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Suneel Mehmi

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PhD in English Literature and Law (Westminster)
LLB in Laws (LSE)
LLM in Law and Society (Brunel)
BA Hons. 1st class in English Literature (Westminster)

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Papers by Suneel Mehmi

There is no Bad Mother: Beta and the Indian Mother-Law Against the West’s Asian Mother Phobia

Cafe Dissensus, 2022

According to Freud, Western frameworks of legal subjectivity are founded on the Oedipal taboo aga... more According to Freud, Western frameworks of legal subjectivity are founded on the Oedipal taboo against mother/son incest. In conscious opposition, Indian legal subjectivity is based on mother/son union and symbolic incest. The intertextual allusions to the film 'Mother India' in the film 'Beta' reveals that the Indian legal subject cannot be separated from the mother.

Reading to See and the Invisibility of Language in the Line of Vision: They Watch the Moon by Trevor Paglen

They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, ... more They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, but actually they see nothing. They are worth watching. 1 Inside the frame of the photograph there are green trees with buildings, machines and lights scattered amongst them. Technology and nature are seen together. However, the image resists the assignation of meaning, the fixing of identities. It is difficult to tell what it is precisely that is seen beyond the general registration and recognition of familiar forms and shapes. Thus we do not understand the image of itself, nor do we truly &quot; see &quot; it with a perfect vision. Instead, we must read the letters of the title in order to derive meaning, which are no less enigmatic: &quot; They Watch the Moon &quot; … The viewing becomes a reading and the viewing an extension and elaboration of reading. They watch. Watching. Not seeing, but watching. The photograph is a representation of a classified &quot; listening station &quot; deep within West Virginian forest. What we see is a secret place, a quiet zone where radio transmissions and wireless internet devices are severely restricted. The listening station captures communications from across the globe as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth. Watching is being done not in the sense not of seeing, but of listening. The surveillance conducted is via the sound of sonic echoes. Vision is not implicated in the process and is redundant, unnecessary. We mirror the watchers since the image remains incomprehensible without the support of the words of the title. It is language that enables comprehension and is prior, privileged, not vision. Vision is supplementary and dependent on the text. They do not see the moon, we do not really see the image, for the seeing is in fact reading and the placing of forms in relation to words. What is imagistic is not independent and does not speak on its own terms. We share a blindness. In the same way that the title of the poem bestows meaning to the image by inserting it into text and language, into the practice of reading, the act of them watching must become an act of language, an act of listening, of comprehending words. We all collude in the system of invisible language set against vision and the visible and we all become watchers, not seers, of a secret language, a secret practice of communication. It is an open secret. The photograph is itself a secret act of surveillance upon those who survey. They watch the moon only to hear. We watch the watchers only through a reading. The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light. If the watchers listen to echoes reflected off the

Annihilation as Segregation Philosophy: White Spaces of Law/Power/Desire

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2021

In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with des... more In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with desire and power. Annihilation, in my view, presents conceptions of white spaces of Law/Power/Desire that are threatened by interracial relationships associated with nightmare spaces of difference. I examine strategies of how space is conceived of and controlled in this white supremacist mindset and how categories of bodies that move through areas to form relationships are controlled. In particular, I expose how the segregation philosophy of the film relies on the control of white women and the prohibition of their connection with black men.

Fiction and the reaction to photography : literalism, the law and the conditions and the control of reading from the invention of photography to the 1920s

This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly Engli... more This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices. I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteentwenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as

Charles Dickens's Writing Project – The Preservation of the Power Name "Boz" and the Foundling

