bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Theatre of Deterritorialization and the Questions We Ask
Authors: Gontarski S. E.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Samuel Beckett's art. In Beckett's own exploration of imagination, he will call the space of not only his stories but of his art ‘issueless’. Beckett's is not a world of resemblances but a world of differences, not a world of metaphors which suggest likenesses but a world, an art of images, opposed to the ‘neatness of identifications’ that actor Ralph Richardson requested. Not that Beckett's art is wholly divorced from or unrecognizable as the world. Art has what Gilles Deleuze calls a functional quality as well as an expressive quality, the former something of a reterritorialization. But such function, such connection or relation to the familiar, a representation of the world, is at best tenuous or fabricated if not accidental or forced in Beckett's art; at its best, functional features of Beckett's art become expressive features.
Constituting Scotland
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

The rise of the Scottish national movement has been accompanied by the emergence of distinct constitutional ideas, claims and arguments, which may affect constitutional design in any future independent Scotland. Drawing on the fields of constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, and Scottish studies, this book examines the historical trajectory of the constitutional question in Scotland and analyses the influences and constraints on the constitutional imagination of the Scottish national movement, in terms of both the national and international contexts. It identifies an emerging Scottish nationalist constitutional tradition that is distinct from British constitutional orthodoxies but nevertheless corresponds to broad global trends in constitutional thought and design. Much of the book is devoted to the detailed exposition and comparative analysis of the draft constitution for an independent Scotland published by the SNP in 2002. The 2014 draft interim Constitution presented by the Scottish Government is also examined, and the two texts are contrasted to show the changing nature of the SNP’s constitutional policy: from liberal-procedural constitutionalism in pursuit of a more inclusive polity, to a more populist and majoritarian constitutionalism.
Introduction
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

This chapter sets the book in its political landscape – in the aftermath of a relatively narrow defeat for the pro-independence side in Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum. It illustrates that the Scottish national movement developed some constitutional ideas that, being distinct from and yet also embedded within the British constitutional tradition, are worthy of study in their own right, chiefly through the detailed analysis of constitutional texts. These texts shed light not only on the nature of the Scottish national movement, but also on the state-of-the-art of Westminster-derived constitution-making generally, in its global and comparative aspect.
2002 Draft III: Judiciary, Rights and Substantive Provisions
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

This chapter, the third of three chapters examining the SNP’s 2002 constitutional text, addresses the judiciary, rights, and substantive provisions of the constitution. As well as examining provisions relating to the appointment and tenure of judges and the processes of judicial review, this chapter includes the draft constitution’s treatment of: nationalism and national identity, statehood, citizenship, religion-state relations, socio-economic rights, ‘fourth branch’ institutions, standards in public life, and local government. It argues that the draft constitution, as a supreme and rigid constitution enforced by judicial review, might be radical and contentious in a UK context, but would be a tried and tested model in the rest of the world, including in most other Westminster-derived polities. It also argues that the text envisages a ‘liberal-procedural’ constitution, in which the constitution acts as a relatively non-prescriptive framework for the conduct of democratic politics, allowing many unsettled issues of identity to be resolved at the sub-constitutional level.
Two Short Essays on Angelopoulos’ Early Films
Authors: Oshima Nagisa
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents two essays whose author offers a unique perspective on Theo Angelopoulos, approaching his work from the standpoint of a contemporary auteur and directorial colleague. The first essay reflects upon several meetings with Angelopoulos while the second provides a filmmaker's appraisal of Angelopoulos' technical accomplishments. The author tentatively attributes his friendship with Angelopoulos ‘to the similarity in approach we feel our films take, but it is also thanks to Theo's love for talking. Or, we could even say love for giving speeches’. He also comments on two of Angelopoulos' films, The Hunters and The Travelling Players, arguing that the latter showcases the director's filmmaking and camerawork. He describes Angelopoulos' camerawork as one of lingering affection and the camerawork of hope.
Theo Angelopoulos’ Unfinished Odyssey: The Other Sea
Authors: Horton Andrew
Published: January 2018

