Subcultural and social innovations in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (original) (raw)
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Weaponising Peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy and ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’
Contemporary British History, 2018
This paper explores how the Greater London Council (1981–1986) deployed community focused cultural policy initiatives to disseminate cultural forms of nuclear scepticism during its ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’ campaign. Drawing upon archival sources and interviews, this paper will present an overview of Peace Year’s cultural programme, which promoted London’s ‘nuclear-free zone’ through arts commissions, poster campaigns, pop concerts, murals, documentary films and photography exhibitions. Focusing on two GLC funded projects aimed at promoting positive representations of women’s peace activism, this paper will reflect upon the emotional and political impacts of the GLC’s radical cultural strategy.
This thesis explores the roles music can play in the making of social movements. The theme is studied through the case of the British nuclear disarmament movement, 1958-1963. The focus is mainly on London and the national level, but the discussion is contrasted with examples from protests in the Glasgow region. By analysing participant perceptions on music, the study answers two main research questions. Firstly, how was music seen to influence the movement, and why? Secondly, how did contemporary musical and political phenomena shape the uses and perceptions of music in protest. The topic is discussed in the context of Cold War cultures in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This thesis provides an example of how local actors interpreted the Cold War, and responded to it using the cultural and social resources available for them. It also demonstrates how the Cold War influenced the political opportunities and internal dynamics of the movement. The British nuclear disarmament movement was a mostly non-aligned collection of groups, campaigns, individuals and protests which aimed at unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom. In Scotland, the direct goal was the removal of American nuclear weapons from Holy Loch, close to Glasgow in Western Scotland. The movement was politically and religiously heterogeneous, and its groups differed considerably in their choice of methods of protest. In 1958-1963 the movement was at its peak, attracting thousands of people to its protest events. This study combines an analysis of archival materials and published sources with oral history. The archival sources, collected from the London School of Economics Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Collection and the Glasgow University Janey Buchan Political Song Collection, consist of documents pertaining to the planning, discussion and reporting of movement activities, correspondence, participant accounts and songbooks and sheets as well as numbers of the Sing magazine. The published sources include books, contemporary records and one short documentary film. The books are accounts of nuclear disarmament activism written from different perspectives, published 1964-1983. The oral history sources consist of four unstructured interviews conducted in Glasgow and in London in February 2015 with six people who participated in the nuclear disarmament movement and two who offered comparative and theoretical insights. The main method of data retrieval and analysis of this study is content analysis. This thesis argues that music had strong influence on the British nuclear disarmament movement. The functions were mainly sustaining, although music could also reinforce fragmenting processes within the movement. As the worlds of music and activism were connected, new participants joined the movement. Many of them came from political music organisations, often affiliated with the Communist Party. In the movement, however, members of such groups were constantly negotiating their political identifications, and participation in a non-aligned movement also offered opportunities to challenge and transcend Cold War dichotomies and work for peace and disarmament independent from the Soviet-led peace movement. The participation of musicians led to a development of a musical infrastructure within the British nuclear disarmament movement. This guided the ways in which musicians participated, musicking occured and music was used and transmitted in the movement. In particular, musicians helped in protest events and social gatherings and in mobilising resources for the organisations. Music also affected debates within the movement as organisers discussed the appropriate place, time and content of music. Discussions and disagreements over music reflected the political, social and cultural complexity of the movement as well as the challenges which peace movements faced in Cold War Britain. Music had considerable influence on the mood, rituals and image of the movement. It motivated activists in protest events and created and strengthened a sense of solidarity between them. This study also shows that individual activists and groups used music to negotiate disagreements and express dissent in the movement. Moreover, the thesis exemplifies how closely interconnected the cultural and the political were in the movement. Activists and musicians recognised this, and they used music to express, perform and reaffirm their political identities.
2003
This article looks at a particular moment in the relation between popular music and social protest, focusing on the traditional (trad) jazz scene of the 1950s in Britain. The research has a number of aims. One is to reconsider a cultural form dismissed, even despised by critics. Another is to contribute to the political project of cultural studies, via the uncomplicated strategy of focusing on music that accompanies political activism. Here the article employs material from a number of personal interviews with activists, musicians, fans from the time, focusing on the political development of the New Orleans-style parade band in Britain, which is presented as a leftist marching music of the streets. The article also seeks to shift the balance slightly in the study of a social movement organisation (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND), from considering it in terms of its ‘official’ history towards its cultural contribution, even innovation. Finally, the article looks at neglected questions around Americanisation and jazz music, with particular reference to power and the past.
