“TISH is especially resonant now. But how many artists don’t get ‘rediscovered’? How much working-class creativity and history are lost?”
Category: Politics
[Essay] Keep Calm and Break Everything: On Peter Hanmer’s Seeking Armageddon — Archie Cornish
“How does the age of Cameronism and cupcake technopopulism relate to the right-populist reactionary politics of the present? It’s on this question that Hanmer’s work, with its teasing allegorical suggestiveness, is most thought-provoking.”
[Essay] Glaring White: Class and Race in Chinese Beauty Ideals — Chelsea Xu
“Growing up, I was told the first rule of being a cute little Chinese girl is to have pale skin.”
[Essay] After “Life and Fate” — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I rock inside, a child again. Daughter of a man born in Ukraine who always said he was Russian.”
[Essay] Empire after Empire: The Endless Desert of Settler Indigenisation in Nomadland — Patrick Turner
“Ultimately, Nomadland’s affective impact, and the sense of authenticity felt in McDormand’s performance should be understood within a colonialist standard of authenticity rooted in the indigenisation of whiteness – and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.”
[Essay] Tom Whyman and the Philosophy of Hope — Josh Mcloughlin
“Whyman replaces Benjamin’s pessimism with realism whilst adopting Adorno’s ‘standpoint of redemption’ to radically critique the present, situating hope firmly within the bounds of possibility without diminishing its transformative potential.”
[Essay] Once Again, the Western — Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
“White male anxiety about an impending age where his place is not solidified is nothing new. We know this story too well, yet on screen white men go on killing, their violent delights our supposed entertainment.”
[Essay] Boris the Katechon — Josh Mcloughlin
“Johnson, like the archetypal Pauline katechon, has been outmatched and overwhelmed by a crisis he has proved damningly incapable and incompetent to restrain, and which will further darken his already wretched political legacy.”
[Essay] A Walking Skeleton: Illusions of Voice — Michael Sutton
“What is human consciousness if not the internal voice, the connotations and denotations of language, voices diseased and voices subsumed, god voices, voices of creation, from brain to page to screen to brain to page.”
[Essay] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and the ‘Veil of Race’ — Tia Byer
“For Du Bois, the abolition of slavery may have freed black people from bondage, but the Reconstruction era that followed served only to disempower black people and perpetuate racial conflict.”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Editorial] Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Links to anti-racist educational resources and how to support and donate to anti-racist causes and organisations
New Critique stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
[Essay] ‘Dominic Cummings must be sacked’: Contemporary Political Engagement and Early Modern Petitions — Ellen Paterson
“Widespread anger over evil counsellors and the exercise of agency via petitioning that dominate contemporary political discourse have fascinating antecedents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
[Essay] The Adviser’s Hubris: Cummings’s Cromwellian Machinations — Josh Mcloughlin
“Following on from Johnson’s turn as the sacrificial lamb, Cummings treads the political boards as contemporary history’s schemer-in-chief, thrasonical and hubristic in the advertisement of his unassailable power.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
[Essay] Grayson Perry and the Politics of Taste — Jonathan Webster
“Perry submerges himself in these cultures without judgment and, through his art, communicates and legitimizes alternative forms of cultural capital.”
[Review] Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra — Will Moffitt
“Beginning with Rousseau as the archetypal exemplar of ressentiment, Mishra initiates a thrilling 300-page journey spanning four centuries that intertwines tales of German nationalists, Russian revolutionaries, Italian fascists, and a host of other anarchist terrorists.”
[Essay] The ‘Marauder’ Movement: Citizen Journalism and the 2013 Gezi Park Protests — Asligul Armagan
“The dynamic between networked journalism and government created a schism that has divided Turkish society to this day – either you are a çapulcu, or you’re against them.”
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