bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Laughter, Fear and ‘Conversion’
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

The idea of World Republic provokes 'laughing' at the idealism of the authors advancing it and ‘fear’ since, in their alleged naivete, these authors do not see the threats of a global Leviathan. The chapter examines criticisms of the idea of World Republic and shows the non-interference of arguments and counterarguments, because this idea is advanced from the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism, while criticism is formulated from the perspective of methodological nationalism. It is impossible for cosmopolitan theorists to incorporate the premises of non-cosmopolitan arguments into their approaches and continue to be cosmopolitan, and vice versa. This gap is the perennial problem of cosmopolitanism, known as ‘the problem of motivation’ in normative political theory and as the need for ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘conversion’ in other styles of thinking about cosmopolitanism. The chapter examines the stipulation of the need for ‘conversion’ to avoid the potential destruction of the world by the atomic bomb in a polemic of Karl Jaspers and Maurice Blanchot, and which shows that in the face of threat, the cosmopolitan ‘conversion’ means not to fall back into the existing ways of thinking but to think the world with its own antagonisms.
If You Are a Political Philosopher, Why Are You Not a Cosmopolitan?
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

The final chapter examines once again the reluctance of political philosophy to be equal to the migrants’ motto, No One Is Illegal, and asks how a political philosophy can be non-cosmopolitan if, as a philosophy, it operates with the principles of universality and generality. Starting with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which was applied by other authors to the world as a whole while Rawls claimed that his theory was for the liberal nation-state,  the chapter argues that cosmopolitanism exists as a potential and an excess generated by the principles of universality and generality, and maps four ways of approaching this potential: ignoring, characteristic for most of the canonical political philosophers from Plato to Rawls; taming by those who advance political theories that reconcile the universal and the particular; and, rarely, affirming the excess, as did Kant or Marx among few others. The ignored potential can be detected by cosmopolitically oriented readers, but cosmopolitanism cannot be involuntary; it was born and remains a self-assumed position. By ignoring or taming its own cosmopolitan potential, political philosophy perpetuates exclusion, so political philosophers must find the courage to think the world anew.
The Presidential Golf Paradox
Authors: Moore Aaron J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter chronicles the association many American presidents – from William Howard Taft to Donald J. Trump – have had with the sport of golf. Most presidents within this timeframe have been golfers and participated in other sports as part of their physical activity and demonstration of masculinity. However, golf has some unique characteristics that can both help and harm the public’s perception of the president. In the early twentieth century, during Taft’s presidency, golf was seen as a sport in which only the privileged could take part, which could certainly impact a president’s image. By the time Trump was elected president just over a century later, the perception of golf had become far more egalitarian. However, a president seen on the course too often could still be considered a political liability. This chapter examines the complicated relationship presidents have had with the sport, and how media coverage of them golfing could be considered both a detriment and an asset.
From Wilson to Dubya: The Curious Case of Presidents and Rugby
Authors: Burns Adam
Published: September 2023

Where most chapters in this volume explore the interactions between American presidents and sports that are widely played in the United States, this one explores the rarely noted link between the presidency and rugby. The bulk of this chapter centers on two future presidents who played rugby in college – George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Both a very similar age, Clinton and Bush played rugby on different sides of the Atlantic, at Oxford and Yale respectively. It was a distinctly un-American sport in a period of increasing national self-reflection during the Vietnam War. This chapter considers the rugby-playing background of both Bush and Clinton as a useful step towards a career in high politics. It explores the use of rugby through the lenses of class and masculinity to see why a sport – that, on the face of it, seems so foreign – works well in signaling virtues key to most future presidents’ resumés. This British game – the precursor of American football – offered a more elite but maybe equally rugged pursuit through which two young students were able to trade blows away from the arenas where many of their fellow citizens and future political rivals fought a more deadly battle.
Seriality
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Specific genres (sitcom, animation) have been highly reflexive from the dawn of TV, with characters citing other shows to praise or mock them. This chapter opens with a reflection on how the serial format offers a wealth of opportune moments for meta-phenomena to creep in: season or episode openings (as in the case of adaptations), episode endings and season finales because they are important links in the serial chain, and specific episodes. The reflection on seriality often takes the form of a motif that becomes an allegory or a mise en abyme of the work as a whole. Finally, special attention is paid to three famous series that are highly meta from beginning to end, whose reflection on the aesthetic possibilities of the serial format lead to considerations concerning the ethics of fiction.
The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This book explores the rise and decline of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, focusing on a prominent noble family based in the Palu emirate—a fortified town on the eastern frontier of the empire. It offers a comprehensive analysis of hereditary nobility in Kurdistan, particularly within the context of the Tanzimat era's centralization policies in the mid-nineteenth century. The book delves into the conflict that emerged when the Ottoman state sought to abolish the long-standing privileges of Kurdish nobles, leading to land confiscations in the 1840s. This triggered a complex, five-decade-long struggle involving Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, Kurdish begs, and the expanding Ottoman state, all vying for control of the fertile lands in Palu. Drawing on extensive archival research and analysing the strategies of these diverse groups, the book challenges the common perception of this conflict as purely ethnic and reveals its multifaceted nature. Ultimately, it sheds light on the historical transformations that unfolded over two centuries, transforming Palu from a prosperous and diverse town into an ethnoreligiously homogeneous, culturally conservative, and economically disadvantaged place.
Analysis and Poetry
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

