Semantron 25 Summer 2025

Semantron 25

Summer 2025

Semantron was founded in 1992 by Dr. Jan Piggott (Head of English, and then Archivist at the College) together with one of his students, Richard Scholar (now Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University).

All the photographs used in this issue of Semantron were taken by A’yaan Abdul-Mughis.

Editor’s introduction

Neil Croally

All art aspires to the form of music, because music is pure form . Someone misquoting Walter Pater 1

Music has been on my mind lately, because I have been marvelling again at the intricacies of jazz harmony, an interest aided and sustained by reading James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool . 2 Apart from detailing the variously painful and difficult lives of his three subjects, Kaplan is good at showing the intellectual and aesthetic effort that went into creating the extraordinarily inventive harmonic worlds of be-bop and modal jazz, even as the latter reacted strongly to the chordal complexity of the former. 1959, the central focus of Kaplan’s book, being the year of Kind of Blue , was also the year in which the jazz world confronted the shock and awe of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz . This record – still provocative – was subtitled A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet . For some listeners, there was nothing collective about the players of two separate quartets playing anything they liked. But was this free jazz – or freedom music, as some practitioners preferred to label it – simply the aural equivalent of rampant libertarianism? Not really. For all its apparent chaos and disconnectedness, Free Jazz displays individual players responding to what a collective is creating: better to describe this music as anarcho-syndicalist rather than libertarian. (This is not to say that the record is actually listenable.) I mean that Ornette Coleman’s revolution ary offering is still grounded in the jazz (and human) realities of collaboration, exchange, call and response and that, in this sense, jazz conforms to the idea that the nature of humanity as produced by evolution is essentially co-operative. 3 In traditional jazz, relatively 1 That someone is, of course, me. Pater actually wrote (‘The School of Giorgione’ from The Renaissance 1888 ): ‘ All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’ He repeats the point later in the same text: ‘It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other .’ I think that Pater’s view that the best art marries or obliterates the distinction between form and content (as I always knew the terms of the debate in my A-level years) misses the point: it is not clear that music has content at all in the same way as the written and plastic arts. I suspect that is why I remembered (that is, preferred) ‘music is pure form’. 2 Kaplan 2025. For jazz aficionados at least, this is a book to be devoured. It details the careers of the three great jazz musicians leading up to, in the making of, and after Kind of Blue , one of the most celebrated of jazz LPs, recorded in either jazz’s annus mirabilis or the year of its death, depending on one’s critical allegiances. The book also recounts the tragedy of how too many musicians of the 40s and 50s took Charlie Parker’s self-destructive genius as exemplary, seeing the heroin addiction that would kill him at the age of 35 as the necessary condition of his harmonic hyper-innovation: the substance was the style. 3 On humans as evolving as social animals, see Dunbar 2014. For more particular discussions or how our ethical systems evolved from our social nature, see Singer 1981; De Waal 2006. For further discussion of the relationship between our social nature, joint intentionality and the evolution of our ability to think in distinctively abstract ways, see especially Tomasello 2014. On the important and currently much debated topic of the evolution of the

simple chord sequences provide the infrastructure in which individual players communicate though improvisation. The be-bop revolution complicated those harmonic arrangements, extending almost madly the use of the 2-5-1 cadence, adding chromaticism and an ever thickening harmonic palette, comprising sus chords, slash chords, 5ths and 9ths, flattened or sharpened, 11ths, 13ths, and so on. 4 But the soloist still solos within the harmony; the individual plays off and with the collective. 5 And this fact persists from the early 12-bar blues of W.C. Handy one hundred years ago, through the swing of Ellington and Lester Young in the 1930s, through be- bop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, Coltrane’s sheets of sound, the stretched blues of (for instance) Wayne Shorter’s Footprints and – yes – the freedom music of Ornette Coleman (and Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor). So, if even jazz, harmonically and rhythmically complex, arena for almost heroic individual performances, is essentially and necessarily a collaborative, collective art, then perhaps we can combine Aristotle’s famous Man is a political animal (understanding ‘political’ as broadly ‘social’) with my misremembered slice of Pater: all art should aspire to the form of music, because music is a political form. In a collection of essays as diverse as this year’s Semantron , it would be difficult to identify any unifying theme. But many of the pieces are concerned with how our actions affect other humans, other species and the natural environment. In some of the essays, in a context of presidential egomania and more genera lized ecomania (‘Drill, baby, drill!’; consumerism; the obsession with economic growth), 6 there is also a clear sense of the urgent need to find sustainable solutions to the climate crisis. We humans, by our activities, have caused a degree of species destruction both astonishing and depressing; 7 we destroy roughly 10 million hectares of tropical rainforest every year, thereby losing over 100 plant and animal species daily. 8 Yet we continue to burn fossil fuels in our homes, cars, lorries and planes, in energy production and in warfare. 9 We cannot seem to see beyond our own immediate environment. Even as the damage is done, we feel unaffected. We think that our needs and desires human mind, see, for example, Buller 2005; Cummins & Allen 1998; Godfrey-Smith 2017; Hookway 1984; Sperber and Mercier 2017. 4 Jazz, like all music, begins with the simplicity of 12 notes, and the simplicity of the basic major and minor triads. In developing genuine harmonic complexity out of such basic components, jazz mirrors evolution in the natural world. It is worth noting, though, that, as jazz became more harmonically and rhythmically complex, it ceased to be a dance music in the way swing had been (see e.g. Kaplan 2025: 45-7). If dancing (and other acknowledgements of rhythm) are a distinctive human trait, then that makes jazz’s relationship to evolution more interesting. 5 I say this while acknowledging the (apocryphal?) story that when Charlie Parker first played the astonishing solo bridge on A Night in Tunisia , all the other musicians just stopped: what was that? It seems that, at first, they did not recognize what Parker played as music. 6 For interesting analyses of our attachment to economic growth, and for some counter-proposals, see Jackson 2017 and 2021. 7 See Wildlife numbers fall by 73% in 59 years at Nature decline is now nearing dangerous tipping points, WWF warns - BBC News. Published 10/10/24; accessed 1/6/25. 8 See How Much Rainforest Is Lost Daily? Understanding the Impact on Biodiversity and Climate – ChaseDay.com. Published 26/1/25; accessed 1/6/25. 9 Not much has been written about warfare as an ecological disaster, though see Kreike 2021 and, very recently, an article about the environmental damage wrought by the war in Gaza: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/carbon-footprint-of-israels-war-on-gaza-exceeds-that-of- many-entire-countries. Published 30/5/25.

