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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

This issue of The White Review – which marks the tenth anniversary of its foundation – takes up questions that have driven the magazine throughout its history: the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the possibilities of form, the question, as Lydia Davis puts it in an interview here, of ‘how one tells a story’ Several of the pieces that follow seek to subvert or expand received notions of narrative and history, asking how we interpret texts and images from the past, and what might be at stake in the stories, places and relationships we choose to remember and forget In a detailed interview, the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola describes how she sets out ‘to question the stories we tell ourselves’ and explore ‘the messy human element of history’ Her work – shown on this issue’s cover, and in a series inside – creates a rich interplay between reality and imagined worlds, and dissects the way myths and dominant narratives are shaped by power   In his essay on the photographic work of Rabih Mroué – in particular his images of gunmen in Syria, drawn from the cameraphones of protesters or civilians in their sightlines – Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa argues that seeing is a ‘necessarily social practice’ Discussing the responsibilities incumbent on the spectators of images of catastrophe, Wolukau-Wanambwa suggests that a close attention to the way images act, and a sensitivity to their possibilities and ambiguities, may ‘sunder the linear division of sequential time by making pasts happen again and again in new and evolving presents’ Taking up this proposal, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s essay ‘All the Stain is Tender’, which layers personal experience over a history of anti-Asian legislation in Australia, examines the corrosive effect of generational trauma, and the way languages and ‘official’ histories have long been co-opted as means of oppression Through archival research into discrimination against immigrants and the buried history of the West Melbourne Swamp, Yu makes a case for ‘racial grief’ as a way to understand the insidious, unquantifiable way that ‘the past embeds itself in your body’, writing against the colonial narratives that

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

fiction

June 2017

Turksib

Lutz Seiler

TR. Alexander Booth

fiction

June 2017

The jolts of the tracks were stronger now and came at irregular intervals. With my arms outstretched, I held...

Interview

May 2014

Interview with Conrad Shawcross

Patrick Sykes

Interview

May 2014

Though an intimidating sixteen feet tall, the industrial robot in Conrad Shawcross’s flat doesn’t look at all out of...

feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

 

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