11 July 2019
What is a Manifesto ... ?
Gay Liberation Front, Manifesto. London: Gay Liberation Front. 1971
The origins of writing and the reason why we write are central themes around which the Making Your Mark exhibition revolves. Encompassing the act of writing and the mediums used from carvings, scrolls, papyri, typing, print and digital. The exhibition is divided into different chapters, featuring a section on ‘People and Writing’ that considers the methods and purposes of various types of documents which are utilised as tools of power. Publications that reflect this include charters, petitions, pamphlets and treaties. Another such ubiquitous document that is congruous with this section is the manifesto.
A manifesto is a unique way of communicating which addresses an audience and asks them to unite to take action and change something. In this sense, the manifesto is an historical artifact and political tool within the history of radical democracy. The earliest examples can be traced back to Europe of the 16th Century; most famous manifestos include the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Party Manifesto. The concept of a manifesto is a little bit like a pamphlet, which were often homemade and distributed by hand in public places; likewise the manifesto is a public announcement often printed in newspapers or journals.
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, (Manifesto of the Communist Party). London : gedruckt in der Office der 'Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter' von J. E. Burghard, [1848]
There is no definite style or format. What all manifestos share is a call to its reader to unite and join together to make a change. Manifestos are frequently written during unsettled periods, often by small groups of people who want to challenge the status qua. Throughout history the authors vary from political parties, art movements and individuals. Developed as a text, the manifesto fuses art and politics to create a type of modernist literature. Studies of this particular writing form has lead researchers to consider it a genre within its own right.
A manifesto proves that writing is a tool of power and can be used to intervene and demonstrate against dominant systems. The phrasing used is often pleading, attacking, protesting and opposing in tone and declaring the intention of the writer. Any subject, cause or social group can write their own manifesto, but it is always written from an opposing position implying an ‘us’ and ‘them’. The style is often short and repetitive that attempts to get its message across and encourage readers to agree.
The texts broadcast ideals demanding the reader seize the moment to change the future. In this way, the writing is an activist text, inciting readers to take practical action to make decisions for themselves. This articulation must however be recognised by the audience or subject it addresses in order to function.
Where and when and who wrote manifestos are dependent on power struggles and an urge for change. The manifesto can appear under threat in this age of social media where a blue thumb can signify individual consent. Yet the desire to transform injustices and ignorance exists now more than ever. In these unsettled times, there are a lot people who still want to change things. If you were to write your own manifesto, what might it include and why?
This post has been written by Rachel Brett, Reference Specialist for Humanities at the British Library. Rachel frequently delivers discovery sessions on art, fashion and related subjects, and contributes to the Library's Doctoral Open Days.
10 January 2019
Archiving Activism: The Animal Guide
Catherine Oliver writes about the online collection she has curated which explores Animal Rights Activism
Animal Rights Activism has a long history in the UK, and with a growing surge in ethical veganism, environmental awareness, and the health-based evidence turning people away from animal consumption, it is a crucial moment to reflect on these histories. It is very difficult to pinpoint an exact moment or movement that a concern and care for the welfare and rights of animals emerged. The online collection I have curated using British Library archives, now available at archivingactivism.com, seeks to discuss some of these ‘entangled histories’ of animal rights, for readers to form a picture of the different strategies, organisations, and characters involved.
'The Rights of Animals' - image copyright of Kate Levey (daughter of Brigid Brophy) and reproduced here with her kind permission.
One part of the collection draws on materials related to the ‘lost women’ of animal rights: Brigid Brophy, Frances Power Cobbe, Rosalind Godlovitch, and Lizzie Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Schartau. These women all made significant contributions to the philosophy, practice, and understandings of animal rights in the UK, but often are not thought of as central figures. Tracing their stories through the British Library’s archives, the collection seeks to recognise the contribution of women in this area. The collection also draws together contentious histories of animals in politics and the use of animals in medical testing and in the beauty history, recognising the ways in which human and animal lives are entangled in different, often violent, ways. Reflecting on recent advances in the rights of animals in these areas, the collection displays some of the histories that allowed for these changes, as well as the different kinds of activists who worked and fought for these rights.
