bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and The New Yorker
Authors: Perrin Tom
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers US critic Dwight Macdonald's celebrated two-part hatchet job on so called middlebrow culture: ‘Masscult and Midcult’. However, it loses its edge when it comes to assessing The New Yorker, the middlebrow magazine for which Macdonald, at the time he wrote the articles in 1960, had been a staff writer for eight years. Like all middlebrow products, Macdonald says, The New Yorker is produced to a formula that makes it monotonous, except that its formula is better than the one used in editing its ‘Midcult brethren’. The chapter shows how Macdonald's prose emblematises a midcentury middlebrow literary mode called blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self contradiction.
Introduction
Authors: Green Fiona
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter discusses how the story of a periodical is not the story of its editors; it is also a narrative of intersections and adjacencies, of timeliness and accident, and of labour behind the scenes that is not visible in the finished product. A magazine is an ‘unstable compound’, a shifting terrain of verbal, visual and historical contingencies that arise from its internal workings (procedures for editing, checking, and production); in its published form (juxtapositions of editorial, cartoons, and advertising, arrangement into ‘departments’, visual constituents and page layouts); and in its external relations (readership, affiliations, and competition with other media). The chapter reads across and between The New Yorker departments, with particular weighting towards fiction and poetry.
Intertextuality and Constructive Non-identity: In Memoriam to Identity
Authors: Colby Georgina
Published: January 2018

In Memoriam To Identity is apprehended in chapter four as an experiment with the récit form. Acker’s compositional practice in In Memoriam to Identity is distinguished from that at work in Don Quixote through the topological form of the text, which folds in intersecting narratives and creates a fluid textual space, rather than a space characterised by disjunction. These topological revolutions have a counterpart in the radical politics of the text. Returning to Denise Riley’s work, I argue that through intertextuality, In Memoriam To Identity offers a site for that which Riley understands as constructive non-identity. The political and social negation of the voices of the narratives is positioned in contrast to the fictional site that offers the voices of the text a site of existence. The text points to the tensions surrounding the avant-garde idea of the sublation of art and life. In its inclusive and reintegrative form, the experimental text is apprehended as a site for community, solidarity, and intimacy.
Montage and Creative Cutting: My Mother: Demonology
Authors: Colby Georgina
Published: January 2018

Acker’s practice of cutting and montage is the focus of the fifth chapter. A close analysis of Acker’s notebooks, the preliminary materials for My Mother: Demonology housed in the Kathy Acker Papers, reveals a compositional process comparable to Maya Deren’s practice of creative cutting in her late modernist experimental film montage. In My Mother: Demonology, Acker explicitly engages with film. Like Luis Buñuel, Acker views desire as having a revolutionary capacity. My Mother: Demonology, in its indeterminacy, sites of condensation, and displacement, embodies the structures of desire. It also marks Acker’s turn to the image. Chapter 5 argues for the primacy of the image in Acker’s experimental montage as a continuation of a modernist aesthetic legacy. The chapter suggests that the work possesses what Deren understands to be a ‘vertical axis’ in poetry that is able to create ‘visible and auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement.’ This vertical axis is present both in the text’s movement from the quotidian to the poetic, and the cutting in of excerpts from the works of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Introduction: Kathy Acker and the Avant-Garde
Authors: Colby Georgina
Published: January 2018

‘TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING’1 Kathy Acker writes in bold capitals in an unpublished notebook. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book. It brings together two interrelated axes of Acker’s practice: her continuation of radical modernism’s preoccupation with the crisis of language, and the avant-garde concern for producing art orientated towards the transformation of society. For early twentieth-century modernist writers the imbrication of form with content was a hallmark of their literary practice. The commitment to experimentation in form and language, upheld by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and James Joyce, is integral to the challenge modernist writers sought to pose to nineteenth-century realism. It was a key characteristic of their larger concern with the medium of writing. The precise nature of that concern with the medium of writing is crucial. Theorists of the avant-garde have attempted to draw a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde on the issue of aesthetic autonomy. Peter Bürger’s now classic work ...
‘Very real shared traditions’? Thinking about Similarity and Difference in the Construction and Use of Clyde Cairns in the Western Scottish Neolithic
Authors: Cummings Vicki
Published: January 2018

