bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Where Grammar Meets Culture: Pronominal Systems in Australasia and the South Pacific Revisited
Authors: Burridge Kate , Biewer Carolin
Published: January 2023

Kate Burridge and Carolin Biewer examine the pronoun systems used in varieties of English in Australia and South Pacific territories, drawing on fieldwork studies in the region. Although nonstandard pronominal forms are attested around the anglophone world (and thus angloversals), those found in this southern hemisphere region for the first-person plural are special to it (and thus areoversals). In Norf’k (Norfolk Island English), the pronouns auwa/uklan are used to affirm insider status in the island community and exclude outsiders; the dual inclusive plural form hemi/ himii, meaning ‘the two of us’, again makes a special distinction in the pronoun system. Elsewhere – in the Cook Islands – the use of we all serves to indicate a collectivity (for example, that of a family) contrasting with the unmarked we, used to refer to the larger island community. These special first-person plural pronouns thus represent fine-grained linguistic constructions of social solidarity within these island cultures. Even where pronoun uses look similar to ENL, local functions reveal regional differences fostered by the local sociocultural context.
The Incoherence of Fairness in International Criminal Trials
Authors: Rigney Sophie
Published: January 2023

Despite its centrality to international criminal trials, there is no coherent understanding of fairness. This Chapter attempts to set out a taxonomy of the factors contributing to the conceptual incoherence of fairness. It lays out the various perspectives on, and challenges to, fairness in an attempt to provide greater conceptual clarity. I argue that there is a conceptual incoherence surrounding the concept of fairness, for three main reasons: a conflict over what principles are constitutive of fairness; a conflict over who should be the key beneficiary of fairness in trials; and a conflict around how to ensure fairness in a sui generis procedural system (where there is a lack of agreement around translating the traditional inquisitorial and adversarial approaches to a hybrid system). In relation to each of these three points, a diversity of opinions shows that there is little coherence regarding what fairness requires. The different approaches on these questions are all related to the links between fairness and rights, in the trial setting. I argue that there is a growing disconnect between fairness and the rights of the accused in international criminal trials, which emerges from, and adds further to, the conceptual incoherence of fairness
Fairness, The Rights of The Accused and Disclosure
Authors: Rigney Sophie
Published: January 2023

This Chapter examines the links between fairness, the rights of the accused, and procedural rules, in relation to the disclosure of information from the prosecution to the defence. I outline the significance of disclosure in examinations of fairness and rights, and how disclosure interacts with both the rights of the accused, and the fairness of the trials. I then analyse how the concept of fairness has been used by parties and Trial Chambers when reaching determinations on disclosure, in three ways. First, I outline the challenges posed by the electronic nature of disclosure. Secondly, I demonstrate that Trial Chambers may be unable to adequately manage large volumes of disclosure provided in violation of the prescribed time limits, and that this has a detrimental effect on the rights of an accused. Thirdly, I argue that at the ICC, there is an environment that permits non-disclosure of material (including exculpatory material) that is in the possession of victims and the prosecution. While Trial Chambers often reiterate the importance of disclosure as fundamental to ensuring a fair trial, the way Chambers regulate disclosure creates a trial environment where the rights of the accused are not upheld, showing a separation between fairness and rights.
The Virtuous Community
Authors: Renard John
Published: January 2023

Virtue in all its colourful variety is not hardwired in human beings. It is nearly impossible to conjure up any virtue – kindness, wisdom, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, justice, faith, hope, love, for starters – that we do not have to learn largely from the example of the most ethically and spiritually gifted among us. Communicating such sought-after values has long been among the loftiest desiderata in the explicit intentions of hagiographers of many faith traditions. Aflaki’s overarching goal is to present in accessible form the role of Rumi and his extended family as exemplars of the values they sought to embody in what eventually grew into the Mawlawi community. Chapter Four focuses on the symbol that became an expression of the core of Mawlawi Community, the ritual gathering called Sama. Aflaki clearly identifies its chief functions as a symbol of membership with its attendant tutelage, as well as a setting around which spiritual transformation occurs as onlookers become swept up and drawn into the rites. [163]
In a Muslim Society
Authors: Renard John
Published: January 2023

In keeping with the dictum that “Kings rule over the people and Religious Scholars rule over the Kings,” Aflaki describes numerous encounters between members of the Family Rumi and representatives of Islamic religious institutions, political authorities, and well-connected fellow citizens – society’s movers and shakers. Chapter Five accordingly revolves around the metaphorical significance of the madrasa as a symbol of religious and epistemic authority as a core value in a Muslim Society. Here the ancillary imagery will include the roles of the prime representatives of such a society’s ‘divisions of labour,’ such as: governmental rulers and ministers, judges, the well-heeled whose material support is critical to a mendicant religious Community, elements of the society that sometimes represent views at variance with that Community, and the ordinary folk. [126]
Deleuze, Kierkegaard and the Ethics of Selfhood
Authors: Jampol-Petzinger Andrew M.
Published: January 2023

