bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Brown Derby Bambino: Babe Ruth’s Celebrity Endorsement and the 1928 Presidential Campaign
Authors: Chiles Robert
Published: September 2023

During the 1920s, baseball’s popularity soared, college football gripped the American consciousness every fall, and athletes and coaches from these and other sports became well-known national celebrities. At the same time, the 1928 campaign featured a contest between the colorless but popular technocratic Republican Herbert Hoover and the conspicuously urban Alfred E. Smith, who happened also to be a grandson of immigrants and the first Roman Catholic nominated for the White House by a major party. As the national fascination with sports collided with the broader Roaring Twenties culture of celebrity, this new cultural phenomenon interfaced with the intense clash of political personalities to produce a conspicuous presence for sports stars in Smith’s list of supporters. Most notably, the most nationally recognized and marketed celebrity athlete of the time, Babe Ruth, campaigned actively for Smith, speaking on his behalf to a national radio audience. This chapter explores how the celebrity-athlete presence in the 1928 Smith campaign reflected an emerging national sports culture while demonstrating how mainstream athletes sought to leverage their popularity for political allies far earlier than most readers assume.
Jackie Robinson and His Presidents: Political Endorsements and Civil Rights Advocacy
Authors: Kotlowski Dean J.
Published: September 2023

Political and civil rights advocacy have become commonplace among today’s athletes. Embodying the nexus between presidential campaign endorsements and rights-based advocacy was the Brooklyn Dodger star Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 and then broke into politics when he backed Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1960. Robinson promoted the principles and fortunes of the Grand Old Party and, even more important, justice for Black Americans. Partially named for Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, Robinson espoused the egalitarian ideals of the GOP’s first president, Abraham Lincoln. Robinson was wary of Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, whom he saw as political shapeshifters on civil rights. And his relations with Nixon cooled after 1960, as Nixon increasingly wooed conservative white southerners and suburbanites. This chapter situates the evolution of Robinson’s involvement in presidential politics within the context of the changing Civil Rights Movement and of partisan realignments during the 1960s. It considers the opportunities Robinson opened to, and the troubles he caused for, presidents and would-be presidents as they either approached or evaded the issue of civil rights. It analyzes his emerging, then declining, influence with White House occupants and aspirants.
Sport, Merit, and Respectability Politics in the Election of Barack Obama
Authors: Butterworth Michael L. , Smith Shawn N.
Published: September 2023

The nomination and election of Barack Obama as the first African American president invited numerous references to sport, especially through comparisons to historically significant athletes such as Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods. Such references relied on mythic notions of merit and liberal progress that have long underscored the narrative of the American Dream. For the most optimistic of observers, Obama’s election signaled that the nation had cleared the final hurdle in the quest for racial equality. Yet, declarations of a “post-racial” society failed to account for both the persistence of racism in U.S. culture and the unique constraints facing a Black president. This chapter attends to those constraints by examining the influence of respectability politics and uplift ideology. It revisits the analogical associations made between Obama and figures such as Robinson and Woods to identify the limits of sport as a political metaphor. Through a critical examination of contemporary writing about sport as a site for equality and inclusion, the chapter argues that the common narrative of racial progress through sport serves as a rhetorical means for deflecting political conflict and celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy.
Afterword
Authors: Dichter Heather L.
Published: September 2023