This afterword offers the first critical account of Theo Angelopoulos' final, unfinished film, The Other Sea, describing it as the capstone to a long career and arguing that it would have synthesised many of the lifelong concerns and stylistic singularities that defined Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. The Other Sea was to be Angelopoulos' concluding film for the trilogy that began with The Weeping Meadow (2003) and continued with The Dust of Time (2008), but production stopped due to Angelopoulos' untimely death. Here the author shares both the nature of this unfinished odyssey and his personal experience with this tragically interrupted project. He first emphasises the importance of ‘unfinished’ and ‘interrupted’ to Angelopoulos' filmmaking before discussing The Other Sea's screenplay and production. He concludes by asking whether The Other Sea will be completed as a film.
Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos , Steven Mark
Published: January 2018

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.
French-language Road Cinema
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

Over the past two decades road cinema has become an increasingly popular form of expression for European directors. Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, including works by Ismaël Ferroukhi, Bouli Lanners, Aki Kaurismäki and Jacqueline Audry amongst many others, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of ‘New Europe’ more evident than in French-language cinema. Drawing on mobility studies, cultural geography and film theory, this innovative work sketches out the flexible yet distinctive parameters of contemporary French-language road cinema, and argues for an understanding of the ‘road movie’ not as a genre but as a thematic and formal template that crosses cinematic categories to bring together a wide array of films that narrate the movements of migrants, tourists and business executives.
Introduction
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

The introduction discusses the political, cultural and cinematic contexts of contemporary European French-language road cinema. It also identifies defines ‘road cinema’ as used in this book and outlines and introduces the book’s three primary aims. The first is to assess the impulse to remap European space through the vantage point of French-language European cinemas. The second is to delineate the parameters of the European French-language road format and identify a number of its narrative, technical and formal particularities. The third objective is to expand the discursive parameters of ‘French’ cinema to encompass a wider realm of inter-related spaces of narrative, film production and reception that I label ‘French-language Europe’.
Mapping the Hybrid European Road: French Connections, European Traditions and American Influence?
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter set the stage for an exploration of contemporary French-language European road movies by tracing the interwoven lines of the tradition in its American and European iterations back to the 1960s, the period during which the template for contemporary road cinema crystalized. It argues that the contours of the road movie tradition are not strictly the product of a direct lineage from seminal American films from the late 1960s, such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA), but the result of complex transnational interactions within European cinemas and between European and American cultures. The films covered are Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy), Le corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965, France/Italy) Les petits matins/Hitch-Hike (Jacqueline Audry, 1962, France), Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1977, West Germany), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki,1989, Finland/Sweden) and Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994, Germany/Portugal).
Remapping the European Road
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter assessesfive contemporary films from three different nations that respond to the Europeanization of economies and identity formulations with a particular eye on how the passages through diverse landscapes are filmed: Le Grand Voyage, Rendez-vous à Kiruna (Anna Novion, 2012, France), St. Jacques… la Mecque (Colline Serreau, 2005, France), Torpedo (Matthieu Donck, 2012, Belgium/France) and La Vraie vie est ailleurs (Frédéric Choffat, 2006, Switzerland). The case studies are used to examine the primary motivations for being on the road in French-language Europe (and Europe in general) and the ways in which the various modes of transit involved are represented and how the techniques and practicalities affect the issue of representation. Each film under consideration seeks to outline the new ‘soft borders’ of Europe by crossing a variety of national, regional and social boundaries.
Cowboys, Icebergs, Anarchists and Toreadors: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Cinema
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter attempts to answer the questions: ‘what, and where, is Belgian road cinema?’ Doing so involves considering the European-ness of Belgian film as well as its national specificity and connection to wider French-language cultural categories and industries. This chapter analyses five films: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008), L'iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005), Quand la mer monte (Jeanne Moreau and Gilles Porte, 2004), Les folles aventures de Simon Konianski/Simon Konianski (Micha Wald, 2008) and Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2004, France/Belgium).Although these voyages generally engage with national culture – or cultures, in the case of Belgium – the limits of the nation-state no longer adequately contain the cultures and spaces explored in Belgian road cinema. Citizenship in contemporary Belgium is reframed as inherently linked to mobility, a stance that rejects fixed, monolithic identity formulations and the closed spaces associated with national identities and conceptions of Fortress Europe.
Formation of the United Arab Republic
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

