bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Group Entitlements and Deliberation
Authors: Vasilev George
Published: May 2017

Chapter 3 analyses institutional designs that are supportive of solidarity. It challenges the view put forward by defenders of institutional homogeneity that group entitlements corrode solidarity by supposedly encouraging parochial behaviour over other-regarding behaviour. It is argued that this view is too one-sided, as it overlooks how group entitlements can compel majorities to orient themselves towards the concerns of marginalised minorities they otherwise have little incentive to respond to under majoritarian decision-making structures.
Conclusion
Authors: Vasilev George
Published: May 2017

What should be the nature of bonds between ethnically diverse citizens, and what kinds of interventions serve to bind divided populations are pressing questions that will always produce open answers rather than complete theoretical closure. Pinning down an ironclad formula for the expansion of solidarity is next to impossible, given the empirical variability in conditions that give rise to conflict and call for contextual variability in institutional responses. Moreover, to the extent that solidarity’s core demands of answerability and autonomy sit together in tension, normative definitions of the phenomenon can only ever court controversy. Different individuals will pass different value judgements on the extent to which one constituent element of solidarity can legitimately encroach on the other, ensuring solidarity remains a topic of lively debate within academic and policy circles....
Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and the Winter’s Tale
Authors: Anderson Thomas P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at The Winter’s Tale and Titus Andronicus to show how Shakespeare’s aesthetics integrates performing objects and performing bodies in its depiction of powerful women. In staging the process of survival for Lavinia and Hermione, Shakespeare travesties the concept of the king’s two bodies central to early modern sovereignty, redistributing agency between subjects to objects. Central to the argument about the female body in these two plays is Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of corporeal femininity, which emphasizes the tactility of the performing body, its agitating power that poses problems for the way these plays and their critics attempt to make sense of the women’s physical condition as an embodiment of fractured or incomplete subjectivity. Julie Taymor’s film Titus (2000), with its cinematic expression of the power of the prosthetic, becomes a touchstone for a reading of the play’s exploration of the politics of vibrant matter. Both Lavinia and Hermione offer a form of corporeal feminism, exemplified in Taymor’s film. In their parody of sovereignty’s charismatic survival beyond death, these two plays to different degrees transform political theology into a feminist politics in which performing objects—Lavinia’s body and Hermione’s statue—evoke the phenomenon of non-sovereign agency that limits sovereign absolutism and enables fugitive politics in Shakespeare.
Plasma! Notes on Bruno Latour’s Metaphysics of Law
Authors: Sutter Laurent de
Published: May 2017

Here, Laurent de Sutter poses a direct challenge to a principal tenet of Latour’s metaphysics: Latour’s commitment to empiricity,
positivity and above all the trace by which alone an actor is grasped in actor-network theory. De Sutter embraces Latour’s argument about the ontological openness or generosity of law – it is the only mode, de Sutter reminds us, capable of seizing any being whatsoever and attaching it to an utterance or an action and thereby registering its agency and, importantly, rendering it compossible with beings of quite other pedigrees. As such, law is the only ‘ontologically neutral’ mode, but there is much more at stake than the harmonics of existential modes, namely the real composition of worlds and, indeed, of what must be defined as the unworldly: ‘all that exists only as non-existing’, ‘all that is present only as absent’, or again, ‘all that has form only as unformed’. These missing masses that Latour occasionally acknowledges, de Sutter argues, escape from the tendrils of the networks that define the real and the knowable, but enjoy something more than a mere negative or emptily theoretical existence. For Latour, plasma is simply the ‘dumping ground’ where he deposits the things that do not awaken his interest, a realm of obscurity that must be set off from the world of which clear and distinct representations are possible. To undo this surprisingly Cartesian tendency in Latour, perhaps, de Sutter suggests, it would be possible to recover plasma as the genus to which Deleuze’s dark precursor would belong. If there is identity, similitude, resemblance, traceability, in short the whole modern system of representation, it is only as a plasmatic excrescent. As a first step along this path, de Sutter makes a pitch for the recovery of what he calls the beings of sensitivity, which may affect other beings profoundly but which themselves leave no measurable trace.
Laboratory Life and the Economics of Science in Law
Authors: Caudill David S.
Published: May 2017