The first synoptic consideration of the relationship between Gilles Deleuze’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophies, with a focus on the intersection between their shared ideas of ethics “beyond” morality, and the self. Moving beyond narrow disagreements regarding theology, the book argues that common emphases on metaphysical premises, and specially a focus on concepts like “repetition,” “becoming” and “singularity,” underlie both philosophers’ views of ethics. On this view, the ethical responsibilities of the individual center around a project of realizing the immanent features of one’s identity, rather than “living up to” some set of transcendent moral rules or principles. This account, discoverable in both philosophers’ work, brings together an “immanent” conception of ethics with a metaphysics of the self as ultimately fluid and in a perpetual process of becoming. From here, the book goes on to argue that such a view of the self ultimately lends itself to a possible political uptake of these philosophers’ ethical views–one in which projects of individual growth carry immediately political stakes within them.
Kierkegaard as a Thinker of Immanent Ethics
Authors: Jampol-Petzinger Andrew M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter situates Kierkegaard’s approach to ethics in terms of Deleuze’s distinction between a “transcendent” morality, operating on the basis of moral rules, and an “immanent” ethics, operating in terms of the realization of essential features of one’s singular nature. This account goes by way of a consideration of Deleuze’s accounts of ethics in Spinoza: Practical Philosophyand The Logic of Sense, and a comparison of the notion of immanent ethics in those places to Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christian ethics in Fear and Trembling and several of his “signed” discourses. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a possible point of contention between the two philosophers: namely, whether the project of “becoming” contained in the notion of an immanent ethics ought to be understood in terms of a concept of immanence, of whether it ought to be understood in terms of a concept of transcendence. Through a consideration of the contents of each of these terms, the chapter concludes that in fact the difference between these philosophers’ choice of focus is largely terminological in nature, and that both concepts serve primarily in order to point towards the notion of open-ended “becoming” that is crucial to their normative worldviews.
Kierkegaard, Deleuze and the Self of Immanent Ethics
Authors: Jampol-Petzinger Andrew M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores some of Deleuze’s references to Kierkegaard in his later works (including his co-authored works) to highlight a set of concepts adequate to a joint Deleuzian-Kierkegaardian conception of selfhood, beyond the set of concepts typically used in “substantialist” accounts of personal identity. Here the chapter focuses on several concepts from Deleuze’s Cinemabook as well as A Thousand Plateausin which elements of “impersonality,” “haecceity” and a kind of porous exchange with one’s surroundings constitute main features of the “singular” self. These concepts are supplemented by two often-underemphasized dimensions of the Kierkegaardian self: namely the concepts of transparency and immediacy as arguably de-personalizing elements, marking the individual’s indifference to conventional and inherited understandings of their own identity. The chapter concludes with a statement of the value of such an account for avoiding the “dual pitfalls” of overly substantial, as well as overly “dissolved,” conceptions of identity: the picture of selfhood gained from a comparison of Deleuze and Kierkegaard’s accounts is one in which an open-ended and developing self nonetheless maintains some minimum coordinates of stability, paceinterpreters of Deleuze who emphasize the self-destructive tendencies of the latter’s thought.
The Personal Infrastructure of Maritime Trade 1
Authors: Marzano Annalisa
Published: January 2023

This paper examines the contribution of formal and informal social ties and personal relations to the workings of long-distance trade. Roman trade was facilitated by overlapping social networks that depended upon social, ethnic, religious, and cultural ties between actors. These links can at times be reconstructed, largely through the evidence of honorific inscriptions. Such ties may have assisted traders in finding credit, in building supply and distribution networks, and in establishing trust between local communities and foreign traders. The right connections, networks, and contacts were important in guarantying successful overseas trade.
Loans and Securities: Tracing Maritime Trade in the Archive of the Sulpicii
Authors: Jakab Éva
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the role of real and personal security in maritime lending. Drawing upon both the Greek and Roman sources, the author analyses documents from everyday practice (including the so-called 'Muziris papyrus' and tablets from the archive of the Sulpicii) to show how Greek approaches to taking security continued to be used in a Roman context.
Black Seals: Missive From Iran’S National Music
Authors: Mottahedeh Negar
Published: January 2023