The formation of the United Arab Republic in February 1958 was an unprecedented demonstration of pan Arab unity. Syria’s voluntary sacrifice of its national sovereignty stoked fears that Nasser, Egypt’s ‘Hitler on the Nile’ would stop at nothing to expand his pan-Arab empire. Chapter 2 explores the intelligence community’s first encounter with the drive towards Arab unity.
It reveals that analysts were initially sceptical about the prospect of any form of political unity, partly due to their perception of Syrian political culture as inherently factional and self-serving. They recognized that a fear of Communist influence in Syria was the primary motivating force behind the union. At the same time, the JIC in particular could not shed the panic of policy-makers that the move was the beginning of Nasser’s imperial expansion, potentially absorbing Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Syrian Secession
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961 marked the beginning of the end of pan-Arabism. This chapter explores to what extent this dramatic development came as a surprise to the Anglo-American intelligence community, and how they reacted to it.
It argues that although analysts had a good sense of the political, economic and cultural challenges of integrating the two regions, Nasser had acquired a quasi-invincible status which precluded serious consideration of secession. Despite initial misgivings about the formation of the UAR, analysts realised that this experiment with Arab unity had rendered Syria more stable than any time since independence was wrested from the French in 1949.
Resorting to their cultural library of Arab stereotypes, analysts feared how the ‘undisciplined’ and ‘individualistic’ people of Syria would manage without Nasser’s moderating leadership and how the latter would respond to this unprecedented challenge to his prestige. They warned that Arab-Israeli relations would suffer and that Nasser might seek to restore his status as pan-Arab leader elsewhere.
Civil War in Yemen
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

In September 1962, a group of army officers led by Colonel Abdullah al Sallal overthrew the Hamid’Ud’Din royal family in Yemen. The coup provided just the occasion for Nasser to re-establish his credibility abroad as the vanguard of Arab revolution. Nasser immediately sent Egyptian troops to bolster the republican revolutionaries led by Sallal. They began a guerrilla war against royalist forces loyal to the deposed Imamate which was propped up by Saudi Arabia and the British. The Yemeni conflict quickly became a proxy war between these rival interests, causing a rift in the Anglo-American alliance and symbolising the division between ‘traditional’ dynasties against the ‘progressive’ republics in the Arab world.
Analysts recognised that Nasser had no blueprint or master plan for revolution in Yemen and that he had underestimated the commitment the conflict would entail. Bound by his ‘face’ as the leader of Arab revolution, he was compelled to maintain support for the republicans despite the unassailable stalemate that ensued. Nevertheless, Nasser’s determination to capitalise on the protracted British withdrawal from Aden led to a revival of widespread hostility towards the nationalist.
Six-Day War
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

The Six-Day War currently stands as one of the CIA’s greatest ‘success’ stories in the Middle East. Good intelligence is credited with guiding policy makers in the UK and US to resist Israeli requests for military support and thereby containing a conflict that could have pitted a Western supported Israel against a Soviet backed Arab force. What made intelligence so effective in this instance?
This chapter argues that analysts recognised the intentions and capabilities of the major players in this conflict. They knew that Nasser had no appetite for a war with Israel and acknowledged that he had been goaded by Syria into an aggressive rhetoric that became dangerously self-fulfilling. More importantly, analysts correctly identified that despite the numerical superiority of the combined Arab forces, the Israeli military would prevail. Yet looking beyond the catharsis of military conflict raises important questions about the utility of discourse such as ‘success’ in describing a war whose tragic legacy remains with us today.
War of Attrition
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

