Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Blog Page 890

University responds as Iffley Open House claim former power station

John Maier
-
0
University responds as Iffley Open House claim former power station

Oxford University has said it hopes to obtain a possession order on the former power station in Osney “as soon as possible”, due to safety concerns after the Iffley Open House (IOH) project moved into the building on Sunday.

Around 20 homeless people, accompanied by ten volunteers, claimed squatter’s rights on the property upon their arrival, following their eviction from the Volkswagen garage owned by Wadham College in which they had been living.

The group stated that they wanted to “open up a dialogue” with the Said Business School, which, according to reports, is seeking to develop the former power station. The building was previously part of the Physics Faculty at Oxford, and has been described by the group as having been left “unutilized” during the seven years for which it has been derelict.

In a statement given yesterday the University of Oxford said: “The Old Power Station is used to store thousands of items from the collections of the Museum of the History of Science and the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a project team has been working on these collections in a separate part of the building.

“For some time we have prevented our staff from entering the part of the building which has been occupied by Iffley Open House because of a number of safety concerns, including the risk of falling masonry.

“We will therefore be seeking an interim possession order as soon as possible, out of concern for the safety of the members of Iffley Open House.

“We are very sympathetic to the plight of these homeless people who need somewhere safe to live and we will continue to speak to their representatives about how to resolve the situation.”

In a press release IOH said they hoped “to stay for two months, and work with local residents to create a safe space which is just as successful as the original Iffley Open House”.

IOH squatters were given notice from Wadham two weeks ago to the effect that they would have to leave the old VW garage owned by the college. This notice came despite the group’s claim that in January the leaseholders of the ground floor of the building, the Mid-Counties Co-Operative, had negotiated a lease to allow the squatters to stay until 10 April.

Sandra Phillips, an IOH volunteer, said: “Ultimately, this is about providing housing for those who need it most – and we truly believe that the residents of Oxford believe in this cause as much as we do”

 

Life Divided: drinking societies

Jamie Onslow and Emma Leech
-
0
Life Divided: drinking societies

For (Jamie Onslow):

Drinking societies sporadically feature in the national press as stories emerge of students committing variously offensive acts in the name of tradition. Ronald Coyne’s recent display of burning a fifty pound note in front of a homeless man comes straight out of the national anthology of horrible things that rich children can do for their own amusement.

Similar stories concerning the Bullingdon Club, perhaps the most famous drinking society in the world, also proliferate. What most people don’t realise is that the club doesn’t actually exist. The photos of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson are, of course, unsatisfactory. After all, it is now common knowledge that these men do not exist either; they were invented by Russians as fake news to utterly destroy any faith in the British political system.

The reality of student drinking societies however is somewhat different to the horror stories. As a proud member of thirty three top-secret drinking societies, I am eager to share this rewarding side to student life.

Every Tuesday sees me don my handmade shrimp costume to attend the weekly gathering of the Crustacean Society. We gather at various rowing lakes, and drink huge amounts of pond water, extracting nutrients using our bristly setose legs as a sort of sieve.

The last Friday of every term is traditionally reserved for the Carbonated Drinks Drinking Society. Members are distinguished by their large and colourful foil hats, modelled after those of the legendary San Pellegrino soft drinks, and the gatherings are held in the President’s fridge freezer.

The highlight of my year, however, is the annual Piers Morgan Ball. Shady-looking individuals sell contraband Piers Morgan memorabilia from a small pavilion, and the evening ends with the appearance of the man himself. In an act of unparalleled debauchery, a brave young piglet is invited to insert itself into the former Mirror editor’s vile mouth, thus concluding the Oxford year in high style.

Against (Emma Leech):

To the untrained eye they might be hard to spot, but they’re always there. Lurking in smoking areas in garishly loud blazers or hiring out rooms to discuss port & privilege. You might see a photo of people at an unspecified event looking thoroughly high on life. Suddenly, they become glaringly obvious and, for secret societies, they do like to tell you about it.

