Nina Power

[Picture from Debrett’s site, advertising training courses on debate]

[This is a version of a text that was originally published in Strike! magazine in 2015]

Nina Power

O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou hast wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing. – John Taylor, ‘A Declaration to the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World, Shewing the Cause why the Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up, Manure, and Sowe Corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by these that have Subscribed, and thousands more that gives Consent’, in The True Levellers Standard Advanced by Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649.

Continue reading “It’s not a Debate, it’s a War!”

[This piece was originally written for Loops magazine, which I think just stopped at some point before they published the issue that this was written for]

Folk doesn’t need Reviving!

Nina Power

The English countryside appears to enjoying something of a revival of late. Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010) delves into the dark arts of biophilia, lichen metaphors and the crumbling post-revolutionary stakes of a rural idyll that is somehow just as much a base for the military-industrial complex as it is for butterflies. Rob Young’s recent Electric Eden casts a similarly wide-ranging and sympathetic eye over British folk music from Arnold Bax and Vaughan Williams to Ghost Box. Less than 20% of British people reside in the countryside, yet we are obsessed with visions of Albion, of some sort of calm, greenish idyll, even if we forget that the British countryside is also the history of enclosures, of the destruction and put-down of peasant revolts, of heavy militarization, of bigotry and racism.

Continue reading “Piece on the Folk Revival, 2010”

[Illustration: Andrzej Krauze used to illustrate my article, ‘Defending Rights against the Rights, published in Red Pepper in February 2015]

Articles and reviews can be found here.

[Photograph used to illustrate ‘Bamboozle, Baffle and Blindside’, my piece on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s 1984, published May 2009]

Various pieces can be found here.

Various reviews and articles can be found here.

[photo of a Cops Off Campus demo, by Paul Davey/ Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis, used to illustrate my article ‘Lecturers must stand with students to preserve the right to protest’, published December 2013]

Various articles, mainly for Comment is Free, can be found here.

Various reviews and articles can be found here.

Continue reading “Badiou’s ‘Existence and Death’ (translation with Alberto Toscano)”