bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Farewell to Arms: Antony and Cleopatra
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

War and conflict, or peace and love? In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare chooses to enact the debate openly as one waged between two contrasting ideologies in the widest conflict between empires, and the male protagonist as a commanding officer made famous in war faces a choice between starkly opposed value systems. As a variation on the theme of a love relationship complicated by the soldier’s past, Antony is shown in the throes of attempting to escape his reputation as ‘the greatest soldier of the world’ (1.3.58), and instead choosing love.
Beyond War: ‘“If” is your only peacemaker’
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

Shakespeare habitually uses forgiveness, ‘pardon’ and mercy as terms for restorative or reparative justice establishing states of reconciliation, contrasted with the punitive and vengeful justice inflicted by unforgiving victors that leads to mutual annihilation in war. Touchstone’s ‘”If” is your only peacemaker’ lightly but powerfully encapsulates the requirement for diplomacy and negotiation (historically important in Elizabethan foreign relations to avoid war), based on imagining different points of view in arguments that lead to conflict. The necessary, voluntary choices and actions, based on altruism, sympathy and imagination, are found in abundance in Shakespeare, if we care to look for them.
Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Anthropocene
Authors: Adkins Peter
Published: January 2025

This introduction theorises what it means to read Virginia Woolf as a writer of the Anthropocene. It does so initially by situating Woolf within the early twentieth century’s growing sense of both humanity’s power to shape the planet and its own precarity as a species. Looking at her description of the 1927 total solar eclipse and To the Lighthouse, this chapter shows how Woolf was highly attuned to rapid shifts in how the planet was being conceptualised and understood, as well as the material transformations taking place around her. The chapter then explores how Woolf theorises what it means to be a reader, critic and writer in the Anthropocene, looking at how her essays and reviews turn to the nonhuman world in their conceptualisation of literary aesthetics and cultural history. Woolf is shown to be not only a writer of the Anthropocene epoch, but a theorist too. The chapter then examines how Woolf’s ecological sensibilities were recognised by critics long before the environmental turn within modernist studies. Offering an account of Woolf criticism from the 1980s to the present, it charts how Woolf’s ecocritical reception has kept apace with developments in the field. This section concludes with summaries of the subsequent chapters in the volume.
Virginia Woolf and Anticipations of the Anthropocene
Authors: Alt Christina
Published: January 2025

This chapter surveys scientific articulations of the concept of anthropogenic climate change that appeared during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime in the work of Svante Arrhenius, Nils Ekholm, R. L. Sherlock, G. S. Callendar, and E. Ray Lankester and considers Woolf’s own representations of climate in relation to these early twentieth-century anticipations of the Anthropocene. The chapter first discusses the fears of natural climatic cooling that frequently led early proponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change to welcome the possibility of human-induced warming as evidence of human agency in the face of natural climatic variability. It then turns to examine Woolf’s representations of past and future climates, particularly her recurrent visions of the Earth in future as a cold, still, ice-sheeted planet. Focusing on ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), the chapter demonstrates that while Woolf, like her scientific contemporaries, anticipated natural planetary cooling, she interrogated the impulse towards the control and regulation of planetary processes that often accompanied early twentieth-century scientific discussions of anthropogenic warming.
Cosmopolitan Anthropocene: The Convergence of Transnationalism and Climatic Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s The Years
Authors: Chattopadhyay Shinjini
Published: January 2025

This essay examines the confluence of modernist cosmopolitanism and climatic consciousness in Woolf’s late novel, The Years (1937). Beginning by establishing the anti-imperialist, feminist tenor of Woolf’s modernist cosmopolitanism, this chapter asks how her politics might be read alongside the return to universalist species discourse that has emerged with the concept of the Anthropocene. One answer, this essay argues, is in Woolf’s nascent awareness of the devastating environmental consequences of imperialism. Examining key moments in The Years, alongside essays such as ‘Thunder in Wembley’ (1924) and The London Scene (1931-32), this chapter shows how Woolf hybridises natural and human history, deconstructing the binary between the human and the nonhuman, and, in so doing, embeds moments of climatic consciousness into her text. The result, this essay argues, is a novel that rejects imperial authority and creates the foundations for an idea of humanity that retains its heterogeneity in the face of a collective planetary history.
Following the Oil: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Imperial Extractivism
Authors: Adkins Peter
Published: January 2025