If you study at Oxford and haven’t watched The Riot Club then don’t. I watched it during one vacation and it nearly took a team of wild horses to drag me back here. Although the violence and debauchery may well be exaggerated—let’s all take a moment to pray that it is—the figures represented are hauntingly familiar.

Sam Claflin’s character is somewhat akin to that boy who brings crystal glasses to pre-drinks (although he is resoundingly better looking), and Douglas Booth reminds you of that someone who you have definitely seen drunkenly breaking into college rooms to trash them, egged on by his signet ring wielding friends.

It seems to me, an unworthy outsider, that the reality just a bit tragic. Inviting girls to follow you around silently is so nineteenth century it’s almost laughable, if you can swallow down the vomit of repulsion. Similarly, initiations remind me of when, in primary school, we made one girl do the playground obstacle course in order to be our friend. We were eight.

People regularly insist that drinking societies are simply harmless fun, but if that’s simply the case then surely I could just draw a logo with Sharpie on some T-shirts and give my squad a name and it would be much the same thing?

Perhaps I sound slightly bitter about the fact that I haven’t been considered for one of these prestigious positions—investigations are still underway to find out whether this is due to my gender or bank balance. But, my grandma has a sideboard full of ‘special’ cutlery, and she doesn’t have to drink piss to earn the right to use it.

No, I would not like to be your pub golf caddy, and, no, I won’t be impressed by your naked lap of the quad. I’m sorry

Single of the week: Lana Del Rey’s ‘Love’

Natalia Bus
-
0
Single of the week: Lana Del Rey’s ‘Love’

“Look at you kids with your vintage music” croons Lana Del Rey’s gentle voice over a muted intro. The queen of wistful ballads and dark instrumentals is back with a track stunning in its simplicity.

With every release Lana reiterates that she is wise beyond her years and this one is no different, as she paints a picture dripping with nostalgia for the days of a reckless youth. She simultaneously positions herself, however, both as detached and in the midst of it all, making for a much more interesting perspective.

Tinged with a sadness that permeates through most of her work, the single is carried entirely by her voice—it brightens and ascends in sync with the fluctuating patterns of the melody.

A handful of posters appearing around the world the day before release merely added to the mystery and allure of an artist who has become so much more than the “gangster Nancy Sinatra”.

Del Rey is an icon of love and loss in an increasingly more superficial and meaningless pop industry and this new release is a promising taste of what is to come.

Blind Date: John and Bessie

Cherwell Life
-
0
Blind Date: John and Bessie

John Maier (Second year, PPE, Balliol)

Bessie looked shorter in her photos, much shorter. This made for a deeply disconcerting start to the evening.

She tried to sidestep all the initial awkwardness by giving me a stern dressing down—and not in a good way—lecturing me with her school mistress’s eyes about my lateness and my appearance. In particular, she seemed quite bemused by my glasses, which she insisted were not real, and proceeded to rip from my face, suggesting a rather over-literal understanding of what makes the date blind. I interpreted this as an act of violence, and hid behind my menu.

This aside, Bessie proved arresting company, commenting at regular intervals about how well the date was going, as if providing director’s commentary on the evening. Fully absorbed in her self-appointed role as director of our date, she also acquired a rather frustrating habit of flouncing away from our table, often cutting me off mid sent-

Out of 10? 2

Looks? Subjective

Personality? Mostly present

2nd date? I don’t see why not

 

Bessie Sorsby (Second year, French, Jesus)

John looked taller in his photos, and less remorseful. Clearly flustered by his own tardiness, his lengthy apology was accompanied by a sequence of rather erratic hand gestures. All the bartenders within a metre radius of us clenched their glasses a little tighter, looking at me with a mixture of alarm and sympathy.

Yet, post this cyclone pantomime, we said hello in an ordinary fashion. My first impression of John was one of great skepticism; I quickly realised that he was the kind of person who chooses to wear see-through glasses. Not the actually useful sight-enhancing ones, but those with frames made from the same colourless plastic of disposable cutlery, the kind you find at weddings. Eye contact proved rather intense, as the lenses make his eyes resemble those of a bird of prey with vision eight times sharper then humans.