The second chapter considers another (if related) set of competing demands that pertain specifically to philosophical style—the demands of analysis and myth. It comprises four sections: the first analyses Hemsterhuis’ most traditional statement on the opposition between proper philosophical analysis and improper speculative narrative, the second considers a very different conception of philosophical communication implied in his affirmation of sentimental certainty, the third treats how he locates such sentimental certainty in Plato’s philosophical style, and the fourth provides a case study of one specific instance of Hemsterhuisian myth in Simon. The first section, therefore, is devoted to Hemsterhuis’ most explicit and sustained treatment of philosophical writing in two 1775 letters to Gallitzin on philosophical style. However, only a couple of years later in Aristée, Hemsterhuis is advocating the ‘pure certainty of sentiment’ and ‘a more-than-geometrical demonstration of the nature of the divinity’—which can only be communicated through myth. In the third section, the book begins to analyse Hemsterhuis’ comments on Platonic style. Finally, in order to identify more precisely the various formal devices that the late Hemsterhuis deploys, the fourth section provides a case-study of Diotima’s speech in Simon.
The Archaic and the Prophetic
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

The final chapter of the book further radicalises this disjunct between the present and other times by identifying the ways in which Hemsterhuis communicates an archaic past and a prophetic future. It comprises two sections: the first looks to the ways in which Hemsterhuis’ texts remember a past that exists outside of representation (for example, in a golden age) and the second turns towards Hemsterhuis’ evocation of a future radically different from the present epoch. Both are concerned with the margins of thinking in Hemsterhuis’ philosophy—pasts and futures that cannot be made present. Particularly important to the first section of the chapter is how Greek ‘spirit’ is not located in any particular name, location or erudite reference in Hemsterhuis’ dialogues, but is to be constructed out of the way they all fit together so as to evoke a world. The second section explores the nature and function of the future in Hemsterhuisian philosophy. It is a section about presentiments and prophecies. Alexis, in particular, is a dialogue oriented towards the future—the future state of mankind and the future proliferation of sense organs.
Conclusion
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

The short conclusion considers the ways in which the foregoing can help us categorise the various stylistic features of Hemsterhuis’ late texts. For example, they can be catalogued in terms of the dialogues themselves (Sophyle emphasises the popular and the accessible, Simon uses its effects to alienate the reader, and Alexis is a dialogue of historical movement); they can also be catalogued in terms of function: there are energetic or sublime strategies, ironic or unsettling strategies and speculative or dynamic strategies. I expand, however, on a series of personae that appear in Hemsterhuis’ dialogues: Socrates, Diotima, Hypsicles and the editor-persona of the fake prefaces to Aristée and Simon. And I use them to argue, in conclusion, that each exemplifies a different aspect of Hemsterhuis’ project of philosophical communication.
The Informational Logic of Human Rights
Authors: Bowsher Joshua
Published: September 2023

How might we understand politics of human rights at a time when atrocities are increasingly rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have embraced information technologies, this ‘datafication’ of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights. Combining contemporary social and cultural theory with archival research and ethnographic insights, this book resituates recent critiques of human rights (i.e. as instruments of neoliberal globalization) within ongoing debates regarding informational capitalism, digital culture, and data politics. Critically exploring the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics shaped by the imaginary of networks and digital computation, the book provides a new conceptual agenda for analysing the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures, and informational logic of late capitalism.
Cybernetic Capitalism/Informational ‘Politics’
Authors: Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

