bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Yom Kippur War
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

The Yom Kippur War was a critical game changer in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the politics of the Middle East. Henry Kissinger famously explained the ‘intelligence failure’ of Yom Kippur thus: ‘Our definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect.’ The most recently released material suggests that Kissinger’s explanation requires some revising.
This chapter demonstrates that British and American analysts understood perfectly well Sadat’s intentions, specifically his desire for a limited military victory to gain ‘face’ at home and leverage abroad. Instead analytical weakness lay in assessments of Egypt’s military capability where there was a unanimous consensus of Egypt’s impotency. Ideas about Arab ‘culture’ seem to have played a key role in this underestimation: the notion of a fatalistic Islam for example, prevailed in numerous analyses.
In a radical revision of the conventional wisdom about the strengths and weaknesses of Western intelligence agencies, the Yom Kippur war provides a revealing case study whereby the West excelled in understanding the ‘mystery’ or intentions leading to war, but simply did not believe that Egypt possessed the capability to act effectively, and so perilously dismissed the prospect of an Egyptian attack.
Conclusion
Authors: Rezk Dina
Published: January 2018

Exploring these case studies through the secret prism of intelligence tells a dramatically different story of Anglo-American relations with the Middle East than the narratives of ‘failure’ and ‘misunderstanding’ that dominate extant accounts. Indeed for most of these seminal events, analysts had a remarkably good sense of the strategic context and provided warnings to policy makers accordingly. Predicting the tactical details of a revolution or war was considerably more difficult, particularly when these details were closely guarded or even unknown to participants themselves.
This concluding chapter explores what lessons can be learned from these case studies. It highlights that assessments produced at the time often revealed an impressive degree of clarity and foresight, frequently foreshadowing the conclusions of later historical scholarship deprived of these valuable sources and writing with the benefit of hindsight. Surviving Egyptian diplomats were notably surprised by how well the analytic community read regional dynamics. ‘Culture’ was a complex and contested double-edged sword, serving as both an aid and an impediment to assessments of the Arab world.
Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood’s Working Women in the 1930s
Authors: Smyth J. E.
Published: January 2018

This shows how Hollywood was more effective than any other institution in America in challenging gender roles and portraying a positive image of working women both on and off screen. It reviews the importance of women within the studio system not only as actors and stars but also as screenwriters, film editors, costume and make-up design, research, and production (but significantly not as directors). It then analyses a set of highly successful films that were significant for promoting a positive image of working women. These are: A Woman Rebels (RKO, 1936); A Star is Born (Selznick International, 1937); Gone With the Wind (Selznick International-MGM, 1939); and Kitty Foyle (RKO, 1940). What these films have in common is an awareness of generations of women working in front of and behind the scenes that is rendered through their working-women heroines.
The Congressional Battle over Motion Picture Distribution, 1936–40
Authors: Jurca Catherine
Published: January 2018

Using largely un-researched congressional records, this chapter examines the four hearings held between 1936 and 1940 on trade practices in distribution, notably block-booking and blind selling, which underwrote an effective big-studio monopoly. It examines how the material problem of getting commercial entertainment from the scene of production to thousands of theatres nationwide impacted on the way various elements in the film industry, notably the big studios and independent exhibitors, represented its practices, as well as its products, both to Congress and to themselves. Although the studios were able to frustrate legislative efforts to challenge their interests, this only ensured that the Justice Department would seek legal redress through the courts. The coming of World War II briefly suspended New Deal efforts to strengthen federal regulation of the film business but the seeds were sewn by the end of the 1930s for the US v Paramount
et al Supreme Court decision that did much to undermine studio power by requiring separation of the ownership of production and exhibition of films.
Astaire and Rogers: Carefree in Roberta
Authors: Evans Peter William
Published: January 2018

