Issue One, Volume CV by Clare Market Review

On the cover: H A N NA H

BAYS What was your thought process behind creating this piece and did you consider the theme of boundaries? I suppose I was considering the boundaries between ideals. ‘Hello’ magazine has a vast readership who obviously subscribe to its unproductive values with its glib emphasis on celebrity and superficial appearance. I find it pretty grim, and my views are expressed in the ‘Hell’ of ‘Hello’ beneath the glare of the camera. There’s an unhealthy obsession with the idea of physical perfection over genuine talent or intellectual

Hannah Bays is a London based artist/illustrator. Born in 1982, she studied Graphic Design at the London College of Communication. Forever inspired by the music and mythology of rock and roll, it was while at the college that she received her first commissions from the bands Babyshambles and Dirty Pretty Things, alongside the director of ‘Quadrophenia’ Franc Roddam. Clare is delighted to feature her artwork on the cover of the journal. enquiry. I was thinking about how our lives are becoming increasingly ‘virtual’ and self-obsessed, and the boundary between that and ‘reality.’ What inspires you as an artist? Life is the inspiration and catalyst to art, therefore ultimately death too. The darker side is where I get most of my creative energy, though not without a touch of irreverence. I’m drawn to fragility, decay, human frailties, and am inspired by places like the Welcome collection on Euston Road — a place where you can ‘consider what it is to be human’, as they put it. I’m interested in the unease — the reality that lies beneath the shiny surface. What sort of boundaries do you encounter in your artwork? I feel constrained by my own limitations regularly. Making pictures is frustrating, as the image you create is not the same as the one you aspired to. This has its merits as the work takes on a life of its own beyond your control, making it much more surprising. But the two just can’t correlate; one vision is based in imagination whilst the other’s the clumsy physical manifestation. Often I feel like I’m fighting Battles. How about the boundaries you face within the art world? I see ‘the art world’ as a far-off highly classified district of commerce — monopolised by very few. The level at which I operate has nothing to do with all that, so there lies a definite boundary. But referring to it in a broader sense it’s better to look beyond boundaries and try to establish your own platform for your art. The rise of blogs, websites,

and the internet means you can potentially get your work seen more easily. There is of course a financial downside to starting out as an artist and so often it’s subsidised with part-time menial work. Mine is in a vintage clothes shop, which has its dressshaped plus points despite the minimum wage.

to Dawn Mellor and many inbetween. Mostly painters, though I love film too, from Truffaut’s ‘400 Blows’ to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Francis Ford Coppola.

How do you overcome these boundaries? D.I.Y. by putting on your own exhibitions you can gain an element of control. The current economic situation has actually galvanised a lot of young artists. Many have appropriated empty spaces and put on their own exhibitions, and collectives are popping up all over. I’m part of Bare Bones (www. quarterlybarebones.blogspot.com) who produce a free quarterly paper as a rebuke to the trashy sublebrity piffle passed off as ‘news’ in free papers these days.

What would you like people to take from your art? Although an outside audience is imperative, I consider it secondary to actually making the picture — at which point I’m the producer and audience. I suppose I’ve always tried to make my work evocative as opposed to narrative or descriptive. I try to evoke a certain mood or condition — of beauty... decay... certain humours... try to transfer how I feel to the viewer as a mix of energies not easily transcribed to words. To paraphrase Francis Bacon: if I could put it into words, why would I need to paint it! ‘Wasteland’ by Hannah Bays featured on page 54.

What is your favourite piece you have produced? It’s called ‘Beautiful Losers’ (see bottom left) and was made in response to the novel by Leonard Cohen of the same name. It appeals to me strongly for the reason that it is dramatic — with an equal weighting of angst and serenity. I guess I aim to represent the beauty of decay — as the title suggests. What other artists influence your work? Crikey, the list is endless. From Hannah Hoch and the Dadaists to Francis Bacon to Luc Tuymans

CLARE MARKET REVIEW The Journal of the LSE Students’ Union, Volume CV, Issue 1

Editor-in-Chief - Sean Baker, Editors - Rena Barch and Katie Rowland, Production Editor - Eric King, Creative Directors - Meredith Bailey and Lydia Sprenger, Copy Editors - Kwaku Awuku-Asabre, John deGraft-Johnson, Amelia Iuvino, Dave Randall, Development Managers - Daniella Lock and Paul McQueen, Web Editor - Alexandra Kane, Special Projects Editor - Annalise Toberman su.claremarketreview@lse.ac.uk

www.claremarketreview.com

Farewell to East Germany In Or d Integ er to Main rity o f the tain the Berli n Wa ll ries of a d n u o B the Sea

Bordering on Madness

An English Girl Examines the Cypriot Wall from the South Side

The Wall

The Original Subculture

Nets

ReďŹ&#x201A;ections in Ink

Jasmine Jade

44 of Iro n 46 Bloomsbury 50 Contents 52 Subcultures without Boundaries

e r a Cl

Circle

Boundaries 57

Would You Like Jihad With That?

MicroďŹ nance Subaltern Studies

The Silence Between Things

Descartes

THE EDITORIAL

A YEAR ON from its reawakening, Clare Market Review, the journal of the LSE SU, is back with a vengeance. Last year’s successes were recognised in the form of two Guardian Student Media Awards short-listings – and with such success came expectation in need of fulfilling. With a fresh-faced editorial board nestled into a brand-spanking new office filled to the brim with hopeful enthusiasm, we hit the ground running and set about smashing through glass ceilings and leaping beyond expectations wherever possible: launching Clare’s closest sibling, Clive, on the cyber-waves (www.claremarketreview. com); piloting a special projects initiative; and recruiting more LSE talent than ever to feature in our first print issue of the year. You are holding hours of ardent Clare loving in your hands. In this issue, Clare explores “boundaries.” At LSE, the focus is often on breaking them down in pursuit of a common passion, but we find that destroying barriers often means confronting them head on. You will read how “Walls and Borders” do more than divide us physically; they challenge our concepts of home, likeness, national identity, and history. In “(Sub) Cultures,” Clare explores the self-perpetuating boundaries of societal association — whether voluntary, as in tattoo culture, or imposed as in the case of the Batutsi and Bahutu in Rwanda; whether generational or classbased. “Perception(s)” will challenge you to question it all: how our perceptions influence loan recipients and how we study history; how we perceive these limitations; how perceptions affect who we are and what we’re doing here. (Are you sure you’re actually holding Clare?) We hope you enjoy delving into the beautiful, multifaceted, and occasionally humorous content as much as we have (and if not, the burden’s on you to contribute next time.) If you find you need more regular lovings from Clare, please send us an email (su.claremarketreview@lse.ac.uk) with your contact details and we promise to keep you abreast of all the wonderfulness of our world. Happy reading Clare

Photo by Sacha Robehmed

A Farewell TO

East GermaNy 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, author Oliver Fritz reflects on growing up behind the Iron Curtain. clare

If I could be granted one wish, it would be to relive the night of 9 November 1989, as I and 1,099,997 other East Berliners broke through the Wall to join the party on West Berlin’s famous boulevard, the Ku’damm. The two faces absent from the crowd were my neighbours. They went to bed at 8pm like good communists so that they could be up early the next day to continue their fight against capitalism at work. I could hear them snoring as I left home. Meanwhile at the Ku’damm, strangers embraced each other and the one word on everyone’s lips was “Wahnsinn” (madness). There was real

champagne for free, West German newspapers printed specially for the occasion, honking cars and everywhere tears, tears, tears. It was all a long way from the East Berlin where I grew up. My childhood was fairly happy, though. In first grade we all joined the Young Pioneers and were issued with a nice synthetic uniform, consisting of blue trousers, a matching blue scarf and a white shirt. Not the most comfortable to wear in the hot Berlin summers. We sang songs like ‘When I’m a Grown Up I will be Joining the People’s Army’ and went on mini-manoeuvres in the woods. Later

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we became Thälmann Pioneers, which meant we could wear a red scarf and pay a higher monthly membership fee for the privilege. In PE, we learned how to throw a hand grenade and were given marks for our performance. Thank God they were only dummies – mine never went more than five metres. Being a member of the Free German Youth in the last few years of school was the highlight of our education. At political meetings we played endless games of the GDR’s version of Tetris – Noughts and Crosses. The compulsory postwar survival camps in the woods were quite popular with us boys as girls became putty in our uniformed arms. Despite many prices in East Germany remaining unchanged for over 30 years, connections were more important than money. If, for example,

you wanted to build a house, a good start was to get your hands on a few kilos of bananas. These you could give to your butcher in exchange for a juicy peace of veal, which could be used to get approval for the construction from the man in planning office. Easy! Next you would buy a mobile home that could be exchanged for a boat which could in turn be used to buy mortar and bricks. If you could persuade your grandmother to bring a few cartons of Marlboro back from the west (only pensioners could travel freely) then you’d have the perfect gift for your friend working at the post office. He’d supply your neighbour, a shop assistant, with a telephone line and then you’d get from her a new freezer, which could be exchanged for a bathtub. The roof tiles were yours for a few kilos

could afford to do if you wanted to stay alive. Our big industry was plastic. There was no end to the number of uses to which it could be put. We even managed to build a plastic car – the Trabant. While the world was marveling at this talent for invention we also invented a new language – DDR speak. A sack became a transportable bulky goods case, border police were referred to as peace guards and coffins were officially called earth furniture. Yes, this was the German Democratic Republic, a land of superlatives. Our language was the most laughable, our secret service the most overworked. Our Wall was the most famous, our microchips the biggest. We had the most ridiculous cars, the oldest factories, the stupidest policemen. Our border police were the best marksmen and our politicians the most senile. I wonder how many of you had ever experienced the GDR first hand. As East Germans, we had 13 a lifetime reservation with no way out, until that cold autumn night 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell.

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of smoked eel and the retro wallpaper (a special import from Poland) could be bought for an old pair of Levis. A bargain! The constructions workers would be secured with a few cases of Crimean sparkling wine and everything else would be bought with Deutschmark – Grandma to the rescue again! She would have to go to West Berlin to illegally exchange five GDR marks for one Deutschmark. A big thanks to our grannies, who almost single-handedly bankrupted the GDR by regularly smuggling our funny money out of the country. In East Germany, everyday life was dominated by plans. There were service plans, production plans, four year economy plans, defence plans, border plans, family plans, military plans, personal development plans, transportation plans, escape plans… People were so used to making plans that they would book next year’s stay when checking out of the hotel the previous year. At least getting to places was easy with our train service – the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? Smells of grandeur, power and… the Third Reich. But this was not what our leaders had in mind when they decided to stick to the old name. By maintaining the old name they could also maintain the old, poor standards of service and technology. What a brilliant idea! This way the capitalists could be blamed for our railways deficiencies. I still managed to visit most places worth seeing in the GDR: from Rostock in the north to Dresden in the south. In Rostock you could enjoy a holiday without ever leaving the beach. But swimming beyond the 150-metre zone was dangerous ; those who didn’t die drowning invariably might die getting shot. Fleeing the country to Sweden just wasn’t the sort of thing you

Oliver Fritz’s memoir, The Iron Curtain Kid is available in the UK exclusively at www. lulu.com. You can read more of his story on his website at www.ironcurtainkid.com.

ve By Ste

Bagley

November 9, 2009 Segments of the wall stand clean of dust

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14 behind a rope barrier, with a warning:

“In order to maintain the integrity of the Berlin Wall, please do not touch.” This is how we remember history in America. I got to the Newseum in Washington D.C. relatively early on the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall came down. It was quiet at the Newseum that Monday. Nobody had shown up yet to pay their respects and it was already 11 a.m. The Berlin Wall exhibit at the Newseum, America’s First Church of the Free Press of St. Russert, was tucked into a groundfloor corner space behind the elevator. It was a nave gallery with five segments of the wall ordered contiguously, relatively fresh out of a fourteen-year rest stop in the museum’s storage. A tower identical to the one from which guards assassinated countless Ossies stood empty of ladder and gunmen behind the

wall, a whitewashed concrete structure resting on a smooth stone floor. I could look at the wall and tower from all angles, passing around the Berlin Wall as easily as from my kitchen to my living room. In getting ready for this piece, I devoted days to researching the fall of the wall, which was easy enough with internet access and every major publication from America and Britain trying to promote their retrospective. I hit every source from the Guardian and The Washington Post to an obscure web site on punk music, and a radio program about the environment. Still, with a glut of information at the ready, the wall exists for me as distant a historical event as the storming of the Bastille or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Everybody aware of it at the time has a story about where they were the day the wall came down. For me though, the wall

Mrs. Gunter turned back to the looped tape of Brokaw. “To have a symbol...” she paused. “To think that these people were really involved.” I remember my first summer as a creative writing teacher at an art school in Connecticut. Many of my students were born in 1990 – the year after the wall came down. Second graders this year were born after 9/11. My greatgrandmother on my mother’s side was a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, born around 1895: meaning she saw the death of the Romanov family and the destruction of their empire, the rise of Communism in the country and the evolution of the Reds into villains in the eyes of North Americans. She never taught my mother her native language, and my mother thinks it was because she was ashamed. Gary was right. I am separated from the importance of the wall by time, a thing that puts more and more concrete between where I was and where I’m going. I tried to look back, but the green

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may as well have come down in 1889. At the gallery, Gary and Maggie Gunter, a former TV broadcast journalist and his wife, had travelled from Albuquerque, New Mexico to pay homage. I caught up with them as they stood in front of a video which featured edited segments of the live broadcast by Tom Brokaw on that night, of the wall being torn up by dancing East German punks in leather jackets. “I worked with Tom a few times,” Mr. Gunter said, a bit of a star in his eye. Gary Gunter, 65, said people of his generation grew up with the wall. “It’s something my age has always been aware of,” he said. “For the other side to be opened, it was a remarkable thing to witness.” “It’s... remarkable,” Maggie Gunter echoed, beaming, in awe. Mr. Gunter said something jovially, innocently, that I wish I could get out of my head. “The current generation doesn’t really understand;” he said, “can’t really relate to this.” We weren’t there – how could we understand?

