Search results
Introduction In 2014, Owen Jones's The Establishment 1 explained how and why Britain's unequal, class-ridden system would always prevail. It was written at a time when the elite seemed to be thriving in spite of recently writing off the global economy. After a couple of lean years for Davos man, bank debt had effectively been nationalised. No-one in power had had to go to jail. Self-enrichment for the few was going better than ever. As Jones explained, the Establishment
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 08/05/2013, SPi 5 Parliamentary devolution, church establishment and new state religion in the UK In 1936, the historian A.L. Rowse perceived that there was a ‘slow march’ to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Yet, despite the evident and considerable social changes since then, the growth of both secularism and religious pluralism and the experiences of the newer devolved Parliament and assemblies, the Church of England remains, in the twenty-first century, as the established church of the UK and its Parliament, while the
The official journal of the International Gothic Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.
In 1885, the Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow presented three human skeletons from the colony of German South West Africa to the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. The remains had been looted from a grave by a young German scientist, Waldemar Belck, who was a member of the second Lüderitz expedition and took part in the occupation of colonial territory. In an attempt to re-individualise and re-humanise these human remains, which were anonymised in the course of their appropriation by Western science, the authors consult not only the colonial archive, but also contemporary oral history in Namibia. This allows for a detailed reconstruction of the social and political contexts of the deaths of the three men, named Jacobus Hendrick, Jacobus !Garisib and Oantab, and of Belck’s grave robbery, for an analysis of how the remains were turned into scientific objects by German science and institutions, as well as for an establishment of topographical and genealogical links with the Namibian present. Based on these findings, claims for the restitution of African human remains from German institutions cannot any longer be regarded as a contemporary phenomenon only but must be understood as part of an African tradition of resistance against Western colonial and scientific practices.
Since its release in 1992, Francis Ford Coppola‘s Bram Stoker‘s Dracula has made a deep impression upon the vampire community, or more likely left an infamous hole in it. Critics received Coppolas movie with closed fangs. To Fred Botting, Bram Stokers Dracula is ‘The End of Gothic’, the final metamorphosis of a faltering convention into some strange and alien form that destroys all of Gothics power. Stokers novel brought to greatness a war between the establishment of gender roles, threatened by the overtly (homo)sexual presence of Count Dracula, who turned women into harlots and men into sissies, before Abraham Van Helsing and his Crew of Light end Counts reign of terror to reaffirm their own faltering masculinity. Coppolas version creates a new heterogeneous blend of the corrupted legends of Prince Vlad the Impaler woven together with the literary Dracula within a Harlequin Romance format. The homoerotic undertones of Stokers novel disappear under the overly-exaggerated romantic quest of Coppolas new vampire.
In Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown attempted to negotiate varying forces confronting contemporary American religious and political life. Through the transformation of the temple into a Gothic zone Brown injects questions of epistemological uncertainty, clashing forces of rational Enlightenment and supernatural faith. Brown outlines the religiously motivated founding of the nation reacting to European oppression as allegorical to the Wieland patriarchs journey from the Old to New World, and his construction of the temple demonstrates the establishment of new institutions in the American landscape. Religious liberty turns into extremism, producing Gothic violence that transforms the temple into a site of horror and destruction. His children attempt to re-transform the temple along rational Enlightenment lines much the same as Brown perceived the need for America to distance itself from its revolutionary and religious extremist origins. Yet the failure of rationalism to expunge the supernatural aura from the temple allows for the tragic events to transpire that comprise the bulk of the novel. Ultimately, Brown‘s Gothic novel evinces the critical nature of the epistemological clash he sees taking place for the direction America will take, and his concerns that Gothic violence will reverberate throughout future generations find their expression in Wieland‘s temple.
expenditure and protecting competitive advantages in the development of technologies critical to economic growth and security; from controlling the production and distribution of energy to combating corruption. But the novelty of the new security strategy does not lie in any of these particular details, variations of which have appeared repeatedly in other documents, in previous decades. Rather, it can be found in various premises that inform the strategy and are presented as if they were conventions of the American foreign-policy establishment, when in
environment, particularly when subsequent developments are considered. The dominant medical paradigm of the day deemed that miasma , essentially foul odours, was responsible for the propagation of illness. While this resulted in the ostentatious display of various aromatic herbs, garlic and so on, improved ventilation – be it in courtrooms, prisons or poor urban dwellings – was largely ignored. Compounding the problem was the subsequent establishment of property taxes based on the number of windows in
society or the American establishment this can benefit. For large corporations, finance capital and, principally, information technology companies, multilateralism is more useful, is it not? Sure, these companies faced some rules, but they grew most of all during this period of globalisation with increased multilateral cooperation. Things are more chaotic now. It is partly a result of the financial crisis. This affected employment in the US and living standards. In a similar way to Mussolini, who was a more sophisticated person, Trump appealed to