School of Arts and Humanities
Culture and Place: Past, Present and Future
Thursday 21st June 2012
All sessions will be held in ICAn GEE219
Programme
10:00
Welcome and conference opening:
Murray Pratt
(Dean of School of Arts and Humanities)
10:15 – 11:30
English Panel
John Goodridge:
‘Where was Swordy Well?’: John Clare on contested ground
David Belbin:
What you don’t know about Nottingham
Burcu Alkan:
Writing Istanbul: A diachronic narrative (Celal Bayer
University, Turkey)
Coffee and book exhibition in ICAn foyer
11:45 – 13:00
History and Heritage Panel
Chair: Graham Black
13:00– 14:00
14:00 – 15:15
Bill Niven:
Narratives of return to the former German east in East
German novels
Stuart Burch:
This place is ours: Heritage, identity and belonging
Peter Olausson:
Regional archives and regional museums in the province of
Värmland: Memory politics and practices in a comparative
perspective (Karlstad University, Sweden)
Lunch in the George Eliot Main Hall
Communications, Culture and Media Panel
Chair: Louise Cummings
Simon Cross:
Bedlam in mind: Seeing and reading historical images of
insanity
Natalie Braber and
Helen Bates:
‘On the flats’: Hyson Green flats and the language of loss
Martin Gill:
English and the defence of “real” community (Åbo Akademi
University, Finland)
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Chair: David Worrall
Coffee and book exhibition in ICAn foyer
Modern Languages and International Relations Panel
Chair: Imad El-Anis
Ruth Crawford:
“Events that have been left in the cold, unregistered,
hanging out in the air, errant and homeless”. The creation of
a post-national identity in fiction from Bosnia-Herzegovina
Sagarika Dutt:
The ‘C’ in UNESCO: Why do we need a UN organisation for
culture?
Amanda Crawley
Jackson
PlastiCities: Interventions and engagement with local
communities (University of Sheffield)
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15:45 – 17:00
John Goodridge: Where was Swordy Well?: John Clare on Contested Ground
This paper examines the contested cultural and geographical space that was called
Swordy Well, through the medium of John Clare’s classic poem ‘The Lament of
Swordy Well’. It is described in Clare’s prose in idyllic terms, as famous for its
orchids., He loved in childhood to play roly-poly on its slopes. But it was also on a
geographical fault line, and extensive quarrying took place, and it is this plundering
of the Edenic space that forms the central theme of the poem. Strikingly set in the
first-person voice of the Well, and in a double-verse ballad-metre, the poem
languished among Clare’s unpublished manuscripts until 1935, unnoticed among
other rough-cast verse in a similar metre.
Who ever pays me rent or takes it
Ive neither words or dates
One makes the law & others break it
& stop my mouth with rates (ll. 145-8)
The masterstroke of giving the land its own voice enables Clare not only to pass
comment on the way the land is abused, but to show how systems of writing,
numeration, timekeeping and law do not and cannot reflect the needs of a
vulnerable ecology. Like Blake’s “chartered Thames”, “Swordy Well” cannot write, or
count, or mark dates, and so does not know if it is being rewarded or robbed, but is
nevertheless in thrall to these rapacious systems of human mark-making and
control. The anthropomorphised well is similarly confused by the fact that the law
may be bent or flouted at a time of economic gold-rush such as the enclosure
period, may be a broken code: “One makes the law & others break it”, because law
is never an absolute or immovable set of values or rules.
Whether or not Clare had a specific financial meaning in mind for the word “rates”,
the sense here is clear enough: that the “others” who break the law, “stop my
mouth with rates”, i.e. silence the land with money. One is reminded of Nye Bevan’s
famous remark, in 1948, about overcoming resistance to his plans for a National
Health Service by stuffing the doctors’ mouths with gold. Money wins all.