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grass that’s come up in the former killing alley between the wall separating East Germany from West hasn’t taken root yet for me. I don’t know if time works that way. All I can do is get older. Gary and Maggie failed to explain to me what it was like when the Berlin Wall came down, in the same way I won’t be able to tell my kids what it was like when the planes hit the Twin Towers. I’m sure my kids will run into the same problem, and theirs, ad infinitum. The problem with history is that it’s old and distant. We call it history because we weren’t there. Take a look at pop culture and it’s easy to see how the Iron Curtain has made its mark, but that’s skin-deep history; slogans and guitar hooks instead of memories of razor wire and lives risked to deliver a letter or a scrap of news. I know from researching the time that in order to get news to the West, people risked their lives to cross the wall, and that ‘Radio Free Europe’ is more than just a chorus in a Michael Stipe song. 16 East German punk music became a sort of angry hippie sound, call it militant hope. And now where the wall stretches through Germany’s rural areas, a green swath of land has taken root where the Death Strip between slabs of concrete had taken route. But I can’t honestly imagine anyone born before the wall came down ever setting foot on the verdure. All I’ve got is media, the mark made on artists by bigger things. Before leaving the Berlin Wall exhibit I catch Christine Tobler, a young mother of two, out of the corner of my eye. She takes a knee in

front of a video telling the story of how the Berlin Wall came up, holding her older child close and whispering in his ear. He was getting collicky, fidgeting, looking around, starting to whine. Tobler’s younger child, probably not more than a few months old, had the wide-eyed look all babies do: drinking it all in without any ability to process it. The question was almost posed to myself as much as it was to her: What do you tell your kids? “I look at the exhibit and try to paraphrase it,” Tobler said, holding her youngest in her arm, while her older child stomps a foot on a grate bordering the wall. “I make the point, a feel for the fact that life can be difficult,” Tobler said, “that people can suffer.” One last look at the wall. I saw the tower looking out over it ominously and had to take a picture to remind myself that there was no ladder inside, and there were no gunmen. As soon as I left the museum, I could get on the Metro and head back to my apartment, miles away from Checkpoint Charley. I will be able to tell my children, eventually that yes, I saw the wall, and would have touched it but for museum rope.

Photos by Steve Bagley

Boundaries of the sea

By Shiu Wo Leung

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In 1967, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, riots broke out in Hong Kong. Initially against the fee increase for the Star Ferry, a means of public transport set up by British, the cause aggregated with labour disputes and resulted in demonstrations against the British colonial government. The room was boiling with the summer sun. The rays penetrated the damp air and shone on the flying pieces of dust. My back was itching all over with sweat and Mama put a thick, rough handkerchief underneath my T-shirt, so I bent my arms behind to rub the piece of cloth against my back. I was sitting on the wooden floor with my tin toy car. “Boom… boom…” I chanted whilst swiping the little red and milk-yellow double decker on the floor. The wheels turned faster and faster until they became four white beams, just like those in the Japanese Cartoon “Speed Racer”. We didn’t have a colour TV at home. I just watched it once when I was at Nicky’s place, the son of a merchant. We only had a broken radio from which all we heard was the DJ’s voice intermittant with the annoying cracking in the background. I released my hand and the car landed delicately and raced out towards the window. It

whirled around the smooth floor, turned at the foot of my stool and screeched to a halt right before the world map at the corner of the room. Papa bought me that map when he came back from Japan with the ship. Papa was a sailor and when he was home, after dinner, when Mama was washing the dishes in the kitchen and the broken radio was singing songs by Beatles, he would lift me to his lap and lecture me while stroking my short thick hair. “Son, son, you know when the Japanese came and occupied Hong Kong for three years and eight months? They treated us really badly. But time changes, you know how much their economy grows each year?” “Papa, what’s economy?” “How much money they earn! Son, you’ve gotta be flexible in this world. You can’t hold onto things for so long. Otherwise, you are the one who’s losing out.” Papa came home for a week every three months, sometimes six, but never longer. And each time after he left, I would sit in front of the map, scrutinising the name of all the countries. The names were in Japanese but more or less the same as Chinese. I knew most of the names because I was in Primary 3 already. My sister dropped

out when she was in Primary 2. So I knew that China was that huge piece of greyish-purple in the middle that looked like a hen, as our teacher told us, while Japan was a group of islands. China was big country, and Hong Kong was a small city, a colony of Britain. I loved to trace the dotted lines marking the countries with my little pink index finger drawing out the crooked borders. Countries in Africa were strange though, they were all bounded by clear-cut straight lines, like pieces of squared biscuits. Not only did countries have their boundaries, but even the Oceans. Hong Kong was in the South China Sea, and further to the right was the Pacific. I wondered how exactly the Oceans were divided. I imagined the Sea, with blue spiky waves like we drew in arts lesson, and the part above the spiky

lines was also blue because it was the Sky. So you couldn’t tell which is which apart from the black line of the waves. I conjured an invisible hand drawing a dark brown dotted line with a felt pen in the middle of the Sea and declared that it was the boundary between the Oceans. Yet, I thought, the waves moved, like the flare sleeves of Chinese dancers in long, slim silk dress, who threw their arms up gracefully like the weightless fairies from the Chinese New Year Performance. We took the Star Ferry across the Victoria Harbour that night and Papa told me about the buoy. It must be that they put buoys on the border of the Oceans with signs, like in those American movies. Nicky told me, “You are now in the South China Sea.” We hadn’t gone on the Star Ferry for

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a long while. The cost of the 20-minute trip rose from 5 cents to 10 cents. I could buy 5 more ice-lollies from Uncle Bill’s grocery stall next to my primary school with that. “They’re having a strike and riots are everywhere,” Mama grumbled while she was gluing plastics together to make fake flowers. “Mama, what’re strike and riots?” “When people stop going to work it’s a strike. When the people hit each other it’s a riot.” I closed my eyes and recalled the British police chasing off a huge mass of people and shooting mists as though just driving away flies. That happened near my home once. One afternoon the street was filled with people, all in worker’s white shirts and black pants, and they marched with wide banners, “Down with the British Government” and “Long live Chairman Mao”. I vaguely remembered the face of that half-bald guy with slacking chins called Chairman Mao from a picture that one of the workers was holding. The people were red-faced from their explosive anger. The crowd, appearing black when I watched from the fourth floor from their hair, loomed towards the police station, where a line of white police stood with small round shields in their hand. The two sides drew closer and closer and the black crowd started to crush the fragile police line. “Give us our wage!” “Trench, You come out!” Suddenly, another troop of police rushed out from the building, carrying gun-like tubes. I heard a scream from the workers at the front, dabbing their eyes with their palms. “If we hadn’t come to Hong Kong, we wouldn’t have to suffer all this fighting and I wouldn’t need to make plastic

flowers at home because my factory will pay me justly, like they do in under the leadership of Chairman Mao.” One night, Papa said we couldn’t go out, because the police forbid everyone to do so. And Mama complained when we were having dinner. We only had the steamed egg with soya sauce leftover from last night. Mama was too scared to go out to buy food today. “The Communists? Even you are foolish to believe that they make life better? It is no different up there. Corruption is in the root of Chinese. And haven’t you heard people say that the Red Guards are beating their own teachers on the street? They are high school kids and they have nothing in their brain anymore. Do you want our son to be like that?” I swallowed my spoonful of beaten egg without chewing and it slipped down my throat. Every time I heard the word Communist, I felt my head spinning and my limbs froze with cold sweat. I never understood. If they were so evil, why the workers took along with them the photo of Chairman Mao. I muttered, “I’m done. Papa, Mama, enjoy your dinner” before I left the table. I resolved to my stool and picked up the map. I stared at all the country names, the familiar words but unfamiliar places. I ran my finger around Britain. I ran my finger around China and stopped on the spot where Hong Kong was supposed to be. It was a humid and hot summer night. I listened to the shrieking fan on the ceiling while the moisture leached through the wall. Sweat came out of my fingertip and sweeped into the paper. And I no longer saw the black dot indicating Hong Kong.

Photo by Chloe Evans

Bordering

on madness Suffering

and resistance where the u.s. meets mexico

“History reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.” - Barack Obama in a 2008 speech to the citizens of Berlin

By Alice Ollstein 22

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It is a felony to place anything—art, graffiti, a message—on the U.S. side of the border wall with Mexico. On the Mexican side, this is a survival tactic, a way to make the ugly metal wall more bearable, more meaningful, more their own. From Nogales, Arizona, the wall looks like a war zone: floodlights, barbed wire, motion sensors, cameras, and the constant roar of Border Patrol vehicles both on the ground and in the air. The wall itself—olive green and rusted—is constructed from old landing mats from the Vietnam War. Cross over to Nogales, Sonora, to the backside of that same wall, and expression abounds. “No More Terrorism from the U.S.” is scrawled in white. Nearby, in red:

“We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.” One artist, Guadalupe Serrano, has installed colorful metal reliefs on the wall depicting the interplay between those crossing the border, the U.S. Border Patrol, and those who never make it out of the cruel desert. “It’s a wall you can barely live with,” said Serrano. “It’s as if the U.S. is saying, ‘Don’t even look over here.’ The art serves to beautify the wall and make people more aware of the pain on both sides. We also want it to have a healing, mending element.” Since the 1990s, the official U.S. border policy has been “prevention through deterrence”— making the border-crossing experience so deadly that people will stop attempting to cross. This involved

increased from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Far from weakening such cartels, U.S. policies have added to their strength and wealth. The democratic process also suffered when the REAL ID Act passed in 2005, giving the Secretary of Homeland Security— an appointed official—unprecedented power to waive every single law – local, state or national; environmental, labor, public health or otherwise – to construct barriers on all 6,000 miles of both U.S. borders. Since then, over 30 federal laws have been waived, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, and the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act. Also waived were laws protecting the rights of indigenous peoples. In 2008, construction of the border wall in Arizona desecrated 69 graves in an ancient burial site of the Tohono O’Odham nation, whose reservation land is divided in half 23 by the border. The bodies, some from the 12th century, were moved and reburied, and the wall marched on.

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heavily militarizing the safer, more urban crossing points in Tijuana, Juarez and Nogales, driving migrants out into the Sonoran desert. These efforts all bear names that paint migrants as a dangerous enemy: Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold-the-Line, Operation Safeguard. Because conditions have remained desperate or worsened in the migrants’ countries of origin, these walls neither prevent nor deter. T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, has said that the wall can only “slow people down by a minute or two,” and Border Patrol spokesperson Mike Scioli refers to the wall as a “speed bump in the desert.” Yet the construction of this “speed bump” has had real and severe consequences. Since the enactment of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, over 5,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The construction of the wall costs anywhere from $2.2 to $9 million per mile in taxpayer money, with 700 total miles planned. This is 5 to 25 times more than congressional leaders predicted. The amount paid by a migrant to “coyote,” professional human smugglers, has also

Just before the wall’s western-most end, where it wades right into the frothy Pacific, it cuts through a historic gathering space for bi-national families. The construction of a double wall along 14 miles of the border between San Diego and Tijuana has destroyed Friendship Park, which since 1971 has been an important cultural meeting spot. It’s a park spanning both sides of the border where family members and lovers could talk and hug through the fence, where groups held cross-border religious services and yoga classes—where people could, as the name suggests, make friends. It was a place that resisted the doctrine of fear of the ‘Other’. When the bulldozers came in to cut the park in two, one activist, Dan Watman, blocked their work for hours, holding a sign that read, in block letters, “Make Friends.” He was arrested for trespassing.

Now, Watman continues to resist by planning creative events that defy the two layers of wall that sit 200 feet apart. With his organization, Friends of Friendship Park, he arranges bi-national a capella singing using giant, homemade sound shells, Sign Language events with Mexican and U.S. interpreters, and vigils of solidarity. Before it was destroyed by the arid desert winds, Guadalupe Serrano’s latest art piece hung across a wide swath of the wall in Nogales, Sonora. On enormous sheets of plastic are enlarged photos taken from the exact same spot on the other side of the wall, facing north. Covering the wall, trees, bushes and sky. Not preachy, not a call to arms, the piece asks simply, “What if?” Featured photos by Alice Ollstein

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Enexaglmiishe

girl

om the r f l l a tW Southern Side Cyprio

nes th

By Elli Graham During the 1970s and 1980s, my mother and her two sisters followed a great Cypriot tradition and went to the UK, one after the other, to study for their degrees. While both my aunts studied law and eventually returned to Cyprus to pursue their careers, my mum, the middle sister, chose architecture and ended up staying in the UK. There is no shortage of Cypriot students who can relate to my aunts’ experiences. Four of my older cousins have already come over to various British universities. I imagine that when it comes to the experience of leaving the place you grew up in to study, I must have one of the largest and most receptive audiences at the LSE.