This final chapter in the book is an afterword that explores the broader themes which emanate from the contributions. The book’s authors demonstrate how presidents’ experiences with various sports shaped their views about sport and physical fitness broadly, which they promoted in speeches, writings, and occasionally policies. This chapter argues that sport and the presidency is also centrally tied to the media. It also suggests areas for future research on the intersection of sport and the presidency.
What Is Meta and Who Uses the Term?
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 starts with a consideration of the circulation of the adjective “meta” in the popular media to describe TV shows and art cinema fare alike, but also by the characters in films and series. The chapter then attempts to define meta in light of existing definitions of similar terms (metafiction, metanarrative, metafilm, metacinema, metatextual, etc.) in academic literature and in relation to the more general concept of reflexivity. It concludes, albeit temporarily, that meta can be defined as a high degree of reflexivity in which the work appears to comment on itself and/or its medium.
How Does Meta Work?
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Much of the literature on metafiction and reflexivity adopts a typological approach to explain the operations and functions of specific devices. Chapter 2 thus opens with a discussion of such typological approaches, with special attention to the most elaborate (Linda Hutcheon’s on metafiction and Werner Wolf’s on meta-reference). This discussion leads to a series of proposals: 1. the specificty of meta (in relation to reflexivity) is its aboutness; 2. meta is always analytical; 3. the explicitness of meta is a question of degree; 4. meta entails an act of interpretation; 5. it is usually intentional but not necessarily; 6. it seems to impose its own framework of interpretation; 7. reflexive devices alert to the presence of meta, which can be expressed through them; 8. meta is play, and play is learning.
Industry and Creation
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the movie-about-making-movies. A staple Hollywood genre that has received much critical attention, such films tend to explore the dangers and difficulties of artistic creation in an industrialized system, a concern that can be addressed explicitly and allegorically. The threat to artistic integrity is often dramatized through metaphors of exploitation. Yet these films do more than condemn the primacy of economics over aesthetics and spotlight the state of the industry at a given period; they also reflect on the power of moving images to endow flickering shadows with life and move us to laughter or tears.
Apparatus and Spectatorship
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 takes us from films portraying spectators to metaleptical fantasies of escaping or crossing over into the fictional world and, finally, to allegories of film spectatorship. These works offer nuanced conceptions of film audiences whose passion for audiovisual fictions is motivated by a variety of reasons (a sense of community, unspeakable desires). The films also go against the 1970s conception of the spectator as a passive voyeur but, on the contrary, present watching movies as an activity: a concern for spectatorship is thus intimately interweaved with a concern for creation, its materials and its relation to the real world.
Genre
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 8 shows that films and series tend to engage with a given genre from the outset (an architext), just as they would with a source text; thus, they foreground their mode of engagement with the genre in a programmatic fashion, the degree to which genre conventions will be subverted and/or its politics revised. The chapter then tries to answer the question “is parody essentially meta?”, before examining how a surface concern for genre can actually serve as a framework for a more profound meta-discourse on the ethics of fiction.
History and Historiography
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 10 opens with a discussion of “historiographic metafiction,” a work that (according to Linda Hutcheon) interrogates “the epistemological and ontological relations between history and fiction.” The chapter then raises the question as to whether an allohistory (an alternate history) is systematically meta. Finally, attention is paid to historical movies that address their own role in the construction, remembrance and understanding of history, notably through the use of (mock) archive footage.
A System in Transition: Negotiating Nobility in the Locality
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the negotiation of hereditary privileges among local actors in Palu within the Tanzimat context. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Kurdish nobility's position, privileges, and relationship with the Ottoman imperial state underwent various changes. Their military power and role fluctuated, while their administrative authority faced challenges from rival provincial elites and Ottoman administrators. By the mid-nineteenth century, the material basis of their nobility, namely landownership, was under threat from both the top and bottom. Central to these discussions was the Palu begs' right to the agrarian surplus. The Ottoman administration aimed to transfer previously untapped revenues from the control of the Kurdish begs to its own grasp, while the Armenian financial bourgeoisie demanded that the begs sell their lands to settle their debts. Simultaneously, cultivators contested the terms of sharecropping as the Ottoman state enforced a new fiscal regime that could benefit them by reducing the tithe. This chapter sheds light on how local power dynamics and events influenced governmental decision-making processes regarding hereditary land ownership in Palu.
Modern Philosopher Kings
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

Can wisdom and power, philosophy and politics be combined to secure justice? Or are there formidable tensions, even antagonism between them? Socrates presented the philosopher king as an aspiration, a remedy for the ills of the world. He also called it a paradox, a challenging and perplexing innovation. Ever since, the philosopher king has been an enduring and fascinating question as well as a political aspiration. Modern Philosopher Kings examines the philosopher king as a paradox and an ambitious modern project. Through a series of diverse studies ranging from the prophet, intellectual, artist, advisor, scientist and ‘the people’ it examines modern attempts to unite wisdom and power. In doing so it reveals the different ways and the extent to which wisdom can be empowered and power ennobled.
Paradox of the Philosopher King
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

Can wisdom and power, philosophy and politics be combined to secure justice? Or is it better to separate them, in the interests of both? The philosopher king provides the epigrammatic formulation for exploring these profound questions. This chapter returns to classical political philosophy to recover the concept of the philosopher king as a paradox and a promise of justice. It shows how at the origins of philosophy the presumption of the separation of philosophy and politics was questioned by the Sophists, who proposed their union, counselling to the ambitious young on how to gain political office. It then traces these arguments in their reformulation in Jewish, Islamic and Christian religious thought and how the Sophist’s ambition were taken up in modern political philosophy. Having formulated the core puzzle and question the chapter then shows how they will be examined in discrete chapters that explore the manifold manifestations of the modern philosopher king.
The Scientist as Modern Benefactor
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

