Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain

Focusing on a series of pioneering radio ballads produced for the BBC between 1958 and 1961 by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, and Peggy Seeger, this article explores representations of industrial working-class culture in folksongs of the radical Left. Situating such work in relation to A. L. Lloyd, mass culture, the nascent New Left, gender, and the aesthetics of social realism (distinct from the project of Soviet socialist realism), I argue that early radio ballads were nostalgic panegyrics for the integrity of working-class identity in the face of unprecedented socio-economic change. At the very moment when distinctively masculine working-class traditions seemed to be at risk of disappearing under the rising tide of affluence, Conservative Party rhetoric, female emancipation, and the emergence of a classless commodity utopia, these programs generated a portrait of an unwavering British subculture damaged and defined by capitalist exploitation yet resistant to the unwelcome advance of globalized modernity. Ultimately, such work revealed far more about MacColl’s own political convictions than about the intricacies of working-class life in Britain.Funding for this project was provided by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (1077009

Trouble in Paradise: One Christian Denomination’s Contemporary Struggle Reconciling Science and Belief

Proposed amendments to Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief No. 6 represent an attempt to define acceptable Adventist understandings of creation more tightly and to exclude alternative viewpoints in a creedal fashion. In particular, there appears to be an attempt to exclude anything but a young age for life. One question which may be asked is whether the proposed amendments are in fact sufficient to exclude unwanted views, since there are models which allow for a creation week consisting of seven consecutive, contiguous, literal, twenty-four days, yet which accommodate current scientific understandings in ways recent creationism finds uncomfortable. While group identity is important, a focus on the formulation of tighter belief statements as a means of defining heretics will do little to bring resolution. Such documents can all too easily become primarily instruments of power and exclusion. They indicate a shift in focus from the core of a community’s identity to its borders and that is no advance. Listening to one another may not always bring unanimity of opinion but it should both foster respect and facilitate a deeper and more productive unity than mere uniformity could ever bring

The Shabuim of Dan 9:24-27 - Weeks, Sevens or Weeks of Years

In Dan 9:24, the word shabuim has been variously translated as “weeks,” “sevens,” or “weeks of years,” various schools of interpretation generally preferring though rarely requiring one translation or the other for support. In terms of its root relationships and nominal pattern, it is clear that the singular word has the basic meaning of a unit of seven. On the other hand, it is never used in such a way that there is any doubt about what elements comprise the unit. This fact goes against the suggestion that shabuim should here be translated as “sevens.” In all previous instances in Biblical Hebrew, shabuim means a week of days. However, the distinctive use of the masculine plural form in Dan 9:24 suggests that a different nuance may be present here. The chiasmus between vss. 2 and 24 and the background of both verses in the cycle of annual sabbaths confirm that weeks of years are here in view. Suggestions are made as to how best to translate shabuim since the expression “of years” is not found in the original

The Language of Appointment to Offices and Roles in Scripture

A study of the language of appointment to offices and roles in Scripture contributes to a theology of such appointment and suggests several ways in which these appointments may be ritually celebrated and the language in which they can be profitably described. However, it nowhere suggests the concept of ordination itself

The Pros and Cons of Intertextuality

An exploration of the pros and cons of intertextuality as a way of understanding Scripture. Historical Criticism has often been seen as the domain of liberal approaches to exegesis, but evangelicals may become the rightful heirs of this approach as liberalism diminishes the place of history in understanding Scripture in favour of more literary subjective approaches

Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle

This article foregrounds discrepancies between vernacular singing in England and the work of London’s Folk-Song Society during the 1890s. Figures such as Lucy Broadwood, Kate Lee, and Hubert Parry acted as gatekeepers through whom folk culture had to pass in order to be understood as such. Informed by colonialist epistemology, socialist radicalism, and literary Romanticism, what may be termed the “folkloric imagination” concealed the very thing it claimed to identify. Folk song, thus produced, represents the popular voice under erasure. Situated as the antidote to degeneration, burgeoning mass consumer culture, and escalating urbanization, the folk proved to be the perfect tabula rasa upon which the historiographical, political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin de siècle could be inscribed. Positioned as a restorative bulwark against the shifting tides of modernity, the talismanic folk and their songs were temporal anachronisms conjured up via the discursive strategies that attempted to describe them. Increased attention should hence be paid to singers such as Henry Burstow and the Copper brothers of Rottingdean in order to rescue their histories from the conceptual apparatus of folk song.</jats:p

It\u27s about the Survivors

This article discusses maintaining the commandments of God and keeping the faith of Jesus in a world that will not survive

Ballads, blues, and alterity

Focusing on interactions between Britain and the US in the field of popular song, this thesis explores the constitutive relationship between discourse, performance, and identity via critical and postcolonial theory. I interrogate how and why nostalgic and essentialising visions of alterity were used to resist mass consumption, global capitalism, and the changes wrought by modernity during the twentieth century. I argue that folk music does not exist outside the discourse of revivalism and is therefore best seen as an institutionalised system of knowledge animating the ‘low Other’. Chapter 1, ‘“Dancing Puppets” | Nationalism, Social Darwinism, and the Transatlantic Invention of Folksong’, uncovers moments of mediation between ‘primitive’ cultures and metropolitan elites during the early twentieth century. Employing the idea of gatekeeping, I critique a genealogy of powerful voices including Cecil J. Sharp and John A. Lomax alongside others who persistently challenged their orthodoxies. Chapter 2, ‘“His Rough, Stubborn Muse” | Industrial Balladry, Class, and the Politics of Realism’, investigates Marxist visions of working-class culture, showing how ideas of rural authenticity were translated onto urban contexts. Focusing on the BBC ‘radio ballads’, I argue that industrial folksong was a form of social realism intended as a gendered bulwark against threats posed by Americanisation and postwar affluence. Chapter 3, ‘“Found True and Unspoiled” | Blues, Performance, and the Mythology of Racial Display’, explores African American culture, showing how desires written into a revivalist gaze forced artists to assume what I term ‘black masks’ for the benefit of white male fantasy. Focusing on televised performances, I argue that the semiotics of blues events provide a way of understanding the workings of racial identity itself. I conclude by proposing that what I term the ‘folkloric imagination’ is a simulacrum brought into existence by ideological fantasy––a manifestation of the colonialist Real.This work was funded by a full grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Counci

The Sabbath and The Alien

Many scholars in modern Judaism have discerned universal dimensions to the Sabbath.\u27 However, few writers in earlier Judaism ever saw them.2 It is almost superfluous to add that non-Sabbatarian Christians have rarely seen these dimensions either. This failure to see universal dimensions may seem surprising, for three passages in the Pentateuch affirm that the 11, resident alien, is to rest on the weekly Sabbath, along with the Israelite (Exod 20: 10; 23: 12; Deut 5: 14). However, rabbinic Judaism has traditionally identified the py in these passages as the ger saddzq, the circumcised righteous alien, rather than the ger toshab, the uncircumcised sojourning alien. The ger saddiq was a newcomer to Jewish territory, but not to the Jewish religion.