There is an important difference though, between the country that my cousins recently left and the one left by their parents. While my aunts’ and uncles’ were in education, there was an attempted Greek coup and subsequent 1974 Turkish invasion of north Cyprus. Independence was only given to the island fourteen years before this. The older generation came out of a young, politically-unstable, ethnically-complex, territorially-sought-after piece of land in which everybody else seemed to have a vested interest and in which the inhabitants had much of a say. This younger generation now comes out of an EU country with a respectable GDP per capita, high rate of education, and

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a growing involvement in international markets — but a country which nevertheless is still divided into occupied and unoccupied territory. Then there are people like me, children of Cypriots who have found their way into other countries. I’ve always lived in London, but sometimes I feel like a family outpost, frequently shuffled back and forth on school holidays, brought up by Greek-speaking ex-patriot students, and included in photos of religious holidays. I inherited everything from my grandmother: her jewellery, dresses, eyes, hair — even her name. But I didn’t watch the historical developments in Cyprus like my mum and her parents, and never lived there long enough for the situation to become normalised. It’s probably because of this that my ideas about the country are full of paradoxes and strange categorisations. Ideas about foreign occupation, demilitarised strips and military enclaves don’t fit well with images of backyard swimming pools, iPhones and a culturally prolific tourist 26 industry. Living in London has taught me that every street leads to another and every borough soaks into the next, so encountering such a conspicuous and impenetrable boundary across another city during my childhood made me feel dislocated and regretful. The border across the island was opened in 2004 allowing people from both parts of the island to cross into areas that had been closed to them for forty years. Visiting the northern part of Nicosia with my dad was strange. We were given flimsy visas by a bored official and walked for about three minutes from one country into another. The roads and buildings caught in the UN buffer zone were from another time. They had a certain dignified, colonial feel that comes from dusty sandstone and palm trees, jarred by the artificial plastic checkpoints and corrugated iron barriers.

What really struck me was how similar the two parts of the city are. I had always imagined that the northern part would be very different and of course, some differences like language were conspicuous. The northern part of the city felt far more crowded to me, but many of the shop fronts were empty. We could hear the calls to prayer more clearly and there were a lot of outdated-looking buses on the roads, a much rarer sight in the south where the number of cars per family is the highest in Europe. The disparities were clear, but the similarities were just as obvious. The architecture in both parts of the city is a mixture of various elements of the island’s history. Turkish baths stand amidst Mediterranean houses with painted shutters and wrought iron details in the doors. Prayer mats are spread on the floor of a mosque housed in the building of a gothic church. The same hulking eleven-pointed Venetian wall runs in a ring around the old centre of the city and encircles both sides of the divide. From knowing bits and pieces about the recent history of the island, I always thought that from the outside, Cyprus must seem like another variation on a lot of twentieth century themes. It was not the only British colony in the Middle East struggling for independence, nor was it the only Cold War bystander, and certainly not the only country partitioned according to religion. All these themes make it in my mind a compelling history, but not quite our own. Reading more and more about the events only made the whole messy story seem more remote. If I knew all the reasons for what happened in 1974 and knew the exact causal order in which they happened, why couldn’t I quite connect it with my family? They were all living there, weren’t they? History isn’t often discussed by members of my family. The few instances I remember hearing about it were

am sitting at a dinner party table, just curious. --The following excerpts are from conversation with Rena (my mum), Cryso (Rena’s sister, younger by four years), and Stelios (Rena and Cryso’s father). Is it difficult to remember what happened and to talk about it? R: When I was a student here I used to get very upset because it was still so recent. People at university always knew that you were from Cyprus and they would ask you what happened. I would find myself preaching to them about how terrible the situation was and trying to explain the experience. I used to try and explain what it was like by telling people to imagine how they would feel if they had lived in Britain all their lives and suddenly couldn’t go any further than Manchester, but I never felt that they knew what I meant. I don’t think the people I spoke to had travelled as much as we did. After a while I stopped talking about it. It was too hard. Did the negotiations that took place between Greek and Turkish Cypriots after independence mean you were aware of the tensions between the two communities? R: I was young but I never felt they were very important. It seemed to me to be something that was coming from outside and had very little to do with real life…My parents never gave any hint that the Turks were different from us or that they were secondary citizens. I knew a lot of them at school. My father spoke

As my grandfather would say, ‘if you’re not going to make yourself useful and pick some olives, get out of the field and don’t get your shoes dirty.’

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usually around tables at dinner parties with other Cypriots, or when I asked the odd question about certain landmarks or events. Even then, the discussion has always been detached and political, rarely venturing into the territory of personal experience. This is partly because war is not pleasant and often exhausting to talk about, but also because people in Cyprus seemed to simply get on with their lives. There were refugees to house, bombed out buildings to repair, burnt forests to re-grow, and the economy to rebuild. My mother and her sisters had school to finish and, luckily, the family house was still theirs. Sometimes this general feeling of practicality and acceptance unnerves me. When I encounter bored officials, rational newspaper correspondents or disinterested checkpoint guards, part of me wants to shake them. ‘How can you be so indifferent? Don’t you know what a human tragedy this is?’ I want to demand. But, of course, that would not be useful; as my grandfather would say, ‘if you’re not going to make yourself useful and pick some olives, get out of the field and don’t get your shoes dirty.’ In talking to my family about how they remember the construction of the boundary in Cyprus, it wasn’t in order to drag up past grievances and turn them into a sob story. It certainly wasn’t to identify where blame should lie. It wasn’t to prove anything to anyone, especially not to myself. If my family is anything to go by, Cypriots would not approve of rehashing old arguments, especially when there is work still to be done, and a country to reunite. I am still young, and

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a little Turkish and worked very closely with Turks in the forestry department, although that all stopped after the troubles between the communities in 1963. S: …We were all Cypriots and the only distinction was religion. Even then, the Turks were never strict Muslims. Most young people would eat pork and all that. Ramadan was the only period that they kept strictly. At Easter we would exchange flaounes and koulouri (Easter cakes and biscuits) and at Ramadan they would bring over their sweets. Whenever anyone had a wedding in the village, everyone would come; even the British soldiers stationed in the military bases would come. We worked together. Before 1950 there wasn’t any tension. It was the British who drew the Turks into the conflict and made them form their own group. R: That reminds me of something my grandmother told me about the Turkish Cypriot minority. She told me that many of them had originally been Greek 28 Orthodox, but they converted to Islam when Cyprus was under Ottoman rule because Muslims had to pay far less tax than Christians. Then when the British took over and they approached the Church to be reaccepted into the fold, the Archbishop didn’t want to know and told them to get lost. One of my Muslim friends Ishik told me that her grandmother was Muslim, but didn’t speak any Turkish at all. She thinks this means that her parents must have converted under the Ottomans. So even through now there is this very obvious physical and religious divide between the two communities, the reality of what people actually identified themselves with and how they ended up in those groups is complicated. That’s why when Cypriot health services advertise here for things like blood or bone marrow donations, they always appeal to both communities.

Where were you living at the time? R: We always lived in Lakatamia. It’s a village very near Nicosia so now it’s been swallowed up as a suburb, but then it was very small, kind of semi-rural. My childhood was very carefree… C: I was going through the summer holidays, which had usually been long and relaxed and wondering what my new school would be like. [My older sister] Danae who was studying in London was back for the holidays too. But in 1974 these holidays were not the usual ones because they abruptly interrupted. We spent most of them away from the house in the open air for fear of air raids. I remember we took refuge in an old house that was used as a barn up in the mountains for a quite a long time. There were three families fitted into one small house and at other times we were fitted in a caravan up in the Trodos Mountains. I also remember Danae having to leave early for London by boat because there were no air connections out of the island. How do you remember your parents’ involvement? R: After the invasion I remember my dad working a lot. At the time he was working for the forestry department as an engineer and he was away for weeks at a time. As the Turkish invaded they would burn forest and so the forestry department had to work very hard to stabilise the environment. My father was very involved in the machinery used to cut terraces along the landscape to plant new trees and stop the soil being eroded. I felt insecure because he was away so much. We would watch the news together. I don’t remember ever discussing it but I was old enough to follow what was going on. Dad was always in favour of Cyprus not banging on about unification with Greece. He and mum particularly wanted to send [my other, younger sister]

How clear was it what was going on during the invasion? C: The realisation of what was happening only came afterwards through the TV and grown ups’ conversations. Everybody was glued to the radio for news of what was happening. The most vivid picture of the war in my mind was ‘sleeping’ in the fields and seeing the Pentadaktilos Mountains ‘on fire’ in the distance. R: Everything happened in a matter of weeks...We were very aware of the tanks coming onto the beaches and the planes. ... I remember having to move out of the house and go away to what was then the

next village down the road. We spent one night in an orchard under the sky and I was trying to read--The Cherry Orchard. I’ve never been able to finish that book. During the other bombing periods, I also remember sheltering under the staircase under aunt Kika’s house. We went back to school on the 15th of September. How different was life afterwards? C: Our village was full of refugees who were looking for new homes. I remember we put up a young girl, a niece of one of our uncles, who was studying to become a teacher. She was a refugee from Morfou and her family was being temporarily house in a hotel in Kakopetria, but she couldn’t travel every day to Nicosia from there, so she stayed at our house for about a year. A young family moved into what used to be the stables in the house next to ours. They were there for years before the government gave them a place in a refugee housing estate. R: I missed a lot of people at school, classmates and teachers who suddenly 29 weren’t there from one year to another. I think my younger sister Chryso was too young, but Ishik was one of my closest friends in class. I didn’t discover what happened to her until twenty-five years later. It turned out she had been living in Canterbury and ended up in South London all these years. I was too worried about how she felt about it all to contact her for a long time.

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Danae to the English School because they were neutral compared to other Greek schools that were more nationalistic to the Greek military dictatorship. ... At the time it always seemed to me that the real fight was between the left and right in Cyprus, not the Greeks and Turks. In the village, opposite my parents’ house there is a coffee shop, like a café that was the official headquarters of the socialist party in the district where they all used to go a drink coffee and watch the football. I remember that within two days of the coup, after the first Turkish invasion, the Greek Cypriot government took the opportunity to send security men over and all those men in the coffee shop got arrested and taken away. I also remember hearing about how the military dictators in Greece were dealing with the left from my cousin who lived over there. I was always hearing about authors and composers being persecuted from [my] aunt Kika who is an author herself. I think that at age twelve to sixteen, I truly thought that it wouldn’t be long before we would get into a civil war. I really thought that was how it was going to go, of course, before the Turks invaded and it never happened.

The other important impact was on my friend Evangelia. She was right in the thick of it all because her family lived in the North in a village called Kithrea and they became refugees. They came down and they had to live in this rather run down flat in Nicosia in a part that was sort of like Kings Cross was a few years ago. She told me they missed their olives and their olive groves. She was very traumatised and afterwards I ended up supporting her a lot through her O levels.

We became closer after the invasion. She’ll tell you that I used to lend her clothes because we were the same size. I think through her I learned what it was like to be a refugee. What about your own life? S: The events gave me a great feeling of indignation. Why should this awful situation happen? R: The year before the invasion was a critical year for me. I remember feeling most distressed seeing pictures of the mums around the buses. In the early days after the population exchange when the buses of people were coming down from the North we would get images of women standing in car parks meeting the buses and holding up pictures of their young male relatives who were soldiers, asking if any one had seen them.

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How do you feel when you encounter this physical line across the country? C: Denial. I find I don’t want to know. I can’t bear to hear anything more about 30 the division. It constitutes a point where my wonderings into Nicosia stop. I will go anywhere else, to any other distant country, but I will not travel the three kilometres north to cross the line. R: After the complete partition of the island, the north seemed to me to be out of reach. [The line] represents the loss of half my country… How hopefully do you look at the recent steps that have been taken towards reuniﬁcation? C: They are pointless. The steps for reunification do not depend on Cypriots at all, but on mainland Turkey. Reports I hear from Turkish Cypriots is that they themselves feel that they are being pushed out by Turks from the mainland. S: Now there are about five new openings in the wall where people can pass through...

In December there may be another EU deadline for Turkey about the question of human rights in Cyprus. The fact is that there are two or three Turkish villages in enclaves in the North West corner around Odofragma and Limniti that are completely cut off by the boundary and can only be reached by sea. They will have to free up the movement of people so that they can get access to these places, especially though ports and airports. I think this gives some hope that if Turkey wants to join the EU they will have to comply. I am somewhat suspicious that the European demands will be relaxed but the veto lying with Greece and Cyprus should be a strong card. Featured photos are reprinted from the author’s family collection.

We d Tea bric We kids

Photo by Eric King

We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave those kids alone. Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone! All in all it’s just another brick in the wall. All in all you’re just another brick in the wall. We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers, leave those kids alone. Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone! All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

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of my favourite ever PostSecrets was a picture of a brick wall, with the words “sometimes we build walls, not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down” written on the front. I remember thinking at the time that such an observation seemed remarkably perceptive (especially to anyone who has been through adolescence). It is also as good a summation as any of the story and overall theme of Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, released some thirty years ago.