Dickens Quarterly, 2020

IMPORTANCE Behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) programs targeting a single ... more IMPORTANCE Behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) programs targeting a single class of problems have not been widely implemented. The population of youths with common mental health problems is markedly undertreated. OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of a new transdiagnostic CBT program (Mind My Mind [MMM]) compared with management as usual (MAU) in youths with emotional and behavioral problems below the threshold for referral to mental health care. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This pragmatic, multisite, randomized clinical trial of MMM vs MAU was conducted from September 7, 2017, to August 28, 2019, including 8 weeks of postintervention follow-up, in 4 municipalities in Denmark. Consecutive help-seeking youths were randomized (1:1) to the MMM or the MAU group. Main inclusion criteria were age 6 to 16 years and anxiety, depressive symptoms, and/or behavioral disturbances as a primary problem. Data were analyzed from August 12 to October 25, 2019. INTERVENTIONS The MMM intervention consisted of 9 to 13 weekly, individually adapted sessions of manualized CBT delivered by local psychologists. The MAU group received 2 care coordination visits to enhance usual care. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was change in mental health problems reported by parents at week 18, using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) Impact scale (range, 0-10 points, with higher scores indicating greater severity of distress and impairment). Primary and secondary outcomes were assessed in the intention-to-treat population at week 18. Maintenance effects were assessed at week 26. RESULTS A total of 396 youths (mean [SD] age, 10.3 [2.4] years; 206 [52.0%] boys) were randomized to MMM (n = 197) or MAU (n = 199), with primary outcome data available in 177 (89.8%) and 167 (83.9%), respectively, at 18 weeks. The SDQ Impact score decreased by 2.34 points with MMM and 1.23 with MAU, from initial scores of 4.12 and 4.21, respectively (between-group difference, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.75-1.45]; P < .001; Cohen d = 0.60). Number of responders (Ն1-point reduction in SDQ Impact score) was greater with MMM than with MAU (144 of 197 [73.1%] vs 93 of 199 [46.7%]; number needed to treat, 4 [95% CI, 3-6]). Secondary outcomes indicated statistically significant benefits in parent-reported changes of anxiety, depressive symptoms, daily functioning, school attendance, and the principal problem. All benefits were maintained at week 26 except for school attendance. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this randomized clinical trial, the scalable transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral intervention MMM outperformed MAU in a community setting on multiple, clinically relevant domains in youth with emotional and behavioral problems. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03535805

Photography's ‘fatal resemblances’

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading, 2021

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading: Literalism and Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Understanding the Significance and Purpose of Violence in the Short Stories of Roald Dahl

In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short s... more In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story in his most successful collections Someone Like You, Kiss, Kiss and Switch Bitch by systematising and accounting for its portrayed violence. I first outline the history, importance and contemporary significance of Dahl’s short stories. I then show that a strange puzzle attaches itself to these stories: that a number of inconsistent accounts have been attempted in order to explain the tantalisingly meaningful violence within them. I see such attempts to account for the violence and meanings of Dahl's adult writing as failures and argue that they do not critically engage with the recurring contexts and forms of the violence or Dahl’s own suggestions for its occurrence. I then remedy such critical deficiencies through an application of the psychoanalytical method and more adequately reformulate the violence by uncovering its relation to unconscious processes which repress innate de...

Representation of photography, literalist reading and ‘the absence of higher truths’ in art

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading, 2021

Photograph albums in fiction

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemp... more At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemporary idea of law emerged out of specific ideas of reading in the nineteenth century. Reading shapes our identities. How we read shapes who we are. Reading also shapes our conceptions of what the law is, because the law is also a practice of reading. Focusing on the works of key Victorian writers closely associated with legal practice, this book addresses the way in which the identity of the reader of law has been modelled on the identity of the political elite. At the same time, it shows how other readers of law have been marginalised. The book thus shows how a construction of the law has emerged from the ordering of a power that discriminates between different readers and readings. More specifically, and in response to the emerging media of photography-and, with it, potentially subversive ideas of exposure and visibility-the book shows that there have been dominant, hidden and unrecognised guides to legal reading and to legal thought. And in making these visible, the book also aims to make them contestable. This secret history of law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, those working at the intersection of law and literature and others with interests in law and the visual.

Representation and reading against photographic details in the work of Henry James

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

Annihilation as Segregation Philosophy: White Spaces of Law

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2021

In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with des... more In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with desire and power. Annihilation, in my view, presents conceptions of white spaces of Law/Power/Desire which are threatened by interracial relationships associated with nightmare spaces of difference. I examine strategies of how space is conceived of and controlled in this white supremacist mindset and how categories of bodies that move through areas to form relationships are controlled. In particular, I expose how the segregation philosophy of the film relies on the control of white women and the prohibition of their connection with black men.

Charles Dickens's Writing Project – The Preservation of the Power Name "Boz" and the Foundling

The Dickens Quarterly, 2020

This study uncovers the foundations, form and intent of Charles Dickens's philanthropic project. ... more This study uncovers the foundations, form and intent of Charles Dickens's philanthropic project. I argue that the pseudonym "Boz" orchestrates the later novels and an author persona of benevolence through its reliance on an association with Moses and the London Foundling Hospital foundling. My analysis reveals the importance of the author's name in shaping and granting cohesion and integrity to writing. I also expose the larger aims and a key, but hitherto unknown motivation of Dickens's work and being. This is a secret story of a tormenting, unreturned benevolence which mercilessly drives the author to greater and greater heights.

