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A recent study in the United States indicated that the rate of Americans identifying themselves using political terms has almost doubled in the past five years.[1] This article considers whether this shift towards stronger political identities is indicative of a wider polarisation in Western politics which is, in turn, creating a space for more autocratic decision-making.   The study, carried out by Nick Rogers and Jason Jones, analysed a random sample of Twitter bios (ie the 160 characters you use to describe yourself) for explicit and implicit political keywords. Explicit words included the terms ‘conservative’, ‘Democrat’, and ‘socialist’ and implicit political terms included ‘woke’ and ‘blue lives matter’. The aim of the study was to measure the extent to which Americans are defining themselves by political affiliations and whether they are changing their identity in a way that saliently incorporates their politics.   According to Rogers and Jones, an individual’s identity goes beyond mere attitudes and behaviour: it is the all-encompassing sense of self that informs attitudes and behaviour.   Whilst identity politics may be slightly less prevalent in the UK than in the US, the rise of political engagement throughout the Western world is undeniable. Despite the restrictions imposed on the Presidential campaigns as a result of COVID-19, the US elections saw the highest rate of voter turnout for 120 years. Similarly, for the 2019 UK elections, voter turnout was at its second highest rate since the landslide 1997 election of Tony Blair.   Arguably, this rise in political engagement has brought with it a shift towards increasingly polarised political groups. Jones and Rogers explain this as tribalism: fostering ingroup pride and outgroup animosity. In a political context, studies show that ‘deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation’.[2] It was certainly true that in the aftermath of the US election, which saw a swathe of Republican devotees (accompanied by a number of alt-right political activists) march on the Capitol, they demonstrated an almost cultish commitment to their political ideals. Their actions marked an unprecedented assault on modern US democracy and were indicative of the strength of support held across America for its former autocratic leader.   As Jones and Rogers point out, if people define themselves increasingly by their political allegiances, ‘their feelings towards political “others” can be expected to become more negative, and debate on matters of policy will become more emotional and intractable’. Traditional methods of political persuasion may cease to be of use as changing someone’s mind on a particular issue requires ‘an adjustment to an entire sense of group identity’.[3]   The rise in autocratic leadership   COVID-19   Arguably the polarisation of political views, most marked recently in the US but also of course seen in the UK in relation to Brexit, enables autocratic leadership to flourish.   The model of representative politics, adopted by liberal democracies, generally requires the government of the day to place legislation before an elected body of representatives for debate. In this way, legislation has the opportunity to be shaped by representatives of the broader electorate rather than purely the Party in power. This model facilitates political oversight and encourages moderation through compromise. Political parties in the UK have often been accused of all seeking to occupy the centre ground: all endeavouring to strike the perfect balance between conservatism and liberalism. This is no coincidence. Decision-making, in a liberal democracy underpinned by representative politics, requires consensus.   As Lord Sumption notes elsewhere in this issue, there has been a shift away from liberal democracy towards authoritarian government. He identified the Brexit referendum as a turning point for modern representative politics in the UK. Noting the use of referendums by some of the notorious autocrats (including Putin, Mussolini, and Hitler) he explains that they undermine the system of representative politics on which a liberal democracy is based by preventing it from accommodating differences among the electorate on incredibly divisive issues. The natural consequence of this, according to Lord Sumption, is the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak.   Recent efforts by the government to expand the remits of executive power can be viewed as a manifestation of this trait. It is widely recognised that during periods of uncertainty the electorate looks for strength and stability from its leadership. Indeed, a US study in 2016—in the run up to Donald Trump’s election—showed that 40% of Americans favoured authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity.[4] Similar trends are visible in relation to the handling of Brexit and the pandemic in the UK. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto depicted the UK as ‘paralysed by a broken Parliament’ and one of the most commonly cited reasons for supporting the Conservative Party was the promise that, by hook or by crook, Boris Johnson would ‘Get Brexit Done’.[5] Until recently (with the rise of protests concerning the ongoing restrictions), the public have willingly ceded their individual rights in favour of decisive leadership and the government’s autocratic tactics for handling this pandemic have largely gone unchallenged.   Since March 2020, the government has laid approximately 415 pieces of coronavirus-related legislation at an average rate of seven statutory instruments per week. Only 26 of these statutory instruments have been laid before Parliament in draft form.[6] The government has relied on the use of statutory instruments (rather than primary legislation) to govern by Ministerial decree. The primary legislation underpinning the coronavirus regulations is the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Under section 45R of this Act, Government can dispense with the obligation to obtain Parliamentary approval for regulations if the regulations ‘contain a declaration that the person making it is of the opinion that, by reason of urgency, it is necessary to make the order without a draft being so laid and approved’ . [7] The advantage of this method of legislating is that the regulations can be enacted without delay. In the early days of the pandemic, Government scrambled to enact the Coronavirus Act 2020. The legislation passed through Parliament at breakneck speed but there was, at least, a forum for debate. The same does not apply to the social distancing or lockdown regulations which have, to date, been governed by statutory instruments. Whilst the section 45R urgency justification was entirely plausible at the outset of the pandemic, its continued use undermines Parliamentary sovereignty.   Despite the fact that a number of these statutory instruments have imposed unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedom, with criminal sanctions for breaching the restrictions, the legislation has regularly been published only hours before coming into force.[8] On at least one occasion, legislation was laid after Parliament was no longer in session, despite having been announced in the media several weeks earlier. Legally curious fans of Channel 4’s It’s a Sin  might have noted that the same primary legislation used by that government to issue decrees for the detention of young AIDS sufferers is now enabling the imposition of urgent legislation authorising our detention. Whilst generally the UK population seems to accept the need for such unprecedented restrictions on their freedoms given the health crisis, there remains significant unease regarding Government’s dismissive attitude towards Parliament. The Coronavirus regulations are detailed and complex statutory instruments that warrant considered analysis and parliamentary scrutiny. Parliamentary scrutiny has the dual advantage of requiring the relevant Ministers to prepare for a debate, and in doing so often alerting them to potential shortcomings with the legislation, as well as providing Members of Parliament with the opportunity to point out loopholes or potential consequences that were not immediately apparent to the Minister responsible for drafting the legislation. This process is widely believed to enhance legislation.   Curbing judicial powers   The barrister Adam Wagner recently noted that, ‘the easier it is for freedoms to be taken away, the greater the temptation to limit them again in the future’.[9] This observation may in part explain the gathering momentum behind the expansion of executive power beyond pandemic related legislation.   During the course of the past six months, the government has launched the Independent Review of Administrative Law (IRAL), to conduct a review into the workings of judicial review, the Independent Human Rights Act Review (IHRAR), to consider whether the Act is working in practice and has also now hinted that it will consider reviewing the judicial appointments process. Whilst the decision to commission both the IRAL and IHRAR already constituted red flags as to the government’s direction of travel regarding constitutional law reform, its response to the IRAL panel’s report (the Faulks Report) is even more concerning. It was notable that Robert Buckland described the consultation launched in response to the Faulks Report as a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ to broaden the conversation.[10] This explanation seems a little far-fetched given that the last government consultation of judicial review was conducted in 2013. A more plausible explanation is that the government is seeking to capitalise on the political momentum it has gathered through its recent spate of autocratic decision-making. Although both reviews were alluded to in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto for the 2019 election, the government’s efforts to push through reform at ‘breakneck speed’ have been widely remarked upon.   The Foreword to the government’s consultation stated that ‘[t]he Panel’s analysis identified a growing tendency for the courts in Judicial Review cases to edge away from a strictly supervisory jurisdiction’ and that ‘the panel found courts were increasingly considering the merits of government decisions themselves, instead of how those decisions were made—moving beyond the remit of judicial review’.[11] Panel members have vocalised their concerns regarding the government interpretation of the Faulks Report with Lord Faulks himself confirming, on the Law in Action podcast, that he did not believe this was an accurate representation of the panel’s findings. He explained, ‘I think we found that there were one or two cases which we particularly pointed out where there was considerable tension between what was legitimate to be considered by the courts and what was really a matter of politics. But those were particular cases. We do not think that there was an overall trend that you could extract from those cases’.[12] The government consultation goes well beyond the Faulks Report’s recommendations, proposing reforms to the use of ouster clauses (to broaden their use and thereby limit the justiciability of decisions by the courts) and mandatory remedies that would significantly restrict the court’s ability to declare a government decision null and void.   The IHRAR panel has been tasked with considering the application of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention Rights) under UK law and, amongst other things, whether the courts should retain the power to interpret legislation compatibly with Convention Rights under section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the HRA). The government’s position is that the courts have a tendency to interpret legislation in a manner inconsistent with the intentions of Parliament in enacting the legislation. If section 4 declarations of incompatibility were a first instance consideration, rather than the interpretative powers used by the courts under section 3 of the HRA, it would severely hamper an individual’s access to a remedy. Mishcon de Reya’s data analysis of cases involving the HRA indicates that the average lag between a declaration of incompatibility being issued and the relevant legislation being amended or repealed is 17 months.[13] Any amendment, following a declaration under section 4 of the HRA, relies on Government making time for the issue to be considered in the legislative agenda. This would impose a significant legislative burden whilst hamstringing the court’s ability to provide individuals with a timely remedy.   Whilst, as yet, no consultation has been officially announced, Robert Buckland’s speech at Queen Mary University on 25 March 2021 gave some insight into the next administrative law issue on the government’s agenda. In February, the think tank Policy Exchange published a report titled ‘Reforming the Lord Chancellor’s Role in Senior Judicial Appointments’ which proposes reforms to the current judicial appointments system so as to grant the Lord Chancellor a greater role in determining senior judicial appointments.[14] In his speech, Robert Buckland expressed his intent to examine the role of Lord Chancellor in the context of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. He referred to strands of reform surrounding judicial appointments that are worth examining to ensure that they ‘continue to provide the appropriate framework for the Lord Chancellor to exercise their duties in respect of our constitutional arrangements’.[15] This topic has been hotly debated in the UK in the past, not least because of the very real fear of moving towards a more political US-style system.   Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision concerning the incompatibility of Northern Irish abortion laws with Convention Rights, it was proposed that a parliamentary committee should play a role in the appointment process for the Supreme Court. Under the current judicial appointment process, judicial appointments are made by a commission, chaired by the President of the Supreme Court and including representatives of the Judicial Appointments Commissions of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, at least one of whom must be a lay member. In fact, the Judicial Appointments Commission for England and Wales comprises a 50/50 balance of judicial members and lay members. Rightly, according to Lord Pannick, whilst ‘[s]ome candidates for Supreme Court appointment take (in broad terms) a more expansive approach to judicial protection of human rights, and others less so’ these factors are not ‘the subject of public discussion’.17 The constitution of the commission does, however, mean that those responsible for approving appointments to our high courts have a diverse professional background. Lord Pannick notes the potential perils of a political system, reflected by the experiences of the US: ‘The unsurprising reality, as Senate experience over the past 30 years has shown, is that the involvement of politicians in the appointment of Supreme Court judges results in political motives and considerations playing the primary role in the process’.[16] Any efforts to incorporate a political element into this decision-making process has the potential to disrupt the balance of the entire British constitution: removing the guarantee of judicial political independence that is essential to maintaining the separation of powers that protects the rule of law.   What can be learnt from the current political situation in Poland?   Since the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, the country has shown impressive economic growth, record lows of unemployment and strong wages. As a result, it has become an increasingly popular prospect for international investment, with a number of US companies establishing headquarters there during the past decade. However, since the return to power of the Law and Justice party (PiS) in 2015, the Polish judiciary has been the target of policy and legislative amendments leaving it vulnerable to political influence.   Reforms include politicising the appointment of the First President of the Supreme Court (the equivalent of our President of the Supreme Court) and restrictions on legal challenges to judicial and constitutional bodies as well as law enforcement agencies. The Index of Economic Freedom showed that judicial effectiveness had dropped to 42.8 points in 2020 which places it in the ‘repressed’ category, over 15 points lower than its score in 2017.[17] This is severely impacting on the country’s ability to attract foreign investment.   It is impossible not to note here that PiS was founded under the banner of nationalism, populism and Euroscepticism: these are of course all themes that have featured, to varying degrees, in recent Conservative manifestos in the UK (and formed the basis of 2016’s Leave campaign).   According to the European Commission, ‘effective judicial institutions that uphold the rule of law have been identified as having a positive economic impact. Where judicial systems guarantee the enforcement of rights, creditors are more likely to lend, businesses are dissuaded from opportunistic behaviour, transaction costs are reduced and innovative businesses are more likely to invest’.[18] Interestingly, this sentiment has been expressed repeatedly in response to the IHRAR consultation. Respondents have expressed concern in relation to the government’s efforts to row back from its commitments to Convention Rights and limit the powers of the UK judiciary, which is widely respected across the world, to interpret legislation and provide adequate protection for Convention Rights.   The expansion of executive power in Poland has seen a surge in the number of protests in the country, recently resulting in the enactment of laws restricting freedom of assembly. Advocacy groups have identified a trend amongst governments with authoritarian tendencies using the pandemic to weaken democratic standards: in particular, in relation to freedom of association and the independence of the courts. According to a 2020 survey, only 34% of the public and 27% of businesses trust the independence of the Polish judiciary.[19]   Indeed, only last year it was noted that ‘the surge of populist far-right in central and eastern Europe has meant repression which seemed unlikely just a few years ago is slowly appearing’.[20] In Poland, this has taken the form of the imposition of an outright ban on abortion and political harassment of LGBTQ groups and individuals. In a deeply concerning move towards the end of last year, the Polish state-run oil company, PKN Orlen, purchased one of the country’s private media outlets—Polska Press—with a readership of 11 million Poles per day.   Clearly, the expansion of executive power, partly through proposed judicial reforms, in the UK does not exactly align with the situation in Poland. The UK remains politically and democratically stable. However, the political situation in Poland gives cause to consider the possible consequences of constitutional reforms. Over the past year we have accepted unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedom and the current proposals, which seek to limit an individual’s ability to challenge Government decisions, should be viewed through this lens and with extreme caution.   Conclusion   The division fostered by autocratic decision-making has been particularly evident in Poland, the US and the UK. Indeed, Mikołaj Łoziński, a Polish author, observed last year that ‘No one is surprised anymore by the sight of nationalists marching with torches, throwing flares on the main streets of major Polish cities’.[21] The same is true in many cities across the US, and in recent months the UK has seen a sharp rise in the number of violent protests, primarily in relation to the ongoing lockdown restrictions.   The political situation in Poland demonstrates how quickly a liberal democracy can slip towards authoritarian rule and the impact that this instability has on foreign investment and the protection of individual rights.   However, PiS’s transition towards autocratic governance has not passed unnoticed. Concerns regarding the protection of LGBTQ rights and the independence of its judiciary have been the subject of significant media attention and the European Union is considering steps to restrict Poland’s access to European funds until an independent judiciary is restored. With a moderate President in the White House, PiS (which counted Trump as an ally) will doubtless be feeling more vulnerable in the face of the criticism of its European neighbours. Equally, Trump’s appointment of two Supreme Court justices during his single Presidential term shows the potential peril in allowing too much political influence over judicial appointments. In light of this we must all view attempts to tinker with the constitutional arrangements here in the UK with caution—particularly those aimed at providing more power to the executive at the expense of the judiciary. Emily Nicholson and Alexandra Agnew   Emily Nicholson is a Legal Director at Mishcon de Reya. She acted for Gina Miller in her successful constitutional judicial review cases concerning the Prime Minister's prorogation of Parliament.   Alexandra Agnew is an Associate at Mishcon de Reya. She has recently advised the Jewish Labour Movement in relation to its submissions to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on Labour Party antisemitism. [1] Nick Rogers and Jason J Jones, ‘Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Self-Identity: Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time?’ (2021) 2(1) Journal of Social Computing < https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9355032 > accessed 20 April 2021. [2] Cass R Sunstein, ‘The law of group polarization’ (2002) 10(2) Journal of Political Philosophy 175 (as cited in ibid). [3] Rogers and Jones (n 1). [4] Matthew C MacWilliams, ‘Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans’ ( Politico , 23 September 2020) < https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681 > accessed 20 April 2021. [5] See ‘The 2019 Party Election Manifestos and the European Union’ ( European & International Analysts Group ) < https://www.eiag.org.uk/paper/2019-party-election-manifestos-european-union/ > accessed 20 April 2021 [6] Hansard Society, ‘Coronavirus Statutory Instruments Dashboard’ (9 April 2020) < https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/publications/data/coronavirus-statutory-instruments-dashboard > accessed 20 April 2021. [7] Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 s 45R. [8] Meg Russell and Lisa James, ‘MPs Are Right: Parliament Has Been Sidelined’ ( UK in a Changing Europe , 28 September 2020) < https://ukandeu.ac.uk/mps-are-right-parliament-has-been-sidelined/ > accessed 20 April 2021. [9] Adam Wagner, ‘Taking Liberties: Covid-19 and the Anatomy of a Constitutional Catastrophe’ ( Prospect Magazine , 26 March 2021) < https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/adam-wagner-covid-lockdown-law-democracy-essay > accessed 20 April 2021. [10] Eduardo Reyes, ‘Buckland’s Judicial Power Project’ ( Law Gazette , 29 March 2021) < https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/analysis/bucklands-judicial-power-project/5107951.article > accessed 20 April 2021. [11] Ministry of Justice, ‘Judicial Review Reform: The Government Response to the Independent Review of Administrative Law’ (2021) < https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/975301/judicial-review-reform-consultation-document.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [12] Joshua Rozenberg, Interview with Lord Faulks ( BBC , 23 March 2021) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000td1g > accessed 20 April 2021. [13] Mishcon de Reya, ‘Response to IHRAR’ < https://www.mishcon.com/assets/managed/docs/downloads/doc_3246/Response%20to%20IHRAR.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [14] Richard Ekins and Graham Gee, ‘Reforming the Lord Chancellor’s Role in Senior Judicial Appointments’ ( Policy Exchange , 2021) < https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Reforming-the-Lord-Chancellor’s-Role-in-Senior-Judicial-Appointments.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [15] Ministry of Justice and The Rt Hon Robert Buckland KC, ‘Law and Politics – the Nightmare and the Noble Dream’ ( Queen Mary University Conference, London , 25 March 2021) < https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/lord-chancellors-speech-law-and-politics-the-nightmare-and-the-noble-dream > accessed 20 April 2021. [16] David Pannick, ‘Brett Kavanaugh Scandal: a Supreme Case of Why Politics Must Stay Out of Judicial Appointments’ The Times (London, 27 September 2018) < https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brett-kavanaugh-scandal-a-supreme-case-of-why-politics-must-stay-out-of-judicial-appointments-bdz8m67k6 > accessed 20 April 2021. [17] ‘Index of Economic Freedom’ ( heritage.org ) < https://www.heritage.org/index/visualize?cnts=poland&type=11 > accessed 20 April 2021. [18] European Commission, ‘2020 EU Justice Scoreboard’ (10 July 2020) 5 < https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/ PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0306&from=EN > accessed 20 April 2021. [19] Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Country Forecasts, ‘Outlook for 2021-2025: Political Stability’ (2021). [20] Rima Marrouch, ‘Going Nowhere: Europe’s Right-wing Populists Will Survive the End of Trump’ The Independent  (London, 29 December 2020) < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe-trump-populism-poland-hungary-b1780027.html > accessed 20 April 2021. [21] ibid.