In 1968, a protracted War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel began along the Suez Canal. In March 1970 this culminated in an unprecedented Soviet military intervention to protect Egypt against Israeli deep penetration raids. This dramatic geo-political shift forced analysts to question Egypt’s commitment to peace and independence and Soviet willingness to escalate the Cold War. The literature published on this issue thus far suggests that analysts ‘failed’ to predict the Soviet intervention.
This chapter reveals that contrary to our conventional understanding, British analysts warned that Arab ‘honour’ would never accept Israeli use of the east bank of the Suez Canal and that attacks on Egypt’s heartland would provoke an intervention by the Soviet Union. The documentary record makes it clear that policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic ignored or dismissed the assessments of their analysts.
In the aftermath of the intervention, intelligence analysis played a key role in quelling the fears of policy makers, arguing that the Soviet Union felt obliged to react to the Israeli offensive and was not seeking to escalate the Cold War. Nor, analysts argued, could Egypt be regarded as a Soviet client state, as the expulsion of the Russian advisors only two years later would aptly demonstrate.
Aftermath of Victory
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

In the aftermath of the 1973 war, analysts grappled with a radically different international environment in the Arab world. The Arabs had demonstrated their ability to unite politically and economically to wage a military offensive in pursuit of a political settlement and Sadat declared a transformation in Egypt’s orientation towards the Western world.
This chapter explores how the 1973 war altered perceptions of Sadat. Was the President finally able to shed his predecessor’s legacy? Drawing primarily on documents that, because of their age, have only been made available to the public in the past few years, it reveals that intelligence analysts were sceptical about the prospects for peace and the domestic implications of political and economic liberalisation. Indeed, the JIC predicted the possibility of Sadat’s assassination as early as 1975 and SIS man in Cairo, Mark Allen warned about the growing threat from the religious right. These most recent declassifications provide a plethora of revealing insights into just how the Anglo-American intelligence community regarded their newest ally in the Arab world until his dramatic assassination by affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1981.
Columbia Pictures and the Great Depression: A Case Study of Political Writers in Hollywood
Authors: Scott Ian
Published: January 2018

This analyses the largely neglected and underestimated role of screen writers in 1930s Hollywood, an era when the art of movie writing actually made great strides as an art form. It considers the significance of three Columbia writers – Sidney Buchman, Robert Riskin, and Jo Swerling, why they were able to flourish at this small studio with the support of mogul Harry Cohn, and their role in the making of Frank Capra’s populist classics – notably Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939). It examines how these scribes responded to the Great Depression not only by becoming active in the newly-formed Screen Writers Guild but also in writing scripts that injected populist values into the Capra movies as well as seemingly non-political comedy films like Platinum Blonde (1931) and Theodora Goes Wild (1935).
Shirley Temple and Hollywood’s Colonialist Ideology
Authors: Hark Ina Rae
Published: January 2018

This chapter shows how the ‘Shirley Temple formula,’ namely how a little girl suffering uncertainty and hardship triumphs through her loving heart and indomitability, was applied to and subverted within limits the ‘settler genre’ of movies she made for twentieth Century Fox in the 1930s: Wee Willie Winkie, Susannah of the Mounties, The Little Princess, The Littlest Rebel, and The Little Colonel. In these movies Temple’s character can appear non-white when it suits her or is more fun, but never when it means suffering the consequences of racism. In essence, therefore, the little Shirley’s embrace of native cultures in her colonial films diverges somewhat from the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism in the Hollywood industry of the 1930s. At the same time, the privilege of her whiteness affords an escape hatch when needed and an implied superiority to the cultures of colour that renders her disruption negligible.
Footlight Parade: The New Deal on Screen
Authors: Cohen Harvey G.
Published: January 2018

This chapters shows how the Warner Bros. movie, Footlight Parade, part of a trilogy of Great Depression made in 1933 and also featuring 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, epitomised the studio’s support for Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and the New Deal programme of the first Hundred Days. It also marked James Cagney’s break from being typecast as a gangster to present him as a FDR-figure overcoming a crisis. The chapter further explores how Jack and Harry Warner forsook FDR shortly after the filming of Footlight Parade to join other moguls in opposition to the National Recovery Administration’s efforts to promote the interests of organized labour. Thereafter the pro-New Deal message in the studio’s productions became muted and it reverted to escapism in its post-1933 musicals.
Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling
Authors: Orning Sara E. S.
Published: January 2018

Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But the “species intermingling” that is staged by Piccinini, according to Orning, holds more potential for ethical engagement with “others” of various kinds or species than earlier settings such as freak shows.
“Sparks Would Fly”: Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality
Authors: Pick Anat
Published: January 2018

Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early cinema in the U.S., but also to its use in electrocution as capital punishment, in the torture of vulnerable bodies, and in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric institutions. Focusing primarily on the film that Thomas Edison made depicting the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903, as well as Sylvia Plath’s work in The Bell Jar and other poems, Pick follows the development of electricity as a less visible instrument of control in democracies supposedly committed to human rights and the monitoring of punishment and interrogation methods, up through and including the current use of Tasers by police targeting communities of color. But there are surprising inconsistencies and ambiguities in these histories as well, such as constructions of nonhuman agency in which an elephant can be judged culpable and therefore deserving of capital punishment, while Sylvia Plath can exemplify the logic of ECT that can claim the ability to restore human agency in the mind of a schizophrenic or psychotic person.
The Nature of Birds, Women, and Cancer: Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge and When Women Were Birds
Authors: Lundblad Michael
Published: January 2018

Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.​
Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds
Authors: Boggs Colleen Glenney
Published: January 2018

Boggs focuses on a volume of poetry titled Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which was published pseudonymously by Michael Field in 1914. While Victorian and queer studies have focused on other works produced by this author, who was actually two women—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, both friends with Robert Browning—less attention has been paid to their later privately-published volume that commemorates their dog who had passed away several years before, a Chow named Whym. Boggs finds great potential in the poems for complicating theoretical explorations of “dog love”, and for rethinking subjectivity and kinship, particularly in terms of the queer potential of human-animal relationships. Rather than reading the poems as examples of anthropomorphism and a privileging of the human over the animal, Boggs sees them as deconstructing these distinctions, with the dog Whym as an “equal partner”.
Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future
Authors: Scheid Volker
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.
How are/our Work: ‘What, if anything, is the use of any of This?’
Authors: Magi Jill , Jones Nev , Kelly Timothy
Published: January 2018

If there is an ethics of reading and writing an ethics we certainly see in Husserl’s commitment to the dissemination of descriptions and observations that contradict the ‘dream’ of phenomenological plenitude, fullness, completion. It is an ethics that demands an unwillingness to fix the essence of experience, however innocent, slight, or radically progressive such fixings might seem.
Picturing Pain
Authors: Biernoff Suzannah
Published: January 2018

What does pain look like? Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) includes a well-known list of the visible and physiological signs of pain. Published a year after The Descent of Man, it sets out to show that the human face is the product not of divine fashioning, but of descent with modification. Joy, melancholy, fear, disgust, contempt, anguish: for Darwin, the body language of human emotion – and pain – provides compelling evidence for evolution, and his account of pain appropriately begins in the animal kingdom. There are some major obstacles to the study of emotional expression, however. The facial movements involved, notes Darwin, are often ‘extremely slight, and of a fleeting nature’.
Victorian Literary Aesthetics and Mental Pathology
Authors: Garratt Peter
Published: January 2018

In WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS? (2005), a polemic aimed at shredding many longstanding conceptions of art and aesthetic judgement, the literary critic John Carey briefly discusses a bibliotherapy project established over a decade earlier in West Yorkshire by John Duffy. This was a project in which patients with depression, stress and anxiety disorders were given the opportunity to participate in reading groups, book advice surgeries and other literacy activities, having been referred to the service by mental health practitioners – an alternative to the anti-depressant medication commonly prescribed to such patients by GPs. The service users in question were ‘helped by art’, in Carey’s words, not treated by pharmacological means. The initiative demonstrated the potential therapeutic benefits of reading books, while seeming to dismantle the languid association of art with uselessness or transcendence, as distilled in W. H. Auden’s phrase, ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ For Carey, bibliotherapy programmes like this one could not help also rubbing up against established notions of literary value, in turn reviving old questions over the nature and ends of art generally.
Introduction
Authors: Whitehead Anne , Woods Angela
Published: January 2018

The medical humanities, we claim, names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences,1 the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities introduces the ideas, individuals and scholarly approaches that are currently shaping the field. The medical humanities is an area of inquiry that is highly interdisciplinary, rapidly expanding and increasingly globalised. As this Introduction and the chapters that follow demonstrate, ...
The Male Body in the Spanish Erotic Films of the 1980s
Authors: Melero Alejandro
Published: January 2018