The S Joke.docx

Analysis of a joke in terms of law, reading and power. Argument: the writing of the law is concea... more

Reading to See and the Invisibility of Language in the Line of Vision: They Watch the Moon by Trevor Paglen

They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, ... more They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, but actually they see nothing. They are worth watching. 1 Inside the frame of the photograph there are green trees with buildings, machines and lights scattered amongst them. Technology and nature are seen together. However, the image resists the assignation of meaning, the fixing of identities. It is difficult to tell what it is precisely that is seen beyond the general registration and recognition of familiar forms and shapes. Thus we do not understand the image of itself, nor do we truly " see " it with a perfect vision. Instead, we must read the letters of the title in order to derive meaning, which are no less enigmatic: " They Watch the Moon " … The viewing becomes a reading and the viewing an extension and elaboration of reading. They watch. Watching. Not seeing, but watching. The photograph is a representation of a classified " listening station " deep within West Virginian forest. What we see is a secret place, a quiet zone where radio transmissions and wireless internet devices are severely restricted. The listening station captures communications from across the globe as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth. Watching is being done not in the sense not of seeing, but of listening. The surveillance conducted is via the sound of sonic echoes. Vision is not implicated in the process and is redundant, unnecessary. We mirror the watchers since the image remains incomprehensible without the support of the words of the title. It is language that enables comprehension and is prior, privileged, not vision. Vision is supplementary and dependent on the text. They do not see the moon, we do not really see the image, for the seeing is in fact reading and the placing of forms in relation to words. What is imagistic is not independent and does not speak on its own terms. We share a blindness. In the same way that the title of the poem bestows meaning to the image by inserting it into text and language, into the practice of reading, the act of them watching must become an act of language, an act of listening, of comprehending words. We all collude in the system of invisible language set against vision and the visible and we all become watchers, not seers, of a secret language, a secret practice of communication. It is an open secret. The photograph is itself a secret act of surveillance upon those who survey. They watch the moon only to hear. We watch the watchers only through a reading. The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light. If the watchers listen to echoes reflected off the

Review: John O'Donoghue Sectioned: A Life Interrupted

<1> Coincidentally, at the time of writing, I find that John O'Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A L... more <1> Coincidentally, at the time of writing, I find that John O'Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster, where I am a PhD student. While I have not had the pleasure of attending his lectures, I have enjoyed reading his impressive first novel. Sectioned is a picaresque novel that also fits into the confessional mode long established by such works as Sylvia Plath'sThe Bell Jar. The novel ably explores the personal suffering of mental illness, the nature of life and society in institutionalised settings in Ireland and London, and the effects of government intervention in the lives of patients. The novel is made up of an ever-changing ensemble of characters and locations. As the narrator writes, This is what life is, I thought. A series of scenes, played out across a stage where the back-cloth and the flats, the props and the lighting rig, are all taken down again and put up again in some other distant place, new performers quickly assembled, old parts recast.

Review: Tarquin Hall, Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End

<1> At the beginning of Salaam Brick Lane, we are confronted with the glaring disparity between a... more <1> At the beginning of Salaam Brick Lane, we are confronted with the glaring disparity between an advertisement for and the reality of a place. Hall is describing his future home, a squalid and ill-constructed attic with scanty furnishings and none of the conveniences that we have come to think of as necessary to modern life. The attic sits atop an illegally run sweatshop. This could easily be the third world, but it is not. This is London --and Hall's first defamiliarised, paranoiac encounter with the 'mere reality' of the East End, the immigrant's view where he sees something of the world of the underclass.

Review of Rachel Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane

Understanding the Significance and Purpose of Violence in the Short Stories of Roald Dahl

PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Jun 14, 2014

In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story... more In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story in his most successful collections Someone Like You, Kiss, Kiss and Switch Bitch by systematising and accounting for its portrayed violence. I first outline the history, importance and contemporary significance of Dahl’s short stories. I then show that a strange puzzle attaches itself to these stories: that a number of inconsistent accounts have been attempted in order to explain the tantalisingly meaningful violence within them. I see such attempts to account for the violence and meanings of Dahl's adult writing as failures and argue that they do not critically engage with the recurring contexts and forms of the violence or Dahl’s own suggestions for its occurrence. I then remedy such critical deficiencies through an application of the psychoanalytical method and more adequately reformulate the violence by uncovering its relation to unconscious processes which repress innate desires, demonstrating that psychoanalytical theories of repression can engage with and contribute to understanding the significance of the violence, which is predicated on taboo relations between son and mother. I thus rethink the meaning and architecture of the stories psychoanalytically, suggesting for them a new claim for attention.

