bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crafting the extraordinary: site-specificity and liveness
Authors: Vélez-Serna María A.
Published: January 2021

‘Experiential’ forms of exhibition use liveness and site-specificity as strategies
to valorize the eventfulness of an engagement with film. This chapter
explores different practices and intentions of eventful cinema. It first
examines liveness as a power struggle between exhibitor and text, which
needs to be understood in relation to the showmanship tradition of early
and classical eras. It then discusses site-specific screenings, considering
different ways to modulate the encounter between environment and film
projection, from the diegetically immersive to the distracted and relaxed.
Finally, it returns to intermediality as a creative opportunity generated
by non-theatrical exhibition.
Jafar Panahi’s Forbidden Tetralogy
Authors: Nagib Lúcia
Published: January 2021

Chapter 2 brings a reflection on Jafar Panahi’s forbidden tetralogy, This
Is Not a Film (co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain
(Pardeh, co-directed by Kambuzia Partovi, 2013), Taxi Tehran (Taxi, 2015)
and Three Faces (Se rokh, 2018), all of which have come into being despite
(or as a result of) the 20-year ban from making films imposed on him
by the Iranian authorities. Forcibly shot in enclosed spaces, these films
are marked by a relentless scrutiny of their restrained locations and of
the director himself, turned into reluctant protagonist of his non-films.
In such restrictive circumstances, Panahi’s irrepressible creative vein
is channelled towards bringing to the fore, with radical realism, film’s
inherent conundrum between its recording and artistic properties.
Film as Death
Authors: Nagib Lúcia
Published: January 2021

Chapter 3 focuses on The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine
Cynn and anonymous), a film that opens up uncharted territory on which
to recast the tenets of documentary, world cinema and filmmaking in
general. It required the crew to put their lives at risk in the name of a
project they hoped would change the way we experience cinema and
reality with it. The film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is
least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the
film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, or a fantasy
realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints
or fear of punishment, but which retains the evidentiary weight of the
recording medium.
The Geidōmono Genre and Intermedial Acting in Ozu and Mizoguchi
Authors: Nagib Lúcia
Published: January 2021

Chapter 5 revisits the work of two cinematic giants, Kenji Mizoguchi
and Yasujirō Ozu, and their recourse to theatre in The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Floating Weeds (Ukigusa,
1959) respectively. In them, the mediums of theatre and film are scrutinised
through the self-reflexive genre of geidōmono, encompassing films in
which the protagonist is a practitioner of one of the traditional Japanese
arts. Here, theatre serves both the Mizoguchi and the Ozu films to break
down the system at the base of the mediums of theatre and film into their
constitutive parts, provide evidence of their reality, and propose a fairer
arrangement of them, in particular as regards the ruthless hierarchy
embedded in both mediums.
Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao’s discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.
Coming Out of The Box, Lalas with DV Cameras
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on China’s earliest documentaries about lesbian
subjects, The Box (Ying Weiwei, 2001) and Dyke March (Shi Tou/Ming Ming,
2004), examining the imbrication of technique and content, and the issue
of “objectivity” in documentary filmmaking. It further raises the question
of how we produce knowledge about social others. Foregrounding the
tension between The Box’s knowledge/power scheme and LGBTQ-oriented
politics, I then turn to Dyke March to explore the contrast in its sensitivity
to the socio-political specificities of its subjects, and its political activist
responsibility for its subjects. This chapter finally introduces four more
recent lesbian documentaries from China, highlighting a developing trend
in Chinese lesbian documentary filmmaking: independent production that
emphasizes both collaboration and the specificity of a lesbian identity.
The Interaction of Canon and History
Authors: Nicklas Tobias
Published: January 2021

In his chapter, Tobias Nicklas focuses on the dynamic interconnections between what became the early Christian canon of the Holy Writings of the Bible and the identities resulting from the history of various Christian groups. The development of the canon was decisive for the beliefs of the Christians and their identity, but changes in the group identities led to changes of perspectives on the canon in various contexts. Thus, the ‘canonical process’ did not come to its end with the discontinuity of the closure especially of the canon. As a matter of fact, other writings that do not claim to be part of the canon, fulfil a function analogous to canonical writings, as the reception history of several so-called apocryphal writings and martyrdom passages imply. Building on Maurice Hallbwachs’ concepts of ‘social memories’ (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire), and ‘collective memory’ (La mémoire collective), Nicklas critically analyses the relationship between memory and martyrdom and argues that while most of the canonical texts have been largely forgotten the landscapes of memory which were created by these texts still exist. This argument highlights the contestation but also the non-fixation and exclusivity of canons.
The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
Authors: Furstenberg Yair
Published: January 2021