Saying that, John’s effervescent personality, wit and charm meant time flew by.

Out of 10? 3

Looks? Like wedding cutlery

Personality? Better than soggy Weetabix

2nd date? Dubious

The female artist: speaking truth to power

Tilly Nevin
-
0
The female artist: speaking truth to power

Last week I went to the Ashmolean to see the exhibition Degas to Picasso: Creating Modernism in France, from 1800 to the mid-twentieth century. There was one mention of a female painter, Berthe Morisot, and an almost overwhelming focus on the female body. The female form was undeniably a preoccupation for the Impressionists and for the Picasso. But the exhibition made me wonder, as I do after seeing most exhibitions, why is art history still overwhelmingly about white male artists and their concerns? Where was even a passing reference to a painting by and not of a woman?

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts didn’t admit women in until 1897. But this didn’t mean that they had no impact on the creation of ‘Modernism’. The exhibition reminded me of the Guerrilla Girls poster, made in 1989, which reads “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5 per cent of artists in the Modern Art sections are women but 85 per cent are nudes of them.” The statistic might have changed but only infinitesimally: in 2011 the National Gallery held 2,300 works of art, eleven of which were made by women.

Guerrilla Girls rephrased the question ‘why haven’t there been more great women artists in Western history?’ as ‘why haven’t more women been considered great artists throughout Western history?’. I still ask myself that question—and it’s not only of Western history. Most people have heard of Michelangelo but who knows anything about Sonfonisba Anguissola? Who has read about Lygia Pape or Mary Cassatt?

The majority of art graduates are female but that is in no way reflected by the presence of female artists in galleries. It also becomes more specific than just gender: the art world still patronises women who have children, for example. Female art museum directors earn less than their male counterparts and although they run 42.6 per cent of museums in the US, these are most usually the ones with smaller budgets.

A painting by Georgia O’Keeffe—known, incidentally, as ‘the mother of American modernism’—entitled ‘Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1’ (1932) sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014, breaking the record for the most expensive art work by a female artist ever sold. The most expensive art work by a male artist ever sold was over double that price.

Female art is worth less, not just economically, but culturally. It’s not important enough to devote solo exhibitions to, and is often not even entrusted to female hands. Carmen Herrera wasn’t seen as comparable to Ellsworth Kelly or Barnett Newman when she was painting as part of the US School. The work of Plautilla Nelli has never been comparable to Caravaggio’s.

The art world seems to be changing: the Uffizi Gallery is exhibiting Nelli’s work in a solo exhibition this year, as well as showing Maria Lassnig in the Pitti Palace from March. The Prado in Madrid is for the first time holding a solo show for a female artist, Clara Peeters, this year. Suddenly, maybe, you could dare to think that a painting by a female is worth as much as a male’s.

In 2015 the Tate Modern held three solo exhibitions by women: Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin and Marlene Dumas. Somehow, I managed to see them all. The bold black print announcing their names on the walls of the gallery and the vibrancy of Delaunay’s paintings held infinite promise. Yet artists such as Eileen Cooper and Phoebe Boswell (speaking on Radio 4 this week) still stress the importance of all-female or all-female and all-black exhibitions, emphasising the importance of spaces in which art can be valued for its own sake, and not be reduced by the fact that it wasn’t painted by a man.

Some of my favourite artists just happen to be female: Frida Kahlo, Cornelia Parker, Rose Wylie, Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delauney, Zarina Bhimji, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, for example. Their work is not less worthy of gallery space, but should be seen as having inestimable value, as they do for me. “Museums in general mirror the power structures in our society, structures that in the arts for example privilege the history of white men’s achievements”, argues Susan Fisher Sterling: they act as microcosms for our divided society. But they are also structures that continually show art that speaks truth to power, that create new spaces for the unsaid, the forgotten, the overlooked.

They should question the narratives we have been taught: the narrative that women can’t create art that holds any value next to the art of a man, the narrative that women weren’t there while the world was changing, that they had no role to play in its transformation.