must be met, in the name of convenience, or necessity, or urgency, or because they are momentarily harmless. Our eco-thinking seems, for the most part, horribly analogous to the apparently neutral, non-Nazi represented in Martin Niemöller ’s famous lines. 10 Let’s hope that, just as Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Evans, Shorter et al. were able to summon beauty out of chaos and complexity, so we can create a sustainable world, one where we enjoy rather than ravage its beauty. Most of the essays in this edition were written as extended essays or as Extended Project Qualification dissertations. But I should note that the essays by Taylor Lai and Kenneth Lai on artificial intelligence were entered for this year’s Popper Prize, and that the contributions by Atticus Dewe and Aidan Leung on the ethics of charity were entered for the Erasmus prize (Aidan’s essay was awarded second prize).

I hope you enjoy this thoughtful and provocative collection.

Bibliography

Buller, D. (2005) Adapting Minds . Cambridge, Ma. Cummins, D. & Allen, C. eds. (1998) The Evolution of Mind . Oxford Dunbar, R. (2014) Human Evolution . London Godfrey-Smith, P. (2017) Other Minds . The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life . London Hookway, C. ed. (1984) Minds, Machines and Evolution . Cambridge Jackson, T. (2017) Prosperity without Growth . Abingdon (2021) Post Growth. Life after Capitalism . Cambridge Kaplan, J. (2025) 3 Shades of Blue . Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool. London Kreike, E. (2021) Scorched Earth. Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature. Princeton Pater, W. (1888 3 ) The Renaissance: studies in art and poetry . London Singer, P. (1981) The Expanding Circle . Princeton Sperber, D. & Mercier, H. (2017) The Enigma of Reason . London

Tomasello, M. (2014) A Natural History of Human Thinking . Cambridge, Ma. De Waal, F. (2006) Primates and Philosophers. How Morality Evolved . Princeton

10 When the Nazis came for the Socialists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Socialist etc. Available, in its various versions, at Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..." | Holocaust Encyclopedia.

iii

Contents

Part one

The varieties of meaning

2 The ‘middle - caste’ of post -colonial literature: post-colonial class dynamics and the psychology of western superiority ARISTOU MEEHAN

Women in the films of Pedro Almodóvar ALESSANDRO MACCHI

Perceptions of the city in English and French literature PETER HELLER

Interpreting Goya’s black paintings through mythological references ROBIN SAMUEL

20 Greece through classical antiquity: Byron and the distorted prism in Childe Harold’s pilgrimage and Don Juan BRUNO LYKIARDOPOULOS

Gender and the divine in early Archaic Greek poetry THEO MULAKI

To what extent can music pre-1970 be termed ‘punk rock’? THOMAS PURVIS

49 Life as cyclical in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ELLIOT COULSON

Part two

Substance and theory

54 The structure, synthesis, and potential applications of mechanically interlocked molecules GEORGE CROALLY

59 Putting enzymes on pause: structural prediction and biochemical characterization of Alternaria Alternata Cdc14 phosphatase for antifungal inhibitor design ELAAB TSEGAYE

Government solutions to the prevalence of ultra-processed food in modern diets SAMUEL BETANCOURT CORTES

Assessing the accuracy and methodology of the chemistry in ‘Breaking bad’ EDWARD ELLAM

The risks and benefits of opioids ISAAC McCONNELL

The hierarchy problem in particle physics and gravity ISMAEL AHMED

97 How does finite element method, a theoretical model, solve the problem of impracticality in some physical testing in engineering? JUSTIN FU

103

Forces and fluid dynamics in the sport of rowing NICHOLAS ELTON

107

Using generating functions to calculate Zetas of positive even integers ZEZI LI

Part three

On the nature of things

114

Does ESG provide the right outcomes for sustainable development? WILLIAM OAKELEY

117

Sustainable development in Africa NATHANIEL THOMAS

121

Appropriate Technology as a developmental aid THEO ISAAC

130

Driving the future: electric vehicles MICHAEL CHANG

137

The Volkswagen emissions scandal NIKOLAS VRAHIMIS

141

The role of solar panels XAVIER WILD

Part four

Money and power

146

The reality of trickle-down economics REINHOLD LIU

152

India: the next superpower? TOBY POLLI

159

The rise of the French Far-Right: a challenge to European stability? HUGO RICHARDS