This essay explores how Woolf and her contemporaries devised new representational strategies in response to Britain’s growing empire of oil. The chapter begins with her 1924 essay ‘Thunder at Wembley’, a critical account of the British Empire Exhibition that can be read as a rejoinder to oil’s promise of a new imperial frontier, with Woolf instead forecasting an apocalyptic future for extractivist economies. The chapter then turns to Vita Sackville-West’s Persian travelogue, Twelve Days, published by the Woolfs in 1928. An early petro-narrative, the book includes an extended account of Sackville-West’s visit to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s oilfields within which we find a heightened attention to the narrative techniques required to write about oil. Woolf’s own travelogue of sorts, The London Scene (1931-32) is the final text to be analysed. Alert to how oil products were altering the fabric of society both in Britain and elsewhere, the chapter shows how we find Woolf trying to write at multiple scales at once, inhabiting both the local and the planetary. Ultimately, this chapter argues, following the oil in Woolf allows us to better understand the strategies, elisions and innovations that speak to petromodernity’s emergence and our continuing age of oil.
Hearing Beyond Extinction: The Inhuman Comedy of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
Authors: Tazudeen Rasheed
Published: January 2025

Read as a proto-Anthropocenic text, Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) is simultaneously a proleptic elegy for the extinctions to come and an attempt to confront the unimaginability of an Earth that persists beyond humanistic possession. This chapter argues that within the context of the novel’s preoccupation with the future, comedy emerges as an ecological modality in which the imagination must surrender to forces, beings, and temporalities other than human. Situating Miss La Trobe’s pageant in its relation to comedy (which comes from the combination of the Greek terms kômos [revelry] and odía [song]), this essay reads the play within the novel as staging a mode of thinking and singing with the Earth. Sound, as this chapter shows, is central to Woolf’s inhumanism, with the novel’s ecological aesthetic residing in the noise-worlds and soundscapes articulated by animals, machines and resonators. Attending to this inhuman comedy, this chapter shows, enables Woolf’s readers to hear towards the resonant improvisations of the Earth that remain indifferent and irreducible to both the humanisms of the present and the (post)humanisms projected into the future.
Darwinism, Dogs and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf
Authors: McCracken Saskia
Published: January 2025

This chapter reads Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) in the context of Donna Haraway’s call for canine stories that ‘teach us to pay attention to significant otherness’ in the Anthropocene. Analysing the manuscript drafts and published version of Flush, this chapter shows how Woolf’s engagement with Darwin is more sustained, extensive and subversive than previously recognised. Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) is shown to be a previously unacknowledged intertext, with Woolf’s modernist innovations drawing on and refashioning his ideas around canine ethics, language, reason and imagination. Reading Woolf alongside Darwin, this chapter argues, enables us to see where her novel pushes beyond Victorian evolutionary theory and confronts what Giorgio Agamben has described as the ‘anthropological machine’. Instead, Flush teaches us to pay attention to significant otherness by imagining different kinds of canine agency and by blurring the boundaries between human and animal, embracing evolutionary theory’s radical levelling of species.
Virginia Woolf’s ‘bewildering world’
Authors: Ryan Derek
Published: January 2025

In his 1941 Rede Lecture, E. M. Forster remarks that reading Virginia Woolf transports us to ‘a bewildering world’. Woolf is ‘like a plant which is supposed to grow in a well-prepared garden bed – the bed of esoteric literature – and then pushes up suckers all over the place, through the gravel of the front drive, and even through the flagstones of the kitchen yard’. This chapter takes Forster’s botanical simile as a starting point to theorise what it means to read Woolf as a ‘bewildering’ writer in the context of the Anthropocene epoch. Beginning by examining the re-evaluation of the wild and wildness in recent critical and ecocritical theory, the chapter follows use of the noun ‘bewilderment’ and its verbal and adjectival forms (‘bewilder’, ‘bewildered’ and ‘bewildering’) across Woolf’s oeuvre, beginning with her reviews and essays before turning to her novels. If the modernist Anthropocene is characterised by ontological and ethical entanglements of various kinds, this chapter shows how bewilderment can be an animating force that injects affect into these entanglements, unsettling processes of human meaning-making via attunement to the nonhuman.
‘Suspending the sky’: Virginia Woolf and the Brazilian Indigenous Worldview of Ailton Krenak
Authors: Pinho Davi , de Oliveira Maria A.
Published: January 2025

