The conclusion provides an overview of the organisation’s history since the interwar years and the ways that it has adapted – and not – to broader social changes. Following the Second World War the GFS, like Britain, struggled to find its place and redefine itself in a post-imperial world. It shifted its imperial work to focus on missionaries and developed a World Council, its own version of a Commonwealth, to connect its branches worldwide. Yet it still grappled with systemic problems, including the perception that it was an outdated organisation. The organisation continues to exist today with around twenty thousand members in branches throughout the world, but it looks very different from the GFS of 1875. The nucleus of power within the GFS has shifted from England, and branches in Africa account for over 70 per cent of the GFS worldwide membership. As the GFS prepares to mark its sesquicentennial in 2025, it is confronted with old and new questions, including its relationship with the Anglican Church and whether single-gender organisations are still relevant. The Black Lives Matter movement led the GFS to reflect on racism within the organisation. The conclusion reflects on how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape girls’ lives and frame the contemporary politics of girlhood.
The conclusion considers the implications of the previous chapters for histories of religion, the supernatural and the body. It surveys historical change between the 1830s and the 1930s, pointing out how the themes and emphases in public debate shifted over time and between different (confessional, regional, temporal, case-related) contexts. It also thematises the reasons that the public sphere was ‘loud with recrimination’ every time stigmata appeared on the radar. Stigmata were so controversial at least in part because as a phenomenon they were imported from continental Catholic Europe. In a first instance, they proved useful in reinforcing religious stereotypes, especially in public expressions of anti-Catholicism. Such understandings were not static but were remade continuously, in public, in conversation with the larger cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stigmata became an argument in discussions about denominational identities, the perceived (ir)rationality of the Churches and (the limits of) scientific expertise. The conclusion ends with suggesting ways forward for scholarship.
London’s Royal Festival Hall opened its doors on 3 May 1951. The first concert hall to be built in Britain after World War II, Festival Hall was not just an iconic piece of architecture but also an archetype of designing for musical tone. Its design fused architecture, music, and science, and its construction process was interspersed with a series of tuning concerts that were implemented throughout 1950 and 1951 to allow for acoustic adaptation as the building was finalised. Drawing on the trajectory of experimental work and interdisciplinary collaborations that were explored in previous chapters, the Conclusion demonstrates how these informed the process at Royal Festival Hall. It also explores the differing forms of experience and expertise that formed a valid part of the hall’s construction. and the contemporary social and cultural priorities which were brought to the fore as a result. This is the point when international knowledge-sharing was becoming a reality, and when the formal and informal work of the preceding decades was ultimately expressed in a landmark building. This is the contemporary era of architectural acoustics.
This book argues that the queer potential of keeping relationships as demonstrated in the first chapter allows readers to reconsider what these Victorian authors are doing with characters whom conventional narrative does not accommodate. In addition to looking at the cultural work that authors perform using explicit mistress characters, the book offers ways to read for kept women when they seem to be absent from narrative, and find experiences for them that do not necessarily shore up the myth of heterosexual marriage. In this way, this project addresses the relationship between readers and authors, via the intermediary figures of kept women characters. The book encourages an active readership, and ways of seeing, and models of connection entailing a queer, ethical compassion. This reading encourages possibility for women and identities excluded from, yet bearing the weight of, conventional narrative. Such readings can appreciate narrative techniques employed by various writers, many who themselves lived beyond convention, and offer strategies for reading other seemingly exclusive texts. Thus in its reconsideration of Victorian literature, this study presents a way towards Susan S. Lanser’s “narrative justice” for kept women characters, women who choose to survive and resist in a world that acts against them. Readers can be active in offering the care work for nineteenth-century women, and women and other disprivileged people today. These Victorian narratives offer queer possibilities of destabilization, allowing readers to recognize the political potential in connections of labor, love, and space, as well as the pleasure in doing so.
While acknowledging the differences between the Simons, the conclusion vindicates the book’s approach of considering the family together as justified by the family’s shared values of public service. It details how each family member contributed to this shared family ethos and how it was transmitted to their descendants. The conclusion also considers how the family’s connection with Manchester was integral to their identity. It also briefly compares Ernest and Shena’s regionalism with contemporary devolution. The conclusion features a ‘legacies’ section which provides an overview of the fate of the Simon Engineering businesses, significant places in Manchester connected to the Simons and the impact on society of their descendants.
