bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Jihadi-Salafi Movement and the Environment
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 6 analyses the environmentalism of two jihadi-Salafist groups, al-Qaeda and ISIS. First, it describes their general perspective on the environment, focusing on perceptions of territoriality. Then, it examines their perspective on water, animal issues, pollution and energy. Lastly, the chapter assesses the role of religion in the formulation of jihadi-Salafist environmentalism.
The Legal Scrutiny and the Resurrection of the Rule of Law
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

The restoration of democracy meant more than putting an end to civil conflict. To secure a lasting peace, the democrats needed to enshrine the rule of law in the restored constitution. To achieve that end, they published in a conspicuous location near the Stoa Basileios all the valid laws on freestanding stelai and maintained a comprehensive list of laws in the city archives to guarantee that all citizens knew what the laws were. The two main accounts of this process, those of Lysias (Against Nicomachus) and Andocides (On the Mysteries) must be read with caution. Because both speeches have a specific case to argue, they tend to distort the legal redaction in line with their own argumentative purposes. The republication of laws was not a haphazard or ramshackle affair but was overseen with care and expertise. The result was a complete redaction of the valid laws of Athens for all to see and witness, so that the law could be consistently applied in the courts. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the forged ‘decree of Teisamenus’ (And. 1. 83-4).
The Amnesty Applied (II): The Trials of Callimachus and Socrates
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

Sometime after 12 Boedromion 403, a law of Archinus was passed on paragraphe. This permitted the defendant in inadmissible cases to block the plaintiff by special plea. Callimachus, who had lost money to Patrocles and Lysimachus in the time of the oligarchy, later settled. When he pursued his claim further, his opponents reversed the tables by the law of paragraphe. This is not because the terms of the Amnesty had been violated, but because Callimachus had violated the rule res iudicata which guaranteed that the verdicts of trials and arbitrations in time of democracy would be respected. The trial of Socrates likewise turned on a legal principle and, though the outcome was scandalous, was nevertheless admissible under the clauses of the Amnesty.
The Athenian Reconciliation as the Paradigm for the Greek World in the Classical and Hellenistic Ages
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

The Athenian Reconciliation embodied the moral principle of political forgiveness, a notion conveyed in the clause me mnesikakein which forbade litigation for untried offences predating the Amnesty. This same principle is in evidence in other parts of the Greek world. Close analysis of inscribed materials indicates that though other cities in Greece may have adopted different approaches to amnesty, the fundamental idea that a divided city should reconcile by letting bygones be bygones is in evidence throughout. To be sure, not all cities or communities lived up to the Athenian paradigm: those that failed did so because they did not pursue legal methods of reconciliation, or else prioritised the interests of one faction over another. The most successful examples were those that pursued peaceful reconciliation methods that applied a rule-of-law standard.
The Rule of Law Restored: The Legacy of the Reconciliation in the Fourth Century
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

The restored democracy of 403 has sometimes been characterised as a more ‘conservative’ democracy than what had previously existed. That approach underestimates the connection between democracy and the rule of law. By restoring the authority of the courts, whose verdicts were underpinned by legal principle, Athens set itself up on a democratic track that was even more democratic than anything that had preceded the Reconciliation. The process of nomothesia was not an undemocratic process but one that lay within the control of the Assembly. The effect of the Reconciliation was to empower the citizen body as the legislator of the law, but also to ensure that the activity of the courts observed the rule of law.
Introduction
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

The introduction traces the relationship of Latin America to the Arab world from the Cuban revolutionary poet José Martí’s chronicle on Egypt to the mid-twentieth century, the history of Arab and Latin American letters through the southern Mahjar poets who settled in South America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and produced some of the finest modern Arabic poetry, comparative methodologies based on direct networks and shared struggles and a survey of the structure of the book.
The African Shore: Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Morocco
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 traces contact between Latin America and North Africa in Central American and Mexican literature through a parallel relationship vis- à-vis Iberian colonisation. This chapter focuses on connections between Latin America and North Africa in Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s La orilla africana (The African Shore, 1999) and Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s Los nombres del aire (Mogador: The Names of the Air, 1987). The Orientalist novels of Rey Rosa and Ruy Sánchez explore cultural contact and direct routes between Latin America and North Africa. Rey Rosa explores connections between Latin America and Morocco vis- à-vis Spain, while Ruy Sánchez highlights the Arab- Iberian heritage of Mexico and Morocco.
Children of Scheherazade: Gabriel García Márquez in Arabic
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 examines direct reworkings of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels in Arabic literature. The chapter focuses on the Arabisation of the genre of magical realism and a rewriting of a Latin American novel by comparing two sets of novels from the second half of the twentieth century: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and Layālī alf layla (Arabian Nights and Days, 1982) by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ); and García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Elias Khoury’s Majma‘ al-asrār (The Assembly of Secrets, 1994). This chapter discusses the ways in which Mahfouz’s Layālī alf layla, a modern Arab adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights, reworks the style of magical realism popularised by García Márquez in his masterwork Cien años de soledad and Khoury’s reworking of García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada in Majma‘ al-asrār. The intertextuality in Khoury’s novel contributes to connections between Latin America and the Arab world. While Mahfouz’s Arabisation of magical realism and Khoury’s Lebanese Civil War novel focus on local contexts, they show engagements with Latin American literature and foreground shared political struggles.
Dreams of Jorge Luis Borges, Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes: Arabic and World Literature
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 analyses intercultural exchange and international networks that open up new directions in Arabic literature in the twenty-first century by focusing on the relationship of the Iraqi writers Jabbar Yussin Hussin (Jabbār Yāsīn Ḥusayn) and Hassan Blasim (Ḥassan Blāsim) to Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges. This chapter examines Arabic short stories that directly engage with Fuentes and Borges: Hussin’s ‘Yawm Bwinus Ayris’ (‘The Day in Buenos Aires’, 2000) and Blasim’s ‘Kawābīs Kārlus Fwintis’ (‘The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes’, 2009). Blasim’s ‘Kawābīs Kārlus Fwintis’, a short story about migration, adopts a style that he calls ‘nightmare realism’. Hussin’s ‘Yawm Bwinus Ayris’ reworks Borges’s short story ‘La busca de Averroes’ (‘Averroes’s Search’, 1947). In his story, Ibn Rushd’s dream of Borges in Buenos Aires focuses on intercultural contact and a shared heritage of the Arab world, al-Andalus and Latin America. Blasim’s and Hussin’s rewritings recontextualise Latin American literature in the Arab world in the twenty-first century.
Epilogue
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

The Epilogue turns to the circulation of Latin American literature in Arab popular culture and Latin American writers’ further engagements with the Arab world. These connections highlight longstanding ties and materialise in Latin America and the Arab world in the twenty-first century. Turning further away from Orientalism, they draw on historical and political ties between Latin America and the Arab world. This chapter takes a forward look at peripatetic exchange that has burgeoned in the twenty-first century and opens up further routes of circulation of cultural production between Cuba and Egypt, Palestine and Chile.
Sex&Drink: The Trouble with Cosmopolitan Desire
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

This chapter starts from an episode when a part of the audience attending a lecture about cosmopolitanism was expecting a presentation about the ‘sex magazine’, and when a challenging question was formulated: could a cosmopolitan stance be achieved through sex, consumption, or lifestyle? To answer this question, the chapter examines the accounts of ‘cosmopolitan sexuality’ which postulate the pursuit of sexual experiences with ethnically or racially diverse others as leading to a cosmopolitan mindset, as well as the theories of ‘queer cosmopolitanism’ that imagine erotic cosmopolitanisms ‘from below’. This ‘cosmopolitan sex’ appears as the peculiar heir of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism understood as transcending national loyalties through intellectual exchange; however, it depends on the ‘banal’ human rights framework because authoritarian regimes do not allow for all sexualities to flourish. Further, cosmopolitanism cannot be achieved through ‘pleasure harvesting’ because there cannot be equal enjoyment and it should not be enforced. The Cynic way of life was a critique of pleasure viewed not as natural needs but shaped by the conventions of the polis, thus cosmopolitics has to be critical of the erotic economies of capitalism that dictate what individuals must desire and enjoy, including the desire for 'exotic Others'.
Theodore Roosevelt: Father of a Sporting Nation
Authors: Swanson Ryan
Published: September 2023

Theodore Roosevelt was, in many ways, the father of a sporting nation. Roosevelt, more than any president before, and perhaps since, sought to bind the presidency to the ideas of masculinity and athleticism. Roosevelt felt that the nation needed to reflect these virtues if it were to succeed in rising further as a great power on the world stage. However, this chapter shows the other side of Roosevelt’s paternal role, by exploring his aims for his own children and their contemporaries. This chapter unpicks a largely ignored speech by Roosevelt at Harvard in order to unravel the wider significance of Roosevelt’s vision. He sought not only to prevent a generation of “mollycoddles” from losing their seemingly virile edge, but an entire nation. In this sense, colleges and the young people who attended them had to commit to embedding athleticism to stop some sort of gradual wasting setting in. Roosevelt did not want the rising U.S. empire to fall into decadence and decline like so many before it. In unpacking this multifaceted speech, this chapter brings fresh focus to Roosevelt’s faith in sporting prowess to help keep the nation’s edge as the challenges of the frontier faded into the distance.
Profile in Vigor: John F. Kennedy and the Quest for Athletic Excellence
Authors: Ohnesorge Hendrik W.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the personal origins and political ramifications of John F. Kennedy’s quest for athletic excellence. Born into a highly competitive and sporting family, Kennedy, despite repeated illnesses and chronic back pain, competed actively in a variety of sports throughout his life. In a striking example of how personal characteristics affect the political, Kennedy took his ingrained love of sports and sense of competition to the White House. Not only did he, as president, reinvigorate and expand governmental programs relating to sports and fitness, he was also personally invested in the issue on an unprecedented scale. This chapter discusses how Kennedy sought to establish and project a vigorous and athletic image of himself and how he transferred it to the nation. The chapter further explores how sports and athleticism became core components of American soft power during the height of the Cold War. In this context, particular attention is paid to the role of Kennedy as an individual. With competition and athletic excellence central to Kennedy both privately and as a public persona, the chapter argues that the Kennedy years indeed constitute a “Profile in Vigor.”
“My Second Vocation”: How Richard Nixon Talked Football
Authors: Berrett Jesse
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the origin story of Richard Nixon as a sports fan by looking at how and when he began to talk about the subject, and how well it worked for him politically. As vice president, Nixon spoke to the Football Coaches’ Association of America in 1958 and the Football Writers’ Association of America in 1959. Before later judgments of Nixon as terminally inauthentic and possibly pathological in his fandom had hardened, these speeches, and their rapturous response, represent the first time any American president so conspicuously advertised himself as a fan. Though neither speech was explicitly intended to help him run for president in 1960, through them Nixon built connections with figures like Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, who later became cultural and political allies, and began to convey the persona that would at once serve and stigmatize him for the remainder of his political life.
The Sport of Presidents? Horse Racing, Politics, and Perception
Authors: Hinds Michael , Silverman Jonathan
Published: September 2023

This chapter views the presidency generally, and Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump specifically, through the office’s relationship to horse racing. In Roosevelt’s time, horse racing was phenomenally popular, and it produced stars such as Seabiscuit. When the latter raced War Admiral in their celebrated match race in 1938, Roosevelt made sure in his subsequent press conference that it should be known that he listened to the broadcast of the race, along with 40 million other Americans. He reinforced solidarity and inclusivity by implying that he was part of a shared fandom. Nixon was the only sitting president to attend the Kentucky Derby, and adeptly played the role of a fan, while using his visit to shore up political connections. Yet his association with the Derby ultimately generated discord and symbolized political disfunction, as Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous account of the 1970 race confirmed. For Trump, the 2019 Kentucky Derby disqualification of Maximum Security provided him with ample political capital for interventions on Twitter, turning the sport’s embarrassments into examples of an America gone mad, with him the only truth teller. Each president’s engagement with the sport echoes that of the other, while also bearing their own media signature.
Donald Trump versus ‘Woke’ Athletes: Presidential Sport in the Age of Twitter
Authors: Crawford Russ
Published: September 2023

Presidents have invited sports teams to the White House since Andrew Johnson in what was previously a bit of harmless theater. That changed when President Donald Trump and Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry clashed on Twitter, resulting in the Warriors declining an invitation to a White House ceremony after winning the National Basketball Association championship in 2017. Trump also criticized National Football League players who followed quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s example and knelt during the American National Anthem. The president’s aggressive use of Twitter, which also allowed fans to pressure athletes, created difficult choices for teams and players. They could go to the White House and face online criticism or avoid 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and become part of the culture wars. For athletes, this was often a lose-lose proposition, and it also had the effect of politicizing an event that typically had flown under the political radar.
Adaptation and Remake
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 7 explores instances where an adaptation or a remake engages with its secondary nature. Generally occurring in the opening scenes, such metamoments are programmatic and seem to have become more systematic in recent years. After analyzing how film adaptations of famous metafictional novels, special attention is devoted to what adaptation scholars have recently called “metadaptations,” works that not only consistently engage with the question of adaptation, but sometimes turn them into an allegory of life.
Politics
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

This chapter responds directly to the assumption and criticism that anything meta is fundamentally narcissistic and disconnected from real-world concerns. After discussing the politics of reflexivity in avant-garde and art cinema, it turns to the writings of Jacques Rancière whose study of the politics of aesthetics implies a form self-consciousness regarding the political efficacy of art, that is a political work of art’s awareness of its disconnection to the world and thus inability to change it. The chapter analyses examples from works with social and political content.
Conclusion
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Meta in Film and Television Series demonstrates the entanglement of concerns addressed through meta-phenomena. Not only does a given work rarely address just one topic (the industry, history, etc.), but it does so through so a combination of reflexive devices (metalepsis, mise en abyme, etc.). The popular usage of the term “meta,” which tends to conflate notions such as metafiction, metanarrative, metalepsis and mise en abyme, thus reflects the entanglement of such phenomena and discourses. The conclusion also returns to the question of the underlying ethics and politics of meta, giving the lie to criticism that meta is inherently narcissistic and cut off from real-world considerations. It ends on some brief considerations bearing on what is perhaps the book’s most significant blindspot—the documentary—and hypothesizes that, in our poststructuralist, postmodernist, hypermedia day and age, the difference between meta in documentary and fiction is but one of degree.
Introduction: Rethinking Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

The introduction begins with a violent encounter between Abdullah Beg, the ruler of the Palu nobility, and the inhabitants of Weşin village in 1848. This event triggers the Ottoman state's actions to abolish the hereditary privileges of the Palu nobility. The introduction highlights the significance of Kurdish emirates in Ottoman and Kurdish historical writings and situates the book within debates on Ottoman-Middle East history, Kurdish historiography, and comparative studies of nobilities.
It presents the book's conceptual framework and main arguments, challenging the established assumption in Ottoman historiography that hereditary nobility lacked legal recognition within the Ottoman politico-administrative system. By drawing on recent comparative revisionist perspectives, the introduction views hereditary nobility as a historical phenomenon rather than a rigid category defined solely by legal and technical characteristics.
Additionally, the introduction offers a fresh perspective on Kurdish autonomy, asserting that current discussions on the topic are influenced by a presentist agenda driven by the contemporary statelessness of the Kurdish population. It emphasizes the importance of understanding Kurdish autonomy within its historical and contextual context.
Lastly, the introduction explores the historical geography of Palu, examining its population, environment, and historical memory. It concludes by providing summaries of the subsequent chapters.
Noble Privilege on the Ground, from the 1720s to the 1830s
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter delves into the relationship between the Palu nobility and the Ottoman imperial establishment during the eighteenth century. It specifically explores their involvement in military campaigns, mining activities, and land management. Initially, the Kurdish begs played a significant military role in the Ottoman military campaigns, but over time, their military significance diminished as they took on responsibilities in mining operations in the Keban and Ergani region. The presence of these mines had various effects on the fortunes of the Palu begs, particularly through the provision of crucial charcoal for the growing energy needs of the mines. The Palu begs derived their economic power from land and its surplus, which defined their noble status and privileges within the Ottoman realm. However, with the rise of land commodification and the increasing monetization of the economy, the Palu begs began leasing their lands to non-nobles in need of cash. The chapter concludes by examining the changing control of land by the begs and emphasizes that the autonomy of Kurdish nobles in relation to the central state was not solely determined by their formal administrative positions. Instead, their actual involvement in military, fiscal, and economic spheres shaped the extent of their autonomy.
The Kurdish Nobility and the Making of Modern State Power in Kurdistan
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on a transformative moment in the Ottoman state's approach to the Kurdish nobility. Starting in the 1820s, the Ottoman state began attempting to undermine the economic and political power of the long-established Kurdish nobility through conscription, regular tax collection, and censuses. This marked a clear departure from the previous centuries, during which the Ottoman state's approach to the Kurdish nobility was determined by the level of cooperation from specific Kurdish begs with the imperial Ottoman state. This moment signifies a rupture, as the Ottoman state started considering the complete annulment of the three-century-old contract made with the ancestors of the begs. This analysis compares the Palu case with other emirates and examines the government's arguments for abolishing the hereditary land ownership of the begs. It provides a comprehensive account of the discussions among imperial and local governmental functionaries. The analysis demonstrates that Palu's geo-strategic position, located away from the Ottoman-Iranian borderlands, brought it to the Ottoman state's attention as a place where hereditary nobility could be abolished without compromising the security of the critical border with Iran.
Conclusion: The End of the Nobility in Kurdistan
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

The conclusion opens with a vignette featuring Rüşdü Beg, a member of a Palu noble family who ran for the position of representative for the Ergani district in the National Assembly (1920-1923) established in Ankara, the nascent parliament of the newly formed Turkish state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Through this example, the chapter highlights the significance of the noble title of beg in the post-Ottoman era. Subsequently, the conclusion explores how the analysis of the Kurdish nobility enables a reexamination of established notions in Ottoman historiography concerning elite formation, the emergence of private land ownership, and Kurdish autonomy. It sheds new light on these topics and offers fresh insights based on the study of Kurdish nobility.
Between Wisdom and Power
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

Succinct formulation of the tension between wisdom and power, philosophy and politics and its implications for justice. It outlines how the philosopher king is a paradox and a project or enterprise that continues to shape important aspects of modernity. It notes the significance of this for both philosophy, politics and our conceptions of nature, the gods and our place within the whole.
Writing after Materialism
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

This chapter attempts to contextualise Hemsterhuis’ organology in terms of other contemporaneous doctrines—particularly those of Diderot and Bonnet. The first section looks at the way Diderot read Hemsterhuis’ early work as a way-in to the problematic of Hemsterhuis’ use and abuse of the materialist tradition, the second turns conversely to Hemsterhuis’ own reading of Diderot and particularly the organology of Le Rêve de D'Alembert, the third shows the ways in which Bonnet’s appropriation of organological tropes to attack materialism provided a precursor to Hemsterhuis’ project, and the final section indicates how Hemsterhuis went beyond Bonnet in using materialist styles, as well as materialist concepts, against materialism. The first section, then, turns on Diderot’s comment that Hemsterhuis philosophises ‘in a harlequin’s dress’, that is, intentionally produces a philosophy full of ‘contradictions’. The second section continues with the Hemsterhuis-Diderot relation, focusing on Hemsterhuis’ reading of Le Rêve . The third section turns from materialist organologies to immaterialist ones and specifically Charles Bonnet’s palingenesis. The final section of the chapter has a twofold task: to make explicit the extent to which Hemsterhuis is embroiled in these organological debates and to show how this impacts on his reflections on philosophical style.
When Violations Become Vectors: Human Rights Work in the Era of Big Data
Authors: Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

The fifth chapter traces the informational logic of human rights today, by critically exploring how utopian ideas about big data, algorithmic processes and machine learning are shaping activism today. The chapter draws together three practices now emerging within contemporary human rights activism: the use of machine learning in statistical estimations of human rights violations; algorithmic processes for marshalling large corpuses of video evidence; and processes that scrape the real-time archive of social media to find and predict human rights events. Developing a critical analysis, the chapter suggests that these informational processes often harbour a faith in the idea that information simply ‘speaks for itself’. Consequently, the greater quantities of information and the supposedly deeper insights offered by new technological practices become an end in of themselves. The chapter concludes that such practices reflect a new iteration of the movement’s informational logic, one that suspends socially and politically inflected conceptions of human rights with the promise of ‘cleaner’ and better information.
The Social Contract as History
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

The three parts of the book investigate the social history of the Egyptian social contract chronologically. The first part examines the social contract under Egypt’s constitutional monarchy, 1922–1952; the second part studies it under Nasser, 1952–1970; and the third part explores the long search for a new social contract between the early 1970s and the 2011 Uprising. Part One of the book,“From Social Reform to Social Justice,” explores the transformation from the liberal social contract that emerged following semi-independence (1922) to a statist effendi social contract that started to take shape after the mid-1930s. Part Two of the book “The Social Contract in Nasser’s Effendi State,” offers significant revisions of our current understanding of Nasser’s social contract. Part Three of the book, “The Tortuous Search for a New Social Contract,” narrates the seeming breaking down yet great persistence of the effendi social contract between the 1970s and the 2011 Uprising.
Old Society, New Society
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter four evaluates social change in revolutionary Egypt along three class lines: peasants and workers, or lower-class Egyptians, the middle-class, and upper-class Egyptians. It investigates pre- and postrevolutionary transitions among these social classes and throughout the period 1952–1970. This chapter considers the notion of a new Nasserite elite and argues that this new elite carried much of the earlier effendi vision of good governance into an evolving Arab socialism. It later investigates how hierarchies of state redistributive schemes benefited each social group. Central to the analysis here, this chapter examines the development of “middle society” after the 1952 revolution. This middle society included the lower and middle echelons of urban, educated, and often state-employed Egyptians. Middle society also included organized labor, now incorporated into the newly emerging public sector, and middle-size landowners/peasants. The chapter explores how an effendi social contract mostly benefited middle society, rather than help the peasants and workers who were most in need, or create the classless, organic society that Nasser’s regime purported to be at that time.
Planning a New Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter six discusses the emergence of the new social contract as a glocal (global and local) planning initiative among Egyptian planners and international developers. It argues that at the core of the new social contract was an attempt to allow the state to disengage itself from its earlier commitment to providing social justice to the middle class in return for a rather vague promise of democratization. The first part of this chapter traces the emergence of the new social contract to planning initiatives conducted during the second half of the 1970s, particularly to the 1978–1982 Development Plan. It later focuses on employment planning initiatives, which pursued structural adjustment, or a transition from state- to market-based employment in Egypt. The chapter then outlines the reemergence of a planning call for a new social contract in the Egypt Human Development Report project between 1994 and 2010. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the planning for a new social contract as a rent-seeking practice on the part of the Egyptian government.
The Problem with the New Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter seven studies the diluted economic and political reforms that emanated from the resilience of the effendi social contract—between the mid-1980s and the January 2011 Uprising—regardless of official state attempts to launch a new social contract. The chapter first examines the growing academic and public discourse of despair over the future of the middle class, beginning in the late 1980s. It then studies how the contours of an existing effendi social contract have shaped the partial implementation of the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment program since the 1990s. The chapter further examines an implied exchange (or pendulum swing) in reforms between efforts at the neoliberalization of the economy and official attempts at democratization. Meanwhile, an informal economy and informal political practices tacitly filled the gap between the dissolving effendi social contract and the unfulfilled new social contract. The chapter concludes that the effendi social contract, despite its many deficiencies and the constant calls for its change, turned out to be highly stable. Economic and political reforms could not move forward as envisioned, because all sides to the existing social contract had too much to lose.
Introduction: Mansion of the Heavens
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

The Introduction recounts the reasons behind construction of the tomb and describes the building briefly. It states the general goals of the book: to learn what this cemetery can teach about the male courtiers and female harem superintendents who worked at the palace; to understand the roles of Ottoman royal cemeteries in general, and this one in particular; and to discover manifestations of the reforms of Mahmud II. The Introduction introduces the concept of representational space—space that is experienced by the symbols gathered in it—and clarifies the methodology used, namely approaching history by examining the artifacts here. It states the specific goal of the book: to identify the strands of royal iconography here, namely what the Ottoman House sought to accomplish through this tomb other than the practical purpose of burying its dead.
The Makings of a Royal Graveyard: Abdülhamid I and the Iconography of Sultanic Tombs
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 presents the story of this Tomb Complex within the tradition of royal tombs of the Ottoman dynasty since the conquest of Istanbul in 1453. It identifies why this tomb was built in this location and the purposes for which it and the charitable complex to which it belonged were designed in 1780. The reader is introduced to evkaf, the pious foundations that funded buildings including this tomb. The chapter enumerates the ways in which the tomb carried out the dynasty’s iconographic program, whose ultimate goal was to enhance support for the monarchy. It investigates the more noticeable aspects of the site: lighting; tombstone epitaphs; turbans, and fezzes; telling time in Ottoman culture and understanding the Hijri (Muslim) calendar; chronograms; mistakes on the epitaphs. A translated 18th-century document describing a princess’s funeral demonstrates how the tomb fit into court life of the era.
The Women in the Garden: The Female World of the Imperial Harem
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 addresses the women interred in the tomb garden, almost entirely female managers in the Imperial Harem at Topkapı Palace and, later, Dolmabahçe Palace. Their tombstones reveal their ‘job’ at court, including wet-nurse and nanny, but mostly kalfa or hazinedar, both titles of women supervisors in the harem, culminating in the Mistress of Ceremonial or Kâhya Kadın, the most powerful working woman (as opposed to princess) in the Ottoman Empire. The chapter considers the origins of these slave women (mostly ethnic Circassians and Georgians), the course of their lives in palace service, the nomenclature of their titles and palace names, the careers they might pursue here, and what became of them in ‘retirement’, as well as how some were selected as a concubine to the monarch. As the preceding chapter revealed for men in palace service, archival accounts of the personal effects the senior managers left behind at their deaths reveal the extent of their great wealth. The chapter also considers calligraphic anomalies on female tombstones here.
Introduction
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

The book opens with a discussion of the aims, limitation, hopes, and story of the writing of the book. Precariously placed somewhere between Hegel studies and Black studies, there is a request of the reader to tarry with the authors as they describe how they, as a Black philosopher and a white philosopher, came to write in a single voice, rooted in one direct yet deceptively simple questions: What if the protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology was Black? After situating the text in the larger scholarly conversation on Hegel, the history of philosophy, and antiblack racism, the Introduction concludes with an articulation of its limitations, which also functions as an invitation for future study
How Hula Hoops Changed Hygiene: From Damp-Cloth Utopianism to Chemical Cleaning
Authors: Cope Angela
Published: September 2023

Cope looks at the ways that high-density polyethylene changed hygienic practices in the post–World War II years. Domestic cleanliness was extremely important in the early postwar years (1946–55)—the time when plastics were marketed as “sanitary.” In 1956, as the polio vaccine was disseminated, sanitation narratives began to disappear, for example, from the toy industry. At the same time, the Ziegler process, which produces high-density polyethylene (HDPE), was invented. Cope examines HDPE’s first introduction to the plastics industry and the way that most North American manufacturers came to know the material: through the childhood craze of the hula hoop. Whereas the scaling-up of polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) were wartime efforts, manufacturing of HDPE scaled through a toy craze in 1958. Soon afterwards, HDPE became the material used for packaging household goods like shampoo, laundry detergent, and cleaning chemicals. By then, Cope asserts, plastics had completed their journey from the heights of hope for an unbreakable, permanent modernity to the ultimately transient material we know today: the stuff of one-season toys, food wrappers, and landfill.
Plastic Intimacy: Chinese Art Making as Recycling Practice
Authors: Lupascu Victoria Oana
Published: September 2023

The essay analyzes the multifarious ways in which plastic and its recycling have influenced the development of Chinese art, permanently transforming artistic practices from the beginning of the twenty-first century onwards. The connection between the West, largely defined, and China as seen through these imports, according to Lupascu, has direct consequences on human bodies and the environment, especially around recycling points. The author’s focus is on Wang Jiuliang’s documentary Plastic China (2016), which explores the meaning of plastic and constructs an almost inextricable intimacy between plastic and human bodies, and on artist Wan Yunfeng’s unwearable clothes—designed out of scrap plastic—which publicly visualize the intimacy between human skin and plastic, between waste and lives. The essay draws on Wang Jiuliang and Wan Yunfeng’s works to theorize and clarify ways of conceptualizing plastic as a pivotal material that redefines Chinese art practices, China’s relationship with the world, its effects on human and nonhuman bodies, and the now inextricable intimacy between plastic and human skin.
Disposable: The Dirty Word in Medical Plastics
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2023

The ability to recycle has become a justification for the continued use of numerous plastic products. But one area where plastics are virtually never recycled, and which comprises a growing percentage of total plastic waste, is the medical field. This results from another dirty word coursing through hospital hallways: contaminated. In this essay, Murphy explores the problem of medical waste, particularly that coming from hospitals in the United States. The essay includes consideration of the growing substitution of hydrocarbon-based plastics for natural rubber latex. Additionally, it analyzes the enormous increase in the use of disposable gloves in all medical areas, including dentistry, for example, in response to the AIDS epidemic and the persistence of HIV among the population. It looks at the impact of a pandemic, such as COVID-19, on disposable plastic consumption. Finally, it takes up the polluting problems of the primary method of medical waste disposal— incineration—and considers whether there are any alternatives to this particular use of hydrocarbons in American daily life.
Eco-Fascism and Alienation: Plastics in a Post-COVID World
Authors: Adkins Sasha , Davis Brittany Y.
Published: September 2023

The authors note that plastics have emerged from the first wave of COVID-19 stronger: not only as toxic molecules but toxic symbols. In the time of COVID-19, plastics became simultaneously the hero and villain of the COVID response. On the one hand, they provide a life-saving interposition between our bodies and a virus that has toppled economies and taken too many lives. Simultaneously, their increased use, as reusable bags and cups return in an effort to guard against pathogens that might be brought from domestic into public spaces, threatens to erase decades of work to move away from disposable culture. Adkins and Davis warn that questions remain about how the desire for a barrier between our bodies and that which is foreign will manifest in a reconfigured post-COVID world. How much damage (in terms of plastic usage) has been done that must be undone to realize life without plastics after this global pandemic? The authors argue that any such vision must necessarily confront people’s desire for protection from the foreign, leading one to ponder the tradeoffs (such as xenophobic policies) that will be made to provide “safety” without disposable plastic barriers.
Carlyle’s ‘Author-Craft’
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 1 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter explores Thomas Carlyle’s championing of a labouring poet: Ebenezer Elliott, the Sheffield ‘Corn-Law Rhymer’. It sits alongside other chapters on writers whose high valuation of manual labour produced misgivings about the value of their own work. Particular attention is paid to those who inherited a sense of disloyalty to occupations seen as honest or useful. This chapter establishes a principle of irregular influence that reveals the uneven and unlikely reception of Carlyle’s ideas. In this respect, Carlylean influence does not flow through an anti-liberal or ‘organic’ ‘tradition’, but exercises a more ecumenical allure, one determined less by political loyalties than by occupational strategies.
Conclusion: Writing as Working
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This chapter serves as the Conclusion to The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter sums up the book’s findings, in tracing a literary rapprochement with the idea and the practice of skilled manual labour. However, it also discusses the dividing line of the Second World War. While this event initially seems to extinguish the Arts and Crafts and modernist traditions of literary making previously surveyed, the chapter discusses a number of exceptions, focusing in particular on Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Peter Dormer, Denise Riley and Alice Oswald.
Being a Journalist in the Grey Zone
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

Drawing on extensive interview material, this chapter shows that legacies of the past and political divides have contributed to a fragmented professional environment in Lebanon and Tunisia, preventing journalists from realizing their full potential. Topics discussed include the working environment, pressures from editors and owners and limitations on the freedom of expression. The chapter confirms the contention of the hybrid regime literature that the ‘playing field’ is skewed to make the media sing the tune of the power holders. At the same time, there is simmering frustration with political instrumentalisation among journalists, pointing to a latent tension that informs the overarching argument of the book.
Navigating a Field of Tensions: Journalism and Politics in Lebanon
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses how Lebanese journalists deal with longstanding media instrumentalisation. Lebanon’s media organizations and political forces are closely aligned, a situation known as ‘political parallelism’. Combined with widespread political clientelism, this results in contrasting journalisms. Journalism under instrumentalised political parallelism plays out in a field defined by both horizontal and vertical conflicts and journalists must navigate this terrain. Some play leading roles in the settling of scores between decision-makers while others engage in struggles between the grassroots and the elites. The chapter argues that journalists can turn contradictions in Lebanon’s state and politics to their advantage to carve out a professional space. It includes a close look at the coverage of two episodes to evaluate journalists’ ability to push back against instrumentalisation: a 2015 prisoner swap between the al-Qa’ida-affiliated Nusra Front and the Lebanese army, and the YouStink anti-government protests in the same year.
Elections and Media Capture
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the role of media and journalists in electoral politics, focusing on the 2018 general election in Lebanon and the 2019 presidential election in Tunisia. Elections are ‘prime time’ for media instrumentalisation, but Lebanon and Tunisia were contrasting cases. Lebanon’s election produced no political change and has been described as a ‘triumph of the elites’. Many journalists ran as candidates, either for established political parties or for civil society lists, and the chapter analyses their interventions and political platforms. In Tunisia, Saied had boycotted Tunisian media during his campaign but won the election, nonetheless. The High Independent Authority of the Audiovisual Commission (HAICA) imposed strict restrictions on the media’s political engagement. Professional and politicial interests were at play in determining journalists’ reactions to HAICA’s interventions and the imprisonment of Saied’s opponent, the media owner Nabil Karoui.
Conclusion
Authors: Selvik Kjetil , Høigilt Jacob
Published: September 2023

The concluding chapter is more than a summary of the findings. It compares the political implications of instrumentalisation in Lebanon and Tunisia and discusses lessons for Middle Eastern studies, media and communication and comparative politics. Journalism should be thought of as a part of what makes politics in Tunisia and Lebanon hybrid. That is, it pulls both ways on the struggle for democracy. On the one hand, journalism is part of the communication system that keeps the elites in both countries in power. On the other hand, journalism serves as a channel for resistance to abuse and mobilisation for accountability. The Conclusion makes a case for more empirically informed investigations of the micro level effects of media instrumentalisation. The analyses of Lebanon and Tunisia suggest that independent-minded journalists find ways of undermining the communication strategies of the elites. The ‘media systems’ perspective i is ill equipped to account for change and may result in blind spots in situations where conditions are constantly shifting. Scholars of comparative politics should take journalism more seriously in their attempts to explain why some regimes are caught in a ‘grey zone’ between democracy and autocracy.
History: James Macpherson’s Narrative Prose Histories
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 examines his three major works of history writing from the first half of the 1770s: The Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1771); The History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hannover (1775); and the Original Papers, containing the Secret History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hannover, with Memoirs of James II (1775). We examine Macpherson’s prefatory material to these works, where he engages in explicit historiographical discussion about how he writes history. Here, we see Macpherson applying Blair’s ideas about truth and impartiality to writing about both the ancient Celtic past and the more recent history of Britain. In these works, Macpherson develops a particular concern with sources, evidence, and footnotes, in a historiographical practice which aligns closely with that of Robertson and Gibbon in their history writing of the 1770s. We then address how Macpherson comments historiographically throughout the main texts of his historical narratives. Like Hume, we see Macpherson wrestling with the balance between narrative and philosophy. In particular, Macpherson uses stadial ideas to interpret the evolution of the British constitution.