This chapter challenges the conventional notion that the song and dance musicals that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made for MGM in the 1930s epitomized Hollywood escapist fare in the Depression decade. Through a close reading of one of their movies, Roberta (1935), it shows how this could be seen as romantic nonsense at one level and as a poignant reminder of ordinary people’s wider lived realities in hard times at another. It analyses, in particular, how the dual rendering of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ in song by the Irene Dunne character and in dance by the Astaire and Rogers characters gives the narrative moments of emotional depth by stressing the potential for loss. This lifts the film beyond the private ordeals of the romantic couples involved in its on-off love plots into the public domain of the Depression audience both on screen in the salon and nightclub sequences and off screen in the case of moviegoers.
The ‘Awful Truth’ about Cary Grant
Authors: Glancy Mark
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the creation of Cary Grant’s star persona – the combination of image, the characters he played, and the publicity that came to form his screen identity – between his early 1930s movies and his breakthrough roles in two 1937 films, Topper, (MGM) and The Awful Truth (Columbia). Grant was neither convincing and comfortable in the ‘likeable rough guy’ roles, in which Paramount (his original studio) cast him in the early Depression years, notably in the 1933 Mae West vehicle, She Done Him Wrong. Going freelance in 1937 led to a change of fortune and a new identity in screwball comedy. By now, the worst of the Depression was over, even if full recovery was elusive. Grant epitomised a newly confident American male, a consumer who cares about fashion and appearance, a leisurely figure who enjoys urban life, and a husband worthy of an attractive wife, but one who was not perfect and often in danger of losing his dignity – thereby suggesting the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy.
Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema
Authors: Neve Brian
Published: January 2018

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.
Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Great Depression: The Reception of the Film in the US, France and Britain
Authors: Stokes Melvyn
Published: January 2018

Chaplin’s Modern Times confronted the effects of the Great Depression in a way unique for its socio-economic realism at the time of its mid-1930s making. In examining reception of the movie in the US, UK and France, this essay debunks notions that Hollywood movies were part of some uni-directional current of ‘Americanisation.’ It suggests instead that the differing national receptions reflected local circumstances and their own social, cultural and political identities and preoccupations. A complex transnational text, Hard Times was made by a Hollywood-based Englishman influenced by ideas developed on his world tour of 1931-32. Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp,’ making what would prove his last film appearance, could therefore be interpreted with differing national contexts as a victim of industrialisation and the Great Depression, an inadvertent radical, a defender of order, or the ultimate survivor.
John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: A Popular Front Hero for the Late 1930s
Authors: Morgan Iwan
Published: January 2018

This chapter locates John Ford’s 1939 movie, Young Mr Lincoln, in relation to his contemporary involvement with the Hollywood Popular Front collaboration of liberals and communists in support of social justice at home and anti-fascism abroad. Like many of the director’s film, it can be viewed at different levels in its exploration of history and myth, but Popular Front sentiments are fundamental to its holistic understanding. Its fictional representation of a youthful Abraham Lincoln’s successful defence of two brothers wrongly placed on a murder charge in 1837 Illinois is an allegory for current concerns. Ford’s presentation of him as a common man capable of greatness, concerned to ensure social justice for the oppressed, identifying emotionally with ordinary people without losing sight of their shortcomings, and possessing a strong sense of right and wrong resonated with the cause of American progressivism at home and abroad in this troubled era.
J. G. Ballard’s Dark Ecologies: Unsettling Nature, Animals, and Literary Tropes
Authors: Beckman Frida
Published: January 2018

Beckman explores the ways that some of J. G. Ballard’s works can be seen as exemplifying a “dark ecology,” a critique of the universalist concept of “Nature” that keeps animals and the nonhuman world distinct and separate from “the human”. Instead, Ballard’s surreal novels can be seen as resisting a fetishized representation of birds in particular, while calling into question the literary tropes of metamorphosis and allegory that have often served to keep nonhuman animals at a distance, “locking them up” discursively, rather than deconstructing the line between “the human” and “the animal.” Beckman prioritizes questions of form and representation in order to track changes in the development of Ballard’s novels over the course of his career. For Beckman, a different form of potential advocacy can be found in Ballard’s work in which postmodern allegory can be aligned with Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, refusing to hold up Nature as an ideal form.
Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Authors: Tsai Robin Chen-Hsing
Published: January 2018

Tsai explores Ghosh’s novel in relation to intersecting histories of both human and nonhuman violence. Set in the tide country of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and India, the novel dramatizes vulnerable forms of life, including endangered river dolphins and dispossessed people, threatened not only by storms and floods stemming from global warming but also by the neo-imperialist violence of the state. Tsai’s reading of the novel draws upon the concept of the Umwelt from Jakob von Uexküll, as well as the fields of animality studies, biopolitics, systems theory, and phenomenology, in order to argue for what he calls a “critical bioregionalism” in which advocacy for vulnerable places needs to be attentive to the overlapping forms and histories of violence that connect human and nonhuman inhabitants.
Afterword: Evidence and Experiment
Authors: Waugh Patricia
Published: January 2018

