Changing the culture of arts governance

Type
Article
Category
the arts

The new report on arts governance highlights a number of themes. The marvellous things our organisations achieve are made possible by small teams of dedicated, passionate (underpaid) arts workers – most of them women. Their already-stretched resources are being asked to stretch further. Our sector is overly dependent on the support of volunteers, who are often ill equipped to provide the support we really need. And the people who have traditionally filled those volunteer roles are becoming less inclined to do so over time.

Type
Article
Category
Coronavirus
Grief

The melancholic background

There is a second kind of anxiety, as we step out into the world we share with the virus. There is the question of how we have allowed ourselves to be moved by these events: how we will tell the story of what has just happened, how we will mourn.

Type
Article
Category
History

Silencing the past: reflections on remembering and forgetting

As we continue to discuss the past and its impact on our present, as we question what stories are remembered and what stories are forgotten, I look to Trouillot and the scores of critical writers since as a reminder of how power relations continue to shape history; how context matters; and how, sometimes, remembering alone is not enough.

Type
Article
Category
Class
Environment

What happens to the renters who were poisoned?

Once more, the substantial population living in contamination zones on land they don’t own are left to their own devices. There is no state to save them, no legal enterprise assured of victory to fund their fight. The only option provided by the powers that solely exist for this type of catastrophe is to surrender to the elements.

Type
Article
Category
Politics
Socialism

Corbyn, Sanders and the Australian left

Encouraged by Sanders and Corbyn and spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the greatest depression in a generation, the Australian left has started to take its first, faltering steps towards a Sanders-Corbyn style of socialism. There is a potential that socialists may, at last, return to serious politics.

Type
Article
Category
Capitalism
literary culture

Capital writes white

In common with many other artists, writers are one of late capital’s most avidly tricked-out assets: not expected to be motivated by crass material concerns themselves, their output nonetheless provides a handy source of wealth for other industries to profit from: industries of marketing, of publishing, of academia.

Type
Article
Category
Fiction

Fiction | The biscuit years

When a letter arrived from an Elizabeth Irving — a name he didn’t recognise — Bill passed it to his wife. His eyesight was poor and he didn’t want any trouble. Still, the pale blue airmail envelope looked innocuous enough. Probably a misunderstanding. Someone had looked up William Reynolds in the phone directory —these things must be online nowadays? — and sent it to him by mistake. The envelope had been posted from Dili, each stamp showcasing a different exotic snake.

Type
Article
Category
Queer politics
Television

We need to talk about Eric and Adam's relationship in Sex Education

the expectation from fans that Eric not only forgive Adam but start a relationship with him – which has been getting so much traction on Twitter since this season’s trailer was released – is troubling and raises broader questions about how we exhort (and, sometimes, bully) racial, sexual and gender minorities to embrace their abusers.

Type
Cartoon
Category
Obituary

Vale Jack Mundey

‘My dream and that of hundreds of thousands or millions of others may come true: a socialist world with a human face, an ecological heart, an egalitarian body.’

Type
Article
Category
Coronavirus
Palestine

Conversations with Abu Ali

Abu Ali and his family have witnessed wholesale horror during the Israeli bombing campaigns of 2009 and 2014. For more than thirteen years they haven’t been able to leave Gaza. Now, they are also under virus lockdown, only able to step out onto their balcony, what is left of it. This is Abu Ali’s account to me, to you.