This chapter brings Woolf into dialogue with the indigenous Brazilian philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak, examining how their bodies of work offer new ways of conceptualising agency, politics and environmental justice in the Anthropocene. Beginning by excavating a methodology of outsideness in Woolf, which has its clearest articulation in her Society of Outsiders in Three Guineas (1938), this essay shows how Woolf’s writing foreshadows developments in ecofeminism and new materialism. It is in this respect, that Woolf can be reread alongside the indigenous philosophy of Krenak, with both writers making clear that to reimagine social relations one must also reconceptualise the earth beneath and the sky above, recognising the interconnected nature of all lives. Turning to a critical reading of Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915), the essay concludes by demonstrating the insights such an approach can yield, bringing to light how the text pushes back against colonialist and imperialist fantasies of mastery and control and showing how Woolf instead endorses an ecological aesthetic of vibrance and vitality that extends far beyond the human.
Where is the Outside?
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the concept of the outside, tracing it across the work of Deleuze, Blanchot and Foucault. But whereas Blanchot and Foucault are both dedicated to a conception of the outside as rooted in the experiments of literature, Deleuze takes up this concept and puts it to work in the realm of thought, images and cinema. Accordingly, this chapter also offers up an exegesis of Deleuze’s own account of thought, conceived as a creative response to the problem of that which we are unable, as yet, to think.
A Politics of the Out-of-Field
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter explicates Deleuze’s political philosophy as it appears in his two-volume study of cinema. Whereas other authors are eager to emphasise cinema’s ideological functions, Deleuze is dedicated to a “political ontology of thought,” according to which the cinematic image is capable of engineering radically new noetic individuations. In presenting us with images which are somehow “unthinkable” according to our extant intellectual categories, the cinematic image thus provokes us to invent new categories, indeed new worlds, in a creative movement which is thus eminently political. The chapter explores this account as it pertains to both the post-war cinema of the various “New Waves,” and the malaise of what mark Fisher called “capitalist realism.”
The Digital Image
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with Gregory Flaxman’s argument, that digital images constitute an existential threat to cinema conceived as an art of the “outside,” smuggling as they do an aspiration to a kind of “total visibility” according to which the image is overdetermined by the interests of both control and capital. The chapter then explores the Deleuzian basis for this approach, and the latter’s fragmentary critique of the entwined notions of control, information and communication. In this context, the chapter explicates Deleuze’s account of what he calls “societies of control,” linking it to the transformation of cinema into a digital medium.
Cybernetic Information
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter reads Deleuze alongside information theory and cybernetics, drawing out the ways in which the specific terms of Deleuze’s engagement with these fields may have caused him to overlook certain possibilities inherent to the digital image. Alongside Shannon and Weaver’s influential “mathematical theory of communication,” the chapter explicates the cybernetically informed philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, himself an important influence on Deleuze. From these sources is derived an account of “noise” as a specific kind of information-a non-systematised content which acts as the potential for radically new processes of individuation. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ways in which this conception of noise can help us to understand not only the noetic potentials of art, but the potentials of an art composed through digital images specifically.
Art and the Digital
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter presents the argument that the contemporary ecology of digital images requires a renovation of Deleuze’s concepts, as well as a turn to the work of his collaborator, Félix Guattari, who helps us to better understand the emancipatory potentials immanent to mass media cultures. The chapter advances a discussion of television in particular, drawing out the ways in which its images are the site of potential “encounters,” such as provoke us to think in new ways. In this context, the chapter explores not only Deleuze’s own engagement with the televisual works of Samuel Beckett, but David Lynch’s experiments in Twin Peaks: The Return, which once more articulate a uniquely digital outside.
The President's Kill List
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

From Fidel Castro to Qassem Soleimani, the US government has been involved in an array of assassinations and assassination attempts against foreign leaders and officials. The President’s Kill List utilises extensive and often recently declassified archival material to unveil the history and politics of assassination in US foreign policy. It reveals how the US government has relied on a variety of methods, from the use of poison to the delivery of sniper rifles, and from employing hitmen to simply laying the groundwork for local actors to do the deed themselves. It shows how policymakers talked about assassination – often through euphemisms and innuendos - how they decided on it, and the level of Presidential control over these decisions. Tracing the history of the US government’s approach to assassination, the book analyses the evolution of assassination policies and, for the first time, reveals how successive administrations - through private justifications and public legitimations – ensured assassination remained an available foreign policy option.
Experimenting with Assassination: Brainwashing, Poison and Early Cold War Plots
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The chapter explores early Cold War experiments with assassination, as well as early Cold War plots against foreign officials. As to experiments, the chapter focuses on two main areas: hypnosis and poisons. Hypnosis aimed at creating the perfect – unwitting – assassin. Experiments were conducted both informally (i.e. hypnotising CIA secretaries) and as part of broader CIA programs, including the controversial MKULTRA. Experiments with poison aimed at devising both suitable substances and suitable delivery devices. The infamous Sidney Gottlieb was at the centre of most of the poison experiments. Early Cold War assassination plots included a plethora of methods from poison in food and explosives to collaboration with local allies. Targeted individuals included Stalin, China’s Zhou Enlai, Indonesia’s Sukarno and many others. Many of the plots did not move past the drawing board, but still signal the availability of assassination as a foreign policy option.
Patrice Lumumba: Eisenhower’s Order to Kill
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