This chapter resituates the conceptual and historical linkages between human rights and neoliberalism within the so-called “information revolution”. The chapter brings together insights from critical and cultural theorists of information and the Autonomist Marxist tradition, to reconsider the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1970s-80s as forming one part of a new socioeconomic conjuncture better understood as cybernetic capitalism. Framing neoliberalism as interwoven with the project of cybernetic capitalism draws attention to the emergence of a cybernetic conception of information, one oriented to standardization, quantification and narrowly conceived but apparently objective facts, as an increasingly pervasive social and cultural logic in the contemporary world. The chapter uses archival material from Amnesty International as well as other organizations to trace the human rights movement’s own embrace of this informational logic as it emerged, rather self-consciously, within the information age. Arguing that human rights practice has now been thoroughly ‘informatized’, the chapter outlines the key components of this informational logic and problematizes the ways in which it radically disarticulates human rights from politics.
Doing Rights as Indicators: Informatising Social and Economic Rights
Authors: Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

The nook’s third chapter follows parallel, if much more discontinuous, efforts to measure social rights through indicators from the 1980s until their ascendency in the noughties. The chapter argues that this turn to indicators reflects a strategy to depoliticize social rights by turning them into information. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, what would become known as the Third World mobilized social and economic rights claims, most notably the right to self-determination, in an expressly political project designed to remake the global economy on fairer, more just terms. Situating indicators in relation to this political use of rights, the chapter considers how their emergence responded to anxieties precisely about the political nature of social rights with seemingly objective forms of measure organized around very narrow interpretations of their legal inscription in international law. The result, the chapter argues, is an informatized practice of ‘doing’ rights work that reconfigures and reduces the social rights project to a process of finding and measuring information.
Beyond the Neoliberal Critique?
Authors: Bowsher Josh , Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter situates the book within broader discussions about the intertwined trajectories of contemporary human rights activism and neoliberalism in the latter decades of the 20th century. Rather than remaining wedded to the conceptual parameters offered by neoliberalism as a critical framework, the introduction proposes that critically rethinking the emergence of the human rights movement through the lens of cybernetic capitalism can offer new political and theoretical insights that contribute much to these debates. On the one hand, by tracing the informational logic residing within contemporary human rights practices, the book offers a clearer account of how rights have been depoliticized under late capitalism that makes connections to ongoing social concerns with ubiquitous data and globalized information infrastructures. On the other hand, the book pinpoints the epistemological assumptions underpinning this logic as a site where new theoretical interventions might support radical rearticulations of human rights.
The Egyptian Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

The Egyptian Social Contract explores the intricacies of the relationship between the state and its citizens, from the establishment of the semi-independent Egyptian nation in 1922 until the 2011 Uprising. The book foregrounds the social history of the social contract: the analysis of state–middle class relations and how these relations have shaped Egyptian society. It studies why and how a social contract that had been reformed in the aftermath of World War II became the core of state-citizen relations under President Nasser. Moreover, it looks at how this social contract channeled socioeconomic development over time, creating an Egyptian middle-class society. The book probes a political economy in which class vision and interests in development—state-supported mobility into the middle class and, later, the reproduction of this class—intertwined with the rise and entrenchment of authoritarianism in Egypt. Since the 1970s, the perseverance of this social contract has mostly inhibited the necessary socioeconomic and political reforms, or the making of a new social contract in Egypt, because such reforms would have challenged Egypt’s ruling elite, and no less so its ingrained, if increasingly struggling, middle-class society.
Master-Slave Dialectic
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

The text begins with the famous “Lordship and Bondsman” scene, wherein Hegel shows the significance of death, labor, and freedom in Hegel’s account of the dual structures of master and slave consciousnesses, especially how the apparent independence of the master and dependency of the slave is upturned as the realization of the binds of recognition emerge through command and labor. Placed in the context of Frederick Douglass’ life, the master-slave dialectic becomes more alive, more concrete, and more dynamic than ever before. Douglass’ narratives, speeches, and life story reveal shortcomings of Hegel’s account. Harriet Jacobs’ narrative of her life under and escape from slavery shows that enslaved women faced additional challenges to those faced by their male counterparts--like Douglass. Jacobs also shows the complicated dynamics of plantation life for women; for example, the more the master sexually desired the female slave, the crueler, more hateful, and more envious was the mistress. These additional challenges disclose a different strategic and intellectual approach to antiblackness--one that doesn’t fight for recognition from the lord, but instead surreptitiously and covertly finds it elsewhere. While Douglass fought his way out, Jacobs hid her way out.
Sacramental Work and Desire
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

