Is The Bank Of England Independent When It Comes To Brexit?

shutterstock.com

By David Cobham, Heriot-Watt University

The Bank of England has been attacked by Leave campaigners for articulating what they deem to be pro-government, pro-Remain views about Brexit, when it should supposedly be independent. Governor Mark Carney’s comment that leaving the EU is the “biggest domestic risk to financial stability” provoked the criticism that he is breaching the bank’s independence. But it seems more likely that this is a case of shooting the messenger in order to distract attention from the message.

Trump University Salesman Speaks Out: "With Donald Trump, You Always Have To Read The Fine Print"

Trump University Salesman Speaks Out In American Future Fund Ad: "With Donald Trump, You Always Have To Read The Fine Print"

A former Trump University salesman speaks out against the presidential candidate in a seven-figure Florida ad buy by American Future Fund (AFF), warning voters that, "with Donald Trump, you always have to read the fine print."

Cliff, the former salesman, explains that he is telling "the true story" about Trump's course, which is the subject of two class-action lawsuits and an action by the office of the New York State Attorney General, which labeled it a "bait-and-switch" scheme.

Cliff underscores that the course, which changed its name five years after the State Education Department sent a letter stating it could not use the term "university," was "D-rated on the Better Business Bureau" and speaks of "non-stop calls with complaints."

Is Britain Safer In Or Out Of The European Union? This One's A No Brainer

PA/Gareth Fuller

By Christopher J. Fuller, University of Southampton

Ever since the Islamic State assault on Paris in November 2015, Brexit campaigners have sought to draw a link between Britain’s partnership with Europe, and the vulnerability of its cities to similar attacks. In the days after the atrocities, prominent Leave proponent Richard Tice took direct aim at In campaigners when he said: “never again should they say the United Kingdom is safer in the European Union.”

Until Britain takes back control of its borders, argues UKIP’s Nigel Farage, it cannot be “isolated” from the threat posed by Islamic extremists. The use of the word “isolated” should not be overlooked – it holds a special place in history, and reveals the fantasy in the thinking of those advocating the UK’s exit.

The belief that, in an ever-more interconnected world, Britain’s geography could somehow allow its government to pull up the drawbridge, as if Britain is some sort of impenetrable fortress, is simplistic and old-fashioned.

Timefire VR Announces First Virtual Reality City

Hypatia - The First City in Virtual Reality created by Timefire www.timefirevr.com
(PRNewsFoto/TIMEFIRE VR)

Hypatia Revolutionizes Gaming Market With Focus on Immersive Social Environment

Timefire LLC, an Arizona tech company, announces the most advanced virtual reality city arriving this year, called Hypatia. This immersive social environment will focus on providing rich cultural and educational experiences, while also offering an entertaining setting where collaboration and creativity are the currency. On the more than 70 miles of streets in Hypatia its citizens will stroll among the tree lined canals, be able to take in a play or attend a concert, visit a museum, paint using 2D and 3D tools, explore, shop, or kick back and read a holographic book from their virtual smart phone.

Donald Trump's Grandfather Was An Illegal Migrant And 'Trojan Horse'

Beware Trojan horses. Gage Skidmore/flickr, CC BY-SA

By Stefan Manz, Aston University

During New Year celebrations in Cologne, there were more than 500 reported attacks against women, including robbery and sexual assault. Most of the suspects are of North African origin, and some are thought to have entered the country illegally or as asylum seekers.

The news was welcome campaign fodder for US presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Referring to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy on refugees from Syria, he commented in his usual rhetoric: “I don’t know what the hell she is thinking”.

Trump went on to say that he did not want to have “people coming in from migration from Syria (sic)” as these were aggressive young men who “look like they should be on the wrestling team”. More dangerously still, Trump believed such people could act as terrorist “Trojan horses”.

Toastmasters Honors Successful Women on International Women's Day

Shurooq AlBanna competes in Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking (PRNewsFoto/Toastmasters International)

In honor of International Women's Day on March 8, Toastmasters International salutes women around the world. More than half of the organization's 332,000-plus members are females who join Toastmasters to become more confident speakers and leaders.

During her tenure as Toastmasters' first female International President from 1985-86, the late Helen Blanchard, a former civilian Navy manager, encouraged women to "commit to excellence." The trailblazer, who broke barriers in Toastmasters and in the workplace at a time when few women were leaders, said she lived by that motto. "Committing to excellence is not about something you put on. It's about something you bring out. By doing the very best I could do in any situation, it always led to better opportunities," said Blanchard.

Golden Globe Nominee Caitriona Balfe Joins Cast of 'Trust No One'

Kassianides and Caitriona Balfe taken from Simon Kassianides' instagram. Caitriona is staring in Kassianides' new movie 'Trust No One'. (PRNewsFoto/Trust No One)

Caitriona Balfe, winner of a Saturn Award and and Golden Globe nomination for her role asClaire Beauchamp in Outlander, is joining a star cast of young actors making an action/thriller movie funded through Kickstarter.