163

To what extent is the intention behind the Belt and Road Initiative political? VINCENT LIU

172

Bayesian Nash equilibria and monetary policy NIKHIL SHIRGAOKAR

186

T he foundation of the Ottoman Empire and the ideology of ‘Holy War’ EDWARD WARREN

189

Spanish authorities and Incan society in colonial Peru in the years up to 1572 HENRY OGNEV

193

The Asia Minor disaster – Greece’s ‘national catastrophe’? ALEXANDROS HALL

201

JFK, the Cold War and African nationalism WILLIAM BRADLEY

205 Time consistency and optimal monetary policy: the application of Bayes correlated equilibrium to inflationary bias NICHOLAS DEMESTICHAS

Part five

Prescriptions and origins

222

Should AI systems be given rights? TAYLOR LAI

226 ‘The greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards.’ (Rosalind Picard) KENNETH LAI

229

The study of modern foreign languages and the advent of translation apps A’YAAN ABDUL -MUGHIS

233

The ethical dilemma of sustainable development GEORGE PINK

238 Should we decide which charities to support purely on the basis of which would do the most good? ATTICUS DEWE

241 Should we decide which charities to support purely on the basis of which would do the most good? AIDAN LEUNG

245

On moral intuition JAMES CORBEN

248 ‘Who made me here, and why?’: how has evolution brought the modern world into existence? RHYDIAN EVANS

vii

Part One

The varieties of meaning

The ‘ middle-caste ’ of post-colonial literature: post-colonial class dynamics and the psychology of western superiority

Aristou Meehan

The purpose of this essay is to examine how post-colonial class dynamics are rooted in an underlying psychology of western superiority, and how this can be observed in post-colonial literature. The dynamics between class, gender, race, and religion create a modern ‘caste - system’ that can be observed in many post-colonial texts. The majority of those narratives that reach a western audience are written by a privileged minority, a proposed ‘middle - caste’, that exists within a liminal cultural and social position between wealth and poverty, colonizer and colonized. In writing for a western audience there is an inherent struggle for integrity, and by writing within the context of the w estern literary canon a kind of ‘dual heritage’ is adopted. In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures , Ashcroft et al. define the term ‘post - colonial’ as ‘ all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day ’ . 1 They further describe post-colonial literature as ‘ essentially political ’ for its ability to ‘ radically question the apparent axioms upon which the whole discipline of English has been raised ’ . 2 Literature as a force for political change in post- colonial societies is further explored in Sanjay Joshi’s Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India , 3 where Joshi asserts that ‘ western-style education and new forms of communication, such as newspapers ’ allowed ‘ a group of literate men ’ in Lucknow to define a new ‘ moral, cultural, and political code ’ and position themselves as ‘ the new middle class ’ . In R.K Narayan’s 1945 novel The English Teacher , Narayan subtly presents how entrenched beliefs in western superiority shape the aspirations of the Indian ‘ new middle class ’ . The titular English teacher, Krishna, views his wife Susila’s spirituality and reading of ‘native’ Indian texts as being markers of lesser sophistication, as his definition of ‘civil ize d’ is highly influenced by the ‘ western-style education ’ that he finds himself a part of. In encouraging his wife to read – ‘ You must spend some more time reading or stitching or singing. Man or woman is not born merely to cook and eat ’ – we quickly learn that Krishna’s true concern is not for Susila’s reading per se (he dismisses ‘ the Tamil classics and Sanskrit texts ’ that she reads ‘ without help ’ ), but rather her disinterest in the western texts that he forces upon her. When he scolds her: ‘ You have neglected your books ’ , he refers to the copies of Ivanhoe and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare that he has given her - in short, the western literary canon. We see him trying to ‘convert’ Susila away from her religious literature and practice and instead adopt his own worship of ‘the g reat English classics’. This crusade hijacks a key moment of romance and creativity with his wife in which he writes her poetry, choosing to test her knowledge instead by copying Wordsworth’s She Was a Phantom of Delight directly and reciting it to her ‘ as if to [his] class ’ . This small moment can be seen as symbolic of Krishna’s mimicry of the English colon izer. Though he

1 Ashcroft et al 1989: 2. 2 Ashcroft et al 1989: 196. 3 Joshi 2001; see also Roy 2002.

Post-colonial literature and western superiority

verbally rejects the colonial authority of Mr. Brown, in attempting to ‘civil ize ’ his wife he adopts the same westernized tone of condescension.