In this paper, evidence for Neolithic activity in the western mainland of Scotland is explored, with a particular emphasis on megalithic monumentality and the archaeology of Argyll. This is a much under-studied area, and as the author notes, has as much if not more in common with the Neolithic or Ireland than of eastern Scotland. The paper draws on the author’s extensive fieldwork in the area including work on Bargrennan tombs and excavations at Blasthill. Monumentality, material culture and other aspects of Neolithic life in the western fringes of Scotland are explored in this important contribution to Neolithic studies in the Irish Sea zone.
Making Memories, Making Monuments: Changing Understandings of Henges in Prehistory and the Present
Authors: Younger Rebecca K.
Published: January 2018

This paper offers a fresh insight into three of Scotland’s most complex henge monuments, based on a critical analysis of the term henge. The late Neolithic circular earthwork enclosures have undergone re-evaluation in Scotland as Early Bronze Age dates for some sites have emerged since the 1990s, and the author draws on the long-term nature of these monuments to explore what came before the earthworks. Case-study sites are Cairnpapple Hill, North Mains and Forteviot henge 1. Each is explored in terms of the centuries of re-use of the space for activities such as ceremony, deposition, fire-setting and monument construction, and viewed through a framework of social memory and commemoration,
On Ancient Farms: A Survey of Neolithic Potentially Domestic Locations in Lowland Scotland
Authors: Brophy Kenneth
Published: January 2018

This paper offers a review of all evidence for Neolithic settlement in mainland Scotland. This work builds on a list of possible domestic sites compiled by Gordon Barclay in the 1990s. An overview and history of the study of Neolithic settlement in Scotland is presented as context. There follows a discussion of the evidence divided into categories timber halls, rectangular buildings, round and circular buildings, four-post structures and pits. The evidence is synthesised and observations made about what this tells us about settlement patterns and mobility in Scotland’s Neolithic, and how this changed through time.
The Neolithic Pottery from Balfarg/Balbirnie Revisited
Authors: MacSween Ann
Published: January 2018

This paper is an authorative and fresh interpretation of the large assemblage of prehistoric pottery that was found at the excavations of Balfarg Riding School in Fife, by Gordon Barclay in the early 1980s. Reviewing past approaches, the author then revisits the Carinated Bowl, Impressed Ware and Grooved Ware Neolthic pottery found on the site. This re-evaluation is set within a new chronological context for the Balfarg monuments, and more broadly within contemporary understandings of the development of Neolithic pottery in lowland eastern Scotland.
Politics and Distributive Justice
Authors: Shields Liam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explains the background to debates about sufficiency. It explains how the field of distributive justice relates to politics and it situates sufficiency within the field of distributive justice alongside rival ideals such as equality and priority to the worse off. It also summarises the structure of the rest of the book.
What is Sufficientarianism?
Authors: Shields Liam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explains how sufficiency or sufficientarianism has historically been understood and explains the debates about it, highlighting the Indifference and Upper-Limit Objections that have been raised. The chapter then goes on to offer a new characterization of sufficentarianism as shift-sufficientarianism, explains how this view avoids the historical objections that have been made and explain how sufficiency thresholds might be supported by certain satiable reasons.
Conclusion
Authors: Shields Liam
Published: January 2018

This chapter summarises the main arguments of the book and the central claims of shift-sufficientarianism. The chapter speculates about the future for sufficientarianism and suggests that the view will have good prospects in the areas of non-ideal theory, and legitimacy and consensus, as well as health and taxation. The chapter also suggests that a more positive relationship between sufficientarianism and egalitarianism might emerge in the future from understanding sufficientarianism as shift-sufficientarianism
Power and Obligation
Authors: Baron Ilan Zvi
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, the author suggests that power is an important and underexplored element in theories of political obligation and argues that there exists an alternative model of political power that is not statist and thus avoids the necessity of accepting anything like the particularity principle. It is possible to argue for an account of obligation that is political because of the power relations contained within, but which are not defined or framed by the state. In other words, while I accept the claim that politics is defined by power relations, I contest the traditional Weberian framing of what power means in this context. Once political obligation becomes deterritorialized in this way, it remains to explain the empirical condition of transnational political obligation.
Obligation and Critique
Authors: Baron Ilan Zvi
Published: January 2018