Elizabeth Susan Wahl suggests that during the eighteenth century, homosexual relations between women became an ‘open secret’ that was ‘embedded and even coded within a multiplicity of … medical, literary, and pornographic discourses’.[1] In Coleridge’s Christabel , the homosexual relations between Geraldine and Christabel are ‘embedded’ within the literal ‘bed’ of consummation. It is in this ‘bed’ that the ‘secret’ of homoerotic desire becomes ‘open’ to the reader. However, whilst Coleridge allows the reader inclusion to the ‘open secret’ of homosexual relations, it remains just that, a secret.   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her essay ‘Epistemology of the closet’ names this idea of ‘secret’ homosexuality ‘the closet’. The concept of ‘the closet’ delineates a social construct of homosexual repression which subjugates and conceals homosexual instincts. The image of a ‘closet’ is an apt metaphor as a literal closet conceals items of clothing, removing them from sight with a physical surrounding structure. Sedgwick applies this literal structure to the social structure of homosexual repression, stating: ‘The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century’.[2] However, examining Coleridge’s eighteenth-century poem Christabel  and its homoerotic undertones suggests that the figurative ‘closet’ is applicable not only ‘in this century’. In Christabel , Coleridge presents an alternative item of furniture, the ‘bed’, that ironically serves to produce an antithetical effect. Whilst Sedgwick’s ‘closet’ serves to repress homosexual transgressions, the ‘bed’ Christabel shares with Geraldine actively brings these repressive and subconscious impulses to fruition. The ‘bed’ is therefore the ‘closet’ Christabel enters unknowingly. Entering the bed sparks her sexual awakening and acts as a catalyst for her homoerotic desires, juxtaposing the function of the ‘closet’ in which an individual knowledgeable of their homoerotic desires must repress them.   And thus the lofty lady spake— ‘All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befel, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie’.   Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness.[3]   The rhyming couplet of ‘I’ and ‘lie’ at the conclusion of the stanza disrupts the ABCACBC rhyme scheme and attracts the reader’s attention to the rhyming relation between the personal pronoun ‘I’ and the intransitive verb ‘lie’. (‘But now unrobe yourself; for I / Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie’.) The stanza takes the form of Geraldine’s direct speech, meaning the ‘I’ is in reference to herself and the ‘lie’ is in reference to the ‘bed’ in which she will ‘lie’. The syntax ensures that the word ‘I’ visually surrounds ‘lie’ both atop and preceding, forcing the reader to associate the ‘bed’ with the image of Geraldine lying on it. This image of Geraldine following her imperative speech ‘But now unrobe yourself’ gives the bed sexual connotations, as the reader becomes aware that the ‘unrobe(d)’ Christabel and Geraldine will ‘lie’ in ‘bed’ together. The imperative but flattering rhetoric of Geraldine ‘Fair maiden, to requite you well. / But now unrobe yourself’, where ‘fair maiden’ and ‘unrobe yourself’ are in close conjunction, leads the reader to suspect that the impending relations within the ‘bed’ may not be platonic. Whether Christabel herself is aware of the suggestive nature of Geraldine’s rhetoric is unclear, but her exclamatory ‘So let it be!’ implies her eager responsiveness and unchallenging coercion to Geraldine’s commands.   Sedgwick notes the conceptual inseparability between knowledge and sex, suggesting that ‘ignorance’ becomes ‘sexual ignorance’. The ‘wide eye’ trope the poem associates with Christabel within the narrative ‘her fair large eyes ‘gan glitter bright’ and ‘raised to heaven her eyes so blue’ implies her innocence and thus lack of ‘sexual knowledge’ to the reader. The reader, according to Sedgwick, is therefore placed in a position of power. ‘The position of those who think they know something about one that one may not know oneself is an excited and empowered one’.[4] The combining suggestive factors of Geraldine’s rhetoric forewarn homosexual relations within the ‘bed’ that Christabel seems ‘sexually ignorant’ to. If the now sexually charged ‘bed’ acts as a symbol for Christabel’s homoerotic sexual awakening, the ease of her coercion to ‘undress’ and ‘lay down in her loveliness’ by an unknown woman advocates an already present but subconscious sexually transgressive desire, meaning despite her ‘sexual ignorance’ the ‘bed’ is able to awaken this desire within her.   But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the lady Geraldine.   Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side— A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!   A volta occurs when Christabel becomes active in the sexual exchange, warning the reader to her sexual awakening: ‘So half-way from the bed she rose, / and on her elbow did recline, / To look at the lady Geraldine’. Christabel begins to observe Geraldine through the male gaze in place of being the one observed, the disruption of the poem’s prosody by the spondaic foot ‘To look’ disrupts the readers iambic meter and focuses on the observational quality of the rhetoric. This volta, Christabel’s interest in observing Geraldine’s form, occurs once she physically places herself on the bed: ‘So half-way from the bed she rose’. The ‘bed’ thus acts as a catalytic symbol for the emergence of sexual awakening, bringing forth the sexual desires of Christabel, not repressing them as Sedgwick’s ‘closet’. The effect is not immediate however, with the compound ‘half-way’ suggesting a transition between ‘sexual ignorance’ and ‘sexual knowledge’.   Sedgwick’s ‘closet’ does become relevant however once Christabel’s homosexual yearnings are brought to fruition. The final stanza deconstructs the female anatomical form—‘eyes’, ‘breast’, ‘feet’, ‘bosom’—whilst employing plosive alliterative ‘b’s, rhyming couplets, and the continuing bounding iambic tetrameter to accelerate the readerly experience of the stanza. The repeated female anatomical language and hastening readerly tempo mimics Christabel’s visual digestion of the female form and subsequent overwhelming sexual desire. The consequent acceleration bounds the reader towards the poetic climax, mimicking in the prosody the acceleration towards Christabel’s sexual climax. The deconstruction of the female form insists that the female body is viewed through the male gaze, despite the lack of any male presence. The newly discovered ‘sexual knowledge’ of Christabel as a result of the sexually charged ‘bed’ insists an entry into patriarchal attitudes towards the female body as a sex object. Coleridge’s text further suggests that this sexualised attitude of the male gaze is corrupting to the feminine and virginal ‘sweet Christabel’, who must be ‘shield(ed)’ from sexual discovery.   Despite this, Christabel’s sexual desire becomes evident through exclamatory language: ‘Behold! her bosom and half her side’. This connotes exuberance, and the plosive alliterative ‘B’ of ‘Behold’ couples this exuberance with the ‘bosom’ of Christabel’s female counterpart. Now that Christabel’s sexual desires are plain, being brought to the forefront by the catalytic ‘bed’, Sedgwick’s social ‘closet’ becomes relevant. Christabel now must ‘not to tell!’ of her sexual transgressions, ‘shield(ing)’ and repressing them socially in order to uphold her socio-normative ‘sweet’ and heterosexual appearance. Therefore, although the ‘bed’ brings Christabel’s repressed sexual desires to the forefront, the realisation of these desires ultimately forces her into Sedgwick’s inevitable ‘closet’. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin   Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts. [1] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment  (Stanford University Press 1999) 14   (as cited in Catherine Craft-Fairchild, ‘Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism’ (2006) 15(3) Journal of the History of Sexuality 408, 409). [2] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epistemology of the Closet’ in Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pelegrini (eds), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question  (Columbia University Press 2003). [3] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ (first published 1816) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel & Kubla Khan (e-artnow 2019). Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent quotations are also from Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. [4] Sedgwick (n 2).

One of the problems of having lived a long life is that it brings home to one the many different identities one has occupied in the course of it.   My own case, I think (but this may be vanity), is particularly complex. For example, genetic analysis tells me I am only marginally white European Caucasian. The rest is 18 percent Jewish—a Jewish grandmother—and just over 30 percent Finnish or Estonian. That is to say, I am a descendant of the Central European tribes who settled on the shores of the Baltic before the Slavs got there. The ‘Lucie’ part of my surname is recorded as being London Dutch, but Dutch friends tell me that it cannot possibly be native to the Netherlands. It most likely comes from Huguenots, exiled from France by the Edict of Nantes, who transited from the Low Countries to London, and thence to the West Indies. My father’s family are recorded in Barbados, as plantation owners, from around 1630. My double-surname seems to have come into use in the mid-eighteenth century.   The family did not remain in Barbados. Having lost money, they translated in the early nineteenth century to Demerara, now Guyana, where they became lawyers. In this period an ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side is recorded as having been a Jewish sea-captain from a Jewish family based in Curaçao, who had migrated there from Venezuela, after an episode of anti-Semitic persecution.   My great-grandfather arrived in Jamaica from Guyana in the early 1860s, having been appointed Lord Chief Justice. He brought with him his already adult son, my grandfather, who joined the Jamaican colonial civil service, a profession into which he was followed by my father. My father was the first member of my family to be born there.   I was not, however, the second. My father had a younger brother, a member of the Jamaica Militia, who went to Flanders to fight in the First World War. Soon he was ‘missing, presumed killed’. My father took leave from his civil service job to join the British army in Europe as a volunteer. He became a junior officer and arrived at the front in time to be gassed in the final, desperate German assault in the spring of 1918. Considered unfit for further service at the front, he was sent across the Channel to be the aide-de-camp of an elderly home-front general, a post for which his civil service training would come in useful. That was how he met my mother, an orphan who was the general’s niece.   This was not quite the end of the story. My father was not back in Jamaica until September 1919, a year after the war ended. He returned to resume his civil service job and was only then demobilised. Very soon afterwards he formed a relationship with a woman of colour, with whom he had a son, born in 1920. This son, my elder half-brother, not only used our unusual surname, but also was given my father’s almost equally unusual Christian name, which was Dudley. He is now dead—I never met him, and did not even know of his existence until quite recently—but his descendants believe that their parents were legitimately married. The barrier to this, however, is that, in the colonial Jamaica of that time, it would have been impossible for a member of the civil service administration to have a wife of African origin. If a marriage took place, it was a clandestine one. I believe, however, that my father went right on seeing his alternative family, long after he got married to my mother.   In the summer of 1922, he returned to the UK, on leave from his civil service job, linked up with my mother again, and proposed to her. She came out to Jamaica and married him in the spring of 1923. I did not appear until ten years later.   Both of them got something. My mother came from quite a distinguished family. Her great-grandfather had been prominent in the British East India Company, at a time when the Company, not the British government, ruled India. He was rewarded with a baronetcy. His younger son, my great-grandfather, was a Member of Parliament and a close ally of Wilberforce in opposition to the slave trade. My great-grandfather’s children were closely linked to the Pre-Raphaelites. One of them was responsible for introducing Edward Burne-Jones, not yet an artist, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, thus setting in motion the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Curiously enough, the Lushingtons (that was their surname) were also Logical Positivists—that is to say, Victorian atheists.   My mother was a neglected orphan, brought up by governesses in various seaside resorts, and lamed by polio when in her teens. In the years immediately following the First World War, when so many of the young men of her class and generation had been killed, her marriage prospects were not good. Both parties needed something. They had a deal. I am the product of that deal. Edward Lucie-Smith   Edward Lucie-Smith has been called ‘the world’s most legendary and prolific art critic’. He has published over 100 books, many of which form the basis of university art history programmes around the world.   CJLPA  invited him to boil down his knowledge and experience to a concise set of propositions.

Since I am now 87 years old, I have inevitably formed certain views about what I do, or try to do, both about writing in general, and more specifically about writing about the visual arts.   The first and most important of these is that the audience is king. If they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, you’ve lost the game. This applies even if they disagree with what you are trying to tell them. In art criticism, perhaps even more so than in most other forms of critical writing, there’s a constant temptation to lapse into gobbledegook. Pundits all too often try to make themselves look important, superior to the audience they are addressing, by using grandiose formulations. I try to resist this temptation.   More insidious is the related temptation, which is to treat the collective consciousness of the audience as a blank sheet, upon which the critic is entitled to scribble what they like. Nothing could be less true. Every member of the audience whom the critic addresses is an individual consciousness, different, even if only in small ways, from every other member. To a large extent, this audience may share a common culture, which leads them to react in—almost—the same way to the images and ideas that the critic presents to them. However, there is always a residue, in each of them, of purely personal experience, which affects how they will react to what is being offered. This means that successful criticism, like all successful writing, is essentially a conversation. It’s not going too far to say that you have to begin in the middle, not at what seems to you to be the beginning.   This attitude of mine is affected by the history of art commentary during my lifetime. Both the Late Modern and what we now call the Contemporary epochs have been much influenced by rival belief systems. First by Marxism then, as orthodox Marxism declined, by the rival credo of Structuralism.   A critic inspired by any faith of this kind naturally tends to put the belief system to which they adhere at the very centre of what they do. The system supplies a framework, upon which they can hang their observations about the art works and art enterprises they encounter. In addition to providing a useful framework, it also supplies a security blanket, reassuring them that what they say about the art they encounter must in essence be right. Any apparent errors or discrepancies can be refined away by further reference to the belief system they have embraced.   A further gloss upon this, where recent Western art is concerned, has been supplied by post-World War II politics. From the end of the war to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, there was a cultural rivalry that expressed itself through the competition between Western capitalist individualism and Eastern Bloc collectivism—art as an expression of the idealised socialist state. What this left out was the fact that the United States in particular promoted certain forms of art as a direct political response to Socialist Realism. Abstract Expressionism was a celebration of the power of the individual psyche, free to express itself without any form of governmental control. Not for nothing were some of the leading exponents of the style first-generation Americans. Abstract Expressionism, though it met with some resistance from McCarthyites in Washington, was skilfully publicised in Europe, and also here in Britain, by patrons connected to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.   Later, American art modulated itself, and Pop Art conquered most of the Western-affiliated art world, with a little help from a group of post-war British artists who had fallen in love with American popular culture, as compared to the dreariness of their own post-war circumstances. Pop was capitalist, but it was also visibly democratic.   Later still, American art began to choke on the purity of its own non-political idealism. Hence the Minimal Art (though he hated the term) of Donald Judd. It tried to remove itself entirely from the political arena. The effort did not succeed. To support art that seemed to wish to detach itself entirely from society became a political gesture in itself.   What changed the situation was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This seemed to remove the main antagonist of now triumphant capitalist art from the arena. However, what one seems to see now, nearly 30 years later, is a triumphant re-emergence of political and social art, as typified, for example, by the work of the anonymous British graffitist Banksy. This fetches huge sums when sold at auction, often for charitable causes. Or simply when detached by others from the walls where the still unknown artist has chosen to place it. At the same time there can be no doubt about its efficiency as propaganda.    Simultaneously, there was an even greater change—the contemporary art world became increasingly plural. This change had been preparing itself for a long time, but after the millennium it became fully visible. What I mean by ‘plural’ is that a number of separate art worlds emerged, quite separate from the world of Europe-plus-the-USA.   There was already a flourishing art world, with its own mechanisms, in Latin America. Now there were visibly separate art worlds in China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ve been personally to all of these, with the exception of Pakistan and Bangladesh, often more than once. I was in Cuba in the late 1960s, in Mexico in the 1970s, and again later, and visited much of South America in the 1980s, with repeat visits to a number of countries. I’d guess that I may possibly be the most travelled British art critic. These non-European art worlds are often diversified within themselves. In Russia, it is no longer simply Moscow and St Petersburg that count, as was the case under the aegis of official communism. There are major art-producing centres in Siberia and in Kazan, to name but two. In China there is not only the Central Academy in Beijing but also the China Academy in Hongshan, plus art hubs in Shanghai and Hong Kong.   The dialogue between these various centres and what we call the West is often complex. They admire the West, but they also criticise it. One can, for example, find examples of Pop Art today in Russia, visibly influenced by what happened in America in the now long-ago 1960s. There is also art that refers to and memorialises World War II, which retains its hold on the Russian imagination far more powerfully than it does here in the West. Plus, art that romanticises the now ruined space stations, from which the Soviet Union sent cosmonauts into orbit. These are both peculiar to Russia.   In China, the two major academies, Beijing and Hongshan, dominate the art world. Ai Weiwei received almost all his early education in art in the USA, and is now again, after a fairly brief period in China during and after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, living in exile. He figures hardly at all in the ongoing history of contemporary art in China, though he is undoubtedly a major figure here in the West.   Meanwhile in the West itself there are manifestations that are changing the character of the art world. There is a great push for greater recognition of women artists, though those chosen for this are often either very senior or actually dead. There is an even stronger push for recognising artists from what are described as  ‘ethnic  minorities’—that  is,  minorities  within  society,  and therefore until very recently disadvantaged within Western cultural organisations and opportunities. To be more specific still, this tends to mean artists who are wholly or partly of African origin. The recent Black Lives Matter movement has had a powerful impact not only in the United States, where it began, but also here in Britain. The impulse to apologise for the insult of slavery has done much to re-politicise art in the countries where the Black Lives Matter movement has manifested itself.   What it has not done yet is to create much interest in the art of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The Dark Continent remains largely dark where contemporary art is concerned, in contrast to the other regions I have mentioned above. The one exception is perhaps South Africa. Edward Lucie-Smith   Edward Lucie-Smith has been called ‘the world’s most legendary and prolific art critic’. He has published over 100 books, many of which form the basis of university art history programmes around the world.   CJLPA  invited him to boil down his knowledge and experience to a concise set of propositions.

Introduction   Canonical Penance in the early Church and the modern concept of prison, broadly construed, are both processes of exclusion, reform, and reintegration in response to an infraction of law. Augustine’s writings on Canonical Penance are some of the most extensive, and consider a number of themes which might be relevant to criminal justice. Specifically, I will consider: the role of humility, both on the part of the authorities and the perpetrator, and whether an appropriate response places more emphasis on the nature of the infraction of the rules or of the person committing it.   Augustine is conveniently historically situated for an effective comparison. By the time of his birth, Canonical Penance was ‘an established and easily recognisable ecclesiastical institution’.[1] This enables us to avoid the potential pitfalls that come with attempting to compare the prison system with the more informal and hard-to-pin-down earliest forms of penance. North Africa was also at the heart of many of the early controversies surrounding penance,[2] meaning both that the historical setting is well documented and that Augustine responded to a variety of pertinent debates.   In attempting to construct an Augustinian ethic, I am not asking what Augustine would have thought of modern criminal sentencing, an impossibly speculative task. Rather, I am applying some of his ethical principles—which he expounded in relation to an institution with some significant parallels—to a modern ethical question. The value of this will vary depending on one’s starting point. For those with a theological commitment to Augustine’s principles, it may help to illuminate what criminal sentencing should look like. For others concerned with the ethics of criminal sentencing, it may help to reveal the assumptions underlying our discourse, and at least one other way of approaching them. Finally, for the intellectual historian, it may reveal something of how our approach to questions of humility and justice have or have not changed.   Canonical Penance at the time of Augustine   The earliest Christian penance was baptism. When adult baptism was the norm and Christianity was still a small sect, the act of turning away from the sinful world was an enormous commitment. Penance for one’s previous life was essential for a community that defined itself in opposition to the rest of the world. This is where the communal element of penance has its origins. Forgiveness of an individual’s sins was relevant not just to that individual, but also to the Church whose holiness in the face of an unholy world depended on it. The Church was a community that had developed a way to reintegrate those who had excluded themselves through the most serious of sins, in the form of Canonical Penance. When examining this reintegration, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that it was at heart ‘a kind of communal examination of conscience, rather than a way to bear down on individual sinners’.[3] Sin was a harm done to and a stain on the whole community, and so penitential processes, from baptism to canonical penance, aimed to make the community whole again.[4] Collective responsibility for sins is emphasised in some of the earliest writings on Christian penance in 1 Clement 2:6: ‘You used to grieve over the unlawful acts of your neighbours and considered their shortcomings your own’.[5]   By the time of Augustine, Canonical Penance was an ‘established and easily recognized ecclesiastical institution’.[6] Entry into Canonical Penance was a serious undertaking. Many were compelled to undergo it for acts of sin, though others chose to go through it: ‘Some people have asked for a place among the penitents themselves; some have been excommunicated by me and reduced to the penitents’ place’.[7] Though one’s status as a penitent was public information, the nature of the offence could be private. This is presumably a result of the gravity of the sins involved: requiring public confession would hardly encourage potential penitents to come forward.   One of Augustine’s sermons provides us with a description of the sins that required Canonical Penance: ‘There is a serious wound involved; perhaps adultery has been committed, perhaps murder, perhaps some sacrilege, a grave matter, a grave wound, lethal, deadly’.[8] A further indication of the significance of Canonical Penance was that it could only be undergone once, for fear of lessening its gravity through repetition.[9]   Penance was characterised by exclusion from the Eucharist, the result of estrangement from God following the breaking of one’s baptismal vows through serious sin. Additional penitential processes, including fasting and almsgiving, were used to enhance the corrective effect of temporary exclusion from the Eucharist.[10] This exclusion extended to praying separately from the rest of the congregation: ‘Pray, penitents - and the penitents go out to pray’.[11]   Canonical Penance concluded with readmittance into the congregation and the Eucharist. A ritual involving imposition of hands by the bishop and public prayers signalled the end of the process.[12] Its effects did not cease there, however, since former penitents could not be clerics, as Augustine discusses in one of his letters: ‘the Church established the rule that after penance for some crime no one should enter the clerical state or return to the clerical state or remain in the clerical state’.[13]   Humility of the offender   The notion of humility in Augustine is rooted in its ultimate manifestation, Christ humbling himself on the cross. Augustine took this to be the cure to humanity’s pride and therefore the source of humility: ‘So for the treatment of human beings God’s wisdom- in itself both doctor and medicine - offered itself in a similar way. Because human beings fell through pride it used humility in healing them … We made bad use of immortality, and so we died; Christ made good use of mortality, and so we live’.