Having traced the emergence of Lumumba as the leader in post-independence Congo, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of the US government’s efforts to assassinate him. The chapter shows that this policy was spearheaded by the US’ European allies, particularly Belgium. These shared with the US a contempt for Lumumba, often driven by racist stereotypes. Having tried and failed to poison or shoot Lumumba, the US government worked to draw him out of UN custody and deliver him to his enemies. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of CIA Chief of Station Larry Devlin and his contacts. It also provides a close account of the decision-making in Washington. Here, the evidence points to an order by then President Eisenhower to kill the Congolese leader.
Rafael Trujillo: Assassination and the US Role in Covert Regime Change
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

Assassination has often been used in the context of covert regime change. This chapter details the US government support and encouragement of a group of Dominican dissidents in their efforts to get rid of Trujillo. The operations started under Eisenhower and continued under Kennedy. A leading figure in the plotting was US consul (and at one point CIA contact point) Henry Dearborn. Dearborn plotted with Dominicans to overthrow and kills Trujillo, making clear to his contacts and to Washington that assassination – while unsavoury – was the correct option in this case. The chapter also covers the White House’s effort to erase the historical record and destroy all the communication regarding the plotting with the unsurprising exception of a cable calling for the US government to distance itself from assassination.
The ‘Season of Inquiry’ and the Fight over the Ban on Assassination
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The chapter analyses the role played by assassination in the “season of inquiry.” The “season of inquiry” was a period – during the mid-1970s – in which the intelligence community’s activities became to object of scrutiny and oversight by both Congress and the media. The chapter covers the Ford Administration’s attempt to stymie the inquiries through a Presidential Commission – the Rockefeller Commission. The chapter then proceeds to explore the battle between the Administration and the ‘Church Committee,’ the US Senate Committee tasked with investigating the intelligence community and chaired by Senator Frank Church. Having started its investigation, the Committee published an interim report on the US government’s involvement in the assassination of foreign officials. The report contained recommendations to establish a prohibition on assassination providing extensive details on how this prohibition should be interpreted. Above all, the Committee wanted this prohibition to be enshrined into law. Unwilling to let Congress restrict the intelligence community, the Ford Administration instead published an executive order (11905) which reformed the intelligence community and contained a prohibition on assassination. Contrary to the Committee’s recommendations, an executive order is not a law, and the prohibition was vague. This, the chapter argues, opened the gates for the future contestation and weakening of the ban.
Saddam Hussein: Assassination and the Long Confrontation between the US Government and Iraq
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The chapter explores the pre-9/11 confrontation between the US government and Saddam Hussein. Starting with the Gulf War, the chapter follows the US government’s efforts to remove Saddam from power. Both the H. W. Bush and Clinton Administrations relied on a combination of economic sanctions, WMDs inspections, covert action, and direct uses of force to punish and remove Saddam. The chapter identifies various assassination attempts. Direct assassination attempts relied on the aerial bombing of targets and infrastructure connected to Saddam and his regime, in the hope that – as the Reagan Administration’s precedents suggested – the Iraqi dictator might be present at these targets. Indirect assassination attempt relied on the support and the provision of materiel, training, and weapons to various groups of Iraqi exiles and Iraqi opposition leaders. In this context, the chapter explores the controversies surrounding attempted coups during the Clinton Administration, as well as Operation Desert Fox, a massive bombing campaign against Saddam and his regime.
Osama Bin Laden: Assassination and Counterterrorism on the Road to 9/11