A transnational political obligation is a political relationship that exists across states, among Diaspora, transnational or trans-state communities, and which frames their relations and identity-practices. What makes them political is that transnational political obligations are characterized by multiple discourses of power. The first of these is a public account of power that associates it with people acting together in public. The roles of authority and of sovereignty are displaced in this reading of power. What unites people in relations of power is a shared purpose in their public lives. Even though the power relations among a transnational diaspora group remain tied to a like-group, the spatial character of this group reflects the fact that people who share ties do not necessarily live in the same geographical location.
Conclusion
Authors: Baron Ilan Zvi
Published: January 2018

This book has been driven by one large question: how are we to understand the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel when it is no longer appropriate, if it ever was, to presume that to be a good Jew means being a Zionist? Answering this question has meant working out what is it about Jewish identity that ties it to Israel, and what theoretical framework can be used to explore this relationship. The language of political obligation raised the hope that political theory could provide a starting point for working out the complexities of a relationship that involved obligations and had clear political aspects to it, but was characterized by a transnational geography spreading across a Diaspora and involving a specific state. The political obligation literature provided some headway, but it became clear very quickly that because of its state-centric focus, this language of political theory was not appropriate....
Introduction
Authors: Baron Ilan Zvi
Published: January 2018

I grew up with a strong attachment to a country that I did not know very well. Nevertheless, as I learned more about Zionism and Jewish history I became a committed Zionist (albeit one who felt that logically, if I argued for the right of Jewish self-determination, I could not simultaneously reject the right of self-determination for the Palestinians). What eventually came to interest me was how I was to explain this connection with Israel, a country I could not vote in, did not live in and whose language I was not fluent in. I eventually encountered the view that to be a Jew meant supporting Israel, that being a good Jew meant being a Zionist. But over time this position became increasingly problematic. I found it difficult to explain the connection, one that seemed to come with an obligatory duty to support Israel, or at least an obligation to feel a connection to Israel. Questions arose about what it meant to support a country whose political future I have no say in as a Diaspora Jew. The questions became all the more pronounced the more I learned about Israel’s history. Many Jews feel the same way, and often are uncomfortable with what such an obligation can mean, in no small part because of concerns over being identified with Israel because of one’s Jewish heritage or because of the overwhelming significance that Israel has come to have for Jewish identity....
‘What is Past is Prologue’: Hollywood’s History of the OSS and the Establishment of the CIA
Authors: Willmetts Simon
Published: January 2018

At the end of the Second World War, the OSS were swiftly disbanded. In response, OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan launched a massive public relations campaign to celebrate the wartime activities of his agency and to advocate for the establishment of a permanent central intelligence agency. Hollywood, perhaps unsurprisingly given the extensive links between American filmmakers and the OSS, played an important part in mythologizing the OSS in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and in so doing helped make the case for the creation of the CIA.
Quiet Americans: The CIA and Hollywood in the Early Cold War
Authors: Willmetts Simon
Published: January 2018

The CIA was established in 1947, but it did not appear in a Hollywood film until Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in 1959. Why? This chapter explains Hollywood’s long silence on American foreign intelligence during the early Cold War. It argues that a combination of patriotism, stringent libel laws, the restrictions of the semi-documentary format, and Hollywood’s in-house industry censor the Production Code Administration, encouraged filmmakers to respect the CIA’s proclaimed “passion for anonymity”. It ends with a sustained examination of one of the most well-known examples of CIA interference with a Hollywood representation of their Agency: Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.
Post-unification (East) German Documentary and the Contradictions of Identity
Authors: Byg Barton
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the three major themes that have helped make the integration between East and West German documentary filmmakers successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It first illustrates the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East–West collaborations, it discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. Finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’, and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) is explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.
Material Traces of Lebanon: A Documentary Aesthetics of Feeling in the Art Gallery
Authors: Takahashi Tess
Published: January 2018