This chapter studies the performances of Tony Fuentes in two popular destape films: Deseo carnal/Desire of the Flesh aka Carnal Desire (dir. Manuel Iglesias, 1978) and Jóvenes viciosas/Dirty Young Ladies (dir. Manuel Iglesias, 1980), as well as the evolution of Fuentes’ star persona. The analysis reveals both how the films projected onto the actor’s body stage some of the social anxieties of the time, and how, in turn, these and other historical traces are carried forward into his roles in other films.
Erotohistoriography, Temporal Drag and the Interstitial Spaces of Childhood in Spanish Cinema
Authors: Wright Sarah
Published: January 2018

This chapter studies the child figure as ‘the conduit for the exploration of the trauma and loss of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath of dictatorship in Spain’ in well-known films including El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Víctor Erice, 1973), Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (dir. Carlos Saura, 1976), Secretos del corazón/Secrets of the Heart (dir. Montxo Armendáriz, 1997) and Pa negre/Black Bread (dir. Agustí Villalonga, 2010). In an analysis informed by queer theory, and in particular by Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism and Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, the chapter focuses on sequences of intense intimacy (between mother and child, for example), transgressive kids’ games, and some traumatic events witnessed by children to explore the potential of the child figure as the key to queer the films’ version of history.
Sex After Fifty: The ‘Invisible’ Female Ageing Body in Spanish Women-authored Cinema
Authors: Zecchi Barbara
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the figure of the ageing female character as a sexual being in a wide selection of films directed by Spanish women filmmakers including Cecilia Bartolomé, Isabel Coixet, Pilar Miró, Josefina Molina or Paula Ortíz among others. The author usefully identifies a number of sometimes opposing strategies that serve to organise the films into three distinctive categories. Some films actively spectacularise the body of the mature and sexually active woman, others do the opposite and use the portrayal of the unglamorous older female body as a means to draw attention to and denounce the expectations set by the youth-obsessed mainstream film and media that displace mature women making them invisible. Finally, the chapter identifies a third group of films with ‘affirmative ageing’ discourses. This latter group of films actively encourage the spectator’s sensual engagement with the erotic experiences of the older women on the screen.
Introduction
Authors: Detloff Madelyn , Helt Brenda
Published: January 2018

This introduction explains how and why the essays of Queer Bloomsbury combine the Bloomsbury Group’s personal lives with aspects routinely elevated to a higher status – art, politics, philosophy – understanding these as inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon. Contributors to this volume neither shrink from nor capitalise on sexual details, but are primarily interested in how group members’ queer perspectives enabled their thinking and its results. Sexual intimacy between friends of either gender was not only accepted, but understood as a rich source of intellectual, artistic, and philosophical affinity. Contemporary philosophical and political theory has returned to the insights cultivated by the Bloomsbury Group, if that return is characterised as a holistic way of living sexually, intellectually, artistically, ethically, and intimately, rather than in parts. Considering Bloomsbury as an interdisciplinary field – inhabited by artists, authors, philosophers, economists, political activists, art critics, journalists, and biographers – enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century cultures.
Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp
Authors: Todd Avery
Published: January 2018

Avery explores Lytton Strachey’s engagement with Christian ethical discourse and iconography to promote a queer ethical ideal of friendship and intimacy unfettered by moral convention. In his famous biographies and in a series of essays, short stories, and dialogues, it is clear he was perennially interested in religious questions and themes. Despite his atheism and disapproval of religious faith, he believed that the achievement of sexual and ethical autonomy, the legitimation of alternative sexualities and a new sexual ethic, demanded a serious critique of Christian moralism. In a sado-masochistic crucifixion experiment in the late 1920s, he allowed himself to be affixed to a cross and pierced in the side by his lover Roger Senhouse, providing a striking example from the modernist period and from the Bloomsbury milieu of how an iconically normative object may be used to express a queer ethical, sexual, and social vision.
Deviant Desires and the Queering of Leonard Woolf
Authors: Blankley Elyse
Published: January 2018