Issuing a bold and, in light of current preoccupations with AIME, untimely call for the continued relevance of Laboratory Life, David Caudill’s chapter realigns the question of Latour’s value for legal theory. Rather than mapping the unstable, unpredictable movements of the legal trajectory – a term that, in preceding chapters, has taken on several perhaps inconsistent layers of meaning – Caudill proposes to reconsider the relationship between law and the sciences (and revisits some of the drama of the Science Wars) under the auspices of the economics of science, a flourishing sub-field of science studies veritably inaugurated by Laboratory Life’s influential discussion of cycles of credit and credibility. Deftly untangling the law-sciences-economics knot, Caudill stages the matter of Philip Mirowski v. Bruno Latour (and Michel Callon), in which the defendants were accused of complicity with neoliberalism and charged, by proxy, with the allegedly pernicious effects of the increasing commercialisation of research on the scientific establishment. Mirowski’s critique runs out of steam, Caudill shows, and runs off the rails as soon as the details of law’s appropriation of scientific research and evidence are examined. But the often dismaying implications of Science Wars-era disputes – now being recapitulated or replayed in miniature, in the economics wing of the science studies field and in legal studies – continue to haunt contemporary law as well as science policy, because it remains unclear to what extent judges and regulators (and legal academics) appreciate the material contributions of works like Laboratory Life to the improvement of our understanding of the sciences, and to what extent the co-production thesis developed by Latour, Callon and others still registers as a fanciful exercise in debunking.
Bartleby, Barbarians and the Legality of Literature
Authors: Barter Faith
Published: May 2017

Faith Barter renews the conjunction of law and literature through the lens of ‘their shared interest in troubling the definition of the human’. Bartleby, in Melville’s story, traverses the superhuman and the subhuman, rendering him illegible and object-like to his frustrated employer, while the young girl in Coetzee’s novella (who is already, as a native, deemed non-human by the law of the Empire) approaches objecthood by virtue of the indecipherable traces of imperial torture she bears. Barter examines the twin dilemmas in Melville’s and Coetzee’s texts while also placing them into dialogue with the infamous 1857 Scott v. Sandford opinion of the US Supreme Court. She analyses the three texts along a temporal axis, from which emerges a set of dynamic historical oscillations and intertextual patterns of world-building. Suspicious of the ‘complete[] singular[ity]’ of law, conceived as a mode of existence,
Barter reframes the relationship of law and literature by passing each through the partial regional ontology of the other, opening up a space for the interrogation of a new hybridity: literature as law. Perhaps all modes of existence are also, simultaneously and necessarily, modes of coexistence.
Why Does Film Policy Matter?
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter positions the role and development of UK film policy within the domain of politics and political culture. It highlights the culture-commerce dichotomy that has run through UK film policy for decades. It also highlights the growth of digital and creative economy policy thinking and the positioning of film policy within this discourse. The latter part of the chapter explores international models of film support, contrasting the UK approach with that of France.
The Creation of the Film Council
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter first analyses the two decades of policy development and debate that lay behind the creation of the Film Council. It details the rebirth of interest in film policy and consequent key interventions made by successive Conservative governments after 1979. The Conservatives’ deployment of film tax relief along with their use of the National Lottery as a funding body for film production is described. Next, the New Labour government’s invention of the Film Council in 2000 is considered, noting the diverse policy moves behind this and role of the Film Policy Review Group. The major impact of the creation of the Film Council on the veteran British Film Institute’s status and range of activity is made clear. The chapter highlights how New Labour’s deployment of the dual logics of using expertise and seeking rationalisation together changed the face of film support.
Flying Too Close to the Sun?
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates how well the Council’s evolutionary development served in enabling it to satisfy the differing constituencies of support that form part of the landscape of film provision. Drawing on original interviews with senior figures from the UKFC and with key industry stakeholders, it assesses the challenges the organisation faced in handling a multiplicity of interest groups, concerns and expectations and how effectively the Council addressed competing economic, industrial and cultural objectives. This chapter also considers how the Council negotiated the various tensions between regional, national, European and international interests in an increasingly transnational film industry.
Performance against Objectives
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyses the performance of the UK Film Council in relation to some of its key stated policy objectives and funding schemes and initiatives. As a distinctive organisation with few obvious comparators around the globe, it notes the challenges and limitations of such a task and the difficulties involved in measuring the performance of public bodies more generally. The resultant analysis draws extensively on secondary source statistical data, such as the BFI Statistical Yearbook and the UKFC’s annual reports and reviews. It also focuses on independent assessments by external analysts and internal documentation assessing the effectiveness of policies and interventions. Overall, this chapter examines the Film Council’s efforts to build a competitive film industry, widen choice and promote exports, while also considering its performance as a public body in terms of delivering value for money.
The Last Days of the UK Film Council
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