Shedding light on the star of cell biology

Calum Stephenson
-
0
Shedding light on the star of cell biology

In the twilight depths off the west coast of North America lives a small and graceful jellyfish floating apparently aimlessly through the void. Who would have known that this humble jelly—Aequorea victoria—was set to revolutionise cellular biology in the latter half of the twentieth century. Along the rim of the jellyfish’s bell (the propulsive body) lies a ring of light-emitting organs which, in the blackness, produce an electric green glow that wouldn’t be out place in a Ghostbusters film. This luminescence can be attributed to a chemical mechanism based around the molecule known as the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), synthesised by the jellyfish. Earning those involved in its discovery the Nobel Prize in 2008, GFP has been the key to unlocking the potential of biological imaging over the last 25 years.

The light organ houses two molecules essential for the light reaction: aequorin and GFP, working in conjunction. By catalyzing the degradation of the protein luciferin, aequorin causes blue light to be released. Rather than emitting this blue light, the photons are instead used an as energy source to activate the fluorescence of GFP. GFP has an excitation peak at the wavelengths of 395 nm and 475 nm—corresponding to blue and UV light. This means that it will most efficiency absorb light in this range of the spectrum. Absorbing this light leaves GFP in an unstable state with ‘too much’ energy, being described as excited. Emission of green light at the wavelength of 508 nm, energetically lower than that it absorbed, returns it to its stable state.

Green light is rare in the ocean depths, meaning that an organism that can luminesce in such a way will be more obvious in its surroundings, allowing it to attract prey and confuse predators. But how is this relevant to cell biology in the laboratory? In 1992, American scientist Douglas Prasher sequenced and cloned the wild-type GFP gene. Over the following few years GFP became the darling of molecular genetics, a result of our ability to fuse the gene onto the beginning or the end of any other gene in any organism.

If inserted into an embryo, every cell in the body can inherit the GFP tagged protein. When the resulting organism is exposed to UV light it then glows green. This allows scientists to track both the distribution and the concentration of the protein throughout individual cells or through the organism as a whole, depending on which protein is tagged with GFP. We can see the trafficking of the proteins through the cell in real time, highlighting a host of cellular processes from protein packaging to the structure of the nuclear membrane.

Over the course of its history GFP has been constantly engineered and modified, transforming it into an increasingly more effective and versatile tool. A whole spectrum of different colours of fluorescent proteins have now been engineered. By using a red-producing variant of GFP, scientists have found success in diagnosing cancer since, due to its longer wavelength, red light can travel further through intervening tissue.

On a grander scale, one couldn’t discuss GFP without bringing up the glow-in the dark rats, cats, rabbits, pigs, monkeys…you name it. Due to its obvious but relatively benign nature, GFP serves as one of the earliest genes used when trialling an organism with genetic modification, as a proof of the technology before more complex manipulation is attempted, with wide implications especially within medicine. We will soon reach the point where we can easily extract vaccines from cow’s milk, and produce disease resistant pigs.

The story of a simple jellyfish that has gone onto transform the very nature of molecular biology and medicine is a testament to the resourcefulness of science and humanity as a whole. It proves that the most useful of tools can have the most unlikely of origins, and should serve as a needed reality check. With every extinction, we say goodbye to another jewel in the biological crown, the vast wealth of unique genetic information that the organism possessed vanishing often forever. Who knows how many ‘GFP’s’ we’ve already lost.

“An enormous array of talent on display”

Jonnie Barrow
-
0
“An enormous array of talent on display”

A running theme of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is hypocrisy in social performance. The story examines Anna’s success in keeping up a socially acceptable facade as her actions run contrary to societal norms. This thematic idea makes the story perfect for adapting into performative mediums such as film and theatre, where the audience’s suspended disbelief required for the performance to work is mirrored by the scepticism of some of the characters on the stage towards Anna’s actions. Despite some first-night nerves, this original musical adaptation of Tolstoy’s (literally and figuratively) heavy tome is a mostly successful adaptation of a notoriously tricky work to do justice to.

