bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The End of the Chimera: Disillusion, Alienation and Ambivalence
Authors: Smail Salhi Zahia
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that the 8 May 1945 massacre is the direct impetus behind the 1954 Algerian revolution. It is a major game changer in the rapport between the Algerian intelligentsia and the Occident resulting in a political divorce, which engendered an important volume of literature that recorded the painful birth of a nation painfully tearing itself from the domination of another.
Caught between the traumas of yesterday’s colonial night, and the uncertainties of tomorrow, the expression of these anxieties produced literary accounts of high value. Their themes varied from a narrative of alienation, to rebellion against colonial injustice, a questioning of decolonisation and imperialism, a revolt against social prejudice, and most importantly an endless search for identity, and an account of the East-West encounter demonstrating all the while that the other of the Maghrebi novel is the Occident.
While decolonisation often meant a repudiation of everything brought by the ex-coloniser including its language, this position tended to lose its intensity as the ex-colonised came to realise the eternal dichotomy between two Occidents: the Occident as a colonial power which is now defeated, and the Occident as a culture and a civilisation which continues to captivate and enchant the Maghrebi person.
Intelligence and Discourse Failure
Authors: Hatlebrekke Kjetil Anders
Published: January 2020

Intelligence as an activity and practice is an extremely complex process. It is this complexity that needs to be understood if intelligence institutions are to hope to diminish the force of discourse failure. The essence of intelligence needs to be acknowledged, and intelligence operatives need proper education and training. Intelligence is a highly demanding profession that is identified by the twelve images that will be described in this chapter. These images also serve as reminders of the challenges of intelligence. Intelligence is method, it is a phenomenon and it is science and knowledge. It constantly deals with uncertainty, and its ultimate objective is to make uncertainty less uncertain through its estimation about the future. It is arguably tempting for many to close cognition, overlook the challenging and displace those factors that do not fit with orthodox beliefs and political assumptions.
Secrecy and Intelligence Tribal Language
Authors: Hatlebrekke Kjetil Anders
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that psychological phenomena, and thus intelligence tribal language, are difficult and challenging to comprehend. Intelligence tribal language is a phenomenon that arises and develops in closed, secretive and often self-referring cultures. This fuels the language as a communication form that can only be fully understood by those who belong to these specific cultures. The language creates a sense of pride and fellow feeling, but it also, and more importantly, develops intellectual isolation and consequently discourse failure between different agencies and their consumers. Each agency probably has its own specific language that increases simultaneously with a changing and increasingly complex threat, since intelligence tribal language develops in the battlefield that arises between the human fear of freedom and the complexities offered by prediction. The communication between the intelligence communities prior to 9/11 was thus significantly hampered.  A complex threat that fused with ‘product protection’ and a ‘need-to-know’ culture, and a rooted self-referring intelligence tribal language, seriously decreased discourse between intelligence operators and between intelligence institutions – but most importantly, and consequently most devastatingly, between the intelligence institutions and the intelligence consumer.
On Collection
Authors: Hatlebrekke Kjetil Anders
Published: January 2020

Blind belief in the force of history make intelligence operatives think that history repeats itself. But history, of course, never repeats itself. Nor do threats repeat themselves. However, they do appear in new forms and varieties, and these may easily be misjudged as historical echoes. This may lead to orthodox beliefs that fuel a classic threat discourse that easily misleads. The US intelligence community thus failed to capitalise on the collected material they already had, and they were therefore not able to identify the change that had occurred on their threat radar. This chapter demonstrates how the US intelligence community’s focus on Afghanistan and bin Laden indicates that bin Laden in practice operated as his own diversion and scapegoat, since he managed to have the US intelligence community focusing more on him than on his organisation and on the threat evolving on American soil. Whether it was intentional or not is unknown, but the focus of US intelligence on bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan led them away from the terrorists in the US. It led the focus of US intelligence away from al Qaeda’s real target; New York and Washington.
On Analysis
Authors: Hatlebrekke Kjetil Anders
Published: January 2020

