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Since the detection of massive Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election, there has been a morass of studies analysing the manipulation, fakes, and distortions, particularly on the Internet, which seem to assault the very notion of truth.   In the US, we have been horrified and perplexed by the huge numbers of people who believed, without much evidence, that there had been massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, of whom hundreds attacked the building housing Congress in Washington.   Still others are convinced by conspiracy theories about the nation’s elite being satanic paedophiles and cannibals swigging babies’ blood.   The world’s ability to achieve ‘herd immunity’ against the coronavirus pandemic is threatened, because millions of people across the planet believe vaccinations are a cunning cover to, among other nefarious goals, inject microchips into humans, or cause heterosexuals to become gay.   Numerous articles in publications ranging from the popular to the academic have discussed information manipulation, fake news, hybrid war—both classic black techniques used throughout history, and modern variants adapted for the new technologies which yielded ‘social media’.   That a significant proportion of the new range of technologies and media has been exploited to transmit downright lies—in the way every previous form of communication has also been subject to abuse—should not have been a surprise.   Most of us—some sooner than others—became aware of the previously secret techniques, such as sophisticated algorithms, working like Avatar predators, luring or prodding us into informational zones filled with traps.

I. The case of George Gavriel   A recent incident in Cyprus re-ignited the debate about the limits of artistic freedom. George Gavriel, a director and teacher of art of a secondary education public school, who is also an artist in his leisure time, posted on social media in September 2020 pictures of some of his latest paintings.[1] Some of them have a clear anti-Church theme, with one picture in particular showing a naked Jesus riding a motorcycle and wearing a scarf with the symbols of a well-known Cypriot soccer team, and yet another picturing a dog urinating on the current Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. Another picture takes a political stance, with yet another dog defecating on a statue of former General Georgios Grivas, who was the military leader of guerilla organisation EOKA during Cyprus’s liberation struggle against the British during 1955-59,[2] but who later became a controversial figure when leading a paramilitary organisation, ironically named EOKA II, in the years prior to the military coup against former President of the Republic of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.[3] Some of the paintings have also been described as sexist and misogynist due to the manner in which the female body was depicted.[4]   The artist defended his work, which he described as ‘anti-systemic art’, an expression reflecting his artistic creativity.[5] However, following a public uproar, and complaints by organized groups, who called for Gavriel’s dismissal, including a letter by the Archbishop himself to the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth, effectively asking for Gavriel’s dismissal,[6] the Ministry (ie Gavriel’s employer) launched a probe to examine whether the teacher-artist was liable for disciplinary offences. The Ministry noted that the freedom of artistic creation could not justify the insult of public feeling and the messages of the paintings that cultivate a sense of contempt or possibly a climate of intolerance within the student community, when such expression derives from an official in the field of public education.[7]   Many defended Gavriel’s art, or at least his right to be provocative, and accused the Ministry of arbitrarily violating freedom of artistic expression. The debate included announcements by political parties and statements by individual politicians, as well as heated discussion and passionate statements by organized groups or the public at large, either supporting or criticizing the disciplinary action against Gavriel.[8] Many accusers of Gavriel demanded his immediate dismissal or even imprisonment, with some even calling him an antichrist or a left-wing conspirator; on the other hand, many of Gavriel’s defenders labeled anyone who disagreed with Gavriel’s work as racist or fascist.[9] Even the Senate of the leading public university in Cyprus, in a rare public announcement requesting the termination of the disciplinary action against Gavriel, could not avoid the extreme comparison between the case of Gavriel and the cases of Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo.[10] Such comparisons, however, are entirely disproportionate.[11] A fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie and the publishers of the book, convicting them to death under Islamic law. Calling on all zealous Muslims to execute the death sentence, it forced Rushdie to live in hiding and led to the murder of the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses , to the wound of the Norwegian publisher of the books, and   to 22 deaths in violent protests in India, Pakistan, and Egypt.[12] The violent shooting by two French Muslim brothers in the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo  resulted in 12 murders and 11 injured persons.[13] So far there has only been a probe for potential disciplinary offences against Gavriel, with the artist freely holding successful unrestricted exhibitions of his paintings, and appearing in all mainstream media discussing his work.[14]