The later history of Swordy Well is discussed via a set of slide images which show
why Clare ends the poem by having the land declare sadly that ‘My name will quickly
be the whole / That’s left of Swordy Well’. In the twentieth century the spot became
a dump for paper-manufacturing waste and, thoroughly polluted and ruined, was
filled in and disappeared from the landscape altogether. However in the new
millennium the nearby ‘Swaddywell Pit’, recently used for motorcycle races, was
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J. W. and Anne Tibble gave it its modern title and first published it, and the recent
full edition of Clare restores 30-lines to the poem from manuscript, including a
quatrain that implicitly links the land’s economic exploitation with the poem’s own
seeming resistance to the instruments of printed culture:
adopted by the Langdyke Trust, who began the long process of cleaning up,
replanting and managing this massively-damaged but beautiful space. Carry Akroyd’s
idyllic watercolours of the nature reserve that now blooms in this contested and
abused place show a remarkable resurrection, and suggest the prospect of a
resolution to its crisis at last.
References:
Clare, John, ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, Poems of the Middle Period, V, ed. Eric
Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 105.
Akroyd, Carry, ‘At Swaddywell Pit’ and ‘Swaddywell Field’, watercolour paintings,
online at http://www.carryakroyd.co.uk/
Rattenbury, Arnold, ‘John Clare and the Bikers’, London Magazine, n.s. 38, nos. 9-10
(Dec 1998/Jan 1999), 33-42.
Simpson, David, ‘A Speaking Place: The Matter of Genre in The Lament of Swordy
Well’, The Wordsworth Circle, 34, no. 3 (Summer 2003), 131-34.
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Farley, Paul, ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, in discussion with Simon Kovesi, radio
programme, BBC Radio 4, aired 7 and 13 September 2008, details at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8h6t
David Belbin: What You don’t Know about Nottingham
My paper would comprise two brief readings from the novel together with a
discussion of the issues involved in writing and researching the book, the first draft
of which was completed during research leave from NTU in 2010-11. These issues
would include the ethical and practical problems posed by writing fiction based on
or inspired by real events and the research required to create a convincing fiction.
For instance, should I talk to the drug dealer behind the Crack Action Team, who has
now been released from prison? One of my two central characters is the MP for a
fictional Nottingham constituency. How do I deal with the real MPs of 1998, both in
the novel and in my research process? This was, after all, a scandal in which they
were unwittingly implicated. Should my fictional MP behave as they did? Navigating
these issues tested my skills as a writer and required a range of moral judgements
that I will discuss as part of this paper.
Writers write novels not to deliver a message but to find out what they think about
the subject, and one of the major subjects of the Bone and Cane sequence is turning
out to be Nottingham itself. Readers and critics have pointed out connections with
other Nottingham novels and remarked on the vivid representation of the city.
Neither of these aspects were at the forefront of my mind when working on What
You Don't Know. Therefore, as a generation of novelists who were my friends and
mentors (Middleton, Sillitoe) passes, and a new one (McGregor, Monaghan) arrives,
I will conclude by considering what it means to be a Nottingham novelist in 2012.
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My novel, What You Don’t Know, published by Tindal St Press on May 3rd, 2012, is
part of a historical sequence, Bone and Cane, about Nottingham and New Labour,
and is set in 1997-98. The Bone and Cane series can be read as a secret history of
Nottingham. In this, the second novel, the focus is on addiction, the city’s drugs
culture and the prostitution of girls in care. The story was inspired by the Crack
Action Team, a government and city council sponsored unit that, in 1997, turned out
to be run by the city‘s biggest drugs dealer.
Burcu Alkan: Writing İstanbul: A Diachronic Narrative
This paper is an analytical exploration of the diversity of culture in Istanbul, as it
manifests itself in the literature that can be deemed Istanbul writing. I will present a
survey of this diversity through examples from literary texts in order to show the
organic thread that links the past, the present and the future in terms of not only
the character of the city, but also its characterisation in literature. Since there are
many studies on how the foreign visitors viewed İstanbul, my focus will be primarily
on Turkish writing in an attempt to outline a relatively understudied field, at least in
the English speaking world, due to the lack of translations. The final emphasis will be
on today’s Istanbul, its culture and its place in literature in order to point out the
significance of the city as an intellectual, cultural and literary sphere.
