Living Utopia

ABSTRACT

This article examines experiments in communal living in Britain and Denmark in the early 1970s, using life-story interviews from seventeen members of two British and two Danish communes. It examines communal living as a fusion of radical political principles with the practice of experimental collective living. It concludes that the movement's egalitarian principles of resource-sharing, gender equality and the avoidance of hierarchies were broadly achieved, even if the movement obviously did not realize its more ambitious objective of undermining the bourgeois family. Though none of the interviewees lives communally now, most remain faithful to the principles behind the movement.     

Marxism and Class Analysis. By André Béteille.

ABSTRACT

The emergence of a new type of consumer society was catalysed rather than impeded by the tumultuous events of the late 1960s. The rebels of 1968 contributed considerably to the breaking down of conservative obstacles to consumption, to the opening up of new markets and to the creation of a new type of consumer. At its heart, ‘1968’ was an intra-bourgeois confrontation pursued by an innovative minority. The many instances of personal transformation from protagonists of protest to pillars of the establishment can be interpreted in the context of communicative and consumerist modernization. The protesters' performative hedonism proved highly compatible with consumer culture. Protest culture, on the one hand, sought the publicity of consumer society as a spatial and moral sphere for its activities. The response of the ‘system’ to the protests, on the other hand, was surprisingly flexible and resulted in the further development of capitalism and consumer society in the late twentieth century.     

‘At Some Point in the 1960s,Hell Disappeared’: Hell,Gender and Catholicism in Post-War England

This article explores changing understandings of Catholic hell in post-war England, focusing on how questions of sex and gender intersected with beliefs in the afterlife. It uses oral testimony from Catholic laypeople alongside the pronouncements of the clerical hierarchy to challenge the pervasive notion that ‘hell disappeared in the 1960s’. Hell did however, change in constitution during the post-war decades, transforming from a material ‘place’ to an abstract ‘state’ in the lay and institutional imagination. Rather than being about a straightforward ‘liberation’ from a coercive theology of damnation, the changing constitution of hell spoke of the way certain religious beliefs became re-categorised in late-modern England.     

The ‘Isle of Vice’? Youth,class and the post-war holiday on the Isle of Man

This article broadens our knowledge of post-war holidaymaking (c. 1950–80) by adopting the Isle of Man as a case study. A popular holiday resort from the late nineteenth century, the Isle of Man experienced considerable political turbulence during the 1950s and 1960s about how best to stay competitive as a seaside resort, where authorities employed uniquely stringent methods to contain rowdiness and protect the island’s ‘respectable’ atmosphere. The first two sections examine the leisure habits of the young and working class in a holiday context, integrating this analysis with perceptions of their behaviour gleaned from oral interviews with local residents. The concluding section explores how the presence of holidaymakers on the Isle of Man – uniquely among seaside resorts in the British Isles – informed (and in some cases emboldened) a sense of national identity. Oral history, complemented by the Hansard reports of the Isle of Man parliament and local press coverage, sheds light on the activities of the post-war working class at play, and how the presence of holidaymakers fortified Manx national consciousness.     

Post-War Cinema-Going and Working-Class Communities: A Case Study of the Holyland,Belfast, 1945–1962

This article utilizes oral history testimony to investigate cinema-going practices in the Holyland, a largely Protestant working-class community in post-war Belfast. It investigates the place-specific nature of cinema attendance, assesses the social practices of cinema-going and examines the reasons for the post-war decline in attendance and consequent cinema closures. Oral history testimony demonstrates the close link between the nature of cinema attendance, changes in the life cycle and urban mobility. By linking the recollections of post-war cinema-goers to broader social and economic developments in Belfast, and assessing Northern Ireland's relationship to the rest of the United Kingdom, this article investigates the reasons for the closure of the Apollo, the local neighbourhood cinema for residents of the Holyland.     