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things presents the Anglophilic foundations of class dynamics in modern India more overtly. Baby Kochamma is fervidly class obsessed and the novel’s greatest Anglophile, finding everything British to be inherently superior. In a moment in chapter two, she punishes the twins, Estha and Rahel, for speaking Malayalam (the native language of Ayemenem, India) and forces them to write lines; ‘” Impositions ” she called them - I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English. A hundred times each.’ 1 Baby Kochamma’s Anglophilia and assertions of her class status are clearly derived from feelings of insecurity surrounding her unrequited love in her youth for an Irish Priest (Father Mulligan). Her cruel persona resulting from this rejection by the west is representative of a generational colonial trauma of othering that provokes a need to ‘other’ others , as seen in her dehumanizing hatred of ‘ Untouchables ’ like Velutha. Similarly, Chacko, boasts of his Oxford degree, and the whole family is obsessed with The Sound of Music , evidence again that, as Chacko admits in chapter two: ‘ They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. ’ 2 Here, Roy references the way members of the ‘Untouchable’ caste must sweep away their footprints so that people of higher classes would not ‘ defile themselves ’ 3 by walking in them. She compares this to the behaviour of upper/middle class ‘ Anglophiles ’ like the Ipe family in metaphorically ‘sweeping away’ their Indian history in order to appease the ‘ departed conqueror ’ . 4 In a sense, despite their high social status as Indians, they are like ‘Paravans’ in relation to the British, made to feel shame for their history and servile in their worship of western culture. Both Ammu and Krishna ultimately find themselves trapped by their class, choosing to abandon their status in order to pursue authenticity. Krishna is a more pertinent example of this: he abandons the status granted to him as a teacher and lecturer at Albert Mission College in order to further connect to his spirituality and rebel against the western style of teaching. His friend, the ‘Headmaster’ of his daughter’s school, comments memorably on the way in which western-style education in India ‘ reduced us to a nation of morons; we are strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage ’ . Salman Rushdie states, ‘ to conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free ’ , 5 but here Narayan takes a different view, arguing that the answer does not lie in trying to prove one’s worth to the colon izer by imitating them, rather it is a refusal to seek this approval that frees the mind of the colonized. Put simply, Indian education is

1 Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 7. 2 Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 90.

3 ‘ Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan's footprint. ’ Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 270. 4 Talib 2002: ‘ According to Roy, “ being forced to identify with a conqueror, especially with a departed conqueror…is like being the child of a raped mother’’.’ 5 Rushdie 1991: paragraph 15.

Post-colonial literature and western superiority

imitation of ‘ a bogus history ’ 6 of western literature that hinders ‘ the fullest use of mind ’ – creatives like Krishna are trapped within the confines of western convention.

The novels already mentioned vividly depict the ways in which inhabiting a middle-class identity in colonial India also means an adoption of a dual Indian- British identity that isolates a ‘middle - caste’ person like Ammu from finding love with a lower- caste ‘untouchable’ like Velutha, but that also affirms Chacko’s affections for Margaret as ridiculous, as the divide between the Indian and British middle classes is still vast. In comparison, Jean Rhys’ 1966 ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Se a, analyses the dynamics between class, race, ethnicity, religion and gender in 1830-40s Jamaica that create a Creole ‘middle - caste’ whose isolating characteristics drive protagonist Antoinette Cosway to ‘madness’. Creole identity as depicted by Rhys is positioned within this ‘middle - caste’ idea for its resemblance to both an aristocracy – ‘ Creole Heiress ’ – and, like in The God of Small Things , to an untouchable class, dehumanized and called ‘ white cockroach. ’ As early as part one of the novel, the disgust felt towards Antoinette for her Creole identity is made clear. She is othered from the ‘ real white people ’ in Jamaica, instead belonging to the ‘ Old time white people ’ – ‘ nothing but white n***** now, and black n***** better than white n*****. ’ 7 Ethnically, Antoinette is white, but, like her mixed-race half- brother, she is labelled as ‘ half-caste ’ nevertheless, and this dual-heritage positions her in a void outside of the social order. The struggles of the dual-heritage, middle-caste protagonists of post-colonial literature are important, but also a uniquely privileged lens that speaks only for a minority of post-colonial experiences. The partly westernized lens through which the stories of colonized people is told can be harmful and reductive, as explored in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe . Much like Jean Rhys, Coetzee chooses to subvert the western literary canon in order to tell a post- colonial narrative, choosing Englishman Daniel Defoe’s 1719 adventure classic Robinson Crusoe , and focusing on the peripheral characters of ‘Crusoe’s wife’ Susan Barton and ‘the tongueless slave’ Friday. Barton does not share the same dual-heritage as aforementioned post-colonial protagonists, but she does resemble them in many of her traits, which allows her to serve as a nuanced critique of the middle- class post- colonial writer. Coetzee’s version of Daniel Defoe , to whom Barton writes, could be interpreted as representing the western perception of what is acceptable literature. Friday is an outsider to the western world in perhaps every conceivable way, yet as Barton travels through Britain alongside him, she becomes perceived as an outsider in much the same way, despite her English heritage. In this sense, Barton is given a mixed-racial identity: ‘ Twice have Friday and I been called gipsies … Am I become a gipsy unknown to myself? ’ In many ways Barton’s racial and class identity resembles Antoinette’s in ‘ Wide Sargasso Sea ’, being ethnically white but culturally ‘foreign’. As Antoinette Cosway has her name stolen and shifted into Bertha Mason to be acceptable to Rochester’s English sensibilities, Susan Barton becomes ‘ Mrs. Crusoe ’ to fit more neatly into Defoe’s westernized reshaping of her narrative. In her struggle to tell Friday’s story honestly, however, Barton finds herself inventing elements of him also.

6 Narayan 1945: 145 – ‘ Why do they make so much of the history of literature? They have to make a history of every damned thing on earth – as if literature could not survive without some fool compiling a bogus history. ’ 7 Rhys 1966: 10.