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By David Woodbridge

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The genesis of the album is wellknown enough, but is nevertheless worth repeating. Following the massive success of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which has sold an estimated 45 million copies, Pink Floyd had made the final transition from their early days as an underground band, playing psychadelia in 1960s London, to stardom. However, the group soon discovered that the trappings of success and fame had many downsides. For main songwriter Roger Waters in particular, frustration grew with the sheer scale of live concerts. Now playing enormous stadiums to tens of thousands of people at a time, he felt that there was both a loss of clarity and connection with the audience as compared to the far smaller venues which the band commonly played in the days prior to Dark Side. At one 1977 show in Montreal, Waters disgustedly spat in the face of an overenthusiastic 34 fan climbing up the mesh fence separating the crowd from the stage.

l you're l a in l Al ick other br n a t s u j all in the w Alienated thus, Waters began writing what was to become 1979’s The Wall. Growing from an initial idea of building a wall across stage to separate band from audience, the concept grew into a double album telling the story of a rock star, Pink, whose various traumatic experiences (the loss of his father in the Second World War, the crushing nature of the British

grammar-school system, etc.) serve as ‘bricks’ in a mentally-constructed ‘wall’ behind which he shelters from the world. Unable to connect emotionally with others, Pink metamorphoses into a fascist character, abusing his position of fame to carry out his twisted totalitarian fantasies, before finally undergoing a self-inflicted mental trial where he is told to tear down the wall. Exaggerated for theatrical effect, perhaps, The Wall struck a chord when it was released, staying at number one on the US Billboard Charts for fifteen weeks and spawning a number one single – Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 – in the UK. This was perhaps not surprising given the social context.The winter of 1978-79 had been particularly hard in Britain, with clashes between trade unions and the Labour government resulting in the complete stopping of many social services. The Cold War, after a period of détente, showed no signs of thawing with the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan just a month after the album came out. In May 1979, six months before The Wall’s release, Margaret Thatcher came to power following the fall of the Labour government. Within the space of a few years, her radical neoliberal policies were challenging many of the most fundamental assumptions of the British post-war social order. “Things aren't getting better,” said Waters in 1975, “they're getting worse and the seventies is a very baleful decade. God knows what the eighties will be like.” Understandable then, perhaps. But what about now? Do the themes of The Wall hold up thirty years later? Perhaps you had to hold back a snicker just now when I wrote about the Pink

fundamental problems – we have less close friends, fewer confidants, than even in the 1980s that Waters felt was so bleak. Some have none whatsoever. Even if we wanted to share our deepest and darkest secrets, with whom could we do so? The Wall is no longer relevant, then, in the sense that traumatic formative experiences can cause a person to shut oneself off behind a wall. Few British children today would have lost a father in the war (though may have perhaps lost one to divorce), for instance, or had their spirit ground down in the sort of grammar school which is fast disappearing. But equally, those born from 1990 onwards have never, and will never know a world apart from the Web, and in that sense they have always lived behind a wall, less able to connect on an emotional level with others who are more real in ‘text’ form online than they are in the real world. And whilst these kids won’t necessarily become 35 fascist dictators, they might forget that we can only truly be judged by our actions, and consider that tweaking an online profile is an adequate way to define oneself. Or they might shoot up a school. Yes, perhaps we do build walls to see who cares enough to break them down. My worry is what might happen when nobody cares enough to do so. And maybe that’s what Pink Floyd were trying to warn us about all those years ago.

References 1. Interview with R. Waters by N. Sedgewick, Wish You Were Here Songbook (Oct. 1975) 2. http://humanresources.about.com/od/interpersonalcommunicatio1/a/nonverbal_com.htm 3. http://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html

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character metamorphosing into a fascist. Perhaps you think concept albums represent the final clichés of bands leaning towards bloated irrelevance. Perhaps you simply think that, in our highly and increasingly technologically interconnected world, the idea of walls separating me from you is an incomprehensible one – not without merit in the 1970s, but hardly after, say, the release of the World Wide Web in 1990. And I would say that you’re quite wrong. That reference to PostSecret at the beginning of the article was not just an introductory anecdote. PostSecret is an art blog, where anonymous users mail postcards containing one of the author’s secrets to the blog’s owner, who posts the best ones every week. Browse through; some of them are terribly sad. One has to wonder whether an internet blog is the best medium for this kind of exorcism. With e-mail, instant messaging, and ubiquitous mobile phones – myriad ways, in short, to contact other people – surely it would be more therapeutic to talk to someone about such things? And therein lies the problem because you can never truly communicate your feelings via such technologies. 93% of the meaning of what you say is conveyed through your body language and through the tone of your voice. These core features of human interaction are only partially relayed through a telephone conversation, and can never be with an instant messaging programme. And then there are more

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t a wintry talk at last year’s Frieze festival, Clare editors heard notable voices from the music industry sit and discuss the nature of the underground in contemporary UK music. From white bohemia to black street music, the gamut was scoured for traces of underground resistance, and the most notable feature of the discursive results? -the end of subcultures as meaningful social spaces. The term ‘subculture’ was first coined in the heady sociologies of 1940s Chicago, but underwent its most famous passage of development in the UK during the 1970s through work undertaken by Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). During that decade, four seminal cultural studies texts were produced: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance Through Rituals (1976), Geoff Mungham and Geoff Pearson’s Working-Class Youth Cultures (1976), Paul Willis’s Profane Culture (1978), and Dick Hebdige’s Subcultures, The Meaning of Style (1979). They predominantly looked at youth cultures — punks, mods, rockers and teddyboys — themed by music and style, subcultures that, in Geoff Stahl’s words, “took objects from the dominant culture and transformed their everyday naturalized meaning into something spectacular

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operate is dispiriting. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that the thesis is myopic, that “in the name of political optimism, it too easily ignores the macropolitical success of hegemonic struggles in favour of abstract micropolitical struggles.” As Castells would have it, ‘resistance identity’ never translated into ‘project identity.’ And indeed, when Goths become managers and Neo-Ravers become doctors, when Grime emcees become Tinchy Stryder, when this sort of teleological absence reveals itself, one is always inclined to ask — what is the point? This failure occurs, of course, in light of the ongoing inevitability of neo-liberal domination of the North. In their book The Rebel Sell, Heath and Potter make the case for the default neo-liberalism of subcultures. They point to the myriad 37 examples of co-option by the mainstream and the lack of instances in which musical subcultures can be said to have substantively altered the mainstream, politically or organisationally, beyond simply acting as an aesthetic provider. Expansion is structured into the modus operandi of subcultural institutions, they argue, and as they expand, they adopt market paradigms for creative endeavour with a frictionless regularity. Thus artists, labels, magazines, promoters, and collectives all eventually transform into expansionist business concerns, or they die. They become Scritti Polliti or Disco Inferno, Mute or Stiff, i-D or Living Marxism. What no one can do is successfully contravene the structural laws of neo-liberalism without becoming Crass. Of course, the co-option of subcultural

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and alien.” For them, “style became a form of resistance.” As a body of work, the CCCS approach didn’t just dignify its subjects, allowing authentic voices to be heard where they were previously stifled and empowering those subjects positing political significance to their actions and lives. It also had the effect of diffusing that legitimacy to pop music cultures, which were so often seen through a Frankfurtian lens as epiphenomenal mass effects of capitalism. Pop music cultures were now suddenly a radical site for opposition, a battleground for, in Umberto Eco’s words, ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ in which we could be, as Clarke and Hall put it, “winning space.” I was not the only music writer to experience the thrill of first picking up a copy of Hebdige’s Subculture in a university library, two decades after it was published, turning over its shockwave neonist punk-adorned cover, and finding inside a language with which to make resonate our love of music and our social concerns, to connect our belief in the transformative power of music and style with the actual mechanisms of transformation. Yet write as we might with their vigour and belief behind us, we collectively have the nagging feeling that the subculturalist thesis is stuttering. Central among our concerns lurks the traditional pessimism of resistance. Cultural studies models suffer a continual inability to translate meaning-work into action, to enlarge and extrapolate sites of resistance. The evident absence of collective actors forming within musical subcultures precipitating social change beyond the small networks in which they

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style by the dominant culture was identified by the subculturalists, and indeed it was Hebdige’s implicit hope that subcultures would eventually converge around a disruptive semiotioc agenda, confounding the logic of the spectacle and continually renewing themselves in opposition. Yet even in regard to the Ur people of the subculturalists, the punks, the purity of the subculturalist resistance has been thrown into doubt. It was Ogersby in 1992 who argued that “any coherent sense of a ‘punk movement’ or ‘punk identity’ was largely the outcome of media simplification and commercial marketing strategy,” and that the discourses of manufacture and pre-popism of the kind that cast The Sex Pistols as the first boy band and noted the relish with which middle England’s tabloids disseminated punk imagery, and how that fed back into the pastiche and bricolage aspect of punk, gave grist to histories of transference and permeability between the spheres of culture. To draw our lens further back, we can posit that subculture’s decline in 38 salience goes hand-in-hand with the decomposition of class. The cultural studies scholars were working from a post-Marxist standpoint, resistance was fired with new hope through semiotics, but the actors were those historical consciously resistant working classes. The problems of organising around a material basis in an ostensibly postmaterial society has yielded a recent analysis of subcultures that is ‘postclass’ in character. The theory of Neo Tribes, first attributed to Andy Bennett in 1999, identifies groups which are de-territorialised, de-localised, and declassed. They shop at TopShop sometimes, Rocket at others; they access brands constantly and formulate their tribes around musical and style consumption. Consumption goes unquestioned as an organisational basis, allowing advertising research institutions to adopt this

model wholesale. While resistance is enacted, from an individual standpoint it is always seen as temporary, faddish, something to move on from as one shifts demographics, and from a market institutional standpoint as a catalyst to provoke innovation. Another recent reworking of the subcultural thesis came from Timothy Taylor’s ‘Little cultures.’ He conducted ethnographic studies of Northern PsyTrance scenes in much the same way that Hebdige did with punk and reggae, and concluded that the subcultural thesis could no longer hold. Why? Because the essence of resistance was lost. ‘Little cultures’ are more or less integrated, plural and consensual, static and powerless. And yet…anyone that has listened to music properly, felt the transporting power of the medium not just as aesthetic but as social, who has glimpsed in a lyric or on a dance floor new notions of how we might come together, knows that style and music are worth more than that. It was Sarah Thornton who wrote that “Hebdige’s multiple opposition of avantgarde-versus-bourgeois, subordinateversus-dominant, subculture-versusmainstream is an orderly ideal which crumbles when applied to historically specific groups of youth.” If we view subcultural activity as a process, connected to global flows, operating in multiple sites, with temporary attachments, as spaces in which sexuality, gender, race and age might still be radically reconfigured and dominant stratification resisted, then we might yet conceive of a way in which the eloquence of Birmingham could cross the decades. Us kids could do with a shakeup, and I can’t help but think it would be a shame if in the next ten years there wasn’t another neon-jacketed slice of wonderment alongside the stochastic textbooks and economic histories in the LSE library, waiting to be picked up.

By Mary de Boer

37 39 seeing the lights inside your house at night. They are wanting to see what you are doing. With no lights, they cannot watch…” Moreover, I had an extreme, pathological fear of being awake past 10 p.m., the time that, according to some research, marks the prime period for malaria transmission — thus at 9:59 p.m. you could find me making a beeline for bed, hurdling furniture in a single bound, hell-bent on evading the impending enemy ambush. Because that bed was the only place to hide safely during the night hours — shaded by the plastic, insecticideimpregnated expanse of my blue Olyset net. It wasn’t a convenient barrier to navigate: I had to first pry loose the edges of the mattress and then limbo underneath the hem, and then, kneeling

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hen I was living in Buguruni last fall — particularly after succumbing to malaria in September — my circadian rhythms were set such that sunset launched me full-tilt into no-holds-barred anti-mosquito warfare. In the hours after 7 p.m., I underwent ritual applications of 100% DEET spray (which stings mightily when applied to pores opened by a full day of heat and sweat). To avoid alerting my wily insect adversaries of my exact whereabouts, I rarely (even when there was electricity) turned on the fluorescent overheads, making do with candles and my flashlight. There were other reasons for this, too, as per a conversation with Mr. Gao, the health centre director: “Maria, the guards, they are never