Yair Furstenberg discusses the changing nature of canonisation of a cluster
of martyrdom traditions about the ten rabbinic sages, who were executed
by the Romans in the First or Second century CE. The canonical texts were
transmitted as isolated stories in several rabbinic writings, which were
only combined to a grand narrative in Late Antiquity or the early Medieval
period. One indication of the major re-interpretation of martyrdom in this
period is the fact that instead of idolatry or the transgression of a Roman
decree or another reason that was obvious from a Roman perspective,
the ten Rabbis were executed because the emperor found out that the
Jews were never punished for the ancestral sin of selling Joseph to the
Ishmaelite merchants (Gen. 37:23-37). This implies that their death was
intended by God, which was confirmed by the heavenly journey of one
of these Rabbis, Rabbi Ishmael, to inquire about their case. Furstenberg
argues that the evolution of the Story of the Ten Martyrs from its Talmudic
foundations in interaction with Christianity betrays a fundamental shift in
Jewish martyrological discourse that reveals the strategy for confronting
the religious claims of political power through the act of martyrdom.
Swimming the Crawl to Educate the Modern Body : Visual Material and the Expanding Market for Participatory Sports in the USA, 1890s–1930s
Authors: Stieglitz Olaf
Published: January 2021

This essay outlines how sports photography and film from the early twentieth
century have been used to introduce US-Americans to a scientific
understanding of human bodies and their motions. It asks how certain
groups tried to make sure that this modern perspective became not only
ubiquitous but also a marketable commodity. The essay focuses on crawl
swimming because its motions became increasingly related to discussing
modernity and modern bodies. Furthermore, crawl swimming was densely
charged along racial and gendered lines: The modernity of the sporting
body and its visual appeal rested significantly on ideas of racial hierarchies
and a changing as well as problematic perception of women’s roles in
public. In that sense, swimming was doing gender as well as doing race.
Shadow Exchanges along the New Silk Roads
Authors: Hung Eva P. W. , Ngo Tak-Wing , Schendel Willem , KARRAR Hasan , BERTHET Samuel , KHARE Vaijayanti , CHAPAGAIN Arjun , GLEDIĆ Jelena , ADAMS Olga , ZUENKO Ivan , HANDKE Susann , MATHEWS Gordons
Published: January 2021

Long before China promulgated the official One Belt One Road initiatives, vast networks of cross-border exchanges already existed across Asia and Eurasia. The dynamics of such trade and resource flows have largely been outside state control, and are pushed to the realm of the shadow economy. The official initiative is a state-driven attempt to enhance the orderly flow of resources across countries along the Belt and Road, hence extending the reach of the states to the shadow economies. This volume offers a bottom-up view of the transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia, and analyses its clash and mesh with the state-orchestrated Belt and Road cooperation. By undertaking a comparative study of country cases along the new silk roads, the book underlines the intended and unintended consequences of such competing routes of connectivity on the socio-economic conditions of local communities.
On the Margins of History: Good Old Soviet Times
Authors: Melchior Inge
Published: January 2021

Chapter 2 explores the taboo on positive stories of the Soviet period in the light of the emotional story of rupture. Although quantitative analyses show that about half of the ethnic Estonians believe that certain things were better in the ESSR than currently, these positive stories remain publicly silenced. Especially in the cities one is afraid to be a national betrayer. The story of Tõnis in the countryside shows that being critical of the rupture narrative is his way to safeguard national solidarity, preserve the real, uncontaminated memories, and stay true to his ancestors. Ultimately, thus, Tõnis shares the same values as those who adhere to the rupture narrative. By circumventing closure, he assures citizen participation and preserves apolitical memories.
Fosterage in the Medieval Irish Church
Authors: O’Donnell Tom C.
Published: January 2021

Irish religious writers used the language of fosterage to describe relationships saints created within and between monasteries. Fosterage was used because it focused on education and the idea of a family without a biological connection. Fosterage was used to describe oblation and monastic education. Tying the practices of monastic recruitment to such a social pillar within medieval Irish society insulated monasteries, to a certain extent, from the debates on oblation taking place on the Continent. Fosterage was based around education, feeding and care, and as such was readily incorporated into religious writing that described human relationships with a caring and nurturing divinity.
Animal Fosterage: A Bestial Parallel?
Authors: O’Donnell Tom C.
Published: January 2021