Based on key players’ testimony and an extensive documented record, this chapter initially discusses the political background to the fraught merger talks between the BFI and the UKFC in 2009-2010, along with the uncertain role of the DCMS. It then turns to consider the shock decision to close the UKFC taken by Conservative ministers in the DCMS serving in the Coalition government elected in May 2010. Various possible reasons for closure are evaluated in considerable detail and the impact on the UKFC is described. The account analyses each of the steps taken by the DCMS to devise a new landscape of film support post-UKFC, with the BFI assuming many functions after extensive negotiation with ministers and civil servants. Next, the BFI’s new turn in film policy is considered. A range of views on the closure decision, both pro and con, is discussed.
Conclusions
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter sets out to show why this study matters and should be of interest beyond the narrow circles of those most usually involved in film policy debate. It asks whether rationalisation of support under the leadership of one body and the weight attached to its work in changing the UK’s film industry is at all realistic. The conclusion is that the UKFC could not possibly have made the UK film industry commercially ‘sustainable’, as originally required. Although this aim was part of changing goals during the UKFC’s decade-long life, it set a frame for ultimately negative evaluation by government. Unified bodies, moreover, have to meet conflicting expectations and cannot satisfy all their constituencies and the UKFC gradually lost some significant wider support. Its closure, however, did not satisfy sound criteria of public policy-making and showed, yet again, that there is no coherent policy for film in the UK.
Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge
Authors: Coombs Nathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter locates the roots of the Marxist theory of revolutionary change in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. In the well-known formula, cumulative changes in quantitative properties give rise to a qualitative leap into the future. However, the chapter argues that the idea rests on shaky ontological foundations. Through a close reading of the Science of Logic, it is shown that Hegel’s idea of leaps relies on excising irrational numbers. To make his dialectical transitions work, Hegel has to dialecticise the mathematical infinite and ignore scientific epistemological breaks from the classical period onwards. This compares unfavourably to Alain Badiou, who makes Georg Cantor’s breakthrough with transfinite set theory the lynchpin for his discontinuous philosophy of events. The final section argues that Hegel’s notion of quantity to quality leaps is also complicit with the reformism and technological determinism promoted by key thinkers of Second International Marxism.
Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation
Authors: Coombs Nathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that although Engels successfully encouraged Marxism to adopt Hegelian metaphysics as its philosophy of historical change, Marx himself can be absolved of charges of teleology and political gradualism. Guided by Galvano Della Volpe’s reconstruction of Marx’s thought, it is shown that Marx’s methodology of real abstraction stands in stark contrast to Hegel’s speculative dialectic. Capital may contain isolated chapters that suggest teleological historicism, but taken as a whole the text points to the need for a conscious break from capitalism informed by economic analysis. The chapter concludes by contrasting Marx’s political statements about communist transformation with Kautsky’s and Lenin’s views on the post-revolutionary transition period.
Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break
Authors: Coombs Nathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that Louis Althusser’s strident anti-Hegelianism and adoption of French historical epistemology was integral in his refoundation of Marxist thought. At the same time, the roots of the Platonic rationalist trajectory found in Badiou and Meillassoux are located in Althusser’s work. The chapter shows that the vicious circularity enjoined by Althusser’s theorisation of the epistemological break grants authority to philosophers to issue judgement on the novelty of events. The concluding section argues that despite the similar vocabularies of late-Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter and Badiou’s Being and Event, it is the unresolved issues of Althusser’s mid-1960s research programme which underpins Badiou’s philosophy.
Afterword: Towards a Complex Science of History
Authors: Coombs Nathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins by taking stock of the first two parts of the book. It argues that although classical Marxism cannot think events discontinuously, its science of history can at least be subjected to empirical verification. By contrast, while post-Althusserian theory succeeds in thinking events radically it does so on the basis of a self-referential rationalism that grants authority to theorists and is resistant to empirical control. To go beyond these philosophical traditions, the afterword suggests that complexity theory and ‘weak’ notions of emergence provide a way forward. Agent-based modelling of complex social systems offers a mediation of necessity and contingency that could help orient political strategy.
Governing Taiwan and Tibet
Authors: He Baogang
Published: May 2017

This book is devoted to a search for democratic governance of China’s national identity problem, with regards to the Taiwan and Tibet questions specifically. It adopts a democratic approach and argues that liberals can offer a democratic solution, defend democratic principles, and develop democratic governance.
This book problematizes the existing hard-liners’ realist policies towards Tibet and Taiwan, and examines how and under what conditions democracy can or cannot provide an answer. It examines the different meanings, practices, institutions and various impacts of democracy with regards to the problem of China’s national identity. It provides a systematic analysis of different forms of the democratic approach and their likely impacts. In particular, it presents the difficulties and obstacles to the democratic approach to the Tibet and Taiwan questions, but it still searches for some political space in which democratic governance can work.
Confucian and Marxist Theoretical Traditions of Minority Rights and Beyond
Authors: He Baogang
Published: May 2017