Image copyright of the National Anti-Vivisection Society and reproduced here with their kind permission.
By no means an exhaustive history of the animal rights movement in the UK, this collection serves as a starting point for engaging with not only these histories, but also with the importance of archiving animal rights movements, as our relationships with animals continue to evolve. Materials like these help us to understand how human histories are entangled with animal histories, and how humans have lived, and continue to live with animals, fighting to protect more vulnerable species from harm.
To find out more about the project, please visit archivingactivism.com
About the author
Catherine undertook a placement at the British Library ‘Animal Rights and Food Fights’, working with the archive of Richard D. Ryder, in 2016-2017, working with Polly Russell, Gill Ridgeley and Jonathon Pledge, where much of the intellectual work in this Animal Guide was inspired and completed. The materials in the collection are almost entirely located within the Ryder Papers. Catherine is a PhD student in the School of Geography, University of Birmingham researching vegan histories, presents and futures.
20 November 2018
Professor Kalwant Bhopal on social justice, exclusion and white privilege in universities
The Annual Equality Lecture with the British Sociological Association took place on 25 October 2018
‘Education is a right, not a privilege’ (Kalwant Bhopal, 2018)
Please note: The British Sociological Association have uploaded a video of the lecture to their Vimeo site here: https://vimeo.com/302226095
On the 25 October this year the British Library and British Sociological Association were delighted to host Professor Kalwant Bhopal who delivered a timely, insightful and important lecture about the current state of ethnic inequality within the UK higher education system.
Professor Bhopal’s lecture began with a look at the demographics of universities in the UK and differences in attainment between different ethnic groups. Her lecture showed that whilst there has been growth in recent years in the numbers of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students attending university, there remain stark differences in attainment and outcomes. For example, White students are more likely to receive a first class or higher-second class degree than BME students. This ‘attainment gap’ is particularly pronounced for Black students from Black African and Black Caribbean backgrounds.
She went on to look at the social and cultural reasons for these differences. Professor Bhopal showed that within secondary education BME students overall achieve good results at A level, compared to their White peers. However, BME students are less likely to apply, or be able to apply, to elite universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and those within the Russell Group. And when they do apply, they are less likely to achieve places. This evidence suggests that cultural and social factors within the higher education system are working to disadvantage BME students, and privilege White students, particularly so those White students from already privileged backgrounds.
So, what are the cultural and social factors that work to maintain White privilege in education, and disadvantage BME students? Professor Bhopal argued that socially embedded racism which operates in all processes, and at all levels, within universities, creates a vastly different playing field for BME students. From the university application process which favours particular forms of knowledge, to teaching at university which prioritises White experience and history, to the fact that within university teaching itself, BME lecturers are hugely underrepresented (only 8% of UK Professors are from BME backgrounds), the mechanics and culture of our university system propagate and reproduce ethnic inequality. Given this, it will come as no surprise that Black students are the group most likely to drop out of university.
Image: Professor Bhopal delivering her lecture. Photograph copyright of Tony Trueman for the British Sociological Association. Reproduced here with their kind permission.
Professor Bhopal was recently commissioned by the Equality Challenge Unit to understand minority ethnic ‘flight’ from UK higher education, to unpick ethnic differences in experience between academic staff and to understand how to attract and retain BME staff. A survey of 1,200 university staff as well as qualitative interviews, gave some clear indications about why BME staff might leave or hope to leave the UK higher education system.
This research showed that BME staff were more likely than their White colleagues to consider working abroad. There were perceptions that certain overseas countries (such as the USA) were more positive in their treatment of BME staff. Within the USA for example, Black Studies is an academic discipline and African American studies is taught at some of the most prestigious institutions including Harvard and Yale. Respondents to the survey felt that within the UK, race and ethnic studies were not highly regarded, and BME staff who worked in this area felt they were harshly judged. There was concern about limitations on career prospects, which was not surprising given the under-representation of BME scholars at senior levels.
