Walter Sickert’s portrait of Charles Bradlaugh, atheist, republican, and birth control pioneer, weaves together disparate threads of late nineteenth century British radical history. Robert Forder explores.
Radical Objects
Radical Object: Gingerbread
As the festive season approaches and thoughts turn to gifts and treats, Edmund Wareham explains how gingerbread could be a Radical Object in medieval & early modern Germany.
Radical Object: The Photos of an East London Suffragette
Jane McChrystal surveys Norah Smyth’s engrossing photographs: a powerful record of women’s Suffrage activism, campaigning and social justice in East London.
Radical Object: An Algerian Portrait
In December 2019, as Paris was brought to a standstill by a massive public sector strike, I was happily foraging away in the backroom of the Centre for the Study and Research of International Revolutionary and Trotskyist Movements (CERMTRI). The volunteer archivist, who had ducked off from the picket line […]
Radical Object: A Colonial Schoolboy’s Report Card
VRG Menon spent a lifetime haunted by the power of this report card and attempting to use other forms of capital he had to compensate for it. But Venu – Moo – also dwelled in a world where the report card’s errors became a running joke, and, its incapacity to tell a full story, a site where the porosities in colonial authority were always evident.
Radical Object: Ballymaclinton
Shahmima Akhtar explores a postcard from the Irish village of ‘Ballymaclinton’, a display at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London created to promote an Irish soap brand and a politically white Irish unionism.
Radical Object: The Black Report
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
