The article addresses the work of British artist and Guyana-raised Hew Locke, between 2007 and 2014. It aims to examine how this work participates in the construction of a cultural memory to make visible, through projects imagined for British imperial monuments, memorial policies that consider the history of diasporas in Great Britain. To do this, the study draws on the analyses of Kobena Mercer, who has reassessed the transnational dimension of Caribbean art in London by revising the art historical habitus of assigning a work to a single place. This allows us to understand the artist’s links to the carnival, within a broader spatial network, including Georgetown, Brixton and London. Caribbean memory in Hew Locke’s art is approached to elucidate, through the analysis of primary sources (the published interviews of the artist), how he came to engage with these different carnivals. Then, the study focuses on the transnational migration of aesthetic elements, such as color and gesture, what Hew Locke calls the “Guyanese palette” to reveal his visibility strategy and address its status within modernism. The study of the reception of his work by the artistic press completes the approach by revealing the difficulty he had, as a Caribbean artist, to enter Britain’s artistic and national space. It completes the analysis of the artist’s relationship to institutions (press, modernism and museum) by describing the artist’s project at the Turbine Hall of the Tate in London, which he addressed not only to imagine a contemporary carnival, but also to draw attention to the discrimination experienced by the Black population of Notting Hill. Finally, the article focuses the reflection on the transnational dimension of this work conceived as a memorialisation and a reconstruction of the Caribbean carnival in London. It proposes reading the work, ultimately, as a paradigmatic artistic expression of the diasporic cultures of the Black Atlantic.

The Sea League was a significant but relatively short-lived movement of popular protest (1933-1939), active in the communities of the Outer Hebrides for the purpose of drawing the attention of government to deep concerns over island social and economic circumstances. Founded in the Island of Barra, their cause was political and public recognition of the destruction of inshore fisheries and of consequent loss of livelihoods in island communities. Through its campaign, evidenced through its newsletter and surviving correspondence, the Sea League can be seen as propagating perceptions of identity in fishing communities in the Outer Hebrides based on commonality of interests and the threats to them from a wider society. This gave their cause profile although the wider aims were only partially realised in the nearly six years of campaigning which was effectively ended by the outbreak of the Second World War. Perceptions of identity engendered by the Sea league have continued to be shaped by the culture and language of the Gàidhealtachd, and these same communities in which the language survives are engaging with the contemporary climate-crisis and current debates on environmental conservation. Considerable space is given to this to highlight the relevance of the Sea League’s campaign for the part of ‘human ecology’ in the marine environment.

[video:between-mountain-and-sea]Zoe Paterson Macinnes's work is a result of her island heritage. She combines personal observations of land and sea to explore themes of identity and belonging. Zoe’s film work is focused on Scottish cultural projects, such as Between Islands Project and organisations alike.

IntroductionIn her preface to her collection Pandemic Poems, Jamaican writer Olive Senior refers to the COVID-19 pandemic as a “truly historic moment” when “everyone across the globe [was] sharing the same experience” (Senior 2021: viii) in the sense that everyone was somehow – though in very different ways – affected by this event. Moreover, Senior stresses the unprecedented importance of sharing information online across the world during the crisis: “[…] for the first time [we had] the tec...

[video:marcas-maighdean-roin]Maighdean-ròin is a commission from the Hands Across the Sea conference. It not only gave the gift of time and financial support to Marcas and Alex, but facilitated the deepening of their creative, collaborative relationship. Alex was particularly inspired by this text from Dùileach, the first of two seeking to re-situate the traditional Scottish Gaelic narrative of the Selkie, within a contemporary context. These works – textual and filmic – use the narrative as...