The below is adapted from Fakir Aijazuddin's 2021 book Imperial Curiosity: Early Views of Pakistan, 1845-1906 . Introduction   The nineteenth century was a period of imperialist expansion. Powerful countries in Europe like Great Britain, Germany, and Russia recognized the potential of countries in the near and far East—potential for travel, for tourism, for the advancement of scientific knowledge, for trade, and perhaps most important of all, resources with which to fuel their own domestic economies.   The British came to India as equals and stayed as victors. By the 1840s, after having dominated most of the Indian peninsula, they turned westwards, annexing first Sindh in 1843, then extending into the Punjab following the First Anglo-Sikh war of 1845-46, and then with finality after Punjab’s annexation in 1849. As one historian of the British Raj has put it, the subcontinent of India thereafter became ‘a manageable entity, brought to order by British method; on the ground, first to last, it was a pungent virile and gigantic muddle, kept in hand by British bluff’.[1]   When the winter of 1845 began, the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh had been dead for less than ten years. The kingdom he had put together with stratagem and guile was left in the inept hands of his successors, each less memorable than the last. The army that he had so assiduously trained with the help of French mercenaries like General Jean Francois Allard and Charles Court, the artillery he had manufactured and assembled at his fort at Govindgarh, the cavalry that rode on horses many of whom he knew by name had all been pitted against the forces of the East India Company in a reckless challenge of misplaced bravado. The irascible Sikh darbar dared to do what the canny maharaja had avoided. It crossed the Sutlej river which served as the border between the Sikh empire and the incipient British one. Had the Sikh darbar read Roman history, they would have understood what the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ meant. They crossed their own Rubicon, except that it resulted not in victory but a humiliating defeat. The Sikh army had to return to its side of the river. With more impulsiveness than reason, the Sikh Khalsa fought the troops of the East India Company. Again, they lost. The Sikh kingdom of the Punjab forfeited both sovereignty and independence.   Before this debacle, in the early part of the nineteenth century, numerous British and European visitors had come to the Punjab to marvel at the court of the fabled Maharaja Ranjit Singh. After the annexation of his kingdom in 1849, the subjects of their curiosity became Queen Victoria’s loyal subjects.   Nothing typifies this more, for example, than an image that appeared in the Illustrated London News  of the preparations for the visit of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1876. It shows local workmen lifting a crown to form the apex of their decorations. The caption ends with a condescending but telling pun: ‘Supporting the Crown’. His and other such tours by British royalty were to become benign affirmations of an irreversible conquest—the clamp of a crested yoke that would not be lifted until 1947.

The recent upsurge of interest in the history of the British Empire has produced a wealth of literature that often presents empire and imperialism in a hegemonic light, couched in a dichotomy that sets the ‘oppressor’ against the ‘oppressed’, the ‘coloniser’ against the ‘colonised’, and so on. Underpinning fashionable postcolonial discourse, this binary terminology can obscure important nuances of political thought in its proper historical context, such as how prominent figures who were governing the Empire yet at the same time opposed imperialism could articulate their ideas. In this article I consider the case of John Morley, a lifelong anti-imperialist who had pursued a career in journalism before entering politics in 1883 as a radical MP. His appointment as Secretary of State for India in the new Liberal government of December 1905 presents an apparent paradox, for as one of Irish Home Rule’s staunchest advocates he had built a reputation as a committed opponent of unjust British rule. Drawing on archival manuscripts and published writings, I argue that Morley’s five-year tenure at the India Office towards the end of his active life was not, as has often been seen, an aberrant postscript to an otherwise principled career in politics but was consistent with a coherent political philosophy he had developed over his lifetime.[1]   Morley was first and foremost an intellectual. He wrote extensively: in addition to his editorship of the Fortnightly Review  and the Pall Mall Gazette , he compiled biographies of philosophers and politicians in an oeuvre that encompassed Cromwell, the major figures of the French Revolution, Burke, Cobden, and finally Gladstone. In doing so, he was a rare example of someone who had expounded a developed critique of imperialism who then had the opportunity to put it into practice in holding political office. It is a truism that he compromised his position as an anti-imperialist in its strictest sense by agreeing to participate in imperial government. Yet this is not the criterion against which he should be measured. A comparison with John Stuart Mill is instructive. Like Morley, albeit to a far greater extent, Mill had set out his theory before entering politics. Renowned as an exceptionally principled politician, he was nevertheless able and willing to compromise, justifying doing so on the grounds of utility and progress.