The scientist seems to be the preeminent modern philosopher king, combining wisdom and power. This chapter examines the Baconian transformation of the philosopher into the scientist, endorsed by new institutions (Royal Societies and Academies) and by subsequent scientists, especially astronomers such as Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, modern philosophers including Descartes, Newton, and modern physicists such as Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg. It evaluates how the scientist as benefactor gained increasing political authority, evident in the Comtean concept of positive rule or Smyth and Veblen’s technocracy. It then examines the three challenges to the scientist as modern philosopher king, based on increasing questions concerning the truth, benevolence and morality of the scientific enterprise. It concludes by noting the radical new vistas opened to us by modern science, transforming what we understand by humanity, and the political limits to these ambitions, albeit in partial and unpredictable forms.
The Wise and Sovereign People
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

In its dispersal of offices and power or accusations of elitism, democracy appears as anti-intellectual and therefore a formidable obstacle to modern philosopher kings. But can democracy, in the form of the wise sovereign people be seen as the preeminent modern form of the philosopher king? This chapter examines how democracy deals with philosopher kings by first evaluating the nature of democratic anti-intellectualism as diagnosed by Tocqueville. It then explores how democracy engages with wisdom institutionally by accommodating them within discrete offices such as the central banks and the judiciary. Finally, it evaluates more ambitious claims that in appropriate deliberative and epistemic fora the people are philosopher kings.
Socrates and Newton
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

Chapter One explores Hemsterhuis’ dual commitment to the ancient and the modern. It is made up of three sections: the first treats Hemsterhuis’ return to a Socratic ideal, the second his embrace of Newtonian geometrical method and the third reassembles these twin demands in Hemsterhuis’ system of epochs. The first section, then, treats what for many readers of Hemsterhuis—especially German readers in the late eighteenth century—was the defining features of his philosophy: its Philhellenism. The second section supplements this fidelity to the Socratic event with Hemsterhuis’ fidelity to modern geometrical method. At stake in this section, then, is an image of a modern Hemsterhuis who celebrates (some) progress in the sciences, drives forward research in optics, animal generation and astronomy and writes on mathematical problems like indivisibility and incommensurability. The final section of Chapter One takes its cue from Hemsterhuis’ account in the Lettre sur l’Homme of the history of science as a series of eccentric orbits with perihelia and aphelia. This system of times determines the relation between the classical and the modern. Hemsterhuis affirms the equality of the two perihelia of the Socratic and the Newtonian, for each has a distinct sphere of perfection.
The Past and the Present
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins the work of categorising the various images by which Hemsterhuis presents time. It focuses in particular on the way his later work moves away from the presentism that characterises much early modern philosophy. It consists of four sections: the first focuses on the ideal of the optimum (or intuition) that is so important to both the early Hemsterhuis and the Cartesian tradition in general, the second then shows how this informs Hemsterhuis’ choice of the epistolary genre, the third begins to put the optimum into question, and, finally, the final section looks to the fakes, forgeries and ironies that animate his final works as forms of resistance to the ideal of the optimum. The first section, therefore, identifies one place where Hemsterhuis’ philosophy does appear markedly different before and after 1775—and that is the model of ‘optimal form’. The next section suggests that the early Hemsterhuis’ choice of the letter is informed by this model. The third section treats one of the more obvious ways in which Hemsterhuis frequently questions such a model—genealogy. Finally, the argument focuses on the antagonism between present and past in the fictional prefaces to Aristée and Simon.
Preliminaries
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