The understanding and acknowledgement of the problem of induction and its negative force on discourse failure bring intelligence studies towards a new theory of intelligence. The understanding of discourse failure opens a window to intelligence failure as a circular problem that intensifies itself by the human tendency to displace and redirect new knowledge that threatens orthodoxies, political assumptions and a uniform belief in nature. The result is that threats appearing in new variations will not easily be acknowledged or accepted, since they exist outside the normative threat paradigms and outside the existing language available to communicate threats that exist outside the possibilities of induction. The acknowledgement of this phenomenon discloses the problems that arise because intelligence has lacked a proper intelligence theory. It illustrates that if intelligence institutions want to reduce the damaging effect of the problem of induction and discourse fail- ure, and produce qualitative intelligence, they must probe beyond the limits of induction. A deep acknowledgement of the discourse failure theory therefore explains the reciprocal nature of intelli- gence, as well as capturing and identifying the circular dynamic between threats, threat perception and intelligence failure. This chapter examines how this phenomenon shapes intelligence analysis.
On Dissemination
Authors: Hatlebrekke Kjetil Anders
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that threats in general, and terrorist threats as such, are complex in their structures and dynamics. They are hard to comprehend and foresee, and therefore highly challenging to communicate and disseminate. Intellectual courage is therefore called for, since intelligence is useless unless the intelligence producer at some point delivers a product that reduces uncertainty to the decision-maker. Intelligence institutions should therefore replace the need-to-share principle with a courage-to-share strategy. The courage-to-share strategy facilitates and stimulates the intelligence operators’ willingness and ability to believe in their own assessments, and therefore also their cognitive capability to approach complex threats. Intelligence is, in its essence, the bearer of uncertainty and complexity. Threats and the future are by their nature dubious and intelligence institutions should not try to present them as some- thing else.
Celluloid and Paper: Rivalries, Synergies, Crossovers
Authors: Schmid Marion
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores New Wave critics and filmmakers' ambivalent relationship with literature as both the main model to emulate and the major authority to challenge. Literature resurfaces not only in screen adaptation, but, more diffusely, in the myriad citations, inscriptions, and allusions punctuating the cinematic text, as well as in the graphological tropes used to legitimise film as an art form ('auteur', 'cinematic writing', 'camera pen'). The chapter assesses novel attitudes of the New Wave directors to adaptation and to questions of cinematic purity, revisits the collaboration between Nouveau roman writers and Nouvelle Vague directors, and analyses the manifold - sometimes irreverent, sometimes celebratory - incorporations of literature in a selection of films. Particular attention is given to the incorporation of the written word in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave films as a symbol of media tensions in the director's work, and as a crucial example of his interstitial aesthetic, which breaks down traditional media boundaries.
The World as Spectacle: Cinematic Theatricalities
Authors: Schmid Marion
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines theatre's double role as both rival and tutelary figure for New Wave directors. From Alain Resnais's theatrical fictions to Jean-Luc Godard's Brechtian conception of the cinematic medium, not forgetting Jacques Rivette's incorporation of theatre rehearsals and theatrical plots into the filmic fabric, the theatre takes centre stage in the New Wave as cinema's embodied 'other'. The chapter explores the manifold interactions with theatre and theatricality in New Wave film, focusing on intermedial tropes such as mise en abyme and metalepsis, but also interrogating the theatre's capacity - as postulated by Rivette - to reveal cinema to itself. We will see that the collective practices of avant-garde theatre of the 1950s and 60sopen up the concept of the auteur, creating a new space for improvisation and creative collaboration.
Painterly Hybridisations
Authors: Schmid Marion
Published: January 2020

New Wave film exhibits a wealth of interactions with painting, ranging from the most literal inscriptions - the referencing of paintings, presence of painter figures and recording of the act of painting - to a plethora of more subterranean interactions. Taking Eric Rohmer's essay 'The Century of Painters' and André Bazin's'Painting and Cinema' as its starting point, this chapter analyses the movement's appropriation and reframing of the visual arts. Revisiting Jean-Luc Godard's incorporation of artworks in his films,it considers the director's practicealongside two filmmakers who were trained in the fine arts, AgnèsVarda and Guy Gilles. The chapter investigates seminal intermedial figurations such as the tableau vivant, as well as charting the three directors' varied engagement with a visual heritage no longer perceived as a restrictive model, but, on the contrary, as a rich repository of iconographies, motifs and techniques to be appropriated and reimagined.
Introduction: The Franchise Era
Authors: Fleury James , Hartzheim Bryan Hikari , Mamber Stephen
Published: January 2020

The introduction chapter provides an overview of the key elements of media franchises in the context of ongoing digital technology developments. In particular, the chapter explains the history of media franchising and how technologies like video games and streaming video have encouraged a shift from multimedia to transmedia franchise management. A summary of significant shifts in contemporary media franchising follows, including a lack of mid-budget projects in favor of blockbusters, the replacement of stars with characters, experiments with cinematic universes instead of just one-off “tentpoles,” the role of television within franchise management, the pursuit of global audiences, and the entrance of Silicon Valley technology companies into Hollywood. The chapter concludes with a summary of the main ideas of each essay within the edited collection.
The (Im)Perfect Organism: Dissecting the Alien Media Franchise
Authors: Fleury James , Mamber Stephen
Published: January 2020