In styles that range from the performatively paratactic and experimental, to scholarly sobriety and sharp sociocultural critique, these chapters engage issues concerning the contemporary uses and forms of experiment and the building and distribution of kinds of evidence in relation to new concepts and practices of experimentation within the contemporary biomedical sciences. They explore some less obvious ways in which knowledges and practices forged in this new ‘megaphone’ science resonate far beyond conventional spaces of research and are deeply and reciprocally entangled with the embodied self-fashioning of individual selves and group identities. Everywhere, not only in postmodern theory or art, as Ian Hacking has reminded us, people are made up: but they are fashioned through highly reflexive and recursive knowledge-making practices deeply intertwined with and distributed across multiple agencies and cultural domains. In this response, I will consider key themes explored in these chapters by bringing to bear on the discussion some earlier conceptualisations of experiment and evidence that still powerfully shape our cultural assumptions and I will consider briefly whether some further reflection on experimentalism in the arts may also usefully bear on key interdisciplinary questions for a future critical medical humanities.
The Body Beyond the Anatomy Lab: (Re)Addressing Arts Methodologies for the Critical Medical Humanities
Authors: Allen Rachael
Published: January 2018

Bearing witness to these anatomies ‘in the flesh’ is rooted in the cultural history of human anatomy and dissection: the meeting of artists and anatomists around the dissecting table; the public spectacle of ritualised dissections in Renaissance anatomical theatres; the study of anatomy in institutions; the contentious display of dead bodies in Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds, to name a few. Our bodies have commonly been understood by both medical and lay people as a biological machine of sorts and an image ‘embedded in popular culture and sustained in the anatomy lab’. First-hand experience of anatomical dissection has become a guarded professional ritual and a marker of special knowledge that depends on the violation of the taboo (access to the interior of the body and to death): ‘The anatomy theatre lies at the mysterious heart of medicine in the public fantasy and the professional imagination.’ Categorical, turbulent and romantic accounts of human dissection have circulated widely over the centuries, through prose, poetry and the arts, and it is precisely because of the body’s moral centrality that it can be used subversively by contemporary artists today.
Medical Humanities and The Place of Wonder
Authors: Evans Martyn
Published: January 2018

It will be the argument of this chapter that, among the critiques that could be thought to contribute to a critical medical humanities, at least one may turn out to bear upon an important – but generally tacit – presumption in mainstream medical humanities. The presumption in question is that, taking our materiality and embodiment for granted, medical humanities’ principal task is to return the patient’s voice to prominence within the clinical encounter. The particular critique I have in mind involves disputing this very taken-for-granted-ness of our embodiment, and cautioning against replacing medicine’s neglect of the personal with medical humanities’ neglect of the material.
Narrative and Clinical Neuroscience: Can Phenomenologically Informed Approaches and Empirical Work Cross-Fertilise?
Authors: Cole Jonathan , Gallagher Shaun
Published: January 2018

Science (from the Latin, scientia) originally meant knowledge, so that ‘natural science’ meant knowledge of the natural world and of its laws. The term has since come to mean empirical, experimentally acquired knowledge and, as such, refers to some of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the world and indeed our own physiology. Scientific medicine has led to huge improvements in outcomes from a variety of conditions, from infectious diseases to cancer and heart disease. These advances have come, largely, from a mechanistic or reductionist approach to illness, which focuses on putting the body, understood as a physical mechanism or collection of physical mechanisms, right.
Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing
Authors: Saunders Corinne
Published: January 2018

A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with later perspectives. Medical humanities research is illuminated by cultural and literary studies, and also brings to them new ways of seeing; the relation is dynamic. This chapter explores the ways mind, body and affect are constructed and intersect in medieval thought and literature, with a particular focus on how voice-hearing and visionary experience are portrayed and understood.
Aphasic Modernism: Languages for Illness from a Confusion of Tongues
Authors: Salisbury Laura
Published: January 2018

In the late 1940s, the physician Théophile Alajouanine wrote an essay about a ‘rare group’ of people who had been left with the condition of aphasia following strokes or other cerebral ‘accidents’. Rare because they had all been professional artists prior to their illness, these patients were particularly useful to their doctor because they offered the intriguing possibility of studying the effect of aphasia – the loss or disturbance of the ability to use language intentionally – on aesthetic representation. The literary author Alajouanine treated was later revealed to be Valéry Larbaud, whose right-sided hemiplegia and aphasia had left him at first with an unusual lexical speech automatism, ‘Bonsoir, les choses d’ici-bas’ (‘Farewell, things down below’), which emerged whenever he tried to speak.
Afterword: Mind, Imagination, Affect
Authors: Callard Felicity
Published: January 2018

