The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.
The newly digitised Manchester Observer (1818–22) was England’s leading radical newspaper at the time of the Peterloo meeting of August 1819, in which it played a central role. For a time it enjoyed the highest circulation of any provincial newspaper, holding a position comparable to that of the Chartist Northern Star twenty years later and pioneering dual publication in Manchester and London. Its columns provide insights into Manchester’s notoriously secretive local government and policing and into the labour and radical movements of its turbulent times. Rich materials in the Home Office papers in the National Archives reveal much about the relationship between radicals in London and in the provinces, and show how local magistrates conspired with government to hound the radical press in the north as prosecutions in London ran into trouble. This article also sheds new light on the founding of the Manchester Guardian, which endured as the Observer’s successor more by avoiding its disasters than by following its example. Despite the imprisonment of four of its main editors and proprietors the Manchester Observer battled on for five years before sinking in calmer water for lack of news.
This essay presents the idea of James Baldwin as a freedom writer, the organizing idea of my biography in progress. As a freedom writer, Baldwin was a revolutionary intellectual, an essayist and novelist committed unfailingly to the realization of racial justice, interracial political equality, and economic democracy. While the book is still in process, this short essay narrates autobiographically how I came to meet and know Baldwin’s work, explains in critical fashion my work in relation to existing biographies, and reflects interpretively my thoughts-in- progress on this fascinating and captivating figure of immense historical and social consequence.
This article traces the evolution of James Baldwin’s discourse on the Arab–Israeli conflict as connected to his own evolution as a Black thinker, activist, and author. It creates a nuanced trajectory of the transformation of Baldwin’s thought on the Arab–Israeli conflict and Black and Jewish relations in the U.S. This trajectory is created through the lens of Baldwin’s relationship with some of the major radical Black movements and organizations of the twentieth century: Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and, finally, the Black Power movement, especially the Black Panther Party. Using Baldwin as an example, the article displays the Arab–Israeli conflict as a terrain Black radicals used to articulate their visions of the nature of Black oppression in the U.S., strategies of resistance, the meaning of Black liberation, and articulations of Black identity. It argues that the study of Baldwin’s transformation from a supporter of the Zionist project of nation-building to an advocate of Palestinian rights and national aspirations reveals much about the ideological transformations of the larger Black liberation movement.
Introduction Drawing its energy from the wave of New Left and counter-cultural radicalism of the 1960s ( Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 ), an NGO-led direct humanitarian action pushed onto the international stage during the 1970s. The radicalism of this new anti-establishment sans frontières humanitarianism lay in its political challenge to the conventions of Cold War sovereignty. By being there on the ground it sought to hold sovereign power to account, witnessing its excesses while professing a face-to-face humanitarian
intersection of the ‘authored’ (and therefore ‘predictable’) and the ‘unpredictable’, Half-Life manages to offer a reading experience that is of a different quality from that which was offered by its competitors in the late 1990s. This chapter seeks not so much to support the more hyperbolic claims for Half- chap3.p65 62 17/02/03, 09:50 Gritty realism: reading Half-Life 63 Life’s radicalism as a groundbreaking text, as looking at the mechanics of its storytelling processes to interrogate the ways in which it works as a supposedly interactive form of text that makes the
satellite. The PCF continues to lose lifeblood but is far from dead. It saved its parliamentary group and it still runs 84 towns of over 10,000 and two conseils généraux. It lost money in the presidentials, as Hue took less than 5 per cent. It too will undergo a leadership struggle, linked to an identity crisis, as it oscillates between protest and the aspiration to be a government party. The Greens are still stuck with the same contradictions. Mamère’s pragmatic campaign rescued them from the electoral consequences of undiluted radicalism and saved their election
. Leigh Browne was a member of the WPAA throughout its 1874–90 lifespan, and was also a member of the MRU and the Social Purity Alliance (SPA). She may have been influential in calling the meeting, but why it was held under the auspices of the MRU rather than as a peace meeting is unclear. It is possible that the WPAA offered the most obvious common ground between the Peace Society and the IAPA, blending as it did the moral and religious concerns of the older organisation and the radicalism of the new. The meeting saw widespread co-operation 134 pacifist feminism in
its literature. Leavis argued that the value of the past in constructing a politics engaging with the constitution of the present should be recognized. It might also inform and found a form of hope for the future. This chapter engages with Leavis’ arguments. The mode of radical liberalism Leavis espoused in the journal Scrutiny in the early to mid-20th century produced a response to technology far from technological optimism, but also distanced from Marxist critiques of technocratic rationality. This radicalism is often viewed as hopelessly
less exciting results. What we might call ‘liberal recognition theory’ (see McBride 2013 ) gives up on much of the dynamism, radicalism and philosophical potential that was articulated by earlier Hegel-recognition scholarship and instead, what gets presented is generally a reduction of the concept of recognition to a set of liberal rights and identity questions. In