Chapter 7 examines the theoretical sources of current Chinese policies on minority rights. It traces a complex combination of various intellectual inheritances, combining echoes of Confucian ideas of paternalistic guardianship over “backward groups” or "younger brothers" with echoes of Marxist/Leninist ideas of ethnic autonomy, mixed with further echoes of liberal ideas of minority rights and affirmative action policies for minority groups.
Blanchot and Affinity
Authors: Evans Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Davis’s literary relationship with Maurice Blanchot. She began translating Blanchot early on in her career and some of her stories can be seen to respond to his work. The chapter first focuses on Davis’s translation of Death Sentence and her approach to the translation, which it argues is the beginning of her own translation style and which shows a respect for the source author. The second half of the chapter analyses Davis’s story ‘Story’ and Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’. It is argued that Davis’s ‘Story’ offers a response to Blanchot’s récit, recreating the indeterminacy of the narrative while addressing the emotional concerns of the protagonist. Translation and story both serve as forms of response to Blanchot’s work.
Proust and Rewriting
Authors: Evans Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Davis rewrites Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, drawing on theories of rewriting from translation studies (Lefevere) and American literature (Moraru). It begins by analysing Davis’s authorial rewriting in her novel The End of the Story, which echoes and parallels Proust’s novel thematically and structurally. By comparing the two novels, the chapter shows the dialogue between. The second half of the chapter focuses on Davis’s translation of Proust and how it is placed in relation to the canonical translation by Scott Moncrieff and the less known translation by Grieve. Davis’s translation is seen as a rewriting of the canon of Proust in English while extending the practices seen in her translations of Blanchot and Leiris.
Descriptive Metaphysics
Authors: McHenry Leemon B.
Published: May 2017

Strawson’s famous distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics describes two different methodological approaches to the question of fundamental ontology. This chapter focuses mainly on the origin of the descriptive enterprise in Aristotle’s metaphysics and examines Whitehead and Quine’s criticisms of this approach to the formulation of a viable conceptual scheme for modern physics. The project of descriptive metaphysics and the concept of substance are rejected on both scientific and philosophical grounds.
The Problem of Time
Authors: McHenry Leemon B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the problem of time with regard to the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics and advances in broad outline one direction that this unification might potentially follow, namely, a version of Broad’s growing block universe consistent with Whitehead’s late metaphysics and relativistic quantum field theory. The theories of time – eternalism, presentism and the growing block theory – are discussed in connection with three and four dimensional views of reality.
Philosophical Implications
Authors: McHenry Leemon B.
Published: May 2017

An event ontology has been proposed by various philosophers as a solution to certain philosophical problems. This chapter therefore explores briefly its implications for the mind-body problem, perception and causation, free will, personal identify and moral agency. An event ontology provides a consistent framework for addressing these problems.
Unshed Tears: Meaning, Trauma and Translation
Authors: Manenti Davide
Published: May 2017