This chapter first asserts that ‘speculative’ forms of documentary art — defined as playful, experimental and unbridled — accentuate the uncertain boundary between fiction and fact, but also between evidence and affect. With this in mind, it then proposes a detailed study of the work of artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, who use the speculative documentary form to examine the legacy of the Lebanese Civil Wars through its material traces. This case study shows that by confronting spectators to cinematic loops and material traces of the Lebanese Civil Wars in gallery installations, their documentary works formally and intellectually challenge their understanding of public and private memory, under which material and affective traces of these traumatic events continue to circulate today.
Independent Documentaries and Online Uses in China: From Cinephilia to Activism
Authors: Pernin Judith
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on online documentary practices. It attempts to puts in perspective the uses generated by the independent Chinese documentary movement from the dawn of Internet film forums in the mid-1990s to the microblogs in the late 2000s. Two decades of online practices in this small film milieu reflect the evolution of both web-based platforms and Chinese independent documentary filmmakers. Using detailed examples, it shows that their unofficial cinephilia, emerging from piracy practices, quickly moved towards exchanges reflecting the filmmakers' concerns for recognition of their works and, beyond that, for the sensitive sociopolitical issues dealt with in their films. The popular practice of online document sharing completes and extends their film practices and creates a wider network ranging from film enthusiasts to activists.
Conclusion
Authors: Deprez Camille , Pernin Judith
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes. It suggests that case studies included here should not give the impression that this volume was conceived as a comprehensive overview of the issue of independent documentary in contemporary times. Rather, it aimed at prompting new interest for, and innovative academic perspectives on, the manifold significations of independent documentary production today. Besides demonstrating the complexity, variability, pragmatism and paradoxes that this notion of ‘independent’ documentary entails, this collection of case studies also endeavoured to reveal important similarities among different practitioners in the field. In fact, the book chapters may be reshuffled to highlight other significant connections between them.
Shattering the Shia: A Maliki Political Strategy in Post-Saddam Iraq
Authors: Isakhan Benjamin
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's efforts to utilise his incumbency to maintain the veneer of democracy while becoming increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian. In doing so, Maliki's government shares much in common with other ‘hybrid regimes’ in which governments hijack nominally democratic mechanisms such as elections, media freedoms, political opposition, and civil society as part of their strategy to retain, rather than diffuse, power. The chapter focuses on Maliki's first two terms in power and examines the ways in which he has been able to systematically fracture the Shia political elite to such an extent that once tenuously united factions now stand bitterly divided. It concludes by reflecting on the reasoning behind such an approach and the prospects of Iraq's democracy moving beyond the blatant power grab of the incumbent Maliki government.
Between Aqalliya and Mukawin: Understanding Sunni Political Attitudes in Post-Saddam Iraq
Authors: Zeidel Ronen
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses how the toppling of the Sunni-dominated Baathist government in 2003 and the subsequent Shia Arab and Kurdish power grabs has left the Sunnis at the political margins. This sequence of events has fostered a growing Sunni resentment of the central government and left an entire segment of the population susceptible to the promises of religious zealots and violent fundamentalists such as ISIS. Contemporary Iraqi political discourse offers two useful terms between which the Sunni appear to fall: aqalliya (‘minority’) and mukawin (‘component’). In current Iraqi political usage, aqalliya refers exclusively to the smaller minorities such as the Christians, Turkmens, Yazidis, and so on. The 2005 Iraqi constitution avoids the use of this term and substitutes it with the term mukawin, referring to all components of the Iraqi population, whether large or small.
Shia Ascendancy in Iraq and the Sectarian Polarisation of the Middle East
Authors: Alaaldin Ranj
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the evolution of sectarianism in post-2003 Iraq, looking in particular at the issue of Sunni–Shia political relations and how sectarianism in the formative stages of the new Iraq has come to define the Iraqi state and society today. Against this backdrop, it analyzes the impact it has had on the sectarian polarisation of the region. It argues that the 2003 toppling of the Baath regime set in motion a series of events that, in the absence of authoritarian and violent containment, allowed pre-existing cycles of sectarian divisions and struggles to spin at a much more destructive rate, with far-reaching consequences for Iraq and the broader region. In this respect, the first legacy of the Iraq War is the intensification of sectarian tensions in Iraq, namely the divide between Iraq's Sunni and Shia communities; the second is the impact this has had on the definition and identity of the Iraqi state, as a result of the rise and liberation of the Shias and the Shia identity, and ultimately on sectarian polarisation in the Middle East.
Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq: The Politics of Protection and Rescue
Authors: Kampmark Binoy
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the legacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, notably the impact it has had on doctrines of humanitarian intervention. Of particular relevance are the contemporary emphases on such events as the intervention in Libya by NATO forces in March 2011, arguably the first instance of what is now termed the responsibility to protect. The mixed humanitarian rhetoric behind the Iraq intervention provided a template for what to avoid. The chapter highlights the fact that notions of humanitarian intervention have achieved renewed vigour in the wake of Iraq, which has been retrospectively understood as an intervention that underemphasised the humanitarian dimension.
Cousins Divided? Development in and of Political Institutions in Scotland and Norway since 1814
Authors: Brandal Nik. , Bratberg Øivind
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, light is shed on the historical relationship between the two countries and their respective outside ruling centres, politically, culturally and economically; how European geopolitics and national mobilisation, existing legal traditions and infrastructure can affect the process and outcome of devolution. Critical junctures are identified in the development of Scottish and Norwegian political institutions, and the circumstances - including class structure, electoral reform, the use of proportionality, - leading to the current differing balances of power between central and local government, and contrasting social models and economies in the two countries, based on negotiation versus top-down direction. Finally the chapter looks at what the implications of the Scottish political historical backdrop may have for Scottish independence.
Agrarian Change in Scotland and Norway: Agricultural Production, Structures, Politics and Policies since 1800
Authors: Bryden John , Hegrenes Agnar
Published: January 2018