The initial section introduces the overriding research question, the structure and also gives biographical and contextual information. It is structured into two parts: the first provides a way-in to the book’s orienting thematic, the second a short intellectual biography to introduce Anglophone readers to Hemsterhuis, as well as a discussion of the book’s thesis in relation to the pre-existing literature on Hemsterhuis. It begins with an example of Hemsterhuis’ poetic turn in his late dialogues—Alexis’s restaging of the ancient quarrel between philosophers and poets. In it, Diocles undertakes to persuade Alexis, a new convert to Socratic inquiry, that, despite appearances to the contrary, philosophical reasoning and poetic fable are not only reconcilable, but that philosophy requires such poetry as its ground. The second section provides a short intellectual biography of Hemsterhuis that contextualises much of what I go on to say in the book and considers the various reasons given in the literature for Hemsterhuis’ ‘poetic turn’ to dialogue, myth and imagery in the late dialogues. What is needed, the chapter concludes, are the philosophical reasons Hemsterhuis holds for experimenting more and more with philosophical communication.
Seeing Violations as Events: Technologies of Capture and Cutting
Authors: Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on HURIDOCS, an NGO network concerned with developing information tools for human rights organizations, and their creation of a standardized data model, the Events Standard Formats, for recording information about (largely civil and political) violations. The chapter tracks how the Events model emerged from concerns about the clarity and effectiveness of human rights information and came to be justified using the utopian language of the information age. The chapter then turns to a critical analysis of the data model itself, by bringing the book’s theoretical approach into dialogue with STS and software studies to conceptualize it as an informational infrastructure. Noting the gap between the complexity of the social world and any attempt to model it as data, the analysis explores how the events approach constructs human rights information through a process of ‘cutting’ it away from, and thus excluding, issues of structural violence, social exploitation, and the political economy of violence.
A Liberal Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter one discusses how Egypt’s constitutional monarchy was founded on nineteenth-century principles of global liberalism that became enshrined in the 1923 constitution. To make this point, the chapter analyzes the minutes of the constitutional commission that drafted and debated the constitution. The chapter further studies “productivist welfare”—the conservative social reform that emanated from the liberal social contract—a reform associated with an austere state budget and therefore with private, as opposed to state, benevolence. This budget centered on educating peasants and, increasingly, the urban poor, in practices of self-help. The chapter also investigates the rather sharp contrast to this conservative social reform: the surge in state investment in elitist and higher education and the rise in state employment—both of which allowed the growth of an effendi middle class.
Presenting the Imperial Family: The Birth, Death, and Survival of Royal Children
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the Ottoman dynasty’s system of concubinage, which included the sultan’s mother, the Valide Sultan or ‘Mother Princess’. It investigates the concept of marriage with concubines, the dynasty’s rules restricting siring of children to the monarch alone, and how royal births and deaths might have been announced. A succinct biography of Abdülhamid I is followed by brief life stories of the 18 children (and one other adult, Mustafa IV) buried here, mostly gleaned from Ottoman chronicles; the children are arranged under the name of the concubine who bore them, with life details of these women provided insofar as they are known. Epitaphs of all buried here are presented, with translations. A discussion ensues of smallpox, the disease that killed most of the children buried here.
Stoicism
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

The slave frees himself from “master” in order to become a “mister,” Booker T. Washington writes, through an abstract freedom that is located inside the formerly enslaved consciousness. The downfall of the Stoic is that this freedom is merely the thought, not the actuality, of freedom. The freedom of the Stoic “I” is only free insofar as it is deprived of all content, an empty form of subjectivity. Such abstract subjectivity appears in Washington insofar as he advocates for a cultivation of a self beyond race -- a pure, universal “I” that is neither Black nor white. Washingtonian Stoicism gains self, freedom, truth, goodness, wisdom, and virtue by creating a radical dualism between the inner citadel of the self and the utterly indifferent and meaningless world. There was, however, another Stoic -- Ida B. Wells – who showed that Washington’s Stoic industriousness would not bring assimilation, but rather the brutality of lynching. Through her courageous investigative journalism, Wells proved how white people sought to control Black bodies in ways that pivoted on a kind of white misrecognition that Washington ignored. In the end, while Washington worked his way out, Wells investigated and reported her way out.
Scepticism
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

Seeking refuge in abstract ideals, the Stoic tried to negate the whole world in one act. The trouble is that ideals compete, entailing dialectical unrest. The Skeptic is thereby forced to divide himself into two, hence the structure of skeptic subjectivity: endlessly caught in the unstable tension between two irreconcilable demands. This divided structure is concretized in W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” Since being Black is being non-white, and being American entails whiteness, the Black soul must do the impossible. Du Bois is neither simply American nor African, and yet he is both African and American. The problem, for Hegel, is that the two parts of the Skeptic self are unstructured and disordered. For Du Bois, however, this double dividedness gifts the Black soul “with a second-sight.” While Du Bois’s Skepticism is captured in the single cleavage of double consciousness, Anna Julia Cooper provides a feminist perspective that deepens and complicates by revealing further divisions structuring Black female souls: she is both and neither Black, American, Woman, and more. Cooper thus provides an early articulation of intersectionality and standpoint theory that Du Bois overlooked and that Hegel never imagined. While Du Bois intellectualized his way out, Cooper voiced her way out.
Devotion
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

As the first moment of Unhappy Consciousness, devotion seeks to purify itself so that it is prepared to receive the Unchangeable insofar as it is incarnated in a particular form. Ultimately, devotion fails because feeling leads back to the body, which was exactly what it tried to escape; it finds itself with a feeling of not of God but of its self. Marcus Garvey is devotional insofar he subordinates personal aims to universal aims through his “Back to Africa” philosophy. Translating Garveyism into Hegelese, “African” is the Unchangeable and “Black” is the changeable. However, if Garvey’s goal was to suggest that Black people must leave and return to Africa, then Zora Neale Hurston, in her life and literature had already made this return--figuratively and literally. Her work in folklore and anthropology showed the world that the Black community here was enough; she devoted herself to chronicling and showing how Black communities, in their inherent complexities, were already rich and full of the very kind of life to which many of her contemporaries aspired. If Garvey literally wanted to sail his way out, then Hurston knew that going in would be the way out.
Conclusion
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