The eight essays in ‘Mind, Imagination, Affect’ address topoi, phenomena and historical junctures as varied as the prostrate form of an individual being put to death in the US via the necropolitical ritual of lethal injection; the prostrate form of Virginia Woolf that allows her to fashion, while prone with illness and ‘as a “deserter” ’ of the ‘army of the upright’,1 a new relationship with words; the affective piety of Margery Kempe’s copious tears; the dense relationalities that narratives about autistic individuals, their family members and animal assistants unfurl; and Antoine Artaud’s autoscopic, aesthetically realised fantasies in which bodies are eviscerated and suspended mid-air.
Medical Migration and The Global Politics of Equality1
Authors: Bradby Hannah
Published: January 2018

Employing doctors and nurses who were trained overseas has been standard practice since the inception of the British National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. However, by the twenty-first century, recruitment of doctors from Africa was being compared with the slave trade in terms of its exploitative and damaging effects: ‘current policies of recruiting doctors from poor countries are a real cause of premature death and untreated disease in those countries and actively contribute to the sum of human misery.’ The assertion that employing foreign doctors was causing poor health in those doctors’ countries of origin was echoed in two reports from global health organisations, which stressed the emigration of skilled healthcare personnel from the sub-Saharan region of Africa as being related to concomitant deterioration in populations ife expectancy and declared a ‘global health workforce crisis.
Culture in Medicine: An Argument Against Competence
Authors: Hester Rebecca J.
Published: January 2018

For the last few decades cultural competence has been celebrated as the curricular response to a variety of political and social challenges in healthcare. These challenges include the persistence of race- and ethnicity-based health disparities, breakdowns in communication between the patient and provider, and issues of cultural difference around delivery and acceptance of healthcare. Commonly defined as ‘a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency or among professionals and enable that system, agency or those professions to work effectively in cross-cultural situations’, cultural competence is meant to engender increased sensitivity, humility and awareness with regard to cultural diversity in the clinical context.
On (Not) Caring: Tracing the Meanings of Care in the Imaginative Literature of the ‘Alzheimer’s Epidemic’
Authors: Burke Lucy
Published: January 2018

The immediate context of this paper is the so-called ‘crisis in social care’ that finds its most prolific and unsettling expression in news reports about the verbal, emotional and physical abuse of elderly people with dementia in care homes. In April 2014, BBC One’s Panorama reported on the abuse of residents at the Old Deanery care home in Essex and Oban House in Croydon. In June 2014, one care worker was jailed and two others were given suspended sentences and community service for the ill treatment of women with dementia at the Granary Care Home near Bristol.
Care, Kidneys and Clones: The Distance of Space, Time and Imagination
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: January 2018

Care as a concept is central to any engagement with health, ill-health and the practices that aim to prevent, mitigate or cure, and the term itself is mobilised in a variety of different ways and at a variety of different scales. The vibrancy of the medical humanities as a relatively new field of inquiry has principally derived from the elaboration of experiential accounts of differential and dynamic conditions of health. Given this particular emphasis, attention to care and caring practices has predominantly concerned the nuanced and complex relations of care at an interpersonal and proximate scale. However, in contemporary landscapes of healthcare, given that the resources for caring for ourselves or for those whom we cherish in our immediate environment are often scarce and demand greatly outstrips the supply available within a national system, healthcare resources increasingly are sourced globally: from the migrant care worker2 through to the transplant tourist.
Introduction: One Hundred Years of Sex
Authors: Peiró Eva Woods
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the periods, genres and key theoretical issues discussed in the book, paying special attention to the political importance of the destape films of the 1970s and the films of the transition more widely. The chapter provides a close analysis of two important erotic comedies. These are used as illustrative examples of the issues discussed throughout the book and of the evolution of eroticism in Spanish cinema since the abolition of censorship until now: Juan Bosch’s Cuarenta años sin sexo/Forty years without sex (1978) and the recent Kiki, el amor se hace/Quickie, Love is So (2016), directed by Paco León.
Sonorous Flesh: The Visual and Aural Erotics of Skin in Eloy de la Iglesia’s Quinqui Films
Authors: Whittaker Tom
Published: January 2018