[14] The sight of God’s humiliation on the cross, when combined with God’s grace, is what Augustine claims leads to humility, shifting our perspective so that we can focus on matters of true importance. John Cavadini explains the operation of this process as ‘arresting our limited and empty vision on something real, the compassion of God, who was unashamed to put aside the power and prestige of divinity’.[15] We can see this shift of attention from the self to God in Augustine’s twenty-fifth homily on the Gospel of John, where the shift from pride to humility lies in the fact that the humble man ‘does not do his own will, but God’s’.[16]   The question for us remains how the process of Canonical Penance contributed to humility. We see in Augustine a distinct concrete aspect of, or contributing factor towards, humility—namely, being humbled. In the case of Christ, being humbled constituted becoming a man and dying on the cross. The penitent, on the other hand, is humbled by the restriction of status, both because of the lack of status associated with penitents[17] and because of concrete restrictions on their future ambitions, namely that they could not become clerics. In his letters, Augustine describes the reasoning behind this latter provision: ‘no one should be a cleric so that, without any hope of temporal dignity, the remedy of humility might be greater and more genuine’.[18] The idea here is that the stripping of status made it harder to take pride in one’s position, removing the barrier to refocusing on God, as required for humility.   The value of humility to Canonical Penance lies in its healing element. Penance and humility are both, for Augustine, processes of healing.[19] For Canonical Penance to be successful, one’s attitudes must change such that future action is directed not towards one’s own pride in status, but rather towards God. This is what Augustine’s concept of humility achieved, and why it played so central a role in his discussion of Canonical Penance.   Though humility is a central part of Augustine’s conception of Canonical Penance, he by no means considered it an inevitable consequence of the formal procedure of being humbled during Canonical Penance. Many of the instances where he emphasised the value of humility were descriptions of how it was lacking in penitents, specifically those compelled to undergo the process (as opposed to those undertaking it voluntarily): ‘those who have been excommunicated[20] by me and reduced to the penitents’ corner don’t want to rise from there, as though penitents’ corner were a really choice spot’ and, more explicitly, ‘it ought to be a place for humility, and it becomes a place for iniquity’.[21] Augustine is clear here that Canonical Penance is not just an externally administered process, such that it inevitably results in forgiveness and humility. The proper attitude on the part of the penitent is essential, however much the concrete removal of status might assist this.   We have from Augustine the idea that humility, constituting a shift away from a focus on the self, can be driven by concrete action to reform the individual, though the action can only assist and not guarantee humility. The difficulty with this notion is that, for Augustine, the goal shift was towards God, which cannot be replicated in a secular state. Equally, we can’t provide an endpoint which is an explicit alternative to God, since we would then undermine the Augustinian notion of humility and any value the insight might have. We require, then, a goal for this focus shift which has value from the vantage point of a secular state without displacing God.   We can find this goal in the good of loving others, concretely manifested in serving our community. This certainly has a scriptural foundation in John 13:34:[22] ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’. In his analysis of this passage from John, Augustine links the love of others to the love of God: ‘he who loves his neighbour in a holy and spiritual way, what does he love in him except God?’[23] We can therefore make the service of others the goal of the focus shift when using humility in reform, since for Augustine it mediates love of God.[24] This also helps us relate the individual elements of reforming the criminal or sinner to the communal elements of crime or sin, since our response is directed at the community. We can therefore go some way to synthesising the interests of the individual and the community in our response to crime. In placing a value on humility, we are helping to reform the individual through shifting their focus, while also acknowledging the harm done to the community and shifting the focus of the offender to positive participation in that community.   In terms of concrete applications, such an Augustinian conception of reforming through shifting the focus of the offender towards their community might help us to construe the value of interventions like restorative justice and community service. It might also provide a reason to measure reform more broadly than through reoffending rates, since this kind of reform is directed at service of and being invested in the community, rather than just not committing further crimes.[25]   Humility in the authorities   Humility is not just a tool of reform for the Canonical Penitents themselves but also, according to Augustine, a necessary virtue of those who hold authority over the process, namely bishops. While his discussion of this in relation to Canonical Penance specifically is limited, he is clear that in dealing with crimes against civil or ecclesiastical law, humility is required in order to maintain the necessary attitude of mercy.   Letter 153 is a useful example of this. It helpfully relates the civil and ecclesiastical cases, as it is a response to Macedonius’ concerns over bishops’ intercessions on behalf of criminals.[26] In the process of explaining to Macedonius why it is right to intercede on behalf of the guilty, and how this does not make bishops complicit in their crimes, Augustine draws a link between our own status as sinners and our duty to be merciful towards others. Because we all require forgiveness, so we must extend it to others: ‘The judgment of God has filled them with fear so that they keep in mind that they need God’s mercy on account of their own sins and do not suppose that it counts as a failure in their office if they act mercifully in any way toward those over whom they have the legitimate power of life and death’.[27] The other side to this is that a lack of humility, that being in this case the failure to recognise our sinful nature and need for forgiveness, results in a pride and arrogance which leads to excessive severity. In discussing John 8:2-12, Augustine concludes that when Jesus points out that none of the accusers who present the adulterous woman to him to be stoned are sinless, ‘the pride of her pursuers yielded’.[28] There was pride in their judgement which, though within the law, ignored the fact that the accusers were sinners as was the accused. In forcing them into humility, Jesus forced them into mercy: ‘After he had said to those who presented the adulteress to him for punishment that the one who knew that he was without sin should be the first to throw a stone at her, their anger collapsed as their conscience trembled’.[29] Violence and severity come with arrogance, and are displaced by the mercy that comes with humility.   Robert Dodaro links this correlation between humility and mercy with Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius. Put simply, the Pelagian belief that human beings can be sinless and that the source of virtue can come from man rather than God’s grace means that they are not forced into humility by recognition of their sins.[30] This contrast with Pelagianism helps us to clarify how humility in authority is, as we previously discussed in the case of humility in penitents, a focus shift away from the self and towards God. For Augustine, humility in authority is the recognition that we attain virtue and avoid sin by the grace of God. The Pelagian arrogance is the assumption that we can be the source of our own virtue. The focus shift of humility in this case therefore lies in moving from identifying the source of our virtue in ourselves to identifying it as being external, namely in the grace of God.   We can take the following idea from Augustine’s discussion of the relationship between humility, mercy, arrogance, and severity: excessive severity can be a result of arrogance, while mercy can be the result of humility. The reason for this is that humility comes with the recognition of the role of external forces in shaping human decisions, whereas arrogance is blind to this in its attempt to claim individual credit for virtue. Severity which results from this arrogance is therefore a blind spot, a failure to acknowledge the origins of virtue and vice. We should therefore tend towards humility, which will establish a presumption of mercy. Movement away from this starting point of mercy towards severity should require careful justification, to avoid decisions based on arrogance. In discussing the applicability of these insights to the legal system, we must address an immediate disparity. Augustine grounds humility to authority in the fact that we are all sinners in need of God’s forgiveness. There is no direct parallel in the legal case. In fact, given the restrictions on who can become a judge or magistrate, none of those deciding on sentences are convicted criminals in need of the law’s forgiveness. What then, in a secular setting, need sentencers be humble about? It turns out the answer to this is not altogether different from the answer Augustine provides, namely the role of external forces in determining which side of the courtroom you find yourself on. For Augustine, virtue was to be attributed to the grace of God. In the case of the legal system, external forces, whether systematic privileges or simply luck of circumstances, play a role in whether you find yourself a judge or in need of a judge’s mercy.[31] This is not to remove personal choice from the equation. However, it would be an arrogant sentencer who failed to acknowledge that of the many factors that contribute to a crime, only some are the personal responsibility of the criminal. Moreover, not all these factors will be obvious, and therefore they may not be presented as mitigating circumstances. Humility will lead to the acknowledgement of imperfect information and the influence of external forces, and should therefore lead to an appropriate level of mercy. An Augustinian ethic of criminal sentencing would be a humble, and therefore merciful, one.   Sinner rather than sin   Reform is often portrayed, particularly in the popular press, as in the interest of the individual, while punishment of the act is in the interest of society. Therefore, in deciding how to treat an individual and whether to emphasise reform or punishment, we are effectively deciding between their interest and the interest of society.[32] One potential resolution of the tension between these apparent competing interests is to insist that reform is in both the individual’s and society’s interests because it prevents reoffending and therefore further societal damage.[33] This construes the value of reform, at least as far as society’s interests are concerned, as instrumental: reform is beneficial to society because it prevents harm to society. Augustine, however, places a non-instrumental value on reform.   Augustine makes clear that he desires reform of the individual rather than punishment of the act. The end at which the instrument of being humbled is aimed is to be discussed not in terms of what the act committed demands in a natural justice sense, but rather in terms of what most effectively reforms the agent. Being humbled is therefore an instrument of agent-reform rather than act-punishment. In other words, the emphasis is on the sinner rather than the sin. Being humbled is necessary for Canonical Penance, but not sufficient to bring about the humility required: ‘What’s the use of your humbling yourselves, if you don’t change your behaviour?’[34] This quotation from Sermon 392 makes it clear that for Augustine change of behaviour is a part of the aim of the process itself. Being humbled serves the aim of changing one’s behaviour, refocusing attention from the self to God, and in the process reorienting one’s actions from being directed towards the self, to being directed towards God.   Augustine’s most illuminating discussion of the emphasis on reform over punishment concerns the distinction between public and private reproving, found in Sermon 82. He argues for rebuking privately in the case of private sins and publicly in the case of public sins. Augustine is unambiguous in his reasoning behind this: ‘what I want to do is cure, not accuse’.[35]   Augustine is prepared, for the sake of private rebuke of private sins, to avoid civil involvement:   A bishop, for example, knows someone or other is a murderer, and nobody else knows he is. I want to rebuke him publicly, while you are looking for a chance to bring an indictment. Well of course, I will neither give him away, nor ignore his sin. I will rebuke him privately, set God’s judgement before his eyes, terrify his bloodstained conscience, try to persuade him to repent.[36]   Augustine’s attitude creates a primacy of ecclesiastical authority over civil equivalents. A bishop is to act not to facilitate an indictment—as one might think a citizen convinced of guilt is required to—but rather to maximise the curing effect, which Augustine argues is achieved through private rebuke. It might seem that we could account for Augustine not informing civil authorities as a simple application of the seal of confession, but in the next paragraph Augustine applies this principle to a case where the wife of an adulterer has come forward with her husband’s sin. She is not confessing a sin, so Augustine’s knowledge of the husband’s infidelity is not under the seal of confession. Yet he chooses to keep this sin private. This tells us that keeping sins private in the cases of the murderer and the adulterer is motivated by more than simple respect for the seal of confession. These cases show us that the emphasis is on the agent, not the act and the natural justice of publicly holding the perpetrator responsible, to the extent of keeping offences which are punishable by civil courts private when this best serves reform.   One fairly natural reading of this would be that Augustine has prioritised the individual sinner’s interest over that of the community. This may be an appropriate response for one charged with the pastoral care of that individual, but hardly seems applicable in the case of a criminal justice system with obligations towards the victims of crime and the public at large. However, to read Augustine like this is to ignore the communal context of the penance he is discussing. We have seen that in all forms of penance in the early Church, the response to sin was deemed necessary not simply for the sake of the individual sinner, but to make whole again the unity of the Church.[37]   For Augustine, the Pauline command in Galatians 6:2 to ‘Bear one another’s burdens and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ’ includes the burden of committing sin. Since we bear the burden of each other’s sins, in placing the emphasis on sinner rather than sin by focussing on agent-reform over act-punishment, we are lifting a burden off both the individual and the community. Augustine here makes implicit use of the usus-fruitio  distinction in arguing that if we neglect our responsibility to those who sin, then we fail to love God fully:   Thus if we love a weak person less because of the vice that made him weak, we should consider him in light of the one who died on his behalf. Not to love Christ, however, is not weakness but death. Hence we should be very careful and implore God’s mercy lest we neglect Christ because of a weak person, when we should love the weak person because of Christ.[38]   Augustine links this bearing of burdens at an individual level to the unity of the Church as a whole. In responding to the Donatists, who emphasised the purity of the Church over its unity,[39] Augustine argued that sinners were the responsibility of the Church, and that bearing their burdens was an essential part of maintaining its unity: ‘All of these catholic unity embraces in her motherly breast, bearing each other’s burdens by turns, and endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, till God should reveal to one or other of them any error in their views’.[40] In emphasising the reform of the sinner rather than punishment of the sin, Augustine was therefore not prioritising the individual over the group, but rather grounding the reform of the individual through Canonical Penance in the unity of the whole.   Put simply, when a member of the Church sins, the damage done is twofold. Firstly, the damage caused by the specific sin itself (for example a murder causes someone to die), and secondly, the burden of committing a sin. These are both burdens which, according to Augustine, we all bear. In emphasising the sinner over the sin, Augustine is allowing for proper reform. This is an attempt to lift the latter burden, in the process healing both the individual and the community that bear it.   The question remains: how do we apply this Augustinian insight to a criminal justice setting? In the case of Canonical Penance, the failure to reform the flawed individual was a failure to bear the burdens of others which, in the corpus permixtum , we all bear at some point. More broadly, in seeking the unity and success of a group (in Augustine’s case, the Church, in the modern case, wider society), we must be prepared to bear the burdens of those who break (canon or civil) law. Government documents of recent years[41] tend to conceive rehabilitation of prisoners as being valuable to society because it prevents reoffending and therefore further damage to the community. This treats prisoners as instruments of harm or benefit to the rest of society, and not as a 92,500 strong part of it. Augustine’s emphasis on reform of the individual recognises that those subject to criminal justice proceedings are a part of society and so society’s interests are intrinsically linked to theirs. If we are to bear the burdens of those affected by crime because they are a part of a society to which we have certain obligations, then we must bear the burdens of those who, as a part of the same society, commit crimes. Sentences that do not attempt reform (for example, whole-life imprisonment on ground of public protection) must not be regarded simply as ways to prioritise the interest of wider society over that of the criminal. It is not within the scope of this article to comment on whether they are ever necessary,[42] but it must be acknowledged that in Augustinian terms, in failing to bear the burden of the individual, they fail the society of which the individual is a member. Augustine’s insight here is essentially to add a dimension of value to rehabilitation. In creating policy and handing down sentences, we must recognise that proper rehabilitation is intrinsically (and not just instrumentally) in the interest of society.   Conclusion   From Augustine we have drawn three central principles for criminal justice based on his approach to Canonical Penance. Firstly, rehabilitation should aim at the creation of humility, constituting a goal shift towards service of the community. This is not only a standard against which to hold efforts at reform, it also helps synthesise the interests of the individual and the community. Secondly, severity can result from arrogance, and mercy from humility. Since arrogance is a blind spot, namely the failure to acknowledge the role of external factors in driving crime, which humility corrects, we should strive for a presumption of mercy, and for humility in sentencing. Finally, effective rehabilitation is intrinsically in society’s interests, independent of its instrumental value in preventing reoffending, since those who commit crime are members of society and the burden of a failure to rehabilitate is therefore borne by society as a whole.   The above provides principles against which an Augustinian ethic of criminal justice might be measured. A range of positions on criminal justice reform, ranging from small changes to sentencing processes right the way through to a complete overhaul of the justice system, are consistent with these principles as stated. Which changes one makes depends on both the empirical data on which strategies best achieve compliance with these principles, and other moral principles one holds which are relevant to the justice system. Augustine’s writings alone, though extensive, cannot provide these. However, we have found clear guidance in an Augustinian ethic: reform is the starting point, and aims to create humility at all levels. Alexander Levy   Alexander Levy is on a one-year master’s programme in Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. His master’s research has examined the value of Christian thought for public policy, focussing on healthcare and the criminal justice system. [1] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance  (Liturgical Press 1992) 57. [2] ibid 70. [3] Allan D Fitzgerald, ‘Penance’ in Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G Hunter (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies  (Oxford University Press 2008) 787. [4] From the fourth and fifth centuries, the lived experience of penance started to move away from its communal origins somewhat. See Fitzgerald (n 3) 801. However, since we are examining the thought of Augustine, who was writing before this process was complete and whose ecclesiology emphasised a mixed community of saints and sinners who bore one another’s burdens, it is nonetheless important to consider the act of penance, in its restoration of sinners to a Church so defined, as communal in nature. [5] In Bart D Ehrman (ed and tr), The Apostolic Fathers  (Harvard University Press 2014). [6] Dallen (n 1) 57. [7] Augustine, Sermons (230-272B) on the Liturgical Seasons  (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1993) Sermon 232 para 8. [8] Augustine, Sermons (341-400) on Various Subjects (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1995) Sermon 352 para 8. [9] ‘And yet it was a cautious and salutary provision that a place for that most humble penance be granted only once in the Church for fear that cheap medicine might become less beneficial for the sick’. Augustine, Letter 153 para 7 (Roland J Teske tr). [10] Claudia Rapp, ‘Spiritual Guarantors at Penance, Baptism and Ordination in the Late Antique East’ in Abigail Firey (ed), A New History of Penance  (Brill 2008) 123. [11] Augustine, Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [12] Rapp (n 10) 123. [13] Augustine, Letters 156-210  (Roland J Teske tr, Boniface Ramsey ed, New City Press 2004) Letter 185 para 45. [14] Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Roger Green tr, Oxford University Press 2008) Book 1 paras 28-29. [15] John Cavadini, ‘Pride’ in Augustine through the ages: an encyclopedia  (Allan Fitzgerald ed, Eerdmans 1999) 682. [16] Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 1-40 (Edmund Hill tr, Alan Fitzgerald ed, New City Press 2009) Homily 23 para 16. [17] ‘It [the penitent’s corner] ought to be a place for humility’ Augustine Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [18] Augustine, Letter 185 para 45 (Roland J Teske tr). [19] For an extensive comparison of the operation of humility with that of medicine, see Augustine, Homily 23 on the Gospel of John para 16 (Edmund Hill tr). [20] ‘Excommunication’ here refers to temporary exclusion from the Eucharist as part of penance rather than permanent exclusion from the congregation. [21] Augustine, Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [22] New Revised Standard Version used henceforth. [23] Augustine, Tractate 65 on the Gospel of John , para 2 in The Fathers of the Church: St Augustine Tractates on the Gospel of John , 55-111 (John W Rettig   tr, Catholic University of America Press 1994) 52. [24] This is a simple instance of the uti-frui distinction. For Augustine’s explanation, see Book 1 of On Christian Teaching . [25] For example, see Christopher Stacey’s summary of the issues surrounding poverty in those who have a criminal record but have resisted reoffending: Christopher Stacey, ‘Looking beyond reoffending: criminal records and poverty’ (2015) 99 Criminal Justice Matters 4-5. [26] For a discussion of humility as a civic virtue in contrast to the Roman ideals, see Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine  (Cambridge University Press 2004) ch 6. [27] Augustine, Letters 100-155  (Roland J Teske tr, Boniface Ramsey ed, New City Press 2003) Letter 153 para 8. [28] Augustine, Letter 153 para 11 (Roland J Teske tr). [29] ibid. [30] Dodaro (n 26) 186-87. The chapter as a whole also provides an excellent elucidation of how Augustine places a penitential emphasis on leadership. [31] For one example of disproportionality in outcomes based on factors outside the individual’s control, see the Lammy Review, which examines the treatment of and outcomes for BAME individuals in the criminal justice system. Government of the United Kingdom, The Lammy Review (2017). [32] See, for example, the contrast Melanie Philips draws between the welfare of the criminal and that of society: ‘the Council’s concern is directed wholly at the welfare of the criminal rather than the welfare of society’. Melanie Philips, ‘Why we must take the public’s lead… and jail ALL drug dealers’ Daily Mail  (6 April 2011). < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1373071/Why-publics-lead--jail-ALL-drug-dealers.html > accessed 26 September 2020. This was in response to a Sentencing Council consultation paper which recommended avoiding custodial sentences for more minor drug dealing offences in certain circumstances in order to avoid overly punishing those exploited by higher-level dealers. [33] See n 41 below for how recent government documents tend to construe rehabilitation’s value in terms of the prevention of reoffending. [34] Augustine, Sermon 392 para 6 (Edmund Hill tr). [35] Augustine, Sermons (51-94) on the Old Testament (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1991) Sermon 82 para 11. [36] Augustine, Sermon 82 para 11 (Edmund Hill tr). [37] See the section ‘Canonical Penance at the Time of Augustine’ above. [38] Augustine, Responses to Miscellaneous Questions: Miscellany of Eighty-Three Questions  (Boniface Ramsey tr, New City Press 2008) Question 71 para 7. [39] During the persecution of Diocletian’s reign, many bishops had lapsed before, at the end of the persecution, repenting. Donatists argued that repentance was not sufficient and that, having committed apostasy, they could longer be considered to be legitimately administering the sacraments. The resulting breakaway was the Donatist Schism. Augustine took the position that schism was a serious sin which violated the unity of the Church for the sake of unattainable purity. In doing so he elaborated his idea that the Church on earth was a corpus Pprmixtum  rather than a society free from sin. [40] Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists  (JR King tr) in Marcus Dods (ed), The Works of Aurelius Augustine , vol 3 (T & T Clark 1872) Book 2 para 8. [41] See, for example, the Coalition Government’s 2013 document, Transforming Rehabilitation : ‘Whilst we continue to tolerate so many   offenders passing through the justice system and going on to commit more crimes, we are in fact tolerating more victims, greater cost to the taxpayer and further damage to communities’. Ministry of Justice, Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform  (Cm 8619, 2013) 9 < https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/transforming-rehabilitation/results/transforming-rehabilitation-response.pdf > accessed 30 July 2020. Notable for its absence is the effect on the prisoners themselves. See also Robert Blakey, Rehabilitation in Prisons (House of Lords Library Briefing 2017) < https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/LLN-2017-0102#fullreport > accessed 30 July 2020. [42] For example, it seems plausible that there is a situation in which they do the least damage to society, if not none, of the options available.