The show has clearly sprung from a close-knit creative team with a cohesive and unified vision. The script (penned by co-directors Suzy Cripps, James Tibbles, and musical director/composer Maria Shepard) contains some really smart creative decisions to streamline the story’s focus without sacrificing dramatic integrity.

With such well-drawn characters, it’s sometimes almost a shame when the story judders to a halt to make way for another musical number. The score and sung numbers were mostly engaging, although the score often emphasised rather than camouflaged a couple of abrupt tonal transitions between scenes. The songs themselves are pleasant, though not memorable, and too often lapse into the trope whereby two characters sing different things over the top of each other to communicate their feelings. The simpler numbers work better, with a particular stand-out being the wickedly funny “That Is What’s Expected From A Woman” as well as the more sonorous ensemble pieces.

The whole cast and crew are terrific, really bringing the best out of the material. Amschel de Rothschild and Susannah Hardwick create sweet chemistry in the romantic subplot of Kitty and Konstantin, while Caitlin Kelly is a wicked delight as the duplicitous Betsy, who always feels one step away from breaking into a Mean Girls-style Regina George impression.

With such a talented cast, it’s pleasing to see the directors showcasing certain performers’ individual talents too. Phoebe Mansell’s dancing, Amschel de Rothschild’s accordion playing, and Hardwick’s soprano skills really add to the texture of the show and breathe extra life into scenes where these skills are brought to the fore.

The action is well staged for the most part, with a particularly stylish flourish at the denouement involving a train ending the show on a strong note. That said, the play’s beginning is a little awkward and slow (though it quickly settles down), and some of the ensemble dance numbers feel a little constrained by the stage space.

As for the main storyline, the three principal performers form a delightfully watchable trio. Henry Jacobs, as Alexei Karenin, is the best of the three, taking a character who is designed to be boring and making him both fascinating and sympathetic. Alex Buchanan does a sterling job as Anna’s lover, Alexei Vronsky, but it is Anna herself whose performance proves the most thought-provoking.

Amelia Gabriel as Anna is an enchanting stage presence, iridescently watchable and enormously talented at both acting and singing. However, her face naturally settles into a smile, and while this contributes to the scenes where she and Vronsky fall in love, it occasionally jars during scenes in the second half when we’re asked to buy into Anna’s dispiritedness. Yet it also strangely plays to the thematic core of the story, drawing attention to the performative aspect of Anna’s attempts to coalesce her desires with society’s norms.

This is by no means a perfect show, but it is undeniably watchable thanks to the enormous array of talent on display. If every audience laughs and cries as much as the audience on opening night, there’s perhaps no greater measure of success for a show than that.

‘We’re going to do it better than Braveheart’

Miriam Nemmaoui
-
0
‘We’re going to do it better than Braveheart’

If your schooling was anything like Tom Fisher’s, who is playing Ross in this new production of Macbeth, you studied the Scottish play in Year 6 for your SATs, in Year 11 for your GCSEs, and again for your AS levels. For me, it was Romeo and Juliet which proved inescapable, which I feel may have been a marginally worse fate. From Hamlet to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I feel we’ve all had one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces ruined by being compelled to endlessly reproduce points about nature metaphors and biblical imagery. After suffering such banal experiences of Shakespeare prior to university, it was a small revelation when I started seeing student productions which did new things with the plays.

In light of this, I ask director Georgia Nicholson how she plans to make Macbeth fresh. She tells me she is doing something which ‘no modern production has achieved’—completely removing modern interpretations and dilutions from the play, and firmly placing it back in its ‘true’ setting in 11th century Scotland.

This historicist take on the play is something which the cast seem very keen to play up too. Ben Kybett, who is playing Malcolm, emphasises that Macbeth is set in a world ‘where a king is near divine’—‘There are a lot of really quite intense views on monarchy and primogeniture and patriotism and nationalism. It’s an entirely different world, an entirely different way of conceiving how political and social relations work.’ But can’t these threads still exist in a modern or ‘timeless’ setting? ‘I worry that if you set it in a modern power setting, like Downing Street, these ideas such as the Divine Right of Kings, and guest relations, and soldiering, just won’t really come out.’ Georgia nods in agreement: ‘Yes, I think a lot of the punch comes from the original’.