This chapter is a study of the erotic content of Eloy de la Iglesia’s quinqui films. Informed by senses-receptor-based film theories, the author reflects on the importance of the visual erotics of touch and skin, using the body of de la Iglesia’s actor fetiche José Luis Manzano as a productive and very fitting case study. The chapter proposes that the aesthetic roughness, the post-synch sound, and the delinquent narratives characteristic of this type of film, make it ideal to illustrate the kind of visual immediacy that sensually engages the viewer with the image on the screen. Manzano’s skin is often shown in close-up, pierced and tattooed. Through his work in de la Iglesia’s quinqui films, the actor became iconic of a genre fascinated with ‘the fragile glamour of male youth’ as a memorable example of what the press at the time referred to as the ‘estética de calzoncillo’,
Exile – The Heart of the Secret World
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

The introduction situates the book in its different frames of reference, and historical and theoretical contexts to show how exile is a persistent political and narrative concern in spy fiction and extends to other current interest in citizenship and belonging. This includes experiential and philosophical definitions of exile and their relation to the genre of spy thriller, twentieth century political crises, and propaganda in relation to political art. It reviews various scholarly studies of spy fiction to show how fictional representations of espionage as tied to states of exile demonstrates historical, narrative, and analytical complexity. The introduction then outlines each of the following chapters and how they relate thematically to each other.
Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant and the Queering of Bretton Woods
Authors: Maurer Bill
Published: January 2018

Maurer reappraises the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, arguing that Keynes’s monetary theory is often mistakenly conflated with the final outcome of the Bretton Woods agreement (different from Keynes’s original proposal to create an international ‘Clearing Union’ that would rely on multiple perspectives to determine the value of currency). Keynes’s affinity for the ‘organic unity’ of complex economic relations resonates with the aesthetic theories of Duncan Grant, his lover and friend. Both Grant and Keynes consider perception an agentive process. Grant manifests this through his post-impressionist interior design, which cannot be experienced from a single vantage point, but must be apprehended from different positions. Keynes articulates the importance of multiple vantage points in his work on probability, which rejects Bertrand Russell’s ‘atomic’, individualistic, logic in favour of dynamic, relational factors that become known through experience and interaction.
Post-Liberal Peace Transitions
Authors: Richmond Oliver P. , Pogodda Sandra
Published: January 2018

Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be ‘failed by design’? This book explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. It looks at how far local ‘peace formation’ dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, the book finds answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.
Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
Authors: Demetriou Olga , Hadjipavlou Maria
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the role of women in forging paths into post-liberal peace formations. The adoption of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 could be said to have marked the incorporation of key tenets of gender rights discourse in the global liberal peace agenda. The resolution is based on liberal principles of representation and participation of women in all levels of peacebuilding and on democratisation in setting up new institutions and norms of gender equality in the post-conflict processes; it also recognises the specific protection needs of women and girls in conflict situations as well as the underutilised contribution women make to conflict prevention, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping. Ultimately, the chapter asks whether gender discourse can uphold the promise of peace formation by holding peacebuilders accountable to just, democratic, and equal societies.
Displaced Vision: The Politics of Realism in Kracauer and Kluge1
Authors: Forrest Tara
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on some of the key intersections between the theories of cinematic realism developed by Siegfried Kracauer and Alexander Kluge. While, on the surface, their definitions of realism may appear very different, on closer view it is clear that both theorists are concerned with the role that a realist film practice can play in displacing the spectator’s vision and, in the process, facilitating a mode of perception that is not inflected by the ‘ideas’ and ‘value judgements’ that shape and delimit our experience of the present. Focusing on Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality and on Kluge’s essays on the political promise of an “antagonistic” realist aesthetic, this chapter explores the role that a realist film practice can play in reanimating the viewer’s capacity to conceive of the possibilities of the future outside the parameters of the status quo.
‘Montage, My Fine Care’: Realism, Surrealism and Postmodernism after Bazin
Authors: Fotiade Ramona
Published: January 2018

The title of this chapter takes its cue from one of Jean-Luc Godard’s well-known articles, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1956, which engaged with Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism in an attempt to effect a generational break with the past by proposing a revised understanding of montage, not simply as an integral part of mise-en-scène, but as a form of deliberate authorial statement and, in that sense, as a practical extension of the New Wave ideology or politique des auteurs. In highlighting Bazin’s formative influence on the New Wave directors (in particular, his relationship to Truffaut and Godard), this chapter also focuses on the revived interest in early avant-garde experimentation (as evidenced, for instance, by Godard’s use of silent era shot transitions, image/sound disjunction and quotations from Surrealist poets in A bout de souffle), as well as the emergence of postmodern strategies and notions of rhythm, movement and time in French cinema (again present in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard), which prefigured Deleuze’s re-appraisal of montage as part of his theory of the movement-image and the time-image.
Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin
Authors: Jeong Seung-hoon
Published: January 2018

