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Editors’ Introduction
Editors’ Introduction to Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12, Issues 1 & 2
Fiona Williams†
, Elizabeth Edwards‡
, Andrew Hadfield*§
a.hadfield@sussex.ac.uk
Abstract
The Editors reveal their ambitions for the newly relaunched Journal of the British Academy, including an explanation of the types of articles that it will contain in future. There is also a description of the contents of the double issue with which the Journal is being relaunched.
Keywords
social scienceshumanitiesartsinterdisciplinaryinnovativeinquiry Welcome to this double issue of the newly relaunched Journal of the British Academy. The Journal was established in 2013 originally as an online open access publication for articles arising from the British Academy’s public Lecture programme. The new direction seeks to broaden the aims, scope, and ambition of the Journal. The Journal will showcase the very best research generated by the British Academy’s Fellowship, research programmes, activities, and events. To achieve this the Editors aim to publish issues that realise the scope for interdisciplinarity and collaboration within and between the humanities and social sciences: to create a platform that promotes innovative interdisciplinary methods, perspectives and approaches. We want to encourage exciting scholarship that pushes boundaries, that can engage beyond discipline-based audiences and involve visual and audio media. The research activities of the British Academy explore global challenges of the present, critically re-examine the past, and shape the future. The Journal exists to disseminate and debate these issues.
In order to meet these aims we, the Editors, decided we would take an active commissioning role as well as receiving submissions. A crucial part of the process has involved setting up the Journal’s first Editorial Board. The composition of the Board reflects our wish to facilitate a diversity of contributions from early career researchers to high-profile intellectuals and practitioners from different backgrounds, identities, and global regions. Furthermore, we have created different categories of contribution to the Journal designed to encourage varied forms of contribution to research and thinking. These include the established research article recognised by its originality and scholarship; and commentary that provides a thought-provoking perspective on recent events, policies, or disciplinary developments. Thematic collections comprise a number of short articles offering a different account of, evidence of, or angle on, a single theme; while the personal reflection has a significant thinker exploring an issue of social, cultural, or political significance. Conversations create the opportunity for a scholar to discuss their recent publication of distinction. In Coming to terms with, short contributions explain and assess a recent shift in terminology or research practice. In future issues we hope to include responses and debates around previously published pieces. Exceptionally, in this double issue we also have an epilogue on the history of 10–11 Carlton House Terrace, the home of the British Academy.
These new directions for the Journal, summed up as ‘Connecting Knowledge–Deepening Inquiry–Pushing Boundaries’, are part of a general new strategy for the British Academy’s range of publications emphasising innovation, distinction, and reaching out to wider audiences. Several contributions to this issue come out of the Academy’s Engagement Week initiative started in 2022, an event that brings together Fellows to organise and discuss their latest work in a series of themed interdisciplinary workshops. In turn this aligns with the British Academy’s wider strategy to open up the Academy in order to champion the central importance of SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) to society’s most significant questions, issues, and challenges. This first double issue signals these directions.
The Journal will have four issues a year, of which one will be a thematic special issue. In June each year, there will be a call for proposals for the themed issue to be published at the end of the following calendar year.
In this double issue
The volume opens with an important and timely essay by Kate Kirkpatrick, based on her 2023 British Academy Lecture, ‘Femininity, love, and alienation: the genius of The Second Sex’. Kate Kirkpatrick seeks to resituate the pioneering feminist work of Simone de Beauvoir in a philosophical and political context that she argues has been sidelined in many celebrations of the work. Beauvoir has been an important voice in discussions about the nature of female identity, in particular through her statement that one is not born but one becomes a woman. For Kirkpatrick this statement has been assumed to have epistemological status, whereas it is an intervention in debates about the nature of sex/gender identities in France in the post-war period. Rather than being a generalised statement that points to the need to separate sex and gender as categories, Beauvoir’s work sought to show how women’s identity was social, fashioned within a society that failed to value women properly and so restricted their freedom to develop as they might have done. Beauvoir, according to Kirkpatrick, needs to be restored to her status as a leading philosopher, rather than appropriated within the more recent tradition of literary theory, her thinking belonging in a post-Kantian line, and her arguments should be read alongside other Existentialist writings that pinpoint the factors that limit human possibility. The question her work poses is how can women achieve their potential when so many avenues they might wish to follow are closed off? The Second Sex works hard to show ways forward. The complicated nature of the task explains why the work is so difficult to summarise and why it has often been distorted and misread.