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The chapter chronicles the US government’s hunt for Bin Laden before 9/11. It shows how the Clinton Administration became increasingly more aware of the threat posed by Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The Administration developed plans to kill or capture Bin Laden. Some of these plans involved the bombing of training camps and targets associated with Bin Laden. Others involved the CIA’s support of local allies in Afghanistan. Many of these plans were shelved due to poor intelligence and – in some cases – due to a lack of capabilities on the part of the CIA’s local allies. Much controversy surrounds whether the Clinton White House and concerns surrounding the ban on assassination hampered the killing of Bin Laden. The chapter suggests that much of this controversy has to do with post-9/11 blame-shifting. Through internal legal reviews, the Administration had concluded that it could kill Bin Laden through aerial bombing. This was no different from the arguments made against Qaddafi and Saddam by previous administrations. Less clear were the authorities given to the CIA to conduct a covert operation to kill Bin Laden, but the book highlights how – at least on one occasion – Clinton gave full authority to the Agency. Ultimately, Bin Laden also escaped the Bush Administration which was too distracted by great power politics and by a lengthy review of counterterrorism policy to do anything before al-Qaeda struck.
Conclusion: Assassination, ‘Targeted Killings’ and the Ban since 9/11
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The aim of the conclusion is twofold. First, the concluding chapter brings the account of the US government’s involvement in assassination to the present day (Biden Administration). Here the analysis details the transition – after 9/11 – from assassination to the more aseptic ‘targeted killing.’ The main argument here is not that nothing changed on 9/11 but that the legal and political precedents for ‘targeted killings’ in counterterrorism had been developing since the 1980s. 9/11 removed bureaucratic and financial obstacles. The chapter also traces the rise of drones and the Obama Administration’s efforts to justify drones strikes as an (internationally) legal foreign policy measure and to deny that such measure represented a violation of the ban on assassination. The chapter shows how – in office – trump considered the assassination of various officials, ultimately ordering the killing of Soleimani. Second, the conclusion summarises the main argument of the book highlighting the strong interconnection between the practice, the politics, and the language of assassination.
Living in History
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This book explores the relationship between poetry and radical politics in Britain between the formation of the welfare state and the advent of Thatcherism. Drawing on a diverse range of authors and traditions, it presents a series of case studies involving individual poets, activist groups, and political organisations. Part One focuses on the legacies of empire and the experience of exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J.H. Prynne and others, including poets associated with the African National Congress. These opening chapters critique the exclusionary category of ‘British Poetry’, and respond to Caribbean, Transatlantic, African, and Latin American contexts and traditions. Part Two follows the emergence of liberation struggles around gender, race, and sexuality across the 1970s. Each chapter is structured around critical close readings and new archival and contextual research. Alongside poets including Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn, Bill Griffiths, Lee Harwood, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, these chapters examine community writings workshops, radical journals such as Race Today, and prisoners’ rights activism. Taken as a whole, Living in History tracks the ambivalence between avant-garde poetic ambition and leftist political organising, and comes to focus on the carceral apparatus of the state as a site of antagonism and critique. The book’s concluding chapter and coda present a methodological account of ‘good enough history’, and restates the difficulty and possibility in bringing together the subjects and traditions of the preceding chapters.
Possessing the Landscape: Kamau Brathwaite in England, 1950–1955
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the early work of Kamau Brathwaite – then known as Edward Brathwaite – produced while he was a student at the University of Cambridge. It begins by providing a biographical account of his position as a Barbados Scholar within the broader context of British Commonwealth students in the post-war period. This is followed by an extended reading of the short poem ‘The Day the First Snow Fell’, demonstrating how Brathwaite’s phenomenological lyric resonates with the contemporaneous work of Frantz Fanon. The argument discusses the bibliographical afterlives of the poem, including a key passage in the major essay ‘The History of the Voice’. The focus then shifts to Brathwaite’s relationship to F.R. Leavis through a reading of his short story ‘The Professor’. It concludes by tracing the importance of the Guyanese radical Walter Rodney to Brathwaite’s thinking as the 1960s drew to a close.
Lovely, Flaring Destruction: J. H. Prynne, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