This method of ‘making it new’ by actually making it really, really old may be radical in that it is decidedly untrendy. From Fascist twists on King Lear at the National Theatre, to 1980s versions of Marlowe’s Edward II here in Oxford, the general trend for directors taking on Shakespeare and his contemporaries seems to be to play with our expectations and experiment with setting.

With the absence of such gimmicks, I ask the director what her vision of a setting so far removed from our own experiences is actually like. ‘We’re in a cold, dark place, especially after the death of the king. We’re in a bizarre place—when it’s supposed to be daylight, it’s actually dark. It’s like a permanent solar eclipse is going on. It’s cold, there are witches coming out of the marshes. So I think, when people say they want to plunge an audience into the setting, we really mean it. It’s going to be like ice water baths. You are literally taken away from Oxford and modernity and electricity.’

This all sounds impressive, but I wonder how it will actually be achieved in a small student production. ‘Aesthetically, it is going to be sparse and cold’, Georgia tells me. I suppose sparseness is quite a budget-friendly direction to take it in really, and probably true to the aesthetic of a cold Scottish castle. ‘A thing that annoys me about traditional companies doing Macbeth is they set them in lavish Elizabethan palaces with red curtains and gold everywhere. Our set will be minimal: we have thrones in the middle of the room, and torches, and not much else. And everything will be in stone and wood.’ The cast will wear woollen clothing which, as the director proudly tells me, has been woven by the costume designer using authentic 11th century techniques, rather than resorting to ‘just something black from Primark’.

The cast seem to have researched their parts extensively, and offer insightful comments on what they will bring to their respective roles. Hannah Chukwu, playing Lady Macbeth, says ‘I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a castle, on your own, not seeing your husband for months because he’s at war. How would you react when he returns? Lady Macbeth is, to me, the most interesting character in the play. Her ‘unsex me here’ speech at the beginning really reveals how she views everything in terms of power relations.’

Will this Macbeth live up to its bold claims? The director jokes that they are ‘doing it better than Braveheart’, no less. If you want to find out, you will have to act quickly, since opening and closing night have completely sold out.

Macbeth will play at St. Hilda’s JdP 28th February – 2nd March.

Sport thought: The growth of ‘Britball’

Tom Hartley
-
0
Sport thought: The growth of ‘Britball’

American football has somewhat begun to take-off in England over the last decade. Every university has a team, local clubs are growing, and the NFL International Series is the most popular that it has ever been. The prospect of an NFL team moving or even being founded in London has however, been received with different levels of enthusiasm by British fans. I am most certainly in favour.

My favourite moment of the NFL season was the hard-fought victory by the Green Bay Packers over the Dallas Cowboys. This game really epitomised the reason I love football. With 15 seconds to go, arguably the most inform quarterback in the National Football League has just been sacked for a big loss by a safety blitz from the Dallas secondary. Aaron Rodgers comes back and doesn’t even call a play in the huddle. He simply tells the receivers to go to specific areas of the field to find the weak areas of the cushioned zone the defence is running. The snap goes off, Rodgers scrambles to his left, under pressure from a defensive end, and throws the ball on the run to the side-line where Jared Cook, the Green Bay tight end, slides with his knees and catches the ball to put the Packers within field goal range. Mason Crosby, the Packer’s kicker, steps up and makes a 51 yard field goal to win the game and beat Dallas in the divisional playoffs for the second time in three years. It’s good.

As far as other exciting moments in my four years of following the sport go, I could point to the Raiders Saints game in week one of the season, or the crazy Dallas-Pittsburgh game with the fake spike and Ezekiel Elliot’s magical game winning run, but this game was in the playoffs—the ‘winner takes all’ knockout round of the NFL. I understand that for a
first time reader, what I’ve described above might honestly make absolutely no sense and for a long time I didn’t know what any of those words meant either, but the growth of ‘Britball’ could mean that this will soon no longer be the case.