This essay works toward a definition of the media franchise and uses the Alien franchise (1979-Present) to consider how digital technologies have influenced a shift in franchise management from multimedia to transmedia. The Alien franchise illustrates how the transition from multimedia to transmedia has brought new demands, such as stricter continuity among texts, stronger collaboration between licensors and licensees, and regular engagement with fans. The authors argue that Hollywood’s turn from multimedia replication to transmedia expansion has led to conflicts of textual continuity, creative ownership, and public relations within the Alien franchise. The chapter dissects these conflicts through the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013) as a case study of media franchise mismanagement.
Evil Spawn or Good Business? New Line Cinema, Critters, and Film Franchising at the Margins
Authors: Herbert Daniel
Published: January 2020

Daniel Herbert presents a historical examination of New Line Cinema’s Critters (1986-Present) franchise. The essay looks at the role that home video early on played in the development of media franchises and also explains the centrality of Critters and other franchises to the development of New Line itself. The essay provides an example of franchise management from the industry’s margins.
The Happiest Plays On Earth: Theme Park Franchising in Disneyland Video Games
Authors: Birdsall Heather Lea
Published: January 2020

Heather Lea Birdsall explores the Disney theme parks as a branded franchise space through a number of its video game appearances, including Kinect Disneyland Adventures (Microsoft Studios, 2011) and its 2017 re-release Disneyland Adventures. Her essay makes clear that franchise management unites multiple physical and digital spaces in its strategic global expansion. She argues that tracing the history of Disney park-based games and apps, and considering other ways that the parks have been ‘gamified,’ reveals an ever-deepening trend of using digital game modalities to expand the Disney parks beyond their physical limitations as a means by which to establish and further them as a super-media franchise.
“Now They’re Playing with Power!”: Nintendo’s Classics and Franchise Legacy Management
Authors: Payne Matthew Thomas
Published: January 2020

Matthew Thomas Payne’s chapter considers the role of franchise management through video games. He uses the case study of Nintendo’s NES and SNES micro-consoles. His essay posits that franchises can refer to both software and hardware, as the built-in games on Nintendo’s mini-consoles function as a form of franchise management and corporate canonizing by privileging certain video game texts over others.
TV Brand-Casting, Svod, and Ott at Comcast and Disney
Authors: Gillan Jennifer
Published: January 2020

Jennifer Gillan’s chapter looks at how television sitcoms have become another promotional arm by which parent companies prop up their franchises. She considers how sitcoms can play a part in what she calls ‘transmedia marketing circuits,’ looking specifically at the content-as-promotion strategies connected to Black-ish (ABC, 2014-Present) and Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009-2015). The essay demonstrates that, with the rapid spread of subscription video on demand services that are either directly owned by or are supplied with content from the studios, television content is but one group of repurposable and reusable assets in massive, integrated platforms.
Locating Esports Spectatorship—Studio Audience(ing) and Sites of Speculation
Authors: Champlin Alexander
Published: January 2020

Alexander Champlin focuses on esports, one of the fastest-growing entertainment markets today. His essay specifically analyzes the relationship between esports franchises (i.e., teams), branded esports studio spaces, and video game franchises. Based on five years of site visits, Champlin examines the history of the North American League of Legends Championship Series studio and, to a more minor extent, the Blizzard Arena.
History/Genealogy/Gothic: Godwin, Scott and their Progeny
Authors: Miles Robert
Published: January 2020

This essay argues that William Godwin's theory of historical romance may be placed in productive dialogue with Michel Foucault's influential preference for Nietzschean 'genealogy' over conventional history. For both, a narrative capable of unfolding the motive forces of history will necessarily be dispersed, contingent and fragmentary. This line of genealogical Gothic is traceable from Godwin through Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in England, and through Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville in America. In genealogical Gothic, history is expressed as trauma, as an originating event that leads to haunting and repetition experienced by the sufferer as (to use Melville's term) 'tranced grief'. These narratives may be contrasted with Walter Scott's versions of the historical romance, which look to narrate some kind of historical resolution to the conflicts of the past. In this respect, genealogical Gothic relates to Scott as New Historicism does to grand narratives.
Postcolonial Gothic in and as Theory
Authors: Rudd Alison
Published: January 2020

A number of cultural theorists and literary critics have identified the postcolonial as freighted with the legacies of colonialism. The Gothic has been invoked by some of these theorists to emphasize the effects of the colonial past in the postcolonial present. In some postcolonial fiction, the Gothic provides a framework or lens through which to analyse and discuss the postcolonial experience presented within that fiction. With others, however, the fictional text itself is the framework which interrogates and critiques the social, political and economic structures that shape the postcolonial experience. This chapter will consider the relationship between the Gothic and the postcolonial, as they inform and shape each other, with particular reference to the novels of the Australian writer, Mudrooroo, who in his Master of the Ghost Dreaming series (1991-2000) utilizes a range of literary and critical devices in order to excavate and foreground an Aboriginal voice.
Abjection as Gothic and the Gothic as Abjection
Authors: Hogle Jerrold E.
Published: January 2020

Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) has had a profound effect on the analysis of Gothic works. Building on Freud, Lacan, and others, it posits a "throwing over" of the deepest anomalies at the roots of human being - the inseparable intermingling of life and death and self and other at the moment of birth - into what seems an alien, other figure (the 'abject', such as Frankenstein's creature) so that the abjecting subject can construct a wholeness of consistent identity over against it. This process, as Slavoj Zizek has emphasized, is even a socio-cultural one, whereby populations abject underlying social conflicts into supposedly alien others. The abject figures in many Gothic works, then, are fear-inducting sites prompting terror or horror because they enact this scheme. In fact, they do so because the whole idea of abjection hearkens back to the very nature of Gothic symbol-making from Horace Walpole on.
Unsettling Feminism: The Savagery of Gothic
Authors: Spooner Catherine
Published: January 2020

Feminist criticism has tended to find in Gothic texts a model of its own master narrative, in which the female subject flees the house of patriarchy. This chapter proposes an alternative model for thinking through gender and the Gothic by returning to Ellen Moers' concept of the 'savagery of girlhood' (1977). The femininities constructed in Gothic texts are often barbaric in the sense of being abjected from the rational, orderly and proper body of feminism conceived as an enlightenment, humanist project. In this barbarism, Gothic offers a feminism that is characteristically unsettling and itself unsettled. Addressing a number of theoretical models from 'victim feminism' to posthumanism and drawing on texts from Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798) to Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (2009), this chapter reveals that it is in its difficulties and contradictions that Gothic has its greatest power to offer contemporary feminism.
Techno-Terrors and the Emergence of Cyber-Gothic
Authors: der Lippe Anya Heise-von
Published: January 2020

Inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, cybergothic texts from the late 20th and early 21st century have explored fears of posthuman becomings. While monstrous machineries and techno-hybridizations are, of course, central tropes of the Science Fiction genre, it is within a framework of Gothic textuality that these fears can be explored in a more self-conscious and theoretical manner. This chapter presents a reading of James Tiptree's 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In' (1974) in light of one of the most central questions of cyber-theory - that of control. Harking back to Frankenstein's struggle over narrative, scientific, gendered and otherwise embodied aspects of control, Tiptree's seminal novella proves to be an exemplary text within an emerging self- and theory-conscious, cybergothic mode, addressing questions of genre, gender, techno-embodiment, narrative construction, and the need for (cybernetic) control over our technological monsters in a manner that connects the Gothic with a number of cyber-theoretical concerns.
Dark Materialism: Gothic Objects, Commodities and Things
Authors: Botting Fred
Published: January 2020

This chapter theorises the significance and effect of the strange objects and spectral Things populating Gothic fiction. It develops a novel and dual sense of materialism by combining Georges Bataille's 'base matter' with Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism. The argument demonstrates how figures of horror both disclose the phantasmatic nature of bourgeois reality and give image and affect to the shadowy dominance of capital as a vampiric drive for surplus value. Things, from this perspective, display the interdependence of a reality determined by commodities, on the one hand, and fictions relishing spectres and monsters, on the other: the former's sense of what is real is defined in terms of, and against, the latter's palpable fictionality. That interdependence informs Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things as it traces the complicity between a cruelly economic materialism preoccupied by profit and the dark fantasies promulgated throughout the Gothic canon.
Thinking the Thing: The Outer Reaches of Knowledge in Lovecraft and Deleuze
Authors: Powell Anna
Published: January 2020

H.P. Lovecraft's paranoid Gothic and the life-affirming philosophy of Gilles Deleuze are, despite polarities, a potent machine for thinking the unthinkable. Lovecraft's modern 'cosmic terror' overturns dominant paradigms of thought by exposing multiplicity and transformation. For Deleuze, Lovecraft's minor fiction thinks 'beyond the matter of any lived or liveable experience' and challenges the sovereignty of selfhood. Lovecraft's 'nature-defying illusions' evoke 'outsideness' via affects that 'go beyond the strength of those who undergo them'. Such images effectively produce pure difference, the ultimately chaotic thing in itself. Lovecraft's things have profound implications for any human 'self' encountering them, exposing the 'limited & fragmentary nature' of human consciousness when faced by 'the outside abyss of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions'. If reason fails us, we need another way to reach the unthinkable. This chapter asserts the resonance of Lovecraft's fiction and theory with Deleuze's speculative philosophy of 'becoming' via the transformative powers of the virtual.
On the Threshold of Gothic: A Reflection
Authors: Punter David
Published: January 2020

