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Since John Street's article on celebrity politics in 2004, the integral role of celebrities in contemporary humanitarian politics has been increasingly acknowledged in the study of international relations. However, as argued in this article, this research has been limited to analysing appearances rather than examining the aesthetics of celebrity representations and their 'thought worlds' that contribute also to the structures, relations and processes of world politics. This article addresses this dearth of critical attention and proposes an approach to engage with celebrity humanitarian imaginaries politically by turning to critical humanitarianism and cultural and post-colonial studies. It concludes that by failing to acknowledge the historicity, conditions and effects of celebrity humanitarian intelligibilities and imaginaries in a globalised world, research in this area is in danger of missing the very location of politics. What is called for is future research that broadens the understanding of this activity in world politics without closing the question of the political.

In the last two decades, illuminating the outside of a house with multi-coloured lights has become a popular British Christmas practice, typically adopted within working-class neighbourhoods and thus producing a particular geography of illumination.This article explores how such displays have become a site for class conflict mobilized around contesting ideas about space, time, community, aesthetics and festivity, highlighting how the symbolic economy of class conflict moves across popular culture. We focus upon two contrasting class-making practices evoking conflicting cultural values. First, we examine the themes prevalent in negative media representations of Christmas lights, notably the expression of disgust which foregrounds the working-class stereotype, the `chav'. Second, we analyse the motivations of displayers, exploring how the illuminations are imbued with idealistic notions about conviviality and generosity.

Within this article, I focus on a number of productive scholarly avenues to which sociological analysis of London 2012 might want to attend. Understanding major sporting events – and thus the Olympic Games – as inextricably entangled with the media-industrial complex, I suggest London 2012 as a commodity spectacle that will emphasize gleaming aesthetics, a (sporting) city and nation collapsed into (simple) tourist images, and the presentation of a particular expression of self within the logics of the global market. In so doing, and by peeking behind the seductive, corporate-inspired veil of material and symbolic regeneration, image, strategy and legacy, we, as a field, can ask crucial questions about whose histories, whose representations and which peoples matter to, and for, the sporting spectacle.

Styles of Indo-Caribbean jewelry created during indentureship have been continually reproduced up to the present. Exploring the demand and desire for these styles, this essay suggests that there is a communal aesthetic underlying the production of the jewelry, influenced by the perception of the jewelry as a commentary on sociohistorical realities and gendered labor practices. Artists working in the diaspora, including British-Guyanese jeweler Vannetta Seecharran, have created experimental pieces that still retain the minimalist and communal aesthetics traditionally associated with Indo-Caribbean jewelry.

This article presents the history of new goods in the eighteenth century as a part of the broader history of invention and industrialization. It focuses on product innovation in manufactured commodities as this engages with economic, technological and cultural theories. Recent theories of consumer demand are applied to the invention of commodities in the eighteenth century; special attention is given to the process of imitation in product innovation. The theoretical framework for imitation can be found in evolutionary theories of memetic transmission, in archaeological theories of skeuomorphous, and in eighteenth‐century theories of taste and aesthetics. Inventors, projectors, economic policy makers, and commercial and economic writers of the period dwelt upon the invention of new British products. The emulative, imitative context for their invention made British consumer goods the distinctive modern alternatives to earlier Asian and European luxuries.

Although Michael Oakeshott has written on such a wide variety of subjects as religion, jurisprudence, education, science, aesthetics and history, Ishall concentrate in this essay on his political philosophy. As a political philosopher Oakeshott has been concerned with two basic themes: firstly, to develop a conception of the nature of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular; and secondly, to develop a substantive theory of politics. Accordingly I shall divide this essay into four sections. In the first three sections I shall outline his discussion of the two themes, and in the fourth, assess their adequacy.

This article focuses on the British West Indies beginning with the involvement of African Caribbean soldiers in the Great War. It challenges the enduring myth of the First World War as a predominantly white European conflict. The main part focuses on C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian and playwright, following his paradigmatic trajectory from the colony to the 'mother country' and his involvement in the protracted transnational process of decolonization after the First Word War. It concentrates on one of his political pamphlets and on his play Toussaint Louverture. The work of the British writer and left-wing political activist Nancy Cunard is also presented as another 'outsider' text which can further an ongoing methodological project: the re-integration and cross-fertilization of received knowledge about the war with seemingly outlying knowledge, unorthodox political commitment and challenging aesthetics to produce a richer understanding of this formative period across the Atlantic divide.