In her contribution »Black Seals: Missive from Iran’ National Music,« Negar Mottahedeh places the genealogy of counter-memories within a history of exchange between the East and the West. Focusing on Delshodegān/Love Stricken (1992), a highly popular Iranian post-revolution fiction film by director Ali Hatami, Mottahedeh’s enunciation-oriented investigation tracks down the transcultural exchange nesting in the practices of inscriptive and reproductive technologies. Mottahedeh carves out the layers and levels of Hatami’s ambiguous landscape of split enunciations, which undermines its own national statements, illustrating »how undeniably the nation and its cinema is produced on the grounds of cultural confluences, wedged in the contradictions of a forked tongue« (p. 97). Set in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Iran, Love Stricken »traces the peregrinations of a group of early twentieth-century musicians to Paris to record traditional music on the newly invented gramophone« (p. 87). While on the surface the film presents characters who find their identity in national and traditional music, on a media-reflexive level it undermines precisely this claimed identity since the music – and thus, national identity – turns out to be a product of cross-cultural montage and the interplay between self-export and re-import of studio recordings abroad.
Towards an Impure Memory: An Archaeology of Counter-Memories Through Telescoping Lenses
Authors: Wittmann Matthias
Published: January 2023

In »Towards an Impure Memory: An Archaeology of Counter-Memories through Telescoping Lenses,« Matthias Wittmann undertakes a re-mapping and a re-examination of selected post-revolutionary Iranian ﬁlms by using Walter Benjamin’s concept of télescopage (telescoping) as brieﬂy deﬁned in his Arcades Project (1927–40). The »[t]elescoping of the past through the present« as understood by Benjamin locates the possibilities of re-membering particularly in montage techniques, ruptures, and refractions, and not in continuity. Consequently, memories become a product of present constellations, forces, and spatiotemporal overlaps. A cinema that puts into circulation impure (counter-)memories produces frictions between political promises and social realities, exposing the emptiness and abstractness of the revolutionary semiotics of continuity and purity as put forward by the ideological architects of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The atlas of counter-memories as elaborated in this chapter also include counter-examples, i.e. purified memories from the Sacred Defense Cinema, thereby creating contrasts and demonstrating nuances between different forms of spatiotemporal constellations and tectonics. This archaeology of counter-memories will be undertaken through films from Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Morteza Avini, Ebrahim Hatamikia, Rakhshan Banietemad, Shahram Mokri, and Mohammad Hussein Mahdavian.
‘At the END of A Century’ (1996)
Authors: Beyzaie Bahram , Roshan Amir
Published: January 2023

Written on the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of cinema and ﬁrst published in Persian in Iran Nameh (1996), Bahram Beyzaie’s article »At the End of a Century« (»Pas az sad sāl«) is now accessible to a wider readership, thanks to the translation by Amir Roshan. Beyzaie traces back the struggle with censorship and with what he calls ‘absolutism’ to the cultural history of Iran and Persia. Absolutism according to Beyzaie is not a political system as in the classic deﬁnition of political philosophy; it is a worldview which horizontally determines the relation between subjects, and between the subject and him- or herself, what Foucault would call assujettissement (subjectivation). Although cinema is a modern phenomenon, Iran’s ﬁlm industry, like the mural paintings of the medieval period before it, is a victim of the same absolutist control mechanisms and dominant traditional values. »[T]he traditional absolutism has now accepted the image, but more than anything else it has accepted the image of its own victory. [. . .] We have created such an elaborated system which, instead of being at the cinema’s disposal, thinks that ﬁlmmakers have to be at its service« (p. 241).
Genres Of The Political: The Impolitical Comedy Of Conflict
Authors: Campbell Timothy
Published: January 2023

Over the last fifteen years much of the Anglo-American reception to the thought of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has fallen principally on his insights into biopolitics and biopower, specifically as they relate to the the exclusionary and inclusionary tension between community and immunity. This essay provides a genealogy of that dialectic by turning to an earlier season of his thought called the impolitical. Through a reading of Categories of the Impolitical and Nine Thoughts of the Political, both written more than thirty years ago, the essay first links Esposito’s use of the impolitical to an attempt to show how the political orders conflict through representation. In the middle section, the essay views biopolitics through an impolitical lens in order to show how easily the former works against generative conflict. The reading concludes with a reflection on the relation between the impolitical and institutions in Esposito’s most recent work.
A Triptych for the Third Earl
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