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on my pillow, methodically tuck it back treated nets either, and most of their nets into the bed frame, my fingers squeezed wouldn’t be useful even as rags. To make together and bent to form spade-like matters worse, there’s not a lot of other protections out there: The classroom tools. But, once inside, how does one and dormitory walls have never been imagine the little cave a mosquito net sprayed with long-lasting insecticide describes? If it’s a really good net, the (too expensive); none of the buildings where the girls space is square, the net suspended at “Climbing in under a net, study at night have four corners from while inconvenient, is sort screened windows, two wooden T’s of like being tucked in at let alone screen doors; and no one tacked on to the night...the idea of having really likes to put head and foot of the bed frame or from through that ritual shut out on long pants and hooks screwed into something quite dangerous.” long sleeves when the temperature is the ceiling plaster, preventing it from touching one at night. 30 degrees Celsius with 100% humidity, The net’s top never seems to be pulled even at midnight. And the girls drop like flies from fully taut but instead sags a bit in the middle, drooping under the weight of all malaria. Many have it monthly — lying on the N2 and O2 molecules bearing down their bunks, self-administering quinine from above. Climbing in under a net, injections, missing class and taxing their while inconvenient, is sort of like being tired bodies still further. It’s brutal. I call this brutal, but that language tucked in at night; it’s comforting in 40 both the physical act of pushing in the represents more than just abstract mesh all around and the idea of having sympathy; it is personal. I, too, have through that ritual shut out something been sick with malaria; I, too — like the quite dangerous, something that — even girls — have been going to bed these last though you can look out at it from your weeks under the exact same type of nets as they have. For the past weeks, my bed safe haven — cannot get in at you. A net really only works, though, if — like theirs — has been not a fortress the mesh is intact and has been treated but rather an indefensible battle zone. with insecticide — it is only protective if And it’s scary knowing that the one place it can entangle and poison whatever is I’m accustomed to finding safety has trying to pass through it. An untreated or become, instead, the one place I’m most hole-filled net is about as helpful as the vulnerably exposed. preferred malaria-prevention technique of one of the young men I interviewed in Buguruni: lying underneath a mattress — a hot and completely ineffective method. Just 20 kilometers away from Buguruni at the Olania Girls Orphanage and Secondary School, none of the students have square nets; none have insecticide-

A Visual and Historical Survey of Women in Western Tattooing By Allison Gretsuk

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The art and practice of tattooing has had a dramatic history, riding waves of popularity and discredit and spanning the globe for thousands of years. Archaeological evidence dates tattooing to as early as 12,000 BC1. Sociologist Michael Atkinson elaborates “in ancient Egypt men were not allowed to be tattooed…only women…used the tattoos as talismans of fertility and sexuality. In the Mayan culture, women were widespread users of [body modification] to enhance the body aesthetically. Women in Borneo tattoo designs on their body as indicators of their social lineage, and Nubian women scar themselves to represent their fertility to males. Finally, Tiv women endure painful rituals of the flesh…to proclaim individual qualities of strength, courage, and fearlessness…The contemporary renaissance in tattooing practices within Western cultures confronts notions of docile femininity by appearing …possibly vulgar or ‘grotesque,’ when 2 compared to traditional gender expectations” . The man considered responsible for the dissemination of tattooing to the West was Captain James Cook, whose voyage to 3 the South Pacific in 1779 led him to cultures rich with ink . The Maori of New Zealand, whom Cook encountered, tattoo both men and women extensively and continue the tradition to this day, even 4 more so among women than men in recent years . When Cook returned to England, he brought the art of tattooing with him, leading sailors and aristocrats alike to bear the marks, including the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) who made discreet tattoos fashionable among aristocratic circles from 1862.

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When the practice spread to the working class, it began to be identified as a deviant 5 practice of marginalized parts of society . Even among the cultural elite, the tattooed slowly began to be considered 6 “eccentrics of high society” . Women were especially discouraged from participating in the practice in the West until the late 19th century. Since the 1960s, however, tattooing has found new life in the hands of women of the West and has been taken up not only as something with which to adorn the body, but as a powerful form of social discourse centered on the body. The famous tattoo artist Spider Webb explains it best in his book Pushing Ink, one of the first published books chronicling the history and culture of tattoos in the West, when he wrote that “[in] the ritual of tattooing there is a transformation which goes beyond 7 the power of verbal exchange” . Women have truly embraced the communicative potential of modifying the body in nonmainstream ways to comment on their experience of being in the world. In feminist thought, research 42 emphasizes that the body is a text upon which cultural codes are imposed, dictating the terms and conditions of femininity; therefore, body projects involve maintaining these conditions 8 and/or consciously subverting them . The ‘maintenance’ consists of culturally acceptable modifications like breast augmentation, excessive dieting or exercising, and other such projects that stem from “exaggerated or caricatured expressions of dominant ideals of the 9 feminine body” . Sociologist Victoria Pitts theorizes that modifying the body in a subversive way, such as tattooing and piercing, becomes an act of liberation through reconstructing self-identity, acting as a personalized rite of passage to the empowered self that is obtained by transgressing the regulations of the 10 idealised female body . Thus, since the body is a continually evolving entity,

these identities are always in a process of becoming, with endless possibility for transformation and rewriting of the self. In the West, we have taken the practices that are used in indigenous cultures to inscribe social hierarchy and write the story of one’s life on the body, and we use it as a way to self-actualize in a post-modern age where identity has become unfixed, or as Pitts describes it, 11 an “organic system” that is constantly 12 in flux . Because the body can be used as a place of reorganizing power relations and analyzing identity, it also becomes an ideal place for a reclaiming discourse centered on empowerment. The pathological label tattooing has received over the years undermines the social legitimacy of tattooing as a whole, and questions the subjectivity of the individuals — as some groups, such as women and minorities, are much 13 more easily marginalized politically . As such, pathological debates can never be politically neutral and they challenge women’s participation in the body modification community as a legitimate cultural practice. In 1998, The Washington Post went so far as to associate body modification with illicit drugs, homelessness and self-loathing, and as a form of “ruining one’s life,” implying a lack of control, self-hatred, 14 and suffering in the tattooed . Such arguments rely heavily on a definition of beauty that idealizes smooth, unmarked skin and such views of modification are particularly problematic for those women who use body modification as a way to reclaim and empower the body — pathology discourses directly destabilize the subjectivity and agency of these women. One writer in the anthology Chick Ink, Ang Harris, uses tattooing in its reclaiming function, and reflects in her story, “I have transformed myself through a means which some would consider mutilation. It has helped me to reclaim myself and see beauty where I couldn’t

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see it before. It does not define me…But without discovering body art, I wonder if 15 I ever would have discovered myself” . Modern women are continually showing that all theories aside, body modification — for any reason — is an individual decision and process, and theoretical arguments have no bearing on the emotional impact of body projects, be it positive or negative. Despite the stigma, attitudes are beginning to change as women become integrated into the tattoo community 16 both as participants and artists . While many challenges remain, the level of acceptance in society as a whole is slowly increasing as the available literature on tattooing expands and educates. With the tattoo renaissance growing exponentially from the late 20th century onward, understanding of the techniques,

practices, safety, and psychology of being tattooed is also spreading more rapidly. This all bodes well for the female tattoo artist, who straddles the stigma of the tattooist, who “mutilates,” and the stigma of the tattooed woman challenging popular ideals of beauty. Spider Webb predicted in 1979, “I suspect that women’s influence in tattooing will not merely change traditional designs by adding a ‘feminine’ flair, but will create 17 a radically new aesthetic” . With each passing year, more women enter the field and add their influence to the modern direction of this ancient art. While there is still much negativity surrounding tattoo culture when viewed by the public who hold to mainstream ideals, tattooing has always been here to stay. It is just now making itself known as a legitimate art, and women are leading the way.

This is an excerpt from an extended essay by Allison Gretsuk, titled ‘Reflections in Ink, A Visual and Historical of Women in Western Tattooing’.

45 10. (Pitts 72) 11. (Pitts 27) 12. (Pitts 73) 13. (Pitts 18) 14. (Pitts 24) 15. (Hudson 21) 16. (Hudson ix) 17. (Webb 56)

Bibliography Atkinson, Michael. Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Hudson, Karen L. Chick Ink. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2007. Pitts, Victoria. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Schiffmacher, Henk. Tattoos. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2001. Webb, Spider. Pushing Ink: The Fine Art of Tattooing. PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2002. Photos Page 42. Featured photo by Wendy Levin/D.M. Gramlin Page 43. Featured photo by Allison Gretsuk

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Footnotes 1. (Webb 31) 2. (Atkinson 175) 3. (Pitts 5, Webb 21) 4. (Webb 49). 5. (Pitts 5) 6. (Schiffmacher 9). 7. (Webb 18) 8. (Atkinson 15) 9. (Atkinson 16)

By Chu Ting Ng in heartbreak, happiness, or extreme emotion this day will come. jasmine will speak to grandma slowly, in spliced english maybe try for a bit of messed-up cantonese but it is enough for por por to answer.

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“my dear girl, baby doll darling, sweetheart dae bao- the one that fits best, there are many things that you do not know 46 and that is why you only live half-ly. we can only blame your mixed union but of course you know that we love you. “you cannot tell between soy and oyster sauce the fat from lean in trotters how to get mushrooms so plump and large and what goes into lap cheong to make it so sweet. you do not know the reason we are stout and wide (you are tall and slender) why we have thick, black hair that never greys (yours is darkening to a mousy blonde that is too common) the only thing we share is slightly brown skin. you do not know, and will never try to find from whence the second half of your name came until your friends tell you it is ‘oriental’ and ‘mysterious’ or until I mention it.

you will wonder when ‘joanne’ becomes ‘yoke lai’ because screams of sei yee mean nothing it has always been ‘mommy’ with thick tongue and you cannot fathom why we are so happy to see her. you will not know the strange slipping words, saek fan sitting dumb while everyone commences chewing loudly because without a fork, you are lost.

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“sit and nod, jay-jay perhaps one day you will see this garble 47 and somehow learnnot to speak as we do (we will not ask that much of you) but at least to know that you were born in the year of the tiger that the humidity, however high, will not kill you among other things, like your array of cousins and chinese new year. that is when you will hear the old music i sway to feel the warmth, but not heat, of the toa payoh one-room flat and taste the sauce properly.”

*por por - grandmother, dae bao - a term used to describe a sulky/affectionate/attached/spoilt child lap cheong - taiwanese sausage, the sweet ones in claypot rice sei yee - fourth aunt saek fan - eat

Circle of Iron Reflections on Rwandan society and politics By Philip Rushworth

“Maramutse?” “Ni meza. Maramutse?” “Ni meza”

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I had woken again at 5 a.m. when the sun habitually sat behind the low, rolling clouds. It made everything a 48 shade of moody grey. Men sleepily walked their bicycles and women walked purposefully hugging troughs or bags. I sat watching. Fils, my colleague and the homeowner, would often wake singing the Titanic song and his wife would be bent double preparing milk-tea. Their home included a young girl they fostered and all of them had lost part, if not all, of their family. Fils had been a street boy for eight years after 1994. The term ‘circle of iron’ was first used by French colonialists in West Africa. They were describing how isolated they felt from the people around them. In Rwanda open sores are covered and the mind and body are isolated; society exists within a circle

of iron. The problem comes when the circle is broken. ‘Ni meza’ translates to ‘I’m fine;’ in Rwanda it is impossible to be anything else. One morning a female student came to class seeming sullen. I asked what was wrong; “nothing, I’m ﬁne,” she responded. At first she willed the tears to go away but their silent tracks betrayed her. She told me her mother was seriously ill in the Southern Province. Social and private boundaries are a traditional feature of Rwandan society; it has only been in the last 15 years that people have eaten outside of their homes. It also means people have never vocalised their problems. After the genocide there was no word in Kinyarwanda to describe the thousands who remained tormented, instead they were labelled babfuye buhagazi, ‘the walking dead.’ I was invited to a wedding just south of Kigali. I was excited, as I had fond memories of previous African

had broken. He drew a boundary around his indulgence, reality hidden and image restored he returned to his wife. Policy-makers in Rwanda behave similarly; they draw boundaries around prostitutes, as they do with street children, discarding them from their

‘Ni meza’ translates to ‘I’m fine’; in Rwanda it is impossible to be anything else.

budgets and paper progression whilst herding them into prisons. I spent three months in Rwanda working for an English language newspaper. One investigative piece I wrote was about Gikondo, a ‘temporary’ prison 49 for undesirables. Its abuses have been documented by Human Rights Watch, but they continue. I interviewed street children who had been former inmates. They recounted horror, confirmed by the simple, haunting adult and child moans that spilled from its compound. Officially, it is a transit before the arrested are expelled from the city; in reality some children spend as long as four months in the prison. Kigali’s streets are an anomaly in Africa; they discard the makeshift stalls gloriously displaying old magazines and beaten-up bananas. These African urban traits don’t belong in modern Rwanda; the same goes for

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weddings. In Ghana it had been one long, frenetic godly celebration where spirituality had seemed to touch and ordain the romantic couple. In Rwanda, weddings are where tradition and modernity meet; however, it is precisely modernity that bound each ritual neatly into a solemn, monotonous procession. The band plays, the speeches are made, the presents are given, the band plays. The couple sit rigidly throughout. Nothing contrasted more with the wailing call to commence Inhore, Rwanda’s most spontaneous and sensual gift. Inhore is a dance which involves four beautiful women swaying rhythmically, enticingly, to represent fertility. They are followed sharply by male hunters. It is a schizophrenic madness in which four men jump blindly with the agility of cats and growl ferociously. Its fluid honesty shocked the sharp-edged formality of the couple and guests. Rwanda unbound was beautiful; the next time it was extremely ugly. Marriage can be claustrophobic and in Rwanda - like most countries around the world - divorce is possible on paper but not by society’s laws. I knew a wealthy thirty-something who was married with children. He was flawless by Rwanda’s reckoning, a loyal Catholic, successful professional and somehow always immaculate. One evening he shepherded me to one of a handful of Kigali’s clubs; two hours later he was sleeping with a barely-adult prostitute in his car. Through alcohol or a ghastly perversion, the man’s circle of iron

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prostitutes and street children. The government is dragging Kigali into a faux modernity. The progress is impressive, but too many are excluded for the visage of order - into obscurity or behind brick walls. Rwandan politics is similarly afflicted. The 1994 genocide saw the Bahutu massacre their Batutsi neighbours; the incoming government responded by erasing ethnicity and seemingly uniting everybody under the banner ‘we’re all Rwandan.’ However ethnic politics persist, as Kagame consistently ensures the 50 top posts in government, media, and business are filled by former Ugandan Batutsi exiles. If anyone dares to complain they are too easily denounced for ‘divisionism’ or promoting ‘genocide ideology.’ This system is maintained by torrents of emotional blackmail, easily done when media is under the government’s clenched fist. One day I read the t-shirt of a lady in a sweaty taxi-bus. It said: ‘I stand up for a new Rwanda. I stand up against divisionism. DO YOU?’ This is supported by a Soviet-style spy network. Society’s suspicion prevents free debate and accountable politics, but I only discovered this after three months in conversation with my students.