Reflecting on the trajectory from the master-slave dialectic to Angela Davis, we return to the professional and personal implications of staging this dialectical parallelism. After the six moments, we take a moment to reflect: What are the implications of our reading? And -- perhaps more importantly -- what does it mean that we, a black and white philosopher, thought it important to write this book? Moreover -- and perhaps most important of all -- we wonder together about the gendered implications (and possible limitations) of our analysis: How have the women thinkers, from Harriet Jacobs to Angela Davis, opened a different path for thought? Stopping with Angela Davis is an intentional move, for we see in her an opening to a different path of Black thought: Black Power. The book ends with a gesture towards the next parallelism in Hegel’s Phenomenology: Reason and Black Power. Hence the next stage is the rise of the Black Panthers, but that is a tale for a different book.
Jugoplastika: Plastics and Postsocialist Realism
Authors: Filipović Andrija
Published: September 2023

This essay examines plastic—its production, dissemination, and removal—as a complex ontopolitical problem in the times of postsocial realism, a condition of possibility of imagining and living (and dying) in the spacetimes of perpetual transition toward contemporary European society. Focusing on Jugoplastika, a factory for the production of petrochemical products, Filipović shows the ways in which plastic becomes a pluritemporal, multimaterial, ontopolitical hyperobject, from the finished product, such as toys for children, to the waste deposited at the largest landfill in Serbia, near Belgrade. Occasional spontaneous ignitions at the landfill transform waste plastic into smoke, changing the urban “olfactoscape.” Filipović claims that events in Belgrade’s olfactoscape reveal a crumbling infrastructure built during the modernization of socialist Yugoslavia. The discourse of a “ruined” landscape and the promise of a “clean” future are inextricably connected to the flows of capital and the financialization of the environment, which is seen as necessary in the transition from a ruined postsocialist state to contemporary European society.
Failed Infrastructures, My Little Ponies, and Wadden Plastics: The Eco-Intimacies of the MSC Zoe Container Disaster
Authors: Hoogland Renée
Published: September 2023

The essay zeroes in on the MSC Zoe disaster, a large cargo spill in which 342 shipping containers ended up in the North Sea in early 2019. Soon after the accident, residents of the nearby Dutch Wadden Islands witnessed enormous amounts of plastic waste that had escaped the spilled containers and washed up on shore. By engaging with this container spill, Hoogland explores the emerging intimacies in a landscape where humans exist in co-constitutive relationships with their ecologically damaged surroundings. The author begins by figuratively tracing the shipping container before it entered the surroundings of the Wadden Islands as a washed-up “lost” object. After exploring how the container disaster marked a dialectic of visibility and invisibility, Hoogland analyzes the social, artistic, and technological bids to make sense of the plastic content of these spilled steel boxes. In doing so, she not only reflects upon the ways that the materiality of plastic enters our lives in moments of infrastructural disruption but also explores how, through plastic, we interact with and invade the environment and other species.
The Pioneers of Plasticraft: When Artists Found Plastics in the United States
Authors: O’Steen Danielle
Published: September 2023

O’Steen asserts that public presentations and exhibitions were integral tools for the growth of modern plastics in the United States, starting in the 1930s. She considers key collaborations between the arts and the plastics industry, particularly seen in the 1939–40 World’s Fair in Flushing, New York. Modern plastics had their most public debut at the fair, creating many opportunities for manufacturers to explore creative ways to sell their products to the public. O’Steen shows how the emerging plastics industry used artwork and exhibitions as part of their corporate agendas. She argues that this 1930s moment laid the groundwork for much collaboration between the arts and plastics for the following decades—particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—when artists were turning to plastics in even larger numbers and with great enthusiasm.
Plastic Poetics: Challenging the Epistemologies of Plastic Waste in the Artwork of Maria Roelofsen
Authors: Beck Nathan , Diamanti Jeff
Published: September 2023

