J.B. Priestley: Bradford and a provincial narrative of England, 1913–1933

J.B. Priestley's writing has been used to explore aspects of landscape and Englishness. Through an analysis of Priestley's early journalism in the Bradford Pioneer and the Yorkshire Observer, we argue that his critical disengagement to most of the landscapes of England was based on a connection to the landscapes of his youth in Bradford where he first developed his fictional and documentary narrative style. In his early journalism, Priestley articulated a sense of dwelling in Bradford that was rooted in the experience of two distinct local landscapes: the spaces of the city and the nature of the surrounding upland and moorland. Priestley's geographical ideal balanced the civility of the Edwardian city embedded in a landscape that offered escape to and commune with nature. The existential balance between the two was, we argue, central to the narrative geographies developed by Priestley in his fiction which is illustrated through an analysis of his two early novels: The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). We suggest that the ways in which Priestley's interwar writing expressed dwelling in local landscapes might be thought of as a critical provincialisation of London and England.     

Obedient children and reckless rebels: Jabotinsky's youth politics and the case for authoritarian leadership, 1931–1933

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky's political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky's deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement's party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.     

How the News was brought from Byzantium to Angoulême; or,The Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart

Abstract

Adémar of Chabannes (988-1034) of noble family, a-monk in the monastery of St. Cybard (Eparchus) at Angoulême, compiled a Chronicon in three books. The first begins with the origins of the Franks and ends with the death of Pepin the Short in 768; the second deals with the reign of Charlemagne; the third covers the years 814 to 1030. The first two books and the first fifteen chapters of the third (down to the year 877) are wholly derivative from identifiable sources. But from chapter sixteen onward the third book provides valuable information chiefly on the period 877-1030 in Aquitaine, presumably drawn from local written sources and from the memories of Adémar's associates. These included notably his two uncles, who were attached to the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, as was Adémar himself in his youth. It was at St. Martial that on a stormy night in 1010 Adémar had a vision in the heavens of a fiery Cross with Christ upon it weeping a great river of tears: an experience that rendered him so thunderstruck (attonitus) that he kept it secret in his heart until many years later when he was nearing the end of his Chronicon. Then he wrote it down. From St. Martial he returned at the age of twenty-two to St. Cybard, took orders, and spent his life in writing. The‘original’chapters of his Chronicon only occasionally evince any interest in or knowledge of events in France north of Loire.     

Historical and Psychological Origins of Child Soldiering in Ba‘athist Iraq

Under the auspices of loyalty and patriotism, Saddam Hussein manipulated and invoked the spiritual term futuwwa as the prime impetus to construct his people's army in Iraq. This article will examine the historical and psychological context of making child soldiers in Iraq, while drawing from similar examples worldwide. It identifies information operations campaigns utilized by Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘ath Party to indoctrinate youth throughout Iraq into a system modeled after those of the Nazis, and other fascist regimes.     

Muchacho que vas militando: Stardom,Youth Culture,and Politics in Palito Ortega Films (1970–1975)

Scholars of Argentine cinema have engaged extensively with the oppositional politics of the Nuevo Cine of the 1960s and ’70s, but much less with the cinema of that time that offered support to more conservative politics. In the interest of better understanding such support in mass culture, this essay contextualises the films made between 1970 and 1975 that star the pop idol Ramón “Palito” Ortega and examines how his star persona – which had been constructed through television, songs, magazines, and films – evolves through the first half of the decade, asking how this evolution is significant in the period’s turbulent context. In the films, Ortega functions as an avatar for a conservative bourgeois morality by delegitimising practices associated with, first, modern youth culture, then, after 1973, specific politically left practices, while exalting traditional practices that support social hierarchies compatible with the Peronist conservative orthodoxy. The essay finds that this process of politicisation runs from nostalgic nationalist reaction against modern internationalising youth culture to, with the legalisation and return to power of Peronism, examples of matter-of-fact anti-Communism and veiled anti-Semitism in affinity with the conspiracy theories propagated by the Far Right that took power in the pre-dictatorship period.     

Experimental and Conceptual Innovators in the Sciences: The Cases of Darwin and Einstein

Abstract

During the past decade, analyses of artistic creativity have demonstrated the contrast in creative life cycles between experimental old masters and conceptual young geniuses. This article extends the analysis to scientists. Charles Darwin was a great experimental innovator, who spent decades accumulating evidence on evolution and its mechanisms, and made his greatest contributions late in his career. In contrast, Albert Einstein was a great conceptual innovator, who made discoveries through highly abstract reasoning, and made his greatest contributions early in his career. The careers of these two great scientists are thus consistent with the thesis that, as in the arts, conceptual creativity is associated with youth, but experimental creativity increases with age.     