Throughout the three months they had, sometimes dogmatically, sometimes enthusiastically, praised Rwandan leadership. This time, we debated and I pleaded for honesty. The results were dramatic. After nervous fumbling, the first man stood up, “If you do something wrong and you are Batutsi they accuse you of corruption. If you do something wrong and you are Bahutu, you are accused of genocide!” I was as shocked as the others; he sat down. “I am not afraid.” We spent hours arguing. Behind the visage of a new, united Rwanda ethnic sentiments and grievances persist. The government succeeds to force a circle of iron around people’s tongues and minds. However, as with personal and social boundaries, Gerard Prunier warns in Genocide to Continental War that the consequences if this circle breaks could be catastrophic.

Artwork by Eric King

the

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By Angus Wrenn

Bloomsbury group

conomics and literature can be mixed, as David Hare’s latest play, The Power of Yes, amply demonstrates with its examination of the Credit Crunch and the Subprime crisis. Indeed Hare even brings in the LSE’s Director, Sir Howard Davies, as a character in the play, albeit in his previous incarnation as head of the Financial Services Authority. By contrast, the Bloomsbury Group is today popularly regarded as being rather hypersensitive, effete and too bound up with the urge to experiment with artistic techniques, or a concern with conveying consciousness itself, to have much time for hard economics. That image has been cultivated in works such as Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On (1968) in the line: ‘Virginia Woolf always said the pen is mightier than the sword, and she had often laid Evelyn Waugh low with her Parker 51.’ It may therefore come as something of a surprise to be reminded that the Hogarth Press (set up by Virginia and Leonard Woolf) was responsible for the publication not only of creative works – pioneering studies of consciousness as Woolf’s The Waves, and the adoption of post-Impressionist and Cubist techniques by Bloomsbury painters such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) and Roger Fry – but also important works not normally associated with the literary world. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) in its first English language translation, and perhaps still more surprisingly John Maynard Keynes’s seminal pamphlet of 1926 The End of Laissez-Faire, were both published by the Hoga-

in Virginia Woolf’s own lifelong fits of nervous exhaustion and mental depression. Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf (who himself had an important career in public administration, was a member of the Fabian Society, friend of the Webbs and was even once offered a chair in International Relations here at LSE) in the first instance bought her a hand printing press, in the hope that it would provide therapy from her creative work. The Hogarth Press grew to become a more commercial undertaking and rivalled original writing in Woolf’s attentions at various points during the 1920s and 1930s. While its value as a therapy for mental illness may be ultimately called into question (Woolf was to take her own life in 1941), the Hogarth Press’s contribution not only to literature but also to the social sciences is of major and lasting importance.

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rth Press. It may seem hard to imagine a contemporary economist bringing out such a key work under the aegis of such a bohemian and avowedly artistic publishing house, and yet it was almost inevitable. Keynes scarcely fit with the modern conception of a dour economist. Economics was still, at that date, a relatively new academic discipline and Keynes considered himself almost as much philosopher as pure practitioner of the ‘dismal science.’ He had known other members of the Bloomsbury Group since boyhood (he had an affair with Duncan Grant while at Cambridge) and afterwards in London was intimately associated with the Bloomsbury Group during the twenties and thirties. Moreover, his wife Lydia Lopokova (widely associated with the Russian figures in Woolf’s fantasy novel Orlando) was a prima ballerina, who had come to the West with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Besides being an astute investor, Keynes was also a major connoisseur of modern art and left at his death a large collection including Braque, Bonnard and Picasso besides the works of Fry, Grant and Bell. In fact, it can even be argued that it was precisely that element of hypersensitivity which led to the setting up of the Hogarth Press in the first place. It had its origins

SUBCULTURES without

Boundaries By Christopher Martin

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Most people are happy to accept the existence of culture; it appears as a largely inoffensive and predominantly passive aspect of our lives, albeit an encompassing one. Most appearances of culture in our conversations are unexamined, yet it appears often enough to recognise, rather uncritically, that we all have some, or that other people have a different sort to us, or that we 54 are dismayed by the lack of it in others. The semantic variety with which it can be used similarly dissipates any precision in defining or even locating it. ‘Yob culture,’ ‘high culture,’ ‘culture shock’ all share commonalities of meaning but are clearly distinct. Perhaps this is due to ‘culture’s’ diffuse and transient qualities, as per Roosevelt’s marvellous image of being unable to “nail currant jelly to the wall.” At the risk of torturing a metaphor, it is with jelly in mind that we might describe a popular understanding of culture that of providing a particular way of seeing the world. Stuck inside the translucent but tinted ‘cultural jelly,’ we are presented with a world of a particular hue; mine is currant flavoured – yours

strawberry. They are thus bounded to preserve their fundamental difference, and even mutually incomprehensible, as in Huntington’s ‘clash.’ It is surprising, however, that what is more commonly described as wearing ‘culturally tinted spectacles’ is so prevalent given the inconsistencies of this metaphor. One of the problems lies in the notion of the ‘subculture.’ It is quite possible that I exist as part of, or see through the spectacles of, several ‘cultures’ at once. I am a part of ‘British’ culture, but I am perhaps also part of ‘English’ culture, or ‘Northern,’ or ‘student,’ or ‘white,’ or ‘male’ too. If I have a takeaway from The Spice Hut maybe I am part of the ‘Bangladeshi diaspora culture.’ If I read an article about human rights, I am perhaps even part of a ‘global culture.’ While the frames may be getting larger, or more flavours added to the jelly, what this metaphor does not encompass is the inequality implied in the use of ‘subculture.’ Speaking about subcultures is speaking about power. This is clearest when considering the commonly employed

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‘high culture’ to refer to, for example, classical music as opposed to popular music. But it applies just as well to the cultural categories mentioned above. Each of which could easily be placed in a power relation with another ‘culture’ of the same order: ‘French,’ ‘Scottish,’ ‘Southern,’ ‘employed.’ As such there exist ‘differences’ on two planes: vertically in power dynamics with subcultures of the same order that are mutually exclusive; and horizontally with those of different orders, of which one can participate without contradiction. We may question the legitimacy of the relationships between subcultures in both directions, and their saliency in different contexts, but it is naive to deny them. How these relationships are represented within and between subcultures illuminate them further. There may be stronger links between certain orders of subculture at different levels. For example, an affinity between some musical styles and some styles of dress, each of which exist in separate hierarchical orders and have corresponding power relationships with other styles. Similarly, antitheses

may exist. Qualities of the relationships such as these are determined by the fluid process of adherents, manipulating inter-subculture relationships with greater or lesser success. For these adherents, culture is then experienced not as a total perception - a tinted jelly or lens - but as an understanding of the fluctuating position of numerous corresponding subcultures. The manifestation in social reality occurs when an adherent to the subculture employs it, by illuminating particular elements of it in different contexts and to different effects. The affinal, antithetical and hierarchical positioning of subcultures with one another is extremely fluid and based on totally independent reproductions of their different idiomatic qualities. Thus, they cannot be positioned as exclusive and bounded or fundamentally different on two 55 counts. The horizontal relationships are clearly overlapping. It is possible to wear wool jumpers and like folk music. So the vertical relationships - which I have likened to a Foucauldian dialectic of power - thus cannot be conceived of as having borders or boundaries, as they depend so deeply upon each other for their hierarchical position. In this sense, the idea of boundaries between subcultures is illusory.

Photo by Candace Holdsworth From a multimedia piece available at claremarketeview.com

By Sara Yasin s he hesitantly listed his order, a thousand questions ran through her mind. However, there was only one question that she could ask at that moment. “Do you want fries with that?” she asked. He nodded, his beard bobbing enthusiastically. He paid and joined a group of men who sat in one of the more secluded corners of the restaurant. The place she worked, Kirkman’s, was part of a chain, but prided itself on its independence. Working there was her weekly dose of the real world, an interruption to her mundane university life. She tried to focus on her calculus homework, but Amir’s tired eyes stumbling through his order were all that she could see. Despite all of changes he underwent, his eyes never changed. Their visits were sporadic at first, and their presence was hardly remarkable. Savannah would notice their sombre entries into the restaurant, and the way they avoided her gaze as they ordered. Initially she dismissed this as shyness, but as time passed she would hear their heated debates in a language that sounded so lyrical. Eventually their visits

became routine and Savannah grew more curious, especially when they began to involve maps, books and longer discussions. Today they were wearing flowing caftans, and something in their conversation had changed. They were exhausted. Savannah knew exhausted, as she was in her final year of university; 59 she was in a routine, and she wanted excitement. Or maybe it was thrill; the spark of a story that would pique her interest in this bizarre group of regulars today. Or maybe there was a much larger picture bubbling beneath the surface. Savannah found herself staring today. They were debating. The older man in the group was highlighting the importance of something, as Amir stared off at the yellowing wallpaper. He would graduate in a month. She saw him sometimes, at university, usually looking complacent and bored. He always travelled with a throng of young men, and Savannah imagined a conversation with him these days. She turned her focus to the group. Her curiosity intensified as she watched them draw lines on a map. Their caftans, their beards, the foreign language; she

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felt as though she was seeing features that would be listed in a crash course in identifying terrorists. The maps. Her heart pounded at the thought of witnessing a terrorist attack being plotted, was she in the midst of killers? She began to reach for her phone, but her indecisiveness kicked in. Was she being paranoid? She decided against calling in that moment. After all, she was the only one in the restaurant. As she went back to her calculus work, her eyes flashed towards the group. They were eccentric, but never disruptive. She remembered the Amir she knew in high school, the one she loved. He was much different then. He represented the trinity of what her parents warned her against. He drank, he smoked, he cut class. They bonded over a love for The Smiths and Nirvana, and confessing their deepest secrets in the earliest hours of the morning. He was always troubled, but her obsession with the tortured-yetbrooding bad boy interfered with her ability to understand the realities of his 60 cultural struggles. He never formally broke up with her, just like he never formally asked her to be his girlfriend. She never learned about his culture or his family. She knew he loved her. Savannah was Amir’s secret, and she did not resent him for that until much later. He changed. He transformed. Whenever she would ask about his family, he would dismissively tell her that she would never understand, and then sigh, and change the subject. As she watched him now, he emitted that same sigh, after another one of the men shared their opinion. Savannah wished she understood the language. Maybe the 16-year-old in her still wished that she understood Amir, because tonight she was afraid. She tried to calm her thoughts but she heard an explosion of chatter from their corner, and her mind challenged her again.

mir was frustrated. He didn’t really believe that the discussion or plans were very productive. He was caught in between two worlds. He was American, and he was Palestinian, but he didn’t know how to exist as both. He liked these men, and he felt lucky to have met them. He thought that he had found truth, and a sense of identity. He had a purpose. A cause. His family would never understand, so he did not tell them. He saw his mother worry as a scraggly beard began covering his chin, and as his demeanour became more sombre. His father, who once lectured him on a lack of belief, was weary of his son’s new friends. Amir tried not to focus on Savannah, but rather on the fact that he needed this. He needed a purpose. He was barely graduating. He would not get a job and this cause was his oasis, his escape from pressure, responsibility, whatever. He didn’t want to think about it. He thought about Savannah and studying for anatomy class. He cursed the counter for blocking her legs. Those legs. His old car. The backseat. The good days. A slap to the arm awoke Amir from his nostalgic state. He rifled through his papers quickly, but it was of no use, the rest of the group noticed his lack of concentration. He was not sure he could carry out such a plan, but he had to. He had no other purpose, and no other choice.

he was afraid. Savannah had only learnt about what to do in the case of a fire, a hold-up, or perhaps a tornado - if she was lucky. She did not want to believe that Amir was innocent, because that way it was the change that stole him away from her. She was not ready to cry “Osama,” but she wasn’t ready to consider them guiltless either. As she began eyeing the phone again, Caitlin showed up for her shift. She rolled her eyes at the men and groaned. She

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complained about late paycheques and other trivial things. Savannah wondered if Caitlin ever contemplated reporting these men. “Those guys are here all of the time,” Savannah stated casually. “I swear all that work for a stupid charity,” Caitlin said, rolling her eyes. Savannah cursed Caitlin for ruining the intrigue. “Charity?” Savannah asked. “I know. They look like fucking terrorists. I wish they were up to no good, I swear, catching terrorists would win me Student Body President…maybe even President of the United States,” Caitlin lamented. Savannah wasn’t sure if she wanted Caitlin’s story to be true. Charity? Something was not right. As the other men spoke, she caught Amir tapping his foot nervously. She impulsively dialled 911 on the cell phone tucked into her smock. She was discrete, but she swore that she could see him eyeing her sadly. Immediately she felt remorseful and confused. She would either be saving lives or ruining lives. She didn’t know how she would react to a parade of police officers, whisking away these men. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Savannah did not dare to look at her phone again. The men began to pack their things, and she panicked. As they filed out, deep in conversation, she pretended to be absorbed in working with the register. As she did so, Amir hesitantly touched her hand; slipping a sheet of paper into it. He held her gaze, and quietly wished her goodnight. After he left, she saw a single sentence: “I am sorry, and I wish you could understand.” She looked to her phone, and saw that she had never hit the green send button. The cops never made a grand entrance, and she never saw him again.