Sacramental work and desire emerges out of devotion’s failure: the withdrawal into the feeling body emphasized, rather than diminished, individuality. Recognizing that individual, earthly life is not only unavoidable, but is actually God's gift, Unhappy Consciousness now sees everyday desire and labor as the fulfillment and thanksgiving for this gift. The trouble is that work also reasserts, rather than renounces, individuality. For Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., racial segregation is the legalization of the separateness that sacramental work desires to overcome. King’s nonviolent direct action embodies sacramental work and desire because it evokes the Unchangeable contained within a white changeable individual by externalizing the Unchangeable within the Black changeable individual. The issue is that although the individual self tried to overcome itself through work, an instrument in god’s handmade plan, it ends up emboldening itself and must admit its hypocritical renunciation. Realizing that grassroots leadership, rather than a changeable charismatic lead like King, is what would lead to true success and longevity of the civil rights movement, Ella Baker advised younger activists organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to promote non-hierarchical and de-centered leadership. While King dreamt his way out, Baker organized the way out for the movement.
Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

This study reintroduces critique. It begins by defining the difference between criticism and critique, and goes on to propose an ampler, dynamic view of critique as a movement of geographical and intellectual displacements. Against the background of a wide-ranging archive, discussion illuminates the non-linear temporalities and trajectories through which theory operates. Italian Theory, in particular, acts as the fulcrum of a more inclusive and less combative notion of critique. This ‘living thought’ cuts across the translation of European thought into Anglo-American theory and carries with it lingering modernist motifs linked to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. While connecting to the ‘post-critique’ debate, the study focuses on recovering the ethical underpinnings of critique. It demonstrates that before being a specific method or disciplinary practice, critique is a stance including indocility receptiveness, openness to transformation awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality, and wonder. The book is structured around fundamental keywords in the lexicon of literary studies: critic, theory, language, tradition, text, method, and poststructuralism. It argues that literary critical practice is allied with the movement of thought outside cruel dynamics of humanization (the struggle for recognition, the gaze of the other), and reflects on the role of reading in the important task of imagining others.
The Ghosts of War: Writing Trauma
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores representations of ghosts in memoirs, short stories and novels, that are not contained within familiar plots. These ghosts are problematic to explain and typically represent moments of traumatic crisis in accounts of the war by Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Brittain (among other memoirs discussed in this chapter), and various novels and short stories. Such ghosts personify no-man’s-land as a liminal zone associated with both death and life. These ghosts sit outside the narrative demands of the ghost story and appear as lost, or without a role, and so challenge the possibility of coherent meaning. They are not ghosts who can be brought back to life within domestic spaces. The lack of a literary plot for the aimless ghost implicates a failure in narrative composition. That failure is reflected in self-conscious meditations upon the problem of writing about the experience of war.
Aftershock: Malevolent Ghosts and the Problem of Memory
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores a number of tales from the post-war period which suggest that the war produced vengeful and malevolent ghosts impossible to accommodate within the home. This chapter explores a specifically Gothic representation of the ghost which seeks to both contain, but also demonise, the war dead. Tales by E.F. Benson and M.R. James, among others, suggest that survivors of the war have irrevocably lost their sense of identity, that what is required is a new strategy by which one might lay the ghosts of the conflict finally to rest - also a feature of the poetry of Richard Aldington and Robert Graves during this period. The horror of the war and how to overcome it is also explored in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934), which, if not a ghost story, does, through its use of the myth of Osiris, explore how anxieties about the fragmented bodies of the war dead haunt the culture of the 1930s. Dorothy L. Sayers in The Nine Tailors (1934) also highlights strategies for laying to rest the ghosts of the war and the memories that they provoke.
Finnish Film Studios
Authors: Laine Kimmo
Published: September 2023

This book approaches Finnish studio cinema as both typical and particular: it is a typical European small nation cinema with its industrial structures, its reliance on hierarchical organisation of labour and its love-hate relationship with Hollywood; yet, it is particular, not only in its genres, cycles and hugely popular domestic stars, but also because films were made in the constant presence of geopolitical realities, at times under the influence of Germany and the Soviet Union. The book provides a thorough examination of Finnish film industry through the core decades of studio era, from the early 1920s to the early 1960s. Attention is paid both to the fully integrated major companies, Suomi-Filmi, Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada-Filmi, and the minor companies and independent producers that were responsible for some of the canonized work of the studio era, including the films of Teuvo Tulio and Nyrki Tapiovaara.
Machinic enslavement and cinema’s machinic powers
Authors: O'Shaughnessy Martin
Published: September 2023