There is no Bad Mother: Beta and the Indian Mother-Law Against the West’s Asian Mother Phobia

Cafe Dissensus, 2022

According to Freud, Western frameworks of legal subjectivity are founded on the Oedipal taboo aga... more According to Freud, Western frameworks of legal subjectivity are founded on the Oedipal taboo against mother/son incest. In conscious opposition, Indian legal subjectivity is based on mother/son union and symbolic incest. The intertextual allusions to the film 'Mother India' in the film 'Beta' reveals that the Indian legal subject cannot be separated from the mother.

Reading to See and the Invisibility of Language in the Line of Vision: They Watch the Moon by Trevor Paglen

They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, ... more They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, but actually they see nothing. They are worth watching. 1 Inside the frame of the photograph there are green trees with buildings, machines and lights scattered amongst them. Technology and nature are seen together. However, the image resists the assignation of meaning, the fixing of identities. It is difficult to tell what it is precisely that is seen beyond the general registration and recognition of familiar forms and shapes. Thus we do not understand the image of itself, nor do we truly &quot; see &quot; it with a perfect vision. Instead, we must read the letters of the title in order to derive meaning, which are no less enigmatic: &quot; They Watch the Moon &quot; … The viewing becomes a reading and the viewing an extension and elaboration of reading. They watch. Watching. Not seeing, but watching. The photograph is a representation of a classified &quot; listening station &quot; deep within West Virginian forest. What we see is a secret place, a quiet zone where radio transmissions and wireless internet devices are severely restricted. The listening station captures communications from across the globe as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth. Watching is being done not in the sense not of seeing, but of listening. The surveillance conducted is via the sound of sonic echoes. Vision is not implicated in the process and is redundant, unnecessary. We mirror the watchers since the image remains incomprehensible without the support of the words of the title. It is language that enables comprehension and is prior, privileged, not vision. Vision is supplementary and dependent on the text. They do not see the moon, we do not really see the image, for the seeing is in fact reading and the placing of forms in relation to words. What is imagistic is not independent and does not speak on its own terms. We share a blindness. In the same way that the title of the poem bestows meaning to the image by inserting it into text and language, into the practice of reading, the act of them watching must become an act of language, an act of listening, of comprehending words. We all collude in the system of invisible language set against vision and the visible and we all become watchers, not seers, of a secret language, a secret practice of communication. It is an open secret. The photograph is itself a secret act of surveillance upon those who survey. They watch the moon only to hear. We watch the watchers only through a reading. The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light. If the watchers listen to echoes reflected off the

Annihilation as Segregation Philosophy: White Spaces of Law/Power/Desire

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2021

In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with des... more In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with desire and power. Annihilation, in my view, presents conceptions of white spaces of Law/Power/Desire that are threatened by interracial relationships associated with nightmare spaces of difference. I examine strategies of how space is conceived of and controlled in this white supremacist mindset and how categories of bodies that move through areas to form relationships are controlled. In particular, I expose how the segregation philosophy of the film relies on the control of white women and the prohibition of their connection with black men.

Fiction and the reaction to photography : literalism, the law and the conditions and the control of reading from the invention of photography to the 1920s

This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly Engli... more This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices. I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteentwenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as

Charles Dickens's Writing Project – The Preservation of the Power Name "Boz" and the Foundling