Finance:

Micro

Breaking the Boundaries of Traditional Finance By Priyanka Verma

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Say the word ‘finance,’ and investment bankers in navy suits is probably the picture you conjure. Microfinance, however, is turning our preconceived notions of finance on their head breaking boundaries of what we assume finance can achieve. A concept developed 62 by Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, microfinance provides loans and other financial services to those too poor to qualify for traditional loans and has been hailed as a revolutionary concept in poverty alleviation. This article is based on the research of the Student Microfinance Development Initiative, a charity run by LSE students. The story begins with Muhammad Yunus teaching economics in 1974 in Dhaka, the the Bangladeshi capitol engulfed by famine. Yunus found his classroom theories to be irrelevant and instead went into the villages and experimented with methods of helping the poor. After giving just $27 to a group of 42 villagers to invest in buying a cow, he realised the power of giving small loans to the impoverished. These people would not normally have access to loans because they do not have any collateral.

The loans enabled them to start small businesses, and thereby move on the path to self-sufficiency. Convinced that this was the way forward, in 1976 he founded what has now become the poster child for microfinance Institutions, Grameen Bank. Perhaps one of the biggest myths in finance has been that the poor cannot repay loans. Many microfinance institutions charge high interest rates, ranging from 20% to even 40%. Common sense says that a poor farmer is never going to generate such high return, but the repayment rates are in fact incredibly high, at around 95% to 98%. The discovery that the poor can be reliable in paying back loans has been ground breaking and has opened the door for greater investment. Many believe that it is ‘group lending’ targeted primarily at woman that has achieved these phenomenal results. Group lending has its roots in ROSCAs, where a group of friends meet for a defined period of time to save and borrow together. Each member contributes the same amount at a meeting and one member takes the whole pot of money,

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giving them access to a larger sum of money. The Grameen Bank did something similar, but in a more formalised manner – they gave out loans to women who came in groups of five. The rationality behind this is simple yet profound, in a group there is more peer pressure to ensure money is being used and saved wisely. These women live in condensed villages; this enables them to monitor each other with more efficacy than an external money lender. Additionally, the fear of being ostracized by their friends acts as an incentive to repay the loan. By strategically lending to women, microfinance has broken another accepted norm. Yunus lent primarily to women because he felt they were more responsible about repayment and that families benefited more when the woman controlled the money. In many cases the women came from households in which the husband would squander money; therefore, microfinance empowered these women. Like all great ideas, microfinance has its share of criticisms. While some say that the interest rates charged are ridiculously high, others have questioned microfinance’s ability to achieve much in the way of poverty reduction. The loans do not always help the poorest people and are more geared towards small scale entrepreneurs or farmers, which sometimes leads to greater social tensions. The ‘group-lending’ philosophy is also believed to engender social fragmentation. While there is merit in all of the above it is important to note that microfinance is still an evolving area and there is great potential for its limitations to be overcome in the future. The microfinance model has challenged many of the underlying assumptions of traditional finance. However, microfinance is not an end in itself, but rather provides the tools needed to overcome poverty. Despite a few limitations, microfinance promises to be at the heart of the development debate. Perhaps it will not be too idealistic to one day hope that our children will walk into what Yunus described as ‘poverty museums.’

SUBALTERN STUDIES:

An Earthy History of the Jewel in the Crown By Tiberio Simonelli

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‘History is written by the victors’: a phrase commonly attributed to Winston Churchill that does much to indict the nature of the subject. History as an intellectual field often tends to focus on elite levels of society, those that have come to dominate the affairs of states, 64 societies and citizens. Undeniably, archives and libraries have long been aware that whole segments of societies (and whole societies for that matter) are underrepresented, misrepresented, or simply not represented at all. The history of the unremarkable, of the everyday occurrence, of the marginal figure in society tends to cower in the face of the towering historical edifice that represents elitist documentation. It is therefore refreshing to turn to the story of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians that set about to chip away at the dominance of elitist historiography in their area of interest: colonial and post–colonial South Asia. This Subaltern Studies school of thought emerged in the early 1980s, first appearing as the title of a journal edited by Ranajit Guha. The essence of the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) can be summed up as a ‘history from below,’ as opposed to a

focus on grand social structures and influential figures. Indeed, the term ‘Subaltern’ is derived from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the term ‘subaltern’ as a euphemism for the proletariat. Significantly, the critical Marxism of the English historian E.P. Thompson — who attempted to move beyond economistic definitions of class interest — encouraged the Subaltern Studies collective to develop the term as an expression for all groups they viewed as oppressed. The real question, Guha suggested, was how far various ‘subaltern’ groups, who had been relegated to the periphery of Indian society, were able to make history and constitute their own politics as an ‘autonomous realm.’ The project was founded on the idea that the history of colonial India was defined by a contest between elite and subaltern political domains, which were mutually exclusive, inaccessible, and incomprehensible to one another. Although some tensions exist within Subaltern thinking, a theme that persists is the opposition of two ‘domains,’ that of the elite (meaning the colonial state and its allies) versus the subaltern.

theory.’ The heroes of this Marxist narrative were the Indian elites — usually presented as the first Indians to gain any sort of political consciousness — who provided the inspiration for resistance and rebellion against the British. Furthermore, Marxist historians widened the parameters of ‘acceptable nationalism’ to include the ‘revolutionary terrorists’ and the left. In any case, both nationalists and communists shared the assumption that the mass of Indians were woken to political life by Gandhi and the Congress High Command. The SSG rejected those narratives. It has looked past the elites to the nonelites, the subalterns, writing them into history and presenting them as autonomous agents of political and social change. What was distinctive about their approach was the argument that these struggles, far from being creations of what they termed ‘elite nationalism,’ were independent of it and actually much more radical. In fact, as Pandey has pointed out in his essay ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism,’ the radical 65 and largely local nature of autonomous peasant resistance actually needed to be reined in by Indian National Congress politicians, for fear of destabilising their own pan-Indian strategy of defiance. Today, the Subaltern Studies Group has extended its influence to Latin American Studies, African Studies, ‘cultural studies,’ and other arenas. It is now broadly conceived as a postcolonial critique of elite and Western-orientated history, which can be applied in all post-colonial societies. Furthermore, it has expanded “beyond the discipline of history” to engage “with more contemporary problems and theoretical formations.” Providing an alternative viewpoint to the study of the present in the same way it supplied post-colonial history with a worm’s eye view of events.

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The collective focused on peasant and tribal struggles, but their project had an even more ambitious aim; they wished to reconstruct peasant consciousness itself, and to demonstrate its autonomy from elite nationalist thought. In writing the histories of Indian ’insurgencies,’ scholars associated with the SSG were concerned not only with political acts (such as rallies, demonstrations, and uprisings) which were often organized from above, but also political rhetorics and discourse. These were more pervasive and subtle entities, and were as much the property of the subaltern classes as they were nationalist politicians. Group members saw the struggles of the subalterns as being rooted in specific discourses of community and religiosity. These ideas, authentically subaltern in nature and origin, were inherently political, and served to generate and encourage political dynamism among the subaltern classes. Fundamentally then, the SSG wanted to know how political action was mobilised among the subaltern levels through the power of their own ideas. The Group was a progressive reaction to the then influential ‘Cambridge school’ of historians, which looked at Indian resistance to colonial rule in terms of bourgeois elites. This school of thought saw the anti-colonial struggle in terms of a ‘unitary movement’ under the leadership of the Gandhian Congress. In this model, Indian politics was conceived through the idea of the ‘locality, province and nation.’ In the Cambridge view, it was through the mediation of nationalist politicians alone that the link between each of the three arenas was created so that the movement subsequently came to constitute an interconnected structure of resistance. The SSG was also a conscious reaction against revisionist versions of Marxist history, which locked India into mechanical interpretations of the ‘stages

Photo by Clive

“Let me tell you what I think about when I walk: As I’m walking to and from work, I pass mostly UPenn students, associated staff and faculty and all the other randoms that you tend to see out on the streets of Philadelphia at the rushhours on any given weekday. I meet eyes with people and do that stare thing that happens next, sometimes you keep looking and maybe you smile or maybe you don’t, but it’s always ambiguous as to whether or not you (or they) are expressing interest, or maybe you do the about-to-make-eye-contact into sheer and utter avoidance of gaze. Which could also express interest. Or not. I like to try and keep my hair kempt-but-unkempt so that I look casual-but-showered. Sometimes I think about whether or not other people see this. Whether they think I’m just gross and need a bath or if they think I look normal. “I think about what other people are thinking in their heads. Do most people have random thoughts going through their random heads? Or do they generally have some kind of silence, or music, or

ever-present loud drone? Like sometimes I ask my girlfriend what are you thinking and she says nothing and I can’t help but think that’s not true. I mean, you’re staring off into space and it looks like you 67 got these thoughts, these gears turning. Is it just she’s thinking about something she doesn’t want to talk about? Like sometimes you catch someone in the middle of a weird or awkward (or even awkward and weird) thought that would just be better summed with nothing. How many people am I passing a day who are thinking weird and awkward thoughts that would be just fantastic to know? Maybe the girl I passed today with red tights, red flats, a grey skirt, and a yellow sweater with a red stripe through it (was all the red intentional?) was thinking something downright absurd, or disgusting. Or maybe it was something sad. I don’t know. It’s weird to think that someone else might hear what I’m thinking or that I could hear what they’re thinking. Would I feel like I was intruding if I could hear people’s thoughts or would I generally just think

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By Samuel Messing

The Silence Between Things

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they were boring? When this gets old I like to just walk in time with my music (which is always playing) and just kind of try and imagine what the music video would be to go along with whatever song I’m hearing. Like this one song which I think generally needs to be an anime music video of ski-ninjas skiing down a slope while an evil general shoots shells from a tank at the slopes above them initiating an avalanche that they have to outrun as they ski towards a mountain town hiding some sort of state secret. The whole thing would end with pretty much everyone dying. “More things I think about when I walk. Philly. Philly is weird. That’s something I think a lot having just moved here. And it’s hard for me to get that out there without someone taking it as an evaluative thing. Like I call my mom and my mom says how’s Philly and I respond Philly is weird and she says stop bashing it, Sam, give it time and I just think she doesn’t get it. It’s not a bad thing and I’m just trying to figure out how I feel 68 about it. Like, for someone coming from Baltimore it feels big, like New York City. But as I’ve confirmed with everyone else who just moved here from elsewhere, there’s nothing going on. Like, nothing nothing. I’m serious. Show me a human foosball tournament. Show me some underground music scene that’s specific to Philly. Baltimore has: 8-bit, Bmore Club, a huge noise scene, a big folk scene, etc. NYC has the whole Brooklyn thing. What does Philly have? It has Kurt Vile and Espers but that’s all I’ve found so far. I mean, Staten Island even has a music scene (respect for the Clan). Again, this isn’t a bad thing—it’s just weird. It’s something I’m figuring out. I walk down the street and just try to imagine where the music is. Why did 8-bit come out of Baltimore and not Boston? Why all of a sudden did Athens, Georgia become a big deal? Austin? Michigan? Who and what decides how these things come out and

why is it that Philly doesn’t have a scene? These are things I think all the time. “When I stray away from music sometimes I think about brains. I think about the fact that the map we have of our body isn’t always right, and you can end up thinking you belong where you don’t. Think about phantom limbs: people who think they have arms when they don’t. Or alien limb syndrome: people who think they don’t have arms when they do (look it up dude, I’m not lying). What about all those experiments where people can be made to believe that their arm is actually a table (again, look it up dude). I’m involved with a lot of transcranial magnetic stimulation studies where we take a giant metal coil and induce magnetic fields to stimulate the brain remotely. We’re trying to see if some part of the brain will change while doing something if it’s stimulated somehow and somewhere. It sometimes certainly feels as vague as it sounds. “Where does this all coalesce? Here is the thing brain- and thought-related that I think about the most: Neglect. Neglect is related to alien limb syndrome. I can define it for you generally as the neglect of things that are actually there: the belief that something that is there is not there (if that makes sense). Let’s take an example. You can take a certain kind of stroke patient with a certain kind of damage to a certain part of their brain (all this information can be filled in on your own time) and ask them to draw a clock. They will draw one half of it, but put all 12 numbers on it. They will tell you it’s correct. If you ask them to tell you if anything’s wrong with it they’ll say no. Or take an example of an alien limb patient. She woke up after a stroke and had this general paranoid delusion that her right arm was not hers. She’d scream and yell and try to throw the arm

split-brain patients? I don’t know if you know about them. They’re patients where you cut the corpus collosum-the neurofibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. Without this the two hemispheres don’t talk and you get weird things like your right hand fighting with your left over your choice in weekend-wear. The worst part is that the weird inter-hemisphere conflict doesn’t normally show up. You can talk to a split-brain patient and not even think they’re a weirdo. It’s terrifying. What if I’m like that? I think all the time when I’m walking towards or away from work that the line between brain-damaged and brain-healthy is so small that I don’t know if it’s worth considering. What about the people I pass? Do they have things like these? “When and at what point do you realize something and know that there’s a reason behind it? How many texts from my sister does it take before something’s pathological? Or is it different than that? Sometimes when I type I type full words completely backwards. Perfect order. 69 I’ve never found someone else who does it but it’s an error I frequently make and it’s just another thing that freaks me out. Think about it. What’s going on there? Or sometimes I mean to type one word but I type something else. Like I’ll want to say ‘sometimes’ in the previous sentence but type ‘sponge’. Something completely unrelated. So unrelated that you can’t chock it up to something simple like I was thinking sponge when I