The repetition compulsion through which the trauma victim attempts at working out his or her neuroses shares similarities with the compulsion to repeat enacted in translation. Translation, like trauma, happens belatedly, looks back at the past of the source text and at the same time looks forward to the future of the translated text. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary, translation and trauma studies, this article presents an analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Life of Ma Parker’ and of the translational challenges it poses. The author finally suggests a rethinking of translation as a peculiar and unexpected form witnessing that, like trauma, originates where a direct access to meaning seems to be denied.
‘Making a Stay in X’: Suppressing Translation in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’
Authors: Stanley Rachael
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Mansfield’s depiction in her diary and in the short story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, of her visit to the French town of Gray during the First World War to meet her newly taken lover, Francis Carco. Mansfield’s description of this event involves a slippage between English and French, revealing a degree of instability in her writing that deliberately undermines her omnipotence as narrator. By carefully locating those moments in her retelling of this journey where we find translation being silently undertaken, where phrases are rendered in ungrammatical or non-idiomatic English, we can open up where the fictional account of this event diverges from the ‘real’ event that took place on 19th February 1915. The French language is revealed to be a marker of Mansfield’s attempt to repress and make unreal the more troubling and upsetting realities not only of war, but of a doomed love affair.
‘Nous ne suivons pas la même route’: Flaubertian Objectivity and Mansfield’s Representations of Travel
Authors: Geheber Philip Keel
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a reading of Mansfield’s ‘Urewera Notebook’, which features notes on Gustave Flaubert as well as diary entries and vignettes of travelling lone women, to first situate Mansfield’s early aesthetic interests in objectively representing characters in transit. It then argues that Mansfield’s 1915 story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ is a feminist transposition of the infamous cab ride of Madame Bovary into a French WWI setting. Mansfield’s translation of Flaubertian objectivity and tropes from Madame Bovary to suit her own perspective and context exemplifies how this mode of thematic and aesthetic translation functions as a generative mode of literary production.
Foreign Languages and Mother Tongues: From Exoticism to Cannibalism in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories
Authors: Lamy-Vialle Elisabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the way Katherine Mansfield uses the French language in her short-stories, and specifically in the stories set in France. Mansfield does not only use the French language as a semiological tool but confronts English-speaking readers with a foreign language that constantly interacts with their mother-tongue, imposing on them the Other’s tongue – Derrida’s ‘monolingualism of the Other’. She opens up an in-between space in which the two languages are questioned and unsettled, a process echoing the ‘becoming-other of language’ described by Deleuze. This chapter examines how the tension between English and French reaches a climax in the schizophrenic process at work in ‘Je ne Parle pas français’; language becomes, between the English and the French characters, a ‘cannibal-language’, the aggressive appropriation of the Other through his/her language in order to leave him/her speechless and powerless.
‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ by Tennessee Williams
Authors: Kimber Gerri
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces a newly discovered play-fragment by Tennessee Williams, which comprises two separate scenes: the first, eight-page scene is called ‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ and the second, two-page scene is called ‘Armistice’. There are four characters in the play: Katharine Mansfield [sic], John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and his wife Frieda Lawrence. The chapter offers a biographical overview of the complex relationship between the two couples, followed by a detailed analysis of the play fragment, which is published here in its entirety for the first time.
Beau Champ
Authors: Gasston Aimee
Published: May 2017

‘I feel that my love and longing for the external world – I mean the world of nature has suddenly increased a million times – When I think of the little flowers that grow in the grass, and little streams and places where we can lie & look up at the clouds – Oh I simply ache for them.’...
Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792-1802
Authors: Wold Atle L.
Published: May 2017

This book is a study of Scotland’s role in the French Revolutionary War. It charts the Scottish contribution to the war effort, as well as to the British government’s struggles to defeat political radicalism at home – lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792 until the War came to an end in 1802. A main argument presented in the book is that Scottish support for the British government was marked by a consistent focus on the challenges presented by the ‘French Principles’ promoted by the revolutionaries in France. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military might of the French republic, the Scottish ‘loyalists’ were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state. Over the period 1792 to 1802, the Scots made their very distinctive mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions. The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and – on the whole – the 1790s come across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.
Women Make Movies: Chicken & Egg Pictures, Gamechanger Films and the Future of Female Independent Filmmaking
Authors: Sinwell Sarah E. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the pioneering and continuing importance of legendary non-profit Women Make Movies, established in 1972 as the first production and distribution company devoted to films by and about women, before focusing on the work of two recently established companies. Created in 2005 to support the work of female nonfiction filmmakers, Chicken & Egg Pictures continues a tradition of activism in which feminist documentaries figure centrally by funding and mentoring filmmakers who address social, political and global human rights issues. More recently, Gamechanger Films was founded in 2013 as the first for-profit fund exclusively for narrative films scripted and directed by women and aims to intervene in the gender imbalance of the feature film industry.
Killer Feminism
Authors: White Patricia
Published: May 2017

