The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

Rethinking historiography and ethnography: Surrealism’s intellectual legacy

ABSTRACT

Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.     

T.H. Green and the Dissidence of Dissent: On Religion and National Character in Nineteenth‐Century England

Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) has been widely recognized for his contributions to Liberal political‐social theory and for his Liberal partisanship. Historians and political theorists continue to emphasize his advocacy of limited state interference and democratic localism, as well as his anti‐imperialist statements. Recent scholars of English nationalism, national identity and patriotism, including Peter Mandler, Julia Stapleton, Krishan Kumar, H.S. Jones, Roberto Romani and Georgios Varouxakis, acknowledge Green as an acolyte of Giuseppe Mazzini, a Cobdenite and a Little Englander. While they place Green's ideas within a continuum of Victorian Liberal nationalist ideas (blending into Conservatism and socialism during the 20th century), their investigations foster the view that Green placed little value in the nation as a focus of individual and collective identification. In their readings of Green, the abstract ‘community’, free of national peculiarities, was to him the antidote to both individual and national narrowness. However, examination of Green's statements about community, the moral ideal and religion reveals that his theorising was informed by a view of national character different from that of most contemporary liberal intellectuals. Green rejected the ‘Liberal anglican’ view that a national church or clerisy was necessary to guide the development of the English nation. He identified ideas and practices of protestant dissenters as progressive forces in English history and endorsed them as means of national development. Religious pluralism and forms of ecclesiastical organisation promoting democratic localism were to Green among the essential characteristics of Englishness.     

Politics of the Anthropocene: Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process

In the Anthropocene humanity acquires a new collective geologic identity. There are two contradictory movements in this Anthropocenic thought; first, the Anthropocenic trace in the geologic record names a commons from below insomuch as humanity is named as an undifferentiated “event” of geology; second, the Anthropocene highlights the material diversities of geologic bodies formed through historical material processes. This paper addresses the consequences of this geologic subjectivity for political thought beyond a conceptualization of the commons as a set of standing reserves. Discourses of limits and planetary boundaries are contrasted with the exuberance and surplus of fossil‐fuelled energy. Drawing on the political economy of Georges Bataille and the material communism of Maurice Blanchot, I argue for the necessity of a political aesthetics that can traverse the difference between common and uncommon experience in the formation of an Anthropocene commons.     

Blondel,the Philosophy of Action and Liberation Theology

Abstract

Maurice Blondel's philosophy of action and concrete political theology provide foundations for modern theologies of action. By commencing with the reflective subject, Blondel compensates the deficiencies of collectivist Marxist social analysis. He did not live to complete his account of the social, political and economic implications of his philosophy, but they are realized in the work and witness of others: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yves de Montcheuil, Henri de Lubac and John McNeill. Liberation theologians of diverse persuasions need especially to acknowledge their debt to Blondel in an era when, in Western societies, the fundamental context of action is no longer material but intellectual, spiritual and interpersonal. The abstract nature of his thought means that he frequently opens suggestive paths into further reflection rather than prescribing complete solutions to specific practical questions.     

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.     

Prêcher sur le prêche. La réflexion de Maurice de Sully sur l’importance et la nature de la prédication

The paper presents an analysis of the work of Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris (1160–96) and the author of one of the earliest complete collections of sermons for lay people. The focus of the analysis is the idea of the preaching as it was understood by the preachers themselves. The importance and the nature of this pastoral activity are quite often presented in the sermons. They also seem to be alluded to through the structure of the sermons and vocabulary used by the preacher.     

Orleanist Diplomacy and the French Colony in Uruguay

Traditional and historic relations between France and Ireland have been the object of numerous fine studies at historic, cultural, and literary levels. They have also been much celebrated. However, the darker side of Franco-Irish relations has received far less attention. The present article aims to act as a corrective and shows that between 1870 and 1970, relations between the two countries were rather distant, strained on occasion even, and that much depended on the political and strategic evolution in Europe and as well on the Catholic question. The scope of the article ranges from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 until Ireland's negotiations to enter the European Communities (EC) in 1970.