This conclusion suggests two ways of interpreting Bartolomé’s career. The first is subtitled ‘Feminist Auteur’, as the book argues for the inclusion of her name among those far better-known figures, in both national and international contexts, to whom this label has been attached. In Spain, these would include the generation that came into prominence in the 1990s, like Icíar Bollaín, Isabel Coixet and Chus Gutiérrez; internationally, her contemporaries, Claire Denis, Euzhan Palcy and Agnès Varda. This first conclusion argues furthermore for the ‘rose’ and ‘blue’ demarcations for her career that have previously been applied to canonical Spanish artists. The second defends the urgent inclusion of Bartolomé in histories of Spanish cinema not in spite of the fact her work is incomplete, but, in fact, precisely because of it. Bartolomé’s career may be incomplete, with countless projects stymied by censorship, a fraction of which this volume has attempted to recover in its exploration, in Chapter 3, of 1970s unfilmed scripts. If her career is darkened by the shadows, or haunted by the ghosts, of her unmade work; it also argues that so is the history of Spanish cinema.
This chapter comprises a biography of Shena Simon which seeks to demonstrate her historical significance and the influences which undergirded her career as a public servant and reformer. The chapter details her early work as a social reformer before exploring her work in local government in Manchester. It details Shena’s role in expanding educational provision and the many years she spent as a campaigner for educational equality. It discusses how her campaigning was inspired by education in America and the Soviet Union. In exploring Shena’s feminist ideas, the chapter discusses her friendship with Virginia Woolf. The chapter demonstrates that underscoring Shena’s career was a radical feminist and freethinking streak. It concludes by asserting that Shena should be given more attention in histories of women in social reform and politics.
James Baldwin Review is delighted to present a special section dedicated to chronicling and demonstrating Baldwin’s direct involvement in the civil rights movement. On tours for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1962–63, Baldwin spoke at dozens of forums. We have transcribed three of his major appearances on May 7, 1963: a speech before a packed gathering of thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley; a radio interview with John Leonard and Elsa Knight Thompson; and an evening speech before the sold-out San Francisco Masonic Temple. Ed Pavlić provides an introduction tracing some of Baldwin’s work for CORE in new detail. These details suggest that Baldwin’s activism enriched his life and work in contrast to the prevailing idea that these engagements threatened and diminished his art.
Chapter 6 examines efforts to reclaim the commons of water, and how grassroots movements drive the struggle and demand the prioritization of democracy, transparency, and human rights over corporate profits in public policy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, the “standpoint” offered by marginalized actors offers important insights into the operation of systems of power and the strategies of resistance. Transnational social movement scholars have too often reinforced the idea that knowledge flows from the Global North to the Global South. This chapter builds on scholarship that has examined the importance of Global South to Global North social movement connections by bringing together all of the book’s empirical case studies. The book argues that these three cases actually reflect a single case of a translocal movement for the right to water, with the National Summit on the Human Right to Water, Nigeria’s Water Emergency: From Resistance to Real Solutions Against Corporate Control held in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2019 (referred to from here forward as the Summit), as one specific convergence space of translocal organizing for the human right to water. The fight against water grabbing in all its forms, and the struggle to build a new world, is connected to a larger counter-hegemonic movement, and is an ongoing and non-linear process.
This chapter focuses on India and the GFS’s efforts to reform two groups that provoked considerable anxiety among colonial governments and the GFS: poor white and multiracial girls. These girls seemingly threatened ideas of whiteness and purity by complicating binary racial distinctions and raising the spectre of racial degeneration. The GFS instituted training programmes for these girls to raise their status and thereby avert the supposed degeneration of the white race, but these programmes encountered problems and resistance, revealing fault lines over race within the GFS. The GFS encouraged its members to think of themselves as belonging to ‘a very large family’ and an ‘Imperial sisterhood’, but not all girls were welcome or equal members in this sisterhood. The GFS presented itself as an organisation that transcended racial divisions, but debates over the membership of non-European girls, especially in India and South Africa, revealed the contradictions in such pronouncements. Because the organisation relied upon the support of Indian and African girls, it begrudgingly admitted them but simultaneously worked to segregate girls and deprive their branches of resources, ultimately leading girls to leave the organisation altogether. These actions demonstrate that girls were not passive participants in the GFS but actively shaped the society in accordance with their interests, sometimes disrupting the organisers’ plans in the process.