Celebrated in accounts of the American indie heyday of the 1990s through the 2000s, Killer Films is headed by the equally feted partnership of producers Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler. Drawing on interviews and other primary source material, White seeks integrates the story of Killer as a butch-lesbian woman’s company into the history of feminist filmmaking. This history includes not only the New Queer Cinema but trailblazing lesbian and transgender features such as Go Fish (1994), High Art (1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and ‘women’s films’ made by women (Mary Harron) and queer men (Todd Haynes).
‘A Woman with an Endgame’: Megan Ellison, Annapurna Pictures and American Independent Film Production
Authors: Lyons James
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the career and production strategies of heiress Megan Ellison, whose powerhouse Annapurna Pictures was established in 2012 with the stated goal of ‘creating sophisticated, high-quality films that might otherwise be deemed risky by contemporary Hollywood studios’, especially in an era of industry retrenchment. Like Vachon in presenting an unconventional company figurehead, Ellison spurs media scrutiny paradoxically by shunning the limelight while strategically moderating her image through various social media – as well as through Annapurna’s impressive list of award-winning films and auteurs such as Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012), Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2013) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013).
‘I’m Absolutely the Right Person for this Job’: Allison Anders and Mary Harron on Lifetime Television
Authors: Schreiber Michele
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the recent careers of Allison Anders and Mary Harron, who took off in the early-to-mid 1990s but subsequently turned to television and have found a workspace in the Lifetime TV Network’s made-for-television film aimed at women. Like Seidelman, Anders and Harron target an older female demographic and make films about women whose stories have been marginalised (June Carter in Anders’ Ring of Fire, 2013) or discredited (Anna Nicole Smith in Harron’s Anna Nicole, 2013). Harron, moreover, exploits the subversive potential of the celebrity biopic to expose the media’s role in constructing the self-destructing Anna Nicole.
My Effortless Brilliance: Women’s Mumblecore
Authors: Perkins Claire
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates women’s infiltration of mumblecore, an indie subgenre associated with auteurs such as Andrew Bujalski, Mark and Jay Duplass and Joe Swanberg, for feminist ends. In representing relationships among twenty-something millennials, mumblecore’s cheap, lo-fi digital aesthetic and anti-mainstream values of ‘authenticity’ are congenial to indie female practitioners such as Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim and Desiree Akhavan. Rather than simple appropriations of a ‘male’ genre, their work represents a ‘reframing’ not only of mumblecore but indie cinema generally, which mumblecore has recently epitomised. In films with a feminist focus on female aspirations and insecurities but that also accommodate queer and racial perspectives, these practitioners transpose the mumblecore ‘ethos’ to accommodate otherwise marginalised subjectivities and experiences.
From Documentary to Fictional Realism: Mira Nair’s Documentary Roots, Fictional Home and Production Politics
Authors: Projansky Sarah , Ono Kent A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates how the transnational figure and twenty-seven-year career of Mira Nair is prototypical of female independent practitioners who negotiate diverse issues of identity and politics in their films and working practices. As an Indian filmmaker with a production company based in New York City, Nair makes films that cross multiple borders, whether of nation, race, class, sexuality or genre, to promote social activism. Highlighting her documentary film production, methods and career-long investment in non-profit organisations, Projansky and Ono explore how even her popular fictional features such as Monsoon Wedding (2001) or Vanity Fair (2004) share political and socially confrontational methods with her outreach programs.
Having its Cake and Eating it Too: Contemporary American ‘Indie’ Cinema and My Big Fat Greek Wedding Reframed
Authors: Tzioumakis Yannis , Papadimitriou Lydia
Published: May 2017

This chapter revisits My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002), remembered primarily as the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time, in order to reclaim it as the work of a woman and one of the indie sector’s biggest box office successes. Tzioumakis and Papadimitriou explore the intersectional perspective of its female writer and lead actor, Greek-American Nia Vardalos, with which it is identified rather than its male director. In so doing, they unpack film’s overlooked ethnic, social and gender concerns.
The Feminist Politics of Collaboration in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture
Authors: Columpar Corinn
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the feminist collaborative practices integral to Lena Dunham, television and film celebrity, showrunner, director and star, as illustrated in her breakthrough film Tiny Furniture (2010). Featuring family members and friends as well as their art and ideas (mother Laurie Simmons’ photography, for example), the film has characteristics of the autobiographical documentary and engages self-reflexively with the multiple communities that make up intersubjective and intertextual experience, including intergenerational feminisms.
“The Edge of Unacceptability”: Preston Sturges and the PCA
Authors: Bernstein Matthew H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter poses one of the most fascinating questions about Sturges’s career: how did he manage to insert so much sexual innuendo in his comedies of the 1940s, given the notorious vigilance of Joseph Breen and other members of the Production Code Administration? Part of it was in the PCA’s quixotic mandate; part of it arose from the filmmaker’s greater skill in exploiting the Code; part of it also stemmed from changing, more expansive conceptions of what met the Code’s censorship requirements. Through close examinations of script drafts and correspondence with the PCA, this chapter explores how Sturges deftly negotiated with the censors to satisfy their demands while ensuring that his satires of war and sexuality made their way to the screen, revealing that in addition to his prolific comedic imagination, Sturges was often aided by the very body that was alleged to be censoring him.
Instress Scaped and Inscape Stressed
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