Fosterage was used as a metaphor to describe relationships between humans and animals. This chapter takes the Life of Saint Ailbe as its central case study to trace how human and animal relationships were thought of and described in medieval Ireland. Ailbe is taken in as a child by a wolf in the wilderness and raised with her pups. Unlike other tales of this type, the relationship between Ailbe and the wolf continues after Ailbe is taken back to human society, modelled as it is on fosterage. This study highlights the permeable boundary between humans and animals and the use of fosterage as medieval tool for thinking.
Introduction
Authors: O’Donnell Tom C.
Published: January 2021

In this Introduction the case is made for using the narrative literature of the medieval period to access the emotional lives of foster families in medieval Ireland. Foster families in this context are those formed when freeborn families send their children – often at a very young age – to another family to be raised and educated until the child entered its late teens. The early exposure and continued association between foster parents and siblings to these children created close and lasting emotional ties. The current study will examine those emotional ties by critically engaging with the language used around fosterage and the assumptions that underpin the relationship, as expressed in narratives, to trace the emotional ties of medieval Irish fosterage.
Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
Authors: Colangelo Dave
Published: January 2021

The use of the moving image in public space extends the techniques of cinema — namely superimposition, montage, and apparatus/dispositif — threatening, on one end of the spectrum, to dehistoricise and distract, and promising to provide new narrative and associative possibilities on the other. These techniques also serve as helpful tools for analysis and practice drawn from cinema studies that can be applied to examples of the moving image in public space. Case studies and creative works are presented in order to examine and illustrate the ways that public projections extend the effect of superimposition through the rehistoricisation of space, expand the diegetic boundaries of the moving image through spatial montage, and enact new possibilities for the cinematic apparatus and dispositif through scale and interaction in order to reframe and democratise historical narratives and scripts of urban behaviour.
Hawa’i the Elephant and Abada the Rhinoceros
Authors: Beusterien John
Published: January 2021

Chapter 1 provides a biogeography of Hawa’i the elephant and Abada the rhinoceros, beginning with their births in India. When Philip II came into the possession of both animals, he took advantage of the financial and structural relationship between hospitals and theaters and placed each animal in a hospital in Madrid, where the public was charged a fee to see them. The spectacle of Abada and Hawa’i functioned like a proto-zoo, reflecting the emerging public sphere and Philip II’s desire to enhance the image of the capital city. Chapter 1 also examines a silver-gilt ewer (1583) designed by Juan de Arfe that uses an image of Abada and Hawa’i to show off Philip II’s planetary power.
Introduction: Armored Beasts and the Elephant in the Room
Authors: Beusterien John
Published: January 2021

Animal spectacles are important for a holistic understanding of early
modern Spanish culture. Influenced by Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros,
early modern Spain celebrated itself as a planetary world power through
the spectacles of an exotic elephant, rhinoceros, armadillo, and lion.
Also, partially due its role as a foil to the positing of animals as exotic,
Spain created a spectacle of a homegrown bull. This chapter asserts the
importance of deploying the methodology of a biogeography for one of
each of these species, all of whom played a role as an animal protagonist in
a spectacle. The writing of biogeographies takes the extinction of species
in the Anthropocene into account and, in contrast to the negative impact
of each animal’s role as an object in a spectacle, places an emphasis on an
earth ethics that fosters healthy animal-human communities.
Juan Cobo’s Map of the Pacific World (1593)
Authors: Padrón Ricardo , Brook Timothy
Published: January 2021

Juan Cobo (1546/47–1592) was a Dominican priest who devoted most of his
efforts in the Philippines to proselytizing the resident Chinese population
of Manila and its environs. This map of the Pacific world from China
to Mexico appears in a translation of an influential piece of Counter-
Reformation apologetics that Cobo prepared with the help, most likely,
of unnamed Chinese collaborators, and that he had published in Manila
in 1593 for the benefit of Chinese prospects for Christian conversion. It is
the first European-style map created for a Chinese reader. Timothy Brook
provides an English translation of the map’s Chinese inscriptions, while
Ricardo Padrón analyzes the map’s rhetorical position.
Manila’s Sangleys and a Chinese Wedding (1625)
Authors: Martínez Miguel
Published: January 2021