Live And Let Die: Did Michel Foucault Predict Europe's Refugee Crisis?

Asylum seekers are held at the Macedonian border. EPA/Georgi Licovski

By Stephane J Baele, University of Exeter

In March 1976, philosopher Michel Foucault described the advent of a new logic of government, specific to Western liberal societies. He called it biopolitics. States were becoming obsessed with the health and wellbeing of their populations.

And sure enough, 40 years later, Western states rarely have been more busy promoting healthy food, banning tobacco, regulating alcohol, organising breast cancer checks, or churning out information on the risk probabilities of this or that disease.

Foucault never claimed this was a bad trend – it saves lives after all. But he did warn that paying so much attention to the health and wealth of one population necessitates the exclusion of those who are not entitled to – and are perceived to endanger – this health maximisation programme.

Biopolitics is therefore the politics of live and let die. The more a state focuses on its own population, the more it creates the conditions of possibility for others to die, “exposing people to death, increasing the risk of death for some people”.

Rarely has this paradox been more apparent than in the crisis that has seen hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in Europe over the past few years. It is striking to watch European societies investing so much in health at home and, at the same time, erecting ever more impermeable legal and material barriers to keep refugees at bay, actively contributing to human deaths.

The One:12 Collective Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice Wows Collectors

The new line of collector-grade, super articulated action figures from The One:12 Collective is a "game changer" according to collectors. (PRNewsFoto/Mezco Toyz)

During their annual Toy Fair Preview at their world headquarters in New York last week, Mezco revealed their latest additions to The One:12 Collective, Batman and Superman from the Dawn Of Justice.

Why Leonardo Da Vinci Would Have Aced The Internet Cat Craze

By Gabriele Neher, University of Nottingham

Leonardo da Vinci may have been ahead of the curve in aerodynamics, anatomy and mechanics, but he also possessed an incredible foresight for another modern staple: cat obsessions.

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies: It's The Jane Austen Horror Show

By Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bestselling monster mash-up must be in want of a movie. Perhaps this explains why Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) – beset by myriad casting woes, money worries, and directorial setbacks since the project was announced – has finally arrived in cinemas this month.

The film – starring Lily James, Sam Riley and Jack Huston – is based on the bestselling book of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Fans – and the weirdly fascinated – can rest assured. England’s green and pleasant land will be beset by a plague of the living dead. Corpses will dig their way out of graves. Crypt doors will burst open. Armies of Satan’s soldiers – shambling, soulless, brain-devouring monsters – will upturn coaches, invade the houses of the rich, and generally terrorise the good citizens of Austen’s Hertfordshire.

But it is unlikely that this will be accompanied by any cries of indignation from the Janeites, howls of outrage from Austen bibliophiles and scholars, or publicity-generating accusations that the barbarians of Hollywood have finally set “our dear Jane” spinning in her grave.

The reality is a lot more interesting.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, book trailer.

Websites frequented by the Janeites are more likely to be sponsoring book giveaways and free movie passes. And the movie is more likely to get a genial nod from popular culture and Austen scholars, not to mention neo-Marxist scholars of the apocalyptic school who have a deep appreciation for the way in which Seth Grahame-Smith has tethered the paradigmatic exponent of western middle-class mores with the zombie monster – the ultimate proletarian monster, which was, at the time of the book’s 2009 release, declared by Time magazine to be the cultural mascot of the GFC.

In fact, Jane Austen horror has burgeoned into a distinctive subgenre of Austen adaptations. Joining Seth-Grahame Smith’s interpretation of Elizabeth Bennet as a katana-weilding zombie slayer, is Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back (2009), featuring Jane Austen as the undead 233-year-old author and owner of an upstate New York book store.

There is also Amanda Grange’s, Mr Darcy, Vampyre (2009), in which Elizabeth Bennet wakes up to the worrying truth that she is married to a “vampyre”; and Carrie Bebris’ Pride and Prescience (2012), and subsequent books, which cast Elizabeth Bennet as one half of a dynamic detective duo investigating supernatural mysteries.

Even the latest BBC Masterpiece sequel to Pride and Prejudice, based on PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberley, features a plotline transformed by the conventions of the neo-gothic thriller.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, film trailer.

These works of Austen horror – styled as fan fictions, spoofs, satires or comedies – are oddly interesting for the way in which they blend the aesthetics of British heritage drama with chic lit, 20th-century soap opera, and the genre of monster tales, which, for many scholars, signals widespread fears and anxieties about the monstrous dislocations at the heart of contemporary life.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a curious case in point.

The film may be set in the past, with lavish hair-dos, costumes and make-up, but there is of course nothing historical in the film. The mysterious plague that the plot envisions has far less to do with the violence of Austen’s world, and more to do with the violence of the Anglophone world today. This makes it one of the more interesting examples of what David McNally has evocatively called the “capitalist grotesque”.