David Punter's The Literature of Terror (1980) is a landmark in Gothic criticism. But, since then, much has changed. For a start, theory has come, and, to an extent, gone, but not without leaving its mark. If 'literary theory' is now less likely to be taught as a separate course in universities, that is because it is otherwise ubiquitous. Gothic, meanwhile, has moved from the critical margins to the mainstream. Faced with all that and having initiated the current conversation between the Gothic and theory, this major Gothic scholar here considers 'what are we on the threshold of now'. To what extent have the questions raised in 1980 been answered? And how satisfactorily? What remains elusive? And what have been the conversation's limitations? This concluding essay reflects less on the chapters that precede it and more on the changes in the theory-Gothic interplay that have been wrought since The Literature of Terror while also looking ahead to the likely directions of future work.
Introduction
Authors: White John
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the concept of ‘American values’ in the light of presidential speeches by George W. Bush, considering ideas such as ‘freedom’ and ‘justice,’ concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘family,’ and notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ The resulting evocation of a very particular vision of the ‘nation’ is then viewed in relation the types of narrative to be found in a range of contemporary, post-9/11 Westerns. In summary, it is suggested that in the films under consideration in this book, the nature of the world as a place of confrontation between good and evil, and within which soft liberal values simply will not be sufficient for good to win out over evil, is constantly brought home, both to characters and to the audience. The suggestion is that as part of American culture these films reflect the current ideological context of the United States.
The Anchorless Postmodern Experience within an Ahistorical Filmic Space: Django Unchained (2012)
Authors: White John
Published: January 2020

This chapter considers the way in which Django Unchained (2012) is specifically positioned by the director within a well-defined historical period but is then constructed very clearly as a cinematic fantasy. It is argued that this film, despite genuine concerns on the part of those involved in its making for the ramifications of slavery, does not look to exist in relation to a real space and time but instead within an intense matrix of film references. The relationship of this film to Hollywood classics, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), as well as to spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation (and sexploitation) movies is examined with reference to specific details from the films. The intense background historical research undertaken by Tarantino is acknowledged. Ultimately, however, the film is seen as a postmodernist text, which because of its ahistorical form is able to escape the need to fully address historical reality.
Introduction
Authors: Demson Michael , Hewitt Regina
Published: January 2020

This Introduction provides an overview of the events that came to be known as the 'Peterloo Massacre' and of assessments that try to account for the violent reaction it received. Drawing on theories by Chandler, Tilly, Butler, Žižek and Nixon, it categorizes the attitudes toward physical force and toward the claims of 'the people' on government evident in the historical record into narratives of 'diminishing' and 'dispersing' violence. Looking at how these narratives were developed in Romantic-era literature, it offers a new interpretation of the conflict in St Peter's Field as indicative of a change in attitudes toward violence as a 'normal' occurrence. It finds that a decreasing pattern of direct confrontation facilitated the Parliamentary Reform that Peterloo protesters sought while a pattern of subtle repression limited the extent to which popular claim-making would be heard.
Henry Hunt’s White Hat: The Long Tradition of Mute Sedition
Authors: Pittock Murray
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Henry Hunt's signature white hat in the context of the use of the tradition of using colours and material objects to signify oppositional opinion while evading prosecution for sedition. It traces the performativity of mute sedition from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, while focusing on the French Revolutionary period and the widely understood nature of Hunt's headgear for his followers and admirers.
Responses to Peterloo in Scotland, 1819–1822
Authors: Carruthers Gerard
Published: January 2020

This essay traces the rapid agitated reception of Peterloo in Scotland, especially in the lowland west among the skilled working class. It also looks at the responses of Scottish Tory writers, in the reactionary mindsets of Walter Scott and William Motherwell and in the more nuanced treatment by John Galt. The emotion and wider political issues surrounding the release of Henry Hunt from jail are particularly focused upon via the proceedings of a convivial meeting at the Saracen Head inn in Paisley in 1822. As part of the detail of the network of Scottish public response to Peterloo, other events including especially the so-called 'Radical War' in Scotland of 1820 and its subsequent commemoration are sketched.
Political Suicide: Castlereagh, Rebellion and Self-Directed Violence
Authors: Faubert Michelle
Published: January 2020

Attention to the violence of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 usually focuses on that of the soldiers who attacked the peaceful protesters gathered to demand equal representation and workers' rights. However, this chapter demonstrates that the event and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the intense concern with, and conflicting attitudes towards, self-directed violence and its ultimate expression, suicide, in Romantic-era Britain. Self-directed violence met with a variety of legal and cultural responses in the long eighteenth-century, but it was often presented sympathetically as a courageous political act that asserted individual autonomy in the face of implacable tyranny in Romantic literature. This theme was threatened, however, when Viscount Castlereagh - Conservative defender in the House of Commons of the government's attack at Peterloo, and the very figure of despotism in the period - slit his own throat with a pen knife in 1822.
Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: January 2020