This chapter proposes a new theorization of André Bazin’s realism in two directions in which the medium-specific notion of photographic indexicality can be deconstructed and reframed in view of Bazin’s own work and post-Bazinian film history. First, aesthetically, iconic index as full representation: it is more accurate that his ontology of the image is less about indexicality per se than about the indexical effect which can also be created in hyperreal or surreal iconicity. The Bazinian total cinema has evolved in this regard, enhancing the spatiotemporal unity in long-take/deep-focus, and even eliminating the boundary between screen and theater spaces through digital/3D technology. Second, philosophically, imperfect index as partial revelation: Bazin’s realism in a more documentary mode often leads us from actual reality to the virtual Real, the unrepresentable abyss of ontological otherness that is only indirectly, impossibly indicated. This underworld of his realism is a fertile theoretical ground of (French) revelationism that has evolved from Epstein to Daney, from Deleuze to Nancy, Derrida, and Žižek. This chapter explores these two contradictory trends of Bazin’s persistent inspiration, and will also analyze relevant films, including post-Bazinian world cinema and contemporary digital cinema.
The Grierson Testament, 1969–71
Authors: Evans Gary
Published: January 2018

From 1969 to 1971, documentary film movement pioneer and founder John Grierson spent his sunset years at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. During that time, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission invited him to Ottawa to advise on the state of television policy and Canadian communications in general. Typically, Grierson cut a wide swathe through the subject, and provided a stimulating analysis of the state of Canada’s public institutions of television, film production, and realist filmmaking. Three volumes of transcripts of his audiotaped sessions stand as his final testament. Using this source, this chapter develops an overview of his position on the industry, on government-sponsored film, and on prospects for expanding realist images in what he acerbically called a developing world of consumerism and inane television. Typically, Grierson’s comments were filled with intelligence, experience, and acumen, while he also seemed to be wrestling with various contradictions and ideas derived from 19th century idealist philosophy. Perhaps Grierson was, as some have said, a curious combination of irreconcilable opposites. These transcripts reveal a visionary who had made things happen, whether as a bull in a china shop or as a fencer whose rapier intelligence demolished or convinced those with whom he engaged. With his death in 1972, this material stands as his last testament.
Viking Law and Order
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

Until very recently Viking Age and Old Norse assembly (thing) sites were essentially unknown, apart from a few select sites, such as Thingvellir in Iceland. The Vikings are well-known for their violence and pillage, but they also had a well-organised system for political decision-making, legal cases and conflict resolution. Using archaeological evidence, written sources and place-names, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of their legal system and assembly sites, showing that this formed an integral part of Norse culture and identity, to the extent that the assembly institution was brought to all Norse settlements.
Assembly sites are analysed through surveys and case studies across Scandinavia, Scotland and the North Atlantic region. Alexandra Sanmark moves the view of assembly sites away from a functional one to an understanding of the symbolic meaning of these highly ritualised sites, and shows how they were constructed to signify power through monuments and natural features. This original and stimulating study is set not only in the context of the Viking and Norse periods, but also in the wider continental histories of place, assembly and the rhetoric of power.
Elite Rituals at Scandinavian Assemblies
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

This chapter builds on the evidence of thing sites as elite foci in the landscape. Previous chapters have shown that the elite strived for the ‘right’ site architecture and competed with rivals through the design of their thing sites. The assembly features were not only symbolic, but also played important roles in the various assembly site rituals. The majority of these rituals seem to have been elite-driven and modifications to the sites can therefore be seen as reflections of societal change, for example in terms of ruler ship and religion. In this chapter, the identified assembly site features will be investigated in terms of their meaning and function in elite rituals carried out at these sites. The differing roles and experiences of the thing participants and the attendees add to the multi-layered nature of the assembly gatherings
The assembly rituals can be defined as ‘commemorative’, which entail performances, that is evocation and declarations of key components of ritual narratives, but also bodily movements, such as gestures, postures and motion. In addition, dramatic spectacle tends to be employed to strengthen memory creation.
Liturgical Labour: Agamben on the Post-Fordist Spectacle
Authors: McLoughlin Daniel
Published: January 2018