Professor Bhopal concluded her lecture with advice and guidance for policy makers and university leaders about ways towards an equal future for all in higher education. First and foremost, higher education institutions must acknowledge that institutional racism is a problem which permeates processes and systems. Central to this is understanding and recognising how White privilege operates in real world interactions within universities; in interviews, at lectures, in seminars, at meetings and in informal and social scenarios. She suggests there should be greater rigour in monitoring BME attainment, with mandatory targets for elite universities around attracting and supporting BME students. Similarly, there must be targets for the recruitment of BME staff into senior roles and unconscious bias training should be mandatory.
The lecture was followed by an abundance of questions about how we achieve ethnic equality in higher education and more broadly, by a very well-informed and passionate audience. The questions and discussions continued into the foyer as the lecture closed, with people queuing up to ask Professor Bhopal to sign copies of her recent book.
To find out more about Professor Bhopal’s recent work, please visit her report with Clare Pitkin on the Race Equality Charter: https://www.ucu.org.uk/HEIs-and-the-Race-Equality-Charter
A podcast of this lecture has been uploaded to the British Library SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/the-annual-equality-lecture-social-justice-exclusion-and-white-privilege-in-universities
03 September 2018
Learning from the Past: our new course for curious researchers starts today
Our free online course starts today. Learning from the Past is for anyone interested in studying the past, what historians do, and why and how research on the past matters for understanding the world today. The course runs for 3 weeks, and is the second course produced by the University of Nottingham in partnership with the British Library.
Over three weeks, this course will introduce the ways in which historians conduct research, and the materials that are used to understand the past. Throughout the course, examples from across the Library’s varied collections are examined by curators and researchers. The course will also do two other important things. First, it will show the challenges that historians face in understanding and decoding the records of the past: books, archives, photographs, maps, recorded sound and digital records. Second, it will discuss how a study of the past helps us contextualise the issues of today. For example, we cannot fully understand the radical shift in our impact on the environment without knowing how societies in the past used natural resources.
The origins for this course come from our earlier work on the course Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life – which sought to explain how contemporary political research provides insight into the values and philosophies that lie at the heart of international debates, co-operation and conflict. We also sought to show how education, and in this case online learning platforms, can be used as a space where people with different ideas and opinions can communicate with each other, understand those differences and also see where there are points of agreement.
The response from learners to this course was incredible. Over the weeks, we saw conversations emerge between participants from around the world on “big political issues” but also in the more personal sphere: the gardens in their towns, food that reminded them of home, and the books and photographs that they always carry with them. We also saw that learners were enthusiastic to follow the debates that drew on current research, and followed links to academic texts where we made them available.
So, we wanted to produce a course that supported this desire for access to the ‘cutting edge’ of historical research, but also took the time to describe the practicalities of research. How do you decide what questions you are going to ask in your research? How can you find the materials that will help you to answer those questions? And how will you avoid the pitfalls of taking the records of the past at face value? Learning from the Past brings together researchers from the University of Nottingham and University of Birmingham, as well as curators from the British Library. Over the 3 weeks of the course, we will look at the materials and methods that researchers employ.
The first day of a new course is always exciting. I've been following our first steps for learners to introduce themselves and their research interests. There's lots of interest in family history and local history, but also other topics such as history of science or a general interest in how researchers work and analyse evidence. A lot of learners want to know more about how to use libraries and archives, and are interested in the practical elements of the course.
A big topic for our first week is on the significance of language, and language change, in communicating ideas and values. I'm currently enjoying the discussion thread on 'what three words would you use to introduce yourself to a visitor from Mars'?
If you’re interested in how historians work, thinking about starting your own research project, want inspiration for your existing work, or want to know why history matters today, join in the discussion at Learning from the Past: A guide for the curious Researcher. No need to worry if you're reading this after 3rd September - you can join any time before the course ends on 23rd September.
22 June 2018
‘The people we are writing for are the people we are fighting for’: Sivanandan as radical pamphleteer.
