I haven’t had time lately to write longer posts for this blog. I will start writing longer pieces on specific topics again in future, but for now I’m going to try something different. From time to time, I’ll post short discussions of things I’m reading, listening to, watching, and so on, that relate to the themes of this blog. So here, just in time to provide some much-needed distraction from the US election, is the first such post.

Listening: I’ve been listening to the podcast Rebel Spirit from writer, comedian and podcaster Akilah Hughes. The show is about Hughes’s efforts to get her former high school in Kentucky to change the name of its sports teams from the Rebels (perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Hughes proposes changing the name to the Biscuits so that it references a more unifying aspect of Southern culture). As one of the few African-American students when she was at school, Hughes always felt unhappy with a name that so clearly referred to the Confederacy, and as an adult she decided to campaign for change. In 2017 the school finally did away with its mascot, a Confederate soldier called ‘Mr Rebel’, but the Rebel team name has remained.

Over the course of the series, Hughes explores the importance and meaning of team mascots, the history of ‘rebel’ team names in the US, how other teams have changed their mascots, controversies over other mascots (particularly those that use derogatory imagery of Native Americans), and much more. She busts some myths (notably the ridiculous and easily disprovable claim that the team name was adopted due to the popularity of the James Dean movie ‘Rebel Without a Cause’) and comes up against a seemingly immovable school bureaucracy, but also finds local supporters and draws inspiration from other schools that have made similar changes.

I’ve found the series (which has one episode still to run, at least for now) entertaining and insightful about issues of symbolism, representation and confronting difficult histories.

Reading: I recently finished reading Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud (2023), which I found enjoyable and ultimately quite moving. I was prompted to read it after listening to this interesting interview with Smith by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. The novel is billed as being about the 1870s Tichborne case, in which Arthur Orton, a London-born butcher from Wagga Wagga in Australia, claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to an English noble family. Despite looking nothing like Sir Roger and having apparently forgotten Sir Roger’s fluent French, Orton attracted a loyal following, particularly among working class Britons. Zadie Smith herself has talked about parallels with the popularity of Donald Trump (dammit, how did he find his way into this post?), but it’s also about much more.

A central theme of the book is our capacity to delude ourselves, to believe what we want to believe and to look away from inconvenient truths, as well as the difficulty of understanding others or even ourselves. It shows how even the most perceptive person (like the central character, Mrs Touchet) can have blind spots, while those who might be considered most delusional (such as a staunch supporter of the Tichborne claimant, or an enslaved Jamaican woman who has wild prophetic visions) may see some truths more clearly than those who pride themselves on their rationality.

The book is also centrally concerned with slavery and empire, and how developments in Britain are intertwined with those in Britain’s colonies. After listening to the life story of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica who became a servant to the Tichborne family in England, Mrs Touchet (a white Scottish woman) has a revelation: despite her longstanding commitment to the Abolitionist cause, she had never previously understood that the stories of Britain and Jamaica were inseparable:

The exotic island of her conception was not some utterly different and unimaginable world. It was neither far away nor long ago. Indeed, it seemed to her now that the two islands were, in reality, two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined, and that this was a truth that did not have to be sought out or hunted down, it was not hidden behind a veil or screen or any kind of door. It was and had always been everywhere, like weather.

The interconnections between Britain and empire, and the ‘everywhere-ness’ of empire in Britain, are the focus of another book I’ve been reading: Corinne Fowler’s Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (2024). Fowler is a historian who has been writing for some time about the connections between the British countryside and empire. She was involved in a project initiated by the National Trust, the UK heritage body, to examine and tell stories of the ways in which National Trust properties were implicated in slavery and colonialism. This led to a vitriolic campaign against her and the National Trust from right wing pundits and politicians, who accused the project of a ‘woke’ rewriting of history. To its credit, the National Trust didn’t back down. (Those attacking Fowler were largely the same people who are quick to cry ‘cancel culture’ when the work of writers such as the imperial apologist Nigel Biggar, currently touring New Zealand under the aegis of the ‘Free Speech Union’, is criticised. It’s also worth noting that Fowler is white, and that non-white British authors who write critically about empire for a popular audience – such as David Olusoga and Sathnam Sanghera – receive much more hateful abuse.)

Our Island Stories takes the form of a series of walks in the English, Welsh and Scottish countryside, each of which illustrates a different story of links between localities in Britain and different parts of the British Empire. On each walk, Fowler is accompanied by another walker whose ancestry connects them to empire and who has thought deeply about these imperial connections. Throughout the book, Fowler demonstrates not only how enmeshed the British countryside is with colonial expansion and exploitation, but also how stories of oppression within Britain are tied up with even greater oppression in Britain’s colonies: for example, how wealth from slavery fueled the enclosure of common lands by the landowning elite in England. Fowler comments that ‘if we know where, and how, to look, these local histories of colonialism are frequently hidden in plain sight.’ Or, as Zadie Smith puts it, they are ‘everywhere, like weather.’