Dickens Quarterly, 2020

IMPORTANCE Behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) programs targeting a single ... more IMPORTANCE Behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) programs targeting a single class of problems have not been widely implemented. The population of youths with common mental health problems is markedly undertreated. OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of a new transdiagnostic CBT program (Mind My Mind [MMM]) compared with management as usual (MAU) in youths with emotional and behavioral problems below the threshold for referral to mental health care. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This pragmatic, multisite, randomized clinical trial of MMM vs MAU was conducted from September 7, 2017, to August 28, 2019, including 8 weeks of postintervention follow-up, in 4 municipalities in Denmark. Consecutive help-seeking youths were randomized (1:1) to the MMM or the MAU group. Main inclusion criteria were age 6 to 16 years and anxiety, depressive symptoms, and/or behavioral disturbances as a primary problem. Data were analyzed from August 12 to October 25, 2019. INTERVENTIONS The MMM intervention consisted of 9 to 13 weekly, individually adapted sessions of manualized CBT delivered by local psychologists. The MAU group received 2 care coordination visits to enhance usual care. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was change in mental health problems reported by parents at week 18, using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) Impact scale (range, 0-10 points, with higher scores indicating greater severity of distress and impairment). Primary and secondary outcomes were assessed in the intention-to-treat population at week 18. Maintenance effects were assessed at week 26. RESULTS A total of 396 youths (mean [SD] age, 10.3 [2.4] years; 206 [52.0%] boys) were randomized to MMM (n = 197) or MAU (n = 199), with primary outcome data available in 177 (89.8%) and 167 (83.9%), respectively, at 18 weeks. The SDQ Impact score decreased by 2.34 points with MMM and 1.23 with MAU, from initial scores of 4.12 and 4.21, respectively (between-group difference, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.75-1.45]; P < .001; Cohen d = 0.60). Number of responders (Ն1-point reduction in SDQ Impact score) was greater with MMM than with MAU (144 of 197 [73.1%] vs 93 of 199 [46.7%]; number needed to treat, 4 [95% CI, 3-6]). Secondary outcomes indicated statistically significant benefits in parent-reported changes of anxiety, depressive symptoms, daily functioning, school attendance, and the principal problem. All benefits were maintained at week 26 except for school attendance. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this randomized clinical trial, the scalable transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral intervention MMM outperformed MAU in a community setting on multiple, clinically relevant domains in youth with emotional and behavioral problems. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03535805

Photography's ‘fatal resemblances’

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading, 2021

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading: Literalism and Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Understanding the Significance and Purpose of Violence in the Short Stories of Roald Dahl

In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short s... more In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story in his most successful collections Someone Like You, Kiss, Kiss and Switch Bitch by systematising and accounting for its portrayed violence. I first outline the history, importance and contemporary significance of Dahl’s short stories. I then show that a strange puzzle attaches itself to these stories: that a number of inconsistent accounts have been attempted in order to explain the tantalisingly meaningful violence within them. I see such attempts to account for the violence and meanings of Dahl's adult writing as failures and argue that they do not critically engage with the recurring contexts and forms of the violence or Dahl’s own suggestions for its occurrence. I then remedy such critical deficiencies through an application of the psychoanalytical method and more adequately reformulate the violence by uncovering its relation to unconscious processes which repress innate de...

Representation of photography, literalist reading and ‘the absence of higher truths’ in art

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading, 2021

Photograph albums in fiction

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemp... more At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemporary idea of law emerged out of specific ideas of reading in the nineteenth century. Reading shapes our identities. How we read shapes who we are. Reading also shapes our conceptions of what the law is, because the law is also a practice of reading. Focusing on the works of key Victorian writers closely associated with legal practice, this book addresses the way in which the identity of the reader of law has been modelled on the identity of the political elite. At the same time, it shows how other readers of law have been marginalised. The book thus shows how a construction of the law has emerged from the ordering of a power that discriminates between different readers and readings. More specifically, and in response to the emerging media of photography-and, with it, potentially subversive ideas of exposure and visibility-the book shows that there have been dominant, hidden and unrecognised guides to legal reading and to legal thought. And in making these visible, the book also aims to make them contestable. This secret history of law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, those working at the intersection of law and literature and others with interests in law and the visual.

Representation and reading against photographic details in the work of Henry James

Law, Literature and the Power of Reading

Annihilation as Segregation Philosophy: White Spaces of Law

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2021

In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with des... more In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with desire and power. Annihilation, in my view, presents conceptions of white spaces of Law/Power/Desire which are threatened by interracial relationships associated with nightmare spaces of difference. I examine strategies of how space is conceived of and controlled in this white supremacist mindset and how categories of bodies that move through areas to form relationships are controlled. In particular, I expose how the segregation philosophy of the film relies on the control of white women and the prohibition of their connection with black men.