This paper examines contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s project The Colony – Archive  (2019), a part of his ongoing research The Colony  (2018–). The Colony – Archive  takes as its point of departure the homogeneity of botanical landscapes across various colonies as observed from old postcards, which evidences a deep-rooted colonial legacy in Singapore’s national narrative. This essay investigates these artificial landscapes and the power relations captured by three archival modes: botanical gardens, photography, and postcards. Applying Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) concept of ‘heterotopias’ to these archival modes, this paper posits that they foreground the tension between human intervention and natural history, instating the artist-archivist as an authorial figure who produces new archival images rewriting the social memory surrounding botanical gardens. Tang’s production, (re)presentation, and dissemination of archival images is understood as a subversion of the persistent structures of power and control enacted by botanical gardens. Situating these ideas in relation to Singapore’s nature-centric national identity, The Colony – Archive engages with discussions charting the future of the independent nation and reclaiming its agency through its natural landscape. Figs 1-9. Postcards, in order of display in The Colony – Archive. Courtesy of Marvin Tang. *   The botanical gardens which proliferated in multiple British colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought together specimens deemed profitable from all over the world, moving an immense amount of plants across the former British Empire while radically transforming ecological and geographical landscapes. Native species were replaced and landscapes homogenised across colonies, with imported specimens cultivated to fulfil the metropole’s agendas. As colonial institutions of research, established for scientific and economic gain, and subsequently represented as utopic, timeless spaces in colonial-era postcards, botanical gardens are crucial archives of the agendas of the former British Empire. They have also left an indelible mark on the historical narratives of the former colonies in which they were established. They are therefore sites which not only enable the production of knowledge, but also reveal the power relations inherent in this process. In botanical gardens, specimens extracted from their native environments congregate with others with they have little or nothing in common with. They therefore demonstrate how colonial efforts co-opt temporal and geographical boundaries to expand colonial power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault identified gardens as ‘heterotopias’ in his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, as they juxtapose ‘several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ and enclose a ‘perceptual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place’.[1] Contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s ongoing project The Colony  (2018-) explores the power relations that underlie the production and circulation of, and access to, knowledge of these botanical institutions. This essay will focus on a constituent project: The Colony – Archive (2019, fig 10). By investigating three modes of archival practice which inform the work—botanical gardens, photography, and postcards—this paper posits that The Colony – Archive  comes to embody the function and workings of an archive while rewriting the social memory of colonialism. By setting off its own circulation of postcards and taking an active part in knowledge production, this new archive of the present recoups an agency lost under colonialism. Fig 10. The Colony – Archive (2019–, Installation View). Courtesy of Marvin Tang and Mizuma Gallery, Singapore. The Colony – Archive  takes as its point of departure the homogeneity of natural landscapes in botanical gardens across former British colonies, as observed from old postcards sold at London postcard fairs.[2] When collecting colonial-era postcards of botanical gardens, Tang observed similarities regardless of their locations, be they Singapore or Kandy, Sri Lanka. Specimens such as hevea brasiliensis  (para rubber tree) native to Brazil were found throughout former colonies such as Indonesia and Singapore.[3] The work consists of nine sets of postcards displayed on a large canvas. Some are nineteenth-century postcards, and others are created by Tang from photographs of the Singapore Botanical Gardens and London’s Kew Gardens. The postcards are placed in an arbitrary order, each of them numbered at the top corner (figs 1-9), with the exception of figs 3 and 5 which belong to the artist’s personal collection.[4] The canvas which forms the backdrop for the postcards depicts a hilly tropical landscape—half plantation and half forest—capturing the transition from dense, natural forests on the right to neatly terraced plantations on the left, likely cash crops. Beside this display of postcards are two frames (fig 11), comprising an image of a botanical garden and a list of gardens established by Kew, as evident from its title, ‘Established at Home, and in India and in the Colonies’. This amalgamation of images, and the list of gardens, form an archive of colonial agenda enacted through the establishment of botanical gardens and environmental manipulation. Fig 11. Framed image of botanical garden and framed list of ‘Establishments at Home, and in India, and in the Colonies, in Correspondence with Kew’.Courtesy of Marvin Tang and Mizuma Gallery, Singapore. Botanical gardens as heterotopias   Botanical gardens are transnational archives of colonial ecological, scientific, and economic efforts in agriculture and trade, charting the global migration of plant specimens. These curated landscapes were established to support the former British Empire’s scientific research, and its commodification and exploitation of valuable plants for crop cultivation. They were born out of a worldview which regarded ‘the world as its plantation’ and amid efforts to secure resources, profits, and trade monopolies.[5] Singapore, for example, was the optimal testing ground for cultivating nutmeg from Indonesia’s Spice Islands, the Brazilian para rubber tree, and Senegal mahogany trees from Africa, which today are the largest evergreens lining Singapore’s parks and roads.[6] As repositories for a variety of plant specimens from around the world, botanical gardens are, as Foucault called heterotopias, ‘contradictory sites’ which are simultaneously ‘the smallest parcel of the world and … the totality of the world’.[7] However, Tang uses the heterotopic potential of botanical gardens as counter-sites, where real space is ‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ to expose and counter established power relations inherent to colonial ideology and institutions.[8] At all times, viewers of The Colony – Archive  are confronted with the artificiality of these heavily curated   landscapes. The framed list of correspondences between Kew and establishments in the colonies stands in stark contrast to the utopic scene promised by the botanical gardens, foregrounding the deliberate, economic motivations underlying the colonial enterprise. The illusion of a timeless utopia, as perpetuated by the curated compositions and images of the gardens, is shattered against the backdrop of the plantation, alluding to the exploitative nature of the colonial enterprise. Through such a display, a direct relationship is drawn between the two colonial establishments, highlighting their shared commercial purposes. Indeed, these colonial institutions are what Tang calls ‘impossible landscapes: [sites] that would not occur in the wild, in first-hand nature’.[9] Thus, botanical gardens are productions and re-productions of colonial ideology which transcend geographical boundaries. They are archives of the newfound research value attributed to specimens upon entering the exploitative institution of colonialism.   Photographic perspectives   Having discussed the colonial motivations underlying the establishment of botanical gardens and their archival function, we can consider how Tang uses photography to counter the hegemonic colonial narrative represented by botanical gardens. Tang ironically employs the archival value of photography as pictorial testimony to problematise the supposed timelessness promised by botanical gardens and their utopian reproduction in images. As William Henry Fox Talbot speculated in his 1846 book The Pencil of Nature , a photograph can be produced against a thief in court, underscoring its unique potential as a visual document that relays legalistic truth.[10] Tang’s postcards are compositions entirely dominated by an amalgamation of plant specimens, depicted with a deliberate yellowing, ‘vintage’ effect and the addition of noise to the image texture. They thus foreground the manipulative interventions in the creation of the images and gardens, a quality made more blatant by the lack of distinction between the colonial-era postcards. The large canvas captures the liminal landscape in a moment of transition and depletion, from a forested area to the bare, structured terraces of a plantation, showing the symptoms of human intrusion into nature. The staged naturality of botanical gardens presented by the postcards stands in stark contrast to the violent reality of colonialism through which these species came to coexist. Displayed alongside colonial-era postcards, Tang’s postcards reject their status as archives of socio-geographical memory, and instead form a new archive which confronts the artificiality of this constructed landscape. Unlike the ordered list of botanical gardens, which presents a systematised, geographical categorisation, the arbitrary ordering of the photographs, their unidentifiable locations, and their mocking imitation of colonial-era postcards criticise the use of gardens by colonial powers in order to implement systematic homogenisation and exploitation. Hence, through an examination of the use of photography in The Colony – Archive , Tang produces a counter-narrative which exposes and highlights the artificiality of botanical gardens. Fig 12. Archival postcard from Marvin Tang’s personal collection (fig 3 enlarged). Postcards on the move   Moving beyond the subject matter depicted on the postcards, we turn to the modes of dissemination which give postcards their extensive mobility and ambiguous provenance, and how Tang uses these to challenge the hegemonic colonial discourse built into botanical gardens. In Tang’s words, ‘postcards became an easy and accessible way for people to collect the world’ during the Victorian age of exploration.[11] This act of ‘[collecting] the world’ as supported and represented by postcards reinforces a colonial worldview which sought to subsume and assimilate others. This worldview is mirrored in the heterotopias that are botanical gardens. Far from being a democratic medium, then, postcards became a symbol of the exotic. They perpetuated romanticised stereotypes of far-flung lands in Southeast Asia and operated as oppressive symbols affirming the extensive reach of the former British Empire. Indeed, Tang sees the postcard as symptomatic of Ernst van Alphen’s notion that photography and imperialism would meet and collaborate.[12] However, Tang also draws on the ease of transmission of postcards—and hence, their potential as democratised modes of dissemination—to counter the colonial narrative of Southeast Asia.   This resonates with the notion of effective democratisation posed by Jacques Derrida in ‘Archive Fever’, which states that ‘there is no political power without control of the archive … Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’.[13] Tang uses his own postcards (participation in the archive), provides free access to them in the gallery (access to the archive), operates from the Southeast Asian perspective (constitution), and problematises the colonial worldview which created ‘impossible landscapes’ in the colonies (interpretation). He also uses the ambiguity of postcards which ‘blur the line of where the image was taken [and] the provenance’ to foreground the still-powerful colonial ideology underlying the botanical gardens.[14] Tang’s act of reproducing and numerically classifying the postcards therefore reclaims the referential significance of botanical landscapes as pictures in archival photographs. For Tang as artist-archivist, the act of reproduction not only inserts his postcards into the physical circulation of goods in the economy, but also (re)introduces colonial postcards into the realm of collective social memory. By engaging with social memory, The Colony – Archive  effects a ground-up movement that disrupts the still-pervasive effects of colonialism. Fig 13. Archival postcard from Marvin Tang’s personal collection (fig 5 enlarged). From ‘Garden City’ to ‘City in Nature’   Through the three archival modes of the botanical garden, photography, and postcards, The Colony – Archive reveals and subverts the structures of power and control as enacted by the colonial institutions of botanical gardens in former British colonies. Tang draws on the archive of the past to create a new archive of the present. He replaces the former colonial power with the artist-archivist as the authorial figure and producer of archival images, overturning the hierarchy embedded in the creation of these botanical gardens. Elevating this analysis to a consideration of Singapore’s national identity, the work questions Singapore’s ‘garden city’ narrative so famously espoused by founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and its implications for collective identity. The Singapore Botanical Gardens, nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, have always played a key role in Singapore’s national narrative and identity, especially in view of Singapore’s founding motto ‘Garden City’, established in 1967.[15] This motto evolved into ‘City in a Garden’ in 2014 and ‘City in Nature’ in 2020, corresponding to more intensive greening and conservation efforts in the city-state.[16] ‘City in a Garden’ evokes an image of Singapore encapsulated by carefully curated nature, which is amplified by its colonial links. The subsequent transition to ‘City in Nature’ not only indicates a shift in Singapore’s greening objectives, but also charts its growing independence from the colonial narrative so deeply embedded in its natural master plan. Viewed collectively, this evolving discourse surrounding Singapore’s greening journey illustrates how nature can be, and historically has been, controlled to serve different agendas. This essay has demonstrated the complex and amorphous quality of ‘nature’, and its susceptibility to manipulation. How might we best define ‘nature’ today? And since the Singapore story is so closely intertwined with nature, how should we define Singapore’s national identity? By raising questions which link collective identity to the definition of ‘nature’, The Colony – Archive  engages with discussions charting the future of the independent nation, reclaiming its agency through its natural landscape. Constance Koh   Constance Koh (Cui Shan) is a second-year undergraduate in History of Art (Asia, Africa, Europe) at SOAS. Interested in contemporary Asian art and arts education, she is looking forward to working in the library and heritage sector in Singapore.   [1] Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (Jay Miskowiec tr, 1984) 5 Architecture/Movement/Continuité 6. [2] Adeline Chia, ‘Online Artist Talk: The Seeds We Sow’ (2020) < http://www.mizuma.sg/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MG-Conversations-The-Seeds-We-Sow-2020.pdf > accessed 5 December 2020. [3] ibid. [4] ‘[Image Copyright] The Colony – Archive’, email from Marvin Tang to Constance Koh (10 March 2021). [5] Ee Ming Toh, ‘How Geopolitics and History Shaped Singapore’s Natural Landscape Over The Centuries’ A Magazine Singapore  (2020) < https://read-a.com/heres-how-geopolitics-and-history-shaped-singapores-natural-landscape/ > accessed 6 December 2020. [6] ibid. [7] Foucault (n 1) 6. [8] ibid 3. [9] Chia (n 2). [10] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature  (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans 1844) 19-20 < http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-pdf.pdf > accessed 7 December 2020. [11] Chia (n 2). [12] ibid. [13] Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ (Eric Prenowitz tr, 1995) 25(2) Diacritics 11. [14] Chia (n 2). [15] Lim Tin Seng, ‘Singapore Botanic Gardens’ (Singapore Infopedia, 27 August 2015) < https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_545_2005-01-24.html#:~:text=Although%20the%20Singapore%20Botanic%20Gardens,Hill)%2C%20where%20he%20resided > accessed 15 December 2020. [16] Audrey Tan, David Fogarty, and Ernest Luis, ‘Desmond Lee on transforming Singapore into a City in Nature’ The Straits Times  (Singapore, 22 Sep 2020) < https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/green-pulse-podcast-desmond-lee-on-transforming-singapore-into-a-city-in > accessed 31 Jan 2021.

What is it that makes you tremble?’[1] Jacques Derrida poses this question to discuss the vulnerability that we fear. We see vulnerability as a form of powerlessness, but this fear itself shows our desire to be alive. As Laurence Simmons writes, ‘life entails an openness to alterity and event, which is also an openness to the possibility of an instant death and destruction’.[2] The answer to Derrida’s question seems to be on the tip of every person’s tongue today. It is in the look of the person sat opposite you on the tube line. It is in the barista’s eye when they hand you your coffee. It is in the flicker of your own eyes on yet another Zoom call. The human body, contact, and touch all seem so far away from our present, a present that keeps continuing. The year 2020 played out as a much less comical version of Murray’s Groundhog Day . I have found myself ‘Walking round Tavistock Square’, as Woolf did, with only the changing of leaves to tell me the time. But Derrida writes that trembling itself is an example of catachresis, or using language against itself. ‘Death too, is an image of catachresis, a term embodying what is unnameable because we cannot experience it as such, and fiction, in turn is a way of figuring that void’.[3] Therefore, I have turned to literature as the future appears to be on standby whereas the past seems wider and deeper than ever. Through literature I have found that the theme of contagion exists not only in much of our reality today, but also in the reality of centuries ago. The similarity that connects experiences over time is how we use language to describe it or evade it.   Language has always been a means of contact but now it is our only means. Although I cannot touch you, through words I can feel you. As Roland Barthes said, ‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire’.[4] Language holds meaning that make us tremble: the verbs ‘to isolate’, ‘to distance’, ‘to quarantine’, ‘to live’, and ‘to die’ now each hold a different meaning, perhaps one of more personal significance. Our language describes our experience, it describes our distance from one another. Barthes suggests that we touch the world through language. We desire to touch each other and therefore literature is a way to summon the body from the untouchable. To read a text is to read a body. It is a body of words but, nonetheless, it is a body. It has a spine, a front and a back. Both a text and a body are inscribed with memories of a past, a past that is desired to be touched and to be returned to. Nostalgia is the greatest contagion of them all.   If language structures our existence, it poses an obstacle for where we desire to travel to, both in memory and in reality. The word remains a mark on the page, both literally and metaphorically a mark we cannot get past. Language is, then, both a barrier and a stepping stone in the boundaries of time, between past and present, present and future. The history of literature proves that the century we inhabit is not the first to experience this kind of distancing. The sixteenth century, for example, experienced a plague; in 1593, 15,000 people died in the city of London, which was one tenth of the English population at the time. As a result, Renaissance literature dwells on the themes of the body, touch and contact. Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander  is a clear representation of this. The poem relays the Greek myth of two lovers living in cities divided by the Hellespont river. Leander swims across the river each night to catch a glimpse of the one he desires most. But the journey brings up obstacles which interrupt the meeting. The poem attempts to reach a climax, a climax both plot-driven and sexual, between the two lovers, but it does not and cannot succeed.   The tension between the fear of and need for touch was therefore topical then as it is now. The poem revolves around the transition of desire to touch. The narrative strives towards the meeting of two bodies, at a time when touch made the general public tremble with fear. But in any poetic narrative, there must be a struggle, an obstacle, or a wall in between the two lovers in order to create tension. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Pyramus and Thisbe erotically speak   through a ‘kink’ in the wall, and in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet , the lovers speak through the glass of a fish tank. In Hero and Leander , the lovers are separated by the depths of water, in an extended instance of the Greek motif paraclausithyron . Paraclausithyron  is usually translated as ‘lament beside a door’, meaning that it places a lover outside the door of his mistress. The lover remains trapped outside, unable to reach what he desires. Hero and Leander , then, narrates the hopeless aspiration to immediacy, the desire to bring oneself into close contact.   Marlowe narrates that Leander is pushing through the water, through the paraclausithyron , to reach what he yearns for: ‘Wide open stood the door … / And she herself … had spread the board with roses …’[5] Hero is there and waiting, but he cannot reach her. He can see that which he desires, but the act of describing it fails to bring it any closer towards him. The poetry itself is pushing through the boundary. Marlowe therefore displays language as the paraclausithyron . The words ‘herself’, ‘almost’, and ‘but’ are mere   reminders of what Leander cannot achieve because of his own failings and, ultimately, his own condition of isolation. There are dreams of ‘he’ and ‘she’ ‘touch(ing)’, but ultimately the poem leads us back to self-referential pronouns, such as ‘she herself’. Back to self-enclosure, to self-isolation. Leander even asserts, ‘My words shall be as spotless as my youth, / Full of simplicity and naked truth’.[6] But they are anything but. We desire a language that is not artificial, but we cannot escape its boundaries. The ‘roses’, symbolic of the female genitalia, offer a glimpse of Leander’s own desires. The door is wide open, but he cannot move. Language paralyses him.   Marlowe implies not only that we use language to gain closer contact with one another, but also that language comes directly from our inward desires—our thoughts become manifest in our speech. The lines ‘Therefore even as an index to a book, / So to his mind was young Leander’s look’, allegorise the idea that what Leander thinks becomes what he sees.[7] The two are inseparable, like an index and a book. Thus, what he thinks becomes the language that he speaks. Likewise, Hero becomes an object of his language. She becomes the object of his very thoughts, as of the reader’s. In a sense, then, language precedes their real consummation. Leander’s language and gaze has penetrated Hero’s body. Additionally, in the lines ‘immortal fingers did imprint / That heavenly path’, the reader is provided with the image of Leander’s fingers ‘imprint[ing]’ the ‘path’ he desires to take—both literally across the wide expanse of water, and more metaphorically to Hero’s genitalia.[8] It is interesting to note the verb ‘imprint’, and in particular the prefix ‘ im- ’, which calls us back to other verbs, such as ‘impress’, synonymous with ‘to influence’. It is also possible that language not only describes Hero but inscribes itself onto her. Language comes to define her identity. In this sense, the poem becomes a tragedy on her behalf, where touch was fatal to a woman’s status and value.   Today, language can be fatal to anyone’s status. Language internalises external government regulation and engenders a collective governmentality. We come to internalise this language and it thus becomes the very thing we fear. It is the matter which stands in between the subject and object, between the signified and signifier. Language, then, not only describes our social distance but also distances us from one another. It seeps into culture, society, and politics. For example, our current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, constantly evades the ongoing pandemic in his words. Through language, we attempt to find the truth, but there is no centre, there is no truth to uncover. Johnson says of lockdown that ‘it is like a nuclear deterrent’. Hero and Leander surrender to their own lustful desires and thus destroy themselves. Johnson’s simile seems to suggest that we assure our own destruction if we too surrender. But, according to Johnson, it is also ‘the narrow path (that) we have to tread’. This metaphor suggests how we are teetering on a boundary, for very few mistakes can be made. Language itself verges on the boundary, as our very words tremble with our fear. Johnson told us ‘that we can turn the tide’—that like Leander, we can attempt to push through this stasis, through this stagnant time, and create some dynamism and move toward contact. But language lies in the way, the double entendre displaying language’s duality. It is both an aid and an impediment. The conjunction ‘like’ itself suggests that we cannot know, that we cannot describe or ascribe meaning to our current state. Instead, we are stuck in a limbo state of mere wandering.   Even Marlowe deploys these literary obstacles for the reader. Jones asserts that, although Marlowe does not use the word in Hero and Leander , ‘plague hovers menacingly in its margins’.[9] The structure   of the poem prevents the very meeting Leander desires. Marlowe repeatedly refers to classical and Greek mythology, as in ‘The way to new Elysium’,[10] ‘Than for the fire filched by Prometheus’,[11] and ‘Yet there with Sisyphus he toiled in vain’.[12] Literary allusions throughout obstruct the relation between the reader and text. They become objects rather than words. ‘Elysium’ is a place of ideal happiness inhabited by the blessed dead in Greek mythology.[13] It is therefore interesting that Marlowe chooses to create a ‘new’ one. Leander is striving for a place of perfect happiness, a place he believes is with, or perhaps even inside, Hero. Our utopia is intertwined with the body. However, the allusion to ‘Sisyphus’ is significant as he ‘was condemned to Hades and made to roll a stone uphill forever’.[14] We are Sisyphus, unable to reach the climax of the poem, and unable to reach the end of this pandemic. Uncertainty is like a disease bleeding into our language. Marlowe prevents progress of chronological time through this back-and-forth motion, mirroring the very waves Leander fights against. Our reading experience then becomes that of our reality. Language makes us tremble, because it reminds us of our present. Marlowe evades the topic of the plague and yet, in doing so, he discusses it. In using language, one cannot escape its plague. Its transmission is just as deadly, for its speechlessness is given a voice.   Adam Islip, the printer of the original published poem, stated that Marlowe’s version is an ‘unfinished tragedy’. It may seem ‘unfinished’, or at least to cut off abruptly, if one agrees with the interpretation that Leander prematurely ejaculates. The finishing point that both Leander and the reader crave is not permitted by the poet. Dreams of intimacy and touch are cut short both literally and metaphorically. The last line inscribed in Latin, ‘Desunt Nonnulla’, translates to ‘something is missing’ or ‘something is lacking’, summarising this incapability of touching what one desires the most.[15] The poem then informs us how time is a continuum. Like the ‘tide’, we cannot control it. It rushes on, moving forward and backward, creating some kind of whirlpool around us. Meanwhile, we find ourselves stuck in stasis. The year 2020 was left unfinished. Relationships lacked touch, intimacy was missed, maybe life was abruptly stopped.   Language, then, defines our experience. It is how we interact with the world and reality and how we describe change. But, since there is no change, no future proposing itself, are we forced to go back to the past? Not only does our language describe social distancing, its very words also distance us from each other. The government imposes guilt, responsibility, and conformity on the individual, urging us to ‘Act like you have it’ and proposing that if we ‘Stay home’ we can ‘Save lives’. But the pronoun ‘it’ again separates us by its very meaning. The sibilance between ‘stay’ and ‘save’ propels us further into a condition of stasis. It places emphasis on our own moral responsibility. The words follow one each other, leaving us behind in the past. The phrases exemplify how language communicates and perhaps even structures our social distance. Therefore, beneath this simple affirmation is a realm of complexity and questionability. It holds as much ambiguity as Descartes’ phrase ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’). It asks us to seal off from the external and move to the internal. But where do we go? Where do we go when we cannot move forward? The answer is literature.   Literature provides momentum, it provides perspective. It is no ‘narrow path’ but a broad spectrum of experiences. The present is a mere echo of the past. The present is born out of the past. Like Marlowe’s allusions, echo is like a stark figure on the page. It is a shadow across the lines. But the next page is blank—unwritten and uncertain. So, we look to literature, to language, to our past for answers. We desire to move back to a time where things were more certain, back to a time when language made us tremble not with fear but with feeling, with desire, and with love. Because language—the word on the page, the whisper between two bodies—is all we have left. Madeleine Nina King   Madeleine Nina King is a first-year undergraduate in English at University College London. She is interested in literature focussing on the human condition, cultural movements, and theatre. She has been involved in a plethora of amateur productions and is hoping to pursue a career in the dramatic arts, in both writing and acting. [1] Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret  (second edn, David Willis tr, University of Chicago Press) 54. [2] Laurence Simmons, ‘“Comment Ne Pas Trembler?” Derrida’s Earthquake’. (2013) 42(3) SubStance 28, 32. [3] ibid 35. [4] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments  (first published 1977, Richard Howard tr, Vintage 2002) 73. [5] Christopher Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’ (first published 1598) in Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall, and Mary Jo Slater (eds), The Norton Anthology of Poetry  (sixth edn, 2018) First Sestiad 207-8. [6] ibid Second Sestiad 129-30. [7] ibid First Sestiad 67-8. [8] ibid First Sestiad 54. [9] ibid First Sestiad 411; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life  (The Arden Shakespeare 2001). [10] Marlowe (n 5) First Sestiad 439. [11] ibid Second Sestiad 277. [12] ibid Second Sestiad 259. [13] ibid Second Sestiad 266. [14] Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations  (Stephen Orgel ed, Penguin Classics 2007). [15] ibid.