This article addresses the attempts in Britain in the 1930s to integrate modernist aesthetics with the home. A number of initiatives during this period were directed towards improving both standards of living and the public's taste: arising from exposure to continental modernism (Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier) and with a fervent belief in the democratisation of the living space, innovators such as Wells Coates, Jack and Molly Pritchard, and Maxwell Fry sought to re-invent the home for the twentieth century. The results were often short-lived, and in some cases, abject failures. Yet the negotiations that these designers, architects, and visionaries made between high-minded aesthetics and the practicalities of quotidian British life reveal much about standards of taste during the 1930s. This article takes two case studies in detail: The Lawn Road Flats – the Isokon Building – in Hampstead, London, and the activities of the Design and Industries Association (DIA). In doing so, I chart the ways in which interior design developed in Britain during the decade before the outbreak of World War Two, and explore how small-scale, short-lived activities in this period laid the foundations for a flowering of new modes of living post-1945.

As the most widely circulated cinematic portrait of Abadan under full administration of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the AIOC film Persian Story offers an exceptional opportunity to examine the ways in which the British company linked the idea of modernity to the image of Western aesthetics of urbanism in the oil city. Damluji argues that the AIOC produced this cinematic spectacle of urbanism in order to control the image of oil modernity in Iran. This article first examines the discursive practices — the verbal exchanges, ideas, decisions, and conditions — that made Persian Story a major cinematic event in Britain and a durable visual record of oil modernity in Iran. It further analyzes the visual composition and narrative of the film in order to understand how AIOC's network of executives and filmmakers selected and managed representations of urban space and society in Abadan. In Persian Story oil modernity is made legible in the spaces of leisure shaped by British town planning. Meanwhile, the film renders invisible the spaces of Abadan's working class, whose demands for fair wages, regular hours, and decent living conditions were routinely neglected by the oil company. As a result, the segregation and inequality that defined the oil city for so many Iranian workers are absent from Persian Story. Yet, even after the nationalization movement in 1951 forced British employees to evacuate the oil city, the film was applauded in London theaters and classrooms as "the clearest impression" the world had of Abadan.

AbstractThis article revisits Stuart Hall's writing on "diaspora" to highlight its potential for future work on the topic. Although Hall has been faulted for excluding modern Africa, his historical and geographic approach to black cultural identities introduces the possibility for an inclusion. Since his "diaspora aesthetics" is based on black British films, photography, and visual art, this reassessment of his work concludes with a consideration of the Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumè's La Bouche du Roi. This room-size multimedia slave ship installation brings a history of transatlantic slavery together with that of colonialism and globalization to make a statement about African identities, both in the past and in the present. Hazoumè's artwork provides a visualization of Hall's mobile model of "diaspora," with its shifting perspectives, geographically dispersed centers, and unsynchronized temporalities.

Research on categorization and category dynamics has been rather silent on the role of powerful third parties in the self-categorization of producers. This study sheds light on this question by analyzing dynamics in the self-categorization of designers in the British ethical fashion movement. Their task of self-categorization is particularly complex in a context in which conflicts between aesthetics, morality and the economy still persist. Most of them enter the field as activists. Over time, however, designers stress their moral ideals less in their self-categorization, but put more emphasis on business-related values. Some even switch their self-identities from that of activists or moralists towards identifying as entrepreneurs. In this article, I argue that the designers' dependency relations to a powerful audience member allow us to better understand these dynamics in self-categorization.

A review article on books edited by: Bruce Robbins, Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1990) & Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, & John Saville, The Retreat of the Intellectuals: Socialist Register 1990 (London: Merlin Press, 1990 [see listings in IRPS No. 67]). Intellectuals, a collection of essays & interviews, examines left-wing intellectuals in contemporary society from a postmodern perspective. Poorly written & often incoherent, the volume includes essays on the peculiarities of English in the metanarratives of knowledge & power, & on the British cultural scene. Also included are interviews with Edward Said & Gayatri C. Spivak. The Retreat of the Intellectuals, a collection of sixteen essays, offers a resentment of socialism & an exploration of the current status of Left intellectuals. A superfluous testament to socialist faith, this book takes up the issue of socialism in pluralistic cultures, but offers little that has not already been said elsewhere. W. Howard

What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.

Karl Heinz Bohrer's Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang: englische Ansichten is a collection of essays on England originally published in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ( FAZ) and in the monthly Merkur between 1968 and 1981. This article explores these and subsequent essays by Bohrer. At the heart of Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang is the concept of decadence as a positive – or at least ambivalent – concept: it is 'the highly stylized capacity for enjoyment after so much imperial exertion'. Marx described England as the 'demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos', and for Bohrer even in decline the country remains the avant-garde of the Western world, in contrast to hard-working, but un-decadent Germany. The Falklands War (1982) marked the end of this specifically English form of 'enjoyment in decline'. More recent reflections on British, German and European politics reveal tensions and inconsistencies in Bohrer's characterization of decadence. In reconstructing Bohrer's work a number of concepts alongside decadence are discussed: the agonal; political aesthetics; closed form; and nostalgic modernism.