Leonard Woolf circulated among Bloomsbury’s different desires because he was himself queered by his class, religion, and caste. Focusing on Woolf’s 1914 novel TheWiseVirgins and letters between him and Lytton Strachey, Blankley shows that the two men engaged with each other’s work to tease out possible answers to the ‘problem’ and pleasures of the erotic male body and the narrative scripts permissible to it. For Strachey and Woolf, the vexing questions of desire and social disapprobation reached an interesting crisis in the years leading up to WWI. The Western mind/body split was a troubling inheritance, and they responded in surprisingly interrelated ways by interrogating the forms available to them for speaking forbidden desire and imagining new parameters of desire beyond matrimony, domesticity, and the marketplace of sexual exchange. Blankley shows that, together, the two writers helped shaped a dialectic of queer literary modernism, in complementary albeit antiphonal registers.
Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
Authors: Belloni Roberto , Kappler Stefanie , Ramović Jasmin
Published: January 2018

This chapter evaluates the (neo)liberal peace agenda in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the region, arguing that local politics and international intervention continue to be somewhat oppositional. The February 2014 protests have pointed to a range of issues which are not even on the international actors' agendas even though they are related to material and concrete issues across the country. This has thrown into question the Dayton Agreement, the legitimacy of intervention, and local ownership, foregrounding questions relating the objectives of politics and the nature of legitimate authority in Bosnian society as a more autonomous political framework than that imagined by the European Union or foreign donors. One which is not just critical of nationalists in the region and country but also the emancipatory claims of external actors where they do not directly speak to the concerns of the local populations and its many different groups.
Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
Authors: Pogodda Sandra , Richmond Oliver P.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the emergence of everyday state-formation movements. With the peace process discredited through the abuse of the power imbalance between the conflict parties, pockets of local agency in Palestine have shifted their emancipatory struggle from peace towards creating the conditions for a viable and inclusionary state. The chapter then introduces and analyses the concept of everyday state formation as the capacity — and limitations — of non-violent grassroots movements to delineate the political space of an emerging state by pushing back external coercive power and the governmentality of pacification. Everyday state formation illustrates the internal tensions of contemporary statebuilding: without reconciliation across multiple scales — local to global — the complex interactions of structural, governmental, and subaltern power will tend to build societal fragility into emerging state structures.
Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within
Authors: Lopes Paula Duarte
Published: January 2018

This chapter outlines the role of peace formation in Timor Leste. Only after the last United Nations peace mission exited did the Timorese government have some space and time to seriously address the gap between the external institutional architecture created and the existing traditional structures still functioning. The chapter thus argues that, to promote a sustainable peace, United Nations interventions should address the tensions arising from building a new institutional architecture by taking into account the existing local governance and dispute-settlement structures and dynamics even when they do not match United Nations norms, principles, and practices. Engaging with local peace-formation dynamics contributes to an increased legitimacy of the externally led peace efforts. In this way, United Nations efforts can become embedded in local dynamics, providing a stronger and more sustainable effort towards peace.
Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
Authors: Boege Volker
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter illustrates how, in the Soloman Islands, very significant agency lies at the social level of peacemaking. In July 2003, after several years of internal violent conflicts, the Solomon Islands became the target of the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date — the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). This mission is generally presented as a success story of post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding. The chapter shows how locals have pursued their own indigenous processes of peace formation detached from, and parallel to, RAMSI, albeit in its shadow. It draws mainly on field research into community views on the capacities, effectiveness, and legitimacy of international, state, and local, non-state agents of peace and state formation, using the categories of incompatibility, substitution, and complementarity to analyse the approaches and practices of these actors.
The Documentary Version of Film History
Authors: Miller Henry K.
Published: January 2018