Shakespeare’s career as a poet took on a life of its own, in an environment as competitive as that of the theatre. Some evidence is on display in the rival-poet series; more can be found in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the two poems that Shakespeare dedicated to the third Earl of Southampton. Parallels between Sonnets and the narrative poems argue that the three works are a triptych, and that Sonnets’ fair youth was modelled, at least initially, on Southampton. Identifying the fair youth is significant not only in view of the poet’s promise to immortalise him; it helps us see Sonnets as the third of three interrelated works. This chapter discuss symbolism related to the number 3 (in such sonnets as 33, 66, and 99), the theme of theft in the sonnets, and the degree to which the fair youth can be identified as the Third Earl of Southampton, the young aristocrat to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Numerological analysis of the narrative poems and comparisons to the sonnets follows. The chapter concludes that the two narrative poems and the sonnets were at least initially intended as a group of related works for the third earl.
Feedback, Asynchronicity and Sonic Sociabilities: Arnaud des Pallières’s Adieu
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter addresses the way noise has been deployed within the sonic practice of French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in his film Adieu (2004). According to des Pallières, the politics of his filmmaking resides in the way his films reflect on experiences of which he has no lived experience. With Adieu, des Pallières considers the experience of migration purposefully obliquely. I argue that des Pallières favours noise as a means of respecting radical strangeness and alterity in his exploration of migrant experience because noise allows him to avoid the violence of identitarian politics. Adieu registers passing presences and absences through noise and asynchronicity, sharpening our responses in a necessary vulnerability that might itself be receptive to the traumatic nature of migration as an experience. This rigorous approach to the sonic opens up avisual dimensions in Adieu that not only evoke socially invisible presences, but simultaneously register them against the ground of historical echoes of past abuses.
Bouche En Feu …’: A Genetic Manuscript Study Of Samuel Beckett’S Self-Translation Of NOT I
Authors: O’Neill Shane
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the importance of genetic manuscript studies in relation to Samuel Beckett’s self-translation process. The author considers the reasons for Beckett’s failure and eventual success at translating Not I into French. He also studies the ways in which Beckett recaptured the musical cadences of Not I, while still preserving the text’s negativity and punctured rhythms in Pas moi. Throughout the translation process, according to O’Neill, Beckett refined the text, carefully selecting French words and expressions that matched those from Not I. Keeping the frantic pace of the English original in French was paramount for Beckett, so that if there was an excess of words in the translation of certain expressions, or if the sounds in French produced a different effect from the original, Beckett took pains to search for a better solution. The author highlights Beckett’s preference for ‘Beckettian’ terms in his own translation, so that this particular work resonates with echoes of his whole literary production.
Esperando A Goethe: Translation, Humanism And ‘Message From Earth’
Authors: Bixby Patrick
Published: January 2023

Patrick Bixby offers insight on the correlation between Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Recado Terrestre” and Samuel Beckett’s translation into English, “Message from Earth”. Both texts appeared on a volume on Goethe published by UNESCO in 1949. Beckett’s own translation of Mistral’s poem, which has received scant critical attention, proposes an examination of Goethe’s surmised “timelessness”. His commitment to Goethe’s literary heritage through Mistral’s adaptation eventually reveals “a far more skeptical light” on the revival of the German writer’s humanist ideas. In other words, Beckett’s translation moves beyond Mistral’s praise of the spirit of Goethe, rather directing a lament toward the renewed humanist tradition in the years after the Second World War. Bixby’s final remarks with regard to Beckett’s rendering of “Message from Earth” are clear: it is less a panegyric, praising the spirit of Goethe and commemorating his legacy, than an extended, if rather ironic, lament directed toward a tradition whose return is hardly to be celebrated.
Lorine Niedecker: Life by Water
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

This chapter contends that the defining existential condition for Lorine Niedecker’s poetics of place is the fact that she lived by water, for edges are paradoxically central to her poems, which return obsessively to the meeting places between terrestrial and aquatic worlds. Niedecker lived and died in the place where she was born: Blackhawk Island, a low-lying, flood-prone strip of land on the banks of the Rock River in South-east Wisconsin. Her poems attest to a profound, bodily ‘implacement’ in her home place, registering its sights and sounds, the change of seasons, and the behaviour of her neighbours – both human and non-human – with sympathy and subtle irony. However, in later life, she began to write long poems that move decisively beyond the bounds of home to explore the meanings of place in contexts that are at once regional, geological, and transnational, developing a distinctive materialist poetics that is preoccupied with the mutability of all things.
Cinematic Populism and the Political Superhero Blockbuster
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter the political messages of the superhero blockbuster genre and its reception within a broader media public. More precisely, the chapter discusses three films – 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and 2018’s Black Panther– which offer particularly clear articulations of a cinematic populism that is more generally at work in the genre. On the one hand, this populism foregrounds political themes that echo the central concerns of political populisms (such as the notion of a conflict between heroic leaders and morally corrupt elites, for example). On the other hand, it uses references to real-world events and discourses to project a sense of political relevance. Recent superhero blockbusters, so the chapter argues, rely on these means to generate publicity effects that increase their cultural visibility. Hence, these films reiterate a schematic worldview that resonates with a politically ambivalent tradition of populist thought which has recently returned to the center stage of American political life.
Metamorphosis and Persistence: An Introduction
Authors: Barrenha Natalia Christofoletti , Kratje Julia , Merchant Paul R.
Published: January 2023

