darkmatter

The failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow in late June were strange and shocking. They were so spectacularly inept and bodged that one has to question both whether they were intended to cause apocalyptic loss of life and their connections to an international al-Queda ‘plot’. Most shocking however, were the rapid revelations in news coverage that the key suspects were thought to be doctors who had worked for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Within days of the attacks, the British government had called for greater surveillance and regulation of all overseas professionals working in the NHS. A response that played to the renewed moral panic about immigration controls that accompanied the vilification of the doctors in the tabloid media. In the blogosphere, the responses ranged from ‘I told you so’, to ideological critiques of socialised health care, to the stark and fundamental question ‘…does this now make you think twice before you go to the doctors?’

A Review of: N. Ali, V. Kalra & S. Sayyid (eds) (2005) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. London: Hurst.

In Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, the last sentence of the book urges that we must seek “a reconciliation between reality and men [sic], between description and explanation, between object and knowledge”.1 I feel this fitting of A Postcolonial People, a narrative which fulfils Barthes very objective; this volume of essays challenges the myths about South Asians which have prevailed and become internalised within a racialized discourse.

The upcoming Cultural Studies Now conference at the University of East London will be a major event examining the critical productivity of Cultural Studies as a discipline and political project. The conference raises a number of key issues:

‘Cultural Studies, as the paradigmatic interdisciplinary project, has always been defined by its relationships to proximate sets of ideas, practices and institutions. As Cultural Studies has grown and matured, its borders have multiplied. Cultural Studies has affected and been affected by contiguous disciplines, academic and non-academic institutions, political movements and projects, and creative practices of many kinds.

Memory, history and location all come together in a series of photographs, abstract watercolours and a video installation collectively titled Lost Pavilion by the British artist Said Adrus