Taking its theoretical inspiration from Maurizio Lazzarato, but drawing also on Walter Benjamin, this chapter explores cinema’s capacity to use its own machinic powers and semiotic richness to engage with our ever-expanding machinic subjection, our insertion as cogs into multiple large machineries which, typically reliant on data, graphs, charts and so on by-pass language and shatter the bounded subject. The chapter looks at works ranging from the social realism of Brizé or Klapisch through Lucy the sci-fi blockbuster from Luc Besson to Sylvain George’s experimental documentaries. It finds the machinic typically subordinated to the centred subject but available to ex-centric reading, in the background or round the edges, in the social realist works. It finds it more centred in the sci-fi, but with the tension between the human subject and the machinic magically abolished. Turning to George’s films, it notes how they mobilise cinema’s machinic powers and semiotic richness to respond to the collective semiotic productiveness of occupations and demonstrations while using their montage to question the Occupy movement’s ability to include migrants in their search to remake foundational European political values.
Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films
Authors: Rasmus Agnieszka
Published: September 2023

Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films: Class, Gender and Stardom is the first book-length study devoted to Hollywood remakes of British cinema. It investigates film remaking from the unique perspective of cross-cultural exchange between two countries which share a common language and history in film cooperation. How does this ‘special’ relationship affect both originals and remakes in terms of production as well as on a textual and paratextual level? Each chapter discusses classic and cult British films connected by the same star, genre and theme to trace the change from 1960s optimism to the despondency of the 1970s. As well as providing historical and cultural background, the book scrutinises how millennial remakes transform the previous class, gender and stardom dynamic to comply with industrial trends and to appeal to a twenty-first-century global audience. Are these Hollywood makeovers a simple face-lift, or perhaps an integral part of a continued cultural dialogue? Does the remake tend to pursue similar concerns or become a point of departure for something entirely new? This book proposes answers to these questions and more. Case studies span many genres and include Alfie (1966; 2004), Bedazzled (1967; 2000), The Italian Job (1969; 2003), Get Carter (1971; 2000), Sleuth (1972; 2007), The Wicker Man (1973; 2006), and The Limey (1999).
Remaking Iconic British Films of the 1960s and 1970s
Authors: Rasmus Agnieszka
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses two moments in the ‘special’ relationship between the British film industry and Hollywood to provide a comprehensive background behind the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. First of all, it examines the impact that the Hollywood film industry exerted on the golden age of British cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s when several iconic British films were made with substantial Hollywood financial and creative involvement. The chapter then explains the reasons why Hollywood would return to these classic and cult British titles in the 2000s to give them a contemporary makeover, providing a broad cultural and historical context from within both sides of the Atlantic. Cross-cultural exchange, talent flows, the impact of the digital era and DVD culture are analysed together with the importance of Hollywood remakes in archiving and reviving old classics.
Music-video Aesthetics in Pernambucan Cinema 1
Authors: Paiva Samuel
Published: September 2023

Many films produced in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, from the 1990s onwards present aesthetic features associated with the Manguebeat musical genre, especially those directed by the filmmakers who took part in the so-called Árido Movie movement. Music video was a key medium in the interaction of film and music in these films. This chapter examines musical moments in Pernambucan films as the result of a dialogue between film and music videos. Tensions between fiction and documentary, as well as pop references, are explored by means of an intermedial method that enables reflections on historical developments and meanings, taking into account the film supports available in a moment of transition between analogue and digital technologies.
‘Synchronised Film Fever’ amid the ‘Gramophonoradiomania’: Record, Radio and Cinema at the Dawn of the ‘Talkies’ in Rio de Janeiro
Authors: Freire Rafael de Luna
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the intermedial relations between film, record and radio in Rio de Janeiro in 1929 and 1930, exploring the proximities between the so-called ‘synchronised film fever’ and the ‘gramophonoradiomania’ announced by magazines and newspapers of the time. It examines the technological, social and political contacts between these different media in the context of convergence and dialogue based on the novelty of electric recording, broadcasting and sound playback, both in private and public spaces. From the first experiments in Brazil in 1922, local radio stations grew slowly but steadily. ‘Radiomania’ was followed by the so-called ‘victrolamania’, with the increase in sales of records and record players. The success of the first Hollywood sound features prompted the press to announce that Rio was going through a ‘synchronised film fever’. By contextualising Rio’s ‘gramophonoradiomania’, this chapter provides a better understanding of the reception and diffusion of the talking pictures in Brazil, together with its adaptations, resistances and specificities.
Too Complex, Too Remote? Scottish Politics in the 1960s
Authors: Petrie Malcolm R.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Scottish politics in the 1960s. It considers first the sharp decline in Unionist fortunes that occurred in the first half of the decade, which encouraged the party to shed its distinctive name and adopt the Conservative label, and to discard the traditional Unionist defence of individual liberty. The chapter then places Unionist decline within a broader context, as the critique of socialism and state bureaucracy that had been essential to political debate during the 1940s and 1950s curdled into a deeper mistrust of central government that damaged the Conservatives as much as Labour. While this phenomenon was visible throughout the UK, this chapter demonstrates that in Scotland such views appeared to encourage support for the SNP.
Introduction
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

