Pea Arts About

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6  Repeating History In addition to the similarities between Northern Ireland and Chile, Good Vibrations and No were produced and released in the wake of political shifts to the right in the leadership of both governments. A coalition government led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was established in the UK in 2010, replacing the Labour leadership held since 1997. In Chile also in 2010, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera was elected President, replacing the now dissolved Concertación, or Coalition of Parties for Democracy, voted in after the 1989 general election. While the Conservative government remains in power due to the UK’s firmer shift to the right after the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, Michelle Bachelet of the Chilean Socialist Party, was returned as President in 2014, only for the billionaire Pi ñera to be re-elected in 2018 (Chilean Presidents understandably canno...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3   Part 4 Reframing Violence Just before the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, David Miller pointed out that since the end of World War I in 1918, ‘[t]he guiding light of British policy […] has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics. This was managed quite successfully until 1968, when the North exploded on to television screens around the world. Since then, British policy has been directed to containing the “troubles”’. 1 The constructed concept of the ‘Troubles’ – a term which connotes a containable and manageable group of homogenous events – was coined by the British press in the 1980s and spread into common parlance. All the while, that parallel containment of the conflict in politics and journalism, Miller continues, emphasized the ‘criminality’ of the Irish Republican Army which, as Miller points out, only served to raise the ‘news value’ of the political violence (pp. 2–3). What it also achieved, ...

The following response to the book contains significant plot details. There’s nothing like doing an English literature degree for dampening your love of reading novels. And nothing like doing a PhD and the subsequent years of futile academic jobhunting to stamp it out altogether. (That’s how it was in my circumstances, anyway, and I commend anyone who refuses to let that happen.) Having said goodbye to that career path and clawed back my health, I’ve been slowly and with difficulty overcoming the guilt of not working every minute of every day and am reading the books that have for years been silently screaming for me to wipe off the dust and give them a good going through. One of those books is Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), which I’m excited to have learned is being adapted as a feature film directed by Lenny Abrahamson – whose work I greatly admire – due out later in 2018. What a gripping, carefully-written tale it is. And what an underlying scathing exami...