Close reading of the texts in which Hopkins uses his neologisms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ give plausibility to the thought that they too are related chiasmically. Further, there is support in many of those contexts for the inference that whereas ‘inscape’ is a matter of predication, being and existence, ‘instress’ is a matter of doing and will, but in a manner that allows interpenetration. That is to say, Hopkins endorses Scotus’s assent to the equiprimordiality of the will and intellect, if not to the priority of will over intellect. When Hopkins, ‘with sorrow’, replaces Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the library shelf and takes down the works of Scotus instead, it is not because he frowns on the form-matter distinction made there and by Aquinas. It is because the Greek and Mediaeval thinkers do not acknowledge the distinction Scotus names distinctio formalis. This is a relation in which the terms are distinguished but metaphysically inseparable and the logical relation between universality and particularity is supplemented by a metaphysical relation between what Scotus calls common nature and haecceitas. Hopkins takes advantage of the unaspirated spelling of this Latin word to bring out the possibility of hearing it say, in the imperative mood, ecce, look, attend.
Parsing the Poem of Parmenides
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

As early as his essay on Parmenides Hopkins demonstrates his agreement with Scotus and Parmenides that being is univocal. There too he progresses to the conclusion that if being is to be the foundation of scientia it requires to be transliterated, however barbarously, by ‘doing be’. This implicates the will, for instance the will of a radical affirmative Yes asserted in such expressions as ‘to be’, ‘it is’, ‘there is’--and therefore ‘not to be’, ‘it is not’ etc., as in the denial of the hypothesis proposed in the second chapter that inscape is the same as haecceitas. The present chapter brings the book’s argument to the point at which grounds have been given for holding that in the hyphenation of being and doing inscape stands to being as instress stands to doing.
Hopkins’ Double Discovery, of Scotus and of Himself
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

‘However, this is me, not you’ writes Hopkins gnomically in his response to a letter from Robert Bridges that makes an unsuccessful attempt to persuade his friend to read Hegel. It is a remark that belongs to the attempt Hopkins makes to come to terms with what he refers to as his ‘self-taste’ and ‘how he finds himself’: ‘searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being’: my ownmost existence, Dasein, as might be said by Heidegger in the light of his dissertation on the theory of categories and signification he and others attributed to Scotus. But nota bene, that theory brings with it the challenge of resolving the apparent inconsistency of maintaining both that haecceitas signifies the singular and that it does so with a name and noun that signifies the universality of the -itas that forms part of that name and of its English equivalent ‘-ity’ in ‘singularity’. Likewise with the ‘-ness’ in ‘thisness’. Hopkins’ resolution of this dilemma, one suggested by the deliberate or happily accidental dropping of the initial aspirate of haecceitas, is to hear these terms not as nominatives but as primarily non-terminal imperatives, for instance ecce, ‘behold’, ‘listen’.
Ecceity, Ipseity and Existents
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

Although Scotus sometimes seems to teach the opposite, he argues, like his compatriot David Hume will, that existence is really the same as essence. This is a doctrine that makes it easier to understand how, against Aquinas, Scotus can endorse Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the existence of God provided it includes a clause specifying that the concept of the highest thinkable being is free from contradiction. But the assertion of the sameness of essence and existence is not obviously true of finite existents. But it is existence as such to which attention must be given if it is to play the role envisaged for it in the blank ecology sketched out for it in the closing chapters of this book. Here it is sheer existence, not predicates, that ground the author’s hope for a widened and more just notion of ecological responsibility, one that listens to the teachings of Scotus and Hopkins and that holds for all the inscapes of the world simply because a thing’s own existence is a good for that existent and therefore calls for our aesthethical (sic) regard.
Being as Doing
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself, myself it speaks and spells; Crying What I dó is me: for that I came. These remarkable lines from ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ hark back seven centuries to Scotus’ emphasis on willing, and forward getting on for another hundred years to (let us say) the instress put by that Scotus scholar Martin Heidegger on the verbal-nominative grammar of Sein, the German word for being, preparing the ground for Carol Ann Duffy’s planting of the conceit of the verb at the heart of the noun thanks to which the self is said as selving and as a priori ‘yessing’, we discovered in chapter 3, that Hopkins borrows from Parmenides along with the latter’s hyphenation of being and thinking or perceiving (noieô).
Afterword
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

The pivotal notion of willing not to will marries intention to attention. It casts light on the letting of letting-be, Seinlassen and Gelassenheit as these figure in the later writings of the author of the Treatise on Duns Scotus’ Theory of Categories and Signification. Willing not to will is the regard attention pays to intention. It is the disponible waiting for the coming of one knows not what, what may turn out to be unsolicited thoughts the imagination of which is both ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ genitive, generative, receptively active and actively receptive: creative but also ‘decreative’ in the sense in which Simone Weil uses this word. Endowed with properties like these, is it any surprise to find that Hopkins’ mentor John Ruskin deems the imagination to be ‘the highest intellectual power of man’, despite that deponent power’s being placed between intellect and sensibility just like the will not to will?
Democratisation in the Maghreb
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