This excerpt from Diego de Rueda y Mendoza’s True Account of the Funeral
Exequies that the Illustrious City of Manila Celebrated to the Death of His
Majesty Philip III (1625) provides an eye-witness account of a Catholic
Chinese wedding celebrated in Manila during the early seventeenth
century. It provides tantalizing glimpses of transculturation among
Manila’s small Spanish ruling class, as well as insights into the culture
of the sangleys, the Chinese residents whose numbers exceeded those
of the Spanish by several orders of magnitude. Miguel Martínez places
Rueda’s account of the wedding within the context of the broader pseudoethnographic
work carried out by the True Account, as well as the early
history of Manila’s sangleys.
The Will of an Indian Oriental and her Chinos in Peru (1644)
Authors: Garofalo Leo J.
Published: January 2021

In her 1644 will, a widow named Leonor Alvarez made arrangements for her
funeral and granted freedom to four people whom she had held as slaves.
Alvarez identified herself as the “Peruvian daughter of gentile parents
from Oriental India.” She had been married to one Hernando Gutierrez,
of Chinese origin, and the people she freed were from Africa and Asia.
Leo Garofalo places this document in the context of Lima’s complex racial
demography, which included significant numbers of people from East,
Southeast, and South Asia, both free and enslaved. The will provides a
glimpse into the life or Asian men and women who had migrated either
freely or by force to South America.
Constitutions and Rules of the Beatas Indias (1726)
Authors: Santner Kathryn
Published: January 2021

In 1726, a Chinese mestiza woman named Ignacia del Espiritu Santo
(1663–1748) sought ecclesiastical approval for a beaterio, or house of
religious retreat for women, that she had founded in Manila. It was the
first such community intended for women of native, sangley and mestizo
origin. With the help of unnamed Jesuit collaborators, she composed a
constitution for the community, called La Compañia, outlining criteria
for admission and a series of requirements meant to structure the community’s
life of prayer and austerity. Kathryn Santner places the text in
the context of female religious life in colonial Manila.
The Poetics of Praise and the Demands of Confession in the Early Spanish Philippines
Authors: Rafael Vicente L.
Published: January 2021

This chapter combines two very different but intimately related texts.
On the one hand, it reproduces three dalits, devotional poems by Tagalog
natives praising the work of Catholic missionaries. On the other, it provides
a questionnaire from an eighteenth-century confessional manual used by
missionaries to administer the sacrament of Penance. Vicente L. Rafael
argues that each text embodies a different attitude toward the written
word in the religious life of the colonial Philippines. For the Tagalog
authors of the dalits, the book becomes a magical talisman of sorts. For
the missionaries, it provides the tactics of an intimate disciplinary strategy
meant to alter the behavior of Filipino natives.
The Female Baroque
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

The concept of the ‘Female’ Baroque, derives from Julia Kristeva; the chief objective of this study is to examine the distinctive contribution of women writers and artists, thus addressing a recurring omission in previous scholarship. This chapter discusses major models for women: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the ideal Petrarchan Mistress. Along with the historical realities of patriarchal exploitation of women in the early modern period, I explore the emergent energies of women’s writings, examining whether there were distinctive ‘female’ experiences articulated through early modern discourse. Kristeva’s emphasis on St Teresa of Avila provides a model of the Female Baroque; her concept of ‘intimate revolt’ and her important distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic also inform this discussion.
Catholic Female Baroque
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

After two largely theoretical accounts of the Female Baroque, this chapter focuses on the seemingly natural association of the Baroque with Counter-Reformation Catholicism, looking at two English Catholic women, Gertrude More and Mary Ward, exiled in Catholic Europe. While More and Ward have attracted attention within the history of religious devotion, either has been viewed in broader cultural contexts. I examine them through the Baroque taxonomy of fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing, and show their distinctive contributions to understanding the Female Baroque, especially the distinctive religious variation of Hörigkeit—self-abasement verging on masochism. I contrast the spiritual quietism of More and the outward activism of Ward, though both are manifestations of these women’s participation in the culture of the Baroque.
Lady Mary Wroth : The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

Mary Wroth’s major literary works, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and the poetry collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, are distinctively Baroque: Wroth repeatedly, obsessively, demonstrates a fascination with multiple narratives, the blurring of fiction and history, and eruptions of magical or miraculous interventions. She establishes the contours of a female Baroque subject, who has to absorb and attempt to transcend enculturation by the dominant male discourse. What happens when a woman enters the predominantly male discursive poetical playground of Petrarchism? Could a woman envisage anything more than her own fragmentation? Would hers be the ‘same’ anguish as that articulated on behalf of the dominant male subject position? What cultural forces speak through her in addition to those she attempts to control?
Catholic Female Baroque
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