Igor Krstić brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’ (Hamid Naficy) with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, Krstić provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. His study includes readings of The Nine Muses(Akomfrah, 2009),Grandmother’s Flower(Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), Home (Hruza, 2008) and A Hungarian Passport(Kogut, 2001).
The World Essay Film and the Politics of Traceability
Authors: Avezzù Giorgio , Fidotta Giuseppe
Published: January 2020

Genèse d’un repas(Moullet, 1979), Ananas(Gitai, 1984) and The Forgotten Space (Burch & Sekula, 2010) constitute three cinematic attempts at representing the global production and distribution networks of commodities. Giorgio Avezzù and Giuseppe Fidotta argue in this chapter that these films, due to their central concern with late capitalism and globalisation, can be labelled ‘World Essay Films’. They question, however, the multi-layered dynamics of global economy and cinema from the standpoint of Cultural Geography and Visual Studies. Although the World Essay Film’s central question pertains to the ways in which the interconnectedness of the world can be made visible, material, spatial, these films also play, as they argue, on the anxieties related to the invisibility of late-capitalist world, whose flows and networks seem to escape conventional representation. This inherent contradiction poses a challenge to realistic aesthetics and the documentary.
‘Time Turning Into Space’: Innocence of Memories’ Prismatic Istanbul
Authors: O’Farrell Tim
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees Gee’s film functioning in multiple registers, principally as a kind of palimpsest, referring to and writing over Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) and also referencing in multi-layered and intricate ways the real museum of the same name, located prominently in the centre of Istanbul. Both film and novel, as Tim O’ Farrell shows in an extended reading of the works, straddle a deep love of the past, a desire to preserve and understand it, and a fascination with the inexorability of time, transformation and notions of progress. Fact and fiction are thereby multiply entangled, produced by and supporting the disjunctive practice and interstitiality of the essay film, as the author points out with reference to Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical work How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).
Lovers in Time: An Essay Film of Contested Memories
Authors: Elsaesser Thomas , Piotrowska Agnieszka
Published: January 2020

This chapter is in two parts – part one is by Thomas Elsaesser commenting on the unstable form of the essay film and making the case for practice based research to count as an essayistic form, exemplified by Agnieszka Piotrowska’s film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare (2015) and her complementary book Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts in Zimbabwe (2016). Part two consists of Piotrowska’s reflections on the making of her film, on the nature of postcolonial trauma in psychoanalytical terms and to what extent it can be worked through or ameliorated by creative collaborations. Piotrowska offers some further ‘behind the scenes’ insights into the experience of making a film in a post-colonial, post-traumatic environment, and the knowledge gained through this experience.
Introduction: Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarisation of Time
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

This introduction returns to modernism’s incipient moments as the “Jonbar hinge” or pivot point for an alternative history of the period’s well-known time fixation. Using Lefebvre to reconsider aestheticism and impressionism in light of multiplicity rather than ephemerality, this new time-story expands the cultural significance and function of Wells’s foundational trope of the time machine to show how twentieth-century culture was defined not just by a Bergsonian repudiation of the clock but also by a proliferation of clocks. The rise of the time-travel trope, from the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, can be reconsidered not only as a symptom of the “eternal present” of late capitalism or our lost sense of history, but also as a component in a larger network that produces heterochrony—time’s multiple rates, scales, and reference frames. Our current political desire to revise history and envision other histories in contemporary discourses connects to the century-wide imaginative contestation of historical progress and the earlier openness to history’s irregular rhythms, its variety of scales, and its divarication of branches.
The Heterochronic Past and Sidewise Historicity: T. S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso and Murray Leinster
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

