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In the words of the philosopher Cornel West, Raymond Williams was ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’. A figure of international importance in the fields of cultural criticism and social theory, Williams was also preoccupied throughout his life with the meaning and significance of his Welsh identity. Who Speaks for Wales? (2003) was the first collection of Raymond Williams’s writings on Welsh culture, literature, history and politics. It appeared in the early years of Welsh political devolution and offered a historical and theoretical basis for thinking across the divisions of nationalism and socialism in Welsh thought. This new edition, marking the centenary of Williams’s birth, appears at a very different moment. After the Brexit referendum of 2016, it remains to be seen whether the writings collected in this volume document a vision of a ‘Europe of the peoples and nations’ that was never to be realised, or whether they become foundational texts in the rejuvenation and future fulfilment of that ‘Welsh-European’ vision. Raymond Williams noted that Welsh history testifies to a ‘quite extraordinary process of self-generation and regeneration, from what seemed impossible conditions.’ This Centenary edition was compiled with these words in mind.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Return of the Native
CULTURE
1. Who Speaks for Wales?
2. Welsh Culture
3. The Arts in Wales
4. Wales and England
5. Community
6. West of Offa’s Dyke
HISTORY
1. The Social Significance of 1926
2. Boyhood
3. On Gwyn A. Williams: Three Reviews
The Black Domain
Putting the Welsh in their Place
The Shadow of the Dragon
4. Remaking Welsh History
5. For Britain, see Wales
6. Black Mountains
LITERATURE
1. Dylan Thomas's Play for Voices
2. Marxism, Poetry, Wales
3. The Welsh Industrial Novel
4. The Welsh Trilogy and The Volunteers
5. Freedom and a Lack of Confidence
6. The Tenses of Imagination
7. Region and Class in the Novel
8. Working-Class, Proletarian, Socialist: Problems in Some Welsh Novels
9. A Welsh Companion
10. All Things Betray Thee
11. People of the Black Mountains
POLITICS
1. Going into Europe
2. The Importance of Community
3. Are We Becoming More Divided?
4. The Culture of Nations
5. Decentralism and the Politics of Place
6. The Practice of Possibility
Afterword to the Centenary Edition
Index

Sujets

Political Science

Wales

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Publié par	University of Wales Press
Date de parution	01 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786837080
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

Facsimile of a page from the Raymond Williams Papers, Richard Burton Archive, Swansea University. Archive Reference: WWE/2/2/1/4.
This page is a list of uncollected essays compiled by Raymond Williams in the late 1970s. Many of the essays listed would appear in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) and Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983). At the bottom of the page, Raymond Williams notes ‘Others best kept for eventual book of WELSH ESSAYS’. ‘Welsh politics and culture’ refers to ‘Welsh Culture’. ‘Dividing Britain’ is the essay entitled ‘Are We Becoming More Divided’. The other titles are as they appear in this volume. Three envisioned essays are scribbled in Raymond Williams’s handwriting on the bottom of the page: ‘Planned: The English View of the Celts; Images of the Border; Finding the Border’. It seems that these essays were never written.

P ROFESSOR R AYMOND W ILLIAMS was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy. Among his seminal volumes of cultural criticism are Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973) and Marxism and Literature (1977). He died in 1988.
P ROFESSOR D ANIEL G. W ILLIAMS is Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University. He is the author of Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales (2012) and Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: from Arnold to Du Bois (2006).
THE CENTENARY EDITION
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
Who Speaks for Wales?
Nation, Culture, Identity
Edited by
Daniel G. Williams
© The Estate of Raymond Williams, 2021
Introduction, Afterword and Notes to the volume © Daniel G. Williams, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-706-6
eISBN 978-1-78683-708-0
The rights of those declared above to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image by permission, Media Wales Ltd.
I Sioned am fynd gyda fi i’r Pandy.
Ac er cof am ei thad Philip Griffith Jones a ddangosodd inni’r ffordd.
Bydd dyn wedi troi’r hanner-cant yn gweld yn lled glir Y bobl a’r cynefin a foldiodd ei fywyd e’
(Having turned fifty, a man sees pretty clearly The people and places that have moulded his life)
—D. Gwenallt Jones, ‘Y Meirwon’
Das Vorleben des Emigranten wird bekanntlich annulliert.
(The past life of the émigré is, as we know, annulled).
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Return of the Native
CULTURE

Who Speaks for Wales?
Welsh Culture
The Arts in Wales
Wales and England
Community
West of Offa’s Dyke
HISTORY

The Social Significance of 1926
Boyhood
On Gwyn A. Williams: Three Reviews
The Black Domain
Putting the Welsh in their Place
The Shadow of the Dragon
Remaking Welsh History
‘For Britain, see Wales’
Black Mountains
LITERATURE

