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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12 Issue 4, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Fiona Williams*†
,
J.F.Williams@leeds.ac.uk
Elizabeth Edwards‡
, Andrew Hadfield§
, Angela McRobbie¶
Abstract
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.
Keywords
social scienceshumanitiesartsinterdisciplinaryinnovativeinquiryContents
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Erica McAlpine
COMMENTARY
Esmé McMillan, Jake Barnes, Colin Nolden and Morag McDermont
CONVERSATION
Lydia Morris and Fiona Williams, in conversation with Mary Daly
CONVERSATION
Abdulrazak Gurnah, in conversation with Andrew Hadfield
THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
Gary Younge, in conversation with Amelia Horgan
Introduction
Welcome to the Journal of the British Academy’s final issue of 2024, completing the first year of the relaunched online journal. We are very pleased to have been joined in this by a fourth editor, Professor Angela McRobbie FBA, who brings to the Journal a further body of expertise and subject base, namely feminist and cultural theory, the creative industries and fashion studies.
Our aim for the Journal remains unchanged, namely, to present the very best of the research generated from the British Academy’s Fellowship, research programmes, activities, and events. The articles here demonstrate the British Academy’s scope for international and interdisciplinary research, its support for early career researchers, its commitment to critical reflection on current matters of social and political urgency—from humanities teaching to climate change—and its determination to explain and defend the role of the humanities and social sciences in a higher education environment that continues to be very difficult. These concerns form the background of all the contributions to this issue.
First is Erica McAlpine’s witty, suggestive and thoughtful article, `Parody’s paradox: “Dover Beach” versus “The Dover Bitch”’. First given as a British Academy Lecture at the University of East Anglia, it explores the relationship between Matthew Arnold’s original poem (probably 1851) and the well-known parody by Anthony Hecht, which appeared over a century later in 1967, using the relationship between these poems to think about reading and evaluation. While Arnold’s poem explores existential doubts triggered by his impending marriage as he wistfully looks out over the English Channel, Hecht describes a more ‘modern’ contractual relationship in which the woman gives as good as she gets, accepting presents in return for occasional meetings. Is Hecht parodying Arnoldian ‘high seriousness’ in his poem? Or is his work less a parody than a reflection on how times have changed since the mid-Victorian era? Or is the real issue that of sincerity, Hecht’s poem reflecting, with a mixture of melancholy and artful knowingness, that we can no longer discuss matters in the way that the Victorians did? Perhaps we feel a certain nostalgia for a world that was beset with uncertainty but which was secure in its ability to write about it with appropriate seriousness. Hecht’s may be a more ‘knowing’ poem than Arnold’s but that does not necessarily make it better, as Hecht is certainly vulnerable to female critique as a further version by Ann Drysdale1 demonstrates. Thinking about all three poems and how we as readers value them should be a forceful reminder of the virtues of old-fashioned literary criticism and the need to articulate how and why we judge poetry.
A very different role of the humanities is addressed in an article on place-based governance in relation to Net Zero (NZ) policies and targets. Responses to climate change are an important and recurrent theme in the pages of the Journal, for example, first, Ievgeniia Kopysia’s article on conflict and climate in the Russian war against Ukraine and, second, the themed collection in Issue 1 & 2 regarding local perspectives on climate and environment in Africa. This reflects the British Academy’s commitment to develop research and discussion of key global challenges, and it is one to which we shall be returning.
In this issue we have a further contribution to the wider debate but one focussed on that crucial local dynamic. In their Commentary piece, `Local, place-based governance for net zero: a review and research agenda’, Esmé McMillan, Jake Barnes, Colin Nolden and Morag McDermont, draw on their research funded by the British Academy as part of its Net Zero Governance Programme. Their Commentary provides an important exploratory review and synthesis of research into NZ policy and practice being carried out at local level, aiming to articulate how, why and when governance matters on NZ in place-sensitive governance systems, structures and approaches. When it comes to achieving net zero by 2050, academic research into the policy implications to ensure a just transformation is crucial. Yet, to date, while much is being developed at the local level by municipalities, civil society organisations and others, academic research on policy innovation has tended to focus on national and supranational governance. The review highlights seven key challenges for the delivery of local NZ policy which includes building local knowledge bases and generating local support. At the same time, it emphasises the crucial role of central government—the ‘guiding role of the state’—in providing the support and policy framework for local authorities to navigate these challenges. The authors outline the opportunities to meet these challenges as well as the ways in which each leads to new areas for future research.