[2] So too with Morley, often labelled as a ‘disciple’ of Mill, who inherited these ideas from him and recognised similarly that short-term expediency and long-term progress were not incompatible priorities.[3]   Furthermore, it is important to draw a distinction between imperialism and empire. Opposing the former entailed a criticism of ‘mis-rule’: a phenomenon that primarily manifested itself in despotism, militarism, and unchecked bureaucracy. Opposing the latter, however, necessitated a deeply held belief in its inherent illegitimacy. Few, save a small band of radicals, were prepared to go this far in this period. I therefore suggest that Morley was not anti- empire , for he accepted its continued existence as a fact—one that   was ultimately compatible with his liberal ideals. He was, however, anti-imperialist in the sense that that connoted at the time—directly opposing the imperialist conduct of his Conservative predecessors in government.   The lack of a detailed study within the last 50 years of this important figure in Liberal politics has led to a certain amount of scholarly oversight. Passing mentions of Morley often dismiss him as an anachronistic intellectual cul-de-sac of Gladstonianism or, in one bizarre assessment, as a ‘New Liberal’.[4] I seek to remedy this by giving prominence to Morley’s biographies and historical studies, which reveal much about the workings of his mind and the themes he prioritised. When Morley concluded of Gladstone ‘always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be’, he could just as easily have been referring to himself, such was the apparent centrality of a literary-historical mindset to his way of thinking.[5] As he agonised over the decision to exchange his literary career for politics, so too, he mused, must it ‘sometimes have occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice when he locked away the fragments of his history, and plunged into the torment of party and Parliament’.[6] The transition from a man of letters to a man of action was a rare one. Morley therefore presents a unique opportunity among anti-imperialist politicians because of the volume of his literary output before his time as India Secretary, much of which was written before he was even contemplating a career in politics. It gives us crucial insight into Morley’s underlying philosophy and principles, shows his consistency of thought, and lays bare the ambiguities of liberalism’s compatibility with empire.

On 9 April 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a crowd assembled in Baghdad’s Firdos square and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein. The event was publicized widely, celebrated by many as an authentic expression of popular revolt against tyranny. Soon, however, it became embroiled in controversy as evidence emerged that the event (ultimately accomplished by American soldiers and equipment) was stage-managed by the American military. In all the ensuing debate, to my knowledge, no voices were raised to complain of the destruction of cultural heritage, nor of the erasure of history. Fig 1. Acción de Duelo (Doris Salcedo 2007, candles, approx. 267 x 350ft). Ephemeral public project, Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá 2007. Credit: Juan Fernando Castro. In 2017, following a vote of the city council, a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee was removed from Lee Park in Dallas, Texas (the park’s name was also changed). The removal was preceded—and followed—by vigorous debate, part of a broader dispute in the United States over monuments to the Confederacy, as well as those who owned or profited from slavery, or those who, following Emancipation, perpetrated or profited from racial violence. This ongoing conflict parallels similar arguments taking place currently in Britain and other European countries.   The debate over Confederate monuments pits those who frame their complaints over what they claim is the destruction of heritage and the erasure of history against those who note the historical inauthenticity of the monuments, which were for the most part created not as memorials immediately after the Civil War, but a generation or more later, following the defeat of Reconstruction. They served as ideological and emotional buttresses to the institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement, and the ruthless exploitation then being enforced against Black Americans (the Lee monument dates from 1936). In any case, opponents of the monuments note that these objects portray individuals who fought to maintain an institution that can only be considered one of history’s great crimes—they do not deserve a place of public veneration.   As the debate proceeded in Dallas, one voice spoke in defence of the Lee monument, but from a somewhat different perspective. The art critic for the Dallas Morning News , also an eminent scholar of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, argued not in support of Confederate monuments in general, but rather in defence of the Lee monument in particular and of the artist who created it. That artist, Alexander Phimister Proctor, the critic noted, was a sculptor of public monuments of some significance, and his autobiography and other works demonstrate that he was not a racist. His reputation and his intentions for the Lee monument, the critic argued, merited serious consideration.