This chapter responds to arguments that Agamben’s work contributes little to the analysis of contemporary capitalism by reading his genealogy of government in the context of Guy Debord’s analysis of spectacular capitalism and the analysis of immaterial labour developed by post-operaismo thinkers. The chapter shows how Agamben’s analysis of glorification in The Kingdom and the Glory builds upon his earlier work on sacrifice to describe an estranged practice that masks the social foundations of governmental power. McLoughlin then argues that Agamben extends on this analysis in The Highest Poverty, which describes a monastic labour that that occupies the totality of life, and which simultaneously enacts and glorifies the divine order. This monastic paradigm can, the chapter claims, be usefully deployed in understanding contemporary capitalism, which has integrated language into both the process of exchange (the spectacle) and the process of production (Post-Fordism).
An Alogical Space of Genetic Reintrication: Notes on an Element of Giorgio Agamben’s Method
Authors: Clemens Justin
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses the relationship between Agamben’s methodology and that of Michel Foucault, which was one of the most hotly contested issues in the initial reception of the Homo Sacer project. It argues that Agamben’s work involves a critical engagement with Foucault that, through a confrontation with its limits, displaces its method and problems. Clemens argues that this method involves a practice of profanation: it is not a substitute for ‘real action’, but a way of enacting, in the reading of texts, the in distinction between theory and praxis that is central to Agamben’s vision of the ‘coming politics’.
Zoē aiōniōs: Giorgio Agamben and the Critique of Katechontic Time
Authors: Heron Nicholas
Published: January 2018

This chapter illuminates Agamben’s understanding of time, which is central to his ‘messianic’ approach to politics, by tracing the semantic history of the term aion (which gives rise to the modern ‘eternity’). Heron shows that aion initially referred to an immanent life force before gradually shifted in meaning to denote an unending duration associated with a transcendent and unchanging being. This latter understanding of eternity became central to the Church, which justified its existence on the basis that the messianic event was delayed (a vision that was secularised by the modern state). The link that Agamben draws between eternal life and the ‘coming politics’ in the final pages of The Kingdom and Glory is an attempt to undermine this institutionalise the messianic event and restore the idea of eternity for use in the present.
Form-of-Life and Antagonism: On Homo Sacer and Operaismo
Authors: Smith Jason E.
Published: January 2018

This Chapter argues that one of the key concepts in Agamben’s account of the ‘coming politics’ – form-of-life – was initially developed through a critical engagement with three concepts central to the post-workerist strain of Italian Marxism: general intellect, multitude, and antagonism. Smith makes the argument through a close reading of the essay ‘Form-of-Life’, which appeared two years prior to the Italian publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The chapter suggests that Agamben’s account of ‘form-of-life,’ which is a power irreducibly antagonistic to sovereignty and the social, is a contribution to the revolutionary communist tradition. However, Smith raises concerns that Agamben’s account of antagonism does not adequately account for the fact that certain forms of social identity – namely the categories of worker and woman – are themselves constituted through forms of antagonism that traverse the social.
What Is a Form-of-Life?: Giorgio Agamben and the Practice of Poverty
Authors: DeCaroli Steven
Published: January 2018

This chapter, and the one following, focus on Agamben’s recent work on form-of-life and the Franciscan practice of poverty. DeCaroli argues that form-of-life should be understood as a particular form of life that is aware of the contingency of the rules that govern our existence, and does not attempt to replace them, but to patiently expose the machinery of their operation. Franciscanism was an incomplete attempt to develop such a form-of-life through a community of non-appropriative use that claimed no social or juridical foundation. The name for this way of living was poverty – which does not mean poverty in material things (although the Friars did live modestly) – but rather poverty in those less tangible things, such as possession and privilege, that profoundly shape our social reality, but whose operation we are often only faintly aware of.
Radical Measures
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the radical nature of the Language poets. Strongly associated since the 1960s with the West Coast in the United States and with Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the Language poets create work that foregrounds uncertainty in a number of ways. Among the terms that practitioners use for their techniques are ‘innovative’ and the slightly more credible ‘postmodern’. Yet both terms understate the radicalism of what the Language poets had accomplished. Uncoupling language — and verse — from its communicative function is not merely an innovation within the artform, but contributes to a whole other genre — the tradition of the text as physical object — which is particularly strong in visual art practice.
The Incurable Park: Fundidora
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