Using plastic and driftwood materials salvaged from the shore, artist Maria Roelofsen creates animal-like sculptures that perform a vital function in surfacing the circuitous nature of global waste and pointing to the universal human complicity in ineffective plastic disposal. Beck and Diamanti argue that the ontological demarcation of plastic as waste or toxic or disposable is temporary, and rewritten in Roelofsen’s art by introducing a poetics of aesthetic play that displaces the immediate discourse on the environmentally destructive tendencies of plastic, and instead provokes a sense of beauty and renewed purpose in its structural (re)composition with organic materials. Drawing on concepts of scale, surface, and camp, Beck and Diamanti situate Roelofsen’s art and its poetics amidst recent thinking by Stacy Alaimo and Amanda Boetzkes in particular to consider how cutesy and creative play can widen the discursive frame and illuminate new ways to engage in critical, aesthetic, and activist practice that help us learn to live within the far-reaching penetration of plastic life.
Plastic City: Temporality, Materiality, and Waste in Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney
Authors: Potter Emily , Seale Kirsten
Published: September 2023

The authors consider the ubiquity of plastic in Australian urban and peri-urban life through the literary practices of Sydney author Vanessa Berry. Berry’s ethnographic practices of mapping and tracing forgotten layers in the urban fabric, through walking, collecting, and narrating, highlight the paradoxical temporality of modernity in an urban powerhouse like Sydney, where a temporality is embedded in its materiality. As in all global cities, in Sydney plastic polymers structure both the rapidity of urban development and its cultures of inhabitation. Berry’s practice, Potter and Seale claim, unsettles this trajectory by paying attention to the debris, the abandoned infrastructure, and the quieter polyphonic stories that fall away from the dominant mono-vocality of the global city narrative—worlds that are also composed of plastic. Yet the authors argue that the fragmentary nature of these histories, and their slow undoing in the urban landscape, tells a different account of the role of plastic in urban Australia. These complex, affective encounters are more intimate, more mobile, and ultimately something that we can imagine ourselves abandoning, in a necessarily different environmental future. In this way, these accounts, and Berry’s embodied, local ethnographic practices, work against the erasure of the worlds from which hypermodernity arose, to contemplate a genuine postmodernity.
Plastic in the Time of Impasse
Authors: Simpson Mark
Published: September 2023

Simpson claims that although energy transition—a shift from dirty to clean energy—is a mantra for the present, energy impasse is the defining condition of our age. So envisioned, according to Simpson, impasse has less to do with blockage, obstacles to circumvent or overcome, and more to do with “stuckness.” In his essay, Simpson argues that plastic, petromodernity’s ubiquitous offspring, materially as well as emblematically epitomizes such impasse-as-stuckness. In developing this argument, the author attends more particularly to plastic time: to the time signatures and temporal imaginaries instituted and normalized, in petroculture, through plastic. The time of plastic operates according to a contradictory rhythm that connects disposability with saturation and impermanence with perpetuity while seeding malleability or fungibility as the determining condition and abiding allure of objects and subjects alike. Simpson explores how a reckoning with these plastic temporalities might illuminate the urgent problem of energy impasse today—and how it might open up some perspective against or beyond the stuckness of impasse.
Ford Madox Brown Among the Brain-Workers
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 2 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter discusses the artistic and literary work ethics of the painter, Ford Madox Brown, and offers a new reading of his large-scale canvas, Work (1852-65). It focuses, in particular, on his reliance on convenient fictions of personal accountancy. Through the notational strategies of his diary, Brown employs literary as well as visual methods of testimony to account for the ‘work’ of art, both under the influence of Carlyle, and in an awareness of differences.
Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 3 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter examines Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dedication to Carlylean labour theory. In common with Chapter 2, it reveals an imperfect fit between certain identities – Brown as an artist, and Barrett Browning as a bed-ridden poet of liberal inclination – and Carlyle’s demonstrative emphasis on the strenuous word. Making the reality of vocation fit the mould of Carlylean work gives rise to productive tensions, as Barrett Browning’s adapted ‘Carlyleship’ demonstrates.
Participant Observers: Gladstone, Ruskin, Morris
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 4 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter discusses writers who personally undertook physical labour. Parts (i) and (ii) address writers who responded to the dilemma of ‘placing’ their labour by personally undertaking physical tasks: Gladstone, as a lifelong advocate and practitioner of tree-felling, and Ruskin, as professing an ‘excavatory fancy’, or ‘original instinct of liking to dig a hole’. Part (iii) examines William Morris’s conception of the poet, or Skald, as a practitioner of craftsmanship, and the ways in which he expounds a ‘loom of the mind’. All three cases address the sense of passing in a role outside the limits of middle-class life.
Modernism and the Maker
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 6 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter demonstrates a link between the aestheticist consolidation of the writer’s ‘craft’ (notably, among Walter Pater, Percy Lubbock and Vernon Lee), and the continued life of these debates among modernist writers. It dwells initially on a stark contrast between Virginia Woolf’s critique of the literature-craft metaphor, and the ideas of Olive Schreiner as expressed in her work Woman and Labour (1911). Part (ii) discusses Eric Gill, a modernist inheritor of the Arts and Crafts movement who promotes a materialization and incarnation of the word while asserting the artist’s status as a ‘maker’. This prepares the ground for a final part on Ezra Pound, whose view of poetry as an apprenticeship epitomises the modern reach of the Carlylean principle. He also hastens its demise by fatally extending Ruskin’s anti-capitalism into anti-Semitism (‘usura rusteth the chisel’, Canto 45). The larger impetus behind these examples is to demonstrate the legacy of Arts and Crafts thinking in the early twentieth century, and the ways in which it becomes embroiled in a gradual turn towards forms of social discipline and prejudice.
Theory: Thinking with Literature
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