SCENE. Manhattan. Street with jazz club and apartment building on a muggy late summer evening.   The tired leaves on the trees are damp with rain. Yellow cabs whoosh by, nearly drowned out by a thrum of cicadas. A door swings open from the jazz club, releasing a bubble of music into the street and ALAN, CLAUDE, and JOHNNY, three young men engaged in animated conversation.   ALAN : [ To CLAUDE. ] Brilliant. Thanks for bringing us. We couldn’t have heard this in London.   CLAUDE : You’re welcome. Should we walk over to my place for a drink? It’s only a block away. [ To JOHNNY. ] OK, Johnny?   JOHNNY : Sure!   They saunter down the street and enter CLAUDE’s apartment building. It is a mess, with papers, books, magazines, empty beer bottles, sheet music, and electronic gear strewn everywhere. CLAUDE sweeps the papers off two chairs and onto the floor and gestures to ALAN and JOHNNY to sit.   CLAUDE : Don’t mind the mess. I’ll get to it one of these days.   JOHNNY : So, what did you mean when you said in the jazz club that ‘It’s all the same thing’? What’s all the same thing?   CLAUDE : Well, let’s see. Did you like the jazz performance?   [ JOHNNY nods. ] OK, so what you heard was a series of notes, right?   JOHNNY : Yes.   CLAUDE : So if I had a way to write every note down, then the concert could be replayed just as you heard it?   JOHNNY : Yes, of course. That’s like cutting an LP record.

There are certain global issues that pay no attention to national borders or natural barriers: climate change; the COVID-19 pandemic; nuclear weapons proliferation; and a migration and refugee crisis. These challenges can only be met by collective action.   This demand binds every country to a multilateral system, but the current global framework is showing its age 76 years after the creation of the United Nations. To be sure, the network should keep out no one: even authoritarian nations belong at the table of universal membership bodies. Their role in potential solutions to world threats often intermingles with their tragic record as the source of many of the same challenges.   But democracies need to be at the global decision-making table in force if the world is to confront the existential threats facing humanity. These require coordinated solutions reflecting the inclusion and diversity that self-correcting representative political systems provide.   Nations unite and exert influence under regional banners like the African Union, cultural/linguistic alliances like the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, or religion-based groupings like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. So, too, should there be a coalition of countries acting as a bloc founded upon adherence to explicitly stated human rights and democratic values.   Fortunately, there is momentum behind a new multilateral structure for the world’s democracies. Whether it’s growing a D-10, or Democracy-10, from the current G-7 as suggested by Boris Johnson[1] or hosting a Summit for Democracy as pledged by President Joe Biden,[2] or people movements like ‘NOW!’ building a league of democracies,[3] these are good steps in support of a values-based energizing of the global system.   21 years ago, driven by events of the twenty-first century, a group of thinkers turned its attention to giving a new global framework to the idea of democracy, which was rapidly becoming the dominant form of governance. At the founding of the United Nations in 1945, there were only 30 countries, almost all Western, that identified as democracies. With the swell of the ‘Third Wave of Democratisation’ described by Samuel Huntington,[4] by 2000, some 120 nations were considered democracies with representative and elected governments. And in notable instances, as in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, the contribution of outside support to indigenous democratic institutions, in that case by West German foundations linked to the country’s political parties,[5] showed the importance of international democratic solidarity.   In his two terms of office (1993–2001), US President Bill Clinton made good on his 1992 campaign promise of promoting democracy around the world. In response to the increasing voices of ‘America first’ following the end of the Cold War, Clinton stated that official support for democracy was both in the national interest of the US and reflected America’s values. Since 1993, significant government funding increases for democracy-supporting NGOs joined structural changes in US foreign policy. At the State Department, the little-known Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was rebranded as Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour. The US Agency for International Development’s stable of experts in global health delivery and clean irrigation systems developed new skillsets in elections and civil society support. And America’s diplomatic missions were required to include information on democracy in their country reports back to Washington.