An important aspect of the relaunched Journal is the opportunity offered by digital formats to develop and respond to the requirements of visually driven research and visual evidence. This aligns with emerging scholarship in a digitally and visually saturated world. These expanded forms of academic debate reflect the contemporary British Academy and, increasingly, the kinds of humanities and social sciences research being funded through its schemes.
Although the significance of the visual weaves its way through a number of contributions—Das, Edwards, Banla, Whyte, for instance—two, those by Ian Christie FBA and Piotr Cieplak, have the visual at their heart, both as a methodology, a prism through which to ask questions, and of content. Ian Christie’s essay focuses specifically on immersive media. He demonstrates the long histories of visual desire and expectation, and technological experimentation which inform the contemporary 21st-century immersive metaverses—from the stereoscopic craze of the 19th century to responses to early cinema, and later IMAX technologies. Presenting an overview of practices, he reveals a deep history in what we consider ‘new’, but also the rapid normalisation of the sensations that virtual reality of the metaverse and immersion have to offer. Given that all media were once ‘new media’, and all media revolutions bring simultaneously possibility, anxiety, and even moral panic, Christie tracks the technological, emotional, sensory, and experiential hopes, desires, and fears which merge in the concept of ‘immersion’ as a technology of illusion. These emotions are, in their turn, manifested through cinema, immersive exhibitions, increasingly integrated into museum and gallery exhibitions (to the horror of some art critics), and the normalisation of these technologies of illusion. They are seen to blur distinction between ‘the real’ and the ‘illusory’, the creative and the commercial, the educational and simply entertaining. Yet these are mass-technologies which are shaping global imaginaries, and for many constitute their reality.
Piotr Cieplak, academic and award-winning filmmaker, was holder of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement award in 2018, working on image-based commemoration and remembrance in Rwanda and the Global South. He provides a ‘commentary’ on his film work in Argentina and Rwanda. He explores the different ways in which photographs, memory, and what might be described as a ‘historical desire’, play out in these two very different political sites. How do people use photographs? What are their expectations of them? His films not only document these uses but become claims for restorative justice in the face of atrocity and political oppression. He demonstrates how film can become central to these processes, both in creating a focus for voices and narratives to emerge and by connecting to audiences in ways that have reparative potential. In the spirit of the digital capacity of the relaunched Journal, there are extensive film clips embedded in the paper. They rebalance the relationship between text and image in making an academic argument. Here, as in Christie’s paper, the images are both evidence and argument. Thus, both these papers have methodological elements which we, as Editors, are keen to develop. For Cieplak, the modes of making the film, the interaction with his participants, who come from very different histories of violence, in Rwanda and Argentina, the ethical challenges facing a medium where participants identities cannot be anonymised, questions of accessibility, all shape the film as an argument and as a visual encounter.
The concerns of Piotr Cieplak’s essay reappear in the piece provided by the multi-prizewinning author Preti Taneja, a disturbing and incisive reflection on her experience of teaching a prisoner who later committed atrocious acts of violence, cast in the form of an auto-fiction.The piece included here derives from a British Academy Lecture which took place in 2023. ‘Aftermath’ deals with the trauma of acting with the best intentions but being caught up in a cycle of violence, not sure quite how to deal with indescribable events yet feeling obliged to make sense of them somehow. Perhaps, the author seems to be saying, only fiction can work, making sense of what might otherwise seem senseless, impossible to process, in itself a potent reminder that thinking comes in various forms and guises, and that dealing with catastrophic events and incidents that leave lasting scars often involves displaced, analogical reflection. Taneja’s fiercely sensitive words stand as a powerful argument for the value of fiction as reflection and intervention, especially when the subject is violence.
If the essays by Cieplak and Taneja address violent histories and events, the significance of history in broadest sense, as a relationship between past, present, and future, unites many contributions. Indeed, all contributions reflect the British Academy’s primary concern to represent the best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and above all their value in the contemporary world and contemporary debates: that it is impossible to talk about politics, race, gender, economics, environment without that sense of the historical, resonates throughout. This is very clear in Paul Bew’s essay on Ireland, based on his 2023 British Academy Lecture. While it has very contemporary pertinence, given the post-Brexit ‘confusions’ over Ireland, he asks how is it that the British, and especially their elected governments, have failed to understand Ireland, their ‘greatest political and moral failure’. Tracked through contemporary 19th-century debates about culpability for the Irish Famine of the late 1840s, through Gladstone and Parnell, the Home Rule debate, extended nationalist demands, the Troubles through to Brexit, Bew takes a view that is both long and profoundly entangled. But it is also a history and historiography fraught with misunderstandings and miscommunications that come precisely from that failure to understand, wrapped as they are, in serial amnesias and aphasias.