Lucrecia Martel’s body of work is in many senses unusual: alongside features that have won critical acclaim across the world are to be found short films, including one made for a clothing brand, and the art direction of a concert tour. This introduction provides a historical-biographical background on Martel by charting her trajectory from her first short films to the recent partnership with the multi-talented artist Björk, and Martel’s place in the so-called New Argentine Cinema and beyond, highlighting the themes and modes that have characterised her works. It also outlines the main tendencies in Martel film criticism, and how this anthology moves beyond those. It concludes with overviews of the subsequent chapters, authored by some of the most prominent scholars of Martel’s films and by emergent voices, and offer a fresh set of perspectives (alongside two translations of landmark essays not previously available in English) that build on existing critical trends and suggest promising new avenues for research.
Muta : Monstrosity and Mutation
Authors: Souto Mariana , Campo Mônica
Published: January 2023

Starting from the short Muta, produced for the clothing brand Miu Miu within the project Women’s Tales, this chapter discusses Lucrecia Martel’s recurring flirtation with horror in her work, citing other films such as The Swamp, The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman, and Zama. The title Muta can refer to both muteness and transformation. In the film’s fabulous and enigmatic universe, a ship that floats across the waterways of Paraguay is occupied only by women – a group of young, slender models, who do not use verbal language to communicate, spew out cobwebs, and at night seem to morph into chrysalis. In interviews, Lucrecia Martel says she often thinks of building her fictional characters not as men, women, children, or any humanoid in general, but as ‘monsters’. This seems to be taken to the extreme in Muta. The filmmaker casts doubt on the existential status of the characters and exposes them more as strange creatures than as humans. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to discuss two central aspects in the short film: the ideas of metamorphosis and monstrosity. We also seek to observe the way the film dialogues with references such as Asian horror and the world of fashion, as well as navigate through some of its symbolism.
‘They Smother You’
Authors: Catelli Nora
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the relation between Zama (2017) and the novel from which it is adapted. The important thing is not what has been taken away (the character’s rhythmic and invasive sexuality, the anxiety of the absurd in the crisp and severe writing of Di Benedetto, a master of the classical style – whatever that may be, in this case, a variation from the Cuyo region of Argentine prose –), but what remains. And what remains, what both novel and movie share – together with Saer’s The Witness (1983) and some works by César Aira – is that awed interrogation, never satisfied, of Argentine culture: How can we imagine that phantasmatic colony we emerged from? How can we, in the opposite process, link ourselves to the living testimony of that time’s reality, to those Americans who owe nothing to the arrival of the conquistadors, those who were already there, who dreamt and ate and hunted there, but whom we seldom address?
The Conquest of the Uncomfortable: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel
Authors: Barrenha Natalia Christofoletti , Kratje Julia , Merchant Paul R.
Published: January 2023

On 20 March 2021, Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha (in Hastings, UK), Julia Kratje (in Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Paul R. Merchant (in Bristol, UK) spoke with Lucrecia Martel (in Salta, Argentina) about her career, some underexplored connections between her films (like humour, or the traits which imbue her films with a certain air of comedy, or musical collaborations, such as those with Juana Molina, Björk, and Julieta Laso, that have not been considered as closely by the audience or by the critics), and her plans for the future, including reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic. Martel says: “I think no one (at least among the people who enjoy my movies) cares about what the film is about. (…) As regards what making a movie means, ‘what the movie is about’ is something very superficial, which enables you to organise time and a series of things, but ‘what the movie is about’ lies in the experience of the film. It isn’t something you can include in the synopsis, or a logline”. In this sense, this chapter invites the reader to participate in a conversation that cannot be summed up in a few lines.
Shifting Grounds: Writers of Colour in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Literature
Authors: Stroh Silke
Published: January 2023

Silke Stroh explores the role played by writers of colour on the Scottish literary scene during the first two decades of the 21st century, and discusses their potential role in changing conceptions of Scottish literature in the decades to come. Her chapter begins by reviewing some essential conceptual and terminological issues, before moving on to a survey of important elements of the literary infrastructure that have provided dedicated platforms for writers of colour and form good starting points for further explorations in this field. These include theatre companies, bursaries, writers’ groups, events and anthologies. This selective overview is followed by detailed case studies of four individual authors: Bashabi Fraser, Tendai Huchu, Raman Mundair and Chin Li. The discussion considers the writers’ engagement with themes of diasporicity, identity (Scottish and otherwise), racism, locality and translocality.
Convivial Correctives to Metrovincial Prejudice: Kevin Macneil’s The Stornoway Way and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag 1
Authors: Scott Maggie
Published: January 2023