Charles Dickens's Writing Project – The Preservation of the Power Name "Boz" and the Foundling

The Dickens Quarterly, 2020

This study uncovers the foundations, form and intent of Charles Dickens's philanthropic project. ... more This study uncovers the foundations, form and intent of Charles Dickens's philanthropic project. I argue that the pseudonym "Boz" orchestrates the later novels and an author persona of benevolence through its reliance on an association with Moses and the London Foundling Hospital foundling. My analysis reveals the importance of the author's name in shaping and granting cohesion and integrity to writing. I also expose the larger aims and a key, but hitherto unknown motivation of Dickens's work and being. This is a secret story of a tormenting, unreturned benevolence which mercilessly drives the author to greater and greater heights.

The S Joke.docx

Analysis of a joke in terms of law, reading and power. Argument: the writing of the law is concea... more

Reading to See and the Invisibility of Language in the Line of Vision: They Watch the Moon by Trevor Paglen

They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, ... more They watch the moon, they watch those watching the moon, they watch those not watching the moon, but actually they see nothing. They are worth watching. 1 Inside the frame of the photograph there are green trees with buildings, machines and lights scattered amongst them. Technology and nature are seen together. However, the image resists the assignation of meaning, the fixing of identities. It is difficult to tell what it is precisely that is seen beyond the general registration and recognition of familiar forms and shapes. Thus we do not understand the image of itself, nor do we truly " see " it with a perfect vision. Instead, we must read the letters of the title in order to derive meaning, which are no less enigmatic: " They Watch the Moon " … The viewing becomes a reading and the viewing an extension and elaboration of reading. They watch. Watching. Not seeing, but watching. The photograph is a representation of a classified " listening station " deep within West Virginian forest. What we see is a secret place, a quiet zone where radio transmissions and wireless internet devices are severely restricted. The listening station captures communications from across the globe as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth. Watching is being done not in the sense not of seeing, but of listening. The surveillance conducted is via the sound of sonic echoes. Vision is not implicated in the process and is redundant, unnecessary. We mirror the watchers since the image remains incomprehensible without the support of the words of the title. It is language that enables comprehension and is prior, privileged, not vision. Vision is supplementary and dependent on the text. They do not see the moon, we do not really see the image, for the seeing is in fact reading and the placing of forms in relation to words. What is imagistic is not independent and does not speak on its own terms. We share a blindness. In the same way that the title of the poem bestows meaning to the image by inserting it into text and language, into the practice of reading, the act of them watching must become an act of language, an act of listening, of comprehending words. We all collude in the system of invisible language set against vision and the visible and we all become watchers, not seers, of a secret language, a secret practice of communication. It is an open secret. The photograph is itself a secret act of surveillance upon those who survey. They watch the moon only to hear. We watch the watchers only through a reading. The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light. If the watchers listen to echoes reflected off the

Review: John O'Donoghue Sectioned: A Life Interrupted

<1> Coincidentally, at the time of writing, I find that John O'Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A L... more <1> Coincidentally, at the time of writing, I find that John O'Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster, where I am a PhD student. While I have not had the pleasure of attending his lectures, I have enjoyed reading his impressive first novel. Sectioned is a picaresque novel that also fits into the confessional mode long established by such works as Sylvia Plath'sThe Bell Jar. The novel ably explores the personal suffering of mental illness, the nature of life and society in institutionalised settings in Ireland and London, and the effects of government intervention in the lives of patients. The novel is made up of an ever-changing ensemble of characters and locations. As the narrator writes, This is what life is, I thought. A series of scenes, played out across a stage where the back-cloth and the flats, the props and the lighting rig, are all taken down again and put up again in some other distant place, new performers quickly assembled, old parts recast.

Review: Tarquin Hall, Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End

<1> At the beginning of Salaam Brick Lane, we are confronted with the glaring disparity between a... more <1> At the beginning of Salaam Brick Lane, we are confronted with the glaring disparity between an advertisement for and the reality of a place. Hall is describing his future home, a squalid and ill-constructed attic with scanty furnishings and none of the conveniences that we have come to think of as necessary to modern life. The attic sits atop an illegally run sweatshop. This could easily be the third world, but it is not. This is London --and Hall's first defamiliarised, paranoiac encounter with the 'mere reality' of the East End, the immigrant's view where he sees something of the world of the underclass.

