Eruditorum Press

We’re all for praxis, just not for going outside

Side Trip – Paradise Dungeons (1)

5

Hey all. Some quick orders of business, and then on to our somewhat unusual show for the day.

First off, I’m pleased to announce that the print edition of the Hartnell essays now exists. You can buy it here. It is, sadly, only available from amazon.com, and international readers will have to pay for international shipping. It is, however, quite lovely, and the perfect gift for the overeducated and underemployed Doctor Who fan in your life this holiday season. It’s $16, which is the price at which I get the same royalty I do selling the Kindle edition for $5. Speaking of the Kindle edition, it remains available on Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, and .fr. Buy it with Euros while you still can.
Finally, an announcement about an odd week of posts. This week TARDIS Eruditorum will post on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Monday and Wednesday I’ll be running sample chapters of the next project I’m trying to get off the ground, a book I’m calling Paradise Dungeons. Basically, it’s a psychochronography of Wonder Woman, focusing on the way in which a piece of feminist bondage utopian propaganda unexpectedly became a popular culture phenomenon, and what that means throughout the 70 year history of the character.
Instead of doing this one as a blog, I’m doing this one straight-up as a book, and attempting to pre-finance it via Kickstarter. So if you like the sample chapter below, please swing by the project’s Kickstarter page and kick in a few bucks. For a $10 contribution you get the book when it’s written, and beyond that there are various other shiny toys available. And, of course, please spread the word. I’m really excited about this project. (And promise it will not interfere with your God-given right to three horrifically wordy posts about Doctor Who a week.)
And we’ll be posting again tomorrow with The Horror of Fang Rock, of which Steven Moffat notes that “There’s the obligatory THE and OF – and all the other words rock. One of them actually.”
Man’s World (December 1941)
The first thing we have to admit is that she does not get a glorious debut. Batman and Superman, the two better-selling members of DC’s supposed “Trinity” of characters, got famous debuts. Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 are two of the most valuable comics in the world, with their debuting characters splashed across the cover in two of comics’ most iconic images. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, debuted as a backup feature in All-Star Comics #8 that was, for lack of a better word, an advertisement.
This is not quite as bad as it sounds. If we’re being honest, All-Star Comics in general was an advertisement. To understand this, however, we need to first explain what DC Comics in general looked like in 1941. The bulk of DC’s line were not single-character comics like Batman or Superman but anthologies featuring a lead story and several backups. So, for instance, Action Comics #43, which came out the same month as All-Star Comics #8, featured a thirteen-page Superman story as its lead feature, followed by five stories featuring more obscure characters (The Vigilante, Three Aces, Mr.
…

Continue Reading

Skulltopus 2: Bad Night at Fang Rock

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3

Further to this post, in which I sketched out the ideas of the author China Miéville concerning the relationship between the tentacular and the Weird, and the superpositioning of the Weird and the hauntological in monsterology (please read that before you read anything below), here’s my first attempt to look at Doctor Who through that lens.

‘Horror of Fang Rock’ (1977) seems like an obvious first port of call.  Set just before the First World War (in other words, in the years of the rise of the semiotic octopus, just before the explosion of the Weird), the Rutan is a tentacular monster, though the tentacles are rarely seen and, on the whole, the creature seems more like a jellyfish (even down to its “affinity with electricity”).

It seems to be a manifestation of the nebulous electrified military modernity that the character Reuben so resents and fears.  It seems permeated with technology through its affinity with electricity.  It uses the generator, speaks of its ability to shape-shift as a “technique” and leaves bits of its own alien tech all over the place, including a “signal modulator” that chimes thematically with all the concentration on the lighthouse’s wireless telegraph.  It also espouses an ideology of empire and militarism, and uses an arrogant tone of snobbery with regards to the Sontarans, which is entirely fitting with the story’s intense focus on class.

(So, there’s an obvious connection here which I’ve made before.  ‘Fang Rock’ is set in the early 20th century and features a tentacular monster which seems to carry metaphorical weight to do with imperialism, technology, militarism, global conquest… just the kinds of things that tentacles were being used to signify in the early 20th century political propaganda posters mentioned by Miéville and in my first Skulltopus post.  Obviously, this connection is complicated by the fact that the story I’m talking about was written, made and broadcast in 1977, not 1907 or 1917… but the connection is tempting all the same, as a possible example of semiotic drift, of the cultural bric-a-brac of one age hitching a ride into another via that previous age’s representation as a period.)