The forging of a life in culture, economics, and security   My formative years were marked by my parents’ hopes and dreams that I would channel my vocal talents into a future where I would perform as a lyrical tenor on an operatic stage.[1]   Musical talent and voice training had inspired these aspirations, which were cruelly shattered when I joined a rock band to accompany my academic studies. Gradually, my father’s disappointment subsided as my career as an economist developed, gaining me recognition and influence.   Eventually, he came to acknowledge that my lifelong commitment to music, economics, and security had provided a fine platform for success. Combining a career in economic analysis in the twentieth century with economic security assessments for NATO in the twenty-first created a richly varied, cultural, and rewarding life.   ‘Are you a professor of economics or a rock ’n’ roll performer?’: The antecedents from wintry Illinois   The antecedents to this lifelong passion emerged one cold winter’s morning in January 1979. The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Illinois university I was visiting asked me this question in a withering voice.[2] Memories of my father’s disappointment came flooding back. The Dean had obviously been made aware of the events of the previous night, and the reckoning had arrived. I had made my debut as a singer/guitarist at a popular pizza house/bar in town. While singing a well-known contemporary ballad, a young woman emerged from the shadows to stand behind the stool on which I was precariously perched.   Swaying and holding me tight, her embrace threatened to dislodge me and the guitar, and terminate the song. Somehow, the song was finished and after a warm hug and a farewell flourish, she returned to the shadows, never to be seen again. With compelling urgency, the pizza house manager rushed up and insisted that I repeat the song. Sales of pizza and beer had suddenly soared during the ballad and gently erotic spectacle.   Confronted by the curious but faintly amused Dean the following morning, there was no choice but to accede to her request that I write a paper for the First International Conference of Cultural Economics in Edinburgh later in the year (it transpired that the Dean was one of the Editors of The Journal of Cultural Economics ).[3] My agreement drew inspiration from John Maynard Keynes’ dying dictum that ‘economists are the trustees not of civilisation but of the possibility of civilisation’.   From Edinburgh and culture to Bristol and defence   Following Edinburgh, I returned to my home city, Bristol, and increasingly undertook research into the understanding and analytical foundations of defence economics, inspired by Bristol’s regional, national, and international importance as a major centre of the European aerospace and defence industry. This distinctive field of enquiry led to many conference presentations and papers. These achievements stimulated a unique invitation from the United States Naval Academy to accept an endowed Chair in the Economics of the Defense Industrial Base at Annapolis, Maryland (combined with a semester at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California).   This new transatlantic odyssey permitted once more a life combining business with culture and the nurturing of my musical soul when singing Monteverdi, Mozart, Motown, and the blues in Annapolis. A fulfilling chapter of life ended when I crossed the Atlantic once more to occupy a senior post at NATO in Brussels, heralding new opportunities and contributions to security, economics, and culture.   The nexus of economic security and cultural diplomacy   I arrived in Brussels in late August 2001. Within three weeks the US was convulsed with anger, sorrow, and disbelief following the devastating, extraordinary Al Qaeda attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.   In the frenzied aftermath of 9/11, and as the fear of a similar attack on NATO Headquarters receded, I was employed in an international role as NATO’s principal Defence Economic Analyst, cooperating with Allies and Partners in developing sustainable security. During the 12 years of my NATO job, missions to numerous NATO member and Partner countries and regions meant frequent presentations at events and conferences, and a permanently packed suitcase.   The unstable unfolding of the twenty-first century   These missions took place in the complicated aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. A decade of retribution and conflict embodied in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ followed, enacted in the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and the calamitous and misconceived US-led coalition invasion of Iraq in March 2003.   These actions inflamed antagonisms and discord among NATO Allies—notably France and the US—and also with some Partner countries. The antagonised states were notably from the Middle East and the Gulf, including the seven members of the Mediterranean Dialogue and the four members of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative.   Such tensions built on the festering and continuing insecurities in Southeast Europe, notably among Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These insecurities resulted from the fragile Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, at the end of the Yugoslav War, and NATO’s bombing of targets in Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.   NATO membership granted to Slovenia in 2004, Croatia in 2010, and the Republic of North Macedonia in 2020 has left a legacy of smouldering ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic instability in other Southeastern European states, such as Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.   A sacred mission to the Russian Far East   Brighter news and a cautious sense of optimism appeared with the historic NATO–Russia Summit in Rome in May 2002. The hope that a constructive and mutually beneficial partnership between Russia and NATO could be forged was represented by the formation of the NATO–Russia Council. A few months later, the Office of the Secretary General requested that I travel to Moscow and then to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. A speaking engagement at an international conference organised by the Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law, on the integration of the Russian Far East into the Pacific Rim, provided an opportunity to stimulate comparisons and contrasts with NATO’s origins and Euro-Atlantic identity.   The ten-hour journey from Brussels across nine time zones and the seemingly endless Russian taiga provided an unforgettable prelude to my visit to this remote region beyond Siberia. A note of sharp realism emerged during a subsequent speech to the Khabarovsk regional parliament. The Speaker was forced to take decisive action to protect me from visceral and angry Deputies who insisted that I be arrested as a NATO spy.   Escaping from Khabarovsk was accomplished by means of a dramatic overnight train journey on the last leg of the Trans-Siberian Express. I arrived in the early morning at the menacing but beautiful Vladivostok railway station. Vibrant, welcoming students from the celebrated Far Eastern State University escorted me to the campus. There followed a series of presentations on international relations and security to a variety of enthusiastic students and classes. Later, I held some conversations in—other than English and Russian—French and German, and to my Scandinavian surprise,[4] there was even a hybrid Swedish–Old Icelandic dialogue! Such a linguistic mélange offered the perfect prelude to an impromptu concert with caretaker Nikolai in the Vladivostok Children’s Home. The spacious meeting room echoed to anthems from Santana and the Beatles including, inevitably, ‘Back in the USSR’.   An eventful return journey from Vladivostok to Brussels was followed by congratulations from Secretary General Robertson on a successful diplomatic and musical mission. This affirmation emboldened me to engage in further musical diplomacy at other NATO conferences and events.   The return of the Cold War   Unfortunately, the positive vibrations from the NATO–Russia partnership faded, and were fatally damaged in 2008. Georgia had become increasingly vociferous and articulate in expressing its desire to join NATO as a full member. This provoked the surprise Russian invasion of Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions in August 2008.   This disruption to the framework and programme of mutual NATO–Russia cooperation was never fully restored. The death knell was sounded as Russia became increasingly alarmed by Ukraine’s own ambitions to join NATO. Unrest in Kiev preceded the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2013, and the subsequent insurgency in Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine erupted when separatists were backed by Russian militia.   The origins of this particular (ongoing) ‘Frozen Conflict’ were precipitated by the 2005–06 natural gas crisis between Russia and Ukraine, which was manifested in unresolved financial and transit disputes between Naftogaz Ukraine and Russia’s Gazprom. This ‘gas war’ greatly unnerved NATO member states, especially those with a significant dependency on Russian natural gas and its transit through Ukraine.   Russia’s continuing need for the security of hydrocarbon energy demand and critical state revenues combines with Western Europe’s dependency on Russian gas. This pas de deux continues to be played out against the economic dislocations of COVID-19, and against the alarming escalation in climate insecurity and international pressure for radical reductions in hydrocarbons and energy substitution through renewable energy sources.   Singing before the Orange Revolution   At the conclusion of a NATO–Ukraine Joint Working Group on Economic Security in Kiev in 2004, the year of the Orange Revolution, a reception took place in a stylish contemporary art gallery in the Old Town of Kiev. A distinguished string quartet from the Kiev National Symphony Orchestra had been asked to provide music, but neither they nor I could have anticipated a request from the Reception Host, the Deputy Minister for Economic Security, that they should accompany me in some songs. With neither rehearsal nor music, the quartet brilliantly improvised accompaniments to Lennon–McCartney songs, which culminated in ecstatic dancing at the reception. This experience imparted an indelible impact on the folklore of NATO–Ukraine meetings that resonated throughout my tenure at NATO.   Music has charms to soothe troubled breasts in the South Caucasus   The most compelling example of the power of musical diplomacy to transform an acrimonious and tense Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) event took place in Tbilisi in the early summer of 2004.   The EAPC conference on economic security in the Black Sea had promised to be a difficult, uncooperative, and hostile event, with the genial Georgians hosting Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.   In autumn 2020, violent and tragic confrontations erupted between the Azeris and Armenians in and around the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus. The Azeris, supported by Turkish and Syrian militias, sought to wrestle back control of this volatile territory, which had been seized by Armenian forces during the internecine conflict of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The secession of predominantly Christian Armenia and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan from the Soviet Union reawakened deep historical ethnic and religious wounds.   On the first day of the EAPC conference, the hostility and the tensions between many of the participants were palpable, and the NATO chairman of the conference called on me to sustain fragmented and difficult discussions.   The Georgians hosted a large dinner that evening at a restaurant just outside downtown Tbilisi. At the circular table, the Georgian Minister of Economy, members of his ministry, NATO participants, and the new British Ambassador drank an initial toast. My NATO boss then commented jokingly that my talents as an economist were outweighed by my singing abilities. Shortly after, the aide-de-camp to the Minister came over and whispered that the Minister requested that I sing. Observing my incredulity, she pointed to the band on the stage in the large imposing hall and returned to her seat. While pondering what to do next, the personal assistant returned to restate the Minister’s request more insistently.   This prompted the newly appointed British Ambassador to announce that he liked to sing in the bath every day. As though in a dream (or nightmare), I went with the Ambassador to the stage, discovering en route that he had never previously sung in public. Short conversations in Georgian, Russian, and English set the scene. The band began to play, and to the astonishment of the hall we began to sing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ followed by ‘Let It Be’.   The audience, electrified by this spectacle, flocked toward the stage with chants of enthusiasm and encouragement. The evening continued with a Georgian contingent performing animated national dancing, followed by the rendition of beautiful national folk songs, firstly and artistically by the Armenians and then by the Azeris. Long after most guests had departed the dinner hall, the restaurant manager begged me to persuade the vodka-inspired Ambassador to stop singing and go home to the Embassy.   The consequence of this extraordinary evening was a reinvigorated conference the next day, with frequent constructive exchanges between Azeris, Armenians, and other participants. The conference report that I submitted to the Office of the Secretary General was applauded for the substantive discussions and proposals. Music had won the day, and would do so many more times in many more places before I retired from NATO in early 2014.   My retirement from NATO did not end regular participation or contributions to NATO’s Building Integrity Programme,[5] or to NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis programme (including virtual conversations through the pandemic). Retirement has not diminished my enduring love for the benefits to soft cultural power and security from music, economics, and security. Professor Adrian Kendry   Professor Adrian Kendry was appointed NATO’s Senior Defence Economist in August 2001. Until 2014 he coordinated all NATO economic intelligence, and he reported directly to the Office of the Secretary General on strategic economic challenges and risks confronting NATO and international security (including Afghanistan). Subsequently he has moderated and spoken at many NATO Strategic Foresight Analysis events, including SFA2021 Webinars on Economics and Resources (most recently 2020, and 2021 forthcoming). From 1996–2001 he held the Admiral William Crowe Chair in Defense Industrial Economics at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, including a Visiting Professorship of Economics at the US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, in 1999. He is now Visiting Professor of Economics, Security and Peacebuilding at the University of Winchester.   Article not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. [1] Such hopes and dreams had been nurtured by my singing Bach to win a major music festival. [2] Precipitated by a headline in the local newspaper announcing that a British rock and roll singer would be performing at a well-known pizza house/bar. [3] Published by Springer in Switzerland. [4] Swedish mother and biological father. [5] Including the composition and performance of ‘Building Integrity Blues’.

For far too long, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades  (2004) has maintained its status as an Indian cinema cult classic. It is a film about a non-resident Indian (NRI) from the USA who visits India to reconnect with his foster nanny. Through his visit, he becomes deeply involved in the socioeconomic issues of the village of Charanpur and ultimately decides to return and settle there. It owes its high status to several features but primarily to its frank depiction and criticism of certain ills of Indian society.   Those ills persist to this day, and in light of this, it is pertinent that Swades ’ status and reputation be re-examined. Whilst Gowariker’s   film was certainly ahead of its time, not recognising its limitations would be both a disservice to the aim of progressing Hindi cinema as well as to the very real issues that the film delves into. Inevitably, such a conversation will expose Swades  as deeply hesitant and trifling in its subversion and critical analysis.   To expose Swades ’ criticality as hesitant and trifling, this article will begin by presenting two crucial ways in which the film does engage in both filmic and cultural subversion. Firstly, Gowariker successfully presents a uniquely nuanced depiction of the NRI, forgoing the typical depictions. This novel conceptualisation lets the narrative critique the caste system—an endogamous system of social stratification unique to India[1]—and conceives of an Indianness that can perhaps be detached from adherence to such oppressive traditions. Unfortunately, because of the large focus on the NRI experience, Gowariker falls woefully short of providing an enduringly meaningful critique of the caste system. It stereotypes the characters of marginalised identities, something that can be seen in current Indian cinema, arguably because no lessons are learnt from Swades . This article concludes that there is an important message within that resonates to this day, but realising it is conditional on taking Swades  off the pedestal on which it has been placed.   Scholarship on Swades  and its relevant themes must be recognised for its contributions to the ongoing conversation about Hindi cinema and the various social issues which are framed within it. Kae Reynolds has recognised Swades for its use of servant leadership in the characterisation of the protagonist, Mohan Bhargava.[2] Relatedly, Amy Bhatt, Madhavi Murty, and Priti Ramamurthy critique the film for operating within a neoliberal framework in which caste (and other social justice issues) are treated merely as barriers to the final aim of economic development,[3] rather than issues in and of themselves.[4] Examination of late-1990s and early-2000s Hindi cinema suggests that Swades  was distinct in its portrayal of NRIs and the West and lacked a cultural superiority complex. Nonetheless, the more simplistic portrayals have persisted.[5] Furthermore, Swades  is recognised for depicting oppressed-caste people as passive and in need of rescuing and recent Hindi cinema films have continued to reinforce the stereotypes of Brahminical saviour complex).[6] Most scholarship critical of Swades relates to caste and neoliberalism, and tends to highlight similar films, rather than critiquing it in isolation.   At the outset, it is essential to outline the Indian caste system as well as the current realities of caste-based oppression. This is crucial to evaluating Swades ’ message. Caste is an endogamous system of social stratification. It has a long and complex history, but throughout various historical periods on the Indian subcontinent, caste-based stratification has endured as part of the dominant religious culture of Hinduism.[7] Through the processes of bonded labour and or strict segregation, those labelled ‘Brahmins’ and other privileged castes have attained great generational wealth and power,[8] and those labelled ‘Dalits’[9] have been made to experience untouchability, violence and exclusion.[10] One’s caste identity is virtually inescapable and shapes every aspect of existence.[11]   According to Rajesh Sampath, caste oppression is comparable to racial oppression to a certain extent. Police brutality, workplace discrimination, and privilege blindness are but a few violations to which oppressed-caste people are constantly subject.[12] Caste has endured perhaps because of its religious roots. Hindu epics and the Manusmriti  feature stark lessons against caste transgression.[13] Eradication has been more difficult since the Modi administration professed a desire to shape India into a Hindu- rashtra (state), with caste politics being redefined as acceptable and defensible to suit this agenda.[14]   Having outlined Swades  and the caste system, the article can begin to examine Swades  for its subversiveness that facilitated its frank social commentary.   To convey the depth of Gowariker’s subversion in the depiction of the NRI protagonist, it is important to be aware of the socioeconomic conditions in which Swades  enters the Indian consciousness. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Indian economy had been liberalised for over a decade, with it bringing rapid change. Huge shopping centres materialised alongside the bazaars in major cities, bringing foreign retailers into India. Migration opportunities increased tenfold post-liberalisation because of the emergence of an upwardly mobile middle class whose members took up work placements and educational opportunities abroad, particularly to the UK and USA. Whether one emigrated or not, for the middle-class, this was a time of improving living standards and a sense that all social issues have been, or will be imminently, resolved.   As Western media—from the Disney Channel to Comedy Central— began to permeate the televised landscape, Indians became keenly aware of the stark differences in lifestyle. Regardless of social class and region, they were being exposed to the superior quality of life in foreign countries, even as things were improving at home.   The yearning for a Western lifestyle of ease and prosperity began to clash horribly with a sense of patriotic pride. After all, adulation of the Occident is difficult to reconcile with a colonial past and the contemporary realities of racism that the Indian diaspora faced. The NRIs—with their theoretically split loyalties—became prime real estate for Indian cinema to play out these clashing values in vivid Technicolor.[15] It would not be far-fetched to argue that an ‘Indian identity’ was strengthened by Bollywood in careful opposition to Western culture. At this time, many films featured overly patriotic themes. The plots follow the model of ‘Indians in the Occident realised India is just so much better’. NRIs were presented in binary terms—those who ‘lost touch’ with their roots were villainised,[16] and ‘good’ ones always felt alienated and yearned to be in their true home.[17] Indian authenticity was measured by checking how much an NRI resisted the ‘Western mindset’ and maintained their sanskaar aur parampara  (cultural norms and tradition), even though ‘there is   no single opinion about what these values are’.[18]   In these vacuously patriotic times, Gowariker released Swades , which had all the markers of a film that would deliver on contemporary audiences’ nationalistic expectations.   Except, Swades  ignored various Bollywood cinematic tropes,[19] and more importantly had a protagonist who turned a critical eye on India, rather the West. The sheer beauty of Mohan’s character lies in his genuine critique of the Indian government (the intertemporal entity) and Indian society at large, whilst being attached to and invested in it. The film begins with Mohan deciding to visit his foster nanny—a personification of India—because he believes he has a duty to not be so detached from her. His undeniable attachment does not render him blind to the ills of Indian society, which he credibly exposes in private, and when the village elders question him.   This realistic NRI character naturally allows for more meaningful critique, and the most notable issue that Mohan condemns is the Indian caste system. Mohan repeatedly mentions caste—not just caste-based discrimination—in the list of issues that plague the country, at a time when middle-class Indians hardly interrogated their caste-based privileges at all. This would have been the first time this generation of the audience was made to confront sociopolitical issues, since themes ‘concerning class/caste oppression, workers’ rights … [had] been tucked away’ in the post-liberalisation Indian cinematic landscape.[20]   In Swades , degrees of casteism are depicted through the characters. First, there is Mela Ram, an entrepreneurial chef, who is not allowed to sit in on the village elders’ meetings. Then, there is Birsa, who is deeply afraid that the village school will not admit his children. Finally, there is Haridas, a severely impoverished farmer, kept poor by the refusal of the community to do business with him because he is viewed as a caste traitor for abandoning the ‘prescribed’ occupation.   The lack of any obvious display of physical violence or verbal abuse against these oppressed-caste characters stresses the extent to which the caste system has been normalised under the guises of peace and social harmony. Casual acceptance of caste-based segregation marks some of the film’s most powerful sequences. In a scene of an outdoor cinema, all the oppressed-caste people are made to sit on the other side of the makeshift screen. After spending a day helping with the task of enrolling children to the local school alongside Mohan, Mela Ram pauses at the cinema divide, shakes Mohan’s hand, and gestures to the fact that he cannot sit with the privileged-caste protagonist.   Mela Ram and the rest of his peers are forced to watch the entire film, including the title, inverted . The cruelty of this is emphasised by how one of Swades ’ major themes is the way in which oppressed-caste people are excluded from their right to education, embodied by Birsa’s struggles. One can easily envision a village elder character remarking: ‘They can’t read, so how does it make a difference whether they view the film from this side or the other side?’   In depicting the normalisation of caste, Gowariker acknowledged casteism as essential to Indian society. After all, the fact that societal structures are a central feature of Indianness forces the audience to wonder what exactly they should be feeling any attachment or loyalty to. Essentially, Swades  asks, can one conceive of an Indianness without social subjugation under the guise of sanskaar aur parampara ?   Gowariker’s answer is revealed when Mohan leaves Charanpur for the USA. It is held in the parting-gift token. It is a wooden box with compartments filled with spices essential to Indian cuisine. When back in the USA, Mohan’s nostalgia for India is shown through a montage. It features the people he met, rich farmland, traditional architecture, and finally the very spices that come from the soil. Thus, Gowariker fashioned a pathway towards an altered sense of Indian identity at a time when cinema blindly mimicked the Indian tendency to claim superiority based on adherence to centuries of religious culture. This critique is not limited to Hindu religious culture. One could question the merits of linking national identity to a specific geographical region, but the attempt to shift the focus away from vague and uncritically accepted social norms such as caste is noteworthy.   The pathway from a critical protagonist—with whom the audience must identify—to a vision of an inclusive Indian identity that has divested itself from oppressive tradition bears further examination. In fact, this examination of Swades ’ messaging will reveal that the pathway is broken, because it relies on an incomplete analysis of the Indian caste system.   Gowariker’s method for creating a new Indian identity is to employ caste-blindness. An entire song—‘Yeh Tara Woh Tara’ (‘Star Here, Star There’)—is dedicated to this message, although it never uses the word ‘caste’.[21] When Mohan was asked by the village elders about his own caste identifier, he simply says, ‘What difference does it make?’ Although this response is meant to challenge caste adherence, when viewed in conjunction with the message of caste blindness, it suggests a wilful apathy towards an issue that has lasted for centuries. Much like race blindness, caste blindness does not rectify centuries of trauma and injustice. In the aforementioned scene where Mohan displays an initiative to discard his caste identity, he is sat in front of the village elders and Mela Ram—one of the few oppressed-caste characters—is pointedly excluded from the conversation. Mohan had made no effort to have him included, which would have been far more meaningful than claiming his own indifference to caste identity.   Furthermore, merely two seconds afterwards, Mohan volunteers his caste identity and—to no surprise—he is a Brahmin. If it takes a Brahmin man to convince the other privileged caste people to not commit caste-based atrocities, has caste identity truly been challenged? For Gowariker and other filmmakers like Anubhav Sinha,[22] to present an outcome where caste oppression ends on the oppressor’s terms cheapens the message.   The film might convince the audience that its project to display the humanity of oppressed caste people is well executed. When Mohan visits Haridas (Bachan Pachehra), Haridas narrates his story of injustice with tears in his eyes. The camera pans slowly forward as Pachehra’s voice and malnourished appearance become the focal point, and the audience forgets all else. It is a deeply moving scene, undoubtedly the emotional apex of the film.   However, Haridas—like the other oppressed-caste characters—never displays any anger at his oppressors. It is Mohan who exclaims, ‘This is an injustice!’. Haridas, the man subjected to the injustice, is only afforded some poetic dialogue intended to invoke the audience’s pity. There is a privileged-caste saviour; the lower-caste people talk about their plight politely and eloquently with a sense of resignation, never outrage; and the story itself ‘does not answer questions like who created caste’.[23]   The characterisation of Dalit people—especially as lacking in anger—reveals the oppressor’s desire never to be harshly critiqued. A Dalit (and oppressed-caste) identity has been fashioned by the dominant caste to create boundaries and put conditions on Dalit liberation. In doing so, any hint of anger is classed as a digression, a reason to discredit the voice (and therefore the message) without feeling guilty. This is evident in Indian media’s treatment of Mayawati, a Dalit politician and leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Her rise to mainstream politics has been praised by prominent journalists for avoiding the ‘abuse of the upper castes’, and she was later characterised as ‘raging again, on the warpath’.