For more than forty years A. Sivanandan was at the forefront of debates on anti-racism and politics in Britain. Born in Jaffna in 1923 and educated in Colombo, he came to Britain in 1958, leaving the anti-Tamil riots in colonial Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) and walking into the anti-black riots in Notting Hill. He was to become one of the most important and influential black anti-racist thinker-activists in the UK. His aphorisms, from ‘we are here because you were there’ to ‘poverty is the new Black’ - are known more widely than his name. Sivanandan was librarian and then director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) from 1973-2013, one of the founding editors of Race & Class, an activist and author of prize-winning fiction and non-fiction. He died in January this year, aged 94, and this coming weekend a memorial event in London will celebrate his life and work.
Three book covers: A different hunger: writings on Black resistance, shelfmark X.529/48334; Catching history on the wing, shelfmark YC.2012.a.7672; When memory dies, shelfmark YA.1999.a.13299. Photo D. Cox
Several of Sivanandan’s writings are available on the website of the Institute of Race Relations, as is a full bibliography of his work, and five articles from Race & Class are free to download as the Sivanandan collection. Collections of his articles are available in print, most notably Catching history on the wing: race, culture, globalisation (Pluto Press, 2008). You can read about his life in more detail in an account on Sage’s Social Science Space by Michael Todd or in Gary Younge’s obituary in The Guardian .
Sivanandan’s response to his arrival at the time of the anti-black riots of 1958 was to abandon his original aim of seeking well-paid employment and a comfortable life. In an interview he said,
“I knew then I was black. I could no longer stand on the sidelines: race was a problem that affected me directly. I had no excuse to go into banking or anything else that I was fitted up to do … I had to find a way of making some sort of contribution to the improvement of society. I wanted time to read and reflect and to become active. … So I started off as a tea-boy in a public library in Middlesex. And I went on to do my library exams by attending evening classes. From tea-boy I became branch manager of that particular library and then finally I went to be librarian at the Institute of Race Relations in 1964.” (The heart is where the battle is: an interview with A Sivanandan, Race & Class, 59 issue: 4, pages: 3-14.)
In his early work Sivanandan put together bibliographies of materials in the Institute of Race Relations library about African, Asian and Caribbean migration to Britain, to help build an area of study and draw out materials for activism. This remains an important area of work for contemporary librarians and archivists. Most of Sivanandan’s political writing was first published as articles in Race & Class, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations, which continues today as an academic journal published by Sage:
Cover images of Race & Class journal. Photo D. Cox
Importantly too, his articles were reproduced as pamphlets, so that they could be achieve wider distribution among the community activists Sivanandan and others at the IRR worked with, including Newham Monitoring Project and the Southall Monitoring Group. The British Library holds some of these pamphlets, allowing researchers to see not only the words on the page, but also to see how Siva’s arguments were taken out beyond an academic context. The pamphlets pictured below show their prices, ranging from 30p to £1.00. Materials from the IRR Library are now housed at Warwick University as part of their Ethnicity and Migration Collections. The range of publications can also be viewed in a video on YouTube recounting the First Fifty Years of the IRR's history.
Some of the pamphlet versions of Sivanandan's articles held by the British Library. Photo D. Cox
Sivanandan published articles in a range of activist magazines, for example CARF (Campaign against racism and fascism.) The article below shows the evolution of Sivanandan’s concerns from racism and imperialism to globalisation and its impact on refugees and migrants. In his foreword to Catching history on the wing Colin Prescod writes that, through his coinage of the term xeno-racism, Sivanandan aimed to show that, “Europe’s formidable hostility to the impoverished migrant workers on which so much of its basic prosperity depends is not just some nice people’s social phobia about foreigners, but a system of belief and practice aimed at locking down, and locking in, the needy and the desperate.” (p. x)
CARF Magazine.
Beyond his political writing Sivanandan also reached an audience through his fictional writing. In 1997 he published When Memory Dies. The novel traces three generations of a family torn by Sri Lanka’s history of colonialism and ethnic strife. It was awarded the Sagittarius Prize (given by the Society of Authors for a first novel by an author over the age of sixty) and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the category of Best First Book for Europe and South Asia. Where the Dance Is, a collection of short stories, was published in 2000.