The story, as a whole, seems more sympathetic to the working class characters than the ‘upper class’ ones. However, the various strands of the drama which explicitly deal with class only arrive at an open and easily comprehensible liberal critique of snobbery, privilege and inequality, albeit a barbed one.  The nature of the Rutan threatens to sharpen the critique, though it is ultimately far too contradictory a figure to function as a straightforward metaphor, of either a reactionary or radical nature.  The Rutan personifies the oncoming dangers of the twentieth century in a form that associates itself with militarism, military technology, class and imperialism.  However, beyond this core of metaphorical specificity, there is a difficulty in pinning down the Rutan.

It cannot be said to metaphorically embody British imperialism, specifically.  True, it appears in a story in which British imperialism is referenced… but then so is the imperialism of other nations, albeit via the xenophobia of Reuben, who mentions various nationalities engaged in imperialism at this point, saying that none of them can be trusted.…

Continue Reading

Skulltopus

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1

In his fascinating essay ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire’ (the link is to a PDF), the author and theorist China Miéville wrote:

The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.

Miéville charts the way that the cephalopodic suddenly erupts into late 19th-early 20th century “teratology” (monsterology), with conflicted foreshadowings and pre-disavowals (Verne, for example, and Victor Hugo) leading up to a story called ‘The Sea Raiders’ by H. G. Wells, in which previously unknown squidular monsters suddenly surface and go on an inexplicable rampage off the British coast, and on to the “haute Weird” of William Hope Hodgson and, especially, H. P. Lovecraft.

In this Weird tentacular, Miéville sees much significance.  His argument, as I’ve gathered from the essay mentioned above (and from listening to various talks he’s given), is that the squidular, tentacular and cephalopodic, but especially the octopoidal, arises as a teratological metaphor to supply a need felt by those writers travelling through the crises of modernity at the turn of the 19th-20th century and after.  In their formless and protean nature – many octopuses and squid have developed natural camouflage abilities, making them capable of astonishing feats of transformation – the octopoda seemed to be the shape to use in order to convey shapelessness.  Moreover, the very “novum” or newness of the tentacular (in the West) as a symbol was attractive to those seeking to convey something that had not been conveyed before, that perhaps cannot be coherently conveyed at all.

The octopus – as I’ve mentioned on this blog and in Panic Moon, following my reading of Miéville – suddenly appears in and conquers the 20th century political propaganda poster (you can see an amazing array of such political octopus propaganda at this blog… to which I have contributed myself).  I’ve suggested (rather obviously and, I’m sure, unoriginally) that the many arms of the octopus, radiating outwards from the central hub of the body, make it a perfect graphic figure for representing the putative multifarious global reach and manipulative ability of centralised power, whether that power is military, commercial, ideological, whatever.  Exactly the kind of centralised but increasingly global power that was arising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The octopus poster tends to show the creature reaching to many places at once.  Miéville himself has spoken of the octopus as suggesting manipulation.  He has noted how, in these propaganda representations, the octopus is used to signify just about everything from “perfidious Jews” and “perfidious Bolsheviks” to “capitalists”, “unrestrained railroad building” and “landlords”.  In other words, it means everything… hence it means nothing.  The octopus became immensely “symbolically fecund” in the early decades of the 20th century, but with no set cultural consensus about what it probably meant (unlike vampires and werewolves, say, which had – and still have – very well established, longstanding semiotic baggage). …

Continue Reading

Historical Memory

, , , , , , 0

On June 16, 1918, Eugene Victor Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio.  He urged workers to resist the draft. 

He also said this:

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.

If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.

He was arrested and charged with sedition later that month.  At his trial, he addressed the court.  He made the following statement:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

…

Continue Reading

Book Launch!

39

The wait has been longer than I had hoped for, but I am absolutely and delightedly thrilled to say that the first volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, covering the William Hartnell years, is now available for the Kindle. You can buy it on Amazon.com for $4.99, Amazon.co.uk for £2.99, and both Amazon.fr and Amazon.de for €3.99. Or at least, those are the prices I set – the European prices have some taxes added to what I set. Sorry about that.

EDIT: There’s now a paper version available on amazon.com. my apologies – I can’t easily make that available on international Amazon stores, although the US store will ship internationally. It’s at $16.99, which is chosen because it gives me the same royalty as I get on digital copies.