In the digital age, the sharing of images is prevalent across a variety of online platforms. Instagram, one of the largest of these, can provide an up-and-coming artist with an audience of over one billion users. Some already predict the platform’s decline. Kenny Schachter recently commented that, given Instagram’s ever-changing format, ‘it is only a matter of time before the powers that be get too greedy and the ease and accessibility of the app decline’.[1] Yet platforms like Instagram provide a space to interact with a vast amount of material. They form what Hayleigh Bosher and Sevil Yeşiloğlu call a ‘cultural “remix” environment’, a space for creatives to be influenced and inspired by other works.[2] This can create tension between an artist’s legal moral rights and the creativity of users on the platform.   In the United Kingdom, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CPDA) ss 77-89 protect moral rights. Notably, they give the author the right to be named and the right to object to derogatory treatment of their work.[3] Both of these moral rights could be undermined in the creative environment of Instagram if an ‘alterer’ were to digitally change their image. An altered image could be deemed original if it expressed a new aesthetic idea. Since current copyright law only protects works that result from individual ‘skill and labour’, the new image is unlikely to be afforded copyright protection. But as copyright law begins to recognise changing artistic practices, could the actions of an ‘alterer’ be legitimised? And would this lead to a weakening of the moral rights of the original artist?   The high originality threshold for ‘skill and labour’ in the law of England and Wales has thus far proved a stable groundwork for establishing authorship. Yet this approach must keep up with the shift in the technology used by artists, and with how apps like Instagram offer an artistic outlet for millions of people worldwide. One way forward could be an objective test using a ‘public’. This notional public would have an interested, informed view that could objectively recognise artworks. This view could be used in an assessment of infringement of moral rights. After all, the ‘real’ public has a vested interest in moral rights, as all artistic work created becomes part of our cultural history, no matter its aesthetic quality. By considering the public view in cases of moral rights, copyright law would recognise the stake society has in knowing who is contributing to its heritage, and in preserving that information. Any lowering of the originality standard in copyright law must balance the new artistic capabilities of the digital world and the importance moral rights have for both the artist and society. In evolving from existing standards for skill and labour, the test of a ‘public’ view could preserve the rights an artist wishes to claim over a digital image.   Can filters make an original image?   In the UK, the test for originality remains largely the standards of skill and labour. An author must show that they have expressed their ideas by the application of techniques that create a fixed work. Bingham LJ in Designer Guild Ltd v Russell Williams Ltd  defined this principle:   [A]nyone who by his or her own skill and labour creates an original work of whatever character shall, for a limited period, enjoy an exclusive right to copy that work. No one else may for a season reap what the copyright owner has sown.[4]

Introduction   Frans Hals was a mildly successful seventeenth-century Dutch old master who specialised in portraits. Few of his works have persisted in popular cultural consciousness in the intervening 400 years. One exception is the Laughing Cavalier,  painted in 1624, which remains on display in the Wallace Collection in London. The Laughing Cavalier  was once described by the Harvard art historian   Seymour Slive as ‘one of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits’.[1] But interest in Hals’ work since has been limited mostly to fine art specialists and investors.[2] This year saw the fruits of that interest in a claim against the auction house Sotheby’s. The subject matter was Hals’ Portrait of a Gentleman, half-length, wearing Black , believed to have been   painted around 1650 .  It is a rather boring work. The subject matter is a grim, wealthy Dutch aristocrat, whose only redeeming aesthetic quality seems to be the fine robe he can afford. Beyond that there is little to spark one’s interest. But luckily the artwork has generated an interesting case, engaging, in an art law context, principles of agency, partnership, witnesses of fact, and contractual construction of state of scholarship clauses. The case also provides a key moment to re-evaluate whether there are any unique or common principles which animate this area of the law. I argue that there are such principles in the final section. First, however, it is necessary to begin with the historical context of Mark Weiss  and auction house claims more broadly.   Historic auction house claims   The vast majority of claims before English courts against auction houses have taken place in the last 30 years.[3] This has corresponded with the growing commercialisation of the fine art market internationally. In the 1990s there was a movement from the culture of gentlemanly handshakes to one of increasing legal formalisation. Martin Wilson, previously Co-Head of Legal and Compliance at Christie’s, noted that in 1998 Christie’s had only three people working in its legal department. ‘By the time I left Christie’s in 2017’, he recently wrote, ‘the legal department numbered 40 employees’.