Locality,ethnicity, national and transnational influences on Afro-Caribbean consumer experiences – The case of post-war Northampton

Abstract

This article examines various manifestations of Afro-Caribbeans’ consumer experiences in the English county of Northamptonshire c.1955–1989. Consumer experiences of Caribbeans were connected to, whilst being distinct from, fellow Caribbeans elsewhere in Britain. This article will focus on the consumer-related connections amongst Caribbeans, between Caribbeans and non-Caribbeans, as well as Caribbeans adjusting to, whilst transforming, overall local consumer markets. Understanding the role of location in the development of ethnic identity alongside the combination of integrating whilst not assimilating within a locality and country played out through Northamptonshire Caribbeans’ consumer experiences. Understanding these relationships supports the discernment of how broader conceptualizations of location combined with relative ethnic isolation helped to shape consumer experiences through simultaneous integration and specifically ethnically focussed zones.     

Inherited Memories

ABSTRACT

This article explores the creation and transmission of second generation memories concerning the 1947 Partition of British India. The research is based on oral interviews with Punjabi families who migrated because of Partition and now live in Lahore and Delhi. It explores how Partition memories have been transmitted across generations within these families, and also examines similarities and differences between how the second generation interviewees from Delhi and Lahore remember Partition. It demonstrates that the second generation have not passively accepted everything that the first generation, or the state, has told them about Partition. The second generation's memories are also shaped by their age, nationality, religion and class, and the nature of contemporary politics.     

Women,Education and Social Mobility in Britain during the Long 1970s

ABSTRACT

Through analysis of oral history interviews and quantitative source material, this article offers a gendered model of social mobility in the post-war decades. It argues that women born between the late 1930s and early 1950s achieved social mobility through entering post-secondary education after a period of employment, followed by occupational movement into the welfare professions. Women’s mobility primarily occurred in the long 1970s, facilitated by the Wilson government’s investment in the welfare state and its expansion of further education and creation of the polytechnics. This challenges the predominantly masculinised trope of the grammar school as the driver of post-war mobility.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

Collages of Memory: Remembering the Second World War Differently as the Epistemology of Crafting Cultural Conflicts between Russia and Ukraine

This essay critically examines the current duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and explores the subject of politics of active and selective memory as the claimed root of current controversies and military tensions. Through rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary national narratives, it demonstrates how culturally defining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is remembered, rethought, and reused by respective parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones positionality on the world arena.     

Scent of a history: the “12.3 Incident”: A history in Macao of 50 years ago

Fifty years ago, there were massive anti-colonial movements in Hong Kong and Macao. During the same period, the Cultural Revolution started in mainland China. The writings afterwards painted these movements, and these people, with the colour of the Cultural Revolution. Local is vanished. These movements constituted the starting point of modern Hong Kong and Macao. The aftershocks of these movements are still strong and widespread within the present political environment, the ideology of the public space and the sentiment of the public. It seems necessary to re-examine this history and to restore those people and those events from the distorted impression. Let’s try to read their oral history with sympathy and historical imagination, feeling the scent of a history.     

Lesbians,Gay Men and The Production of Scale in East Germany

This article uses the concept of ‘scale’ to analyse the relative importance of local, national and global places, events, and explanatory frameworks in everyday lives in late communism. It uses a case study of lesbians and gay men living in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and asks how these groups negotiated the restrictions of life under state socialism. It argues that both individuals and groups used scale in two ways: as an imaginative tool for making sense of the world, and as a political strategy for dealing with the state. In both cases, ‘scaling’, or choosing the scale at which one located oneself and one’s actions, was a means of disrupting and even contesting the rigid hierarchies of state socialist rule.     

Socio-Economic Profile of Shopkeepers in Embedded Markets: Social and Cultural Perspectives From a Hundred Years of Bengali Literary Works

Retailing, in the context of developing economies, has been claimed to be a social practice. A review of fictional literature from the ethno-linguistic region of Bengal may enhance our understanding of the social and cultural history of independent retailing. The evidence from social sciences shows that most retail markets in the economically less developed countries function in similar ways. Such a similarity in social structures may be explained using the concept of embeddedness. This article identifies the history of socio-economic roles of rural unorganised retailers in the embedded markets of developing economies through the discourse analysis of Bengali fictional literature.     