Perhaps the most innovative means of taking his ideas out to a new audience was his collaboration with Asian Dub Foundation on the track Colour Line which features on their album Community Music (2000).
Asian Dub Foundation: Community Music (2000).
The British Library holds an oral history interview conducted by Louise Brodie for National Life Stories in 2010 with A Sivanandan. Available on the Library’s Sound Cloud the interview is in ten parts and sheds a fascinating light on the life experiences, relationships and events that shaped Sivanandan’s writing. This long and detailed interview provides a resource for anyone researching the complex evolution of anti-racist or activist politics in Britain. Many others played important roles in challenging racism and building activism, but Colin Prescod writes, “For those who recall the first half of the 1980s as a watershed in Black British politics, Sivanandan was father, elder to them all.” (Catching history on the wing, p. viii)
Selected works by A Sivanandan:
Race and Resistance: the IRR story, London: Race Today Publications, March 1975
A Different Hunger: writings on black resistance, London: Pluto Press, 1982
Communities of Resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism, London: Verso, 1990
When Memory Dies (a novel), London: Arcadia, 1997
Where the Dance Is (short stories), London: Arcadia, 2000
Catching history on the wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation, 2008 (Pluto Press).
01 May 2018
Archiving Activism Website
PhD placement students, Rachel Tavernor and Catherine Oliver, in collaboration with the British Library, are launching a new website. In this post, Rachel discusses her work encountering stories of housing activism in the British Library. Later this year, Catherine will launch a new section of the website on food activism and will discuss a new British Library acquisition of the Richard Ryder archive. We hope this collaborative initiative will grow with new sections added showing the diversity of our British Library Collections.
The brief for my time with the British Library was to investigate 20th and 21st Century anti-poverty activism in the the British Library Collections. In particular, to make connections between archives and to explore the value of the British Library’s holdings as a whole. I am not a historian, nor an archivist, so my approach to working with the collections was informed by my background in the arts, as well as my own involvement with institutional and grassroots activism. Having worked with smaller archives, I was interested in exploring how radical and rebellious voices are preserved in a large scholarly institution. Before working with the British Library, I had wrongly assumed that institutional voices would be the focus of the collections. While these voices are dominant, and at times privileged, the rebels in the archives are also there to encounter.
After a preliminary mapping of the collections and available material (there was lots), I narrowed the focus of my research to housing activism in the UK. Struggles for decent and affordable housing, with secure and fair tenancies, are at the forefront of many anti-poverty movements today. The decline of social housing, rises in private rents and poor living conditions, are a catalyst for many forms of activism (demonstrations, squatting, housing cooperatives and rent strikes).
One of the greatest strengths of researching activism in the British Library Collections is the diverse range of materials, from personal papers to government documents. Housing activism, as with many political struggles, stretches across institutional, community and mediated spaces. The Library’s collections offer ways to explore the everyday experiences of activism, preserved in oral histories, diaries and letters. Alongside examining how campaigns are shaped by, or in reaction to, housing policies. Researchers can trace these differing, and at times contradictory, narratives throughout the collections. By exploring these stories in tandem, the public have the opportunity to listen to these voices, and explore them alongside one another, to weave new histories, and perhaps new stories of housing activism.
While exploring the different collections archived at the British Library, I also conducted a small research project on ways to archive contemporary forms of activism. It was a privilege to conduct this research, which included interviewing archivists at feminist libraries, housing activists and academics that engage with archives of activism. You can read a section of the report on our new website. One of the themes that emerged in these interviews was that archives are a living resource, which can inspire and influence contemporary forms of activism. However, many people may experience different barriers to accessing materials archived at institutions like the British Library. It was these conversations that inspired Sarah, Catherine and I to collaborate on a website that would act as a guide to materials archived at the British Library. We hope that the Archiving Activism website may inspire people to further engage with some of the histories of housing activism, as well as the British Library Collections. If you have an idea for a new section or would like to contribute, please email: [email protected].