Post-colonial literature and western superiority

Edward Said states that the colonizer treats the colonized ‘ not even as people, but as problems to be solved or confirmed ’ . 8 In her quest to humanize Friday, Susan Barton treats his ‘inhumanity’ as ‘ a problem to be solved ’ , ironically dehumanizing him in this pursuit. Every struggle which Susan experiences trying to communicate with Friday in a western sense fails infuriates her, as Friday strays further from her idea of humanity with each failed attempt. As Paul Williams notes: ‘ Susan's attempt to free Friday with writing is also an attempt to force him to submit to her will. ’ 9 Emily Stockdale quotes Christine Voght Williams as she observes how Roy in The God of Small Things transcribes Velutha’s thoughts, noting that the language Velutha uses i s not indicative of the way Untouchables would speak: ‘ Velutha, an Untouchable, would not have had access to the kind of English Roy uses in his speech. Yet Roy reports his thought patterns and lends his speech a certain dignity by using a more or less standard variety of English. This of course contributes to the reader’s perception of Velutha not as just an Untouchable, but rather as a person with rights. ’ 10 Like Barton with Friday, Roy chooses to ‘civil ize ’ and anglic ize her authentic portrayal of a lower-caste Indian in order to make him more sympathetic to a western reader. This effort, however, cements the idea that Velutha must earn his humanity by ‘ conquering English ’ to compensate for his class. In contrast, Friday’s speechlessness is never rectified by Coetzee. Both Barton and the reader are challenged to see his humanity without being able to comprehend or categorize him. Underlying much of post-colonial literature are western- shaped, rigid caste structures. The ‘middle - caste’ post -colonial writer transgresses these boundaries simply through the honest telling of their narratives, which are ‘ essentially political ’ . 11 However, the partially westernized perspective that these novelists offer can dilute post-colonial realities. The many dimensions of post-colonial experience often fail to appease the western desire to categorize . As Rochester says of Antoinette’s homeland, ‘ everything is too much ’ . For this reason, many post-colonial writers choose to make their narratives more appealing to the western palate. However, to truly ‘ complete the process of making ourselves free ’ 12 as Rushdie states, this mentality must be entirely abandoned. Instead, as Chinua Achebe states, the experience of colonized people should be told ‘ with all its imperfections. ’ 13

Bibliography

Achebe, C. (1965) The Novelist as Teacher. Leeds Ashcroft, B. et al. (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures . London Baldwin, J. (2018) Dark Days. London Bayly, S. (1999). Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age . Cambridge Cesaire, A. (1955) Discourse on Colonialism. New York

8 Said 1978: 207. 9 Williams 2009. 10 Stockdale 2008. 11 Introduction in Ashcroft et al. 1989. 12 Rushdie 1991: paragraph 15. 13 Achebe 1965: 126.

Post-colonial literature and western superiority

Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. London Coetzee, J.M. (1986). Foe. New York Egrer, C. (2008). Deciphering Friday: the zero-image in Coetzee's Foe . Available at https://cahiersforell.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index.php?id=150#ftn4 Gilbert, H. (2001). Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. London Joshi, S. (2001) Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India. Oxford Narayan, R. (1945). The English Teacher. Great Britain by Eyre and Spottiswoode Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London foreword by A. Smith (1997). Roy, A. (1997). The God of Small Things. London Roy, T. (2002) Review of Joshi (2001) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4127834 Rushdie, S. (1982). Imaginary Homelands. London Said, E. (1978) Orientalism . London Stockdale, E. (2008). Language and the creation of characters in Arundhati R oy’s The God of Small Things . Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington, https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncw/f/stockdalee2008-1.pdf Sunder Raj, E. (1985). ‘The origins of the caste system’ , Transformation 2.9: 10-14. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43052102 Talib, I. (2002) The Language of Postcolonial Literature: An introduction. New York Thieme, J. (2003) Post-Colonial Studies: the essential glossary. London (2013) ‘Becoming a madman, becoming a madwoman: ex - centricity in Caribbean writing’, in Ex- centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Writing (eds. Zinato, S. & Pes, A). Newcastle Williams, P. (2009) ‘”Foe” - The Story of Silence’, available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398808690846

Women in the films of Pedro Almodóvar’s

Alessandro Macchi

Pedro Almodóvar is a Spanish film director who became famous through his unique style in cinematography. He first started his film-making career after the death of General Franco in 1975, in the midst of the cultural surge now known as ‘La Movida Madrileña’. In the beginning his films were short, sexual silent movies (he was too poor to afford tapes able to hold soundtracks) and were merely displayed at Madrid nightclubs. These movies were focused on undoing the many themes that had been censured under Franco, and as Almodóvar himself put it, ‘I sort of forgot about my political leanings and dedicated myself to finally enjoying the things denied me.’ 1 As time went on, and his production quality improved, these themes evolved into more subtle underlying issues that were prevalent in everyday modern life in Spain, focusing especially on the hardships and discrimination women went through. I will focus on the way that women are portrayed in his movies, including the problems they are forced to face and the way they are shown to deal with them. Almodóvar presents many of the women in his movies with traditional female characteristics and values, exemplified through their jobs and roles. However, he also contrasts this idea by presenting many women, including those already mentioned, as taking on more stereotypically male roles, breaking down the social norms in Spain, and portraying the women as strong, independent and resilient. The other theme Almodóvar often displays are the incredible hardships in many of the women’s’ lives, often undetectable by an outsider or even a close friend, leaving the women to have to deal with them alone. The first way in which Pedro Almodóvar portrays women is in a traditionally feminine way. That is to say, many female characters act as they would have under Franco’s regime, with stereotypically ‘female’ roles such as mother, maid, housewife and cook, and often seem to rely on male company and validation, whilst simultaneously showing much more of an empathic and a loving nature than the male characters. A clear example of this is presented in Volver (2006), which depicts the struggles of a single mother (Raimunda), looking after her daughter after her husband was killed (by her daughter). In this movie, Almodóvar presents the theme of motherhood as complicated, as Raimunda also has a complicated relationship with her own mother who she mistakenly thought had died. However, an underlying theme of the loving nature of women resides throughout the movie, harshly contrasting with the nature of men, who are portrayed as only focused on sexual drive. The idea of women being desperate for male (or female) company is also a recurring theme in various of Almodóvar’s movies, for example in Todo sobre mi madre (1999). In this dramatic comedy, the main character (Manuela) witnesses the death of her teenage son, and therefore decides to fulfil his last wish of learning about his father (a transgender woman called Lola). Throughout the course of the movie, we learn about the stories of various women, and the extreme struggles of living alone. In fact, Manuela s tates that ‘Apart from the tits, the husband hadn’t changed that much; so, she ended up accepting him. Women will do anything to avoid being alone’, exemplifying Almodóvar’s idea that often women would feel forced to stay with abusive husbands rather than face life alone.