[4]   Since the mid-1990s, claims against auction houses have involved mixed allegations of breach of contract and tort.[5] A useful mixed example is the 1995 case of De Balkany v Christie Manson and Woods .[6] This case was about a work by Egon Schiele, an Austrian   Expressionist protégé of Gustav Klimt, purchased in 1987 for the reserve sale price of £500,000 plus the hammer price and buyer’s premium. By 1991 the buyer believed that it was a forgery, and contacted Christie’s requesting a refund. Christie’s’ terms and conditions generally excluded liability. There was only a limited right to obtain a refund if the item was a forgery, defined with the classic term of being a piece created with an ‘intention to deceive as to authorship, origin, date, age, period, culture, or source’. But that right was further limited by the requirement that, if the sale had been in line with general scholarship at the time of sale, no refund would be possible. Christie’s argued that there had not been an intention to deceive, nor was it contrary to the state of scholarship when sold.   The judge disagreed. He found that 94% of the painting had been overlaid by someone other than Schiele, with ‘E’ and ‘S’ initials being added ex post as part of that conservation. He rejected Christie’s’ argument that no amount of overpainting could turn it into a forgery, and held that whoever had overpainted clearly intended to deceive, otherwise they would not have added the monogram. The judge also held that irrespective of the state of scholarship, the detrimental overpainting and intended forgery of Schiele’s signature would have been clear to Christie’s on inspection, hence the ‘state of scholarship’ clause could not prevent liability from attaching. Beyond just these contractual provisions, in tort, the judge went on to apply Hedley Byrne v Heller [7] to find that there had been an assumption of responsibility from the catalogue preparations by Christie’s. In effect, Christie’s comprehensively lost in both contract and tort.

A central image in the consideration of law is the totemic figure of justice—Justitia—the blindfolded Roman goddess of justice. Often appearing in statue form in many courthouses and carrying a sword and scales, she heralds the idea of law as impartial and unseeing, of law as a system that, theoretically at least, is open to all—democracy as a form of blindness. The irony of this sightlessness will not be lost on artists, who tend (with good reason) to think of law as oafishly clunking behind them, laughably out of touch with contemporary artistic form, ideas, and methods, and unconversant with the light-fingered nimbleness of creative work. Law generally confines creative freedoms, increasingly in the interests of the gods of corporatised intellectual property. Artists often see law as dry and administrative, as an expensive threat, or something to be resisted (with the usual artistic-anarchic leanings), rather than, dare I say it, a source of curiosity, or a medium for them to work with, like paint.   Justice’s blindness is said to represent objectivity—since postmodernism, another enemy of artists. Justice must be seen to be done, thereby allowing public access to many trials, and the principle of ‘open justice’, but law privileges language and the written word over images and aesthetics. In this era of McLuhanesque visuality-over-orality, in which Instagrammability has tended to trump criticality, this seems especially absurd. Legal theorist Peter Goodrich asserts that Justitia’s blindfold ‘marks an exclusion, an indication that mortals should keep out’[1]—a class issue with which most of us can sympathise. Nevertheless, from the perspective of visual artists, or perhaps only us perverse ones, all this might represent temptation, in terms of a rich subject. Law may have been termed an ‘empire’[2] (and that idea in itself should act as artistic provocation) but its gaps, elisions, and silences—and there are many—are lacunae, or a form of social-sculptural negative space. Law has an unconscious—we just need to analyse it.   Law’s inherent relationship to performance could be seen as further enticement. The courtroom can of course be seen as a ‘theatre’ of judgment, centring on the performance of authority and the fragile recall and transferral of mental images by witnesses and defendants as well as jury, judge, and litigants. Law’s many performative statements, in which speech becomes act—‘I sentence you’, etc—have been termed ‘superperformatives: performatives backed by force’,[3] evoking law’s complex relation to the body and the physical. Law’s inherent violence, its state- or sovereign-backed ability to remove a person from life, society, family, home, and possessions, is Foucault’s ‘technology of power over the body’.[4] But we should not forget that the law also includes a liberatory potential, a choreographic circumscription of individual agency, rights, promises, and liberties. Fig 1. Carey Young, Palais de Justice (still), 2017. Single-channel HD video (from 4K); 16:9, colour, quadraphonic sound; 17 mins 58 secs. © Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