In the preceding chapter we have been on the trail of the muse of critique, discovering how resilient it is, how desired and pursued even by thinkers of the present who reject any hermeneutics of the subject but still seem to be receptive to critique’s gentle indocility. In the process, a theme has emerged that now requires proper attention, and that is the contact between literature and philosophy. The keyword for this chapter, “Theory” is a name for the shaping force of that contact. “Theory” with a capital letter is understood as a stage in literary criticism delimited in time, while “theory” with lower case letter, is understood as an approach to texts that, as Raymond Williams advised in Chapter 1 of this book, moves beyond their governamentality. The chapter traces the degree to which critique depends on the question of the contact between literature and philosophy through the example of Fredric Jameson, a pioneer of that transformation of criticism that in American academia gave rise to the new discourse of “theory.” The chapter approaches Jameson through the resources of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Carla Lonzi.
Tradition: Eliot and Work
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

This chapter enlists T. S. Eliot in living thought. It shows that Eliot’s theory of literature flows from the conflict of life and form, breaking down tradition as a temporal sequence of authors in favor of a plane of repetition and méconnaissance. Discussion builds on Eliot’s distinctive trait, which is undoubtedly his turn from philosophy to poetry, to concentrate on the poet’s projection of himself as the practitioner of a writing life that overlaps with ordinary life. The fact that the sustainability of the writing life is central to Eliot sheds light on a mode of action in which the stake was keeping himself in a relation of “potency” with regard to language. Discussion draws on previously unpublished photographic portraits of Eliot by American photographer George Platt Lynes to show that, in the case of Eliot, it would be limiting to understand the relation of life to writing in terms of a subjective metanoia or a technology of the self through which the artist creates himself. Rather, the conflict of life and form indicates a practice of life aimed at ensuring a relation to language as pure potentiality.
Text and Method: Cixous–Joyce–Lispector
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

Even though feminist theorist Hélène Cixous has been assimilated to French poststructuralism, her idea of literature strays from what is customarily understood by the term “poststructuralism.” She neither assumes a competitive relation with the text nor feeds the hostility of text and critic, which in postcritical times has been lamented as a negative poststructuralist legacy. Cixous, instead, places centerstage the activity of reading, and shares with Toril Moi the conviction that reading begins in wonder. The chapter considers Cixous’s pioneering transnationalization of modernist Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector before the geo-cultural reorientation and expansion of The New Modernist Studies. It looks back at the audacious discovery of the Brazilian writer and argues that it activates the modernist conflict of life and form, redirecting it in an alternative line of reflection qualified as “living.” For Cixous, “writing is something living.” Discussion focuses especially on her comparative reading of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, to outline the dialogue with Esposito’s living thought. Echoed and amplified by Esposito’s living thought, Cixous’ living writing concerns our critical practice because it compels us to re-examine the ways we conceptualize the text and think about method.
Poststructuralism: Faith and Lacan
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

In Chapter Six, in the hands of feminist poststructuralist thinker Hélène Cixous the modernist motif of the conflict of Life vs. Form took on centrality. The notion of a “living writing” employed by Cixous has consequences in that it causes our interest to shift from language seen as an all englobing, even imprisoning, horizon to a principle of natality, within language, in spite of the symbolic order and the symbolic structure that fix the subject in the social order. The keyword for this chapter is “poststructuralism” and discussion considers its wider, far-reaching effects by expanding on the notion of a gift that is simultaneously a paternal donation, presenting it as a neglected aspect of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism usually means the rejection of an idea of reality independent of language. Yet, this chapter follows up Cixous’s recuperation, via Joyce’s modernism, of a beneficial principle in language beyond the Oedipal law. It enlists the help of Jean-Luc Marion’s work on Augustine, of contemporary theology, and of Jacques Lacan’s texts on psychoanalysis and religion to pursue the notion of a paternal donation beyond the Oedipal father and beyond the struggle for recognition.
Conclusion: Depending on Your Neighbor
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

