Books and culture: Being political in divisive times

Sandra Obradovic recommends…

Podcast

The Bunker, episode 'The post-logic election year – Does anybody vote rationally'. 
It's a massive election year, with billions voting worldwide. But will those casting votes do so logically? Has voter psychology changed in recent years? And what can be learned from it? To find out, Jacob Jarvis talked with me.

Film

Don't Look Up. This is a satire of the rise of anti-science and how difficult it is to challenge norms. There's a Guardian article that captures it nicely (tinyurl.com/5n6v4k7h).

Book

The Power, by Naomi Alderman. A dystopian fictional novel set in the future where gender power relations have been reversed. Cosmopolitan magazine describes it as a cross between The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale.

Anthony English recommends…

Film

Dirty Pretty Things. Directed by Stephen Frears, this 2002 film tells the story of asylum seeker Senay (Audrey Tautou) and irregular migrant Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), both of whom illegally work in a luxurious London hotel (among other places). The inciting incident is Okwe's discovery of a human heart in one of the rooms. From there, the story goes on to chart how the characters seek answers and navigate a London which both needs their labour and also despises them in equal measure.

The film explores how the hyper-precarity of their work environment and legal status challenges their moral integrity. This is a world of outsiderdom where fairness is considered to be just as much of a luxury as the hotel in which they work. 

They exist on the fringes of a society with combative migration enforcement officers and bosses who know vulnerability means exploitation. Both are indicative of broader systematic incentives which encourage antagonism towards those dispossessed through no fault of their own.

Lest I make this sound overly depressing, the film is actually a very taut thriller with blossoming human relationships that, I am not afraid to confess, always evoke tears in the final scene. 

Of course, it is not flawless – it is over-romanticised in places, Tautou's accent wanders between countries every other sentence and some of the supporting characters verge on the stereotypical. That said, it is a thoughtful story about the value of empathy and how this fosters shared meaning in an environment hostile to the needs of those considered outsiders.

Although the film was released nine years before I even began my undergraduate degree at Durham, it has always stayed with me. Now, as I embark on post-doctoral research exploring how polarised individuals can sustain dialogue on the issue of immigration, I am given pause to consider the themes of the film once more.

Monica Hope recommends…

Book

The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain by Darren McGarvey (Ebury, 2022)

As its title suggests, this book's central premise is the 'proximity gap' between political and institutional decision-makers and the people whose lives are most impacted by the UK's 'binfire' of failed social policy. This idea is explored by looking at the operation of power in individual areas of social policy, mapping out class barriers and division as potential pathways to social exclusion.

Especially powerful are the insights offered by the author's own lived experiences and other first-hand accounts. These stories challenge the ways that dominant discourse obscures, exploits and individualises the structural roots of poverty, and show how social problems proliferate when there's a vacuum of interest and resource.

It's this interweaving of personal and political narratives that implores us to take a reflexive, relational perspective to the book's message. Important distinctions are made between interventionist initiatives and meaningful opportunities for representation and self-advocacy.

Because what are the implications, if separation simultaneously propagates inequalities and disrupts our ability to identify and resolve them? What are the everyday ways we each accept, perpetuate and take advantage of the status quo? Can we conceive of and practice something different? These questions are of course very relevant to political psychology.

The book's answers are inevitably incomplete and some demand such ideological and cultural shifts they seem unimaginable. But its resistance to apathy and disconnection are inspiring and persuasive – and the binfire it points to is hard to ignore.

Ashley Weinberg recommends…

Film

Pride is both heart-warming and poignant, with reasons to cheer and hold your breath. Focusing on the true-life story of a Political (big 'P') campaign by a London-based LGBTQ+ activists group to 'Support the Miners' of Dulais Valley in South Wales during the miners' strike of 1984-5, the film shares the lives of its main characters and their (political with a small 'p') battles with coming out, discrimination, AIDS and violence, among other themes.

Yet, the colours of this film mean it is both light and dark, as music, dance, political will, community and togetherness engage the audience and have you moving with it. It is both a celebration of what can be right as well as the difficulties in making it so. Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Andrew Scott are part of an all-star cast in this rich and enlivening tapestry.

Hitting on the idea of a gig to raise funds for the miners, the campaigners find how they are perceived is a part of the challenge in times when homophobia was a norm – yet the end of the film (spoiler alert!) shows just how much can be achieved 'politically' (with a 'P' and a 'p') when people accept and learn from one another to work together.

Book 
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us, by Nick Hayes.

Politics is living history. This book brings to life the struggles of the land in the UK in a unique manner. In each chapter, the author trespasses on what is deemed 'private land' in order to see what is behind the walls built by those powerful enough to take possession of it and those whose influence and privilege have shaped the 'law of the land' in their favour. 