This Chapter addresses differences in agrarian structures, politics and policies between Norway and Scotland. It identifies four key processes: (1) agrarian improvers acceleration of the first agrarian revolution in Scotland through forced enclosures and the dispossession of the peasantry (2) the impact of the free trade period and war time food shortages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (3) the elaboration of agrarian policy and state interventions in the interwar period, and (4) the consequences of the second agrarian revolution following the Second World War, including the Mansholt plan and subsequent EU policies. These processes help explain the emergence of a dual agrarian structure in Scotland as opposed to the smaller farm size and greater pluriactivity in Norway. Neither history corresponds either to Marxian theories of agrarian change or to those of ‘Modernisation’, but reflects a series of critical junctures and context-specific politics and contests between interests.
Education in Norway and Scotland: Developing and Re-forming the Systems
Authors: Cohen Bronwen , Rønning Wenche
Published: January 2018

This chapter reviews the development of educational policy and practice in Scotland and Norway. The chapter mainly focuses on the public education systems, and the authors examine the historical development of public education in each country, factors that have encouraged democratic access to schools, the development of Early Childhood Education and Care programs, and interactions between schools and their communities. The Chapter encompasses the history of school education and education legislation, the role of the Church in education, an analysis of the democratisation of access to schooling and introduction of democratic systems within schools as a part of the wider democratisation of society; the development of early years education and care, and the relationship between schools and their communities and wider area. The authors highlight the importance of decentralisation of education in Norway, including decisions about appropriate curriculum, to local governing bodies. This has built close linkages between schools and communities with an emphasis on place-based learning.
Ozu in Transition: The Coming of Sound and Family Melodrama
Authors: Joo Woojeong
Published: January 2018

This chapter deals with the period of the mid-1930s, when Ozu had to face new challenges from the pressure of commercialism to the coming of sound technology. The main question addresses whether and how the director maintained his critical view of Japanese modernity while using mass-oriented genre formats. Firstly, the conversion to sound in the Japanese film industry is investigated in relation to how it influenced Ozu’s filmmaking. It is followed by a discussion of Ozu’s Kihachi series (such as An Inn in Tokyo (1935)) and woman’s films (such as Woman of Tokyo (1933) and Dragnet Girl (1933)), as an evidence of the director’s expanding generic interest from the middle class into the working class and women. These generic terms will be finally confirmed through textual analysis of Ozu’s films to examine how Ozu’s everyday realism, while working within the context of established generic formats (such as ‘failed moga’ narrative in woman’s film), remains as a critical view of the Japanese modernity.
Wartime Ozu: Between Bourgeois Drama and National Policy Film
Authors: Joo Woojeong
Published: January 2018

This chapter deals with Ozu’s wartime works from the perspective of their continuing inquiry into the everyday as well as their relation to his postwar films so that they can be re-evaluated as a connecting bridge between the prewar and the postwar period. In the first part, Ozu’s complex stance on the war and the nationalistic ideology is examined through contextual survey of wartime history of Japan and Japanese cinema, and also analysing primary sources that has recorded Ozu’s own experience at battlefield. The second part analyses Ozu’s wartime bourgeois drama, The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1939), which, along with the previous work, What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), reveals gender politics of the female domestic everyday that operates antithetical to prevailing male-centric wartime collectivism. The last part of this chapter discusses Ozu’s humanistic position, by analysing two wartime films about paternity and its absence (The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942)) along with Burma Campaign (1942), which is Ozu’s only attempt at war film genre in a complete form.
‘Knock-on Consequences’: Irish Media Coverage of the Scottish Referendum
Authors: Rafter Kevin
Published: January 2018