With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my placement at the British Library and to all the copyright holders for granting us permission to publish images of the items archived in the Collections.
03 January 2018
The Persistence of Gender Inequality
A Summary of the Annual Equality Lecture 2017 by Professor Mary Evans
At the end of October 2017 we hosted our seventh annual Equality Lecture in partnership with the British Sociological Association. We were really delighted that the lecture this year was given by Professor Mary Evans, who has been central to the development of women’s and gender studies in the UK, and a prolific writer and academic on all aspects of gender in society. Her work has covered diverse topics such as love, detective fiction, austerity, autobiography, social class and higher education, Jane Austen, and has examined how social actions and actors are formed and structured within the social world.
Professor Evans drew on her recent book ‘The Persistence of Gender Inequality’ (Polity, 2016) to show how gender inequality is being reproduced in contemporary society, but is taking new forms. She began by making the point that gender as well as race, have been largely ignored in those major recent works (for example, by Thomas Piketty) which seek to address inequality. She argued that the connection between class inequalities, as shaped by gender and race, need to be brought to the fore if we are to understand the forms that unequal social relationships take in the contemporary western world.
Professor Mary Evans taking audience questions with event chair, Professor John Horne. Photo credit Sam Lane for The British Library Board.
She suggested that in the past forty years particular forms of social change have enlarged and reshaped inequality including:
‘the dissolution of some forms of class boundaries; the creation of a new social contract and with it a new version of the ‘ideal citizen’ and the expectations of women’s appearance and conduct.’
Evans described these latter two changes as constituting a form of ‘aspirational coercion’ which has a particular effect on four central forms of inequality between men and women, which are:
‘inequalities of income, public power, responsibility for care and; forms and means of representation, all of which are experienced in different ways according to difference in class and race.’
The notion of who counts as ‘middle-class’ and assumptions about middle-class personhood and values in contemporary neoliberal western societies such as the UK, were shown by Evans to be important to her idea of ‘aspirational coercion’.
On the one hand traditional markers of ‘middle-classness’ are increasingly uncertain; on the other, the middle-class to whom politicians often refer could be more accurately described as the ‘upper middle-class’.
Evans argued that in the UK, it is in fact, upper middle-class white men who remain dominant in elite professions, ‘high’ culture and politics. Yet, it is this particular version of elite autonomy, financial reward and social mastery that have become central to the notion of the ideal contemporary citizen whom she named: ‘the master of the universe’.
‘Being a commander of men has always dominated the aspirations of the ruling class but what interests me here is that we get to the point here where it intersects with gender in the way in which this idea of the powerful autonomous individual, replete with choice and agency has now become generalised as a human ideal.’
Evans suggested that very few people, men or women, of any race, ever get to occupy the position of ‘master of the universe’ but that this fantasy has a very real impact on the way in which people, and especially women, are recognised and ascribed social value. As paid work becomes the ‘gold standard’ as part of the fantasy status of ‘autonomous subject’, the unpaid work of caring for others, which remains overwhelmingly work done by women, becomes value-less:
‘The ‘master of the universe’ […] the specialist, the highly skilled, is essentially […] care-less. So with ‘success’ goes distance from care: a social association which establishes a connection between high achievement and being care-less, and being a low achiever and doing care.’
Audience questions at the Equality Lecture. Photo credit Sam Lane for The British Library Board.
The second issue of ‘aspirational coercion’ is around consumption as a route to, and marker of, female emancipation. The inability to participate in social expectations around consumption become a marker of lacking, and therefore source of personal shame, such that for women living in poverty, consumption has done very little to narrow class difference or experience. At the same time, consumption is a site for control and coercion around the shape and appearance of the female body. In this, the standards about the appearance of the female body are presented in ways which are connected to an ideal about an autonomous, emancipated, culturally hegemonic female subject. An ideal subject very far removed from the reality of most women’s lives, both in the west and in developing nations.
