by Ralitsa Chorbadzhiyska. Ralitsa is an undergraduate student in the English Department in her third year, with research interests in Modernism and Contemporary culture. Ralitsa worked as an editorial and marketing intern at Bahati Books this summer as part of King’s Internship Summer Scheme. She also has a personal blog where she writes about books, music and art.
Ever since applying for university I knew I wanted to study English literature and use my degree to become involved with publishing. But I never knew which role would suit me best – an editor, an agent, a person in marketing or sales. I applied for my internship with Bahati Books before going into my third year as I figured that the best way to find what part of publishing intrigues me the most was to learn from experience.
Instagram-friendly promotion for ‘WIne and Water’, by Hannah Onoguwe. Photo by Ralitsa Chorbadzhiyska.
by James Rakoczi, PhD researcher, Department of English
The cover image of Martino Scalvi’s ‘The Finch in My Brain’
Reading Martino Sclavi’s The Finch in My Brain(Hodder & Stoughton, 2017)took longer than expected. I found myself slowing down, re-reading passages, trying to work out how the text relates to itself, to its images, and to the people in Sclavi’s life.
My copy of the text is now defaced by marginalia, doodled over in an inky green.
Page 308, for example, tells me to re-read p. 215. I turn that page, and p. 216 directs me to p. 268, and so on. My copy has gone a bit rhizome: an ecology of self-citation…
In early 2011, living in LA, Italian film producer Martino Sclavi was experiencing bad headaches. He thought it was the coffee, or the stresses of script-writing to deadline. In fact, it was a grade 4 glioblastoma – an extremely severe brain tumour. During a script-reading, Sclavi became increasingly delirious. Driven to a hospital by a friend, Sclavi recalls how his friend’s words ‘stopped having a meaning for me… just sound with no information. A rhythm with no shape’ (p. 43). This loss of ‘meaning’ but retention of ‘shape’ characterised not only Sclavi’s immediate crisis but presaged the direction his life would take.
by Carleigh Morgan, former Fulbright scholar and current PhD candidate in the Department of English
The seminar series ‘Speculations’ at King’s hosted a conversation on 27 April about conspiracy theories in relation to the political spectacle of Trump and the upsurge in global conversations about disinformation, ‘fake news‘, and the alarmist sense that trust in expertise is crumbling. Two interventions – one from myself and one from Clare Birchall – structured the focus of the event on a closer inspection of what we mean by the term ‘conspiracy’. How can conspiratorial thinking be useful for solidifying formative political movements? Can it, perhaps, mount counter-oppositions to some of the more disturbing mobilisations of right-wing political activism?
by Ella Parry-Davies, PhD researcher funded by King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, working on performance, place, and memory, and Myka Tucker-Abramson, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. With a postscript from Kélina Gotman, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies
“The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. The male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
SCUM is too impatient to wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined? A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”
(Valerie Solanas, “The Scum Manifesto”, 1967)
“If sexism is a by-product of capitalism’s relentless appetite for profit then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution. If the world historical defeat of women occurred at the hands of an armed patriarchal revolt, then it is time for Amazon guerrillas to start training in the Adirondacks.”
(Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”, 1975)
“Homoexplosion is a radical queer/ trans group of fly fatherfuckers. We advocate people fucking in the street and burning shit—especially cops.”
(NYC Queers Bash Back Against NYPD, 2009)
Image via AP, 2009: Two protesters wearing black carry a black banner emblazoned with white text that reads ‘Queers Bash Back: Harm any face the many’.
We live in a moment of amplified violence, or at least a time in which certain kinds of violence have become more visible. New forms of surveillance, and heightened attention to the reported arming of both so-called individual terrorists or terrorist cells, as well as hostile nations, often speaks less to new threats than to carefully crafted states of emergency. However, at the same time, we are seeing an increasing incidents of hate crimes, intensified and increasing police brutality and state violence, and the continued expansion of the War on Terror.
Paul Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature, was the guest expert on the second episode of Russell Brand’s new series ‘Under the Skin’.
Professor Gilroy discusses the re-emergence of open racism within political rhetoric, the relationship between race and religion, and why we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour.