A description of Dors’ placement on the cover of The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) is followed by an analysis of her performance in a one-minute scene in the British comedy film It’s Not Cricket (1949). These establish her spectacular qualities, her charismatic star image and use of poise. A brief overview of Dors’ film career follows with a discussion of how she was written about by feminist film scholars after her death in 1984. This ends with the synopsis of the subsequent chapters of the book.
Pseudo-star acting in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (1953)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter contains an analysis of the 21-year old Dors’ performance in a leading role in a British farce that has all the hallmarks of a B-Movie despite its talented Anglo-American cast and distinguished veteran director Maurice Elvey. As discussed here, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? was not intended as a star vehicle for Dors. Rather, it was an ensemble comedy in which the American actor Bonar Colleano received first billing for his role as the main protagonist. Nevertheless, Dors outshone him and everyone else in the cast despite maintaining an understated and naturalistic performance.
The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

Much Persian sufi literature is explicitly didactic, aiming to instruct its readers and motivate pious reform. Moving beyond a recapitulation of religious content, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction investigates the performative function of didactic poetry for mystical audiences, focusing in particular on the verse of Farid al-Din ʿAttar, a central figure of the tradition best known for long narrative poems imbued with edifying sufi themes. Through a close reading of ʿAttar’s oeuvre alongside contemporary sufi texts, the monograph shows how ʿAttar uses frame-tales, metapoetic commentary, and allegories to think through his relationship with his readers, imagine and guide their reactions to his work, and perform his instructive authority. By teasing out this implicit, recipient-centred poetics, the book recovers sufi didacticism’s participatory, interactive character and shows how the act of reading was invested with ritual significance as a spiritual exercise aimed at the purification of the soul.
Huesca, Aragón, Spain, 20 May 1937, 5:00 a.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Two is introduced by the incident which saw George Orwell being shot and severely injured by a sniper on 20 May 1937 during an offensive on the Aragón front of the Spanish Civil War. This episode introduces the political and historical complexities of the war and opens an investigation charting the topography of the conflict across a range of locations, including Guernica, Lérida, Badajoz, Madrid, Guadalajara and Toledo. This chapter also looks at how the portrayal of the Spanish Civil War has changed from the Nationalist perspective which characterised films made during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the later emergence, upon the return to democracy in the late 1970s, of what had previously been repressed. This chapter also articulates a discourse on how films made by international filmmakers during and after the conflict provide alternative political perspectives and often embrace the Republican cause.
Sobibór, Generalgouvernement, Occupied Poland, 14 October 1943, 4:00 p.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Three begins with the killing of a Schutzstaffel officer by Jewish prisoner Yehuda Lerner at the Sobibór death camp on 14 October 1943. The uprising which took place in the camp on that day is the defining event of a chapter which looks at three sites of memory of the Holocaust and includes a space which was exploited by the Nazis during the Holocaust and two locations which were created for the purpose of forced labour and extermination, namely the Old City of Lublin and the camps in Majdanek and Sobibór. Lublin and Majdanek are explored in regard to the opposition between creative geographies and topographical coherence; Sobibór, a site obliterated by the Nazis in the attempt to hide the mass murder, is discussed with a focus on the ways in which fiction films and testimonial performances included in documentaries are intertwined in the process of memorialising a place where no tangible trace bears witness to the events which unfolded on its grounds.
Olympiapark, Munich, Germany, 5 September 1972, 4:30 a.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Six begins when wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund was awakened by the noise made by the terrorists who, on 5 September 1972, were breaking into the apartment hosting the Israeli team at the Munich Olympic Village. This chapter focuses on Apartment 1 at 31 Connollystrasse, in the Olympic Village, and the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, the two places where the assassination of eleven Israeli athletes, coaches and referees unfolded. Along with the dissection of the ways in which these locations have been used in documentaries and fiction films, this chapter looks at the relationship between later films and the live coverage of the event broadcast on the ABC. This investigation anchors the memory of the event to the aftermath of the Second World War and establishes topographical connections between the locations of the massacre and the past; it also uses documentary to chart the historical significance of the return of the Olympic Games to Germany thirty-six years after the Berlin Olympics hosted by the Nazi regime.