Here I consider two women writers whose work marks a transition from the Baroque to Enlightenment. Margaret Cavendish figures in two diverging intellectual worlds. There are multiple rich, if often contradictory, Baroque aspects to her life and writings. However, she later developed an ambivalence towards the new empirical science, the dynamics of which point us beyond the Baroque to the Enlightenment. Aphra Behn’s groundbreaking writings are frequently described as Baroque but she, too, is moving into a new cultural paradigm: just as, at the beginning of the period, the Baroque spasmodically surfaced in Pembroke and Lanyer, in the late seventeenth century, some Baroque characteristics blazed spectacularly before merging into Enlightenment culture and literary neo-classicism.
Spiral Notebooks
Authors: Walters Holly
Published: January 2021

Shaligrams are both fossils and living deities, born of the sacred landscape
of Mustang. For pilgrims, Mustang is home to multiple sacred sites belonging
to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bon. The land is also conceptualized
as a body, wherein the Kali Gandaki River Valley is simultaneously the
location where the Hindu deity Vishnu manifests himself as a sacred stone
as well as the place where the corpse of a great Buddhist/Bon demoness
(sinmo) is continuously subdued through ritual and sacred architecture.
Any ethnography of Shaligrams must therefore account for intersections
of mobility, time, place, and access. This is because the consolidation of
movement and ritual is what enlivens Shaligrams and begins the process
wherein they become living members of a community.
Picked-Up Pieces
Authors: Walters Holly
Published: January 2021

The history of Mustang, Nepal is complicated and can vary significantly
depending on the textual sources one uses. For local Mustangis and
pilgrims, however, issues of place, space, and time are a vital part of what
it means to be Hindu or Buddhist as well as Nepali, Indian, or Tibetan,
even though these categories remain continuously blurred and fluid.
Beginning with the paleontological history of Mustang’s extensive fossil
formations and ending with an overview of the political history of the
region, this chapter focuses on the ways in which historical narratives
have affected access to the Kali Gandaki River Valley, and to Shaligrams
specifically, since the earliest days.
The Optics of Bodily Deviance: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Path to Public Office
Authors: García Piñar Pablo
Published: January 2021

Through an account of New Spanish playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón
y Mendoza’s path to secure an administrative position for himself in
seventeenth-century Spain’s Hapsburg administrative apparatus, this essay
discusses the cultural and social conditions that led to the administration’s
persistent preoccupation with its public image and, in particular, with the
safeguarding of its authority. I argue that the instances of public contempt
expressed by his peers – on account of the severe bodily deformity Ruiz
de Alarcón suffered from – played a decisive role in the decision of the
Council of the Indies to ban the playwright from any public office. The
council’s behaviour reflects the restraining influence that the Hapsburg
administration exercised over the physical appearance of state officials.
This essay also discusses how Ruiz de Alarcón challenges the logic behind
this disciplining of bodily appearance in his play Las paredes oyen.
An Education: Johannes Schefferus and the Prodigious Son of a Fisherman
Authors: Bondestam Maja
Published: January 2021

In this essay, the value of monsters and prodigies is examined in relation
to seventeenth-century learned reflection and the German-Swedish
intellectual Johannes Schefferus. Earlier research on the positive meaning
of wonders has highlighted the Augustinian tradition of reading prodigious
bodies as reminders of God’s presence. Schefferus himself emphasized
a cultural heritage in which strange and thought-provoking bodies were
considered educational and morally enhancing. A monstrous birth and a
boy with a prodigious appearance thus functioned as a teacher of virtue,
a guiding example and an object of contemplation. For Schefferus, this
pedagogical and moral potential was the reason why such a body should be
displayed and remembered through museums, histories, books and images.
Postcolonial Spatiality
Authors: Sim Gerald
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically
inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive
palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical
origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management
of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and
imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence,
and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment,
infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s
Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that
results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with
activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity
thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three
forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases.
Postcolonial Cacophonies
Authors: Sim Gerald
Published: January 2021