So, let’s talk content. Here’s what your hard earned portrait of Abraham Lincoln gets you. First, the book has every entry from An Unearthly Child through The Tenth Planet, fully revised and expanded. These are the definitive versions of my arguments regarding the Hartnell era at least until I next change my mind.  On top of that, you get four extra entries – all of them Time Can Be Rewritten entries. These cover Kim Newman’s Time and Relative, a Telos novella set before An Unearthly Child, Steve Lyons’s The Witch Hunters from BBC Books, featuring Ian, Barbara, and Susan between Reign of Terror and Planet of Giants, Andy Lane’s Virgin Missing Adventure Empire of Glass, featuring Steven and Vicki between The Time Meddler and Galaxy Four, and Simon Guerrier’s entry to Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles range Guardian of the Solar System, featuring Sarah Kingdom after The Daleks’ Master Plan.

And then, beyond that, you get a wrap-up essay entitled “Now My Doctor: William Hartnell,” reflecting on Hartnell’s performance and conception of the Doctor and what the essential nature of the “First Doctor” is. Plus a series of shorter essays in which I attempt to provide as definitive an answer as is possible to pressing questions like “Was William Hartnell a Bigot” and “What Happened Before Totter’s Lane?” So even if you’ve read the blog, there’s plenty of new stuff here.

So, I’m about to make a big sales pitch and beg you to buy my book. But before I do that, I want to say thank you. Because if you’re reading this, you’re one of my blog readers who show up every day. And there are few things I find more gratifying or wonderful about the world than the fact that apparently there are a couple thousand people who genuinely enjoy reading sprawling pop-academic criticism of 60s and 70s British sci-fi shows. If you are reading this, you’ve already made my day. So thank you.

All of which said, a personal note. I graduated with a PhD into an economy with no jobs for PhDs. I’m overqualified or misqualified for most entry level positions in sane career paths, and there aren’t any entry level positions in the career path I trained for.…

Continue Reading

Amnesia Day

, , , , , , , , , , , 2

I don’t wear a poppy.  Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here.  I don’t engage in the silence at 11 o’clock either.  I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons.  But I myself cannot stomach it.  I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:
What’s the collective noun for warmongers?  A troop?  A collateral?  Well, whatever.  There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces.  All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism’s access to markets.  And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘freedom’.  The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the ‘Ode to Remembrance’… I can’t help but see it all as cynical and calculated.  As ideology.  As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that ‘our’ country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we’ve been carefully taught to perceive as ‘moral’ and ‘necessary’, to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.
Mind you, it’s more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be.  Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective.  There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day.  A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the ‘pointlessness’ of, say, World War I.  To tut and shake one’s head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets.  It’s the great noble failure… perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing.  (It’s been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.)  And, of course, there’s the redeeming moral clarity of the ‘good war’ that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What’s lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets.  WWI wasn’t a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success.  The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before. …

Continue Reading

Nice Guy, Nasty Cosmos

, , , , , , , , , , , , 0

The great Timelash II rehash finally hobbles to a close.  Here’s the last roundup.  Seasons 19-21.

Castrovalva

This is a story, like ‘Logopolis’, that achieves greatness despite its many flaws. Flaws first:

“Take your hands off me – this is an official uniform!” and “We’re perfectly harmless, unfortunately!”

Seriously… who the hell talks like that? I can forgive “I know so little about telebiogenesis” because Nyssa is an alien scientist child prodigy aristocrat. But Tegan is supposed to be a down-to-earth working woman. And, on that subject, it becomes abundantly clear during this story that the programme makers aren’t going to exploit the contrast between the two characters’ backgrounds and attitudes for interesting dramatic conflict. Nor are they going to milk the business of the Master inhabiting Nyssa’s father’s body for dramatic potential either… though, to her great credit, Sarah Sutton is still trying to use her face to express anguish at the Master’s appearance.

Ainley, it need hardly be said, excels as the delightful Portreeve (channelling Olivier to the point that it becomes beside-the-point that it’s always obvious who he is) but suddenly goes crap when called upon to play an obtuse, snarling Dick Dastardly. At times, when playing the Master at the end, Ainley moves and looks like no-one other than Groucho Marx (my second favourite Marx, as it happens… but there’s a time and place for everything). As in ‘Logopolis’, we needed a better villain. It seems hardly credible that a dunce like this Master could devise a trap of such subtlety and beauty as Castrovalva, let alone characters like Ruther and Mergrave. (One can only assume that they come as much from Adric as from his captor.) Ironically enough, we’re meant to be wrong-footed into suspecting Shardovan of villainy… because he’s a villain stereotype in black clothes and a black moustache.