Seminar from February 16, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter concerns the Milesian thinkers and above all Anaximander and the fragment attributed to him. Castoriadis reads the Milesians with emphasis on the conceptual linkage between two pairs of opposing significations, namely chaos/kosmos and hybris/dikē. He then argues that they initiated an attempt to investigate an origin or principle that is distinct from any mythical conception inasmuch as it is necessarily something unrepresentable. In Anaximander this principle receives its full expression through the notion of the apeiron, or the indefinite. Castoriadis then critically discusses Heidegger’ translation of the Anaximander fragment, giving special attention to the various core meanings of the verb einai, or being. As Castoriadis argues, Anaximander ultimately understands beings as offering justice and punishment to themselves for their own hybris. And existing as such, he argues, should be seen as adikia or hybris, i.e., as transgression. Castoriadis closes with an anecdote about the tyrant Polycrates of Samos. In question-and-answer, he responds with comments on the Greek terms chreōn and apeiron.
Seminar from March 9, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter furthers the discussion of Heraclitus and moves into an examination of subsequent thinkers. Castoriadis argues that Heraclitus tirelessly provoked the work of thinking by way of his vigorous critiques of presumptuousness, of a private thinking disconnected from the whole, and of allowing oneself a sense of finality or of guarantee against illusion. Castoriadis then briefly discusses the Parmenidean argumentation against multiplicity and links it to the emergence of a strand of theological philosophy in Greece, a development, as he argues, which was symmetrically countered by the early philosophers who refused to grant ontological privilege to purely thinkable reality. Segueing into a discussion of Democritus as a case in point, Castoriadis connects the birth of philosophy to the play of certain oppositions, especially the physis/nomos opposition. He discusses the latter specifically with reference to Democritus’s arguments against the naturalness of language (as transmitted via Proclus’s commentary on Plato’s Cratylus) and emphasizes the question of whether sensations are merely conventional. He closes by interpreting nomos broadly as involving a notion of the active self-constitution of humanity. In question-and-answer, he comments on Heidegger’s reading of the ancient Greeks and criticizes a naïve conception of historical influences.
‘Every Country Has a Monster’
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter establishes the parameters for the analysis of the kaijū eiga as a transnational genre. It defines aspects of transnationalism and globalisation, whilst establishing how the study defines the kaijū eiga. This covers two areas of classification: firstly, what is the kaijū eiga, and secondly, how to classify this an object: is the kaijū eiga a genre, like the Western or the Japanese swordplay chambara, or does it represent a subgenre, a subset of the science-fiction or horror film, or is it a hybrid genre that mixes elements of different genres with tropes of giant monsters? The chapter also considers when a kaijū film is indeed a kaijū film and how this is recognised.
The First Monster Boom
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins to investigate the ripple effect of Gojira’s impact on national popular cinemas. This is largely through an exploration of how tropes developed throughout Tōhō’s monster films came to be imitated by their competitors and the ways in which a genre started to crystallise. The chapter examines how Japanese studios, and the government, came to support a wave of films in the first monster boom that were intentionally transnational in nature. Not all examples of national cinema are intended only to be exhibited locally, and kaijū eiga quickly became an attractive market for export and co-production with American producers.
Distributing Kaijū : Localisation and Exploitation
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the localisation of kaijū films and how the work of distributors shaped contemporary understandings of the kaijū eiga. It explores how films with giant monsters were adapted to fit other cinemas’ standards and became exploitation films in the process, circulating in different forms and often with numerous titles to fit with distributors’ catalogues. The chapter also engages with the ways in which transnational genres are subject to appropriation and localisation through distribution and co-production that problematise the association of the kaijū eiga with definable national origins and mythologies. Following principles of exploitation cinema defined by Eric Schaeffer, the chapter explores the ways in which popular national cinema becomes a transnational exploitation cinema.
‘Paul Bunyan Never Fought Rodan’
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers western productions that have appropriated kaijū tropes and memes, exploring how the kaijū eiga has been adopted and adapted by (mostly) western producers. It explores many films produced across low-budget and Hollywood sectors and how they sometimes problematise or adapt the kaijū formula to different ends. The kaijū film continues to be highly adaptable to different national contexts and engages with transnational themes and lines of cultural flow. However, this chapter argues that, since the kaijū film is a modern rather than traditional form, it is already a product of media globalisation. Therefore, its essential Japaneseness is not simply overwritten by Americanisation. This includes considering how kaijū have become staples of low-budget mockbuster production and the prominence of giant ape films.
Introduction
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