Considering the live topics of 'common land' and detailing the attitudes, prejudices, discrimination and violence that have characterised legalised approaches to land ownership and possession – that include the UK's legacy of slavery – Nick Hayes invites us to join him on his journeys into the taboos of so-called trespass and peer beyond the legal protections that have made it so difficult to regain what was once owned by all. As a reader, this is a hugely informative handbook of history and an emotional investment too. It is hard not to feel a share in the victories where these are documented – because this land belonged to 'us' at one time or other!

Sue Nieland recommends…

Book

Code of Conduct: Why we need to fix parliament and how to do it, by Chris Bryant

My first thought at taking this book off the shelf to read was, why put yourself through another set of chapters that reinforces the misery that avid Parliament-watchers are currently going through? But the book was actually both educational and cathartic. 

It answered many of the 'why don't they just…?' questions ('because it really isn't as easy as that' is the usual answer), but also made me feel that I am not alone in getting incandescent every time there is a major breach of moral guidelines without accountability. 

Plus, maybe surprisingly from a Labour politician, the account is non-partisan and issues that involve Members of Parliament of all parties are considered. It doesn't solve the problems, but it does provide some potential solutions. 

I'd like to think someone coming into new parliamentary roles in the not-too-distant future might just read this and think, I'd like to do that. And maybe we could see change for the better and some real accountability for actions and behaviour that is sadly missing right now.

Kesi Mahendran recommends…

Film

"One of us should have been with her", says James Baldwin about Dorothy Counts, the 15-year-old schoolgirl who crossed the colour line and attended an entirely white high school in 1957. The footage of the abuse she faced was beamed around the world.

Baldwin was gay, Black, working class and a family man, dedicated to his younger sisters. He was writing at the intersections. He never got past 30 pages of his book, Remember This House, and the Haitian director Raoul Peck has taken Baldwin's books and those 30 pages to create this documentary.

When watching this documentary it could be the term 'negro' that jumps out of you, speaking as it does to a time now past of the American civil rights movement and expressions such as the 'negro problem' or the N-word. Yet it is his critical use of the word house that stays with me long after the documentary is over. His point to his American audiences is that we are all in the same house: to insult him is to insult what it means to be an American.

The film uses only Baldwin's voice either narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, delivering a steady laconic stoicism, or James himself, a child preacher, delivering rousing rhetoric. There aren't many people who can upstage Samuel L. Jackson, but you soon learn that Baldwin is one of them. He decentres racial prejudice long before critical race theories and decolonising terms such as 'racial capital'. 

'The world is not white. It never was white. White is just a metaphor for power.' Approach this documentary cautiously if you know what it is to be marginalised – it is powerful and may well trigger past traumas. View it when you are strong, together and feel the need to be inspired.

The film, like the unfinished book, is focused on three of Baldwin's murdered friends – Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. As Baldwin recounts, 'I saw Malcolm before I met him. I stumbled through my lecture with Malcolm (in the audience) never taking his eyes off my face.' 

The fact impressed upon you by this documentary is Baldwin was there at a momentous time in American politics, a time of racial segregation and space travel. For me, as a dialogical psychologist, the moment that stays with me is his speech at the Cambridge University Union Debate in 1965.

Baldwin challenges Bobby Kennedy, who he had met previously, alongside Raisin in the Sun author, Lorraine Hansberry. Kennedy had given a presidential campaigning speech saying in 40 years a negro could be president of the United States. 

Baldwin captivates the audience, dismissing this seemingly emancipated statement by locating us to the point of view of a man in a Harlem barbershop. He states 'Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and he's on his way to the presidency. We've been here for 400 years, and he's saying maybe if we're good we may let you become president in 40 years' time.'

It's Baldwin's role as a witness that's of interest to the intersections between psychology and politics. His insistence on using we, in relation to the American people is made all the more powerful by the way Raoul Peck intertwines his words with a vast timeline of images and film footage; from Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, to classic films such as The Defiant Ones, alongside the dreamy constructions of white innocence and moral obtuseness in Doris Day and Cary Grant films containing only white Americans, where immaturity is a virtue.  

These are brought into the present with modern footage of police brutality, such as Rodney King's beating in 1991, to the shooting in Ferguson in 2014, evoking the seemingly endlessness list of young teenagers shot by the police in the US and of course here today in Europe.

The documentary serves to decentre most of the Western civilisational conceits about enlightenment and humanism that often exist still within Psychology. Baldwin was a public activist and frequently appeared on chat shows and panel debates. On the Dick Cavett show, he says about his time in Paris in 1948, 'Paris released me from a real social terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible on the faces of every cop, every boss, everybody'. It is hard to imagine our mainstream channels today in the UK, providing the panel debates and hard-hitting interviews of the 1960s.

The documentary asks you to accept that I am not your negro, to view the invention of the negro and the invention of whiteness critically – if you do this then the reconciliation of all things becomes possible.