As we near the publication of this year’s Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, we’re pleased to be able to publish the introduction from editors Emily Cuming and Phil O’Brien. To make sure you receive your copy of the special issue – which features six extended essays from our Raymond Williams centenary conference – join the society or renew your membership by 31st December 2023. You can do so here.
Amongst the many articles, opinion pieces, events, lectures, and symposia to mark Raymond Williams’s centenary, a minority were noticeable for their missteps. David Herman, describing the thrill of attending Williams’s lectures in the late 1970s, lamented that ‘Williams’s reputation has waned […]; he seems out of date in the 21st century’ (1). ‘I wish this would be a moment of celebration and rediscovery’, Herman concluded, ‘I fear it won’t be’ (2). Herman’s piece for the New Statesman, which found its antidote in Lola Seaton’s insightful essay on Williams at 100 for the same publication, identified the Williams of the late ’70s as marking the last high point for his work. In contrast, it was this same moment which, for Boyd Tonkin, saw Williams cede ‘too much ground to the salon theorists who tried to outflank him from the Left’ (3). Not only is this evident in the interviews with New Left Review for Politics and Letters (1979), according to Tonkin, but in what he describes as Williams’s ‘indigestible’ 1977 book Marxism and Literature; ‘you have to sigh that – in the deepest sense – his heart wasn’t in it’, suggested Tonkin (4). It is a remarkable accusation when you consider Williams’s own description, in his introduction to the book, of his relationship with Marxism and Literature as preoccupying ‘most of my working life’ (5). Both articles reveal a lack of engagement with scholarship on Williams during the intervening five decades, as well as a residual attachment to each author’s past, rather than a critique of Williams in the present. While an editorial in the Guardian published on 1 September 2021, a day after what would have been Williams’s 100th birthday, took a different line to Herman and Tonkin, noting that ‘much of Williams’s work feels contemporary’, it too failed to capture the scope and relevance of both his thinking or pick up the strands of his influence today. It ends with the rather banal line: ‘What Williams did needed doing and he said his say. Few better things can be said about any life’ (6). As an assessment of a writer who contributed more than 200 book reviews and articles over a thirty-year period to the paper, it is somewhat lacking. But these three pieces – by Herman, Tonkin, and the Guardian – were, thankfully, outliers.
As Seaton notes, Williams’s own past is an abiding feature of his work: the repeated yet light use of autobiography to explore the logics of capitalism or the literary canon, for instance. But his ‘detachment’ was also just as important; it ‘may provide a model of taking one’s experience seriously but not uncritically’, Seaton adds (7). Her article also helpfully identified one of the pitfalls faced when ‘celebrating’ the work and thought of a writer such as Williams. There is a risk, as Daniel Hartley has said, of ‘eliding a whole range of [Williams’s] more unusual, and perhaps more original, political and theoretical innovations’ if we succumb to a ‘personal and generational nostalgia’ (8), which can result in either condemnation or hagiography. This was the challenge for the Raymond Williams Society as we prepared for the centenary. How could we ensure that the event was duly marked and celebrated, that the year could be the site for detailed critical reflection, and that Williams’s writing could continue to be the impetus for renewed political work?
This special issue of Key Words is the culmination of those attempts, in the context of the centenary, as it collects together six extended essays originally given as papers at the RWS conference in April 2022 organised by Society chair Ben Harker and secretary Phil O’Brien. ‘Raymond Williams @ 100’ involved 35 speakers presenting their research on or adjacent to Williams across two days in Manchester, with topics ranging from a Persian translation of Keywords and the reception of Williams in Germany and Spain to papers on Stuart Hall, science fiction, William Morris, and adult education. It was one of many such events which, far from meaning the centenary passed with little notice, contributed to a year-long, sustained engagement with Williams, his legacy, his limitations, and his relevance. Conferences and lectures, online and in-person, in India, Brazil, Spain, the US, and the Netherlands are testament to the global reach of Williams. Much of the work to establish this network of global scholarship has been done through the Williams archive at Swansea University and Daniel G. Williams, editor of a collection of Williams’s writing on Wales: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (2003; 2021). In the autumn of 2021, for instance, the university organised an online, centenary symposia which consisted of four separate day-long events on the theme of Williams in Europe, Brazil, Japan, and China, respectively. That such engagement with his work in comparative national and international contexts has emanated from Wales is of particular significance. While Geoff Dyer commented that a legacy which seemed assured on his death in 1988 has since waned, the opposite could be said of Williams’s reputation in Wales (9). Between the original publication of Who Speaks for Wales? in 2003 and the release of its updated centenary version 18 years later, some of the most illuminating engagements with Williams’s writing have been from Wales and through the prism of the border country – of class as well as nation – which so shaped Williams’s life and work. These include Daniel G. Williams, as mentioned, as well as Rhian E. Jones, for example, both keynote speakers at our centenary conference. Further, the anniversary was discussed extensively by Planet, Nation.Cymru, and in a new collection of essays, Raymond Williams: From Wales to the World (2021), edited by Stephen Woodhams. Alongside a range of reading groups and one-off talks, Peak Cymru also marked the centenary with a programme of events titled, appropriately, ‘Culture is Ordinary’.
