This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.
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Following Crass’ disbandment in 1984, Vaucher’s artwork took a back seat, partly due to her caring for her dying mother. As the 1990s dawned, her work took a distinct shift towards more introspective themes as her solo output flourished. This included series of paintings and pastel drawings concentrated on partial abstractions of the human form. A lifelong preoccupation with animal rights is reflected in her work from this period, as are concerns with human abuses of power. She turned again R. D. Laing’s ideas on the repression inherent in the functioning of the traditional family unit, and much of her work formed a critique of the way that societal institutions curtail the freedom of children. While Vaucher’s approach was indebted to certain early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements, as with punk, the radicalism and emancipatory ethos she embodied was also rooted in the early expression of postmodernism as a route to freedom from dominant ideologies. This stands in contrast to the debased manifestation of postmodernism – as an oppressive cultural embodiment of the emerging economic order – that dominated by the 1990s. The alternative approach she maintained stands in marked contrast to the sensationalism that dominated the art world at the time, notably with the Young British Artists (YBA) movement. Their output is critiqued in relation to 1970s communal artists COUM, in relation to Vaucher’s work with Crass, and with her less overtly didactic approach in the 1990s, which still managed to invest her work with meaning.
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Soaking up the rays
Light therapy and visual culture in Britain, c. 1890–1940
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.
Migrants shaping Europe, past and present
Multilingual literatures, arts, and cultures
This comparative volume examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, arts, and literatures of the places where they settled. They contributed to these cultures and economies. Some were on the move in search of a better life; others were displaced by war, dispossessed, expelled; while still others were brought in servitude to European cities to work, enslaved. Today’s immigration flows in Europe are not exceptional but anchored in this longue durée process. Iberia/Maghreb, Sicily/Lampedusa, Calais are the three hotspots considered in this volume. These regions have been shaped and continue to be shaped by migrants; by their cultures; their Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Somali; their French, English and Mandarin languages. They are also shaped by migrants’ struggles. The scholars and artists who wrote Migrants shaping Europe, past and present compose a new significant chapter in the cultural history of European migration by reflecting on the forces that have put people into motion since the premodern period and by examining the visual arts, literature, and multilingual social worlds fostered by migration. This historically expansive and multilingual approach to mobility and expressiveness makes a crucial contribution: migrants as a lifeblood of European cultures.