Drawing on a line in a 1964 letter from J.H. Prynne to Charles Olson, this chapter works through the idea of an ‘emotional near-Marxism’ in Prynne’s The White Stones (1969) and related texts. The chapter reads Prynne’s correspondence with Olson as a negotiation of emergent U.S. imperialism and the decline of the British Empire. This is argued, in part, through a survey of the prevalence of Fulbright scholarships and university exchanges among Prynne’s contemporaries, suggesting poetry’s relationship to ‘soft power’. After arguing that Prynne’s geological metaphors are a species of ‘oceanic feeling’, the chapter turns to focus on his friendship with Edward Dorn. Through Dorn’s North Atlantic Turbine (1967) and Prynne’s involvement with the magazines The English Intelligencer (1966-68), the chapter suggests that Prynne moved unevenly towards a radical politics and a critique of imperialism.
The Avant-Garde of Their Own People: Poetry and Exile, 1959–1975
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

Beginning with a line by Hannah Arendt (‘refugees… have become the avant-garde of their own people’), this chapter brings together variously stateless or exiled poets working in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter begins with a reading of the work of Trinidadian Communist Claudia Jones, understood in conjuncture with Joseph Keith’s concept of alienage. It goes on to consider two different experiences of exile in the work of South African poets Mazisi Kunene and Arthur Nortje. Kunene’s work is discussed in light of his leadership position in the London Office of the African National Congress and his political activism during the turn to armed struggle in the later 1960s. Nortje – who died in Oxford awaiting leave to remain in 1970 – presents a more ambivalent figure, but no less important for a poetics of alienage. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami (1973), produced in the wake of the military coup in Chile.
Yout Rebels: Refusal and Self-Defence, 1970–1979
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on poetry by young people and the social struggles they were involved with in London in the 1970s. After discussing the Stepney School Strike of 1971, the chapter turns to Vivian Usherwood’s Poems (1972), first published when he was 12 years old. The work – which emerged from the radical working-class community group Centerprise – is considered as an example of what Mark Nowak has termed ‘social poetics’. The chapter turns to struggles by schoolchildren in Brixton, South London, against police brutality and harassment in the early 1970s. Presenting a reading of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s early work – read in conjunction with analysis by Darcus Howe and other members of the Race Today Collective – it tracks the development of forms of self-defence across the decade. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue (2015), and the murder of the teacher and anti-racist activist Blair Peach in Southall in 1979.
The dialect lexicon
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the dialect lexicon from an onomasiological and a semasiological perspective. It presents a ‘thesaurus’ of traditional dialect lexis found on RTG, discussing words which have been categorized as ‘North East’ in dialectological and/or lexicographical sources since at least the nineteenth century, from the perspectives of currency, meaning and usage. The chapter shows how ‘old’ words can be a valuable resource in the construction of dynamic discourses of place, affiliation and identity, and also demonstrates the affordances of RTG as a means of tracking lexical innovation in North East English.
Discourse-pragmatic features
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter shows how the interactive and expressive nature of RTG is evident in the array of locally inflected speech-like discourse features to be found amongst its threads. It covers interjections, vocatives, greetings, attention signals, discourse markers, quotatives, response forms, expressions and dislocation.
Thami al-Glaoui
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

The book Studies the never-ending story of Thami al-Glaoui (1879–1956), leader of the Amazigh Glaoua tribe and Pasha of Marrakesh throughout Morocco’s colonial era (1912–56), and its implications for Moroccan history and historical theory. Thami al-Glaoui was by the 1930s the third most powerful person in Morocco, after the Sultan and the French Resident-General. In 1953, he was a key supporter of the deportation of Sultan Mohamed V by the French. After recanting three years later, he was pardoned by the returning Sultan, but died shortly afterwards. In the four decades that followed, al-Glaoui became a synonym in Morocco for betrayal and corruption. In the 21st century, however, the retelling of his life and deeds has become more complex, and his reputation has been somewhat revised. The book investigates al-Glaoui’s biography as a creation continuing beyond the demise of its protagonist, asserting a conflation of history, story and storytelling. The book interprets the multivalent stories and controversies that have shaped how Thami al-Glaoui is remembered, incisively revealing – and challenging – how Moroccan colonial and national histories have been written.
Introduction: The Last Lord of the Atlas
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces al-Glaoui, emphasizing the essential oddness of an extraordinary personality whose story had been suppressed for many years before its recent resurfacing— in turn rekindling old arguments. The chapter outlines the book's theoretical and methodological frameworks, describes the materials consulted, and underscores the book’s central argument—namely, the indivisibility of story and history. The chapter sets the stage for the book’s multidimensional approach to al-Glaoui’s biography: intertwining histories and historiographies, texts dedicated to him and analysis of their modes of expression, life stories of their authors, and numerous additional tales by multiple storytellers of different orientations. All these constitute a historical-literary plot of a person, a period, and of discourses.
A Loyal Servant of Two Empires
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

Covering the early years of his public presence (ca. 1890s to 1930s), this chapter delineates the formative period of Thami al-Glaoui’s career. It charts his rise to power, the role that he (and his brother) played in the deposition of Sultan Mawlay ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, and his alliances with both the French protectorate and the ‘Alawi dynasty under Mawlay Youssef. The chapter depicts the emergence of a literary topos which typified al-Glaoui’s image during this period—that of a “savior.” It is argued that this motif reflects a broader contemporary discourse, one appropriated by the French to legitimize their colonial project through the claim that they came to the Maghreb to save indigenous populations from decadence. French officials and narrators regarded the use that al-Glaoui made of the same topos as an incursion into their privileged zone, and as an omen presaging his predisposition for blurring borders: the possibility that today’s collaborator could turn into tomorrow’s threat.
The Age of Conspiracies
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

This chapter addresses the final years of al-Glaoui’s life (1940-1956). Its central theme is the concept of conspiracy, and the manifold uses to which it was put in storytelling and the historical narration of al-Glaoui’s life during that time (which extended across World War II, global decolonization, and the beginning of the Cold War). The chapter also focuses on the multiple accounts of the 1950 Mulud (the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday) at the Royal Palace. This event is commonly considered as the trigger for the chain reaction that led to al-Glaoui’s greatest conspiracy—his part in the expulsion of the Sultan. The differing perspectives of the many storytellers about this event formed the basis for the multiple future narrations of al-Glaoui’s tale.
‘He is the Jews’ Friend’ 1
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