Maggie Scott’s chapter examines some of the ways that Scotland’s languages are used in twenty-first century fiction to undermine ‘metrovincial’ perspectives. Scott analyses how the multiplicity of voices in post-devolution Scottish fiction provides examples of local cultural references, knowledge – and especially language – that refute standard linguistic and cultural hegemonies and establish narratives within their own self-determined centres of power and place. She then demonstrates how the works of a growing number of contemporary writers engaging with many of the varieties of language found in modern Scotland reposition the local as the international and invert traditional metrovincial paradigms, where the provincialism of the metropolis is allowed to dominate unchallenged and where the cultures, languages and practices of ‘the faraway’ are dismissed, stigmatised or ignored. Scott argues that multilingual practices including ‘broader’ varieties of Scots, ‘prestigious’ forms of Scottish English, but also elements of Scottish Gaelic, Urdu, Panjabi and diverse English dialects have the potential to act for under-represented or marginalised identities in order to, in the words of Suhayl Saadi, ‘enact both a progressive politics and a meaningful literature [that] must be about enabling the possibility of dissent against the sources of power’.
Post-National Polyphonies: Communities In Absentia on the contemporary scottish stage
Authors: Schaaf Jeanne
Published: January 2023

Jeanne Schaaf’s chapter demonstrates how the contemporary Scottish stage, in the dialogue it initiates between art and politics, constructs and deconstructs representations of the nation. While reflecting the tensions around the very idea of nationhood that are exacerbated by the recent geo-political context, the Scottish stage reinvents its relationship to the national space by playing with scale, the scale of space, place and community, and by travelling freely between the local to the global. As a building-less national theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland reinvests all types of spaces, be they real or virtual, asking us to rethink the presence and absence of the body on stage, and fostering new transnational communities of ‘spect-actors’. Schaff argues that this theatre without walls is a metonymy for the radical opening up of Scottish theatre itself, which invites postnational and horizontal representations of identity. Through an analysis of four recent productions of the Scottish stage (The Events 2013, The Great Yes No Don’t Know Five Minute Theatre Show 2014, The Suppliant Women 2016 and Adam 2017) her chapter presents us with a productive paradigm to explore new understandings of the way communities are fostered by post-national polyphonies on stage.
Where Words and Images Collide: Will Maclean’s Intertextual Collaborations
Authors: Blair Lindsay , Blair Donald
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines word-image relationships through the collaboration between contemporary Scots artist Will Maclean and the poets Sorley MacLean, Angus Martin, Kenneth White, Douglas Dunn and John Burnside, more specifically Maclean’s artistic response to two particular poems in the Scots/Irish word and image publication, An Leabhar Mòr. Lindsay Blair and Donald Blair first demonstrate how the relationship between word and image in these poetic collaborations sits in sharp contradistinction to the Modernist grid with its ‘hostility’’ to literature as defined by Rosalind Krauss. They then examine how Maclean’s different kinds of framing device can be related to the concept of the ‘framing’ of reality as advanced by Jacques Rancière, while reaching for historical antecedents in Maclean’s orientation – his peculiarly ‘aletheic’ gaze – to early Medieval Scots carvings and illuminated manuscripts, through different concepts of Scottish ‘enlightenment’ to the metaphorical imaginings of French and American Surrealism, to the images and poems of the collaborations themselves.
Economy And Its Inoperativity
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines questions of a possible humanity and divinity beyond their historical-theological signatures, turning first to the construction of a political-theological order meant to ceaselessly unite as an economy that which is forever kept separate: the Kingdom and the Government. The historical attempts to conceal and yet maintain such a tension is instructive in that the order (ordo) it articulates is one that defines the role of rationality itself. It is from this place that we begin to see how philosophical and theological models of reasoning have neglected the economic ones. The entire dualistic representational fabric of politics and theology, as much as of language, is given its particular raison d’être through such political-theological configurations of economy which hinge upon an exclusionary inclusion (or inclusionary exclusion) that depends upon its sacrificial machinery—the very basis for the entire Homo Sacer project that Agamben has undertaken. As such, taking a look at his genealogy of western notions of economy is essential for comprehending the larger role it plays in particular instances of glory, but also in the construction of the human being and its society in relation to both God and the world of animals.
State Building in Qatar
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Compliments the analysis of Kuwait with an analysis of Qatar between 1905 and 1989. Since competitive access to resources before state building is the more common configuration in tribal societies, the Qatar case serves to illustrate the applicability of the model beyond the two major cases. In Qatar, access to vital limited resources was competitive before state building. During state building, the government attempted to consolidate power by building up public administration and engineering settlement patterns. However, kinship authority instrumentalized bureaucratic authority as a result of path dependent constraints on how the government conducted this state building process. Like in Kuwait, Qatar’s government engaged kinship groups as kinship groups, preserving the salience of kinship. As a result, kinship in Qatar at the end of state building had governing salience.
State Building in Oman
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Contrasts Kuwait and Qatar to the case of Oman between 1871 and 1986. In Oman, access to vital limited resources was cooperative rather than competitive. In Oman, many tribes cooperated to obtain water from aquifers and similar sources through a system of water channels known as aflaj. Prior to state formation, these tribes established proto-bureaucracies that managed the physical aflaj. These proto-bureaucracies were staffed by tribe members but carried bureaucratic authority by virtue of controlling knowledge about the aflajsystem. As such, they acted as intermediaries between pre-existing kinship authority and the new bureaucratic authority of the state. During state building, Oman extended infrastructure and national water, road, and electricity networks to non-urban populations. It also subsumed existing bureaucratic infrastructure within the national state, and created buy-in for this project through a different nationalist idiom than Kuwait and Qatar had used. Whereas Kuwait and Qatar described citizens as those who had been in the country since a certain year (1920 in Kuwait, 1930 in Qatar) and their descendants, Oman defined citizenship territorially. For each of these three steps, the chapter contrasts Oman's experience with Kuwait’s showing how cooperative access impacted state building in different ways in each case.
Kinship Salience After State Building in Kuwait, Qatar and Oman
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Outlines the difference between governing and instrumentalized salience. Where kinship authority governs functions normally conducted by the state and compels political behavior by kinship group members, it has governing salience. Where it lacks both of these, it has instrumentalized salience. The chapter operationalizes these concepts using a table of observable outcomes that assesses, firstly, the governing function of kinship in the state and, secondly, kinship authority’s ability to compel behavior. The chapter then provides a comparison of each outcome in Kuwait and Qatar on the one hand, and Oman on the other. Ultimately, Kuwait and Qatar reflect the presence of key indicators of governing salience, while Oman reflects instrumentalized salience. This assessment demonstrates observable variation in the dependent variable and suggests, in the context of the previous empirical chapters, that differences in kinship group access to vital limited resources before state building explain why kinship plays a governing role in some Arab Gulf states but is itself instrumentalized by the state in others.
Moving Forward: Space, Time and the Bicycle
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