1 The Standard 2023.

Women in the films of Pedro Almodóvar

However, Almodóvar’s cinematic style is famous for being erratic and almost incomprehensible, and therefore contrasts all of the traditional female traits and roles as I mentioned above with more modern depictions of women, often even portraying these different depictions within the same woman. For example, in Volver , Raimunda’s motherly role is juxtaposed with her taking over her neighbour’s restaurant, highlighting how she is not limited to traditional female roles and is capable of juggling both her complicated personal life with work. Moreover, after she takes over the restaurant, she states ‘Now I am in charge here’, proving that she can be resourceful , capable and authoritative, qualities not viewed positively in women under Franco’s regime. Similarly, in Todo sobre mi madre , Manuela learns to live alone and ends up adopting Lola’s baby (which was made with another woman), showing that she has accepted the fact of living as a single mother. In fact, from what we can see at the start of the movie Manuela had already been a good mother with her son and had succeeded in earning enough money while simultaneously looking after her son. The young nun Rosa, who is characterized by her kindness and innocence, states that ‘Women are more tolerant, but that’s good,’ putting forward Almodó var’s idea that women are more resilient to hardships and oppression, and can keep on moving forwards despite the problems they encounter in life. In fact, another key theme expressed in Almodóvar’s movies in relation to women are the numerous hardships they suffer. Often caused by men, in almost all of his movies the women deal with issues such as heartbreak, domestic violence, loneliness, and poverty. The most recurring theme I found to be was heartbreak, as portrayed in the dark comedy movie Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), where the main character Pepa Marcos (a successful actress) is abruptly abandoned by her husband Iván. Not only does the film portray the desperation of Pepa to be alone, but it also combines a mixture of other problems from other characters who all push their problems onto Pepa (for example, her friend Candela is involved with a group of Shiite terrorists and fears she will be arrested). In summary, the movie depicts the bad effects a breakup can have on women, and this is clearly visible when Pepa states ‘I am not the same anymore Iván. You have destroyed me’, and then later on also says ‘I have no more dreams. I have no more hope’. Quotes like these are used by Almodóvar to depict the extent of the suffering women go through during heartbreak. Similarly, La flor de mi secreto (1995) focuses on a similar idea, basing the story on a female writer (Leo Macias) who has a troubled relationship with her husband before he breaks up with her, and then later finds out that he had been cheating on her with her best friend. Once again Almodóvar uses dramatic language such as ‘I am tired of suffering. I do not know how to go on’ to expose the raw emotion the women feel. Almodóvar also creates many scenarios of domestic violence and stories of sexual abuse, for example in Volver where Raimunda’s daughter is sexually assaulted by her father (leading her to stab him), and then we learn later on in the film that Raimunda’s daughter is also actually her sister, as Raimunda herself had been raped by her own father. By creating such a horrendous scenario for both characters, Almodóvar forces his viewers to appreciate the extent of how such nightmarish situations can appear in wom en’s lives, and creates the idea that they are not uncommon even in modern Spain, where it is estimated that 22% of women have experienced violence. 1

1 EIGE’s Gender Equality Index 2015.

Women in the films of Pedro Almodóvar

Lastly, the other major theme Almodóvar frequently entertains in his movies is the difficulty which women in Spain have to earn money, especially if living alone or having to support a family. This is demonstrated most clearly in Todo sobre mi madre , in which various characters including (in the past) Manuela herself sold their bodies in order to earn money. Almodóvar portrays the way this is common in Spain, and how many women just accept their lives as they are, despite living in poverty and misery. For e xample, Agrado (a transgender sex worker and an old friend of Manuela), tells Manuela that ‘A woman is her hair, her nails, lips for sucking or for bitching’. This idea of the widespread objectification of women is exactly what Almodóvar presents to us, whilst simultaneously showing through Manuela how women are much more than that and can defy traditional sexist stereotypes. In conclusion, Pedro Almodóvar portrays women in his films in a variety of different ways, pushing forwards the idea that they can simultaneously have feminine qualities such as being nurturing, loving, caring, etc., whilst also defying traditional gender roles by taking positions of power, and not depending on men to be emotionally stable. The majority of his movies are based on female principal roles, and as stated by Almodóvar in an interview at the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan ‘I do find at least in Spa nish culture, women to be more vivacious, more direct, more expressive, with a lot less of a sense of being fearful of making a fool of themselves.’ 2 Almodóvar also uses many of the same actresses in his movies, such as Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura or Cecilia Roth as he forms strong, personal bonds with the actors, and therefore is able to highlight their actual personalities and strengths, creating a much more real experience for the viewers. The impact that Almodóvar’s portrayal of women has had on both his works and on global cinema is huge, creating many new opportunities for women actresses and raising awareness of the malleability that women roles can have in both cinema and in real life.