Over the last decade, analyses of Scotland’s historic global diasporas have incorporated more pronounced conversations on how Scotland’s current political, social, and economic contexts are rooted in the legacies of the British Empire. While this has produced narratives highlighting Scotland’s key role in imperial expansion, the resonance of this in establishing and perpetuating systems of white oppression are less widely addressed in Scotland’s consciousness of its own identity. Through consideration of how architecture’s cultural analogies reflect and represent Imperial ideologies, this paper will explore the resonance of architectural urban discourse funded by the outputs of the British Empire. It will discuss how an architecturally focused reading of our built environment can clearly recognise the systemic legacies of colonialism and imperialism within our urban realm, and further enhance inclusive narratives of Scotland’s heritage. This will highlight how a more nuanced approach to reading the historic built environment is necessary to challenge established current authorised heritage discourse of white male histories. It will demonstrate the function of the built environment in telling stories of Scotland’s prominent role in Empire and how this supports a human-rights based approach to heritage analysis.

The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-fictional literature, and inscribed in the Edinburgh cityscape. It is also commodified so as to attract the international tourist trade. Using as its prime example Ian Rankin’s 2001 Rebus novel The Falls, this paper sketches the cultural history of one notorious criminal case, that of William Burke and William Hare. In particular, it discusses the spatio-temporal referentiality of texts about Burke and Hare and situates them in the wider context of the Scottish literary tradition.

The impetus to devolve power to regional health and social care partners is part of a general process towards devolution and decentralisation in the UK. Yet, for over a century or more, centralisation of power has been a key feature of UK regional policy. In 2015, on the eve of health budget devolution to Manchester, only 25% of public expenditure was allocated to local government. The NHS also followed a tradition of central control for much of the 20th century. From 1997 and the devolution process in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it was expected that transfer of power to the regions would be high on the political agenda, but initial attempts to create directly elected mayors failed to get much support. It was not until 2010 that a consensus emerged across political parties that power should be devolved to local communities on a much grander scale, which led to the Localism Act of 2011, the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships and 26 City Deals. In 2014, George Osborne announced a major devolution of powers and the development of a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ in an effort to boost economic growth in the North of England. NHS England’s Five Year Forward View report of 2014 underlined the need to decentralise health policy stating that “England is too diverse for a ‘one size fits all’ care model to apply everywhere” (NHS England, 2015). It is within this context that Greater Manchester was chosen to be the first region to run its own health and social care budget. This represents a significant move to improve health outcomes in the Northern region, given that the North West has comparatively poor health outcomes. Initial evaluations of the effectiveness of devolving health budgets to the regions have been rather inconclusive. Doyle and Johnston’s (2016) review of international literature found that there was little evidence to suggest that devolution improved clinical outcomes or health status. As far as England is concerned, while there is much support for the decentralising and democratising process, there is concern that it is still largely driven at national level. Nevertheless, the Health Foundation (2017) has underlined the importance of this move. While it claims this may not bring significant changes to the way in which NHS services are run, it could well have a significant impact on overall health because devolution has also transferred more powers to the region over housing, employment and transport. However, the health deal has not led to an increase in the overall budget. The concern is that while regions may have innovative ideas to improve the health of their citizens, they may not have sufficient funding to implement such changes. This article thus seeks to assess whether six years after devolution of the health budget to Greater Manchester the ambitions to improve outcomes have been achieved. It will do so through analysis of secondary data (academic research, local government literature, publicly available minutes…) and original interviews with health and social care providers and principal stakeholders.

A translation is always a process and never a simple one or a complete one. The task of the translator is to transpose meanings allowing distant worlds to make sense of each other but this always bears with itself a dimension of failure as nothing can be perfectly transposed from one language to another without losing or altering part of its meaning. If, as Salman Rushdie observes, from an etymological point of view to translate means to carry across, then the migrant is a ‘translated man’. The migrant’s translation implies physical, linguistic and cultural border-crossings that generate a process that shapes the migrant’s identity. This process is an act of sur-vival, both in the sense of living on the margins and in the sense of the migrant‘s dream for survival (Benjamin, Bhabha, Derrida, Rushdie). The paper proposes a reading of Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers that analyses how it represents the relationship between translation and the Pakistani migrants’ processes of identity construction.