The origins and definition of the word ‘Americanitis’ are opaque at best. It is generally believed to have appeared in medical journals of the late nineteenth century, describing a particular nervous ailment found in the inhabitants of the United States of America. Thought to cause disease, heart attack, nervous exhaustion, and even insanity, Americanitis was seen as a serious threat to the American public. In fact, in 1925, Time  Magazine reported that Americanitis was responsible for claiming up to 240,000—white—lives a year.[1] Nevertheless, with the passing of the Great Depression, its position as a legitimate disease faded in the public eye. Now virtually forgotten, I wish to resurrect it, and propose that it be used to describe a disease that truly does claim lives: white supremacy.   Currently, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘Americanitis’ as ‘excessive nervous tension’ and an ‘enthusiastic or aggressive advocacy of Americanism’.[2] In my reinterpretation, I would like to expand upon this definition to describe Americanitis as a structural disorder which plagues American society at large, as opposed to a disease that merely infects individuals. I will argue it is an entanglement of power, fear, and amnesia that writhes under the surface of the American landscape. The foundation upon which white supremacy stands is a polarised sense of white identity as virtuous yet vulnerable to the supremacy of Black identity, which is regarded as impure and violent. It reinforces hierarchies by instilling a fear—indeed, an ‘excessive nervous tension’—of Black assault on white structures, people, and spaces. It fabricates a link between the upward mobility achieved by Black Americans with the violent invasion of white spaces. What belies its tactical purpose is that it has been repeatedly harnessed by white supremacist hate groups— ‘aggressive advocates of Americanism’—to endorse racial violence as a defence strategy. Paired with mass media and its falsified depictions of Black violence, they seek to use this to justify attacks against Black communities and their spaces.   Mutative expansions of Americanitis have cycled since Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, cinema, television, and the Internet have emerged as effective platforms to spread a fear of encroaching Blackness through representations of architectural destruction. Cinema’s maturation in the early 1910s transformed the Neoclassical architecture of Southern plantations into a symbol of white supremacy and confederate nostalgia. Half a century later, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the television was used to associate the Civil Rights Movement to the dread of imminent nuclear annihilation of racially segregated neighbourhoods by Soviet forces. Half a century after that, during the Obama era and the Trump era, the Internet and its social media platforms have allowed an association to be constructed between increased diversity, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter, with social discord and detriment to America’s structures. In this essay, I will explore each of these expansions, and the resulting white supremacist violence, in an effort to show how the through-line of Americanitis has been an essential tool for spreading and maintaining white supremacy. I will conclude with the recent white supremacist attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, to illustrate how this ‘disease’ very much affects the nation to the present day. Fig 1. Lincoln Memorial (Nicolas Canal Tinius 2021, from photograph by Martha Raddatz 2020).

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever?[1]   *   The rich symbolic inner workings of Hobbes’ Leviathan  have been much commented on in the centuries since its publication, with most attention being given to its incomparable frontispiece. But fewer interpreters (especially today) comment in detail on the reference to the Book of Job in Hobbes’ title, a reference that Hobbes mentions explicitly in the text.[2] I want to offer an interpretation of the image of Leviathan that connects it directly with some of Hobbes’ central concerns (his ideas about human nature, sovereignty, and covenant), and that helps us understand the place of symbolism, metaphor, and literature in Hobbes’ famously mechanistic politics.   A brief synopsis of the book of Job. Job, a ‘blameless and upright’ man who ‘feared God and turned away from evil’,[3] has been tested by the Lord. Everything he owned has been taken from him, his family have been killed, and his body is covered in painful sores, to the point that he curses the day of his birth: ‘Let those curse it who curse the Sea, / those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan’.[4] The bulk of the text consists of verse dialogue between Job and three of his friends about the problem of theodicy: how can Job, a blameless man, be made to suffer by God? His friends argue that he cannot have been truly blameless, that he must have acted so as to justify his punishment. Job continues to insist on his innocence.   Hobbes’ reference is to the climax of the text, where the Lord answers Job ‘out of the whirlwind’: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?’[5] The Lord’s (somewhat ironic) response is not to prove that Job was deserving of suffering, but merely to humble  him, rhetorically—even sarcastically—asking:   Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?