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THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PRIVILEGE Parliamentary privilege as practised today both in Ireland and elsewhere is based on medieval precedent. In the medieval period, parliament was a representative body of both church and state, attended by all the senior officers of the state. It was the apex of the judicial arm and had all the senior members of the judiciary in attendance. Parliament was an effective conduit of communication between the monarch and his subjects for the presentation and resolution of
restriction. 9 This essay contends that these recruitment schemes and the preferential treatment provided to British and other European migrants was just as much part of racialised immigration regimes as policies of restriction. Looking at both aspects of the migration policies of these countries together reveals the longevity and scale of the privilege provided to British and to a lesser, though still
the great Chiefs of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria who will have paid a visit to the United Kingdom since the Protectorate was established.’ Clifford went on to proclaim the political advantage such a meeting would likely create: ‘Such a privilege would be immensely prised by the Emir and appreciated by all the principal Chiefs in the Northern Provinces, and if an audience
2 The decline of British privilege: migrants of the 1970s A migration of rising expectations At first glance the expanding rates of British emigration and mobility, which had marked the immediate postwar generation, seem to have continued with little significant change into the 1970s. Britons were barely less inclined to leave the country after 1970 than in the intense peak years of the later 1960s, especially to those countries like Australia and New Zealand, which continued to offer subsidised fares to eligible families and individuals. In 1966 British
Origins, originality, and the privileges of nature179 6 Origins, originality, and the privileges of nature There can be little doubt that the University – indeed the entire infrastructure of all our educational institutions – has become a battleground in recent times. In extreme form, this affects jurisdictions beyond the UK much more negatively than it does here. Recently, we have seen academics being arrested and jailed in Turkey, for instance; we have seen students attacked in a whole series of places, including South Africa, Australia, and the USA. Violence
James Baldwin, in his landmark essay “My Dungeon Shook,” says that white Americans are “still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” This open letter explores this history on a personal level. Taking notes from Baldwin’s indictments of whiteness in Another Country and The Fire Next Time, this essay explores how white people, despite claims of deniability, become culpable, complicit, and ensnared in their racial privilege. By reading Baldwin’s work through a personal lens, it implores fellow white readers and scholars of Baldwin to begin examining the myths of America by first examining themselves.
This article proposes that the popularly held model of ‘Gothic’ writings emergence in the Eighteenth Century is too partial: it tends to privilege prose fiction written in England in the latter part of the century. As a corrective, the article looks at poetry written in Scotland across the century, seeking not origins for ‘the Gothic’ as a transhistorical literary mode of expression, but emergent treatments of the supernatural that fed back into the literature of the period. It argues that poetry in eighteenth-century Scotland develops well-established indigenous supernatural tropes, especially that of the ‘ghaist’ or ghost.
Elizabeth Gaskell used Gothic as a symbolic language to explore the dark side of Unitarian thought. She explores, in rationalist terms, evils origins, effects, and remedy, using Gothic tropes as metaphors for humanly created misery. Gaskell locates the roots of ‘evil’ in an unenlightened social order – in ‘The Crooked Branch’ erroneous parenting, and in ‘The Poor Clare’ wider social structures, both distorted by the ideology of privilege. ‘The Poor Clare’ also engages with the tension between moral determinism and personal responsibility, and defends a Unitarian salvation. This tale also demonstrates Gaskell‘s views on aspects of Roman Catholicism.
Smith reveals the particular biases and assumptions of blacklist allegories as well as the extent to which this type of interpretation has informed the reception of 1950s films. More specifically, he addresses several questions about the validity of allegorical readings of the blacklist. Is there a basis for such allegorical interpretations? What is the place of authorial intention and audience reception in the encoding and decoding of blacklist allegories? What does this reading strategy tell us about the politics of the films makers? Does this reading strategy privilege certain meanings of the text over others of equal significance?
This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.