This chapter argues that Malaysian f ilmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, a
prominent cultural voice on racial politics, presents a fresh model of
postcolonial poetics. Through interracial romance melodramas set in
globalized milieus, she stages interethnic squabbles between speakers of
different languages. Ahmad deemphasizes linguistic meaning in favor of
purely acoustic pleasures. The soundscape harbors a local aesthetic that
transcends the hybridity paradigm associated with postcolonial culture.
Ahmad’s predilection for highlighting characters who speak ethnically
incongruent languages, furthers a cinematic experience that is aural,
spatially marginalized, yet seductively immersive. Jean-Luc Nancy’s
concepts of “ecouter” and “resonance” inform these readings, while his
eponymous writing vis-à-vis globalization circumscribe a phenomenology
that speaks to Malaysia’s postcolonial-global duality and geopolitical
“sense of the world.”
On Dissolution
Authors: Turquety Benoît
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at two of Straub-Hullet’s later films, The Death of
Empedocles and Workers, Peasants. Both films deal with the theme of
dissolution—of the protagonist in nature or the individual in a community
as well as the dissolution of a community itself. Charles Reznikoff’s
Testimony, a long-form poem that quotes verbatim witness transcripts
from American legal trials, is discussed with special attention paid to
how the poetic versified the transcripts and put them in relation to one
another. The result on the page is a text that looks strikingly similar to
the published script of Workers, Peasants, a film based on Elio Vittorini’s
novel Women of Messina and that also deals with witness testimony.
Mobilizing Visitors: Political Persuasion and the Somaesthetics of Belonging in the Chapel of the Magi
Authors: Terry-Fritsch Allie
Published: January 2021

Chapter Two provides a thick reading of the set up and action of somaesthetic
experience in the Chapel of the Magi, constructed by Michelozzo inside Palazzo
Medici and lavishly decorated by Benozzo Gozzoli and Fra Filippo Lippi in the
1450s. Linking the mindful movements of viewers in the room to contemporary
rituals of Epiphany, the analysis recasts the chapel as a virtual Florence that was
practiced by the visitor in a time-based experience. By reconstructing the ways in
which theater and ritual were enfolded into the artistic program and the process
of viewing itself, the chapter recovers the somaesthetic co-involvement of the
visitor in the processional drama of the room and demonstrates how somaesthetic
experience is a critical key to understanding the style and content of the chapel
within its dynamic political dimensions.
Performing Virtual Pilgrimage: Somaesthetics and Holy Land Devotion at San Vivaldo
Authors: Terry-Fritsch Allie
Published: January 2021

Chapter Four examines the somaesthetic experience of the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, a virtual holy land that was constructed by Franciscan friars from Florence in a Tuscan forest in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Designed to emulate key aspects of the Renaissance experience of Jerusalem, San Vivaldo offered a performative space for pilgrims to construct personalized memories of the Holy Land without ever touching its soil. The chapter investigates the affective enhancement of devotion through somaesthetic conditioning and questions the Franciscan founders’ political motivations for building such an interactive and full-bodied experience of the Holy Land, particularly in the period after the Medici were exiled from the city and Fra Girolamo Savonarola burned at the stake. As the chapter reveals, the mindful engagement with the artistic program was an effective strategy to legitimate both the place and the whose practiced it.
The Witch Who Moved to the Wilderness
Authors: Toivo Raisa Maria
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses how Risto Olavinpoika and his family moved – both socially and geographically – in order to prosper, stay together and survive in early modern Finland. The family initially resided in a somewhat remote but bustling hunting village and earned a living from fishing. When Risto, the father, faced charges of witchcraft, the family changed location and occupation twice, ending up on a large farmstead in remote southwestern Finland. This chapter uses court and tax records to explore the interdependency of family ties, geographical distance and reach in this family’s experience of dealing with and surviving state and church control and witchcraft accusations.
The Consilium and Reform Constrained
Authors: Cussen Bryan
Published: January 2021

In 1535, Paul III set up a reform Commission composed of outstanding Churchmen and tasked them with producing a comprehensive reform program. Their program, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia, was long on condemnatory rhetoric but, grounded in tradition, short on practical steps forward. It lacked engagement of cultural issues, especially those which promoted enhancement of Church and family honour through the accrual of benefices. Indeed, acting on the Consilium would have dismantled pathways to honour and created social unrest in a fragile period when Rome was under external threat. While Paul brought in other prelates to work with the Commissioners, overall no viable ways forward emerged.
Evaluating data visualization : Broadening the measurements of success
Authors: Ridley Arran L. , Birchall Christopher
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates the evaluation of data visualizations using observational research in an award-winning design studio. It outlines some professional and commercial forces that are involved in the shaping of evaluative strategies and identifies differences in methods and forms of evaluation in projects with different aims and intended audiences. The research showed that alongside quantitative headline figures of consumption, such as audience reach and interaction, qualitative measures of audience experience—which consider the sociocultural context of consumption—were sometimes included in evaluation strategies, but this varied between projects depending on the level of access to, and knowledge about, the audience. This chapter highlights the importance of such measures, outlines attempts to develop them, and comments on the potential to do so.
Data visualization literacy: A feminist starting point
Authors: D’Ignazio Catherine , Bhargava Rahul
Published: January 2021