Bibliography

D.T. Max The evolution of Pedro Almodóvar. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/the-evolution-of-pedro-almodovar. Consulted: 21/08/24 El Hunt. Who is Pedro Almodóvar: iconic director and counter-culture trailblazer https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/who-is-pedro-almodovar-director-strange-way-of-life-volver-penelope- cruz-pedro-pascal-b1107921.html. Consulted 22/08/24 European Institute for Gender Equality. Combating violence against women https://eige.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/2016.5476_mh0216771enn_pdfweb_20170215100603.p df. Consulted 22/08/2024 Films: Almodóvar. P. (1999) Todo sobre mi madre. Almodóvar. P. (1988) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Almodóvar. P. (1995) La flor de mi secreto Almodóvar. P. (2006) Volver

2 The New York Times 2016

Perceptions of the city in English and French literature

Peter Heller

Samuel Johnson famously wrote: ‘ When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. ’ Less well-known is his remark in Boswell’s Life : ‘ A man cannot know modes of life as well in Minorca as in London; but he can study mathematics as well in Minorca. ’ This second quote explains, I would argue, why writers have often set their novels and stories in major cities. It is in the nature of great world-cities, with their shifting, diverse populations, with ever-changing relationships, that results in dramas, conflicts, love affairs and jealousies, all the ‘ modes of life ’ to which Dr. Johnson referred. The city thrives from its contrasts; it juxtaposes isolation and community, joy and despair, success and failure. For this reason, throughout history, writers have been enamoured with the idea of the city and the life within it. In this essay, I will examine how a number of British and French writers have used the city as a background to the lives of the alienated people that their stories are about, and how it becomes a metaphor for their individual or collective states of mind. The ambiguous duality – the city-as- buildings and the city-as-people – has fascinated writers down the centuries and they have played with it in various ways, with juxtaposed glimpses of particular locations and of the thought-sequences that the locations conjure up in the characters’ minds. We can find examples of this in both Sartre’s La Nausée and in Camus’ novels; and unsurprisingly we find it as well in some of the great novels set in New York, where the streets become a looming backdrop for madness and pressure, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of Vanities. In the latter, the streets are much more than the backdrop; they become at every level major characters. Henry James wrote that life in London was like ‘ the rumble of the tremendous human mill ’ which is ‘ supremely dear to the consistent London lover ’ . This idea of London’s beauty coming from its hectic, cacophonous nature is one that has been espoused by many. In Cities and People , the architectural historian Mark Girouard talks about a city’s romance, citing William Morris: ‘ By romantic I mean looking as if something was going on. ’ However, Girouard also accepts that the city can provide an acute sense of loneliness and disaffection, quoting Henry James: ‘ [London] sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you. ’ This is the dichotomy present in two works of 20th-century literature about London: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Sam Selvon is often considered the father of Black British Writing and The Lonely Londoners, written in Caribbean vernacular, is often seen as his masterpiece. In this novel, we follow the lives of several Caribbean immigrants who have moved to London as British citizens to provide a livelihood for their families and themselves. The central character in the novel is Moses, a Trinidadian immigrant who has settled in Bayswater in search of better wages. By virtue of being an early arrival to the city, he acts as a sherpa to the young men who arrive with little money and no job. These characters often struggle to adapt to life in the city which is busier, more tiring and more expensive than their lives in the Caribbean.