Inviting the reader to revisit history is behind John Tolan’s essay on ‘The Enlightenment prophet: Muhammad in early modern Europe’, based on his 2023 British Academy Lecture. This throws a fascinating and forensic light on the central influence of the Muslim prophet on the intellectual history of the early Enlightenment of the 17th century in England and France. Starting with the simultaneous execution in 1649 of Charles I, the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the first English translation of Quran in London, Tolan proceeds to connect these events through key debates on the relationship between Church, Crown, and the people. To some royalists these events were evidence of the kingdom’s moral demise, but to some republican writers Muhammad was acclaimed as a reformer who opposed the corruption of the clergy. Tolan shows how Muhammad’s views were used to bolster the attack on the powers of the Anglican church in England and the Catholic church in France, and, in this way, how Islam became a significant referent in these debates.
The long arm of the past is central to Catherine Hall FBA’s conversation with Journal co-Editor Elizabeth Edwards about slave owner, planter, and advocate for slave-based economies, Edward Long, in his 1774 History of Jamaica. These volumes set a tone of debate around race, economics, and exploitation which continues to resonate. Key to Hall’s argument are the ways in which Long’s argument effectively describes what might now be termed ‘racial capitalism’, that is a capitalist system that depends on practices of racialist dispossession and exploitation. She goes on to discuss contemporary interpretations of these histories especially in the light of the ‘culture wars’, and consider the role and future of histories of enslavement in recent reparative cultural debates. These broad arguments, over time and space, reflect Hall’s seminal work on the legacies of British slave ownership which has brought both a strong sense of global interconnectedness, and an unassailable empirical base to the debate.
Counterposing reparative histories to the ‘culture wars’ is the theme of four essays edited by Gurminder Bhambra which came out of the British Academy Fellows’ Engagement Week in October 2023. The essays unpick this theme through the prism of historical and sociological research, and in this way represent the necessity of an archivally informed interdisciplinary response to urgent contemporary questions. They also confront the burning question of reparations. The essays start with Gurminder Bhambra’s questioning of the adequacy of the term ‘racial capitalism’. She calls for a reparative sociology which can give full historical weight to the centrality of colonialism in creating the conditions for the growth of private property, capitalism, and its attendant inequalities. Through the subsequent three short essays, which range from the 18th-century British in India to the possibility of reparative justice within the late 20th- and 21st-century welfare state, the need for conceptual complexity and archival density emerges strongly. Concrete and meaningful debate, and thus action, is positioned as counter to reductive assumption. This density is tracked in Elizabeth Edwards’s discussion of colonial photographic representations of Indigenous repositioned through conceptual retooling; Margot Finn addresses issues of reparative justice in the context of the gendered history of British colonialism in India and what they might add to that analytical framework. Both of these papers, from two very different historians, stress not only the essential work of detailed archival research, but also an associated conceptual finesse. From this, they argue, it is possible to build a cogent basis from which to think about restorative and reparative histories, a position which echoes Hall’s work on Edward Long. Fiona Williams looks at forms of imperial resourcing in the history of the British welfare state, from colonial taxation to the extraction and exploitation of care labour from the ex-colonies and the Global South. She considers whether this poses a suitable case for reparative justice.
Reparations also underpin claims for climate justice. The global challenge of the climate crisis is elucidated further through three separate articles each with a different inter/disciplinary approach. In the first, Sarah Curtis FBA and colleagues Melissa Leach FBA, Kate Ardern, Carly Beckerman, Paul R. Hunter, Hanna Ruszczyk, and Mark Pelling address the ways that the humanities and social sciences can complement STEM approaches in developing strategies that protect and sustain good health threatened by the crises brought by extreme climatic events or conflicts in different regions of the world. The commentary, based on three workshops funded and facilitated by the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy in 2023, is informed by three themes: interdisciplinarity, inclusiveness, and international cooperation.
A point to emerge from Curtis et al.’s article is the importance of local knowledge in understanding the effects of the environmental crisis. This is precisely the contribution of a highly original collection of four short essays on ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’ which bring the humanities to bear on this understanding. In doing so, the collection enacts a form of epistemological justice in the face of the African continent’s experiences, in common with much of the Global South, of the worst accumulation of environmental extraction and ecological damage while contributing the least. The four authors, Zaynab Ango, Emmanuel Edafe Erhijodo, Ibukunolu Isaac Olodude, and Noela Kinyuy Banla, all early career researchers, attended the ‘African Ecologies’ International Writing Workshop which was funded by the British Academy and took place at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi, Kenya, in July 2023. It was co-hosted by the BIEA and the University of Leeds Centre for African Studies; the essays are edited by Adriaan von Klinken, Simon Manda, Abel Ugba, and Damaris Parsitau.