This chapter is a pedagogical experiment in curatorial design that takes issue with humanist and socially oriented forms of collaboration in the age of ethnography. In 2013 the author had the opportunity to conduct a one-week seminar and deliver a public lecture in the context of the ‘Curation and Critique’ series programmed by Javier Toscano at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Mexico's industrial city of Monterrey. The seminar was designed to explore the concept of the incurable-image with twelve participants active in Monterrey's contemporary art scene. To this end, participants embarked on a thought experiment and a collaborative essay that would diagnose one of Monterrey's postindustrial landmarks: Parque Fundidora. This chapter first describes Toscano's curatorial work before discussing the interplay of control and curation in the layout of what seminar participants refer to as the ‘Incurable Park’. Through collaboration, this chapter tests the limits of ethnography, curation, and conceptual pedagogy.
‘Tantalus ever in Tears’: The Greek Anthology as a Source of Emotions in Late Antiquity
Authors: Herrin Judith
Published: January 2018

During the period of Late Antiquity (AD c. 300-600) few texts are preserved that were intended to make the reader laugh. The Greek Anthology, however, provides an unusually rich source for late antique attitudes to both laughter and tears. As Agathias, a lawyer and historian, explains when putting together his Garland of epigrams he followed and quoted the wise model of the ancients, and added sixth-century topics that illustrate ‘the devious paths of life’, ‘scurrilous rhyme’, ‘sweet love’ and ‘the joys of Bacchus’. He also describes the collection as a literary feast with different new flavourings, the kneading of fresh poetical dough by many skilled cooks. Their ‘dishes’, read aloud at real banquets, reveal a persistent devotion to Aphrodite/Cypris and all the passions that love brings. Yet the ancient gods and the wheel of Fortune that frustrates human endeavour appear side by side with Christian heroes, the martyrs of the early church, bishops and pious virgins, who overcame pagan disdain and persecution. The collection therefore captures the representation of emotions between two distinct worlds: the inheritance of Greek antiquity as it was being accommodated and restricted in the emergent world of Christian dominion.
Guiding Grief: Liturgical Poetry and Ritual Lamentation in Early Byzantium
Authors: Ashbrook Harvey Susan
Published: January 2018

Early Byzantine church leaders regularly admonished against grief as a Christian response to death. Yet, mourning practices continued unabated, and church leaders also participated in the lavish mourning that attended the funerals of beloved church figures, whether bishops or holy men or women. Amidst such contradictory discourses, liturgical piety appears to have provided a constructive manner of engaging grief and negotiating such tensions. Early Byzantine liturgies in both Greek and Syriac abound in hymns and homilies that retold biblical stories in dramatic fashion. Often, these included searing depictions of anguish, grief, and lamentation over loss or death for biblical characters. The accounts show strong similarities with traditions from classical drama, with imagined speeches as well as dramatic narrative that linger closely on postures, gestures, and lyrical expressions of sorrow. This chapter argues that these presentations took on particular social significance in the context of liturgical setting and performance. Embedded within liturgy itself as an overarching narrative, such stories took on resolution within a higher process of grief turned to restoration. Biblical tragedy, articulated in homilies and hymns, offered congregations typological expressions of their own sorrows, even as people were ritually guided from bereavement to consolation.
Laughter on Display: Mimic Performances and the Danger of Laughing in Byzantium
Authors: Marciniak Przemysław
Published: January 2018

An important yet understudied part of Byzantine humour is occupied by mimes and so-called jesters, although the difference between these two categories of entertainers remains unclear. Evidence is scattered and difficult to interpret. None of the types of performance defined as mimes (the term is misleading) has left visible traces, since no scripts, texts or specific illustrations have been handed down to us. Accordingly, the history of mime and other non-script based performances in Byzantium is difficult to grasp and describe. The nature of the sources is uneven and each testimony has to be analysed with caution. This chapter explores whether today a more comprehensive picture of Byzantine mimes and jesters is possible. The sources, especially from the twelfth century, provide us with scraps of information which complement each other, thereby creating a portrait, however incomplete, of Byzantine mimes whose main function was to entertain and make the Byzantines laugh. The overall aim is a hypothetical reconstruction of the possible appearance and modus operandi of the mimic actors, for example what they looked like and how they behaved, and how the laughter caused by the mimic spectacles was perceived and understood in the wider context of Byzantine attitudes toward laughter.
‘A Girl Appears in Camiknickers’: Jean Kent’s Austerity Stardom
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides a detailed case study of the stardom of Gainsborough Studios’ star Jean Kent, focussing on her rise to fame in the 1940s, and her sizeable fan following during that period, but also examining the difficulty of sustaining that stardom in subsequent decades.