We assert that visual-numeric literacy, indeed all data literacy, must take as its starting point that the human relations and impacts currently produced and reproduced through data are unequal. Likewise, white men remain overrepresented in data-related fields, even as other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineeering and Medicine) fields have managed to narrow their gender gap. To address these inequalities, we introduce teaching methods that are grounded in feminist theory, process, and design. Through three case studies, we examine what feminism may have to offer visualization literacy, with the goals of cultivating self-efficacy for women and underrepresented groups to work with data, and creating learning spaces where, as Philip et al. (2016) state, ‘groups influence, resist, and transform everyday and formal processes of power that impact their lives’.
Is literacy what we need in an unequal data society?
Authors: Pinney Lulu
Published: January 2021

Having the skills and awareness to make sense of data visualizations has become a contributing factor in determining who gets to participate in our data-driven society. Initiatives that seek to enable people to make sense of some aspect of our digital, datafied worlds are often described in terms of literacy. However, taking a closer look at different usages of literacy across academia, policy, and practice reveals different notions of power embedded in different populations’ implicit understanding of the term. Situated in the emerging field of critical data studies, the field that is concerned with understanding data’s role in reproducing and creating social inequalities, this is a conceptual chapter that asks how useful literacy is in this context.
A multimodal perspective on data visualization
Authors: Hiippala Tuomo
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the multimodality of data visualizations, that is, how they combine multiple modes of expression, such as written language, photographs, diagrammatic elements, and illustrations, in various printed and digital media. Because the medium in which a data visualization is presented determines the modes of expression available, the chapter shows how different media can be pulled apart for multimodal analysis. The proposed approach is illustrated by analysing static information graphics, non-interactive, and interactive dynamic data visualizations.
What a line can say : Investigating the semiotic potential of the connecting line in data visualizations
Authors: Lechner Verena Elisabeth
Published: January 2021

The line is a graphical element widely used in data visualizations, its
purpose often being to signal a connection between other visual elements.
Based on social semiotic theory, this article investigates what semiotic
functions connecting lines can have and how these functions can be
related to variations in form. The results show that, in addition to the basic
function of connecting elements, such lines can also indicate the level of
certainty, direct the viewer to read the information either as a narrative
or a conceptual claim, indicate patterns of cohesion, and regulate the
viewer’s position. These findings allow for further empirical research on
the formation of visual conventions.
Humanizing data through ‘data comics’ : An introduction to graphic medicine and graphic social science
Authors: Alamalhodaei Aria , Alberda Alexandra P. , Feigenbaum Anna
Published: January 2021

In recent years data visualization scholars and practitioners have drawn attention to the need for data to be humanized. In addition to making complex information more coherent, visualizations can work to incorporate empathy and help audiences connect to information. Addressing this call for humanizing data visualization, this chapter considers the emergent area of ‘data comics’, looking at how the new fields of graphic medicine and graphic social science deal with numeric data. We examine recent data comics from graphic medicine and graphic social science that exemplify the complexities and potential of presenting data in humanizing ways. Our discussion is framed around what we call the EMA framework, considering the Epistemic (knowledge and perspective), Methodological (ways of working), and Aesthetic (practices of representation).
What is at stake in data visualization? A feminist critique of the rhetorical power of data visualizations in the media
Authors: Hill Rosemary Lucy
Published: January 2021

Data visualizations are powerful semiotic resources, which, it is sometimes
claimed, have the power to change the world. This chapter argues that to
understand this power we need to consider the uses to which visualizations
have been put. Using visualizations relating to abortion as a case study
alongside Klein and D’Ignazio’s notion of a ‘Bring Back the Bodies’ in data
visualization, I argue that visualizations tell a narrow story, removing
contextual detail and omitting to ask questions important to women’s
health. To grasp the significance of this I propose a new body issue: the
neglect of the viewer and those affected by decisions taken based on
visualized data. Far from being a simple device to graphically display
numerical data, therefore, there are important social and ethical issues
at stake in data visualization.
‘Your Vagina is a Rice Paddy’
Authors: DeFillipo Cassie
Published: January 2021