The capitalist grotesque
In Haitian folklore, the zombie represents the historical memory of slavery – the idea of one human enslaved by the will of another. Appropriated by US directors such as George A. Romero, the zombie expressed a range of domestic threats, from civil rights to violence arising from the war in Vietnam, or as critiques of consumerism and the military industrial complex.

Wikimedia Commons/ Quirk Books, Philadelphia

In the wake of the global financial crisis activists and scholars appropriated the zombie image as a metaphor for a newly globalised proletariat – modernity’s outcasts, disenfranchised social classes, the “superfluous” populations evoked by sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman, depleted of their affective and intellectual energies by a cultural and economic system dedicated to the production of “human waste”.

In short, the zombie usurped Frankenstein’s position as the proletariat monster of choice – a symptomatic representation of a cultural and economic system rotting away from within and without.

Austen is an apt target for such anxious envisioning not only because of her centrality in the western cultural canon, but also because she is fundamentally an uncompromising moralist.

Her ethical system is every bit as complex as Kant’s, and her ethical values – including such allegedly quaint-sounding notions as “amiability”, “civility”, “propriety” and “dignity” – are, as Thomas Rodham has argued, fundamentally about middle-class existence.

Indeed, the middle-class myopia of Austen has long been a point of critical attack. As Raymond Williams famously pointed out in his book The Country and the City (1973):

where only one class is seen, no classes are seen.

These critical concerns also attach themselves to anxieties about the imperial “unconsciousness” of Austen.

In the novels of Britain’s imperial age, “money from elsewhere” in the guise of profits from the East India Company, or exotic sugar plantations, provided the means for many a plot resolution, as Edward Said famously argued in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with respect to the sugar plantation that sustains the Bertram’s family estate in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814).

The Pride and Prejudice and Zombies cover, by Doogie Horner, is a ‘zombification’ of a painting of Marcia Fox by William Beechey. Wikimedia Commons

Hence, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – a putative democratisation of Austen – the upper classes also go to the “Orient” not to acquire wealth, but to acquire the “deadly arts” that will allow them to impose order on society in a more direct and violent way.

But despite these apparently democratic renovations, the “Orient” still functions within this monster franchise as a site of exploitation, just as the disaffected zombies still function as an outcast social order to be vanquished.

Moreover, the novel somewhat blunts the force of its critique by breaking the conventions of the zombie narrative – one of the few mainstream genres to adhere to the convention of the nihilistic ending – by featuring a happy ending. Indeed the other two books in the trilogy – Dawn of the Dreadfuls (2010) and Dreadfully Ever After (2011), by Steve Hockensmith – do the same, giving us three happy endings in a row.

But there is also something in this monster movie for the Janeites.

Jane Austen was no revolutionary. But had she seen the state of our world – the way in which we appear to have failed so completely at “amiability”, “civility”, “propriety” and “dignity” – then, perhaps she might even have agreed that, as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' original fanboy trailer put it:

Maybe You Need Some Zombies.

Further reading:
Jane Austen … Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem, by Camilla Nelson.


About Today's Contributor
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

More Zombies Related Stories

For more zombies related stories, click here...

STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons Helps Families Fighting Childhood Cancer

Stage Rush: Imagine Dragons lets you play as your favorite Imagine Dragon on your smartphone. Even better, for every $1.99 download purchase, $1 will be donated to Imagine Dragons' foundation, the Tyler Robinson Foundation, during the first month of release. The Tyler Robinson Foundation was created by Imagine Dragons and Tyler Robinson's family in 2015 to help families deal with the financial and emotional costs of childhood cancer. The more games downloaded, the more money will go to TRF. After the first month, 25% of the revenue from a game download will got to TRF. (PRNewsFoto/Zig Zag Zoom)

Play STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons as your favorite Imagine Dragons band member and help families fight pediatric cancer. Created by mobile game publisher Zig Zag Zoom, this fun and fast-paced endless runner game launched today on iOS and Android. In STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons, you run as a member of the band to the beats of their hit songs, weaving your way through the streets of their hometown Las Vegas and the enchanting streets of Paris.

For every $1.99 download purchase, $1 will be donated to Imagine Dragons' foundation, the Tyler Robinson Foundation, during the first month of release. The Tyler Robinson Foundation was created by Imagine Dragons and Tyler Robinson's family in 2015 to help families deal with the financial and emotional costs of childhood cancer. The more games downloaded, the more money will go to TRF. After the first month, 25% of the revenue from a game download will got to TRF.

Here is what Imagine Dragons had to say: "The ability to incorporate meaningful charitable components in ordinary, everyday activities and purchases is something the younger generation appreciates like no other. We teamed up with Zig Zag Zoom to bring that giving spirit to mobile gaming, an area not really explored in the past. The game is a blast, but we're even more excited about the money it will raise to rescue pediatric cancer families by way of our charity, the Tyler Robinson Foundation."