The first two episodes are a bit of a trudge. There are lots of good bits, but they could easily be condensed into one episode. Again, Bidmead makes the TARDIS into an almost metaphysical space, a peculiar and vaguely-sinister labyrinth with healing rooms that smell of roses, rooms that can be ‘deleted’ as though the whole structure exists as data on a hard drive, rooms that seem to have been placed in the Doctor’s way by the TARDIS itself (to help provide him with a new identity) and medicine chests with Alice in Wonderland-style bottles inside marked ‘The Potion’, ‘The Ointment’ and ‘The Solution’. “Ah my little friend… if only you were!” Gorgeous.

Sadly, the business with the TARDIS being sent back to the hydrogen inrush is a bit of a mcguffin… and, again, as in ‘Logopolis’, Bidmead feels the need to have characters naming and explaining this story’s Big Theme to each other… just in case we miss it when it pops up. Having said that, the business with the Index File being listed in the Index File under Index File is very clever, both conceptually and linguistically. But the second half of Episode Two, featuring Tegan and Nyssa slowly carrying a box through a (admittedly beautiful) forest, is possibly the most boring thing ever committed to film.…

Continue Reading

Things Fall Apart

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1

Here’s a round-up of my Timelash II on Season 18.  I was holding this (and some of the stuff about Seasons 19-21) back because I was going to rework it into something bigger, but that isn’t happening (too much else to do), so…

The Leisure Hive

Bidmead’s script tinkerings somewhat dilute the essential idea of a leisure planet in favour of wannabe-big-conceptual stuff… which is pretty dull and lumbering, if we’re honest.

The planet fails to convince as a leisure resort, which kind of undercuts all the lengths they go to to stress that the whole race have become employees of a going concern. All that boardroom stuff where they discuss investments suddenly looks redundant. What’s it there to contextualise?

The stylistic overhaul is huge, ambitious and largely successful. There’s a new willingness to try stuff out. They’re happy to go all dark and quiet during the scene where Timson is stalked by the West Lodge Foamasi. I particularly like the slow, melancholy opening.

Mind you, the seeds of the later-80s problems are already visible. The Doctor is now wearing a uniform, etc.

The politics is weird. The war was about… what? Argolin militarism? So, their response to their catastrophic defeat was to become capitalists specialising in leisure? Umm, okay… And their enemies, who now want peace, are apparently statists who have outlawed “private enterprise”… apart from a kind of mafia faction… er…  Y’know, it’s potentially good stuff but, somehow, it fails to fit together.

It’s darn good as a first attempt at an overhaul of the basic dramatic and aesthetic values of a show in decline… but we’ll have to wait until ‘Full Circle’ before they get it to work.

You wouldn’t think this was the start of one of my absolute favourite seasons, would you?

Meglos

This is daft. But I have to confess to having a seriously soft spot for it.

There are some good ideas buried in there. The Dodecahedron makes me think of Kepler, and his obsession with the perfect shapes that he thought contained the secrets of the universe… which was a conflict within him between science and mysticism which he sought unsuccessfully to reconcile… the problem is that the nearest thing to such a character in the story is Zastor, who’s hardly there at all.

Some of the music is great. The Screens have an impressive monumentalism to their design.  They suggest (to me anyway) some ruined statue of Ozymandias lying rusting in the silicon desert of the real.

Sadly we have a silly jungle planet too. And someone who wants to run the universe for no particular reason.

Also, we have casual racism in the casting: the Gaztaks are multi-racial because they’re a band of criminals.  Of course, I realise this happens because they’re pirates… and pirates were supposedly (I know next to nothing about the actual history of pirates) a multi-racial bunch… but this also explains why there are no black Tigellans… which underlines the fact that, in this story, normality is civil society and civil society (i.e.…

Continue Reading

A Side Jaunt of Internet Politics

6

I try to avoid side posts other than the meat and matter of the blog, but occasionally an issue comes up that seems to me worth remarking on, and in this case it is at least relevant to this blog.

You may have noticed that this blog has an overtly left-wing perspective that is actively sympathetic to, among other things, feminism. This perspective is in part the product of extensive reading. Some of that reading consists of academic tomes and philosophy. Other parts of that reading consist of blogs and casual conversations. And one of the single biggest sources for my viewpoints are a wealth of feminist bloggers. It is my genuine belief – and I say this as someone well familiar with academic popular culture studies – that the best work in the field is often done by feminist bloggers. They have quietly reinvented or helped to reinvent a wealth of new perspectives that have been jaw-droppingly lively and productive for understanding media.