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out of the bed. She’d throw herself out of the bed just trying to throw the arm out. When you asked her how many arms she had, she’d say one and if you asked whose arm her other one was, she would say I don’t know yours probably and so you would say, naturally, so I have three arms? And she would respond with something like yeah I guess. “And this is where it comes in during my walk to work everyday: What the hell am I neglecting? How would I know if I’m neglecting anything? Is there any kind of metric or piece of information that I can use to figure out what I’m not thinking about? I get a text from my sister telling me to call my mom because I don’t call her enough and then it makes me think: is this a moment of neglect? Generally, I go through each day so busy and thinking such random thoughts that I don’t think the most obvious ones. Or sometimes I mean to do something in earnest but I just don’t. For instance EH has called me enough times I feel like I should call her back but I never think to. Given my history with her it might make sense for me not to want to call her, but it doesn’t even get there. I just don’t think to. Is my brain stopping my brain from thinking something because it doesn’t want to think that? Does that make sense? I’m humble enough to believe that I don’t have full control over my thoughts or what’s going on inside my brain. I mean, random thoughts just pop in there and all the time I have dreams that I wake up from in a cold sweat and I wouldn’t do that if I had the choice. “And so I think all the time, what kinds of stuff does my brain do that I don’t want it to do? Do I really forget to call my mom? Or am I stopping myself from thinking about my mom? What about EH? I mean, I don’t know. And what about

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tried to type sometimes. Because I wasn’t thinking sponge. There are no sponges in my workplace (well none near my desk). There is no reason to type sponge. “I’m not always so drowned in thoughts, though. I told you before that sometimes I just like to walk to the beat of my music. That’s why I like the band Pinback so much since so much of their music is close to the tempo I walk at (or some nice factor of it). It’s something that when it works it works perfectly: each step a snare hit and every third foot a bass kick. Or something. But it suddenly makes everyone seem as though they fit in with what I’m doing and I love that too. You see everything with a new order that’s arbitrary and not-real but you see it anyways. Patterns where there should be none. But besides listening to music there are things that I just will not think about. I do not think about them as a conscious choice. Like, I don’t think about what my sister thinks of me. I mean she’s older so I look up to her but because of the whole growing-up and sibling thing 70 I still feel that middle-school-level fear of rejection with her sometimes. I don’t

think about all the people I’ve forgotten to call back, I don’t think about the people who haven’t called me back. I don’t think about the fact that my mom has stage-three bilateral breast cancer. I don’t think about the fact that I listen to music so loudly that sometimes I’m sure I’m going deaf. I try not to think paranoid thoughts about my girlfriend, the longdistance and that whole bit. I don’t think about what the other people at work think of me or the fact that I spend most nights alone. When I’m biking I never think about how many near-misses and close-calls I’ve had. I don’t think about the time that I got between two vans and one of the vans didn’t see the other one so he turned into the other van and so they were going to crash except I was in between them, banging on the sides of both of them and screaming at a volume I didn’t know I was capable of. I certainly never think about what my face must’ve looked like.”

Featured title photo by Sam Parfitt Featured artwork by Chloe Evans

Descartes By Sean Gittins

Written in a tone that shows its author to be on familiar territory, Descartes wrestles with multiple philosophical problems about knowledge and doubt -- how can we know truths, what are truths, how can we know that we know a truth, how can he

know that I know that I know 71 a truth, what is God and is he taller than Jesus? Most shocking, perhaps, is that the draft manuscript is set in a toilet. Once one has gotten over the initial jolt, the reason why should be obvious. The toilet is a place where doubt surfaces more prominently than any other place. It is the part of the house where we expose ourselves most, and we spend essential time in the toilet. Yet we fear it, despite its constant presence (at least I did in my student house). Descartes is searching for truths that cannot be doubted, and where better to look than the place where we doubt ourselves most?

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he famous 17th Century French p h i l o s o p h e r, Rene “The Ren” Descartes, noted for his proposal that the universe is made up of two distinct substances, mind and matter, has once more come under the philosophical spotlight thanks to the discovery of an early draft of his most famous work “The Meditations”.

MEDITATION ONE An enquiry into the nature of our beliefs and truth.

I walk into the toilet. How do I know I am in here? I walk over to the mirror and look at myself. I look old. How old? How do I know how old? A lady walks in behind me and gives off a loud shriek. She calls me a pervert and slaps me on my bulging jawbone. I am obviously in the wrong toilet, but I decide to pursue this fortuitous opportunity will my wife say? I still haven’t finished and search for true knowledge. urinating and I go back to the latrine to finish the job. Is my penis really there in my hands? My wife has asked the same thing on several occasions. Maybe she too is a sceptic? When I hold her, she whispers, “How can this be happening to me?” She is such a philosophical woman. I must look for certainty in my beliefs. I believe I see my penis in my hands, but how can I know I see it in my hands? I must search for clear and distinct ideas. Only they can be “How do you know this is a woman’s true and form the basis of my beliefs. I zip up. Preoccupied with my thoughts about toilet?” I ask her. I try to persuade her that I am looking truth, I catch my penis in the zipper. I am for knowledge but she says she hasn’t seen in pain. Oh God, it hurts. No one else can him. Her shrieks continue. I decide to leave know my pain, only I can know my pain If the toilet. The woman’s persistent wailing people could share my pain, why would they aggravates my tinnitus. How would I know be laughing at me? I hear laughter coming if I have tinnitus or not? If I asked the doctor, from the other cubicles, and some voices saying, “That guy got his penis caught in his would I be able to hear his answer? zipper, ha ha!” I walk into the men’s toilets. Again, I I hobble onto the toilet seat. My penis is ask myself how I can know that I am in a toilet. I think about how it feels like a toilet red. Is it red, or does it just look red? How to me. The images of yellow-stained urinals can it look red and not be red? It hurts. flash out at my optic nerves, allowing me Sitting on the crapper gives me an urge to to perceive a dirty toilet. My God, it is dirty use it I begin the process of emptying my and the smell is overpowering. But, how can bowels. There is more than I expected — a lot I trust these sense perceptions? I walk over more. I attempt to flush the toilet, just as I to the latrine and begin to urinate. I look at have attempted to flush my mind of false my hands as I urinate. I hold one hand up. thoughts. The toilet has become blocked. It looks real. I hold the other hand up, and My bowels were too ambitious in emptying it too looks real. Are, therefore, my hands themselves so voraciously. Now what do I real? Oh God, I have urinated on myself. I do? I don’t know how to unblock a toilet. I shouldn’t have held up both of my hands. am trained in philosophy, not plumbing. The My trousers and cape are soaking. What toilet attendant raps his manly knuckles on

How do you know this is a woman’s toilet?

Is my penis really there, in my hands?

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the door of my cubicle. “Get out of there, you!” he shouts. “You’ve been in that toilet for ages. People are saying that you keep putting them off by talking about knowledge, and screaming because you got your knackers caught in your zip ... Oi, answer me!” My trousers around my ankles, surrounded by a bowl of floating eﬄuent, I am trapped. I do up my trousers and open the door. The smell emanating from my cubicle hits him like a slap in the face. “Jesus, boy, what you been eating?” he says, in a primitive Flanders dialect. “Pardon me, sir,” I reply, “I have blocked your mighty fine toilet. What wonderful porcelain…” I say, feigning praise, realising the precarious nature of my situation. He cuts me off. “You’ll have to pay to unblock that, you know that, mister?” he says. Sensing that fate has placed a golden opportunity in my path, I try to extend my quest for knowledge.

How do you know it was me? question. “I’ve caught you, trousers down!” says he. “But how do you know you know it was me?” I question further. At this point the man lunges at me, saying that he knows it was me because I am full of ‘it’, and only a man as full of ‘it’ as me could have produced such a blockage.…

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“How do you know it was me?” I

Contributors Alice

Ollstein will soon graduate Oberlin College with a major in Latin American Studies. Last spring, she spent a semester in a U.S./Mexico border studies program where she researched the media’s treatment of immigration. She has published many pieces about border and immigration issues in Spanish and English newspapers. Wrenn is a lecturer in English Literature at the LSE. His experience key words are: reception of British authors in Europe; comparative literature; Cold war; American literature; Anglo-Soviet literature and modernism. Holdsworth is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. She obtained a BA in History and Politics from the University of Exeter in 2007, and is currently studying for an MSc in Political Theory at LSE. Since graduating in 2007, she has spent the past two years travelling and working as a freelance journalist. Evans is a third year Social Anthropology student at the LSE. She has an interest in the fine arts, design and photography.

Angus

Candice

Chloe

Christopher

Martin is a 3rd year BSc Social Anthropology studentfrom Derby, UK. He writes often about multiculturalism, ethnicity and ethics in the social sciences, drawing on experiences working in social care in ethnically diverse communities. He is also a peer mediator for the LSESU Dialogue Commission.

Chu

Ting Ng is a first year law undergraduate at LSE. Besides her deluded dream of being published one day, short-term goals include staying alive and graduating in one piece, while soaking up everything fabulous/terrible. Like a sponge. Woodbridge studies International History at the LSE. He has a green belt in Taekwondo and plays the cello. B. Yates has been writing ever since he could, and for at least three years prior to that. An LSE undergraduate, former Ed in Chief of Clare, and Guardian shortlisted student critic, he currently writes for Artrocker magazine, Music OMH and Drowned in Sound. King is a 2nd year Law student at LSE. Eric’s creative process involves head tossing and hair ruffling. Eric is the production editor of Clare. Graham is not as tall as she seems and wears insensible shoes. Since beginning her undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology she has worked hard to overcome her bad habit of looking for definitive and all encompassing solutions. de Boer spent the last year living and working on malaria prevention in the small peri-urban community of Buguruni in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She is originally from Ohio, USA, where— two hundred years ago—malaria was also once endemic.

David

Daniel

Eric

Elli

Mary

Oliver

Fritz was born in 1967 in East Berlin. He worked for several years in the country’s foreign trade industry and later for East German state television, appearing in more than 150 movies and TV productions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall he moved to the UK, where he has been living since 1993. In recent years he has been focusing on filmmaking, translating, art and writing. Rushworth studies International History and Language at the LSE. Interested in all things African, he travels as much as possible and writes for a couple of publications, including a newspaper based in Kigali in which he is referred to as ‘a friend of Rwanda.’ He would like to follow a career in journalism.

Philip

Priyanka

Sara

Yasin was born and raised in North Carolina. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, she spent her adolescence in between Arabic lessons, mosques, fried chicken, and sweet tea. Sara is studying for an MSc in Gender, Development, and Globalisation at the LSE. She also contributes to Muslimah Media Watch. Gittins, a mistreated orphan, ran away from home after being inspired the eponymous hero’s actions in Oliver Twist. He studied Philosophy as an undergraduate - at least he thinks he did. This enabled him to write short comic pieces about philosophers rather than preparing him for the working world. Wo Leung was a quiet kid. Talks a fair amount now. Paints. Backpacks a lot (company is the most important factor though). Misses the Italian village by the Adriatic where she woke up to the sound of the waves for two years. Bagley lives and works in Washington, DC, where, as a piece of the belching engine running American politics, he hunts for time to write nonfiction, poetry and more, and practice the art of photography. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2006. Simonelli is a 3rd year International History Student with a particular interest in the Middle Eastern history. Born and raised in West London, he is very much a child of the capital. He really loves condiments. You can never have too much sauce.

Sean

Verma studies Economics and Statistics at UCL. Having frequented India, her country of origin, she found her interest for development economics and, more specifically, microfinance. She works closely with the LSE Student Microfinance Development Initiative and is creating a similar group at UCL. Robehmed is a 3rd year Social Anthropology student at LSE. Half English and half Lebanese, he had a wonderful summer being inspired by the ever-present contradictions and contrasts in Beirut, where the featured photos were taken. He is fairly new to lomography, but had fun experimenting with Diana. Messing is a research specialist at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, part of the UPenn. He graduated in 2009 from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. His work has previously appeared in Loose AND Flickr users Mike McHolm (pg. Ends and Zeniada. He currently lives in 7), Ernie|Bert (pg. 29) and Arts Visual Philadelphia. Lab (pg. 55)

Sacha

Samuel

Shiu

Steve

Tiberio

the journal of the London School of Economics Studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Union