Conceptualising Youth Culture in Postwar France

The article discusses the meanings of youth culture, and particularly music, in contemporary France, in the light of the Ministry of Culture's adoption a quarter of a century ago of a sympathetic discourse towards it. Contrasting similarly sympathetic French sociological analyses with the seminal work undertaken in Anglophone cultural studies on subcultures, it argues that the variable nomenclature of youth culture in French public discourse is founded on two fundamental ways of conceptualising youth culture, to which the work of Pierre Mayol draws attention. While la culture des jeunes, denoting the leisure practices of 15- to 24-year-olds, connotes a culture existing in an ephemeral, ghettoised present, la culture jeune has undergone the process that Bourdieu calls legitimation. The article concludes by asking whether these dual meanings of youth culture may ultimately be mapped on to the republican opposition between particularism and universalism.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

The ‘youth-fullness’ of youth geographies: ‘coming of age’?

ABSTRACT

The 21st anniversary of Cool Places (Skelton, T., and G. Valentine, eds. 1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge) provides an opportunity to reflect on the direction of travel in youth geographies and map out future journeys. Here, we argue that scholarship on youth geographies is increasingly dispersed across sub-disciplinary niches of Human Geography. A more conspicuous point of coalescence would be beneficial for the advancement of conceptual and theoretical understandings of youth geographies. It is suggested that the journal Children’s Geographies, offers a meaningful place for the publication of further, dynamic and increased work on youth geographies. To illustrate the exigent research agendas of youth geographies, some exemplars of the ways in which the contemporary lives of young people are being transformed are highlighted. We conclude by asserting that it is an exciting time for researching youth geographies, to grapple with the complex and diverse contested meanings and lived experiences of youth across the Global North and South.     

Exposure: a postcolonial turn in urban ethnography

A diary kept during the development of Sugar, a commission of the Liverpool Capital of Culture Festival (2006–2007), was the occasion of an autoethnography. This essay reflects on the triangulation made between the architecture of slavery, contemporary discourses of ‘youth culture’ and the dissolution of the representational frame as thematics or topics liquefied into the repressed topology of the city; a direct analogy is made between the famous but inaccessible Williamson tunnels and the creative unconscious of a post-representationalist dramaturgical practice. The ghost volumetrics of this history are cathected into a movement form, assimilable to the kinetics of hip-hop culture; a new topologically identified community was felt to emerge that performed Sugar largely in the sense of channelling its concerns back into cultural traces continuously in informal production. The relationship between peripatetic dramaturg and peripherally located creative youth mapped an urban dérive quite different from that cultivated by the Situationists, a secret tracking or collaboration that linked urban ethnography to a decolonising dramaturgy.     

Demolition of Chengzhongcun and social mobility of Migrant youth: a case study in Beijing

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1980s, millions of poor and low-income rural migrant workers migrating to Chinese metropolises with their children have congregated in chengzhongcun (villages in the city) for low-cost housing. Drawing on data from a 14-month participant observation in one chengzhongcun in Beijing, we critically explore the potential impact of urban expansion on social mobility of migrant youth. We argue that the uncertainty and chaos connected with looming demolition result in substandard schooling and business closures for migrant parents, leading to the stagnant mobility of migrant youth. Expanding the social hierarchy pyramids, we argue that eliminating chengzhongcun, a space that creates the possibility of climbing the social ladder, hampers the social mobility of migrant youth in the context of the rigid class structure in the late-socialist China. This research re-examines the goals of the demolition of chengzhongcun and advances our understanding by analyzing the prospects of disadvantaged migrant youth during and after the demolition process.     

Josiah Wedgwood and the seventh dominion scheme

The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, believed that Zionism would create a new type of Jew. The youth organization that he headed, Betar Youth, used a variety of means to train its members to realize the vision of the “new Jew,” from physical and paramilitary exercises to learning and using the Hebrew language, from a certain code of behavior to making every effort to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael. Jabotinsky presented three figures as models of the new Jewish character: Herzl, who had brought the nation back into history; Trumpeldor, who personified the pure idea of pioneering and serving the nation; and Shlomo Ben Yosef, who, when sentenced to death by the British Mandate authorities, demonstrated strength and honor while in prison and went to the gallows with the Betar Song on his lips. These three men symbolized in their lives the idea of the “new Jew” – the antithesis to the figure of the ghetto Jew.     