Among the ones who have influenced me – and this list is not a list of the greats, but an idiosyncratic list – are places like DC Women Kicking Ass, A Random String of Bits, Game Girl Advance, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. These are, of course, just the ones I happen to remember – there are many more stray LiveJournals and the like I’ve read one or two posts by and not written down or remembered the name, but have been quietly influenced by and responding to for years now.

I say all of this because there is a well-documented problem of female bloggers getting viciously trolled and abused, with threats of rape and sexual violence against them and horribly derogatory personal attacks. The Guardian ran a chillingly good story on it this weekend, but it’s not the first thing I’ve seen on the topic. It’s a real problem.

I love the feminist blogosphere. They are among the giants whose shoulders I stand upon. And so I want to make this post. Partially because raising awareness of the issue matters. Partially because it’s important to stress that this is a human issue, not a women’s issue – anyone who is interested in having a world with more exciting, moving, and interesting comments and observations in it wants more women bloggers.

But mostly to say this:

I have very, very good commenters on this blog. But then, I’m a male, and apparently that helps me. I can’t imagine most of my readers are the sorts of people who send vicious abuse to female bloggers, mostly because I can’t imagine that what I write would be of interest to an asinine cave troll who would do things like that.

All the same, if there is any blogger, anywhere in the world, that you would e-mail to berate for their physical appearance, that you would threaten or joke about raping or hurting, or that you would advocate violence against, you had damn well better be willing to make those exact same threats to me.…

Continue Reading

Behind the Times

, , , , , , , , , , , , 4

Doctor Who was (and is) frequently racist in its representations.  Probably no more or less than most other cultural products of our society, but nonetheless…

Now, to deal with the banalities first, I don’t accuse anybody involved in making the show of being deliberately racist.  I don’t generally know much about their opinions.  When you hear about their views, you tend to hear that they were liberals or soft-lefties.  People reminiscing about working with Hartnell tend to raise his right-wing opinions on race (and other things) as though they were considered unusual.  And that’s not the issue anyway.  I’m not interested in making personal attacks on this or that writer or producer. 

The show started nearly 50 years ago… so a lot of it is old, dated, the product of vanished days.  This is often raised by fans who see the problems in certain Who stories but, understandably, are eager to defend them.  Nobody wants to feel that something they love is tainted by racism – that terrible bogey word that stops people thinking clearly because, like so many important words, it’s been systematically stripped of its context and has become a Bad Thing that menaces society from without.

I ‘get’ this desire to explain away racist representations in stories we love.  I get it totally… but I’m against the giving out of passes on the grounds that something is ‘of its time’.

E. P. Thompson – in a very different context… in his book The Making of the English Working Class – coined the phrase “the enormous condescension of posterity”, to refer to the oblivion into which the struggles of ordinary people get consigned by bourgeois history.  It’s a great phrase (which I have previously and idiotically attributed to Christopher Hill!) which expresses something about what is arrogantly forgotten when you invoke ‘the times’ to excuse reactionary representations.

Cyber-Race

In the Hammer film, The Mummy, George Pastell plays the sinister Egyptian who brings the Mummy back to life, which chimes with his role in ‘Tomb’ (and also with the character Namin in ‘Pyramids of Mars’, another story in which genre semiotics transmit a representation of ‘foreign’ cultures as sources or vehicles of sinister, uncanny forces which threaten white Westerners).  As I’ve argued elsewhere, ‘Tomb’ is racist largely because it is a reworking of the ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’ type story.  Klieg is the guy who tries to resurrect the Mummy in order to use it.

Those kinds of stories – gothic colonialist fiction of the 19th century which found its way into 20th century pop-culture via movies – carry certain kinds of baggage with them because they stem from British imperial engagement in Egypt. They’re about Brits breaking into Egyptian tombs, finding Egyptian mummies, being cursed by Egyptian curses as punishment. They express – quite unconsciously I’m sure – a certain anxiety about colonialism. Beneath the surface they seem to whisper ‘we’re barging around where we shouldn’t be and we’re gonna pay for it’. But inherent in such anxiety is fear of the colonised people and their culture.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 232 233 234 235 ›»