Peace, Green and Antinuclear activism in the 1980s – redefining nature and culture
Through the 1980s, the green movement in the UK developed a strong critique of existing environmentalism. In doing so, it drew both on international links and theoretical perspectives, but also, on a much broader set of local traditions of opposition and cultural idealism. Respecting McKay’s ground-breaking 1996 study, “Senseless acts of beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties”, which first articulated these connections, this paper concentrates on the intersection of anti-nuclear, peace and green movements during the 1980s to explore how concerns with broader aspects of social change function to produce new understandings of the relationships between humanity and the world around. The paper re-examines primary source materials and activist narratives to explore the complex ambivalence of the activism of the time towards ‘the environment’ as a distinct concept. Concentrating on activist produced newsletters and periodicals (including Green Line, GreenCND newsletter, Green Anarchist, Living Green, Peace News and the Molesworth Bulletin) it advances the argument that in the mid-1980s, despite its great diversity, the Green movement in the UK in the 1980s is better understood as an extended counter-cultural movement, rather than as a political environmental movement. Its understanding of culture, moreover, is one that critiques and redefines the nature/culture divide.
Protest and survive: Reclaiming William Morris from Britain’s nuclear fleet
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2016
A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament is an Arts Catalyst Nuclear Commission by David Mabb David Mabb’s practice investigates the aesthetics of William Morris’ designs within contemporary political culture. In response to a visit to HMS Courageous, Mabb has created a new series of works to investigate The Ministry of Defence's (MOD) use of the Morris Rose print that has been used to furnish - in the officers’ and senior ratings’ quarters - nuclear submarines. The MOD commissioned the fabric for over thirty years, from the 1960s through to the 1990s, including the Vanguard Class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines which are armed with Trident nuclear-armed missiles. As a socialist, William Morris could never have anticipated that his designs would become the symbol of English homeliness in a nuclear submarine. Prompted by the work of British historian E. P. Thompson, whose biography of Morris was republished in the 1970s when he was a leading intellectual in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Mabb reappropriates Morris from the MOD, bringing the designs into conjunction with a range of anti-nuclear protest signs and slogans which are presented on late twentieth century freestanding projection screens. A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament is an Arts Catalyst Nuclear Culture Commission. It has been exhibited as part of Material Nuclear Culture, KARST, Plymouth, UK 17/6/16–14/8/16. Perpetual Uncertainty, Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden 02/10/16-16/04/17, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium 17/9/17-10/12/17 and Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden 24/2/18- 26/8/18. Parade, Broadway Gallery, Letchworth, UK 13/12/19-16/2/20
Beyond Greenham Woman? Gender Identities and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Peace Camps
International Feminist journal of Politics, 2017
This article investigates the discursive construction of gendered identities in anti-nuclear activism and particularly in peace camps. My starting point is the now substantial academic literature on Cold War women-only peace camps, such as that at Greenham Common. I extend the analysis that emerges from this literature in my research on the mixed-gender, long-standing camp at Faslane naval base in Scotland. I argue that the 1980s saw the articulation in the camp of the figure of the Gender-Equal Peace Activist, displaced in the mid-1990s by Peace Warrior/Earth Goddess identities shaped by radical environmentalism and reinstating hierarchical gender norms. I conclude that gendered identities constructed in and through anti-nuclear activism are even more variable than previously considered; that they shift over time as well as place and are influenced by diverse movements, not solely feminism; and that they gain their political effect not only through the transgression of social norms, but also through discursive linkage with, or disconnection from, political subjectivities in wider society. With such claims, the article aims to re-contextualise Greenham Woman in her particular place and time, and to contribute to a more expansive understanding of the gendering of anti-nuclear activism.
Kick It 'Till It Breaks: The Socio-Cultural Revolution of Britain's Angry Brigade, 1967-72
This research paper is a study of the British social libertarian grouping known as the Angry Brigade, who committed a series of bombings against industrial, political, and military targets that destroyed property in and around London, 1968-1971. This research engages with the historiography of the global “Long 1960s” as well as studies of revolutionary militant violence. Analyzing a collection of press communiqués issued by the Angry Brigade as well as media portrayals and transcripts from the trial of those charged with the bombings, this paper fits their actions and rhetoric into an overall theme of socio-cultural revolution based primarily upon the ideology and practice of extra-parliamentary working-class insurrectionary direct action (e.g., wildcat strikes, sabotage, occupations, et cetera) and Situationist International critique of late capitalist society. The Angry Brigade’s rhetoric will be considered in conjunction with the Society of the Spectacle to illustrate the influence of that revolutionary ethos upon their actions. In addition, a psychogeographic analysis of the depressed north London communes from which the Angry Brigade emerged will elucidate the influence of the environment upon their revolutionary militancy. The Angry Brigade used the violence of the bomb to expose and disrupt what they perceived as the violence of an authoritarian system as well as shock out of complacency an alienated and commodified society. A central premise of this research paper is the Angry Brigade were not terrorists because they did not use violence in the pursuit of political goals but instead engaged in violence as an expression of their revolutionary goals in themselves.