At the beginning of the twentieth century, primitivism and paleomodernism appeared to reflect primarily those conditions out of which both modernism and SF have been shown to emerge: evolutionary and imperial conceptions of history. Modernism’s complex engagement with late-nineteenth-century time culture went beyond a simple turn toward the past and produced alternative conceptions of time and history. This chapter explores the idea of heterochrony derived from evolutionary biology’s knowledge of the body’s hodgepodge of disjunctive timings and times in order to reexamine two canonical orientations toward the past—Eliot’s tradition and Picasso’s primitivism. Drawing a connection with Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), which features a jumbled and patchwork geography comprising a “Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee,” a Russian Alaska and California, and preindustrial Chinese settlements around the Potomac, this chapter reconfigures modernist “pastism” against the notion of a single, progressive, evolutionary history justifying racist imperial schemes, as well as the shallowing of time by capitalist space-time compression.
Time Lags And Differential Pace: Bullet Time, William Faulkner and Jessica Hagedorn
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins with the way Wesely’s record-breaking pinhole photographs from Open Shutter (2004) use the effect of blur to connect relative rates of movement to larger histories as such. Similarly, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is focused on racialised time lag not simply between two points on a single historical line, but between different histories that move at different rates and go their own ways. Here, the temporal aspect of double consciousness – of always living in someone else’s time and yet also located in a distinctive history marked by laggy access – connects with postcolonial treatments of time lag and the way in which historical behindness opens onto the tangle of histories that appears synecdochically in the plane of the present as heterogeneity. Finally, Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003) stages the collision, overlap and differences between the story of Magellan’s ‘discovery’ of the Philippines, the 1970s hoax of the uncontacted ‘Stone Age’ Tasaday people, the filming of contemporary US history in Apocalypse Now in Mindanao, and the long-running Moro insurgency. Each of these texts contains a bullet-time scene in which the dilation of the encounter of disjunctive rhythms reveals a heterochronic assemblage of time-paths and historical frames.
Alternate History And The Presence of Other Presents: Virginia Woolf, Philip K. Dick and Christopher Nolan
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter addresses the aesthetic exploration of historical alternatives by thinking about strange conceptions of historicity and the fantasy of alternate histories in three different texts: Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Each of these texts not only thematises the condition of temporal alongsidedness but also formally structures itself by means of crosscut parallel plotlines that de-synchronise from one another. Nolan’s film uses parallel editing, normally deployed to construct simultaneity, to represent the de-synchronisation among reference frames. Woolf’s modernist text is an early model of this very specific sort of alternate history, a text that is likewise a kind of post-apocalyptic meditation on a variety of rhythms in a present interpenetrated by what might have been and what comes next. Dick’s text is like Woolf’s novel, featuring two main characters who never meet and live in timelines with differing pace, duration and sets of possibility. All of these texts are not interested simply in a mutation of a past sequence that produces a forking historical path with an altered present and future, but in the reconfiguration of alternativity, historicity and the present in the context of diverging concurrent trajectories.
I Was Sitting in a Room: Cybernetic Aesthetics and Victor Burgin’s Projection Loops
Authors: Bishop Ryan
Published: January 2020

I was Sitting in a Room: Cybernetic Aesthetics and Victor Burgin's Projection Loops The chapter examines the loops that structure Victor Burgin's projection pieces in relation to works by US composer Alvin Lucier to suggest that a form of cybernetic and post-digital aesthetics is operative in each, resulting in similar ethical and political agendas regarding agency, space and attentiveness. Burgin's discussion of his digitally-modified panoramas addresses the 'zero degree' of perspective that he crafts in them, suggesting that technological systems of information-gathering and perception simultaneously provide the conditions for a perceiving and understanding subject while removing the subject from the picture through the performance of its subject matter: 'the disembodied point of view'. The desire of the zero degree renders an aesthetics and politics that speak neatly to cybernetic formulations. The chapter argues that the seemingly anti-humanist qualities of cybernetic aesthetics and Burgin's decidedly humanist aesthetic steer actually lead to the same ethical and political agenda regarding agency, space and attentiveness.
Prairie
Authors: Burgin Victor
Published: January 2020

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Introduction: Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in the Victorian Period
Authors: Easley Alexis , Gill Clare , Rodgers Beth
Published: January 2020

This volume aims to both broaden and deepen understanding of women’s active engagement with this expanded periodical print culture, be that as consumers or contributors, in the context of the ‘general’ press and the dedicated women’s press, in both its commercial and specialised forms. Moving beyond expected periodical titles, geographical locations, and scholarly assumptions, the 35 essays collected in this volume reveal the complexity of women’s participation with print media and the diversity of their contributions as authors, readers, editors, journalists, correspondents, engravers, and illustrators. These chapters demonstrate the variety of trajectories forged by women as they entered into print, cultivated a public voice, and shaped public discourses about women’s lives, issues, and interests. Yet while the growth of the press undoubtedly empowered women to develop public identities and pursue professional careers, the conventions of journalistic publication problematised the notion of individual agency in significant ways. So while this volume showcases the diversity of opportunities created for women by the expansion of Victorian print media, both as producers and as consumers, it also explores the limits of that freedom.
Avatars, Pseudonyms, and the Regulation of Affect: Performing and Occluding Gender in the Pall Mall Gazette
Authors: Dillane Fionnuala
Published: January 2020