The conclusion recaps the findings of the study, dwelling on the critic’s vocation for the outside, as someone who seeks his or her grounding in literature’s neighboring disciplines. The current debate on postcritique has turned the spotlight on reading as the central activity in literary studies. If reading is a practice (not a method), by definition it privileges the unforeseen; it implies a degree of experimentalism and an openness to transformation, which over time have fostered the critic’s reliance on other disciplines -- linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and so on – for theoretical grounding. Such a reliance has been a source of anxiety in the past and today it is a risk, overshadowed by the louder rejection of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet, the study concludes that close proximity with other disciplines may itself be constitutive of the critical-literary field. The rise of a new type of thinker who wants to ask questions about reality does not necessarily mean an uncritical celebration of objectivity in literary studies; if anything, it affirms the vulnerability and instability of the figure of the field practitioner, with his or her dependence on the neighbor as the living trait of critique.
Introduction
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

The chapter explains the political constraints and possibilities of journalism in Lebanon and Tunisia and places the issue of journalism and politics within the literature on media in the Arab region. In conceptual terms, media instrumentalisation, hybrid politics and hybrid media are the organising terms for the book. The combination of these three features is found in many countries around the world and leads to a mixed situation for journalists. While journalists are formally free to say what they want, and their work is politically consequential, they are also either encouraged or pressured to toe the line of powerful media owners and politicians. Media instrumentalisation in such contexts is an unstable equilibrium. It generates resentment among journalists and the wider society that may, in critical situations, lead to open conflict.
Finding a Role: Tunisian Journalism after the Revolution
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

What kind of journalism emerged in Tunisia following Ben Ali’s ouster? Drawing on interviews with journalists across a wide range of media, the chapter investigates what aims and ambitions journalists in the post-revolution transition had. There was a divide between activists who cherished an interventionist ideal and proponents of disinterested journalism. The ideal of professional autonomy was strong in Tunisia but came into conflict with politicians and businessmen who used their might to instrumentalise the media. One important result is a distinction between the journalist-commentators known as chroniqueurs and ordinary journalists. Leading chroniqueurs are celebrities and entrepreneurs who are frequently accused of being on politicians’ payrolls. By contrast, many journalists and the powerful National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) are committed to an independent watchdog role and fiercely defend their professional integrity.
National Security and Free Speech in Tunisia
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

Chapters 6-8 interrogate how journalists react when critical features of democracy are at stake and the first issue is the balancing of national security and civil liberties. Tunisia and Lebanon face real and home-grown problems of violent extremism, but security is also evoked to justify infringements on citizen rights. The chapter discusses how Tunisian journalists handled the tension between a heightened sense of insecurity and the country’s frail democratic opening in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum. It shows that prominent commentators fell back on interpretive schema from the Ben Ali era when they tried to make sense of the terrorist attack, thus facilitating the authoritarian drift of the Tunisian government at the time. The fraught relationship between the right to free speech and appeals to national security has characterized press-politics dynamics since. Paradoxically, the real losers in the aftermath of the Bardo attack proved to be not the Islamists who were so roundly condemned, but liberal civil society activists and journalists.
Protests and Disruptive Journalism
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

How did Lebanese journalists cover and intervene in the 2019-2010 popular protests against the political establishment? Drawing on face-to-face interviews and content analysis of different media including Twitter, the chapter follows the trajectories of some influential media professionals during this period. It starts by presenting the conflicting narratives of the channels that supported (LBCI, New TV, MTV) and condemned (al-Manar, OTV, NBN) the uprising. Then, it discusses how social media contributed to the conflict dynamics and how journalists made use of them. The protests and journalistic coverage of them affected relationships between journalists and politicians, audiences and media organisations, as well as conflicts among journalists themselves. The chapter covers the worrying rise in physical attacks on journalists and the scale of counter-protest defamation campaigns. Media and journalists contributed to the protests in very significant ways, illustrating how the latent tension of media instrumentalisation may lead to political disruption.
Macpherson the Historian
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

This is the first book-length study of James Macpherson (1736-1796) that considers him as an historian. From his early poetry, to the Ossianic Collections, his prose histories, and his later political writing, Macpherson’s subject was the past and he engaged with the latest Enlightenment theories about how to write history.
Macpherson the Historian examines James’ published works, from the neoclassical verse of The Highlander (1758) to his pamphlets defending the British imperial state during the late 1770s. In all of these texts, Macpherson wrote as an Enlightenment historian, where ideas about narrative, philosophy, and erudition were interwoven with eighteenth-century debates about the Highlands, commercial modernity, and the British Empire.