In their introduction to this collection, the editors situate these four articles in the context of a significant African multidisciplinary literature on the environmental crisis, a context in which social, cultural, and religious ecology provide ‘vital perspectives to enrich and expand the understanding African ecologies’. In the first article, Zaynab Ango examines the ways in which the political text by Wangari Maathai on the Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s novel Get a Life constitute major African eco-critiques of the exploitation and extraction of Africa’s natural resources through colonialism and capitalism. This is followed by Emmanuel Edafe Erhijodo’s examination of the ways in which poetry has the capacity to articulate the experiences of the entwined human, spiritual, and environmental trauma resulting from the degradation of the Niger Delta. In the third contribution, Ibukunolu Isaac Olodude starts by evoking beautifully the sound of the cockcrow in Yoruba towns and villages. His essay then reflects upon the ecospiritual implications of this in relation to the accounting of time—in the experiential, discursive, and numeric senses. The final article by Noela Kinyuy Banla uses the techniques of photo-elicitation and interviewing to consider and analyse the ecological value of local agrarian religious rituals among the Nso’ people of the Bamenda Grasslands of Cameroon, in particular their importance in shaping and forecasting climatic conditions. But she also considers local uses of photography to record and preserve traditional rituals relating to agrarian practice. The resulting photographs, she argues, should be valued as important knowledge of climate change adaptation.
There is a second conversation, that between Nandini Das, author of, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023), which has been awarded the British Academy Book Prize (2023), and the political scientist, Charles Tripp FBA, an exchange that reminds us that the relationship between the colonial past and the present has deep roots, but also consists of strange dead ends. In her book Nandini Das concentrates on a largely forgotten episode in the early history of the British Empire: the unofficial embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Mughal court in India in the early 17th century. Roe’s embassy has not been celebrated or condemned largely because it was such an abject failure, Roe failing to persuade the court of the emperor Jahangir that the British had much to offer them. He also failed to please his supporters and masters at the Jacobean court—he had probably only been given the job because of his connections—and returned empty handed. English/British contact with the Mughal court had to wait until later in the 17th century.
Nandini Das’s timely, innovative, and important book explores these ironies and what we might think of as the lost episodes of history. In an era of too-often over-determined representations of colonial encounters, it reminds us that colonial failure was a frequent occurrence. Here, Nandini Das explains much about her book, from her own personal investment and motivations for writing it, small and large, to the ways in which she has understood the significance of Roe’s actions and non-actions, and the place of his miserable experience after the event.
In many ways these concerns about indigenous voices, power relations, and social justice link to the essay by anthropologist Antonio Ioris, a British-Academy-supported researcher, on the impact on indigenous peoples of subtractive colonial pasts and contemporary ‘hyper neo-liberal’ agribusiness in Paraguay. In a case study of the Paĩ Tavyterã people, he considers how diminishing environmental and cultural space, shaped by a history of regional conflict, colonial exploitation, and, increasingly, extra-national landownership and recent aggressive extractive capitalism, have not only been brought to the surface tensions between local and national interests, but also subjected peoples to shocking processes of dispossession and exploitation. However, as Ioris shows, Paĩ Tavyterã people have increasingly combined with other groups that challenge these processes and reassert and reclaim social, political, and spatial agency. Significantly, it is an account that addresses larger and globally applicable questions about environmental justice, especially in the Global South.
The article by Karen O’Brien-Kop, Xiang Ren, and Alexander Rippa attends to a more conceptual reappropriation of spaces. They elaborate an innovative and ‘experimental’ conceptual framing for the study of Asian cultural mobilities. Their joint research comes out of an interdisciplinary project, ‘Asian Cultural Mobilities: Transitions, Encounters, Heritage’, which was funded by the British Academy and the von Humboldt Foundation as part of the 2022 Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on ‘Mobilities’. While much research on mobilities stems from the social sciences, this article widens this to include the humanities and demonstrates how culture and heritage shape spatialities. In focusing on the Global East, they also seek to challenge Eurocentric interpretations of Asian culture. To illustrate their approach the authors draw on two ‘micro’ case studies: one that links an anthropological analysis of China’s Belt and Road Initiative with yoga as cultural infrastructure between China and India, and a second, an architectural humanities study of Chinatown that combines cultural heritage, minority space, and symbolic meaning into one infrastructure.
