‘Come Buy,Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London

Placing Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ (1862) within the rich context of children's London guidebooks establishes a literary tradition in which readers are counseled to be wise urban consumers. During this period of rapid industrialization, exotic foods appeared on English tables amid public fears about food adulteration. Rossetti's poem and contemporary guidebooks transmit the anxiety surrounding food selection and consumption. From Aunt Busy-Bee's New London Cries (1852) to Aunt Louisa's London Alphabet (1872), London is depicted as an urban sounding board for commercial opportunities and moral choices. Removed from agrarian sites of production, urban readers are urged to select food according to the moral character of the vendor. In Rossetti's famous poem, Lizzie's and Laura's choices are immediately relevant to readers who hearkened to similar cries shouted daily in their neighborhoods. Rossetti herself would have heard them growing up in London, and these traditional cries bear semantic and metaphoric similarities to the goblins' cries. Apart from serving as inspirations for Rossetti's work, guides to the cries are also important documents in their own right, part of the corpus of near-forgotten work penned for children to amuse them in their idle hours as well as to instruct them in proper practices of commercial enterprise and moral consumption. The child reader is invited to know London and to absorb lessons by piecing together the letters and sounds of the metropolis.     

‘In Accord with British Traditions’: The Rise of Compulsory Religious Education in Ontario,Canada, and Victoria,Australia, 1945–50

This article examines the establishment of legally mandated Protestant training in the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fearing moral decay at home and a menacing world environment seemingly unfavourable to the ‘British way of life’ in the 1940s, educators asserted that religion, and specifically Protestant Christianity, was the only means by which the moral core of their British democracy could be preserved. The teaching of religious instruction was highly controversial in both places. Supporters of the new curriculum believed the religious courses would strengthen the British identity and moral backbone of the Canadian and Australian nations, while opponents argued that imposing religion in the classroom was antithetical to British ideals of freedom and toleration. Educators struggled to reconcile these divergent views on how religion fitted into a wider British identity, and the resulting tension exposed the points of ethnic and cultural fracture that undermined the credibility of Britishness after 1950. The very efforts to impose a unifying sense of Britishness were so controversial and problematic that they ultimately required an alternative understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of Ontario or Victoria.     

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality,Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.     

‘Local Repercussions’: the Impact of Staff ‘Bias’ and Market ‘Sensitivity’ on Reuters Coverage of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–73

The importance of international communication and media to the study of international relations has long been recognised. This paper focuses on coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Reuters news agency, one of the most important international providers of news. The voluminous academic discussion of international media coverage of that conflict has related primarily to exploration of news content. This article breaks new ground by evaluating through archival documentation some organisational, commercial, and editorial aspects involved in the actual process of news production. It studies the efforts by Reuters to overcome staff ‘bias’ and market ‘sensitivity’ and to provide publicly perceived ‘objective’ coverage. This it does in respect of a conflict separating the political and emotional loyalties of media and institutional subscribers in the Middle East region and around the world. It examines in particular the problems created by the national affinities of local staff employed in the region and the effect of political considerations and market pressure on regional dissemination of media information.     

‘We are of the connections’: migration,methodological nationalism,and ‘militant research’

Abstract

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.     

‘Angelic Spirits of ‘68’: Memories of 60s’ Radicalism in Responses to the 2010–11 UK Student Protests

The winter of 2010–11 saw a significant upsurge of student protest in Britain. This paper analyses the numerous references to 60s’ radicalism which circulated in responses to the protests, with a focus on left-wing media. Drawing on performativity theory, the paper traces the highly polarised divisions between affirmations and repudiations of ‘1968’ in responses to the protests. This polarisation, I argue, reflects an absence of a clear-cut collective memory of the British radical 60s. More broadly, the paper sheds light on the hitherto under-explored mechanisms through which memories of ‘1968’ shape the discursive and affective landscape of contemporary radical politics.