[24] It is saddening, though unsurprising, that privileged-caste people have their blindspots. This underscores the need to question and dismantle each misguided fictional representation of oppressed caste people. Lack of such examination has impoverished Swades ’ legacy. Storytellers and film-watchers continue to place it on a pedestal, and they remain nostalgic about themes that did not shake them out of their comfort zones.   To give an idea of the current state of Hindi cinema, one can consider Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 . The latest major film to depict caste-based violence, it features all the aforementioned tropes. The glaring difference is that the director does not shy away from the darker themes of sexual violence. Whilst there was more criticism of the Brahmin saviour complex, in a panel discussion on NDTV, Sinha can be seen as deflecting from the criticism. He says: ‘If it’s wrong to show a Brahmin, then we can re-cast with a Dalit hero, but in today’s times this story is a humble beginning’.[25] Rahul Sonpimple, a Dalit student activist, could be seen looking unsatisfied with the director’s response. It is evident that a lack of critical engagement with Swades  has resulted in repeating patterns of casteist storytelling, employing all the tropes that damage the cause of caste eradication, and openly profiteering from uninspired narratives of caste-based oppression.   Is there hope for more grounded social commentary, which centres the voices of the oppressed? The current political climate does not provide any reassurance. The Modi administration cannot tolerate an iota of criticism) and routinely acts to subdue and threaten it.[26] Its primary aim (besides maintaining power) is to continue to act on a Hindu nationalist agenda. Any criticism that can be even vaguely considered an attack on Hinduism—which anti-caste storytelling would certainly be—is likely to receive strong pressure to be rescinded, if it gets published at all.   The most recent behaviour of the Modi administration—attacking public figures such as Rihanna and Greta Thunberg for their opinions on the farmer protests—has already revealed its wild and unhinged character to the world. Less known is the tendency of Bollywood personalities to act as governmental mouthpieces. This is widely interpreted as a sign of the devastating reach and influence that the Indian government wields.[27]   That said, creative resistance is free to take root in any space it can. In a thread on Twitter, Raghu Karnad, an Indian journalist, pointed out the historical precedent of raising awareness and forming resistance against previous Indian regimes through important institutions such as The New York Times and Western governments.[28] Promisingly, the most recent iteration of resistance is the ‘younger generations of Indian expats and diaspora’, which uses safer spaces such as social media to profess support for issues back home.[29]   However, the diasporic community is also dominated by privileged-caste people. It therefore remains important that lending a critical voice does not overshadow the ongoing efforts of oppressed-caste people to create their art and provide their critique.[30] Therefore, questioning Swades ’ elevated status is a small step towards making space for better narratives, especially given that I am a part of the community that largely holds Swades  in very high esteem.   Ultimately, after re-evaluating the film, only one message from it still resonates with me, as an NRI in 2021 looking at a fictional NRI in 2004. Just like Mohan, voices like mine need to recognise their own privilege and hold Indian institutions accountable. Richa Kapoor   Richa Kapoor is the Impact Officer at Social Market Foundation. Prior to this role, she graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She contributed an article to the first issue of CJLPA , before becoming an editor for the second. [1] For detailed understanding of the caste system in India, it is crucial to learn from oppressed-caste voices. Some of the most notable works on the subject and experience are: BR Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste  (seventh edn, Verso Books 2014); Meenakshi Moon and Urmila Pawar, We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement  (sixth edn, Zubaan Books 2016); and Om Prakash Valmiki, Joothan  (third edn, Columbia University Press 2008). [2] Kae Reynolds, ‘The Hindi language film Swades: We, the People: A different kind of journey to the east’ (2013) 7(1) The International Journal of Servant Leadership 279. [3] Near the end of the film, Mohan leads a bottom-up electricity generation project, since the village was plagued with unreliable electricity. Making the climax an economic development project has been criticised. [4] Amy Bhatt, Madhavi Murty, and Priti Ramamurthy, ‘Hegemonic Developments: The New Indian Middle Class, Gendered Subalterns, and Diasporic Returnees in the Event of Neoliberalism’ (2010) 36(1) Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 127 < https://doi.org/10.1086/652916 > accessed 14 February 2021; Prem Singh, ‘The Representation of the Dalit Body in Popular Hindi Cinema’ (2011) < https://www.academia.edu/25943972/The_Representation_of_the_Dalit_Body_in_Popular_Hindi_Cinema > accessed 27 March 2021. [5] Ravinder Kaur, ‘Viewing the West through Bollywood: a celluloid Occident in the making’ (2002) 11(2) Contemporary South Asia 199 < https://doi.org/10.1080/0958493022000030168 > accessed 14 February 2021; Laya Maheshwari, ‘How Bollywood stereotypes the West’ ( BBC Culture , 2017) < https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170922-how-bollywood-stereotypes-the-west > accessed 12 February 2021. [6] Vidushi, ‘Cinematic Narrative: The Construction of Dalit Identity in Bollywood’ in Einar Thorsen, Heather Savigny, Jenny Alexander, and Daniel Jackson (eds), Media, Margins and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) 123; Khushi Gupta, ‘Stereotypes in Bollywood Cinema: Does Article 15 Reinforce the Dalit Narrative?’ (2021) 13(1) Inquiries Journal 1 < http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1868 > accessed 12 March 2021. [7] Romila Thapar, The History of India , vol 1 (second edn, Penguin 1990) 28. [8] Rajorshi Das, ‘My Casteism & Privileges: A Test For Upper Caste People In Academia’ ( Feminism In India , 2020) < https://feminisminindia.com/2020/06/10/casteism-privileges-test-upper-caste-people-academia/ > accessed 14 February 2021. [9] Caste is hierarchical. Several groups are between Brahmins and Dalits on the caste ladder. [10] Das (n 8); Adam Withnall, ‘Caste in India: What are Dalits and how prevalent is casteism in modern-day society?’ The Independent (London, 30 September 2020) < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-caste-dalits-brahmins-hindu-society-b718984.html > accessed 14 February 2021. [11] Kaur (n 5); Varghese K George, ‘Caste is the constant’ The Hindu  (2016) < https://www.thehindu.com/sunday-anchor/conversion-confusion-caste-is-the-constant/article6711442.ece > accessed 27 March 2021 [12] Rajesh Sampath, ‘Racial and caste oppression have many similarities’ ( The Conversation , 19 June 2015) < https://theconversation.com/racial-and-caste-oppression-have-many-similarities-37710 > accessed 12 February 2021. [13] Tejas Harad, ‘Why Manusmriti is the symbol of the caste system for anti-caste reformers’ ( The News Minute , 3 November 2020) < https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/why-manusmriti-symbol-caste-system-anti-caste-reformers-136809 > accessed 14 February 2021. [14] Avishek Jha, ‘BJP’s 2019 victory: How caste-based politics has been redefined and reinvented’ ( South Asia @LSE , 26 June 2019) < https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/06/26/bjps-2019-victory-how-caste-based-politics-has-been-redefined-and-reinvented/ > accessed 14 February 2021. [15] Laya Maheshwari, ‘How Bollywood stereotypes the West’ ( BBC Culture , 25 September 2017) < https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170922-how-bollywood-stereotypes-the-west > accessed 12 February 2021. [16] As in Pardes  (1997). [17] As in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). [18] Kaur (n 5) 207. [19] Song lyrics featured the messages of the story and weren’t mere eye or ear candy. The romance was not the focus of the narrative, and it lasted three hours without much epic drama. [20] Kaur (n 5) 206. [21] Although the song does not mention caste, the film alludes to caste by playing it during the segregated outdoor cinema event scene. During the song, the makeshift screen that divided the villagers is brought down and all  the children sing together about ignoring differences and truly unifying. [22] The director of Article 15  (2019), a crime drama film about a police investigation about the disappearance of three Dalit girls. The film is inspired by several real-life incidents. [23] Khushi Gupta, ‘Stereotypes in Bollywood Cinema: Does Article 15 Reinforce the Dalit Narrative?’ (2021) 13(1) Inquiries Journal 1 < http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1868 >. [24] Bhatt, Murty, and Ramamurthy (n 4) 139-40. [25] NDTV, ‘Does “Article 15” Have An Upper-Caste Gaze? Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha Responds’ ( YouTube , 19 July 2019) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIdZs7DbBfA > accessed 14 January 2021. [26] Meenakshi Ganguly, ‘Dissent is “anti-national” in Modi’s India - no matter where it comes from’ ( Scroll.in , 13 December 2019) < https://scroll.in/article/946488/dissent-is-anti-national-in-modis-india-no-matter-where-it-comes-from > accessed 14 February 2021. [27] Geeta Pandey, ‘Farmers’ protest: Why did a Rihanna tweet prompt Indian backlash?’ ( BBC News , 4 February 2021) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-55931894 > accessed 14 February 2021. [28] Ironically, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the group that rallied foreign bodies and lobbied them to put pressure on Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s, is closely associated with the Modi administration and supports curbing dissent. [29] Raghu Karnad ( Twitter , 3 February 2021) < https://mobile.twitter.com/rkarnad/status/1356917930194202627 > accessed 14 February 2021. [30] Satyajit Amin, ‘Dear Indian Diaspora, We Need to Talk About Caste’ ( Varsity , 24 July 2020) < https://www.varsity.co.uk/opinion/19634 > accessed 27 March 2021.

Abstract   In the wake of successive disappointing election performances by the UK Labour Party, commentators on the party’s centre-right have argued that it can only be electorally successful if it is perceived as closer to the political centre than it was under leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband. These comments reiterate the received wisdom that, for a political party to be successful, it must be perceived as occupying an ideological centre ground. This political wisdom is derived from Anthony Downs’ ‘median voter theorem’,[1] which states that ‘a majority rule voting system will result in the outcome most preferred by the median voter’.[2] The following study tests this argument empirically by comparing voter estimations of the ideological positions of the Labour, Conservative, Green, and Liberal Democrat parties on the left-right ideological scale before the 2017 and 2019 General Elections and during polling carried out in June 2020.   Introduction   Discourse within the political commentariat, and the general public, often involves discussion of whether parties have moved towards the left or right because of leaders, political philosophies, or significant events such as Brexit or the 2008 financial crisis. Failure at the polls—such as the Labour Party’s failure to win a majority in 2015 and 2019—is often attributed to a party shifting its position on this scale so that it is out of sync with the electorate. The UK Labour Party was accused of moving ‘too far to the left’ under Corbyn,[3] while Joe Biden was attacked on the campaign trail in the US as being not left-wing enough.[4] However, studies have suggested that it is actually quite rare for parties to shift significantly on the left-right ideological spectrum.[5] This raises the question: is there actually a correlation between a party’s position on the left-right axis, as perceived by the mean voter, and electoral success? Do voters ignore ideological shifts when making electoral decisions—and is electoral perception of such shifts even accurate enough to allow informed decision making? The following study seeks to answer these questions by using a number of simple statistical tests and linear models to investigate the link between voter estimation of British parties’ ideological positions on the Anthony Downs’ scale,[6] and the electoral success of these parties. As a precursor to this analysis, the study also considers the conclusions of two previous studies on voter estimation of ideological position in Europe and Britain, and the influence these have on this study’s results. Ultimately this study finds that—based on the results of two previous general elections, pre-election surveys from these polls, and survey results after one year of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party—the proximity of a party’s perceived ideological position to that of the median, centrist voter, is a poor indicator of electoral success. The study also highlights that, in order to better understand the relationship between voter estimation of the ideological position of a party and electoral success, more data from smaller-scale electoral contests is required.   Theoretical background and previous studies   Before testing the hypothesis that, in the UK, the party which is perceived as being closest to the ideological centre ground does the best, it is necessary to consider some of the assumptions within this hypothesis.   The first of these is the assumption of a level of ‘political knowledge’ or ‘political sophistication’ within the electorate. Parties in Britain and many other Western democracies tend to be characterised as ‘left’, ‘right’, or ‘centrist’ on the two-dimensional scale described by Downs.[7] In Down’s model, these labels describe, with broad strokes, the ideological positions held by parties which determine their stance on a range of policy issues. They let members of the electorate identify the party they are most closely aligned with without having to analyse the party’s stance on individual issues.[8] Busch[9] points out that this model assumes voters can understand the ideological content of a party’s positions and compare it with their own, rather than comparing the label itself, which may disguise significant differences between party and voter priorities. The same assumption is present within the argument made by centrist politicians such as Tony Blair[10] and Peter Mandelson[11] that the Labour Party can only win elections if it is perceived by the median voter as being closest to the median (centre) ideological position. This argument, like Downs’ model of electoral decision making, relies on voters being able to understand the congruence between their own ideological stances, and their political parties’. However, research on voter perceptions of European parties and electoral decision making has suggested that the average voter does not notice when a party changes the ideological content of its manifesto.[12]   Similarly, several studies[13] have found that if individuals have strong positive or negative emotional predispositions to specific parties they tend to exaggerate the ideological similarity or difference between themselves and said party.[14] This undermines the core assumption of informed electoral decision-making of Downs’ model and the arguments of Mandelson and Blair. Busch tests the hypothesis that voters are able to accurately perceive and compare the ideological position of a party with their own using multi-level linear modelling, identifying the individual-, party-, and system-level factors that influence the accuracy of voter estimations of ideological position.[15] Busch finds that voter estimation of a party’s ideological position, and shifts in this position, is generally accurate. Changes in a party’s political ideology around economic policy actually appear to improve accuracy. The greatest source of confusion to voter estimation was multiple parties significantly shifting ideological position simultaneously, which caused a decrease in estimation accuracy. Dahlberg suggests that if parties want to avoid voter confusion about their ideological position they should take distinctive positions, since the further from other parties they are, the clearer voter estimation is.[16] However, successful parties tend to try to have ‘broad appeal’ amongst the electorate by operating under as wide an ideological umbrella as possible,[17] which makes them harder to locate accurately on the left-right scale as ideological positions will inevitably overlap.   The second assumption made by commentators such as Blair and Mandelson is that the distance between the perceived ideological position of the Labour Party and the electoral median position, is greater than the distance between the same median position and the perceived ideological positions of other parties. Ed Fieldhouse considers this claim in a widely republished blog post for the British Electoral Survey.[18] Fieldhouse argues that the overall mean ideological position of the British Labour Party is less important than the difference between its position and that of the electoral median, or whether competing parties position themselves closer to this median. Fieldhouse uses data from the British Electoral Survey—the source from which this study’s data is also drawn—to interrogate the claim made by Tony Blair that the Labour Party moved too far left under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn,[19] in the wake of the 2015 General Election, where Labour won 232 seats to the Conservatives’ 330. His study is therefore a useful precursor to this paper. Fieldhouse’s comparison of mean voter position on the ideological scale and mean voter estimation of Labour’s position on the same scale showed that in 2015 Labour moved further away from the median voter than any time during the more electorally successful Blair years. This suggests that the received wisdom of Downs’ model—and the arguments of Blair, Mandelson, and other centrists—may be correct. As Labour has moved further from the median, its electoral success has declined. However, Labour’s perceived ideological position was actually 0.6 points to the right of its own voters’.[20] This is a good position for a party attempting to have a ‘broad appeal’ across the electorate.[21] Additionally, Fieldhouse’s study showed that despite the Liberal Democrats being perceived as the party ideologically closest to the median voter’s position,[22] they still suffered an electoral collapse, losing 49 of their 57 seats in 2015. Additionally, while the Labour party was considered left-of-centre, they were still perceived as closer to the centre than the Conservative Party. The modal score of the Conservative Party was 8, compared to Labour’s 3.[23] The Conservative Party’s ideological position was also further to the right of Conservative supporters (0.9 points) than the Labour Party was from Labour supporters.[24] Fieldhouse concludes that there are more important factors in electoral success in Britain than perceived ideological position. This suggests that Labour’s main challenge will be increasing its support by implementing new policies associated with conservative fiscal responsibility, whilst also keeping its established electoral base.   A brief overview of previous studies on voter estimation of ideological positions in the UK and Europe upholds the core assumption of the Downs model—that the average voter can accurately estimate the ideological position of a political party. However, it appears that, in the UK, the ability of voters to accurately estimate party positions does not necessarily mean they set great store by them when making electoral decisions. As Fieldhouse concludes, the proximity of a party’s perceived ideological position to the median is a poor indicator of electoral success.   Method   The following section will lay out the steps taken in the treatment and analysis of data during this study. While the techniques used are simple, they can still reveal significant phenomena concerning voter estimation and electoral success.   Data   This study focuses exclusively on voter estimation in the United Kingdom. While restricting the applicability of the study’s results, this also brings several benefits. The presence of multiple parties within the UK electoral system has been proven to make voter estimations of ideological position more accurate.[25] So has the presence of several established parties which have traditionally been associated with a specific area on the left-right axis.[26] The time frame studied (2017-20) was selected because, within it, multiple parties changed either their ideological position or party leader, and because it largely predates the confounding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on electoral decision making. The raw data from the study was obtained from three waves of the British Electoral Study 2014-23: Wave 11 (April-May 2017), Wave 17 (November 2019), and Wave 20 (June 2020). The results of each survey were compared to the percentage vote share and number of seats won by four major parties (Labour, Conservative, Green, and Liberal Democrat) in the General Elections they preceded. Data from the Wave 20 survey was compared to YouGov polling on voter preferences carried out between 11 and 12 June 2020. Vote share was taken directly from polling, and the seat count this vote share would translate into was calculated using the online calculation tool at . By comparing mean estimated ideological position to both vote share and seat count, this study can resolve the effects of the first-past-the-post electoral system in the UK, whereby a party with a lower national vote than another may win more seats if its votes are concentrated in a smaller number of constituencies. The raw data was aggregated into a dataframe showing each respondent’s answer to the question, ‘In politics people sometimes talk of left and right. Where would you place the following parties on this scale?’, for each of the political parties listed above, as well as the respondent’s response when asked to give an estimation of their personal ideological position. Scores were given on a scale of 1-10, with 0 being the most left-wing and 10 the most right-wing position.[27]   Statistical test selection   The analysis of the resultant dataset was structured around three questions. Did voter perceptions of the ideological position of each party change significantly over time? Is there a correlation between a particular voter estimation score and electoral success? And finally: If such a relationship exists, could it be adequately modelled using a simple linear model? Having established a set of guiding research questions, the first step in the analysis was to check the distribution of the data using a Shapiro-Wilk test. This found that the data was not normally distributed (see Appendix I in PDF below), and so non-parametric tests were used throughout this study. A Kruskal-Wallis test was used to test whether voter estimations of party ideological positions varied significantly over time, followed by a post hoc Wilcox rank sum test to identify where these specific differences lay. The Benjamini and Hochberg method[28] was used as the adjustment. It controls the false discovery rate rather than the more stringent family-wise error rate, which makes it a more powerful method than alternatives.[29] Following the Kruskal-Wallis test a Kendall’s Tau correlation test was used to identify any cases of significant correlation between ideological position and electoral success amongst each party. Significance level was set at 0.05. Kendall’s Tau was selected as the test, rather than Spearman’s Rho, because it is less sensitive to error and the p-values it produces are more accurate at smaller sample sizes. A power analysis was carried out for each correlation test. Finally, a simple linear model with a fitted regression line was used to model the relationship between vote share or seat count, and voter estimation of a party’s ideological position. A post hoc goodness of fit test was run to check the residuals of this model, with the effect size and test power also calculated.[30]   Results   Results in the first set were from the Kruskal-Wallis test for significant difference between voter estimations of ideological position in 2017, 2019, and 2020. The results are summarised in fig 1. We can see that, in the majority of cases, the perceived ideological position of each party has shifted in between each round of polling. The exception to this is voter estimation of the Liberal Democrats’ position between 2017 and 2019. Respondents’ self-estimations also appear to have shifted significantly, but only between 2017 and 2020. These results allow us to make several statements about shifting ideological positions within different parties between 2017 and 2020. The Labour Party was perceived by the electorate as moving significantly to the left after the 2017 elections, at which it prevented the Conservative Party from winning a majority. However, it was perceived as having shifted further to the right than it was in 2017 after one year of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. The replacement of Teresa May with Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and Prime Minister appears to have resulted in a small but significant shift to the right, followed by a sudden shift to the left by around 2.6 points between November 2019 and June 2020. This dramatic shift is probably the result of increased public spending and of the expansion of government regulation and policy into more sectors of public life as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Other notable shifts include the leftward shift of the Liberal Democrats between 2017-20 (4.19-3.88), and the leftward shift of respondents over the same period (4.93-4.57). In summary, voters perceived a significant ideological shift in all four parties between 2017 and 2019, while shifting to the left by almost half a point themselves over the same period. These shifts are visualised in figs 3-6. Fig 1. Summary table showing p-value for changes between estimated ideological position of parties in 2017, 2019, and 2020. Fig 2. Summary table of estimated ideological scores for political parties in 2017, 2019, and 2020. Fig 3. Boxplot of perceived position on the ideological spectrum for the Labour Party, 2017–20. Fig 4. Boxplot of perceived position on the ideological spectrum for the Conservative Party, 2017–20. Fig 5. Boxplot of perceived position on the ideological spectrum for the Green Party, 2017–20. Fig 6. Boxplot of perceived position on the ideological spectrum for the Liberal Democrats, 2017–20. Having established that there were significant shifts in perceived ideological positions between 2017 and 2020, we can look to the results of our correlation tests to see if this change was significantly correlated to electoral outcomes.   The overall correlation tests between mean perceived ideological position and vote share or seat/MP count returned p-values of 0.2496 for Mean Score vs Vote Share and 0.1116 for seats won. This indicates that there is no significant correlation between the average perceived ideological position of a party and electoral success. However, a significant caveat to this result is that a power analysis of both sets of Kendall’s Tau tests showed them to be very underpowered (fig 7), with scores well below 0.8, probably being a result of the small sample size (n=12) for the overall tests. The chance of these results being a false negative is therefore relatively high. The p-values returned by Kendall’s Tau correlation tests for specific parties were all non-significant (see Appendix II in PDF below). While their sample sizes (n=3) prevented power tests from being run, it can be assumed that small sample sizes will also have influenced these results. Despite the lack of a significant relationship, plotting our variables by political party still produces an interesting graphic (fig 8). Fig 7. Summary statistics for the Kendall's Tau correlation test of the overall dataset. Fig 8. Scatter plot of mean estimated ideological position of political parties (L0–R10) vs percentage vote share in the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections, and projected vote share in June 2020. Even if we cannot confirm a significant relationship between perceived ideological position and electoral success, the coefficients from a linear model are informative. Fig 9 shows the coefficients and p-values for each linear relationship modelled.   Fig 9. Summary table of coefficients and p-values for linear models of mean estimated ideological score vs seats won and mean estimated ideological score vs vote share for individual political parties and for the overall dataset. While the p-values for our linear models show only four significant relationships, the coefficients indicate several interesting trends. For the overall linear model, the coefficients for both seats and vote share were positive, with every point shift towards the right gaining a party 3.8% of the national vote share, or 38 seats within the UK-wide electoral system. For the Labour Party this trend was more pronounced, with a single point shift towards the right modelled to net the party an extra 52 seats, or 13% of the vote. The Conservative Party, however, was not modelled to profit from any shifts to the right, with a one point shift costing them 4.7 seats and 0.7% of the vote. A heavy caveat to these figures, however, is that neither the Labour, Conservative, nor overall model had a p-value indicating a significant relationship. The coefficients for the Green Party Seats~MeanIDScore model suggest a flat regression line, but the Green Party would only ever win 1 seat, no matter what its mean estimated ideological position was. While this model produced significant p-values, common sense tells us it is implausible. The model for Green Party Vote Share~MeanIDScore appears to be better, indicating that Green Party vote share decreases by 5.9% for each perceived point further to the right. The linear model for Seats~MeanIDScore for the Liberal Democrats was the only model with a non-flat regression line to produce two significant p-values. It suggests the Liberal Democrats would gain 25.8 seats for every perceived point shift to the right, while the model for vote share (p-value:0.585) suggests such a shift would increase the party’s share of the vote by 10.29%.   