Some histories here are also personal. The distinguished and Booker-Prize-winning writer, Bernadine Evaristo, describes her decades-long encounter with the art of the African diaspora, her unease over questions of visibility, and the gradual emergence of a robust and politically engaged practice which was, at last, increasingly visible in public galleries, notably work by Black women. Indeed Sonia Boyce, who represented Britain in the 2022 Venice Biennale and whose work is discussed by Evaristo, was created a Dame in the New Year’s Honours list of 2024. For Evaristo such events are both a measure of how much has been achieved, but also the painful and on-going struggle along the way.
The state of education is the focus of two commentaries. The first is by Regenia Gagnier FBA, who has long been involved in discussions about the future of English as a specific discipline within the Academy and beyond. Here, she has developed her thoughts first delivered in an event in ‘Engagement Week’ about the issues that confront English as a subject in schools and universities. English has long been a popular subject in secondary and tertiary education and teachers have not had to worry about student numbers, and neither have universities. Recently this blithe, even complacent, confidence has been challenged as numbers have dropped significantly, and English is facing a crisis that mirrors and follows on from that in modern languages, another area in which the Academy has worked hard to intervene, carrying out ‘deep dives’ to find out what is happening and commissioning reports to aid teachers and lecturers struggling to make sense of and so effectively confront the situation. In a reasoned and wide-ranging discussion, ‘Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state’, Regenia Gagnier argues that if English is to survive it must rethink and redefine its nature as a world language, exploring the different ways in which it exists as a series of cultures and as a medium for facilitating diverse cultures, understanding its heritage as a specific imperial language but also showing how that history has given way to a number of languages and literatures that modify, challenge, and confront its origins.
In the second article on education, Anna Vignoles FBA develops, first, a critique of how the English education system is at one and the same time undervalued and over-measured and, second, provides an alternative way forward for policymakers. The article emanates from a British Academy Lecture given in 2022. Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, is an economist of education, and here she reflects on how policymaking in education has been dominated by narrow economic concerns of cost rather than a broader understanding of education as a public good, a sustained investment that can bring not only economic benefits but benefits to society’s social, cultural, and political participation and well-being. Furthermore, this narrow approach has given rise to a narrow form of accountability that fails to measure the broader outcomes of education. Vignoles sets out proposals that depend on cross-party consensus for long-term planning with parallel policies to reduce child poverty, as well as a set of policy priorities for the short term.
The Journal also sees what we hope all be the first in a long series of interventions, reflecting on the significance of particular widely used terms in academic and public discourse, and we here ask Fellows and others connected to the British Academy to submit reflections on major words within their disciplines. Here, based on another discussion in ‘Engagement Week’, Nicholas de Lange and John Haldon explore the significance of the terms ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’, captured in common definition as a reference to something of excessive and often unbearable complexity generating confusion. Noting that the people the terms describe never described themselves as they have been subsequently, the authors consider alternative possibilities before concluding that alternatives might generate more confusion and disinformation. They conclude somewhat reluctantly that specific historians can be left to use the best terms they feel are suited for the task at hand, explaining their choices to the reader.
Finally, architectural historian William Whyte considers the context and space of the British Academy’s work, that is, the history of the building itself at 10–11 Carlton House Terrace. The Terrace was built in 1827–31 on the site of the royal palace Carlton House. Since then, the building has been at the centre of power, influence, and imperial investment. William Gladstone lived there between 1857 and 1875, but also on occasion it was home to a splendid gallery of rogues and financial wide-boys. Whyte gives us a truly fascinating and intriguing glimpse into the history and vicissitudes of the building, its architectural development and redevelopment, and its occupants: a building one hopes is now another centre of power and influence as the home of the British Academy, which moved into 10–11 Carlton House Terrace in 1998.
We hope that the relaunched Journal serves its purpose in providing a stimulating range of articles of varying types, and that it inspires debate, discussion, and argument, encouraging further submissions on the wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences fostered by the British Academy. We want the Journal to be a highly visible, widely accessible, vehicle for the values of humanities and social sciences and their crucial role on the contemporary world.
Acknowledgements
The Editors would like to thank all the peer reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on the articles considered for this issue, and the dedication and support of the Publishing Department at the British Academy.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a01
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 934
Article download count: 15
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Williams, F., Edwards, E. & Hadfield, A. (2024), ‘Editors’ Introduction to Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12, Issues 1 & 2’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a01 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a01Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12 Issue 3, Contents and Editors’ Introduction Fiona Williams, Elizabeth Edwards, Andrew Hadfield
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18 September 2024
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The Editors introduce the fourth issue of Volume 12 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
13 December 2024
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