The introduction contextualises and maps the specific approach of the book. First, it locates animated films, and Disney more specifically, within genre studies, and shows how a generic framework can open up new perspectives on contemporary mainstream animation and challenge the compartmentalisation of animation and live action in film studies. The introduction subsequently explores how combining genre with gender, a key component of both contemporary genre studies and analyses of Disney, and the concept of post-feminism can help us investigate the complexity of the studio’s current output, and its multifaceted relationship with Hollywood generic trends.
Disruption/Containment: Gender, Marvel and Disney’s Superheroes
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6 and Moana reappropriate and rework constructions of gender characteristic of the superhero genre, revising and expanding Disney’s gendered formula in the process. Disney animated films rely on the comic potentials and aesthetic freedoms of the animated medium to challenge contemporary portrayals of superheroes and superheroines. This chapter first focuses on Big Hero 6’s Hiro and Baymax, exploring how the portrayal of teenage Hiro playfully subverts the coming-of-age narrative as depicted in Marvel live-action superhero films, and how the characterisation of robotic superhero/nurse Baymax complicates gendered binaries as constructed within the superhero genre. The chapter then examines the parodic construction of male super-heroism characterising the portrayals of Ralph and Maui, knowingly mocking superheroes’ excessive and unruly performance of masculinity as showcased through the portrayals of the Hulk and Thor throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Lastly, this chapter investigates Disney’s starkly different treatment of female super-heroism. The portrayals of Vanellope and Elsa are not characterised by such a light-hearted approach, foregrounding instead a more ambiguous and typically post-feminist narrative. The figure of Elsa particularly crystallises Hollywood’s uneasiness towards the construction of the empowered superheroine.
Reflections of/on Contemporary Disney Animation: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter uses Ralph Breaks the Internet to map the book’s main discoveries regarding Disney’s re-envisioning of its contemporary animation, enlightening intersections between Disney animation and Hollywood, as well as live-action cinema and animation. It also considers this film as an entry point for possible avenues of research in relation to Disney’s animated output, which evolves within and engages with an ever-expanding cinematic universe. The first part of this chapter analyses the ways in which Ralph Breaks the Internet revisits the portrayal of the Disney Princess, pointing to distinct generic shifts emerging from Disney’s contemporary cycle of animated fairy tales and musicals. The second part focuses on the remobilisation of Disney’s musical tropes, and the merging of action and musical, a recurring generic combination throughout the studio’s contemporary output. The third part of this chapter explores how Ralph Breaks the Internet maps Disney’s shifts within and overall move towards the action mode. In parallel, the development of multiple buddy relationships and the reconfiguration of gendered dynamics within the film point to subtle convergences with romantically influenced animated features.
Conflicted and Confused: The Changing Complexity of Masculinity in Zoya Akhtar’s Films
Authors: Shields Amber
Published: September 2023

One of the top female directors in the Hindi film industry, Zoya Akhtar’s films are conspicuously centred on male protagonists. However, by depicting masculinity in the midst of change, Akhtar’s films and streaming series actually contribute to a complicated feminist discourse re-examining all gender roles in society. Looking at multiple characters, this essay will explore how Akhtar’s male protagonists embody a neoliberal crisis in the male identity. As opposed to other mainstream Bollywood films like the new Don (2006, 2011, forthcoming) or Dabangg (2010, 2012, 2019) series that are reacting to these shifting societal roles with hypermasculinity, Akhtar’s films and male stars embrace the complications of this change and give space to negotiate the nuances this means for her characters and society. This chapter will position Akhtar as a director not making ‘female films’ or ‘male films’, but rather a critical writer and director examining all aspects of the evolution of gender roles in an era marked by changes and the resulting tension and violence it can animate, thus highlighting that there is a vulnerability in gender that needs to be examined from all sides.