This study, thus, is not just a diachronic analysis of the literature that is set in this
cosmopolitan space but the narrative of the city itself. A narrative that shapes and is
shaped by the past, fuses with the present and questions the future as its story
unfolds in the literary imagination.
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İstanbul has been politically, economically and culturally significant for all those who
ruled it and those who wished to rule it throughout its over 2000-year history. It has
been the home of various cultures and belief systems, as well as a hub where a
diverse range of people interacted, traded and clashed. It has also been a setting to
many romances, adventure tales and other forms of narratives that paralleled the
general diversity of the city. The story of the city itself and its narratives were
shaped by both the global historical transformations and the local histories of the
people who inhabited it. As its inhabitants and visitors changed in a constant flux, so
have its narratives. It has been romanticised, idealised, loved and despised in a way
that reveals the great passion that pervaded the way people viewed and portrayed
it.
Simon Cross: Bedlam in Mind: Seeing and Reading Historical Images of Insanity
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In this paper I explore the mythical Bedlam of popular imaginings. In the early
modern era London’s Bethlem Hospital was a unique institution caring for the insane
and its alter ego ‘Bedlam’ influenced popular stereotypes of insanity. For instance,
while the type of vagrant beggar known as a Tom of Bedlam was said to have
disappeared from English society with the Restoration, the figure of Mad Tom
retained a visual and vocal presence within popular musical culture from the
seventeenth century up to the present era. Using the song ‘Mad Tom o’ Bedlam’ as a
case study, I illustrate how an early modern stereotype of insanity maintained
continuity within a popular song tradition whilst undergoing cultural change.
Natalie Braber and Helen Bates: ‘On the Flats’: Hyson Green Flats and the Language
of Loss
‘On the Flats’ is a Heritage Lottery Funded Project involving local volunteers
interviewing and recording residents of the former Hyson Green Flats and those
working with the community to find out about their experiences of the flats and
their lives since that time. One of its core aims was to run a project which would
benefit the local community and involve people to become involved with local
heritage and the local community.
These interviews represent a fascinating opportunity to examine how people feel
about communities that have been physically destroyed. It draws on interdisciplinary information from oral history and linguistics. This project is represented
by over 60 interviews of former residents and those working with the community
talking about their memories. In this study we have a defined community with many
different perceptions and values in relation to their culture and place. For some, the
flats represented an erosion of values of a nostalgic past, for others, the flats
represented a safe haven and a new life.
We can identify issues of belonging and identity, dispersal and scattering (both as a
result of the flats being built, and as a result of them being pulled down) and
examine the importance of ‘place’ for such communities. We can examine how
people talk about such circumstances and investigate their ‘language of loss’.
Learning from such a community can inform how values change over time and the
implications this may have for future development of local communities.
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Hyson Green was considered one of the most economically deprived areas of
Nottingham and in the 1960s slum housing which had for many years been the
homes of framework knitters in the area was condemned and a total of 593 flats and
maisonettes built in its place. These flats, built by Nottingham City Council, remained
there from 1965 to 1987 when they were razed to the ground.
Martin Gill: English and the defence of “real” community
Current popular and political discourse is dominated by negative assessments of
multiculturalism, and the damage it has done to the supposed integrity of British
communities. The presence in our neighbourhoods of cultural and linguistic diversity is
portrayed as a source of anxiety, or worse: according to David Cameron, speaking in April
2011, it “has created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness”, as “new people” resist
integration. Increasingly, the main cause is held to be the incomers’ lack of proficiency in
English, for which the proposed remedy is legislation to require basic English skills for all
those applying for residence in the country.
In late modernity, mass migrations of people and languages, as never before, have made
these issues current and pressing; yet, the response has hardly changed. Dichotomizing
discourses, centred on language, serve to define the common sense moral space within
which ‘our’ community is imagined and its norms are taken to be self-evident, and to
exclude those who do not (or will not) accept them (as Cameron’s comments illustrate,
agency and intentionality are usually attributed to ‘others’ in cases like this, meaning that
their failure to meet these criteria is also their fault.)