The plebe in the Florentine Histories: Machiavelli’s notion of humours revisited

According to recent scholarship, the Florentine Histories expresses Machiavelli’s growing scepticism toward the popolo. This more elitist ‘late Machiavelli’, however, is an illusion. I show that the illusion arose from (1) the scholarly oversight of Machiavelli’s criticism of the popolo in his early work, Discourses, and (2) the failure to notice his new terminological distinction between the popolo and the plebe in the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli never was a whole-hearted defender of the popolo in the first place, for his consistent commitment was to preserve the balance between the popolo and the grandi. Nor was he unusually critical of the popolo in his later work, Florentine Histories: he directs his harshest criticism to the lower-class plebe and not to the middle-class popolo.     

YOUNG ACTIVISTS IN MUDDY BOOTS

The Swedish youth organization Fältbiologerna was founded in 1947 with the mission to inspire learning about nature through outdoor activities. Since then, the members have stayed true to their slogan ‘keep your boots muddy’ through engaging in bird watching and forest excursions; however, in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a period that environmental historians refer to as the ‘ecological turn’ – the organization’s activities were extended to also include political activism. Fältbiologerna increasingly evolved into a fertile terrain for young environmentalists. In this article, we explore how this Swedish branch of modern environmental youth activism came about. Based on a close reading of the members’ journal, Fältbiologen, between 1959 and 1974, we identify four key characteristics that were communicated in the journal during the years of study: adventurous, knowledgeable, influential, and radical. We demonstrate that Fältbiologerna took an increasingly radical position and began to engage in environmental debates and actions, while still holding on to ideals of learning through spending time in nature. Participation in these different activities shaped the young members into environmentalists.     

Uncertain dimensions. Western overseas empires in the twentieth century

I consider the extent to which Fichte might be classed as a German Jacobin. I argue that if we think of the history of Jacobinism as being driven by two main forces, a concern for private rights and a concern for the public good, then Fichte might be classed as a Jacobin because his ethical and political thought combines these two concerns. I also suggest that his argument for the right of existence in the Foundations of Natural Right and his idea of ‘public’ virtue, which can be found in his main work on ethics, The System of Ethics, provide a link between his philosophy and the radical phase of the French Revolution.     

Communities of discourse: Ideology and social structure in the reformation,the enlightenment,and European socialism

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

The countryside as educator: schools, rurality and citizenship in inter-war Wales

This paper examines the ways in which the educational system in inter-war Wales reflected wider debates about national identity, rurality and citizenship. It begins by outlining the role of education in the “rebirth” of Wales at the end of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of the central figure of O. M. Edwards. It then traces his legacy into the inter-war period and the work of the Welsh department of the Board of Education and its permanent secretary Alfred Davies. Themes of nature and the rural, citizenship and Welshness are examined in the context of the Board's Scheme for the Collection of Rural Lore in Schools. These educational debates are linked to others within Welsh youth movements likeUrdd Gobaith Cymru, academic geography (especially the work of H. J. Fleure), and the emerging Welsh nationalist movement. The paper ends by noting the contested role of education in Welshness.     

‘Elementary aesthetics’, hedonist ethics: The philosophical foundations of Feuerbach's late works

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

两代学人的情谊与风范--杨志玖与傅斯年关系述论

傅斯年与杨志玖是具有师生关系的两代学人,他们二人的学术成就和贡献在学术界有着重要影响。但很少有人对他们的交往和情谊进行论述。他们数十年前往来的书信和交往的资料,记载了他们交往的史实和表现出的深厚情谊,其中既显示了杨志玖先生谦虚诚实、好学进取的学人风范和重诚尚信、尊师重道的品格,也反映出傅斯年为发展学术重视人才的培养和使用、不遗余力奖掖后学的宗师风范。     

“A beacon-light to the oppressed of every land”: James Connolly and the work of the working-class intellectual

Abstract

This article seeks to defend James Connolly from attacks on both the Left and Right, particularly the charge that his legacy is nationalist delusion and fanaticism. The article argues that Connolly’s politics and his engagement with Irish cultural politics demonstrate his commitment to human equality as both a right, but also a principle of human intelligence. The article addresses Connolly’s status as a working-class intellectual with reference to how he challenges conventional hierarchies between the philosophers of Marxism and the proletarians who are the object of those deliberations. The article argues that from Connolly’s thought and activism an anti-colonial Marxism emerges which might help explain the neo-imperialist world we find ourselves in today and provide a critique lacking in the collapsed teleological versions of orthodox Marxism. The relations between his Marxism and nationalism are explored, as are his play Under Which Flag? his poetry and songs.