From a Politics of Conviction to a Politics of Interest? The Changing Ontologics of Youth Politics in India and Nicaragua

There exists a longstanding association between youth and revolution, partly due to the assumption that the politics of the former are inherently “prefigurative” in nature. Youth politics can often actually be quite conservative, however, as can be observed in contemporary Nicaragua, where rather than attempting to “change the world” in the way that previous militant youth generations were famously associated with, current Sandinista youth activists engage primarily in forms of neo‐patrimonial clientelism. At the same time, the evolving experience of everyday political action by university educated youth in Uttar Pradesh, India highlights how economic endeavours can, under certain circumstances, become a form of politics, often of a more transformative variety than classic forms of collective mobilization. The comparison of Nicaragua and India thus highlights the critical importance of considering the wider environment within which youth mobilize and take action in order to understand how and why particular political “ontologics” emerge.     

Southern Pennine Brass Bands and the Creation of Northern Identity,c. 1840–1914: Musical Constructions of Space,Place And Region

In spite of being a national form of music-making, the brass band movement is accepted — almost without question in the popular imagination — as working class and northern. Hence, in 1974, Peter Hennessy described a band contest at the Albert Hall: ‘A roll call of the bands is like an evocation of industrial history. From Wingates Temperance and Black Dyke Mills to more modern conglomerates .... Grown men, old bandsmen say, have been known to cry at the beauty of it all …. Of all the manifestations of working-class culture, nothing is more certain than a brass band to bring on an attack of the George Orwells. Even the most hardened bourgeois cannot resist romanticising the proletariat a little when faced with one.(The Times, 11 Oct. 1974) This stereotype, which emerged in the nineteenth century, generated the following questions about northern identity: what elements in the brass band movement created this reportage of northern bandsmen and how did bands, which thrived in large numbers in the Southern Pennines, emerge as a musical and cultural metonym of the industrial landscape? This article explores notions of music-making and the creation of a musical space, place and region through the reporting of brass bands c. 1840–1914.     

Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics

SUMMARY

The debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned.     

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies' man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.     

Simon McBurney’s Ambitious Pursuit of the Pure Maths Play

Abstract

When Simon McBurney set out to create a play about the fabled relationship between Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, he was immediately confronted by the question of how to engage the mathematics authentically. Undaunted by his own uneasiness with the subject, McBurney incorporated a host of experts into the rehearsal process, calling on mathematical educators, expositors, and Fields medalists to come work with the company. While on the surface maths and drama make an incongruous pair, the result was a vibrant collaboration. The final product — the award-winning play A Disappearing Number — shines an interesting light on the surprising similarity between the creative process in mathematics and the creative process in theatre, especially as manifested by the company at Complicite.     

'Dare the boist'rous main': The role of the Belfast News Letter in the process of emigration from Ulster to North America, 1760–1800

Before the mass migrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century, earlier waves of migration in the eighteenth century saw significant numbers of people leave Ireland, predominantly from Ulster, to settle in North America. This article, using as its principal data source the Belfast News Letter ( BNL) , its letters, advertisements and reports, focuses firstly on reconstructing the late eighteenth-century migration process and voyage, highlighting the barriers represented by the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the challenges of the sea, there were problems with the ships, the ever-present danger of disease and also threats from other vessels, from privateers to press gangs. The voyage was recognized as a 'universal dread', and the risks taken to 'dare the boist'rous main' were perhaps not minimized in the pages of the BNL , whose editorial stance was antipathetic to the migration for the potential harm it caused to Ulster by removing so many of its industrious young. The second part of this article goes on to consider the newspaper's and others' vested interests in the emigration process, demonstrates how these were manifested in the press and sets the coverage of this very significant early emigration flow within the context of contemporary religious and colonial discourses at a period of very lively transatlantic interactions.