The book offers fresh insight into the recent political development and contrasting experiences of four Maghreb countries: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. The Arab Spring affected them in different ways. Tunisia underwent profound change as Ben Ali was overthrown in a fortnight. Yet in Algeria, President Bouteflika won an unprecedented fourth term in office despite being too ill to campaign. What explains these variations? Why did Ben Ali’s regime fall and Bouteflika’s survive? Why has Morocco not gone the same way as Tunisia? And what of Mauritania, the often forgotten other Maghreb country? This book addresses these and other questions by using Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s celebrated model for examining political transitions to analyse and compare the political development of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania over the last ten years.
Introduction
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

The Maghreb’s political development continues to confound expectations. Few specialists anticipated the start of the Arab Spring. Fewer still thought it would begin in Tunisia, long regarded as one of the region’s most stable and prosperous countries.1 Then, when the demonstrations did break out, most assumed Ben Ali would easily deal with them. Not only had he overcome similar challenges in the past, but he had the support of a large, well-funded and experienced security apparatus. Their shock at his downfall less than a month later was compounded by the simultaneous outbreak of copycat protests elsewhere and Libya’s descent into civil war. Many now issued millennial predictions about what would happen next. Unrest would sweep the region. None of its leaders would be spared. Algeria was especially vulnerable....
Levitsky and Way and Competitive Authoritarianism: Leverage, Linkage and Organisational Power
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter charts and explains Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s celebrated model for explaining regime transition. It is divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of the dimensions of leverage, linkage and organisational power focusing, in particular, on the inter-play between them; how the strength of one renders the others more or less important. The second section examines the dimension of leverage – the principal ways in which it is exercised and how it is quantified – and defines a Black Knight patron (what a state or regime must do to qualify as one). The third section examines the dimension of linkage; the main forms it takes and how its strength is measured and categorised. And the fourth section examines organisational power; the state and other structures on which it is based.
Tunisia
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on Levitsky and Way’s model, this chapter offers a sophisticated assessment of Tunisia’s political liberalisation. Of all the region’s countries, it alone emerged from the Arab Spring significantly more democratic than when the protests began. Ostensibly, Levitsky and Way’s model can account for this outcome. Not only did does Tunisia have high linkage to the EU and US, but the West has high leverage over it. In such circumstances, the Ben Ali regime’s high organisational power is of secondary importance. Yet this being the case, why did he remain in office for so long? The chapter argues that the EU and US consistently failed to put as much democratising pressure on him as they could have done, and that the regime’s organisational strength was not as great as it seemed owing to the persistent alienation of the country’s armed forces.
Algeria
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on Levitsky and Way’s model, this chapter advances an innovative explanation for the endurance of Algeria’s competitive authoritarian order. Like its Moroccan and Mauritanian counterparts (two of the volume’s other case studies), the Algerian regime emerged from the Arab Spring largely unchanged. Levitsky and Way offer a compelling account of its survival. The European Union’s and United States’s medium links to and low leverage over of the country prevent them from putting decisive democratising pressure on it. While the scope, cohesion and experience of its security apparatus give it sufficient organisational strength to withstand any domestic challenges. Nevertheless, the West could have pressed Algiers to liberalise harder and with greater consistency. And, in a departure from Levitsky and Way’s theory, President Bouteflika did not create and rely on a single ruling party.
Mauritania
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on Levitsky and Way’s model, this chapter advances a nuanced explanation of the survival of Mauritania’s competitive authoritarian order. Just a few years before the protests began, the country seemed to offer a near textbook example of their thesis as, under coordinated pressure from the West, its dictatorial regime introduced democratic reforms (only to relapse into authoritarianism shortly thereafter). Yet during the Arab Spring itself, no such liberalisation took place. While the EU and US have only medium linkage to and leverage over Nouakchott, its reduced organisational power means that they still have the ability to put decisive democratising pressure on it (just as they did before). Their failure to do so confirms one of Levitsky and Way’s vital caveats: that the West often allows important strategic considerations to take precedence over democracy promotion.
Conclusions
Authors: Hill J.N.C.
Published: May 2017

The past few years have been a period of unprecedented political upheaval for the Maghreb. While each country had, of course, experienced dramatic moments before – Ben Ali’s ousting of Bourguiba, Algeria’s Black October riots, the Casablanca bombings and Mauritania’s 2005 and 2008 coups d’état to name but some – nothing of the breadth, depth or duration of the Arab Spring, a protest that began in a provincial city in one of North Africa’s quieter corners and quickly engulfed the entire region. Presidents of decades’ standing – latter-day imperators – were swept from office on waves of public discontent while their counterparts elsewhere nervously and hurriedly tried to calm the mob....