Review of Rachel Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane

Understanding the Significance and Purpose of Violence in the Short Stories of Roald Dahl

PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Jun 14, 2014

In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story... more In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl's short story in his most successful collections Someone Like You, Kiss, Kiss and Switch Bitch by systematising and accounting for its portrayed violence. I first outline the history, importance and contemporary significance of Dahl’s short stories. I then show that a strange puzzle attaches itself to these stories: that a number of inconsistent accounts have been attempted in order to explain the tantalisingly meaningful violence within them. I see such attempts to account for the violence and meanings of Dahl's adult writing as failures and argue that they do not critically engage with the recurring contexts and forms of the violence or Dahl’s own suggestions for its occurrence. I then remedy such critical deficiencies through an application of the psychoanalytical method and more adequately reformulate the violence by uncovering its relation to unconscious processes which repress innate desires, demonstrating that psychoanalytical theories of repression can engage with and contribute to understanding the significance of the violence, which is predicated on taboo relations between son and mother. I thus rethink the meaning and architecture of the stories psychoanalytically, suggesting for them a new claim for attention.

'The Walworth Beauty' Book Review

Michèle Roberts was raised in and lives in London. She was brought up in Edgware and she currentl... more Michèle Roberts was raised in and lives in London. She was brought up in Edgware and she currently resides in SouthEast London. The city itself has been seen as being a key creative influence on her writing. In 2008, Dr Jules Smith observed that Roberts's " exploration of London, the various areas and houses that she lived in, went alongside her development as a writer " (https:// literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/michele-roberts). The Walworth Beauty shows a fascination with the city and the exploration of its spaces and people both in the present and across historical time. The novel oscillates between two settings which interact with each other and have considerable overlaps. One is a Victorian London underworld of prostitutes and 'fallen women' represented by the experiences of Joseph Benson when he comes into contact with a black Londoner called Mrs Dulcimer. The other setting is more familiar. It is that of the contemporary scene in which Madeleine's experiences tell the story of London and Londoners. As can be seen from the title, in which a woman is named after an area in London, one of the key concerns of the novel is the representation of London life and Londoners, especially female Londoners. The novel emphasises the point since Joseph Benson is imagined as a researcher into the living conditions of prostitutes for London Labour and the London Poor, a work of Victorian journalism by Henry Mayhew which was written between the 1840s and the 1850s. Mayhew's towering work is often cited as breathing life into the experiences of London's poor, as a rich repository of fact. However, Joseph finds that his researches into the lives of prostitutes and 'fallen women', and his sympathy, cannot be corseted into the unemotional and statistic-heavy writing that Mayhew wishes to compose. This representation, he finds, is horribly inadequate and inhumane. Joseph also sees this form of representation to be rooted in a conservative and masculine Victorian mindset which is ignorant of women and their lives. Joseph " rewrites " the representation of London prostitutes in the novel, or reimagines them. Similarly, Arina Cirstea has called some of Roberts's works a " rewriting of London. " (Arina Cirstea, " A Space of One's Own: Reading Michele Roberts' Urban Imaginary " , Peer English, 9 (2014), 42.) The novel itself can be seen to mirror Joseph's assessment and " rewriting " of Mayhew's representation of London and London women since it eschews figures, facts and distance in favour of exploring the character of 'fallen women' and the concrete reality of their day-today lives and choices. The novel appears to champion its form as an empathetic and emotional woman's perspective over the abstract and scientific perspective of a man like Mayhew who doesn't even conduct his own research and interviews and doesn't appear to have any real experience of how marginalised groups live their lives. The Walworth Beauty aims to show that Mayhew's abstract notions of the representation of city life and its people are firmly situated in Victorian times, a time when white, middle class men held the reins of power and their perspective dominated intellectual and cultural life. The novel suggests that it

Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila - Representing Against: The List, the Photographer Blackmailer and the Writer

Book Review, French Literature, Postcolonial literature, fiction Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila... more

Morphologies, edited by Ra Page - The Classic Short Story in Contemporary, Non-Anatomical Vision

English Literature, Short stories Book Review of Morphologies edited by Ra Page, Comma Press, 2013

Book Review - The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Book Review and analysis

Sectioned - John O'Donoghue

Book Review in 'Literary London'

Salaam Brick Lane - Tarquin Hall

Book Review in 'Literary London'

On Brick Lane - Rachel Lichtenstein

Book Review in 'Literary London'

Chapter 4: Photograph Albums in Fiction -The Illegitimate Plots and Counter-Narratives of the Photograph-book

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 2019

In this chapter, I share Green-Lewis’s idea that photograph albums were associated with narrative... more In this chapter, I share Green-Lewis’s idea that photograph albums were associated with narrative function and this was why they were of importance to fiction and exploited by it. However, by concentrating on the representation of the photograph album within fiction itself and its relationship to the law within that fiction, including in writing by Charles Dickens himself, I wish to show that the narrative function of the photographic album was problematized in the fiction I have studied and to explain why this was so. I see the narrative function of the photograph album to have been perceived as competition and a significant threat to the writing of fiction. The photograph album was seen to usurp the narrative function of fiction.