While the trends outlined above all suggested plausible relationships, even if most were statistically insignificant, there were some coefficient and p-value outputs which indicated that a linear modelling method was not always appropriate for modelling the relationship between estimated ideological position and electoral success. For example, the intercept coefficient for a linear model of Seats~MeanIDScore for the Conservative Party indicates that, if the Conservative Party had a mean estimated ideological score of 0 (as left-wing as possible), they would win 380 seats. This is clearly incorrect. Furthermore, post hoc goodness of fit testing suggests that the relationships suggested by the linear models do not encompass enough explanatory factors. Figs 12 and 13 show the residuals for the overall model plotted against fitted values. The value of the residuals for each model can clearly be predicted based on the fitted values, indicating that the model is missing explanatory information. However, power analysis of the overall models returned values of 0.94 for the Seats~MeanIDScore model and 0.95 for the VoteShare~MeanIDScore model (fig 14), indicating the tests had sufficient explanatory power. This may be because, despite the small sample size and the absence of other explanatory variables, the effect size, calculated as Hedge’s G (see fig 14), was large for both models. Goodness of fit tests, power analyses, and effect size calculation present a contradictory picture of how well linear models can describe the relationship between electoral outcomes and voter estimation of ideological position. Nonetheless, the R-squared and F-statistics (fig 14) indicate more clearly that linear regression modelling with only the mean voter estimated ideological score and an electoral outcome does not sufficiently explain our data. The R-squared statistic for the Seats~MeanIDScore model was 0.286 and 0.192 for the VoteShare~MeanIDScore model. This indicates that the linear models explain only 29 and 19 percent of the variability in electoral outcomes. The F-test p-value was greater than 0.05 for both overall models (fig 14), indicating that neither linear regression modelled a significant relationship. The only party-specific model with a significant F-test p-values was the Liberal Democrat Seats~MeanIDScore model. Therefore, although examining the coefficients of linear models provides us with a number of hypothetical relationships, linear regression modelling suggests these relationships are significant in only a small number of cases. The clearest result from linear modelling is that, in order to improve the effectiveness of this method, more data is needed. It could be gathered either by increasing the longitude of the study, or the granularity of the data—potentially looking at results at a constituency level. Fig 10. Linear model of vote share vs mean estimated ideological score for overall dataset. Vote share attained by political parties in 2017, 2019, and 2020 plotted as individual points. Fig 11. Linear model of total MPs elected (seats won) vs mean estimated ideological score for overall dataset. Seats attained by political parties in 2017, 2019, and 2020 plotted as individual points. Fig 12. Plot of residuals vs fitted values for a linear model of seats won vs mean estimated ideological score derived from the overall dataset. Fig 13. Plot of residuals vs fitted values for a linear model of vote share vs mean estimated ideological score derived from the overall dataset. Fig 14. Summary table of post hoc test outputs for linear models. * Model was a perfect fit because of flat regression line. Discussion and conclusion   Following the above analysis of data from the British Election Study 2014-23, we can draw several conclusions about the relationship between a party’s perceived ideological position and its electoral success. The first key finding was that voter estimations of the ideological positioning of the four major political parties of the UK have shifted significantly between 2017 and 2020, and in most cases (Liberal Democrats excluded) shifted significantly between each set of surveys. This finding runs contrary to Adams[31] and Budge and Klingemann,[32] who suggest that significant shifts are rare. While the applicability of this trend outside the UK is not proven, it does confirm that the electorate perceives ideological repositioning amongst political parties as something that occurs relatively often in the UK.   The following findings, the most important, concern the relationship between these shifts and the electoral fortunes of the parties in question. Correlation testing on the level of both the electoral system and the individual parties found no significant correlation between a party’s perceived ideological position and electoral outcomes. This suggests that, while commentators such as Blair and Mandelson might link the decline of Labour’s electoral fortunes to a perceived leftward shift, there is no evidence in the data to support this. The same was true for the linear modelling approach, which found no statistically significant relationship between mean voter estimation of ideological position and electoral outcomes, except in one case (see fig 9). This study’s most statistically robust results were associated with modelling of the Liberal Democrat party (figs 9 and 14), which suggested that shifting a point to the right could increase the party’s seat count by 25.8 seats. This directly contradicts the centrist mantra that parties should strive to be perceived as closest to the median voter. The Liberal Democrats scored 4.43 on average between 2017 and 2020, by far the closest average score to the average self-estimation by respondents across the same period (4.82) (see fig 2). This trend may illustrate Dahlberg’s argument that parties which adopt more distinctive ideological positions are easier for voters to recognise ideologically, and hence easier to identify with.[33] Further evidence can be found in the modelled results for the Green Party, which lost 5.9% of its national vote share for every point it moved away from its clear left-wing position (2.82 across all three years) towards the centre, where its position would overlap with Labour and potentially the Liberal Democrats.   A methodological issue which prevented more conclusions being drawn from the correlation analysis and linear modelling was the lack of statistical power when testing and modelling at the level of individual parties. This was probably down to two factors: the simplicity of the models, which used only one independent variable, and the small sample size of the data. These factors led to some results being clearly inappropriate, such as the linear model suggesting a far-left Conservative Party would win 380 seats. Similarly, the linear model describing the relationship between the Green Party’s seat count and ideological position was clearly impacted by the Greens’ consistent score of 1 seat regardless of vote share, leading to a flat regression line and a meaningless model. However, as always with hypothesis testing, the failure of our models also points us towards useful conclusions. There are two notable failure-driven conclusions. 1) Perceived ideological position alone is not a sufficient predictor variable of electoral success. 2) Research in this area would benefit from using data on the relative electoral success of parties, either a greater number of administrative levels (council, mayoralty etc) or from a greater breadth of electoral contests (local council elections, mayoral races, devolved-administration elections).   The key finding of this study is as follows: there is no evidence to support the centrist mantra that the party perceived as being ideologically closest to the median voter will have the best electoral outcomes. There is no significant correlation or relationship between how the electorate perceives a party’s ideological position and how well it does at the polls. This confirms what Fieldhouse[34] suggested when investigating the issues facing the Labour party after the loss of the 2015 general election. Instead, it appears that other explanatory factors are of greater importance in determining which parties individuals vote for. These factors account for the 70-80% of variability in electoral outcomes that is not explained by the impact of perceived ideological positions within the linear models (fig 14). These other ‘explanatory factors’ may be valence issues, such as which party has the best leader or is the most charismatic, which are often primed as being significant by the media during election campaigns.[35] While focus by the media on leadership and personality issues does not detract from voters’ abilities to accurately estimate the ideological position of parties,[36] it could very well alter their priorities when it comes to the issues which bear heavily on electoral decision making. In summary, this study’s conclusions suggest that politicians who advocate recreating a party’s ideological position in line with the mythical ‘median voter’ are sacrificing the useful asset of ideological recognisability for little to no electoral gain. Colin Kaljee   Colin Kaljee is an MPhil student in Archaeological Research at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he completed his undergraduate degree. After the MPhil he will start on the Civil Service Fast Stream as a Generalist streamer. He has excavated at archaeological sites in Belize, Massachusetts, and the UK, and his work on the chronology of Scottish brochs will be published in a volume later this year. [1] Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy. (Harper and Row 1957). [2] Ed Fieldhouse, ‘Is Labour really too left-wing to win an election?’ ( British Election Study , 2015) < https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/blog-update-is-labour-really-too-left-wing-to-win-an-election/#.YKz_Q42Sk2x > accessed 28 May 2021. [3] Tony Blair, ‘If your heart is with Corbyn, get a transplant’ The Telegraph  (London, 22 March 2016); Rajeev Syal, ‘Ditch Corbyn’s “misguided ideology” Tony Blair urges Labour’ Guardian  (London, 18 December 2019). [4] ‘Why Progressives Think Joe Biden Is Not ‘Electable’ ( NPR,  17 July 2019). [5] James Adams, ‘A theory of spatial competition with biased voters: party policies viewed temporally and comparatively’ (2001) 31(1) British Journal of Political Science 121; Ian Budge and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, ‘Finally! Comparative over-time mapping of a party policy movement’ in Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, and Andrea Volkens (eds), Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1988 (Oxford University Press 2001). [6] Downs (n 1). [7] ibid. [8] Kathrin Barbara Busch, ‘Estimating parties’ left-right positions: Determinants of voters’ perceptions’ proximity to party ideology’ (2016) 41 Electoral Studies 159. [9] ibid. [10] Blair (n 3). [11] Peter Mandelson, ‘It’s simply a myth that Labour can win from the left’ The Independent  (London, 3 April 2021). [12] James Adams, Lawrence Ezrow, and Zeynep Somer-Topcu, ‘Is anybody listening? Evidence that voters do not respond to European parties’ policy statements during elections’ (2011) 55(2) American Journal of Political Science 370; James Adams, Lawrence Ezrow, and Zeynep Somer-Topcu, ‘Do voters respond to party manifestos or to a wider information environment? An analysis of mass-elite linkages on European integration’ (2014) 58(4) American Journal of Political Science 967. [13] Andrew Drummond, ‘Assimilation, contrast and voter projections of parties in the left-right space: does the electoral system matter?’ (2010) 17(6) Party Politics 711; Donald Granberg and Soren Holmberg, T he Political System Matters: Social Psychology and Voting Behaviour in Sweden and the United States  (Cambridge University Press 1988); Samuel Merrill,   Bernard Groffman, and James Adams, ‘Assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections of party locations: evidence from Norway, France and the USA’ (2001) 40(9) European Journal of Political Research 1999. [14] Busch (n 8). [15] ibid. [16] Stefan Dahlberg, ‘Does context matter - the impact of electoral systems, political parties and the individual characteristics on voters’ perceptions of party positions’ (2013) 32(4) Electoral Studies 670. [17] Zeynep Somer-Topcu, ‘Everything to Everyone: The Electoral Consequences of the Broad-Appeal Strategy in Europe’ (2014) 59(4) American Journal of Political Science 841. [18] Fieldhouse (n 2). [19] Blair (n 3). [20] ibid fig 4. [21] Fieldhouse (n 2); Somer-Topcu (n 17). [22] Fieldhouse (n 2) fig 2. [23] ibid. [24] ibid. [25] Busch (n 8); Stacy B Gordon and Gary M Segura, ‘Cross-national variation in the political sophistication of individuals: capability or choice?’ (1997) 59(1) Journal of Politics 126; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis  (Cambridge University Press   1976). [26] Busch (n 8). [27]  British Election Study 2014-2023: Waves 1-20 Internet Panel Codebook  s l (2020) 303. [28] Yoav Benjamini and Yosef Hochberg, ‘Controlling the False Discovery Rate: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Multiple Testing’ (1995) 57(1) Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 289. [29] RDocumentation, p.adjust: Adjust P-Values for multiple comparisons  (no date) < https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stats/versions/3.6.2/topics/p.adjust > accessed 29 May 2021. [30] fig 14. [31] Adams (n 5). [32] Budge and Klingemann (n 5). [33] Dahlberg (n 16). [34] Fieldhouse (n 2). [35] Busch (n 8); Elisabeth Gidengil, Andre Blais, Neil Nevitte, and Richard Nadeau, ‘Priming and campaign context: evidence from recent Canadian elections’ in David M Farrell and Rudiger Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums (Routledge 2002). [36] Busch (n 8); Danny Hayes, ‘Has television personalised voting behaviour?’ (2008) 31 Political Behaviour 231; Max Kaase, ‘Is there personalization in politics? Candidates and voting behaviour in Germany’ (1994) 15 International Political Science Review 211; Klaus Schoenbach, ‘The “Americanization” of German election campaigns: any impact on the voters?’ in David L Swanson and Paolo Mancini (eds), Politics, Media and Modern Democracy  (Praeger Publishers 1996).

Fig 1. The Danish Palaces Egg (House of Fabergé 1890). James Petts, Wikimedia Commons. . The Russian jeweller Peter Karl Fabergé achieved enduring fame under the last Czar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Fabergé is best known for his eggs, which are better described as objects of opulence and fantaisie  than as pieces of jewellery. In the form of small pendant eggs, these Easter gifts were adorned with gemstones, chromatic porcelain, and Imperial monograms.   Although Fabergé eggs represent only a fraction of the magnificent jewellery the house produced for the Romanovs, they are key symbols of the Russian Empire. Peter Fabergé was appointed jeweller to the Imperial Court in 1886. He was at the heart of Imperial production, and described as the ‘reinventor of Russian jewellery’.[1] In celebration of Easter, Nicholas II’s Czarina and mother would receive a Fabergé egg each year. 52 Imperial Fabergé eggs were produced between 1885-1917. They often took more than a year to complete, and are now exceptionally rare. These Imperial treasures were therefore incredible displays of affluence. However, the significance of Fabergé eggs extends beyond their glittering façade. They were to become symbols of the schism between the Russian people and the Romanov dynasty.   After almost 300 years of Romanov rule, Fabergé eggs came to symbolise the extravagance of the Russian Empire. They were polyvalent, simultaneously reminders of Christ’s death and of his revolutionary resurrection.[2] They would become emblematic of the attempts to uphold the artificial, luxurious façade of the Romanov Empire in Russia, which concealed the discontentment permeating through society. The contrast between actual events in Russia and these lavish gifts is one between violence and beauty, destitution and extravagance. By exploring Fabergé eggs as an insight into the watershed of the 1917 Revolution, I intend to highlight the stark disconnect between the last Romanov Imperial family and their country’s people.   Blinding glory and magnificence   The memory of a previously magnificent Russia would distort the reign of Nicholas II, who was both a deeply religious and absolutist. The Romanovs saw themselves as irreplaceable, each of them being a gift of revelation by God to Russia. Their privilege was perceived as a rightful consequence of their God-given status. Although the jewelled eggs were gifted through an annual tradition, commemorating Easter festivities, they had the political aim of illustrating Nicholas II’s transcendent power, unique to the Czar. Nicholas II’s coronation of 1897 was marked by the ‘greatest’ and most significant Fabergé egg, the ‘Coronation Fabergé Egg’.[3] As Malcolm Forbes put it, ‘one man’s decadence is another man’s creative art’. Forbes characterises the Romanovs’ lifestyle as both excessive and artistically enriching, illustrative of the growing moral and cultural severance of the Imperial court from its nation.[4]   Made of red gold, the egg was covered in yellow enamel and encrusted in a lattice pattern of black Romanov eagles. Drawing inspiration directly from Czarina Alexandrovna’s coronation attire, the colours of the Fabergé egg were intended to evoke power, succession, and the extreme luxury of celebration.[5] The egg opens to reveal an exact replica of the coronation chariot, constructed with remarkable delicacy. The main frame of the carriage is encrusted in diamonds and red enamel. The chariot’s detailing extends to the windows, made of rock crystals, and to the tyres, made of platinum. The chariot alone took 15 months to complete. The jeweller did not spare on materials—these objects were of astounding luxury. This projection of power and expressive visual opulence seems incongruous with the actual events of the coronation in 1897, which the Romanovs may have preferred to forget.   Ambitions to secure a smooth transition of monarchical power from Alexander III were crushed at Nicholas II’s coronation. Whilst an elaborate coronation ritual was orchestrated to reinforce the notions of a positive ‘consensus of a new monarch’, events transpired that became known as the ‘Khodynka Tragedy’. As authorities failed to maintain civic order, a rush to acquire celebratory gifts resulted in a catastrophic crowd crush following the coronation.[6] The repercussions of the event caused approximately 5,000 deaths.[7] Despite the number of lives lost, festivities continued as soon as the Czar and Czarina appeared, suggesting a dismissive element to the Czar’s early governance. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of deprivation—with citizens desperate to receive edible gifts—is symbolic of the dichotomy in Russia at this time. Despite fabricating opulence with the Fabergé traditions, the system of dynastic power was not representative of contemporary life. The precursors of revolution were already occurring in the newly anointed Czar’s Empire. While the Romanovs continued to fund their lavish lifestyles, the Czar was turning a blind eye to the mass poverty and deprivation in his country. Thus, the glorious tradition of the coronation ended up as a blood-stained reminder of the beginning of the end for Russian dynastic rule.   Although these events were not known to the jewellery house at the time of the gifts’ conception, the ‘Coronation Fabergé Egg’ had become a tainted symbol of Nicholas II’s ascension to the throne. The concepts of the Fabergé egg were leveraged from the Empire’s traditional past, characteristic of state ideology under the fatal rule of Nicholas II. Alla Bychkova further encapsulates the significance of historicity for Fabergé: the jewellery house was ‘breaking through all the barriers between the past and the future, between myth and reality’.[8] Although the Empire was founded in ruthlessness and ruin, both jeweller and Czar developed their image by invoking historical power.   The growing divide between Czar and subject was embedded in this dynastic flamboyance. Although they shimmered, the Fabergé eggs also blinded the dynasty to its true situation: a ticking time-bomb which culminated in revolution.   Reality and the dynasty   The contrast between dynastic majesty and harsh reality in Russia was concealed by the scalding grip of Nicholas II. Transfers of power were initially straightforward in the Romanov Empire. However, the throne changed nine times during the nineteenth century, much more often than in any other European state. Following the shooting of Alexander II, initial reforms towards a more democratic Russia were upturned.[9] The Duma had broken down into a number of warring factions. Nicholas II reverted to conservative reform, considering it to be more successful at maintaining social order. The normal ‘metamorphosis from absolute monarchy to democracy’ did not occur. This was one of the many consequences of Romanov rule.[10] Those who celebrated absolute monarchy and political stability were misguided, as revolutions do not simply erupt unexpectedly.   The tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty was marked by celebration across Russia. Culminating in the grand entry of Nicholas II to Moscow—upon his return across the Volga river from Kostroma—the Imperial family were greeted by immense crowds of people wanting to get a glimpse of the Romanov Czar and Czarina.[11] The events of 1897 seemed to have been safely overlooked and cloistered. This momentous event was independently celebrated with the commission of the ‘Tercentenary Egg’ by Fabergé. The jewelled Easter egg’s surface incorporates 18 separate miniatures, one for each Romanov Czar, from Michael I to Nicholas II. Within the Fabergé egg is the surprise of a rotating globe of the Earth. One hemisphere shows the original Empire inherited by Michael Romanov in 1613. The other hemisphere shows the Romanov Empire in 1913, which had grown to a vast 6.2 million square miles.[12] The messages of the egg are Imperial strength, power and, notably, continuity of expansion. The materials of enamel, gold, and precious stones are mimetic of sovereign affirmation, having been extracted from the lands of Romanov Russia. For the Czarina, that there were personal and national celebrations upon their return to Moscow signalled that the rumours of revolution were false. Remarkably, she told her lady-in-waiting, ‘We only need to show ourselves, and at once their hearts are ours’.[13] As usual, the Romanovs perceived their dynasty as the jewel of the Empire. They did not even attempt to understand the real situation of Russia.   The corollaries of the 1912 famine, and increased demonstrations for workers’ rights, were more indicative of the reality of the Empire on the ground. Whilst the Romanovs squandered the nation’s wealth on Fabergé eggs—the ‘Tercentenary Egg’ was valued at 175,000 rubles in 1927—their country lived in poverty.[14] The causes of the 1905 Revolution continued to affect the lives of radicals, trade unionists, and ordinary people. Disastrously, two million deaths followed the 1912 famine, and three million workers came out on strike between 1912 and 1914.[15] A morbid awareness of extreme poverty became widespread as the endemic deprivation created a sense that life was fleeting. Education was seen as the best means to increase the workforce’s productivity, but it had uncomfortable political consequences—literacy rates remained at only 24% at the start of Nicholas II’s reign.[16] This highlights that the regime was more concerned with self-preservation than with promoting education, especially since education could increase actions against their absolutism. Lenin’s vision of a communist Russia was becoming more appealing by comparison with the deeply flawed and archaic actual system. Revolution was in the air and it seemed only a matter of time before the business of 1905 was completed.   The duality of Romanov Russia is manifest in the Imperial jeweller’s creations. The dynasty was resistant to recognise the constant hunger and the dire conditions of their nation’s workers. Fabergé eggs were still produced in the First World War, and even in 1917 epitomised the extreme naivety of the Romanovs. The jewels of the Empire, which seem to speak of eternal life, would come to emblematise death.   Converted symbols of revolution   On the brink of revolution in 1917, these works were still being created. The volatility of the situation did not diminish the extravagant tradition. The production of the ‘Steel Military Egg’ by Fabergé would come to symbolise the destructive force of war and Romanov misfortune. Intended to have a finish of dull blackened steel, with minimal decoration, the Easter egg is supported on four small artillery shells. Hidden inside is a surprise miniature of Nicholas II and his son. The humility of father and son, and the bond between them, are captured in the miniature surprise. However, both were trapped in a politically volatile situation, inside and outside the image. The Czar was unable to uphold his sovereignty and Romanov rule. His son, Alexei Nikolayevich, would never succeed to the throne, because of his haemophilia. In the image, father and son are surrounded by soldiers, who are a poignant reminder of the imminent revolution. Kenneth Snowman described the egg as a ‘banal kitsch’, as its black finish has gradually degraded, symbolising the breakdown of the dynasty.[17]   Eventually, this breakdown was completed. The way forward for Russia, following the 1917 revolution, was the formation of Vladimir Lenin’s communist government. As Tatiana Muntian argues, the Fabergé eggs were a ‘tangible symbol of the destruction of the Russian monarchy’.[18] This interpretation evokes the Romanovs’ ignorance to the Russian people’s plight. The fragile nation and Imperial family became subverted upon revolution, just as the polishing away of the egg’s black finish revealed an artificially glistening metal shell. This destruction is epitomised by the abandonment of the jewels in the wake of the forced abdication and exile of the Romanov family.[19] Fabergé eggs were confiscated and nationalised. Such was the denouement of the jewelled dynastic symbol of Imperial Russia. The remaining Fabergé eggs are a nexus to the times of the Romanovs, a reminder of previous, opulent suppression. As substitutes, pluralist experience and commonality came to the forefront of political symbolism in the new socialist Russia.   The Romanovs were sentenced to death by communist revolutionaries. Thus, the Fabergé traditions of splendour vanished, never to return.   Loose ends of Fabergé   Today, Fabergé eggs are objects of Russian cultural heritage, exhibited around the world. Several Fabergé eggs disappeared during the pillaging of palaces, and 12 are still missing. However, Tatiana Muntian and Marianna Chistyakova have solved the intriguing mystery surrounding a 1917 Easter egg, the unfinished ‘Blue Tsarevich Constellation Egg’, discovered in 2003. This egg represents the final struggle of the Romanovs, who refused to entertain the possibility that their Imperial opulence may have sparked revolution. It represents ‘a scattered [and] incomplete’ façade of the Romanovs, cracking under revolutionary force. The fragments left over from the Easter egg’s construction by Fabergé likewise ‘epitomiz[e] the collapse of the illustrious firm’.[20]   Nevertheless, the eggs originally had a religious purpose: to reflect the resurrection of Christ. These decorative objects remain an insight for the contemporary viewer into the turbulence of the Romanov dynasty. Even though the dynasty collapsed, Fabergé eggs have been revived for the contemporary viewer on view in museums, in keeping with the Easter egg’s religious connotations of revival. Danielle Jump   Danielle Jump is an undergraduate student of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the decorative arts, jewellery, and the ways in which these art forms are reflective of contemporary culture. She hopes to pursue a career within the art industry, specialising in contemporary jewellery. [1] ‘Carl Faberge’ accessed 14 February 2021. [2] ibid. [3] ‘Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology’ ( Fabergé Research Site ) < https://fabergeresearch.com/eggs-faberge-imperial-egg-chronology/ > accessed 12 February 2021. [4] Toby Faber, Fabergé’s Eggs  (Random House 2008) 206. [5] ibid 46. [6] Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy , vol 1 ( Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I , Princeton   University Press 1995) 89-90. [7] Faber (n 4) 47. [8] Alla Bychkova, ‘Peter Carl Fabergé, Biography, History of the Fabergé House in Russia’ ( La belle epoque ) < https://www.liveinternet.ru/users/la_belle_epoque/post73433488/ > accessed 14 February 2021. [9] Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ‘The Idea of an Elected Monarch in the 18th century’ (2001) 18 Acta Slavica Iaponica 1. [10] Daniel Gordon, ‘“Public Opinion” and the Civilizing Process in France: The Example of Morellet’ (1989) 22 Eighteenth-Century Studies 302. [11] Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology’ (n 3). [12] Faber (n 4) 95. [13] ibid 96. [14] ‘Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology’ (n 3). [15] Fuyuki Kurasawa, ‘The Making of Humanitarian Visual Icons: On the 1921-1923 Russian Famine as Foundational Event’ in Jeffrey C Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, and Bernhard Giesen (eds) Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life  (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) 68;   Faber (n 4) 96. [16] Lenore A Grenoble, Language Policy in the Soviet Union  (Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003) 46. [17] A Kenneth Snowman, ‘Carl Fabergé Goldsmith to the Imperial Court of Russia’ (Debrett’s 1979, as cited in Faber (n 4) 112). [18] ‘Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology’ (n 3). [19] Faber (n 4) 129. [20] ‘Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology’ (n 3).