The final chapter builds on the phenomenological findings of
Chapter 3 in order to examine the cyclist’s specific engagement with
time and space. Combining theory and literature, I present the bicycle as both a modernising influence and a counter-cultural technology. In performing a human-centred interaction with time and space, the cyclist proposed an alternative path at a critical juncture. The spatial theories of French critics including Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Paul Virilio are mobilised to analyse spatial representations in texts by Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), among others. I examine the cyclist’s nostalgic, backward-looking gaze, inherited in part from the flâneur. The bicycle allowed these and other authors to propose an interactive geography based on individual exploration and criss-crossing of urban and rural environments, while reviving spaces racked by industrialisation, the railways and the emerging motor car. Reading spaces from a turn-of-the-century cyclist’s perspective creates a vision of civilised, humane transport capable of enriching communities and retaining a vital link to the past.
Conclusion
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

The conclusion summarises the findings of the research, arguing that the bicycle was an alternative, counter-cultural technology right from its inception. The bicycle accompanied many of the cultural changes that defined modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, while suggesting alternatives to the mechanised, commodified, accelerated, polluting, violent nature of life in the high industrial era. Current directions in scholarship in this domain are outlined and possible future directions of research are suggested.
A Discourse on Tendency
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents a comprehensive account of Bergson’s idea of tendency. It begins by situating the idea of tendency against the background of Bergson’s study of psychological effort, which sets the stage for the book’s reinterpretation of the élan vitalas an image for tendency drawn from psychological analysis. The chapter then traces the development of the idea of tendency across Bergson’s work. The author argues that the status of tendency is virtual, and that it should be interpreted according to the mereological features of virtuality presented in Chapter 2. This is what sets tendency apart from more familiar modal categories such as possibility and potentiality. This is also what distinguishes Bergson’s view from other theories of tendency on offer in the metaphysics of powers, for instance. The chapter concludes by distinguishing Bergson’s view from one such theory, that of Anjum and Mumford (2011), and arguing that Bergson’s conception avoids some issues that persist through the contemporary account. While the first sections of the chapter should be of interest to Bergson scholars, the last section should appeal to philosophers of science interested in ideas of causality, disposition, powers, and potentiality in nature.
New Things That Have Happened: Forms of Irish Poetry
Authors: Lloyd David
Published: January 2023

