��ֱ��political message is often lost, indeed undermined, by the same widespread salacious interest in the naked female body that garners Femen so much media coverage.

Given the flurry of sensationalised media surrounding Femen’s nude protests, it’s not surprising that many feminists have distanced themselves from the group, arguing that its tactics reinforces the notion that women can only get attention for (and by means of) their physicality, not on the strength of the inherent merit of the feminist cause.

̽��ֱ��catalyst for the shift in Femen’s focus was Amina Tyler, 19-year-old founder of the group’s Tunisian branch. In March this year Amina posted topless photos of herself on Femen’s Facebook page. One image, in the style that has become characteristic of Femen’s activism, depicts Amina with the slogan “My body belongs to me and is not the source of anyone’s honor” written in Arabic across her bare chest. Another shows her with “F**k your morals” in the same bold style.

These images triggered immediate reactions within Tunisia, with Amina reportedly receiving threats of death by stoning. Rumours circulated that she had been arrested by the local authorities; these turned out to be false. Femen’s rapid response was the organisation of “Topless Jihad Day” in support of Amina – and what began as feminist activism quickly slipped into what appeared to be anti-Muslim protest.

It became apparent that Femen is waging a campaign that shows little consideration for the vast majority of the community whose rights it claims to promote. ̽��ֱ��group that spoke up against Femen, Muslim Women Against Femen, sought to challenge the narrative that Muslim women are de facto oppressed by dressing a certain way or subscribing to a particular theology.

As many other commentators have noted, Femen have obvious representation issues outside Europe. White European women represent the vast majority of its supporters and, furthermore, they seem committed to advancing a particular brand of feminism as universal with little regard for local histories and efforts.

Many observers too baulked at the language of “Topless Jihad Day”. Jihad is not a word to be used lightly. One can only imagine how frustrating it must be for Muslims, who regularly insist that jihad is misunderstood by both terrorists and Western commentators, to have it thrown back at them in this effectively hollow sense. It seemed another instance of Femen prioritising attention-grabbing publicity over coherent message. But beyond this, seeking to “save” others implies superiority.

̽��ֱ��Femen protests are more than simply unnecessarily provocative and culturally insensitive: they also expose deeper truths. In response to Femen, Muslim Women Against Femen instituted “Muslimah Pride Day”. ̽��ֱ��group described Femen as perpetuating and promoting Islamaphobia and accused it of cultural imperialism. Many individual voice spoke about issues of freedom and choice. One post displayed the message: “My hijab is my pride. Islam is my freedom. This is my choice. I don’t need you to be my voice. I have mine.” Another one tackled feminism head-on: “Feminism comes in many forms! You bare up, I cover up.”

̽��ֱ��manager of Muslim Women Against Femen’s Facebook page regularly warns members against “slut shaming” Femen activists. Hundreds of responses illustrate complex, multi-faceted responses to Femen’s actions, not outright rejection. ̽��ֱ��message is clear: freedom has to involve choice, and respect for the choices of others. ̽��ֱ��posts engage with feminist debates, while exposing how such protests ultimately struggle to engage with multiple forms of oppression. Two of the many messages that illustrate this are: “Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving” and “Let me tell YOU how oppressive your culture is.”

̽��ֱ��issue with Femen’s representation is not just that white, European women are campaigning on ‘behalf of’ Muslim women. By its actions, Femen (perhaps unintentionally) deepened racial and religious divisions within the communities it sought to liberate. These tensions led to the alienation of many women who came to see themselves as having no place within the Western feminist movement, which they now associate with Femen’s radical protests.

Worse still, Femen, in the eyes of many Muslim and Arab women, has come to symbolise oppression. While attempting to liberate Muslim women, Femen has succeeded in oppressing them along religious and racial lines.

Femen misrepresents the complexity of both individuals and groups. A woman’s identity is shaped by an intricate web of influences – economic, cultural, sexual and religious, to name but a few. Many would argue that feminist movements do provide space for diversity among women. ̽��ֱ��problem, in Femen’s case, was that a woman could only be “in” – and by implication only be free – if she subscribed to a particular set of values that does not sit well with the lifestyles of many communities.

Across the political spectrum struggle, there is debate about what it means to be “free”. Whichever aspect is grasped, we commonly fail to see how we are simultaneously disadvantaging freedom in another respect. Femen is an archetypal example of this common occurrence. Its alienation of those it seeks to empower does not stem from uncharitability; indeed, often it comes from an overwhelming abundance of concern.

Femen activists mobilised in opposition of patriarchal control and the subjugation of women they perceived in North Africa. Many of these activists were horrified to find so many women speaking out against their campaign, and often insisted that there had been a misunderstanding.

Such a narrative ignores messy historical and political dynamics that make female empowerment different from place to place. People are products of different circumstances and choices. Can we honestly call the banning of the veil an advancement of freedom – or is it just the advancement of a particular view of what it means to be “free”? Similarly, does demonising women who choose (and also those who choose not) to wear a headscarf really liberate them? Or does it just place them in a category of “repressed”; a category that they have little power to escape without our consent.

Hardest for us to acknowledge is our own place in structures of injustice, and, at times, the place of a very particular concept of what it means to be free in those structures. While we seek to improve the lives of women by liberating them from dressing a particular way, we both willingly and unconsciously overlook that in other respects we play a role in their inequality.

A large part of this stems from our weakness at grasping multiple forms of oppression and inequality. Tunisian women are oppressed not just because they are female; this oppression intersects with poverty, religion, education, culture and other factors that may disadvantage them. It is naïve to target one aspect while refusing to see that you are simultaneously reinforcing another. Femen protests do just this; they seek to empower a group of women, and simultaneously worsen their oppression as Muslims.

When it comes to advocacy, protest and many kinds of charitable action, the start must be a long hard look in the mirror – honest self-reflection. This has to include understanding and admittance of the ways in which our position disadvantages those who we seek to help in other ways.

For the feminist movement, it is tempting to isolate sex as the crux of repression, which conveniently negates our role as wealthy (globally speaking), often white, often middle class, often Christo-agnostic, often well-educated individuals. We have to acknowledge the privilege and difference these factors endow to us, and that the women we are talking to, and often simply talking about, may also be affected by other factors, potentially to a greater degree.

We should start by working with people, with the awareness that they are as intricate, perhaps as contradictory, as we ourselves are, and that their situations are subject to personal and historical change as well. If you agree with a cause, support it – but rhetoric and ideology must flow from the repressed to the repressor. ̽��ֱ��other way around ultimately reinforces what we are seeking to overcome.

This is an edited version of an article by Raffaella Taylor-Seymour for the online magazine King’s Review. http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/

When radical feminists took their cause from Europe to North Africa, the outcome was a deepening of the divides they sought to break down. Social anthropology student Raffaella Taylor-Seymour argues for greater reflection about the meaning of freedom.

When it comes to advocacy, protest and many kinds of charitable action, the start must be a long hard look in the mirror.

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour

PLANETART (Flickr Creative Commons)

Inna Shevchenko of Femen

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