The overall pattern of Irish media coverage suggests limited interest in the Scottish referendum with a degree of attention in the first half of 2014, increasing attention from July 2014, and a spike in coverage immediately before the vote. Reasons for this relative lack of engagement include generic editorial preferences around news values which are more likely, for example, to prioritize stories which directly affect audiences. However, both politicians and the press in the Republic displayed awareness of possible political and economic implications for the Republic, and also its relationship with Northern Ireland, in potential Scottish constitutional developments. Both RTÉ and the Irish Times sent reporters to Scotland. Nonetheless in the press the referendum tended to be classified within foreign or world news. Irish politicians with one or two exceptions generally remained very discreet and mainly voiced no preference, or much assessment, of the referendum. The Irish media moved on from the story relatively soon after the result.
Ahlussunnah: A Preaching Network from Kano to Medina and Back
Authors: Thurston Alex
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes a network of prominent preachers, the “Ahlussunnah” (People of the tradition of the Prophet) of contemporary Kano, northern Nigeria. Of these preachers, roughly half are graduates of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM). By looking at leading figures within the network, the chapter shows how exposure to new thinkers and texts at the university, as well as physical distance from the bitter struggles in northern Nigeria, launched a process of reflection that culminated in the Medina graduates' decision to break with the anti-Sufi movement, Izala. The students felt that Izala had become too rigid in its approach and was excluding non members. Moreover, study in Medina, the chapter argues, increased these preachers' intellectual self confidence and led them to seek models of leadership based more on individual reputation than on the backing of hierarchical organisations.
From Mecca to Cairo: Changing Influences on Fatwas in Southeast Asia
Authors: Shiozaki Yuki
Published: January 2018

This chapter demonstrates how exposure to al Azhar led over time to the complete transformation of the methodology adopted by independent ulama and state religious platforms to issue fatwas in Southeast Asia. It examines the mainstreaming of Salafi methodology — inspired by the work of Muhammad Abduh — in place of the taqlīd of the traditional Shafi'i School in Southeast Asia for the issuing of fatwas. A number of factors, including the establishment of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, led to a shift to al Azhar as opposed to Mecca being the base for Southeast Asian Muslim scholars. By comparing Southeast Asia fatwas of the early twentieth century against those issued in the 1970s, the chapter shows how the transition from Mecca to Cairo led to the mainstreaming of Salafi methodology.
Beyond the Postmodern? The Inhuman Condition
Authors: Woodward Ashley
Published: January 2018

The introduction to this book argues that Lyotard’s work may be approached anew by recognising that his views developed in significant ways after his most popular work, The Postmodern Condition. In his later book The Inhuman and elsewhere, he suggests that a type of metanarrative persists after the decline of Enlightenment metanarratives, one which he calls “development” and associates with technoscience and capital. This “inhuman condition” is suggested as a perspective for reconsidering Lyotard’s work in light of contemporary concerns such as transhumanism, posthumanism, information society, and new media arts. This chapter frames discussion of these themes by introducing three major areas to be explored in the book, and the relationships between them: nihilism, information, and art.
Economy, Ecology, Organology: On Technics and Desire
Authors: Woodward Ashley
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the theme of general economy which is evident in many of Lyotard’s diverse writings, and relates it to wider contexts – such as ecology and organology –in which it is operative. Economic terms inspired by Freud’s libidinal economy and related philosophical notions have been influential in economics, environmental ecology, and Systems Theory. Lyotard proposed a Nietzschean reading of the Freudian drives which defies convention by placing a positive value on the disharmonious, deregulating function. In various essays he examined ecology, economy, and Systems Theory explicitly, revaluing the way economic terms are typically understood. The chapter charts the links between these themes in Lyotard’s thought, and develops them especially for a critical comparison with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of ‘general organology.’
Nihilism and the Sublime: The Crisis of Perception
Authors: Woodward Ashley
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the subtle relations between the themes of nihilism and the sublime in Lyotard’s works. One of the puzzling shifts in Lyotard’s work is from the castigation of nihilism in his earlier “libidinal” philosophy to the elevation of the sublime in his later philosophy of “the differend.” The puzzle is that nihilism and the sublime are identified with each other in Lyotard’s work: they have the same basic structure, and are elaborated through the same examples. This chapter argues that in his later thought, the sublime acts as both a trope of nihilism and as a minimal response to nihilism. The apparent reversal in Lyotard’s thought may be understood as a case of his employment of the sophistical strategy of retorsion (turning an opponent’s argument back against them). Lyotard employs this technique to find, within nihilism itself, a resistance to nihilism in the aesthetic of the sublime. The value of Lyotard’s “sublime” response to nihilism lies in its very extremity: he sketches a liminal possibility for meaning at a point where it would appear that all hope for meaning is lost.
The Scottish Context
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