The central text analysed in this chapter, Les Dessous d'une Conspiration (“The Story behind the Conspiracy”), refers to what in Morocco is generally considered as the greatest conspiracy of the era: the expulsion of Sultan Mohamed V in 1953, which al-Glaoui played a major role in facilitating. Les Dessous, written by Albert Berdugo, a Moroccan Jew and al-Glaoui’s secretary at the time, describes many of the pivotal events during the period. Berdugo’s biography leads to an examination of the historiography and myths attached to the complex relationship between al-Glaoui and Moroccan Jews, and the place of the Jews in his court as part of a broader Moroccan Muslim-Jewish culture.
‘I am a Moroccan and a Berber’: al-Glaoui and Amazighness
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

The chapter elaborates on the issue of Amazighness (Amazighité), which is one of the sociopolitical processes which is exceedingly relevant to the current state of stories about the Pasha. The identity politics of Amazighs, the indigenous population of North Africa, and the awakening of Amazighness in the last decades has had a major bearing on the twenty-first-century telling, and a parallel phenomenon of ‘non-telling’, of al-Glaoui. In order to fully analyse this process, the chapter first presents a very brief overview of the history of Amazigh activism in Morocco, then connects it to al-Glaoui and the ways in which he is told today.
A Never-ending Story
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

The concluding chapter makes the point that the enduring fascination with Thami al-Glaoui’s story emanates from his influence on Moroccan and French histories, the countless people affected by him and by stories about him, the numerous references to him across various media, the mysteriousness attached to the telling of his story, and the constant thrill that his name arouses, up to this very day. No less intriguing than the man are the fascinating twists and turns in the telling of his life story. The “story of his story,” narrated in the book as a journey through a host of authors from various periods, stands, and nationalities; its links with multiple literary genres and devices; and its recent expansion into new media: all these bestow a unique value upon it. The chapter concludes that in historical projects, texts like those researched here—which are often considered a “background” to historical events—are in fact significant historical events in their own right. Finally, the chapter details new outlooks concerning history, historiography, and historical storytelling, opened up through this research.
Introduction: Revisiting Ramón Mercader, 1966
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter discusses Jorge Semprun’s 1969 novel The Second Death of Ramón Mercader as an example of a non-Anglophone work of fiction that narrates a spy story within the style of literary modernism. The novel suggests a different posture vis-à-vis the relative status of genres in foreign literary cultures. Individual chapter descriptions.
The Maugham Paradigm: Performing English Identity amid the Surges of History
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter examines three short stories from Somerset Maugham’s collection Ashenden, or the British Agent: “Miss King,” “The Traitor,” and “Mr. Harrington’s Washing.” In these narratives, the protagonist, an intelligence office based in neutral Switzerland during World War I, represents a type of English national identity on his assignments but is also, in the last story set during the Russian Revolution, made uncomfortably aware of its limitations.
“We’ll Meet Again”: War, Memories, and Loss in MacInnes and Garve
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter reads Helen MacInnes’ novel I and My True Love and Andrew Garve’s novel The Ashes of Loda as exemplary espionage narratives of the postwar decades. Both texts deal with the legacy of World War II and the shadow it throws over the Cold War. The role of memory and its effects on both personal and political identity dominate both these works of fiction.
Muhacir as Colonist
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the 1857 Migrant Regulations (Muhacirin Nizamnamesi), a law intended to attract European and North American settlers to the Ottoman empire. In this context, the Ottoman term muhacir (migrant; pl. muhacirin) was synonymous with colonist. The chapter traces how Ottoman statesmen, consuls and potential migrants considered the regulations with reference to mass European trans-Atlantic migration. It identifies how the logic of the Migrant Regulations – that the state should facilitate migration, that requiring muhacirin to adopt Ottoman subjecthood could address the challenges of the European protégé system, that colonization could enhance agricultural development, and that settlement could render the population more legible – aligned with the Tanzimat reform era (1839-1876). The chapter describes obstacles Ottoman officials faced in enacting colonization. Lastly, the chapter considers two factors that have contributed to the sidelining of the Ottoman Empire within global migration histories: first, scholarly emphasis on migration restriction rather than facilitation as the basis of modern migration regimes, and second, the conceptual separation of free and coerced migration, a distinction that did not align with Ottoman approaches to managing muhacirin.
Muhacir as Possibility
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines Ottoman understandings of migration and the muhacir (migrant) immediately following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The chapter explores how Ottoman subjects posed the question of ‘what does muhacir mean?’ in order to diagnose society’s flaws and to consider possibilities for an Ottoman future. Whether among the self-identified muhacir of the Society for Rumelian Muslim Migrants (Rumeli Muhacirin-i İslamiye Cemiyeti) or in the Ottoman General Assembly, individuals employed the concept of muhacir to consider the role of the citizen and the nature of equality within Ottoman society. The chapter demonstrates that though the revolution initiated rapid change and political upheaval, durable assumptions, drawn from sixty years of mass migration, influenced how Ottoman politicians, administrators and subjects considered issues of Ottomanism and migration management in the years prior to the Balkan Wars (1912-1913).
Conclusion Categories of Movement and Categories of Belonging
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

