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Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can be read in The White Review No. 13.



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Wildness of the Day

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December 2016

Orlando Reade

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December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier that year a canopy of...

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

Three of Ngozi Onwurah’s exceptional shorts were screened at the fifteenth London Short Film Festival this January Ngozi was a member of the late 1980s avant-garde, making socio-political films about the experiences of marginalised people She was also the only Black British female filmmaker to have a feature film – Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) – released in UK cinemas for a long damn time   My favourite of the three was The Body Beautiful (1991), a deeply empathetic exploration of the relationship between physical disability and sexuality, aided by extraordinary aesthetic imagery Neither documentary nor fiction, the film opens with the shot of a white mother and black daughter, naked and embracing Ngozi casts Sian Ejiwumi-Le Berre as her teenage self, and her real mum, Madge Onwurah, in the lead role The young Ngozi is working as a fashion model, and she is forced to conform to the stereotype of the highly sexualised black woman on set – her photographer calls for her to give ‘sex’ and ‘passion’ Madge has lost a breast to cancer and suffers from rheumatoid arthritis While Ngozi possesses a casual confidence, and is realising her sexual appeal as a young mixed race woman, Madge is experiencing post-surgery anxiety Part way through the film, a scene of a tender, uninhibited, erotic fantasy between Madge and a young black man is a reminder that disability does not erode sexuality It’s beautiful and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this on screen, ever   At the close of The Body Beautiful, the shot of mother and daughter embracing is repeated Only once we’ve witnessed the intertwining of their experiences does the full significance of this embrace become clear – it carries the weight of inclusion and exclusion, of a mother and daughter, each gifted with something the other cannot access   Coffee Coloured Children (1988) takes a gruelling look at growing up mixed-race in 1980s England It begins pleasantly, with archive footage of people of various ethnicities, accompanied by the fitting Blue Mink song ‘Melting Pot’ – but the tone shifts very quickly The voices of two children, a brother and sister, narrate

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette...

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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November 2012

Orlando Reade

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November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer:...

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poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

poetry

February 2012

Giant Impact Hypothesis

James Midgley

poetry

February 2012

I bought a satellite’s eye from the market. To look through it involved the whole god-orbit, a cotton-wooled Faberge...

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Issue No. 7

The White Review No. 7 Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 7

A few issues back we grandiosely stated ‘that it is more important now than ever to provide a forum...

 

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