Which is in fact because I have just finished #AliSmith's 'Spring'. It is a beautiful novel. Part 1 is particularly brilliant. I'm not sure about its flirtation with magical realism in part 2. We need a writer who can find hope without recourse to magic.
On the other hand, it is more mythological realism than magical. We can believe in myth making and story telling. What is real is not the mundane, but the eternal or, better, the eternal in the mundane. Smith is on the side of the angels because she believes in art, in myth in story telling. Spring, with its promise of life, is contrasted with winter which is dark and unenchanted. It is also art and the mundane. Smith is with Chaucer not Elliott. So am I.
What I particularly like is the motif that none of this is about you. It serves to cut the privileged down to size, but the moral extends. The story isn't Florence's or the Machines. It is a shared world and 'world' here is truely all that is, was, will be or even could have been the case.
‘AM I LESS BRITISH?’ Racism, belonging, and the children of refugees and immigrants in North London by Doğuş Şimşek (2024) #UCLPress#OpenAccess#Book
"Am I Less British?’ focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants in North London, whose parents migrated from Turkey.
Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity, belonging and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism and discrimination, and explores how they think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey."
Notes from My Travels
Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan and Ecuador
From the ever-intriguing and appealing actress Angelina Jolie comes the personal journals she compiled while performing humanitarian relief efforts in such countries as Sierra Leone and Tanzania, Pakistan and Cambodia.
We've just published volume 17 of George Lansbury's archive, which covers his peace campaign up until his death. It also includes lots of correspondence about refugees. It's online here: https://lse-atom.arkivum.net/uklse-dl1gl01
"Places we slept as children:
they warm us in the memory "
#WhatTheGruffalosReading : the G-Man is reading @neilhimself 's What You Need to be Warm from @BloomsburyBooks , each purchase helps the UNHCR refugee programme, something that is sadly badly required all the more.
In this era of the global refugee crisis in which millions of Africans are rendered stateless, does it become imperative for Afropolitans and other elite African travellers to be stakeholders in the conversation?
This is one of the many questions Sakiru Adebayo, winner of the 2022 Amílcar Cabral Prize, will address this afternoon.
Tomorrow, you’ll have another chance to see and hear the 2022 Amílcar Cabral Prize winner, Sakiru Adebayo (University of British Columbia), in a lecture where he’ll examine the ethical relations between privileged and underprivileged African subjects in the West.
A comparison of refugee attitudes 2015 and today, just published in Nature:
Bansak, Hainmueller & Hangartner: Europeans’ support for #refugees of varying background is stable over time
"support for asylum seekers today is, if anything, slightly higher than six years ago at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis"
which is
"a consequence of the socio-demographic composition ... of Ukrainian refugees"