November 11, 2004
Christopher Hill: "Levellers and True Levellers"
Hill, Christopher. "Levellers and True Levellers", from The World Turned Upside Down in Cultural Resistance: A Reader ed. Stephen Duncombe (2002): 17-34.
In Duncombe's Introduction to the Reader, he explains the significance of this reprint for this reader. "We open with an archetype: Christopher Hill's account of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers' seizure of St George's Hill in 1649. Laid out in the Diggers' actions and Winstanley's words are nearly all the possibilities and pitfalls of cultural resistance that will be played out for centuries to come - and explored in the readings that follow" (9).
The article itself is a compelling narrative of resistance brought on by frustration and exasperation during a time of starvation and severe class battles between the poor and the elite. The resistance is pre-empted by a note to Parliament which says, "Necessity dissolves all laws and government, and hunger will break through stone walls" (18). In short, desperate and hungry, a group of people choose to make common property what was privatized so that they could grow food. As it turns out, their efforts are futile since the land is barren, but "the symbolism of taking back as common land what had been enclosed (i.e. privatized) overshadows the negligible material value of planing corn in barren soil" (17).
Functionally, the article serves to introduce the reader to a political and socio-cultural situation in which resistance emerged. While the narrative is quite compelling, it is not necessarily the contents of it that are of value for my purposes, so much as the mindset.
In prefacing the article, Duncombe reminds us that the struggle exposed in this article is "archetypal, exhibiting many of the characteristics - pre-figurative symbolic protests, ideological appropriation of a master text, lack of strategy and organizational structure, spread of idea and ideal - that mark cultural resistance today" (17).
Category: cultural studies
Posted by zephoria at November 11, 2004 10:29 PM
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