The assumption we live in a secularized world is false. The world today … is as furiously religious as it ever was. —Peter Berger[1] Fig 1. Illustration of the opening sequence of La dolce vita (Federico Fellini 1960) (the author 2021). In his seminal work The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics  (1999), Peter Berger challenges the assumption that modernisation means secularisation. Following Berger’s repudiation of the secularisation thesis, a ‘postsecular turn’ has, in recent years, appeared in many fields of scholarship, from political theory and sociology to religious studies and cultural history. Largely popularised by Jürgen Habermas, ‘post-secularism’ seeks to accommodate the place of religion in modern society, rather than occlude one in favour of the other. Although I cannot cover the theoretical nuances of this elusive concept in the space of this article, I wish to stage the question of the secular and the sacred using two Italian films from very different time periods: Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita  (‘The Sweet Life’, 1960) and Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza  (‘The Great Beauty’, 2013).   La dolce vita  chronicles the colourful spectacle of modern Rome through the world of Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a suave journalist-cum-gossip-columnist, whose aspirations as a writer are ultimately drowned out by the glamorous spectacle of Roman nightlife, Hollywood stars, declining aristocrats, and jaded intellectuals. Marcello descends into bitter, Dionysian revelry and self-serving hedonism.   Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), protagonist of La grande bellezza , is not unlike an older version of Mastroianni’s charismatic journalist. We meet Jep at his sixty-fifth birthday. Despite early success in his career, Jep has only written one book. Since then, he too has been seduced by ‘the sweet life’, living, like Marcello, between the dizzying late hours of Roman nightclubs and the lonely, hungover moments of clarity that accompany the light of dawn. Although both characters never quite part ways with their cool cynicism—we may think of La grande bellezza ’s final words, ‘in fondo, è solo un trucco’ (‘after all, it’s just a trick’)—both films end with a possible glimmer of hope. In La dolce vita , the angelic waitress Paola (Valeria Ciangottini) waves on a beach to Marcello, who has just emerged from a night of partying. Though he seemingly cannot understand her, she proceeds to look directly into the camera. Even if she cannot reach Marcello, she extends her mysterious, salvific gesture to us as spectators, and the film fades to black. La grande bellezza similarly ends with a saintly figure and a beach. In Rome Jep meets Sister Maria (Giusi Merli), a missionary nun and proclaimed ‘Santa’ (‘Saint’), unambiguously a parody of Mother Theresa. Jep then leaves Rome and returns to the island where he consummated his first relationship, with a girl named Elisa. In a direct evocation of Fellini’s final shot, Elisa now looks into the camera. It is here, in turn, that we hear Jep read in voiceover the opening of his new novel. As his words spill beyond the film frame through his disembodied voice, they suggest the genesis of a wholly new medium, yet to be written—yet to be told.   Produced during a period of unprecedented Italian economic growth known as the ‘Economic Miracle’ (1958–63), La dolce vita  juxtaposes the secular with the sacred from its outset. In the opening sequence (fig 1), a helicopter carries a statue of Jesus above the peripheral ruins of a Roman aqueduct. It then turns towards the city centre. As this buzzing emblem of modern technology heralds the arrival of the sculpture, the effigy casts its shadow over awestruck construction workers and glamorous sunbathers. When the flying statue finally arrives at the Vatican, we witness, quite literally, a migration of the religious icon into the modern city. Decades later—and arguably now at a time that no longer grapples with the question of the modern but dwells instead in the postmodern—Paolo Sorrentino alludes to this moment in his television series The Young Pope  (2016): in one scene, the camera hovers over the dome of St Peter’s basilica, the humming of a helicopter audible offscreen.   Throughout his works, Sorrentino sets himself in dialogue with Fellini. Sorrentino’s intertextual playfulness is particularly apparent with regards to Fellini’s thematic and formal penchant for repositioning the sacred into the secular. Rather than opposing the religious and mundane worlds as irreconcilable,[2] both directors use stylised tableaux, cityscapes, and panoramas to show how religious icons and rites move into the everyday, urban landscape—how they move, as it were, from the otherworldly sublime into the earthly quotidian. This use of setting is especially evident in Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza  and Fellini’s La dolce vita . The backdrops of both   films, of which Rome is the central one, become the locus for the shift between sacred and secular. Using the city as a metonym for modernity, both Fellini and Sorrentino foreground the figure of the flâneur through an urban, secularised landscape, mapping the shift of religion in modernity through distinct, juxtaposed topologies. By emphasising the geographies of the modern cityscape—and its antithesis in the natural seascape—both Fellini and Sorrentino trace the relocation, rather than the disappearance, of the sacred into the secular.   The narratives of La dolce vita  and La grande bellezza  feature protagonists who correspond to the Benjaminian/Baudelarian model of the ‘flâneur’, the quintessentially secularised aesthetic figure of the modern urban experience. As artist figures who have become creatively impotent over time, Marcello and Jep wander through Rome in a series of loosely connected vignettes. Even the episodic structure reflects a kind of ‘flâneurship’: it is propelled by the meandering movement between accumulative long takes and by non-causal narratives. Aligning themselves with the camera, Jep and Marcello tend to adopt a detached, passive viewership of the city. Significantly, the flâneur is a product of modernity, pursuing ‘the modern only through a fundamental passivity’.[3]   In Walter Benjamin’s terms, the Baudelairean flâneur receives ‘profane illumination’ and ‘materialistic, anthropological inspiration’ through his ‘overcoming of religious illumination’.[4] I propose that the flâneur is a modern-day foil to the pilgrim. Unlike the flâneur, the pilgrim performs an ultimate act of ‘sacrifice’ through movement, as Giorgio Agamben points out, reestablishing ‘the right relationships between the divine and the human by moving…into the sacred sphere’.[5] Though Agamben contrasts this process with the tourist’s ‘destruction of all possible use’, the flâneur—even more so than the tourist, another recurring motif in Sorrentino’s works—aestheticises the world around him in a way that is purely self-serving.   Sequences from both La dolce vita  and La grande bellezza  echo this idea. In La grande bellezza , Jep peruses some of Rome’s most beautiful buildings with Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), a stripper who in fact offers a much more profound relationship than any of Jep’s friendships with glamorous literati. After attending a grotesque party at which a child prodigy is forced to perform action painting, Jep and Ramona leave with a friend who is entrusted with ‘le chiavi dei più bei palazzi di Roma’ (‘the keys of the most beautiful palaces in Rome’). The three experience a kind of museum by night, and as spectators we are led through a montage of oil paintings, sculptures, and spectacular architectural works. While the wide-eyed Ramona faces the galleries with childlike awe, Jep is more apathetic. He turns away from the paintings with a cynical smile, retreating into the dark shadows of the candlelit corridor. In La dolce vita , Marcello visits a historic castle on an evening revel with the mysterious heiress Maddalena, with whom he has one of several profound yet melancholically doomed relationships. The two hold up a candle to an array of portraits. Marcello comments to a tipsy Maddalena, ‘Che bello, hanno tutti gli stessi occhi, hai visto?’ (‘How marvelous, they all have the same eyes, did you notice?’). Maddalena, though, is more interested in playing with her veil than in examining the paintings.   It is important to note the axial connotations of the flâneur as one who moves horizontally. This meandering direction contrasts with the verticality associated with religion. As S Brent Plate observes, ‘vertical sacred spaces aspire with their spires’, whereas ‘horizontal landscapes are bodies, circuitries that circulate and foster social communication’.[6] Sorrentino juxtaposes Jep’s horizontal movement across the social circles of Rome with the vertical acts of penance performed by Sister Maria. Despite the caricatural vein that inevitably accompanies this postmodern use of the cliché saint figure, Sister Maria’s presence in the final sequence of the film is striking. Sorrentino juxtaposes her penance with the opening of Jep’s novel, spoken in voiceover. On her knees, the ‘Santa’ toils upwards, ascending the stairs towards the altar. Whereas Jep frequently has the advantage of looking down, surveying the convent courtyards from his terrace, the ‘Santa’ looks up towards the final step in a physically gruelling act of humility. Furthermore, this vertical-horizontal axis undergoes a redemptory reversal in the flashback to Jep’s ‘prima volta’ (‘first time’). He often nostalgically recalls the event by looking up at the ceiling of his apartment in Rome. In a flashback, Jep also looks up at Elisa, who stands a few steps above him, filmed from a slightly low angle.   La dolce vita  frames the reversal of religious, pilgrim-like ascension even more clearly. The religious journey now transforms into secularised sightseeing. One scene was deemed particularly blasphemous by a reader of L’Osservatore Romano  ( The Roman   Observer ),[7] the Vatican’s daily newspaper. In the scene, the film star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) ascends the stairs of the Vatican. Dressed in a couture version of priestly vestments, her costume further emphasises the culture industry’s desecration of religion and pilgrimage. Sylvia, as the figurehead of the ‘cult of the sex goddess’[8] or ‘cult of the star’, replaces the saint as an object of reverence. She becomes yet another character that, like the flâneur, has transformed the acts of walking, aestheticising, and surveilling into a new modern myth. The enraptured Marcello comments, ‘Tu sei tutto Sylvia! … Tu sei la prima donna del primo giorno della creazione’ (‘You are everything, Sylvia! … You are the first woman of the first day of the creation of the world’). The flâneur is thereby attached to the secular ‘cult of beauty’.[9] La dolce vita ’s Steiner (Alain Cuny) embodies this kind of detached intellectualism. He touts the rhetoric of an aesthetic avant-gardist but, as with Sorrentino’s performance artist Talia Concept (Anita Kravos), this rhetoric masks emptiness. These spatially grounded figures, led by the flâneur, use the city to stage the shift between the religious cult and the modern ritual of secularised aestheticisation, rather than wholly nullifying the former.   Georg Simmel linked the city to modern spiritual anxiety in the early twentieth century, and many have followed suit. We can see Rome as a metonym of modernisation. Zach Zimmermann notes that, in La dolce vita , ‘Fellini presents an image of [a] new Rome in which religion is absent and material and sexual impulses rule’.[10] Yet this assertion overlooks the pervasiveness of religious symbols, architecture, and rites. These still dominate Roman life, albeit in a secular mode. As Michel de Certeau quips, ‘unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts’.[11] Rather than transforming into a wholly new, urbanised metropolis, Rome preserves its iconographic identity as capital of both Hellenism and Christianity. Jep’s apartment, for example, is surrounded by the courtyards of a convent, but it also has a spectacular view of the Colosseum. Though set in the twenty-first century, Sorrentino’s production shuns modern transport and urban movement in favour of the old model of the ambulatory flâneur. Fellini, on the other hand, juxtaposes Rome’s new and old. Modern transport, in fact, pervades the film. Characters ride cars frequently, Sylvia flies in to the airport, and there is of course the helicopter opening sequence. Yet while Fellini’s helicopter symbolises modernisation, it moves towards a historic destination: the Vatican. Thus, the opening sequence foregrounds the Vatican within the modern-day cityscape. Despite the dwindling religious participation brought by Italy’s 1958–63 ‘Economic Miracle’, the dome of St Peter’s dominates the Roman skyline in La dolce vita .[12] Even today, Rome, as capital of the Catholic Church, cannot completely renounce its religious affiliations.   These religious symbols and institutions coexist with consumer-driven capitalism. This coexistence is the mode of survival for a postmodern Rome that persists today, in which, as Pierpaolo Antonello comments, ‘l’unico ancoraggio simbolico viene dato da una estetica e dalle sopravvivenze del sacro nel contesto di un processo continuo di “profanazioni”’ (‘a symbolic undercurrent only appears through an aesthetic and perpetual process of “profanations” that allow the sacred to survive’).[13] In one episode in La dolce vita , the debauched aristocrats wander through the ruins of a decaying palazzo which, as the smarmy host explains, was originally built for two popes. ‘Due papi!’ (‘Two popes!’) repeats his vapid German girlfriend, seemingly amused by the sacral history of the now-derelict building. Though the architecture survives, it is now a site for pagan séances and nighttime sexual escapades. Modern relics are displaced, even defamiliarised, into mundane settings. In La grande bellezza,  ageing aristocratic ‘principesse’ (‘princesses’) are patrons of   some of Rome’s most beautiful buildings. However, surrounded by Rome’s melancholy historicity, the ‘principesse’ spend their evenings playing cards and drinking whisky. In La dolce vita , miracle trees stand in a halo of cameras. In Sorrentino’s The Young Pope , popes awaken under crucifixes to slip their feet into Havaiana flip-flops. The mise-en-scène of each tableau ironically juxtaposes religious symbols with secular, mundane objects of capitalist modernity.   While the city becomes the main site of modern secularisation, the sea represents its antithesis, a possible site of redemption and true spiritual experience. Andrew McKenna points out that in both La strada  (1954) and La dolce vita , Fellini makes the beach a ‘threshold   space’. It offers symbolic redemption to Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) in La strada  and to Marcello in La dolce vita .[14] Similarly, Jep’s nostalgic flashbacks to his ‘prima volta’ with Elisa take place on the beach of a depopulated island. Jep returns to this site by way of an oneiric ocean edited onto his apartment ceiling, a surrealist image that blurs time—as both a flashback and a diegetically present-tense daydream—and place—Jep’s bourgeois interior merges with the faraway island. The simple horizons of these seascapes mark a formal contrast to the decadent baroque textures featured in both films. When Marcello first meets the angelic Paola at a seaside trattoria, he asks her to turn her head in profile. As a few rays of sunlight form a flat canvas-like background, she resembles a Cimabue cherub or Umbrian angel, and Marcello comments on this resemblance. Paola, as image, presents a stark contrast to the busy textures and depth of field Fellini uses for the decaying Roman palazzi. It is no surprise, then, that her reappearance at the end of the film occurs at the beach. Sorrentino makes an intertextual reference to this scene with Elisa. In a Caspar David Friedrich-like panorama, the sea aligns itself with biblical references and with the figure of the spiritual wanderer, but not with the flâneur. Rather than inviting secular aestheticisation, the seascape solicits self-reflection. The empty horizon has religious connotations and presents both Jep and Marcello with a chance for redemption and ascetic natural contemplation. In Marcello’s case, though, this is seemingly lost. The waterscape is thus a visual, spatial, and (given its premodern simplicity) temporal foil to the cityscape. Read symbolically, the sea is an embodied setting for the Catholic ‘grace’ that Pier Paolo Pasolini criticised in Fellini’s film.[15]   As a result, Fellini and Sorrentino thematise the migratory, modernised identity of religious symbolism through their formal language. They use tableaux to reflect the totalising effect of their modern worlds. Rather than being eliminated, the mystic ritual migrates into empty forms of ‘pure art’ and ‘secular beauty’.[16] Mythical symbols survive in a modern setting by stripping themselves of their spiritual value, becoming objects that offer themselves to the secular aesthete and flâneur. For this reason, Jep Gambardella can proudly declare himself ‘il re dei mondani’ (‘the king of high society’, or ‘the worldly king’). Yet despite the superficial appearance of his aesthetically opulent life, Jep has not found ‘the great beauty’ of the film’s title. Thus, although Fellini and Sorrentino primarily adopt a formal method of juxtaposed coexistence, they use a thematically contrastive approach, mapping spiritual debasement—and rare pockets of hope—through a progression of symbolically imbued loci. Authentic spiritual enlightenment, on the other hand, peeks through as a simple, silent, and uninhabited landscape. The words of a priest in La dolce vita  capture this irresolvable dichotomy, exposing the mundane as cluttered, modernised chaos that occludes possibilities of individual contemplation. ‘I miracoli nascono nel raccoglimento, nel silenzio … non in questa confusione’ (‘Miracles are born in contemplation, in silence … not in this chaos’). Marie-Louise James   Marie-Louise James studied German and Italian as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge (2016), and is an MPhil student at the Cambridge Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. In autumn 2021, she will be begin a PhD with the German Department at Princeton University. She works between film, visual media, and literature and has both written and illustrated articles for Varsity , Polyglossia , and Notes Magazine . [1] Peter Berger, ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’ in Peter Berger (ed), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics  (Eermans Publishing 1999) 2. [2] ‘Mundane’ derives from the Latin mundanus (worldly/earthly). [3] Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement  (Edinburgh University Press 2012) 17. [4] Sigrid Weigel, Body and Image Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin  (Routledge 1996) 17. [5] Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation’ (2007) 10 Log 23, 31. [6] S Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World  (Columbia University Press 2009) 68. [7] Tomaso Subini, ‘La lagrimetta negata nel finale di La dolce vita ’ in Raffaele De Berti (ed), Federico Fellini. Analisi di Film: possibile letture  (McGraw-Hill 2006) 65. [8] Andrew McKenna, ‘Fellini’s Crowds and the Remains or Religion’ (2006) 12/13 Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 159, 167. [9] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism  (Oxford University Press 1992) 669. [10] Zach Zimmermann, ‘Film as History: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita  as a Historical Artifact’ (2010) 6(2) Elements 42, 49. [11] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Steven Rendall tr, University of California Press 1984) 91. [12] Peter Bondanella, The Films of Federico Fellini (Cambridge University Press 2002) 66. [13] Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Rivalità intermediali e destino della letteratura in La grande bellezza di Paolo Sorrentino’ in Denis Brotto and Attilio Motta (eds), Interferenze: scrittori/registi e registi/scrittori nella cultura italiana  (Padova University Press 2019) 163. [14] McKenna (n 8) 171. [15] Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Catholic Irrationalism of Fellini’ (Frank Demers and Pina Demers trs, 1984) 9(1) Film Criticism 63, 70. [16] Benjamin (n 9) 669.