The academic critical industry has tended to promote a very conventional Irish lyric practice since the 1970s, with scant regard to the pressures that either the spectacular political violence or the “slow violence” of neoliberal capitalist development during recent decades have placed on the forms and language of poetry. The chapter focuses on three poets whose work has pushed against the constant reproduction of “well-made poems”: Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Catherine Walsh.
Between Invention And Authenticity: Representations Of Abdülhamid Ii In The Tv Series PAYITAHT
Authors: Tekin Caner
Published: January 2023

Over the past decade, the government of Turkey has gradually popularised a specific historical narrative. According to this narrative, Ottoman (that is, Turkish) conservative elites have been battling ‘internal and external enemies’ in order to defend ‘Turkish–Islamic civilisation’ throughout history. This narrative concludes with the emergence of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the final (and ultimate) defender of Islam and the Turkish nation. This chapter discusses how representations in the popular TV drama series Payitaht: Abdülhamid are instrumentalised in order to make an implicit connection between the historical travails of Sultan Abdülhamid II and the present-day challenges facing President Erdoğan. This connection, it is argued here, has been intentionally constructed. The chapter also reflects changing representations of Abdülhamid II in educational materials (history curricula and textbooks) during the AKP era.
‘Because They Would Misunderstand’: Romeyka Heritage And The Masculine Reconfigurations Of Public Culture In Contemporary Turkey
Authors: Sağlam Erol
Published: January 2023

This chapter draws on ethnographic research on Romeyka-speaking communities in Trabzon to explore the practices and discourses that configure the contours of public culture in contemporary Turkey. It does so by attending to the public (in)visibility of Romeyka and argues that public culture in Turkey is structured around a regime of (in)visibility. This chapter further argues that, through discretion of certain sociocultural differences, Turkish selves navigate across limitations of the public sphere and appropriate Turkish identity in different forms - though without necessarily renouncing these distinctions altogether. This analysis thus attends both to the diverse ways in which Turkish nationalist communities in contemporary Turkey retain sociocultural differences, and how locals use peculiar tactics to manoeuvre across the constraints of nationalist ideology. The chapter thus stresses how the fundamental parameters of public culture are negotiated, altered and yet upheld.
Main Melody Films
Authors: Yiu-Wai Chu Stephen
Published: January 2023

The 2010s will probably enter the annals of Chinese film history as the decade of change, and major changes include, among others, the “blockbusterisation” of main melody films. Main melody films are indeed not new to the Mainland market. Simply put, they used to refer to propaganda works that paid tribute to the nation, the party and the army, and in this sense its history is as long as that of Chinese cinema. In the new millennium, they had gradually grown into the main genre in Chinese cinema, and its “blockbusterisation” was arguably the most phenomenal development of the Chinese film industry in the 2010s. This book endeavours to go across Mainland-Hong Kong border to examine Hong Kong filmmakers’ contributions to main melody blockbusters that affected both regions in this decade. Providing an in-depth study of Hong Kong directors’ participation in Chinese “main-melody” blockbusters in the 2010s, it aims to shed light on the development of cross-border cooperation and changing values in a new era of Chinese film production.
Founding an Army with Soft Power: Captain Andrew Lau
Authors: Yiu-Wai Chu
Published: January 2023

When Andrew Lau, who is most widely known for his crime film series Young and Dangerous and Infernal Affairs trilogy (co-directed with Alan Mak), was invited to helm The Founding of an Army, Hong Kong audiences must have been quite surprised. In commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, this was arguably one of the most typical main melody films. This chapter investigates how Lau turned the tribute into a commercial war film that aimed to achieve a political goal and attract a broad audience at once. His subsequent project, The Captain, a disaster film dubbed the ‘Chinese answer to Sully’, is analysed to show how he has contributed a new genre to main melody films.
Zoopower
Authors: Briggs Robert
Published: January 2023

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida follows Jeremy Bentham in displacing reason in favour of suffering as the key question in thinking about animals. Derrida’s stress on this ‘nonpower at the heart of power’ is typically taken as foregrounding a compassionate ethics in the face of the vulnerable (animal) other, an interpretation which has been given a political inflection in recent work on animals in biopolitics (Cary Wolfe). By contrast, this chapter proposes a radically different reading of this move with the aim of speculating on a concept of ‘power’ appropriate to identifying and analysing the arenas, operations and stakes of an alternative ‘zoopolitics’. Engaging power as originarily divided and delayed, referred and relayed, Derrida’s account of ‘nonpower’ not only speaks in useful ways to Foucault’s account of ‘productive power’ and his proposals for a ‘microphysics of power’ but, when read alongside Derrida’s work on ‘sovereignty’ (Rogues, The Beast and the Sovereign), also opens the path to a novel account of animal ‘ipseity. The chapter then explores the animal-existential implications of thinking power in this way by reinterpreting a range of zoopolitical scenes discussed by Donna Haraway, Dominique Lestel, Jocelyn Porcher and Vinciane Despret.