In this essay, Fionnuala Dillane draws upon theories of affect to show how the affective space of the letters page functioned to reinforce ‘structures of feeling in nineteenth-century emotional economies,’ which had especial significance for women writers, who ‘could make their mark on public discourse more readily and more regularly than in other periodical publication formats’ (p. 337). One of the consequences of women’s intervention in the public space of the periodical was that male journalists attempted to regulate their contributions. As Dillane demonstrates, copy produced by male writers in ‘avatar mode’ to the letters page of the Pall Mall Gazette functioned not only to underpin the paper’s ‘clubby, homosocial’ atmosphere but also, more egregiously, to ‘censor and restrict women’s access to public spaces and public debate’ (p. 343). Moreover, the use of avatars and pseudonyms in a space more readily associated with signature calls our attention to the performative qualities of letters pages, which are ‘amongst the most fictive, manipulative spaces of the press, playing regularly on the feeling reader’ (p. 347).
Introduction
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

This book picks up where most books on the American Syria Mission have left off-in 1860, when civil war threw the Syrian Protestant community and the wider Ottoman Syrian society into chaos. This opening chapter introduces the diverse characters who sought to rebuild Syrian society and became enmeshed or entangled in one another’s history during the Arab renaissance (Nahda) that picked up steam in the late nineteenth century: American missionaries, Ottoman administrators, Syrian Protestants, and others from Syria’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze sects. It proposes setting the dominant Western male missionary narrative alongside the overlooked stories of Ottoman residents-especially women-and it locates this exploration of Syrian Protestant history within the field of World Christianity.
“Publishing” the Gospel, Reading the Nahda: Protestant Print Culture in Late Ottoman Syria
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 turns to the American Mission Press in Beirut, which was a site of American-Syrian collaboration and a resource for Syrian Protestants to participate in the Arab cultural and literary renaissance. Locating the Nahda in Beirut within the context of broader nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movements, the chapter explores the socio-cultural contributions of Protestant men who wrote for the American Mission Press beginning in the 1870s. It demonstrates that these authors - including the nahdawi scholar Ibrahim al-Hurani - engaged in Nahda production not only through Arabic poetry, scientific studies, and other “secular” publications, but also in their writings on Islam and through press debates with Jesuit missionaries, Syrian Catholics, and Greek Orthodox leaders.
A Feminist Awakening? Evangelical Women and the Arab Renaissance
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

Syrian Protestant women did not join in the published theological debates of the Christian presses in Beirut, but chapter 3 reveals that in the 1880s they began publishing sermons and articles on female education and child-rearing (tarbiya) for the mission periodical al-Nashra al-Usbu’iyya (The Weekly Bulletin). Along with the books and novels that women published at the American Mission Press, these largely neglected articles put Syrian Protestant women at the forefront of the Arab women’s awakening that gained momentum in the early twentieth century and united Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women activists. These proto-feminist authors occupied the traditionally masculine sphere of Arabic production and carved out a space for women’s intellectual and spiritual leadership in the Protestant community. Among these women were the acclaimed journalists Farida ’Atiya, Hanna Kurani, and Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya.
Syrian Women With A Mission: Preaching The Bible And Building The Protestant Church
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

As counterparts to the women writers of the Nahda, Syrian Biblewomen (women evangelists) pursued equally subversive activities as they preached spiritual revival in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian homes and in rural areas far beyond the elite Protestant circles of Beirut. This final chapter pieces together the elusive history of these women preachers who were members of the American mission’s Evangelical Churches but turned to the female-led British Syrian Mission to support their preaching vocations. This research considers how the Victorian era’s conception of “woman’s work for woman” manifested itself in Syria. The chapter introduces another layer of complexity in the Syrian missionary encounter, which brought together American Protestants, Syrians of all religious backgrounds, and members of other Western missionary societies.
Conclusion
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

The networks connecting American missionaries, Syrian Protestants and other residents of Ottoman Syria expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as mission churches and institutions multiplied, as the American Mission Press advanced the Arab renaissance, and as Syrian Protestants engaged their own society through ...
The Azd in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter first reviews the evidence for al-Azd in Epigraphic South Arabian inscriptions, and argues that there was one al-Azd kingdom centered on Jurash in the Wadi Bisha and perhaps another elsewhere. It then discusses the “Scattering of al-Azd” accounts in the Arabic sources, arguing that the Malik b. Fahm accounts served as an origin story for al-Azd in Oman, and were grafted onto separate accounts of Amr Muzayqiya which served as the basis for the “southern” Arabs (Yemen) in Umayyad times. The evidence for al-Azd in both the pre-Islamic (Jahiliyya) Sarat Mountains and Oman is then reviewed, along with the impact of the rise of Islam in these areas. Finally, it notes the significance of Bedouin to later senses of Arabness as important in the primary sources on pre-Islamic Arabia.