The conclusion traces Governing Migration’s key insights. The chapter summarizes the book’s narrative by tracing how migration and migration administration contributed to the development of Ottoman governmentality and social engineering, and it reviews how the identification and exclusion of population groups was attached to the figure of the muhacir (migrant). The chapter retraces the sixty-year period examined in the book to outline how a system that was originally designed to facilitate orderly immigration and settlement in the Ottoman Empire eventually became a tool for exclusion, deportation and genocide. The conclusion extends the book’s discussion of Ottoman social engineering and migration administration to World War I, the Armenian genocide and the empire’s final years. As a further illustration of the import of migration labels, the chapter comments on the ongoing significance of categories of movement in the Turkish Republic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Introduction: Towards the Embodied Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This introduction presents the central theme of disability in J.M. Coetzee’s work, situating it within broader literary, ethical, and political discourses. It highlights the connection between Coetzee’s formal innovations and his representations of disability, which challenge normative discourses of power. Drawing on the concept of narrative ethics, the chapter argues that Coetzee’s fiction provides counter-ableist critiques through its textual and narrative disruptions. Using disability studies as a critical framework, the book examines how Coetzee’s novels confront dominant cultural narratives, while reflecting on the intersections of form, embodiment, and ethics. The introduction also outlines the organisation of the chapters, detailing how the chronological structure of the analysis follows the publication order of Coetzee’s novels to trace the development of his representations of disability over time. This approach allows readers to see how Coetzee’s engagement with disability evolves alongside the shifting political and cultural landscapes he has witnessed.
Disabled Textuality: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance of J.M. Coetzee’s works for disability studies. Drawing on A. Z. Newton’s concept of “narrative ethics” (1997) posits that in Coetzee’s early fiction, the ethical implications of social and political oppression are inseparable from the formal and meaning-making devices of his texts. Coetzee’s characters with disabilities illustrate how the disabled body challenges affirmations of the wholeness and authority of normative subjectivity. Similarly, the experimental techniques in Coetzee’s writing work to dismantle the normative myths of textual completeness and closure. This chapter, therefore, seeks to examine how Coetzee’s first two novels, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, engage with the complexities of mental and physical disabilities by employing formal strategies of textual disruption as a means of subverting hegemonic and normative discourses.
Scopic Regimes, Haptic Commitments: Countering Ocularnormativism in Waiting for the Barbarians
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines how Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, challenges sight-centred modes of thinking. Reflecting on Laura Marks’s concept of “haptic visuality” (2002), it explores how the haptic triad of touch, feel, and grope undermines the dominance of vision-centred discourses and their “ocularnormative” implications, a term coined by David Bolt, in Coetzee’s works. The chapter focuses on the ethical effects of Coetzee’s use of haptic narrative devices and linguistic forms, alongside his implicit critique of ocularcentrism through the self-reflexive deployment of visual metaphors. The relationship between reading and groping is introduced to explain how Coetzee encourages readers to suspend their ocularcentric reading habits, inviting a more tactile, embodied engagement with the text.
Mute Letters: Against Phonocentrism in Foe
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores Coetzee’s representations of silence and muteness in Foe. Referring to J. Rancière’s concept of “mute speech,” the discussion begins with an examination of the divide between the conceptual pairings of speech-writing and silence-muteness. The analysis considers how writing intersects with muteness, investigating the complex ways of giving voice to those who either refuse or are unable to engage within accepted linguistic norms, or those who have been denied access to dominant language and forms of writing. The chapter argues that Coetzee’s interlinking of the metaphysics of writing and the materiality of the disabled body challenges allegorical depictions of disability typical of traditional literary representations.
Disability Ethics and Gothic Form in The Master of Petersburg
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the extent to which the imbrication of the vocabularies of disability and gothic aesthetics in The Master of Petersburg informs the ethical commitments of Coetzee’s works. It argues that through the interlacing of gothic and disability themes, Coetzee refuses to acknowledge the boundaries between fictional representation and factual accuracy. The following section examines the ethical implications of Coetzee’s use of specular metaphors and vocabularies in light of Jacques Derrida’s concepts of “spectre” and “hauntology.” In the closing section, this chapter suggests that Coetzee’s fiction resists “affirmative” modes of disability representation.