Constitutions have to fit the context for which they are intended. Before examining specific constitutional proposals for the future constitution of an independent Scotland, this chapter therefore explores the contextual conditions that set the needs and basic parameters of constitutional design. Subjects covered include national identity, the party system, religious influences and sectarian divisions, ideology, and the internal territorial politics of Scotland.
2002 Draft I: Parliament and the Legislative Power
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

This chapter is the first of three central chapters in which the SNP’s 2002 constitutional text is examined in detail. This document, although now dated, is still the most detailed statement of the SNP’s constitutional policy ever to have been formally announced by the party. In examining the constitutional draft’s provisions relating to Parliament and the legislative branch, the chapter argues that the general structure of the proposals are sound, but that they lack the institutional and procedural clarity needed in a working constitutional text.
Theo Angelopoulos as Film Critic
Authors: Chalkou Maria
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' work as a film critic, focusing on the ways in which he was invested in cinema — personally, professionally, intellectually and aesthetically — even before stepping into the role of filmmaker. The time frame of Angelopoulos' critical activity is particularly intriguing since the 1960s were the formative years of New Greek Cinema. The chapter considers Angelopoulos' film criticism for the newspaper Democratic Change during the turbulent but creative pre-dictatorship 1960s. It explores unknown aspects of Angelopoulos' cinéphile background and how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices. It also discusses Angelopoulos' introduction of auteur theory in his very first review, how he was influenced by fellow filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the importance of form and temporality in his work, his interest in film performance and sound, and his discourse on Greek national cinema.
Cinematography of the Group: Angelopoulos and the Collective Subject of Cinema
Authors: Murphet Julian
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines one of Theo Angelopoulos' technical signatures, ‘the long-take circular or semi-circular pan in long shot, stretching from between 180 degrees and 720 degrees’, describing it ‘as the great auteur's most distinctive device for dynamic group framing’. It considers Angelopoulos' early contributions to the project of a collectivist cinema for those signature formal effects that make his work truly distinctive in order to delineate some aesthetic-political limits to his cinematography of the group, which may therefore have forced him by a mounting aesthetic logic — as well as a geopolitical one — to transfer to a more ‘subjectivist’ approach in his later films. It argues that when Angelopoulos uses panning shots in films such as Megalexandros and Landscape in the Mist, he is deploying ‘cinema's most trenchant shorthand for the totality as such: a camera movement whose logic is not self-regarding but self-effacing…’.
The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos
Authors: Eades Caroline
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.
Syncope and Fractal Liminality: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera and the Question of Borders
Authors: Nobus Dany , Pouli Nektaria
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1984 film Voyage to Cythera, arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos' career’, whereby an individuating and ultimately humanising ‘recalibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films' characters’. Employing Voyage to Cythera as a starting point, the chapter explores two interrelated concepts and two interlocking mental functions — syncope and fractal liminality. It considers how Voyage to Cythera condenses within its intricate filmic texture Angelopoulos' key paradigm of the ‘boundary phenomenon’. It shows that Angelopoulos' borders can be more accurately represented as ‘fractal liminalities’ — endlessly self-duplicating, transitional lines of separation between parts of an organic entity, or between stages of an ongoing journey, which cannot be located and drawn with any degree of certainty.
An ‘Untimely’ History
Authors: Rollet Sylvie
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines a formal dialectic as it plays out through Theo Angelopoulos' later films, arguing that here the historical stage is treated as a psychic scene. Angelopoulos' work is not modernist cinema in the sense that Anglo-Saxon critics have given to this term to qualify, in art history, a time past, but still belonging to modernity. Angelopoulos' films are, in fact, traversed by history. His gaze upon Greece allows him to embrace the upheaval that altered the face of Europe throughout the twentieth century. Focusing on films such as Voyage to Cythera, The Odyssey, The Travelling Players, and Ulysses' Gaze, the chapter considers what it calls a ‘poetics of form’ and how Angelopoulos' obsessive return to the same themes and the constant repetition of a small number of malleable figures in his work emerge ‘through the images, the sounds, and the narrative’.
Angelopoulos and the Time-image
Authors: Rushton Richard
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer pure recollection.
‘Nothing Ever Ends’:Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration
Authors: Grønstad Asbjørn
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' last film The Dust of Time (2008), describing it as an apotheosis to the director's visual investment in duration. In The Dust of Time, a voice-over declares that ‘nothing ever ends’. The dust of time is the obliviousness of history. It would seem that the temporality of history is couched in opacity, whereas the work of memory struggles to bring a sense of lucidity to the past, to past experience and, finally, to the experience of the past in the present. The chapter considers The Dust of Time's consistent foregrounding of duration as both aesthetic effect and experiential mode, and how Angelopoulos' films in general encapsulate both these senses of temporal duration: that is, as a phenomenon intimately connected with the nature of the moving image and, secondly, as the more thematic and philosophical notion that ‘nothing ever ends’.
Travelling Beyond the National: Mobile Citizenship and Flexible Identities in French-Language Return Road Movies
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines what is likely the increasingly prevalent ‘return to origins’ movie. A close look at the corpus of French-language road cinema of the past twenty years reveals a genre that actively reformulates the limits of national and European identity by (often literally) redrawing the map. The popularity of ‘return’ voyages is reflective of a desire to remap French and other national identities within the parameters of an enlarged European Union, within which physical and administrative frontiers have fallen. Return films demonstrate that it is now conceivable to be French, Belgian or Swiss and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity, whether Polish, Czech, Armenian, Spanish, Italian, or Maghrebi. The chapter begins with a discussion of how mobile and layered outlooks on citizenship fit into conception of French republicanism and European identity frameworks before zooming in on case studies from France and Switzerland. Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006, France), Ten’ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004, France/Morocco) and Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2005, Switzerland) furnish the examples.
Introduction
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter outlines how intelligence on the Middle East was gathered and assessed on both sides of the Atlantic and reveals the challenges posed by the legacy of the Suez Crisis. It details the book’s key research questions, sources and historiographical debates.
Exploring an atmosphere of widespread hostility towards Nasser, it shows how analysts underestimated the degree to which the Suez debacle had thrust President Nasser to the unrivalled leadership of Arab nationalism. As the stability of the Arab world appeared to unravel, the stage was set for a series of dramatic confrontations between Western powers and the Egyptian president in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Orientalism and Analysis: Ideas of the ‘Arab’
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