Contributions to this issue are also linked by concerns with the legacies of colonialism, migration and the complexities of inequality in a rapidly polarising world. This issue is marked, in particular, by Conversations, which are emerging as an important contribution form of the Journal.
In the first, `Pushing the borders of social policy analysis’, Professor Mary Daly FBA invites two leading figures in sociology and social policy, Professor Lydia Morris FBA and Professor Fiona Williams FBA, to reflect on some of the key concepts and ideas that undergird their recently published books which jointly won the biennial Peter Townsend Prize in 2023. Of core interest are the shifts that the field of social policy has taken in recent years, in order to interrogate changes to what were previously assumed more fixed entities such as nation, welfare and family. These are now viewed through the prism of racialised boundaries, migration, racism and the ‘complexities of inequality’ that accrue when the state welfare paradigm undertakes a ramped-up managerial role. This is especially in regard to the immigration system, such as the creation of a ‘hostile environment’, and the making destitute of vulnerable people. Williams conveys the extent to which welfare states are constantly in flux, but now more so in regard to the ‘crisis of racialised boundaries’. Lydia Morris also emphasises the broadening of the social policy remit to incorporate stark inequalities of the rights regime, as well as processes of civic stratification which underpin migration politics. This articulates directly with the domestic welfare system often deploying a moralising discourse with stigmatising effects.
The second, very different, Conversation is that between Professor Andrew Hadfield FBA and Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, Honorary FBA. ‘Changing places and writing the postcolonial novel’ explores the writer’s career and his main preoccupations and themes. Professor Gurnah reveals how carefully and slowly his literary career developed. He shows how he adopted and transformed themes from his reading and his experience to create his particular mode of fiction. A crucial work has been Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), with its representation of love and survival in times of upheaval and fear. Professor Gurnah has used the book to think about relationships between people in the postcolonial world. He explains that many of his novels are more optimistic than they might seem, showing how people adapt and change even in the most hostile environments. Even a work with a bleak ending such as Admiring Silence (1996) concludes with a protagonist who has learned to live and cope with what he will have to face in the future. Many of Professor Gurnah’s novels deal with secrets, large and small, and those that need to be revealed and dealt with, alongside those that need to be left buried. Overall, the conversation does much to explain why Professor Gurnah is a leading novelist of world-wide importance whose deceptively straightforward work speaks to huge numbers of novel readers.
The British Academy’s Summer Showcase in 2024 presented The Books That Made Me as a new literary conversation. In the first of the series, Professor Gary Younge, Honorary FBA, Guardian journalist and author of Dispatches from the Diaspora (Faber and Faber, 2023), was interviewed by Amelia Horgan. Gary Younge discusses his working-class childhood as a serious-minded child of Barbadian heritage and the influence of the words of the Buddha and Sartre’s deep dives into the meaning of freedom. At seventeen, Younge was working as a teacher in a refugee school in the Sudan and reading feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham and Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982). These days, the crime novels of Black writers such as Walter Mosley, Attica Locke and Chester Himes provide reading for relaxation. The discussion ranges from his need as a journalist to go beyond ‘the story’, the necessity of calling out racism and Younge’s parents’ experience of migrating from the Caribbean in the 1960s. Younge cites Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes (1996) as vital for understanding the impact of colonialism on subsequent European history. The job of academics, he concludes, is to understand the world and to convey that, but not to write people off who do not have that understanding. We publish their conversation here, hoping that ‘The Books That Made Me’ will become an occasional series in the Journal; another emphasis on the contribution of the humanities and social sciences to people’s perspectives on life.
As ever we are grateful for the support our Editorial Board and our unfailingly helpful peer reviewers whose thoughtful comments improve the quality of the articles. We are, as always, indebted to the Publishing Department of the British Academy for their contribution to these discussions and the smooth running of the production schedule, especially as the number of potential contributions continues to grow as the Journal gathers strength.
1
The Dover Bitch Criticises Her Life, 2005.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a44
Published on: 13 December 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 379
Article download count: 9
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. & McRobbie, A. (2024), ‘Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12 Issue 4, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(4): a44 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a44Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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22 May 2024
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The Editors introduce the third issue of the Journal of the British Academy in its new format, continuing the dynamic and wide-ranging character of the relaunched Journal. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue and its synergies.
18 September 2024
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