The danger of listing the range of centenary celebrations is that inevitably some will be missed off but just this brief overview of what emanated from Wales alone in 2021/22 demonstrates the resonance of Williams’s work in the country of his birth, as well as the pressing political questions – notably of Welsh independence – to which his writing offers many potential answers. The Society, along with our friends at the Raymond Williams Foundation, aim to capture such currents of Williams’s thinking, alongside many other interlocking and divergent themes. Much of what the Foundation did during the centenary year aimed to ensure Williams’s insights on politics and education could reach a new audience. The ‘Raymond Williams Explainers’, for example, used a range of media – from podcasts to animated short films – to introduce and expand upon the major concepts across Williams’s writing. You can read more of what the Foundation has been up to this past year at the back of the issue. Articles released on and around the centenary in Tribune, Jacobin, The Morning Star, by Verso, New Socialist, Red Pepper, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation demonstrate the renewal of interest on the wider British left in Williams’s writing. A special issue of The Coils of the Serpent, ‘Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the Present Conjuncture’, edited by Victoria Allen and Harald Pittel (2021), featured interdisciplinary engagements with Williams’s work in the context of crisis phenomena of the present. The versatility and global reach of Williams’s work is on display in this rich centenary issue, with articles spanning topics from the Cold War to Marie Kondo, drawing from across the fields of history, literary studies, film theory and eco-criticism among others. There was also a special Williams centenary issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, edited by Jilly Boyce Kay (2021), which foregrounded Williams’s method and continued significance as a key intellectual within cultural studies, with essays by Marie Moran, Graeme Turner, and, notably, Juliet Mitchell, who discusses Williams’s fiction and the role of his wife Joy to examine the significance of feminism to his work. Further, an outstanding collection of essays titled Raymond Williams at 100 (2021), edited by Paul Stasi, affirmed the significance of Williams to recent literary studies in the US and Britain. In many ways, then, it was a true celebration and one which the Society was able to contribute to, either leading or supporting key activities.
Our year of Williams’s centenary began with a series of online lectures in the autumn of 2021 delivered by the writer Lynsey Hanley, the leading Williams scholar Daniel Hartley, and three contributors to Raymond Williams at 100, Anna Kornbluh, Madhu Krishnan, and Paul Stasi. We also hosted an online screening of Border Country, Williams’s BBC documentary from 1970, and Phil O’Brien made available on the society’s new YouTube channel a range of films and interviews featuring Williams, unearthed through his archival research. This was part of a larger archival project to digitise and make available recordings loaned by the Williams estate to the Society. Funded by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust to coincide with the centenary, O’Brien’s subsequent Raymond Williams Tapes projects released previously unreleased lecture recordings on SoundCloud. Some of these were also transcribed and published in Culture and Politics: Class, Writing, Socialism (2022), a new collection of uncollected or unpublished essays by Williams, edited by O’Brien and released by Verso to also mark the centenary. That we are still finding unpublished work from Williams is both an indication that there are many more versions of Williams to explore but also that we need to continually revisit and reassess his thinking in the contemporary moment. Largely unknown work, often because it has never been collected in a volume of his writing, is still waiting to be made more accessible; a 1968 essay on Scandinavian fiction – ‘Intensely Observing, Bloodshot Eyes’, which is, primarily, an analysis of Tom Kristensen’s novel Havoc (1930) – published in the Danish journal Omkring, for example. So, there is still much to be done.