It is commonly suggested that the major weakness of the American intelligence community in the Middle East stems from its inability to understand the mindset of a fundamentally different culture. How has intelligence conceptualized culture? Exposing a collection of rare documents that deal with the issue of ‘national character,’ this chapter provides striking revelations about the dominant and controversial stereotypes of ‘the Arab mind’ shared by British and American intelligence in the post war era. It traces the evolution of ideas about the influence of Islam, Arab ‘motivation’, the role of rhetoric and the prevalence of ‘honour.’ Moreover, it demonstrates that these are themes that persist in our understanding of Arab culture and politics to this day.
Revolution in Iraq
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

In July 1958, an unknown nationalist, General Abdul Karim Qasim, came to the helm of power in Iraq. Chapter 3 reveals how analysts reacted to the brutal murder of his predecessor Nuri al Said, as Britain’s most important ally in the Middle East seemed to contract the Nasser ‘virus’ spreading through the region.
Qasim quickly demonstrated that he was no Nasserist stooge however. Whilst British policymakers hoped in vain that the new Iraqi leader could be cultivated as a counterweight to Nasser, the intelligence community rapidly realised that Qasim had neither the charisma nor the popularity to compete with his Egyptian counterpart in the Arab Cold War.
Qasim reliance on Iraqi Communists to counteract the influence of local Nasserites led to widespread fears that Iraq was on the brink of acquiring Soviet satellite status. This chapter brings to light for the first time the JIC’s nuanced analysis of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), suggesting to policy-makers that in fact the Soviet Union was acting as a restraining influence on the Iraqi communists. Qasim came to be increasingly depicted as ‘paranoid’ and ‘irrational’, whilst assessments of Nasser took on a new and more complimentary light as a ‘moderate’ potential ally in the quest to prevent Communist penetration of the Middle East.