Dylan Thomas’s Play for Voices
Marxism, Poetry, Wales
The Welsh Industrial Novel
The Welsh Trilogy and The Volunteers
Freedom and a Lack of Confidence
The Tenses of Imagination
Region and Class in the Novel
Working-Class, Proletarian, Socialist: Problems in Some Welsh Novels
A Welsh Companion
All Things Betray Thee
People of the Black Mountains
POLITICS

Going into Europe
The Importance of Community
Are We Becoming More Divided?
The Culture of Nations
Decentralism and the Politics of Place
The Practice of Possibility
Afterword to the Centenary Edition
Notes
PREFACE
W ho Speaks for Wales? first appeared in March 2003. It collected in one place the Welsh-related essays of Raymond Williams (1921–88) and was conceived and compiled in the years following the narrow vote for Welsh devolution in the referendum of 1997. If a distinctive Welsh political culture was to develop, and if devolution was indeed to be a ‘process’ rather than an ‘event’ – as the then Secretary for Wales Ron Davies described it – then, as several commentators noted, a sense of common aspiration and interest would need to be forged between the socialist and minority nationalist threads of Welsh political radicalism as embodied institutionally in the Labour party and Plaid Cymru. Raymond Williams’s thought and writings offered resources for forging a rapprochement between these traditions, and that is what I was attempting to foster in my emphasis in the introduction (which I have deliberately not updated nor amended for this edition) on the pluralism of Williams’s vision, on the questions asked as opposed to the answers offered, and on the ways in which Williams’s self-defined ‘Welsh-Europeanism’ could be seen as a manifestation of his call on socialists to engage in a project – associated primarily with the minority nationalist parties of Europe – of exploring ‘new forms of “variable” societies, in which over the whole range of social purposes different sizes of society’ could be ‘defined for different kinds of issue and decision’.
When the volume was launched, in the company of Raymond Williams’s daughter Merryn, at the annual Association for Welsh Writing in English conference in Gregynog, Newtown, the Labour government of Tony Blair was two years into its second term in Westminster and about to follow George W. Bush and the United States into a calamitous war in Iraq. An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis were killed in the first four years of conflict. Having established, via referenda, a Parliament for Scotland and an Assembly for Wales in 1997, and having brokered the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that ended most of the violence of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, Blair’s Labour government in the new millennium seemed to revert to an ideology of British exceptionalism: courting the Murdoch press; wrapping itself in the Union Jack; embracing a neo-liberal ideology that espoused interventionism abroad and a domestic program characterised by the expansion of privatisation and the adoption of the language and values of competitive business capitalism into the public arenas of health and education. The two-tiered system established by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was continued under Blair, with richer sectors of society buying themselves into private provision and thus cementing the political base for the rejection of any meaningful redistribution. Raymond Williams had warned in the 1980s that destroying public common interests in the name of private solutions would drive whatever was left of the ‘public’ sector into crisis, starved of investment. This is what the Thatcherite neo-liberal agenda delivered, perpetuated by Blair’s Labour.
Wales registered an early resistance to this neoliberal programme in the first elections to the new National Assembly in 1999. While Blair openly admitted that he regarded the devolved institutions to be little more than ‘parish councils’, Wales at least now had a vehicle where its political voice could be heard. In the first elections to the new Assembly, Labour won as expected, but Plaid Cymru surpassed expectations by gaining 30.5% of the vote (outperforming her Scottish sister party, the SNP). Labour learnt its lesson and soon deposed the Blairite Alun Michael, putting Rhodri Morgan in his place as First Minister. While Blair was essentially a post-Thatcherite individualist, Morgan had political roots in the hopes and aspirations of the Labour movement and, as the son of T. J. Morgan, onetime Professor of Welsh at Swansea University, also had a foot in the traditions of Welsh language culture. Evoking the legacy of Aneurin Bevan, Morgan set out to create ‘clear red water’ between ‘classic’ Welsh Labour and Blairism. Morgan understood that welfare systems have profound effects on the wider social framework. He knew that the principle of ‘social insurance’ was not only efficient but was also a way of underwriting an evolving sense of Welsh citizenship; that ‘universalist’ policies (free bus passes, free prescriptions, free school breakfasts) were essential to binding the richer sections of society into collective forms of welfare. Thus, while Blair was reconstructing the Labour Party along the lines of Bill Clinton’s neo-liberal Democrats in the United States, Rhodri Morgan was establishing a new Welsh polity based on European social-democratic values. This social-democratic vision informed the period of coalition with Plaid Cymru from 2007 to 2011. The affirmative ‘Yes’ vote (63.49%) for Wales to have law-making powers at the end of this period of coalition government in the referendum of 2011 seemed to suggest that the ‘Welsh European’ project was very much on track.
Retrospectively, the low turn-out of 35.2% in that referendum should have been a major cause for concern. The form of ‘Welsh welfarism’ espoused and developed by a series of Welsh Labour administrations failed, unlike the series of SNP administrat