In this paper, I will examine two contrasting manifestations of such discourse: one historical,
around the notion of the ‘native speaker’, still well entrenched in English language teaching,
and the other contemporary, taken from public debate on a BBC ‘have your say’ on-line
forum, on whether proficiency in English should be mandatory for immigrants to Britain. In
each case, the ‘common sense’ discourses of language and nativeness help to establish
apparently self-justifying grounds for drawing an exclusive boundary, and so for defining the
limits of authentic belonging.
In the mainstream policy world, reflected in Cameron’s comments, perceptions are shaped
by and responsive to assumptions such as these; in which the integrity of the British speech
community seems to be under threat and in urgent need of defence. That such views can be
maintained in the face of an everyday reality in which multilingual and multiethnic identities
are increasingly the norm, I will argue, suggests that what is needed here is not merely more
evidence or better understanding, but a critically informed challenge to the basis of these
‘common sense’ exclusive discourses themselves.
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Using the ability to speak correct English to index a range of moral and cultural qualifications
for community membership is hardly new; language is central to post-romantic notions of
authentic community, and since at least the 18th century has been a regular element in the
definition (and exclusion) of ‘outsiders’. The apparent common sense of such a view tends
to be reinforced by routine discursive / ideological work, both by official policies, and by
‘ordinary’ members of the public, to construct, maintain and police community boundaries.
In the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990), there was no clamour for the
return of the ‘lost German East’, i.e. those parts of Germany lost to Poland,
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the end of World War Two. While in West
Germany, organisations of those who fled or were expelled from these territoties
petitioned the West German government to agitate for the return of East Prussia,
Silesia and the Sudetenland, in the GDR such agitation would have been unthinkable;
expellee organisations were forbidden, and friendly socialist relations towards
Poland and Czechoslovakia dictated acceptance of the new eastern German borders.
But the ‘lost German East’ nevertheless left its imprint on GDR film and literature.
This paper examines narratives of return to the former German East in GDR novels.
It argues that, in the 1950s, flight and expulsion were presented in GDR literature as
a painful schism successfully overcome by integration into the new one.
Displacement from the old Heimat (homeland) was nullified by a re-placement in the
new one, whereby the new Heimat was presented not simply as an alternative
space, but a better one (thus East Prussia was identified with feudal agrarian
exploitation, the GDR with socialist emancipation). In the 1960s and 1970s, the
socialist realist take on postwar developments, with its emphasis on healing through
the absorption of the individual into the all-bearing collective, gives way to a more
sceptical stance in which the individual, no longer able to find answers to all
questions through socialism, begins to search for orientation in pre-socialist roots.
My paper will analyse GDR novels in which the main characters return to the space
they once inhabited beyond the borders of the GDR, exploring attempted
trajectories of individual reconnection and their intersection with narratives of
German guilt, loss and personal failure.
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Bill Niven: Narratives of Return to the former German east in East German Novels
Stuart Burch: This Place is ours: Heritage, Identity and Belonging
Thus determinations over what constitutes “Heritage” have ramifications far beyond
notions of antiquarian preservation. Rather, conflicts over the past have a bearing
both on the politics of the present and a society’s aspirations for the future. This led
Hall to argue that a more inclusive attitude towards our multiple heritages promises
to offer the best chance of building successful, tolerant communities.
I intend to expound this through a series of cautionary examples pertaining to the
built environment. Divisive commemorative statues; “ugly” buildings at risk of
demolition; and the bid for heritage recognition by marginalised groups will all be
used to explore the vital linkages between culture and historically informed places.
Reference:
Stuart Hall, “Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-imagining the Postnation”, Third Text, Vol. 49, Winter 1999-2000, pp. 3-13.