Professor Evans finished her lecture with a reminder of the need to think about gender and social inequality together, to enable us to understand what is being called the ‘new form of capitalism’. The idea of ‘aspirational coercion’ is important to understanding the relationship between individuals and capitalism which shape who is able to participate as an autonomous subject. And autonomy remains largely determined by new forms of this interplay between class, gender and race.
Further information;
Watch a video of Mary’s lecture here.
Listen to a podcast of Mary's lecture here.
Read a short piece by Mary on her lecture here.
08 November 2017
The Power of Documentary: John Pilger at the British Library 9- 10 December
The British Library will be holding a 2-day documentary festival over the weekend Saturday- Sunday 9- 10th December, to celebrate the career of John Pilger, along with other documentaries chosen as fine examples of the craft. The festival will include screenings of films from across his career, John Pilger will speak on the Power of the Documentary (Saturday) and will be in conversation on Sunday afternoon. A full programme can be found here.
The screening celebrates the acquisition by the Library of a digital archive of Pilger’s journalism – covering print, film and radio broadcasts over six decades. The archive, produced by Florian Zollmann from John Pilger’s personal collection, brings together for the first time nearly 1,500 news reports, films and radio broadcasts. This includes articles from the Daily Mirror, Guardian, New Statesman, BBC Radio, and 60 films. His latest, prescient documentary, The Coming War on China, is his 60th film.
Throughout his career, John has demonstrated the power and significance of investigative journalism in uncovering stories of peoples who have been ignored by the mainstream media or left otherwise without voice. His ground-breaking work in Cambodia revealed the devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge, and his film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) has subsequently been described as one of the 10 most influential documentaries of the 20th century. His later film, Stealing a Nation (2004), revealed the plight of the Chagos people, who were expelled from their homes in the 1960s and 1970s on idyllic islands in the Indian Ocean to make way for a military base.
John Pilger’s work is well-known for reporting on conflict, the human and civil rights abuses that result from conflict and the propaganda used to justify and prolong such abuses. His first film, The Quiet Mutiny (1970), interviewed young American soldiers in Vietnam, uncovering confusion and resistance to the war amongst conscripts and breaking the story of American troop insurrections in Vietnam.
Other work has placed a fresh focus on everyday subjects. His film, Burp! Pepsi v Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) was an early example of investigative film-making that used originality and wit to examine the power of multinational corporations.
John Pilger’s work also sounds a warning of the threats to independent investigative journalism. The War You Don’t See (2011) recounts the history of embedded journalism in conflict and asks us to question the reporting of conflicts in the 21st century.
All these films will be shown at the British Library for the festival, The Power of Documentary, celebrating the career of John Pilger and emphasising the continued significance of independent investigative journalism.
Social Science blog recent posts
- Animals and the law: readings on animal rights law
- 7 Days, Culture and the Arts
- 7 Days - Back then and now: a personal recollection by John Mathews
- Designing 7 Days
- ‘You Cannae Eat Ships’: 7 Days and industrial news.
- Reflecting on activism and protest around the Disability Discrimination Act
- Six months that launched the Seventies
- Introducing '7 Days': a revolutionary weekly newspaper in the Anthony Barnett archive
- Important information for email subscribers
- Hundreds of definitions for a big word: The Refugee Dictionary comes to the British Library
Archives
Tags
- Africa
- Americas
- Archival Research
- Black & Asian Britain
- British Library Treasures
- Business and Management
- Contemporary Britain
- Current Affairs
- Digital Methodologies
- Digital scholarship
- Events
- Food and Drink
- Government publications
- Higher Education
- Humanities
- Law
- Legal deposit
- Literature
- Manuscripts
- Maps
- Modern history
- Newsroom
- Open data
- Oral history
- Politics and Government
- Propaganda
- Research collaborations
- Research data
- Research methods
- Science
- Social Policy and Welfare
- Social Sciences
- Social sciences
- Sociolinguistics
- Sociology
- Sound and vision
- South Asia
- South East Asia
- Sports
- Statistics
- Television
- Unfinished Business
- Visual arts
- Women's histories
- Writing
Social science links