American Football in Britain has supposedly “really taken off” according to pundits on Sky Sports’ ‘Sunday Night Football’. More and more people are playing at a grassroots level and there is a new BBC highlights show every week that many people tune in to watch or catch up with on IPlayer. There are going to be a record four NFL games played in the UK next year featuring playoff team the Miami Dolphins and the newly relocated LA Rams.

The possibility of a London franchise is serious: George Osborne, speaking in both 2014 and 2015 has said that it could be achieved in the next “four or five years.” Teams moving is something that occurs fairly regularly in America, though somewhat of an alien concept in this country. For example, the original Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis for 20 years before returning to LA and the famous Colosseum stadium for this season just gone. The San Diego Chargers are, this off-season, moving to Los Angles as well and the current Oakland Raiders have, relatively recently, filed paperwork to relocate to Las Vegas.

The team most often cited as being the candidate for London is the Jacksonville Jaguars, owned by Shahid Khan, who also owns Fulham FC. The Jaguars (or Jags) are a young team with some good young playmakers such as Allen Robinson at receiver and first round pick last year Jalen Ramsey at cornerback. Their biggest struggles come at quarterback with Blake Bortles having a regression in performance from, what was a decent showing in 2015. If the Jaguars do move, which I personally hope they do, the sport can surely only continue to grow in this country and guarantees at least eight NFL games to be played in London every year, a prospect many fans in this country can only dream of.

Between the World and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Altair Brandon-Salmon
-
0
Between the World and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his autobiographical rumination on race relations in America, Between the World and Me (2015), to his son, Samori. This is how he sums up his advice: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” It’s Coates conviction that America, founded on the backs of slaves, has been irrevocably tainted by its original sin; institutionally, culturally, all-pervasively racist.

Coates has become the most influential African American writer of his generation, his series of long articles for The Atlantic becoming required reading, from the angry, incisive ‘The Case for Reparations’ (2014) to the moving, ‘My President was Black’ (2016). He is a journalist unafraid to embed his personal experiences into highly detailed reportage. Between the World and Me, his second book, comes after his 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle, and won the 2015 National Book Award. Despite such worldly success, Coates’ pessimism runs deep, unconvinced racism will ever be ‘solved’ in the US.

He writes powerfully that “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.” Yet this nakedness, its fear and vulnerability, are constants, can never be left behind by Coates or by his son. America is an environment where new
methods of oppression are invented at every stage, from the lash of the slave-owner to the police officer’s bullet in the back. The book is a confession to his son, that he is incapable of protecting him, that he can never be truly safe.

Coates’ great rhetorical devices is to term white America ‘the Dreamers’, perpetuating the American Dream, an intrinsically racist construct used to disguise African Americans oppression, blaming their lack of achievement as a lack of effort.This alienation Coates feels from white America leads to most provocative passage in the book. Witnessing the events of 9/11 unfold from his apartment building in Brooklyn, he says, “my heart was cold. I had disasters all my own… I would never consider any American citizen pure.” Coates, despite his atheism, has an almost catholic belief in the original sin of slavery transmitting down through the generations, affecting all. Written before the election of Donald Trump, Coates clearly has no time for the myths of Obama’s post-racial America.

The book however, is not without its faults. The description of the murder of a friend, Prince Jones, is seen as a watershed in Coates’ consciousness; yet his account of the policeman murdering Jones never fully explains the officer being black as well. Perhaps more troublingly, Coates, despite writing extensively on the black body, rarely moves beyond his own masculine viewpoint to consider the double binds of racism and misogyny black women have been subjected to. Nor does Coates give more than a cursory acknowledgement of the racism inflicted upon Hispanic or Asian Americans. In his defence though, Coates makes no claim that his slim volume is an all-encompassing record of US race relations—it is his experiences he writes about, not others. Astute and sharp tongued, it is a major work by an important writer which, even when you disagree with his points, is always engrossing.

1...889890891...2,491Page 890 of 2,491

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley