bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Trava-Travlya-Trata: Tarkovsky’s Psychobiography à la Lettre
Authors: Gornykh Andrei
Published: September 2021

This chapter offers a close reading of Tarkovsky’s diary from a Lacanian perspective by focusing on the director’s recurrent use of those key words which symbolically epitomize and organize the major thematic layers of his biography and cinema as well: namely, grass (or trava in Russian), persecution from the state authorities (travlia), and expense (trata). Phonetically consonant and etymologically derived from the same root tra- (or proto-Slavic ter), these words make up a coherent cluster of signifiers (trava-trata-travlia) which are centred around the director’s primal fantasy of the house. As the author argues, the signifying constellation “trava-trata-travlia” in Tarkovsky’s diary could be viewed as a psychobiographical code to the internal dynamics of his visual imagery
The Truth of Direct Observation: Andrei Rublev and the Documentary Style of Soviet Cinema in the 1960s
Authors: Mandušić Zdenko
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses Tarkovsky’s appreciation of newsreel-documentary films in the context of the Soviet film discourse over new documentary style in the 1960s. As Mandušić demonstrates, the sixties’ cult of authenticity achieved through the documentary representation of reality was one of many ways for the Thaw cinema to counter late Stalinist movies notorious for their excessive mythologization. Against the backdrop of these debates, Tarkovsky devised his theory of documentary realism in his essay “Imprinted Time” (1967), which he practically implemented in Andrei Rublev (1966). Aimed to recreate the authentic experience of time and space rather accurately reconstruct the historical environment of medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev applied visual strategies – extended duration, stable or static frames, composition in depth – that constitutes his method of direct observation.
Framing Infinity in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia
Authors: Goldfarb Moss Yelizaveta
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses how Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) organizes its mise-en-scene to frame a relationship with mental and spatial infinity that speaks to timelessness, fluid immobility, and spiraled untraversability. By employing Aristotle’s terminology, the author demonstrates how Tarkovsky represents space as unfolded becoming through tableaux vivants and superimpositions of architectures. In support of this argument, the author turns to optical geometry, theories of painting, and architectural framings. The chapter also discusses an excess of vision in the film that parallels its treatment of time and space. In opposition to traditional notions of cinema as Cartesian monocular vision, the author maintains, Tarkovsky values curved, non-mechanical perspectives that align with Lyotard’s theories of painting and theater architecture.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Or the Thing from Inner Space
Authors: Žižek Slavoj
Published: September 2021

This chapter offers a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky’s films in terms of an encounter with the radical otherness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, illustrated by the planet Solaris or Stalker’s Zone. This motif, the author maintains, is structurally quite similar to more commercial horror movies dramatizing an encounter with the unknown. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a materialist interpretation of Tarkovsky’s films in which an encounter with the impossible and traumatic Thing is thoroughly devoid of religious and mystical connotations that often accompany commentators’ discussions.
How ISIS Fights
Authors: Ashour Omar
Published: September 2021

How can a widely hated, massively outnumbered and ludicrously outgunned organisation expands to occupy over 120 cities, towns and villages from the Southern Philippines to Western Libya? How can it endure and survive a military coalition of over 150 armed state and nonstate actors? How did ISIS/IS and their predecessors fight? And how can we account for their combat effectiveness? This book describes and analyses how ISIS/IS fights in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt. It analyses the military-making of ISIS/IS and their predecessors. The analysis focuses on 17 urban battles in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, Raqqa (City and Governorate), Derna, Sirte and Northeastern Sinai. The book is based on fieldwork, dozens of interviews with soldiers and fighters who engaged ISIS/IS and their predecessors, and hundreds of ISIS/IS combat-relevant publications, audio- and video-releases. The findings contribute to our understanding of insurgencies’ combat effectiveness and offer insights on how ISIS/IS, like-minded organisations, and other armed nonstate actors may or will fight in the future.
Is It Mainly Tactics?
Authors: Ashour Omar
Published: September 2021

This chapter introduces the puzzle of the military endurance and combat effectiveness of ISIS/IS, though outnumbered and outgunned by substantially stronger state and nonstate militaries. Beginning with the academic study of insurgency dating back to Lawrence, Mao, Templar, Lansdale, Guevara, Galula, Hoffman and more recent scholars; this book explores traditional factors associated with insurgency success, such as the support of an external power, popular support from the disaffected population, sanctuary, geography or topography, regime type, or other factors, which might, individually or in combination, be explanatory of ISIS/IS endurance and expansion. Most of those factors are found not to be especially significant, so the chapter focuses on the military strategies and tactics employed by ISIS/IS and central to its successes. The chapter then argues that the military tactics employed by ISIS/IS in the four countries and elsewhere better explain their expansion and endurance. The chapter concludes by outlining a framework of analysis explaining ISIS/IS combat effectiveness in the four countries and beyond.
Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

In this essay, Matheron investigates the philosophical foundations of Proposition 16 of Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics, which states that God, by virtue of being an absolute infinite being, necessarily produces an infinite number of things and effects. Such a startling claim, Matheron argues, is in fact well founded and can be understood by returning to the important demonstrative moves Spinoza makes in the preceding moments of Part I. By turning to Proposition 7 and its two scholia, Propositions 9 and 10, and the Scholium to Proposition 11, Matheron meticulously reconstructs Spinoza’s argument according to which God is conceived as immanent productive power that inexhaustibly gives rise to all logical structures. In turn, Matheron concludes, the demonstration opens onto Spinoza’s famous theory of conatus.
Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

What is Spinoza’s relationship to the mathematical physics that followed from the Galilean revolution? In this essay, Matheron reconstructs Spinoza’s response to his interlocutor, Tschirnhaus, regarding the status of the concept of extension in Spinoza’s philosophy and, in particular, its difference from Descartes’s concept of extension. But, as Maheron notes, Spinoza nonetheless encountered difficulties in his response to Tschirnhaus, namely, his need to reformulate his ontology of power by once again rewriting the opening of the Ethics as well as redefine the status of physics. The successive drafts of the Ethics show Spinoza working towards a clearer and more concise account of his ontology of power, which holds that God as absolutely infinite causal substance has the power to produce anything and everything that is conceivable without contradiction. But does it then follow that the laws of the physical universe are deducible a priori? Matheron investigates Spinoza’s attempts to address this question and concludes with a discussion of Spinoza’s relevance for more contemporary developments in science.
The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

Following the work of the French Spinoza scholar Bernard Rousset, Matheron here endeavours to read Spinoza’s interpretation of Descartes by examining how Spinoza himself critically reworked two of his own earlier texts so as to ultimately establish the identity of being and power. It is thus in 1663 that Spinoza finally develops and lays out the key feature of his mature philosophy, namely, the definition of God as an absolutely infinite substance whose formulation and re-formulation across multiple drafts Matheron re-establishes. He then turns to Spinoza’s own critical reflections on his earlier Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, which sets the stage for grasping the development of Spinoza’s thought as it moves towards its ultimate philosophical originality as displayed in the Ethics.
Spinoza and Power
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, Matheron lays out in perhaps its most concise form the Spinozist theory of power in language that is particularly inflected with Marxist terminology. From the initial claim that God is absolute causal power, from which nothing is exempt, Matheron builds up Spinoza’s theory point by point from the perspective of an isolated individual faced with nature to our preliminary interactions with others. Matheron then shifts to the perspective of a multitude of human individuals, describing the chaotic and despotic relations of power that necessarily inhere in the ‘state of nature’ and which are subsequently transformed with the establishment of political society. The ideal political organization would be one the encourages the maximum amount of democracy. However, Spinoza is no theorist of bourgeois democracy precisely because he sees the State as the result of a relation of forces, and not the actual realisation of the ideals of ‘reason’ or ‘liberty’.
Spinoza and Property
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

Though Spinoza did not write much explicitly concerning the subject of property, Matheron, in this essay, makes the convincing case that Spinoza nonetheless had a rich and compelling view on the matter as it was understood in the context of the 17th century. Spinoza’s decisive innovation, against Hobbes and all of his other predecessors is to conceive of right as a physical power, as opposed to a moral power. In other words, right is coextensive with the real power to do whatever one desires to do, which is, quite simply, whatever they actually do in fact do. The inevitable human desire to possess external objects, be they land or money, serves as the basis for Matheron’s analysis of Spinoza’s political philosophy. Matheron concludes with a number of striking claims about Spinoza’s communism, which he suggests is very present in such discussions of property.
Spinoza and Sexuality
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

In this striking chapter Matheron deals directly with the seemingly bizarre claims that Spinoza makes about women and sexuality in his writings. By reconstructing the context in which Spinoza makes seven at first glance prudish or scandalous claims about women and sexuality, Matheron effectively eliminates every misunderstanding and misreading that has arisen in the nearly 400 years since Spinoza published his major works. Spinoza’s radical anti-teleology and theory of desire lead Matheron to lay out the arguments for a number of memorable claims: that Spinoza might be the only early modern philosopher—and perhaps one of the rare philosophers from any period—whose views can ground the reality of non-genital sexuality, that the passions to which men are subject, and not women, are responsible for sexual drama, and that women are in no way incapable of becoming sages in the Spinozist sense.
The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

Many agree that Rousseau’s The Social Contract takes Hobbes as its target. Does his critique of Hobbes also apply to Spinoza? In this essay, Matheron systematically compares Hobbes and Spinoza’s respective political philosophies with an eye to Rousseau’s criticism of the notion of the ‘right of the stronger’. As Matheron shows, Rousseau’s critique misses the mark in both cases, but for different reasons. The core of Spinoza’s innovation with respect to both Hobbes and Rousseau is his rejection of the idea of right as a moral power distinct from physical power and his identification of right with power. Power, for Spinoza, is not simply corporeal power, but rather the capacity to produce real effects in nature. But whereas Hobbes’s view appealed to the use of reason to determine what is best for preserving ourselves, Spinoza sees all human action as expressions of greater or lesser degrees of power governed instead by desire. Matheron concludes with a short discussion of the right to revolt in Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau.
Introduction
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

The introduction of the book discusses some of the reasons why the study of Muslim-Christians relations in Iran in the Safavid period has lagged behind when compared to studies of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire in particular. After discussing some of the documentary challenges behind these kinds of studies, the attention is brought to the question of whether the paradigm of “confessionalisation” can be an adequate one in the early modern Middle Eastern context. In light of these issues, the book proposes that the study of polemics should account not only for the sociological aspects of the context in question, but also for the broader history of the polemical genre as intellectual history.
The Profile of a Convert in Safavid Iran
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

This chapter introduces the case of a Portuguese Augustinian missionary who converted to Islam in late seventeenth century Iran and worked as a court translator for the Shah, adopting the name of ʿAli Quli Jadid al-Islam. It situates his story within the broader context of conversion to Islam and of the history of Muslim-Christian relations in the early modern period. It also provides an overview of the status of Christians in Safavid Iran, concentrating both on indigenous Christian groups like Georgians and Armenians, as well as on European missionaries.
A Cycle of Polemics and Translation Projects
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

This chapter presents the history of a cycle of theological polemics of which Jadid al-Islam’s work was the last link. This cycle starts in Mughal India with the work of the Jesuit missionary Jerome Xavier, followed by responses in Iran and counter-responses in Rome, under the auspices of the missionary congregation of Propaganda Fide. The chapter also presents the history of biblical translation projects in Arabic and Persian, which were directly linked to these polemics, including Jadid al-Islam’s own biblical Persian translation and commentary. A general overview about other polemical works in Iran into the nineteenth century is also provided.
Jadid al-Islam and the Signs of the Prophecy
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

This article situates Jadid al-Islam’s work within the context of the history of the genre of the “signs of the prophecy”. The chapter provides a general overview of the history as well as the tropes and rhetorical conventions of the genre. It then concentrates on examples of how Jadid al-Islam’s work adapted these tropes to its own Shiʿi and Iranian context, emphasizing the use of the trope of “scriptural falsification” applied to the Latin Vulgata.
Sufis as the Christians of the Umma
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on Jadid al-Islam’s anti-Sufi positions, both within his anti-Christian polemics as well as in his treatise specifically devoted to Sufism. An overview of the history of Sufism in Safavid Iran is provided, focusing on the rejection of scholastic and mystical philosophy by the ʿulama in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The chapter also considers the broader history of anti-Sufi polemics based on accusations of the ideological links between Sufism and Christianity. Jadid al-Islam’s work is studied in light of this context as an example of an apology for a particular understanding of Shiʿi Islamic orthodoxy. In this way, he his anti-Christian views complement and contribute to intra-Islamic debates in the late Safavid period.
Framing Aesthetics: Witnessing Francoism in Pan’s Labyrinth
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

Chapter one examines images of graphic violence and their effects on viewers through Guillermo del Toro’s film El Laberinto del Fauno (2006), which combines the imagery of dark fairy tales with images of torture and murder in its depiction of the Spanish post-war years and the resistance of anti-Francoist guerrillas. The chapter situates the film within the genre of human rights cinema, by challenging the emphasis on narrative and truthfulness of the Charter of the Human Rights Film Network. Instead, it follows Shohini Chaudhuri’s suggestion to shift from focusing on narrative in favor of addressing aesthetic choices that lead to either moral or ethical confrontation with human rights violations. The film’s graphic images of torture and murder may shock, appall, and stir feelings of hatred and revenge, but they at all times push viewers to reflect on the frames that delimit seeing and not seeing, the subject position and agency of both victims and perpetrators, as well as viewers’ own embodied investment in the scenes of violence. In this way, the film opens up the possibility of an ethical witnessing, challenging the hierarchical object-subject relationship.
Campy Performances: Queering Law in High Heels
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

Contrary to the ideals of objectivity, impartiality, and abstraction that dominate law and the administration of justice in the modern age, chapter two seeks to establish an alternative model that would emphasize fluidity, role-reversal, and aesthetic engagement as critical for understanding law and legal judgment. It does so through the lens of Pedro Almodóvar’s Tacones Lejanos (1991). By analyzing the cinematic technique of the “direct address” (when a character looks directly into the camera) and the judge’s campy performances as a female impersonator, the chapter argues that High Heels places the viewer in several judging positions that challenge the one-dimensional compassionate judgment and opens up the possibility for an aesthetic judgment that is responsive to the call of marginal subjects traditionally excluded from the law. The last part of the chapter explores how the interaction between the camp aesthetics of the on-screen judge and the viewer reconceptualizes law as a queer performance.
Policing the City: Haptic Visuality in Grupo 7
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

Chapter six turns to Marcelo Piñeyro’s El Método (2005) to examine a perceived tension in contemporary societies between the depoliticization of the public sphere and the opposite call for its repoliticization. The film productively presents this tension in two ways: first, by inviting viewers to participate in depoliticizing structures of power, and then by inviting them to question their role and responsibility in those structures. On the one hand, the film uses the cinematic split-screen technique to grant viewers a godlike perspective and ability to watch different actions and events synchronically, as if through a surveillance camera. Job candidates are scrutinized from the point of view of a multinational corporation during massive anti-corporate globalization protests in Madrid, which the mass media presents in dismissive terms. On the other hand, the film’s subtle use of sound effectively disrupts the complicity of the viewer in these structures and provides possibilities for political subjectivation. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion and Mdalen Dolar, the chapter shows how the “acousmatic sound” of protest irrupts into the viewer’s given space of the visible and provides avenues for what might be called a “sonic emancipation.”
Figures of Transgression in Representations of the First World War on British Television
Authors: Hanna Emma
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores British televisual representations of transgression in the First World War from the 1960s to the centenary period (2014-18). It examines the ways in which the television medium has mediated public discourse about the historical and historiographical meanings of war and identity during and after the conflict of 1914-18 by focusing on the ways in which figures of transgression such as mutineers, conscientious objectors, and deserters have been used to subvert normative narratives of the Great War. The chapter considers how the deployment of historical transgression has enabled critical reflections of contemporary political and social discourses. It demonstrates how and why the intersection of the commemorative impulse in televisual representations of war encourages reflection on and negotiation of positions within and outside of more reassuring cultural narratives about the conflict, within institutional and governmental contexts for production and reception, and how they have shifted over time. This chapter concludes that such figures provide uncomfortable counter-narratives but that these are ultimately deployed to reinforce dominant ideas about the conflict.
Activist, Mother, Filmmaker: Competing Transgressions in the Syrian War Documentary
Authors: Purse Lisa
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the ways in which the Syrian War documentary has depicted and reflected upon the figure of the activist mother, and the competing concepts of personal and political transgression that cluster around her as she occupies fraught zones of conflict and its witnessing, mortal danger and forced migration. Through two case study films, A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, UK, 2015), a British filmmaker’s account of the family of political prisoner Raghda Hasan as they negotiate living under Bashar al-Assad’s regime and eventually flee it; and For Sama (Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, UK/Syria, 2019), a first person account of a Syrian activist journalist, Waad, who gives birth to and raises her child during the siege of Aleppo, the chapter explores the ethical and representational questions raised in this centring of the activist mother and her potential status as a transgressor of political and social norms. It also situates these activist mother films in the wider array of anti-regime Syrian War documentaries, where the plight of parents and children are foregrounded as part of the call to action to North American and European audiences.
Intermediality and the Origins of Cinema
Authors: Wiseman Boris
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores intermediality in early moving images.  It traces manifestations of the cinematic prior to the invention of the cinematograph. It argues that, from Carlo Ponti's Megaletoscopio (1862), inspired by Daguerre’s dioramas, to stroboscopic projections and the early animations of Émile Reynaud, cinema came about in-between technologies, in-between different viewing experiences and viewing spaces, and in-between media.
Cinematography’s Blind Spots: Artistic Exploitations of the Film Frame
Authors: Jutz Gabriele
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses filmic and photographic works that focus on isolated film frames, whether extracted from the continuum of a film strip, as in Slide Movie (Gebhard Sengmüller, 2007) and Und ich blieb stehen. (Thames, London) (Susanne Miggitsch, 2017), or captured photographically from a book or a viewing table, as in Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon) (Peter Tscherkassky, 1984/2008) and Précis de decomposition (Éric Rondepierre, 1993–1999). Usually rendered invisible during projection, a single frame represents the ‘blind spot’ of cinematography. An explicitly ideological perspective was offered in 1971 by French film critic Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, who distinguished between the use of extracted frames (or ‘photograms’) and idealized still photographs produced on a film set. These ‘parasitic photographs’ no longer bear traces of the material state of a given film copy; they look flawless and perfectly meet ideological requirements of ‘legibility’ and ‘beauty’. The examples presented here bypass ideological claims, because, on the one hand, their dissected frames belong to the same order as the film they are taken from, and, on the other, they result in varying forms of ‘illegibility’.
Performance, Moving Image, Installation: The Making of Body of War and Faith
Authors: Rocamora Isabel
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, moving image artist Isabel Rocamora reflects on the thematic, aesthetic and philosophical concerns that drive her intermedial art practice. The essay traces the ways in which core elements of her performance work – gesture, place, temporality and presence – in turn inform and are transformed by her film and video installations. A discussion of the ethical dilemmas that motivate Body of War (2010) and Faith (2015) – namely, military violence and ethnic segregation – opens up problems of identity and alterity as well as questions of form, structure and register. To address these, Rocamora places the illuminating philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas into dialogue with her own directorial approach to casting, location, performance, cinematography, sound design and exhibition architecture. The aim of her moving images, she explains, is to draw out the personal from the collective in mise en scènes that dislodge performative action to expose ontological presence. The creative means, the essay concludes, emerge from the productive strife between the media.
Standing up for Scotland
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

David Torrance reassesses the relationship between ‘nationalism’ and ‘unionism’ in Scottish politics, challenging a binary reading of the two ideologies with the concept of ‘nationalist unionism’. Scottish nationalism did not begin with the SNP in 1934, nor was it confined to political parties that desired independent statehood. Rather, it was more dispersed, with the Liberal, Conservative and Labour parties all attempting to harness Scottish national identity and nationalism between 1884 and 2014, often with the paradoxical goal of strengthening rather than ending the Union. This book combines nationalist theory with empirical historical and archival research to argue that these conceptions of Scottish nationhood had much more in common with each other than is commonly accepted.
Prelude
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

This prelude gives an account of a gathering of the Convention of Royal Burghs of Scotland in January 1884, which it argues marked the birth of a ‘nationalist unionist’ approach to Scottish politics. Conservative and Liberal politicians shared a platform to call for a ‘Scottish minister’ in the UK Cabinet, someone to take charge of government affairs in Scotland and recognise Scotland’s status as an historic nation in partnership with England. Most speakers used nationalist arguments to make their case – Scotland’s distinctiveness and ‘neglect’ by Westminster – yet their goal was a reformed and thus strengthened United Kingdom.
‘Scottish Control of Scottish Affairs’
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

This chapter continues its analysis of Scottish Conservative ‘nationalist unionism’ by tracing the evolution of the party’s more ostentatiously nationalist ‘Scottish Control of Scottish Affairs’ agenda after the Second World War. This was the consequence of several forces in Scottish and British politics, chiefly rising nationalist sentiment in Scottish society (though the SNP remained weak) and the then Labour government’s centralising policies in relation to nationalised industries. Sensing an opportunity, Scottish Unionists made a nationalist ‘offer’ to the electorate, which helped the party recover at general elections in 1950 and 1951. By outbidding Labour with its Scottish policy agenda, Scottish Unionists were able to present themselves as the most ‘Scottish’ party and the most credible defenders of its distinctiveness within the Union. At the same time, Labour was depicted as ‘anti-Scottish’ and the Home Rule movement (which wanted legislative as well as administrative devolution) as too extreme.
Scottish (Conservative and) Unionist Party: Rise and Fall
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

This chapter looks at the difficulties faced by the Scottish Unionist Party as it tried to retain its ‘nationalist’ appeal after returning to government in 1951. Although it implemented some of what had been promised in opposition, it proved harder to harness national sentiment while in office, especially as the Labour Party began accusing the Conservatives of being ‘anti-Scottish’ and not delivering on its promises. Following an electoral high watermark for Scottish Unionists in 1955, ‘nationalist unionism’ transferred to the Scottish Labour opposition. Only in the 2010s was the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (as it became in 1965) in a position to recapture its earlier nationalist unionist appeal, ironically as it competed with a popular Scottish National Party.
‘The Fair Claims of Wales’
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

Nationalist unionism was not confined to Scotland. This chapter extends the book’s analysis to Wales, where the three unionist parties – Liberal, Labour and Conservative – had also deployed nationalist arguments and language in order to maintain Wales as part of the United Kingdom. As in Scotland, the originators of this approach were the Liberals, although one wing of the Labour Party in Wales was also nationalist in mindset as was, to a more modest degree, the Conservative Party, particularly in the 1950s and 2010s, when calculated appeals were made to Welsh traditions such as its distinct language. In contrast to Scotland after power was devolved in 1999, the Welsh Labour Party managed to maintain control of this ‘nationalist unionism’ while Plaid Cymru (which advocated greater autonomy) languished.
Northern Ireland and ‘Ulster Nationalism’
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

Many analysts of the politics of Northern Ireland have argued that there exists some form of ‘Ulster nationalism’, particularly among Ulster Unionists. After 1886, when Gladstone promised Home Rule for Ireland, Unionists fashioned an Ulster identity predicated on Protestantism and ‘loyalty’ to the British Crown. This was contrasted with the ‘disloyalty’ of Catholics in what would become the Republic of Ireland. This form of ‘nationalist unionism’ was more ethnic in character than the civic variety which existed in Scotland and Wales. It too contained contradictions, not least its suspicion of Westminster and paranoia as to the intentions of successive UK governments towards the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. At various points after 1921, some Ulster Unionists even toyed with the idea of Northern Ireland becoming a ‘Dominion’ (like the Irish Free State) or else pursuing some other form of ‘independence’ from the UK.
Conclusion
Authors: Torrance David
Published: September 2021

This concluding chapter revisits the arguments set out in the Introduction, the idea that something called ‘nationalist unionism’ was promoted by several political parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between 1884 and 2014. It further concludes that this nationalism was both ‘banal’ and ‘ethno-symbolist’ in nature, a means by which the Liberal, Conservative and Labour parties could manage the United Kingdom’s ‘territorial code’. This they did by allowing parties and government’ on the ‘periphery’ of the UK to ‘stand up for’ their respective territories and promote degrees of autonomy short of secession from it. Finally, the contradictions within this approach are discussed, not least its resulting legitimisation of more radical nationalisms which gradually moved from the fringes of political discourse to its mainstream.
Women’s Rights in the Hereafter: A Qur’anic Theological Study
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

Will women and men have equal rights in the Hereafter or will gender-based difference or discrimination continue in the mould of desert-based justice (al-‘idala-a-istihqaqiyya)? Is gender a factor in the rewards and punishments of the eternal life in the Hereafter or do faith and righteous deeds set the eternal path without regard to gender? Does Divine grace apply equally to men and women or do men enjoy more of it because of what they intrinsically deserve? Are heavenly blessings and the material and spiritual pleasures of those who have prospered given equally to men and women, or does heaven have a masculine visage and have its blessings and pleasures been based on the tastes and leanings of men, and women are to follow men in second place in relation to what they receive of God’s Grace?
This chapter seeks answers to such questions, and to determine and describe the place and situation of women in the Hereafter from an Islamic point of view and to explain the role of gender in resurrection.
Introduction
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

The Introduction to The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre does three things. First, it introduces the reader to the broader aspirations of ‘law and literature’ scholarship, in the process placing the book in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities series. Second, it provides the reader with an introduction to the particular area of literature in question, modern drama, surveying its development over the second part of the twentieth century and into the first part of the twenty-first. Third, the Introduction signposts the reader, providing a guide as to the contents of the coming chapters.
The Haunting of King Charles III
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, a ‘virtual history’ play which imagines the prospective succession of Charles III. In so doing, it revisits a number of themes in constitutional jurisprudence which were introduced in the previous chapter. Most obviously those which examine the relationship of the executive and the legislative. At the same time, the chapter also discusses, in greater depth, the theatricality of monarchy. Taking its lead, here, from the famous demarcation found in Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution, between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’. It can be argued that the ‘play’ of monarchy is every bit as relevant today as it was a century and a half ago.
A Revenger’s Tragedy
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter develops a number of themes introduced in the previous chapter, most obviously those which touch on contemporary expressions of child-abuse. The broader focus of the chapter is on the familiar, and contentious, issue of pornography and its legal regulation. More particularly, though, it is concerned with the challenges presented by the internet ‘age’. And more closely still with cultural and legal responses to what has become know, itself contentiously, as ‘revenge porn’. The play upon which the chapter focuses is Evan Placey’s Girls Like That. The fact that Placey wrote his play for a student audience reinvests the educative capacity of modern theatre, whilst also inviting his audience to contemplate, once again, the place of empathy and compassion in (legal) education.
Spacepower, Empire and Theory
Authors: Bowen Bleddyn E.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 1 defines and explains spacepower, and challenges the undervalued role of spacepower in contemporary International Relations scholarship by outlining its significance to modern warfare and grand strategy. It then explores the role of thinking about hegemony and geopolitical thought in outer space, and makes the case for embracing material factors in the analysis of spacepower as much current literature in international relations turns away from material considerations. Much though on spacepower is overly focused on imperial domination of the seas, and translates it into an effective imperial domination of space without sufficiently examining the realities of spacepower in Earth orbit. Chapter 1 ends with an explanation of how pedagogical theory and strategic analogies work, and how the propositions should be used by drawing on the concepts of Carl von Clausewitz.
Dispersal, Concentration and Defence
Authors: Bowen Bleddyn E.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 5 theorises the ubiquitous dispersing effects of spacepower upon Earth, which continues a longer-term trend in military capabilities. It is through exploiting and challenging the dispersing power from commanding this coastline of Earth orbit that we can integrate the real consequences of spacepower into thinking on grand strategy and international security on Earth itself. Satellite constellations are dispersed and enable the dispersion of networked terrestrial military units without losing cohesion or combat power when coupled with precision-strike weapons. This also imposes dispersion on enemy forces and changes the terms under which concentration can still be achieved in conventional warfare in the 21st century.
Conclusion: Spacepower and International Relations
Authors: Bowen Bleddyn E.
Published: September 2021

Spacepower’s time has come. The deployment and use of machines in Earth orbit influences the conduct of modern warfare and perceptions over the balance of power in the international system. Yet the use of space technology and the ‘geo’ politics of space continues to be a marginalised material reality in IR. To attempt to redress this somewhat, this book has built on existing space-power theories and provided an original and rigorous theory of spacepower based on seven propositions, the vision of Earth orbit as a celestial coastline, and an application of that theory to demonstrate the influence of spacepower upon a scenario of modern warfare. Regardless of the actor or of the exact space warfare capabilities and basing locations, this theory should structure creative and critical thought about how spacepower influences modern warfare, and how the universal logics of war influence our thought about space warfare itself. Not only does the theory intend to educate the reader in the qualities of spacepower and the dynamics of space warfare on the strategic level, but also to instil a Clausewitzian way of thinking about the conduct of war in the Space Age. Space cannot be reduced to the simplistic ‘high ground’ as often described in public commentary on military space activities, yet the advantages derived from space infrastructure for tactical military capabilities cannot be denied. The seven propositions and the coastal analogy have instead probed the more nuanced complexities of war in Earth orbit and terrestrial warfare under the influence of spacepower and orbital infrastructures....
Opening Credits
Authors: Salzberg Ana
Published: September 2021

This introductory chapter sets out the argument for Thalberg’s significance as a theorist of studio-era filmmaking, as well as a legendary producer and executive. It outlines the work’s critical intervention in existing scholarship on Thalberg specifically and producer studies more broadly, positing that his oeuvre from the founding of MGM in 1924 to his death in 1936 is as much conceptual as it is cinematic. This introduction also offers a biographical overview of Thalberg and considers his identity as the “Boy Wonder” of production within the context of early Hollywood itself.
Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
Authors: Salzberg Ana
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores how the rise of sound cinema impacted Thalberg’s approach to filmmaking. Like others in the industry, Thalberg did not initially recognize the dominance of the talkies; yet in a 1929 lecture, he would frame his response to sound within a broader theory of “entertainment value.” Here, Thalberg aligned the new technology with a more fundamental imperative to provide meaningful and immersive productions for the public. The chapter draws from this cohesive commentary and look closely at three films released in various stages of the talkie revolution – Garbo vehicle Wild Orchids (Franklin, 1929), foundational musical Broadway Melody of 1929 (Beaumont, 1929), and Chaney tour-de-force The Unholy Three (Conway, 1930) – to consider Thalberg’s response to sound as part of his broader conception of “entertainment value” rather than as an isolated historical episode.
‘An intensive study of – feet!’ in two films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot
Authors: Hutchinson Pamela
Published: September 2021

In Shoes (1916), Lois Weber re-examines the relationship between shoes and social mobility. Far from guiding the working-class protagonist’s progress, a pair of worn boots trap her into a moral compromise, which destroys her hope of future advancement, either romantically or socially. Weber’s investigation into wage inequality, the rights of women and the influence of consumer culture via footwear continues in The Blot (1921), which revisits the same plot in a lower middle-class milieu and expands on the theme. Here, shoes are again a danger to women, but also an indicator of genteel distress and a cheap, impractical commodity, good only for profiteering rather than practicality.
The ruby slippers at the V&A: an odyssey
Authors: Lodwick Keith
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, a curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London tells of efforts to track down the iconic ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz for the major exhibition Hollywood Costume held at the museum in 2012. Once the shoes were located, they travelled to London from Washington, D.C. in their own seat on a plane, handcuffed to a security guard and accompanied by the curator of the Smithsonian Institution. Their arrival at the V&A prompted a top-secret security operation. The resulting exhibition remains one of the most successful in the V&A’s history.
The sole of Africa: shoes in three African films
Authors: Langford Rachael
Published: September 2021

The shoe in European colonial societies bears a particular weight of symbolism, for amongst the myriad object of the colonial imaginary, the coloniser’s emblematic dichotomies of civilised/uncivilised, white/native also found their expression in the shoe as another means of distinguishing the shod scion of civilisation from the subhuman, barefoot native. Thus, shoes in the imaginary of European colonial societies were objects of desire, anxiety, and phantasm; and the footprints of the past’s colonial shoe fetish can be uncovered in the attention accorded to shoes in the visual cultures of post-Independence, postcolonial societies too. This essay will look at a selection of post-Independence African films to explore how African filmmakers’ imaging of shoes responds to these past histories and present traces of colonial and postcolonial calciphilia.
‘Whoa! Look at all her Louboutins!’ Girlhood and shoes in the films of Sofia Coppola
Authors: Handyside Fiona
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the complex role that shoes iplay in two films by Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring (2013) and Marie Antoinette (2006). Audience pleasures turn on the recognition of the designer shoe, and an appeal to a girl connoisseur who understands the codes of dressing. Shoes gain their power within Coppola’s feminine universe because of what girls know about them and how they deploy that knowledge. While shoes, through their sheer numbers, might still be aligned with hyper-consumption and shoe-obsessed femininity as pathology, Coppola balances this view with acknowledgement of shoes as products of artistry recognised by girls who function like trained specialists.
Isabelle’s espadrilles, or, les chaussures d’Huppert
Authors: Wheatley Catherine
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the role of shoes in Mia Hansen-Love’s 2016 film L’Avenir/Things to Come, particularly as worn by Isabelle Huppert, who plays the character Nathalie Chazeaux. The chapter analyses both the film and Huppert’s career more broadly through the lens of philosopher Stanley Cavell’s work on cinema. The shoes that Huppert sports as Nathalie in this film deepen and expand our understanding of the character, offering a more nuanced view of Huppert as a star and a performer, and allowing us to understand that her repertoire expands beyond stillness, passivity and micro-gesture. Finally, while Huppert’s shoes are revelatory of her, they are also revelatory of the medium of cinema itself.
Introduction
Authors: Maguire Warren
Published: September 2021

This chapter summarises what the book is about and how it is structured, it introduces the concept of Mid-Ulster English (MUE) and how it relates to other dialects in Ulster and the rest of Ireland, and it describes sources that may be used in the study of the dialect’s phonology. These include not only published data and descriptions, but also substantial unpublished corpora, which the author puts to use in the analysis in the rest of the book. It also includes a new map of the linguistic landscape of Ulster. In addition, it begins to explore the phonological origins of MUE and what kinds of questions we need to answer.
Consonants
Authors: Maguire Warren
Published: September 2021

This chapter analyses the origins of a range of consonantal features in MUE. Starting with an overview of the consonant system and a comparison of it to the consonant systems of the input varieties and to those of Ulster Scots and Southern Irish English, the chapter specifically concentrates on a number of key phonological patterns, several of them previously ascribed to Irish influence, which reveal crucial things about the history of the dialect. Features examined include Velar Palatalisation, Pre-R Dentalisation, survival of the dental fricatives, rhoticity, realisation of /l/, epenthesis in consonant clusters, and consonant deletions. It is shown that most consonantal patterns in the dialect derive from English and, to a lesser extent, Scots, possibly with some reinforcement from Irish.
Conclusions
Authors: Maguire Warren
Published: September 2021

This chapter recaps the content of the book and summarises its main findings, that the dialect developed through New Dialect Formation as a result of contact between different dialects of English and Scots, and as a result of it being learned by adult speakers of Scots, who imposed aspects of their phonology on it. The language shift from Irish had minimal impact on the phonological development of the dialect. The importance of these findings for understanding the genesis of Irish English more generally and for expanding our understanding of new dialect formation in situations of settlement colonisation are also considered.
The Unnatural in the Natural: Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s Early Weimar Film Backstairs
Authors: Doerre Jason
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.