Chapter 3: Representation and Reading against Photographic Details in the Work of Henry

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 1920

In this chapter, I will again explore how a reading which characterises the law and legal truth a... more In this chapter, I will again explore how a reading which characterises the law and legal truth as timeless, or ahistorical, and apolitical determines the nature of an ideal reading and reader. I aim to show how such a reading of the law emerges from a conception that photography's key contribution is the attention to detail in the work of Henry James. As I noted in the introduction to this thesis, photography was commonly associated with details. John Leighton stated that "minute detail is the attribute of the sun-picture". 1 Similarly, in the text accompanying Plate X, "The Haystack" in The Pencil of Nature (1844), Henry Fox Talbot wrote that: One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature. In my chapter on Wilkie Collins I have tried to show how a legal reading grounded in identity politics, particularly the identity politics of women, is rigorously denounced in works of fiction. My study of Henry James's work aims to show how such a reading is characterised as untruthful and too literal, and to reveal how it is seen as associated with the representation of women, because of their association with detail. Furthermore, Henry James is a very different writer to Collins, and his writing had pretensions to fine art. A study of his work therefore shows how the constructive opposition to photography by writers of fiction was shared across both popular culture and high culture and was central to authorship.

Photographys Fatal Resemblances Reading the Invisibility of Individuality and Truth in the work of Wilkie Collins

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 2019

This chapter analyses the depiction of reading in fiction as it emerges from the ideas of individ... more This chapter analyses the depiction of reading in fiction as it emerges from the ideas of individuality and visual resemblances in the work of Wilkie Collins. In Collins’s fiction, as I will show below, the idea of a photograph as a “likeness” is challenged. That is, the photograph’s visual resemblance of the individual, or its “likeness” is seen as inappropriate and misleading for ascertaining both individuality and legal truth. In fact, I will further contend, the photographic likeness is seen as a fraud on identity which is likened to both the murder of the individual and an act of forgery, or exploitation of their identity. Collins therefore outlines a picture of likeness as a “fatal resemblance”.

Chapter 1 -Representation of Photography, Literalist Reading and "the absence of higher truths" in Art

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 2019

In this chapter, I aim to outline how photography was linked to literalism and literalist reading... more In this chapter, I aim to outline how photography was linked to literalism and literalist reading in art criticism in a strategy intended to produce, simultaneously, art viewers and readers. As I aim to show, fiction shared this strategy. Focusing on John Ruskin's writings, although I also discuss other art critics, I aim to show exactly how his tying together of literalism and photography and his position that they were limited in terms of artistic truth influenced both narrative painting and fiction and consequently produced both intended readers and art viewers. It is my intention to show how Ruskin's formulations were productively exploited by both narrative painting and fiction drawing on his own statements about the conceptual relationship between power, the law and reading which he understood as enmeshed and mutually reinforcing categories.

Introduction ( FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S

This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly Engli... more This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices.
I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteen-twenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The study aims to illuminate how vision and reading are tied together and how visual codes are involved in how reading is experienced, conceptualised and carefully regulated. It also suggests how legal knowledge and methods of reading were a prime influence on fiction, its themes, how it was read and its readers.
The representation of photography and reading in fiction itself can be linked to the legal prohibition of photography and photo-realistic artwork from the courtroom in the 1920s. Thus, the analysis of fiction itself illuminates the conceptualisation, truth status, authority and construction of the law and the way in which the law preserves its status through the ways in which it is read and envisaged.

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 2019

This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly Engli... more This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices.
I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteen-twenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The study aims to illuminate how vision and reading are tied together and how visual codes are involved in how reading is experienced, conceptualised and carefully regulated. It also suggests how legal knowledge and methods of reading were a prime influence on fiction, its themes, how it was read and its readers.
The representation of photography and reading in fiction itself can be linked to the legal prohibition of photography and photo-realistic artwork from the courtroom in the 1920s. Thus, the analysis of fiction itself illuminates the conceptualisation, truth status, authority and construction of the law and the way in which the law preserves its status through the ways in which it is read and envisaged.