Collaboration in,Collaboration Out: The Eighties in the Age of Digital Reproduction

In this article I bring together the practical, pedagogical and theoretical implications of a relatively small digitization project, ‘Observing the 80s’, in order to explore the ways in which ‘the digital’ might transform historical practice. Borrowing from Benjamin’s work on production and reproduction I argue that not only are historians currently using digital tools in interesting ways, we are also well equipped to understand what the implications of these tools are. By thinking about digitalization, we can draw together the processes of production, analysis and reception of our historical evidence. Digital technology may only have become the subject of historical research, funding and teaching relatively recently, but the frameworks of cultural and social history provide us with the skills to evaluate its potential meanings. Not least, Benjamin helps us to analyze and evaluate what it really means to be a historian researcher and teacher in a British University today. In so doing, Benjamin’s work can help us uncover and celebrate the unknown through a process of collaboration, juxtaposition and engagement despite the increasingly quantified and goals orientated context in which most academic historical work takes place.     

The Construction of Insiders as Outsiders

ABSTRACT

Using a memoir written decades later, I examine key features of the religious scene in Knock, County Mayo, in the 1830s and 1840s. I address the nature of the writer's memory, embodied as it was in orally transmitted stories, and show how these narratives provide maps of the cultural terrain. Then, after briefly considering the class dimension of poor Catholic resentment of powerful Protestants, I focus on the sectarian feeling by and towards other poor people. I analyse the complex ideological work through which local Catholics who converted to Protestantism were socially constructed as ‘not-Knock’ people.     

Historicizing Singapore cinema: questions of colonial influence and spatiality

Films produced since the 1990s revival of Singapore cinema have been interpreted through a historical backdrop consisting of the nation's rapid development, participation in the global economy and authoritarian one-party governance. Film historians have described these texts by relying on discourses associated with globalization and postmodernism. This paper finds the perspective of Singaporean films to have overlooked colonialism as a significant part of Singapore's cultural identity and argues that greater consideration of that history can not only illuminate contemporary films, but also expand film scholarship to include understudied films from Singapore's ‘golden age’ of filmmaking from the 1950s to early 1970s. The history of Singapore cinema should thus be re-periodized. By analyzing the heuristic function of colonial urbanity in films from both eras, this paper explores how spatiality provides a common thread that runs through local experience, identity, culture and cinema.     

The Singing Postman: The Mobility of Traditional Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

Nineteenth-century French traditional culture was not immobile. Nor was it a conservative impediment to ‘modernization’. Focusing on the ethnographic work of two folklorists – Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Landes, and Victor Smith (1826-1882) – this article explores the ways that traditional culture circulated, and the people that carried it. Far from sedentary ‘peasants’, many of the singers and storytellers the folklorists collected from were actively involved in modern transport networks and worked in new occupations. These hybrid networks suggest a picture of nineteenth-century culture ‘from below’ that flows along informal, regional conduits, both within and beyond the borders of France.     

The Changing Faces of Manx Witchcraft

ABSTRACT

The nature of witchcraft beliefs and trials in the early modern Isle of Man has recently been the subject of some excellent research. The history of attitudes to witchcraft on the island is, however, also susceptible to a different approach: that of examining the manner in which they have developed and adapted over the time since the opening of the modern period. This longer perspective reveals, as did the close study of the early modern material, that Man both exhibited a number of individualistic features and acted as a microcosm of more general alterations in belief. As those alterations have, as yet, failed to attract any sustained interest from historians, the perspective shed upon them by the Manx material is all the more important. Man's abundant early modern archives and rich modern literary culture together provide ample evidence for such a case study, while the latter presents wider implications for the treatment of the subject in a broader context.     

A lonely and beautiful country: reflecting upon the state of oblivion in Turkey through Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys

Abstract

Through an in‐depth analysis of internationally acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2008 film Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun), this article discusses the politics of Ceylan's cinema against the backdrop of the current memory debate in Turkey. Turkey has a troubling relationship with its past. The process of the foundation and the early development of the Turkish nation‐state included traumatic events during which ethnic and religious minorities were massacred, deported, or encouraged to migrate. There have also been several violent incidents in Turkey's subsequent history that include massacres, mass killings, political assassinations, as well as military coups. It is a widely held opinion that social memory in Turkey is based on forgetting and denial, that is, Turkish society deals with the troubling events in its past by turning a blind eye to them. Drawing upon the question of how it may be possible to make the traces of forgetting and silence observable, this paper argues that Ceylan's film, despite its seemingly apolitical story, has indeed profound political connotations since its narrative and visual organization serve to display the prevailing mood of silence, oblivion and complicity in Turkey.