The overwhelmingly negative response of members of the British documentary film movement (the ‘documentarists’), Grierson very much included, to Cavalcanti’s compilation film Film and Reality (1942) has been taken as a crystallization of a split between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘purposive’ drives within the documentary film movement. Without rejecting this broad characterization, this chapter treats the version of film history advanced by Cavalcanti’s film as largely consonant with that which Grierson and others around him had promoted in the late 1930s, about the time Film and Reality was conceived and commissioned. Both Cavalcanti and Grierson saw in the studio story-film the betrayal of film’s ‘natural destiny of discovering mankind’ (Grierson); both agreed on the realist canon of (principally) Flaherty, the city symphonists, and the Soviets; and both put the documentary movement at the pinnacle of the medium’s progress in the 1930s. Cavalcanti differed from Grierson’s trajectory by introducing Jean Renoir at the climax of his film, but their disagreement over this particular issue was to a large degree a matter of institutional politics and positioning, rather than of theoretical substance. After exploring these issues, the chapter then proceeds to relate the ‘documentarist conception of film history’, which was influential at the time, to others then in circulation, such as what David Bordwell has described as the ‘Basic Story’ account. The chapter concludes by relating the documentarist model of film history to that elaborated later by Andre Bazin.
Introducing the Assembly Sites of Scandinavia
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 represents the starting point for the assembly site investigations by examining the layout and design of some of the most important thing sites across Scandinavia. It is demonstrated that these major assembly sites had many features and traits in common, albeit in ever-shifting patterns. When a thing site was first created, the location was carefully selected, as it needed to have the right topography, and often pre-existing anthropogenic features, such as burials. For the continued creation, or redesign of an existing assembly, a pool of features was available, from which a selection were added and presented in varying combinations. By bringing together archaeology, written sources and place-names, it is possible to characterise a range of features associated with assembly sites. This clearly demonstrates the most important result of this study: that a shared idea of what constituted an assembly site existed in the minds of the Norse. The detailed site investigations also show that the assemblies that were designated as top-level sites have the most striking monuments and design. The archaeology of these sites therefore reflects the hierarchy spelt out in the written sources.
Assembly Sites in Scandinavia: Activities and Rituals of the Community
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

Chapter 5 shifts the focus to the rituals and activities of the wider community in Scandinavia. At thing sites a wide range of community activities and rituals, which most likely and created collective memories and strengthened social cohesion, were enacted. Many of these activities may have been designed by the elite, but equally the idea of assemblies as communal spaces may have been collectively driven. The archaeological signature of meeting-places and assembly-sites suggests associations with feasting and eating on a large-scale, and architectural layouts that emphasised the collective over the individual and facilitated group interaction and cohesion. The construction, enlargement and maintenance of monuments and other features required the participation of large numbers of people. By joining in this work the population gained shared ownership of the sites. This was further enhanced by communal activities during the meetings, which also involved games and sports, as well as trade. Assemblies therefore formed arenas of interplay between the top-elite and the wider population; kings were elected and ruled through the assembly, while at the same time continuously dependent on the endorsement of the people.
Centralisation of Power: Christianity and Urbanisation
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

This chapter builds further on the idea of the constantly shifting and evolving thing site, examining in detail the modifications that took place in assembly site location and features from the late tenth and eleventh centuries until the end of the Middle Ages in Scandinavia. Alterations in the tenth and eleventh centuries are most clearly seen in the rune-stone rich areas of the Mälaren region of Sweden and most of the evidence presented here relating to this time period is therefore from this area. The changes observed at this time can, however, be expected in other geographical areas too, bearing in mind the major societal shifts, such as urbanisation and Christianisation, that seem to have been driving them forward. Further changes in the following centuries, connected with to building of parish churches and cathedrals as well as urbanisation, are also investigated. The most striking pattern to emerge in the late Middle Ages is the gradual merging of top-level assemblies, trade and episcopal sees in the towns.
Capitalism as Religion
Authors: Agamben Giorgio
Published: January 2018

This chapter is the first translation into English of Agamben’s essay ‘Capitalism as Religion.’ It develops on Walter Benjamin’s thesis that capitalism is an extreme form of religion by considering the role that money plays in the capitalist cult. Agamben argues that the theological content of capitalism was clarified by the end of the gold standard in 1971 because money no longer refered to a concrete thing whose value it represented, but rather, to credit. The capitalist religion puts money in the place of God and replaces faith in God with faith in credit, which is, ultimately, faith in faith. The chapter concludes by drawing out the destructive implications of this parodic form of Christian faith by considering its relationship to the contemporary hegemony of finance, the development of the spectacle, and the “profound anarchy of the society in which we live.”