Perceptions of the city

While the novel contains multiple vignettes focused on different characters, the most notable passage of the book takes the form of a ten-page stream of consciousness which is meant to mirror the state of mind of someone who lives in a big, hectic city. In this extract, ‘ Big City ’ , the character in question, is describing his summer. It begins with bucolic imagery: Selvon writes, ‘ Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city ’ and ‘the old geezers…would sit on benches and smile everywhere you turn the English people smiling ’ . These observations mirror the initial rosy perception of London that many immigrants feel. However, as the passage goes on, the imagery becomes darker and more foreboding. He describes a winter day by saying, ‘ you could look on a winter day and see how grim the trees looking and a sort of fog in the distance ’ . These descriptions, particularly that of the ‘ fog distance ’ , act as an analogy for the immigrants’ perception of London as they live there for longer. Gone is the positive outlook, and instead the city’s faults come to the fore. This ten-page sentence tells us of Kensington Gardens and the Bayswater Road, and casual hook-ups, and violence, and the mixture of pride (one character’s father is a Nigerian king) and fear that combines in the black men’s lives. Stylistically and thematically this passage has echoes of Patrick Bateman’s mental breakdown i n American Psycho . At the very end we find a glancing reference to the easier life that one character believes he could have in France: ‘ Daniel was telling him how in France all kinds of fellars writing books what turning out to be best sellers. [ . . . ] One day you sweating in the factory and the next day all the newspapers have your name and photo, saying how you are a new literary giant. ’ (I will be saying something about the French immigrant experience, as reflected in contemporary literature, later in this essay.) Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia is noted for its striking portrayal of London (and notably its suburbs) in the 1970s and British race relations at the time, while maintaining a strong comic perspective. The book is centred around the life of Karim Amir, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant growing up in the south-London suburbs around Bromley, and his experiences with his eccentric family and the zeitgeist. The Pakistani immigrant experience that Hanif Kureishi describes has some quite cl ose similarities with the life of the Caribbean immigrants in Selvon’s book. Like Selvon’s characters from Trinidad and Jamaica, some of Kureishi’s characters, or their fathers at any rate, came from privileged circumstances back home. But London proves to have been a difficult place to have moved to. ‘ London, the Old Kent Road, was a freezing shock to both of them. It was wet and foggy and people called you “ Sunny Jim ” ; there was never enough to eat, and Dad never took to dripping on toast. “ Nose drippings more like ,” he’d say, pushing away the staple diet of the working class.’ Karim finds happiness of a kind with the daughter of a family friend, Jamila, with whom he has his first sexual experiences. ‘ At the age of thirteen, Jamila was reading non-stop, Baudelaire and Colette and Radiguet and that rude lot, and borrowing records of Ravel, as well as singers popular in France, like Billie Holliday. Then she got this thing about wanting to be Simone de Beauvoir, which is when she and I started having sex every couple of weeks . . . ’ Jamila’s rebellious nature leads her father to con clude that he needs urgently to protect his family’s honour by marrying her off to a man from back home. However, the groom he finds for her – who he hopes will both give him grandchildren and help in his shop – is hopelessly and comically unable to perform either task.

Life for older immigrants is hard, however philosophical they would like to be about it. Jamila’s father tries unsuccessfully to console himself. ‘ What will I do with the profit? How many shoes will I wear? Thirty breakfasts instead of one? And he always said finally, “ Everything is perfect ” . “D’you believe that,

Perceptions of the city

Uncle? ” I asked one day. “ No, ” he replied. “ Everything gets worse. ”’ And get worse it does, when in a slapstick scene the inadequate son-in- law knocks Jamila’s father down with a dildo, leading Karim to remark: ‘Uncle Anwar, who’d come from India to the Old Kent Road, to lodge with a dentist [ . . . ] could never have guessed all those years ago that late in life he would be knocked unconscious by a sex-aid. ’ Karim becomes disillusioned to some extent. But he remains enchanted by London itself, the city which, as with others of the books I have discussed, is this story’s real hero. Karim muses, ‘ And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people that I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it w ouldn’t always be that way.’ Just as London has been the source of some wonderful contemporary books about the immigrant experience, so too has Paris. A recent book, Lumières Étrangères , edited by Elisabeth Lesne, has brought together a number of short stories about the immigrant experience in Paris: a story by Fouad Laroui about life in the Moroccan community, one by Eduardo Manet about the Cubans in Paris, Bernardo Toro’s story about the Chilean community, Saber Mansouri’s set among the Tunisians, Arezki Metrel’s story about Algerian life and so on. Paris – and indeed highly specific quartiers and streets of Paris ( the avenue de la Bourdonnais, the rue Mouffetard) feature all the way through these stories, in a way that reflects the adhesion of these disparate communities to this or that arrondissement . Does Paris offer the immigrant the greater security and opportunity that the character in the Selvon book suggests it would? Not if all of these stories are to be believed (and it should be noted that none of these new writers have become seen as ‘ new literary giants ’ – yet). But one literary giant’s descriptions of Paris have lived on through time. Charles Baudelaire used Paris as the backdrop to many of his poems and the theme of loneliness and detachment is ever-present in his volume Les Fleurs du Mal . Born in Paris, Baudelaire led a peripatetic life, living in the Latin Quarter, Lyon and India before the age of 21. He enjoyed the city lifestyle although, at times, he also felt a strong sense of detachment and isolation from the city. His poem Paysage, for example, clearly presents this dichotomy. He finds the landscape of the city itself a source of endless fascination, writing of ‘ Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cite, / Et les grands ciels qui font rêver d’éternité.’ This line, and particularly the phrase ‘font rêver d’éternité’ , demonstrate the sense of hope that the city provides just by existing. The fact that the towers of Hausmann’s Paris could be built on what was once empty countryside is of course inspiring and makes Baudelaire proud of humanity’s achievements. Furthermore, Baudelaire expresses a sense of wonderment at the machinery of Paris. He writes, ‘ Il est doux, à travers les brumes, de voir naître / L’étoile dans l’azur, la lampe à la fenêtre / Les fleuves de charbon monter au firmament. ’ Here, Baudelaire appreciates that the beauty of the city comes from its mix of natural beauty and man-made invention: to him, a star in the blue sky holds equal value to the smoke pouring out of chimneys. However, despite this wonder, Baudelaire believes that the city in the winter is a cold, unforgiving place, and instead says, ‘ Je fermerai partout portières et volets / Pour bâtir dans la nuit mes féeriques palais. ’ While explicitly directed at the weather, this could also be an allegory for the city itself: its intensity can be beautiful, but in can also prove overpowering when one is exposed to it in large doses, prompting a sense of isolation and detachment.

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