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Just over a decade ago the sociologist and cultural theorist, Stuart Hall reflected on
the concept of “Heritage”. He understood this quaint and ubiquitous term to refer to
“the whole complex of organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the
preservation and presentation of culture and the arts... and sites of special historical
interest” (Hall 1999-2000, p. 3). These facets of culture operate at a variety of scales,
including at the level of the nation. According to Hall, “[t]he National Heritage is a
powerful source of… meanings. It follows that those who cannot see themselves
reflected in its mirror cannot properly ‘belong’” (p. 4). Evocations of “our” heritage
are, therefore, potentially exclusionary – with an invariably unspoken “other” used
to consolidate a feeling of belonging, a sense of “us”.
Peter Olausson: Regional Archives and Regional Museums in the Province of
Värmland: Memory Politics and Practises in a Comparative Perspective
Regional archives, libraries and museums share responsibilities to present events of
the past for the people of today. What they choose to show in exhibits, say in guided
tours or print in books, leaflets or memorial tablets has an important impact on the
collective memory canon of the district. In that perspective, they are shaping the
region through the themes and stories that they stand for.
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How is this memory politics practice formed and what changes can be traced during
the last hundred years – of what reasons? Which are the stories that are evergreens,
which of all will never be told: who are included and excluded in the shaping of
regional identity? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in a
planned project between researchers at Nottingham Trent University and Karlstad
University in Sweden. In my paper, I will talk about the regional museum and the
regional archives in the province of Värmland and raise some of the questions
mentioned above concerning memory politics in regional official practice.
Ruth Crawford: “Events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging out in
the air, errant and homeless.” The creation of a post-national identity in fiction from
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
By looking at works by diasporic authors Aleksandar Hemon and Sasa Stanisic, and
comparing their presentation of the difficulties of re-membering an identity in a new
language with the process of reconstructing an identity in the aftermath of war and
genocide by authors who remained ‘at home’ (Miljenko Jergović and Muharem
Bazdulj), this paper will examine construction of self and community in this
literature. Both groups of authors are required to contend not only with the changes
within their national communities and self-imaginings, but also with new linguistic,
political, religious and cultural developments which have left parts of individual
pasts “in the cold, unregistered, hanging out in the air, errant and homeless.”
This paper will demonstrate a trend emerging in fiction from Bosnia-Herzegovina in
the past fifteen years, which has as its predominant concern the re-incorporation of
these events within a new, progressive identity which is, despite the very deep, very
‘national’ rifts within Bosnian and Herzegovinan society in general, post-national in
character.
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This paper will look at the creation of a post-national, post-war identity within fiction
from Bosnia-Herzegovina. A comparison will be made between diasporic authors
and those who remained in BiH after the end of the main conflict in 1995. The
mainstay of Bosnian and Herzegovinan ‘community’ identity within the former
Yugoslavia had been multinationalism: a state and republic which was differentiated
from others by its multiethnic and multinational make-up. After the devastation of
war perpetrated along nationalist and ethnic lines, therefore, it was a crucial
undertaking for many artists to try and constitute a new identity in a new, very
different multiethnic and multinational state.
Sagarika Dutt: The ‘C’ in UNESCO: Why do we need a UN organisation for culture?
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The United Nations was created to deal with conflict between states and maintain
international peace and security. It also aimed to promote ‘international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or
humanitarian character and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights’
(Article 1.3, UN Charter). The vastness of this undertaking has necessitated a division
of labour between the UN and the specialised agencies in various fields. Thus
UNESCO has carved a niche for itself in the field of culture which is reflected in its
work programmes and standard-setting activities. UNESCO’s Universal Declaration
on Cultural Diversity adopted in 2001 sums up the organisation’s approach to
culture. It states that ‘respect for the diversity of cultures, tolerance, dialogue and
cooperation, in a climate of mutual trust and understanding are among the best
guarantees of international peace and security’. This paper assesses the value of
UNESCO’s work by examining the debates about the relationship between cultural
diversity on the one hand and human rights, peace and development on the other.