Such forms of reassessment can also occur as we mark significant anniversaries, such as his birth, but also of those landmark publications which originally established his reputation as a leading intellectual. It is 50 years this year since the publication of The Country and the City (1973), for instance, so it is apt that the first essay in this issue involves revisiting that book and using it to read contemporary writing on class and the countryside. Katherine Greenwood’s article builds on that study to examine ‘a common countryside’ – the ordinary, working, and sometimes impoverished landscape of contemporary rural life – in the work of post-millennial working-class writers Adelle Stripe and Anita Sethi. Through illuminating close readings of contemporary texts, Greenwood heralds Stripe and Sethi as part of a new wave of working-class writers whose accounts shift away from the familiar viewpoint of the detached metropolitan observer and visitor. Both Stripe and Sethi are framed as figures writing from within the landscape, providing accounts that have the potential to redress the longstanding absence of the countryside from working-class literature, while rewriting the rural through the lens of class, race, gender, access and embodiment. Merlin Gable’s article is also concerned with the representation of people and place, looking back to the posthumous publication of Williams’s last, unfinished novel People of the Black Mountains. Adopting a book historical approach, based on research into the cache of letters and materials held in the Chatto & Windus publishers’ archives, Gable uncovers new insights into the marketing of Williams’s work and ideas, including the promotion of Williams as a distinctly Welsh writer whose works might be aligned with the burgeoning category of ‘world literature’. Graham MacPhee revisits Paul Gilroy’s infamous comparison of Williams’s analysis of community and belonging in Towards 2000 (1983) to the far-right rhetoric of Enoch Powell. Through a close reading of Powell’s thinking on nation – demonstrating that rather than suggesting continuity, he consistently argued that the nation is a performative act – MacPhee argues the misreading of Williams emanates from a misreading of Powell. In contrast, Williams’s writing on community is compared to that of Ambalavaner Sivanandan in a powerful analysis of how, at a time of disintegration due to the dynamics of global capitalism, we can strive to form diverse, dynamic, and progressive forms of mutual support.
The final three essays, by dealing with different time periods, all take as a central focus the purpose of art and culture in democratic society. Joseph Williams offers a fascinating critique of the journal Critical Quarterly. Based on new archival research, Williams constructs the intellectual and political contexts around the launch of the literary journal and, through readings of the work of C. B. Cox, A. E. Dyson, F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, suggests important ways the original aims of Critical Quarterly raise pressing questions around culture, the humanities, reading and democracy for this century. Similarly, Robin Harriott’s essay on literary commitment and alignment in 1930s fiction offers a detailed and complex theorisation of what constitutes proletarian literature. Engaging with debates in the United States and Britain on class and form, Harriott seeks to elucidate the political impulses in the work of working-class writers such as Walter Allen; his essay, which draws from Williams’s own work as a theorist of class and political commitment in literature, posits the novel as an active site of historical struggle, rather than an ahistorical artefact with questions of political commitment long resolved. These questions of ongoing struggle over contested historical sites are then extended by Nick Stevenson during his discussion of the political uses of museums and the notion of heritage in the twenty-first century. Examining the relationship between class politics, heritage and critical pedagogy, Stevenson argues that museums and heritage sites, as a popular educational resource, have the potential to challenge neoliberal orthodoxies in their representation of radical histories of labour. Stevenson tests this assumption with reference to his visits to four sites with links to labour and trade union history: the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the Framework Knitters Museum, the William Morris Gallery and Derby’s Museum of Making. Blending critical analysis with first-person reflections on the experience of heritage site visits, Stevenson’s article reminds us – through style as well as content – of the compelling intersection of the political and the personal in cultural debates.
We would like to finish by thanking the people who attended and contributed to the ‘Raymond Williams @ 100’ conference and particularly the authors featured in this special issue for their work and commitment. Many thanks are also due to Liane Tanguay from all at Key Words for her exemplary work as reviews editor and editorial board member for many years, and welcome to Kate Spowage, a new editorial board member, who has edited this year’s reviews section. We are also delighted to welcome Hayley Toth to the editorial board, bringing expertise in literary sociology and colonial and postcolonial print cultures. This issue features another keyword entry by Tony Crowley on ‘woke’, which, as ever, aptly draws attention to the ways in which Williams’s method of close historical enquiry of culture and language as constitutive processes remains as relevant for the next 100 years as it has been for the last.
Notes
(1) David Herman, ‘What Raymond Williams Taught Me’, New Statesman, 25 August 2021.
(2) Herman, ‘What Raymond Williams Taught Me’, New Statesman.
(3) Boyd Tonkin, ‘Raymond Williams Mapped Mountains’, UnHerd, 30 August 2021.
(4) Tonkin, ‘Raymond Williams Mapped Mountains’.
(5) Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 1.
(6) Editorial, ‘The Guardian view on Raymond Williams at 100’, Guardian, 1 September 2021.
(7) Lola Seaton, ‘How Raymond Williams Redefined Culture’, New Statesman, 25 August 2021.
(8) Daniel Hartley, ‘Reflections on Raymond Williams – Part Two’, Raymond Williams Society, 26 January 2018.
(9) See Geoff Dyer’s introduction to the re-issue of Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: Verso, 2015).
The Raymond Williams Society 