In Thailand, there is an adage that a woman’s vagina is her rice paddy wherein it is considered a natural resource she can harvest when necessary or desired. In a culture where sexual relationships are defined by norms of masculinity and femininity, women’s sexual decisions are often aimed at using this natural resource to perform femininity in culturally idealized ways. Through ethnographic work in commercial sex establishments, this chapter argues that heterosexual sex practices help women express and enact hegemonic femininities in Northern Thailand. In contributing to the literature on hegemonic and multiple femininities, the chapter contends that gender is relational and that analyses of men’s performances of masculinities are insufficient if reviewed separately from women’s performances of femininities.
Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism
Authors: Szymanski Adam
Published: January 2021

The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry’s clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health.

Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable.
The Antwerp Foundation
Authors: Mujica Bárbara
Published: January 2021

Ana arrived in Antwerp at the beginning of the Twelve Years’ Truce.
She was involved in every detail of the Antwerp foundation, from the
purchase of the land to the acquisition of construction materials. Unlike
her earlier foundations, those in the Low Countries were pluralistic centers
that recruited from French-, Flemish-, Spanish-, and English-speaking
populations. Around 1606, the English recusant Mary Lovel decided to
found an English convent in Antwerp. After complicated negotiations, an
English Carmel opened in May 1619, with Anne of the Ascension (Worsley)
as its prioress. However, conflicts about confessors soon arose. Fearing a
rupture in the order, Ana wrote to Anne repeatedly, trying to convince
her to remain under the umbrella of the Discalced Carmelites.
Introduction
Authors: Mujica Bárbara
Published: January 2021

Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform tells the story of the Carmelite expansion beyond the death of Teresa de Jesús, showing how three of her most dynamic disciples, María de San José, Ana de Jesús, and Ana de San Bartolomé, struggled to continue her mission in Portugal, France, and the Low Countries. Like Teresa, these women were prolific letter writers. Catalina de Cristo, a Carmelite nun who never left Spain, also produced a corpus of letters that reveals the distress of those who anxiously waited for news of their sisters abroad. In devoting themselves so assiduously to letter-writing, these women, as Joan Ferrante has shown, were continuing a long monastic tradition that had begun in the Middle Ages.
The Relationship between Mainstream and Movement Parties in Taiwan
Authors: Kwan Tommy Chung Yin , Fell Dafydd J.
Published: January 2021

Since democratization began in the mid-1980s, Taiwan’s party system
has been dominated by two parties, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). However, smaller parties have at
times played an important role, bringing diversity into the system, stressing
different issues and representing neglected communities. These small
parties tended to be those that split off from the mainstream parties,
while alternative social movement parties struggled to be electorally
relevant. The picture changed recently with the rise of two different types
of movement parties, the New Power Party (NPP) and the Green Party
Taiwan/Social Democratic Party Alliance (GPT/SDP). In this chapter
we examine the relationship of these new players with the mainstream
party, DPP, offering some thoughts on how the relationship affected the
development of these alternative parties.
New Immigration, Civic Activism and Identity in Japan
Authors: Chiavacci David
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses immigrant advocacy groups’ influence in Japan’s immigration policy. For three decades Japan has been a new immigration country. However, immigration policy has been marked by ideational and institutional fragmentation, resulting in a deadlock lacking bold reforms and immunizing state actors to external pressure. Against this backdrop, civil advocacy has been surprisingly influential. While civic groups have generally not been included in decision-making bodies, they have altered the perception of immigration. By analysing reforms combating human trafficking, this chapter identifies factors that resulted in indirect influence of civic advocacy in this case, allowing us to gain a differentiated understanding of the limited but still significant influence of civic activism on Japan’s ‘strong’ state in immigration policy.
Japanese NPOs and the State Re-examined
Authors: Ogawa Akihiro
Published: January 2021

This chapter builds on long-term research at SLG, a pseudonym for a non-profit organization (NPO) in eastern Tokyo, established under the 1998 NPO Law. Incorporated as an NPO in 2000, SLG is one of the largest civic society organizations promoting lifelong learning in Japan. Over nearly two decades, SLG offered more than a hundred courses to the local community. However, SLG faced a crisis and risked dissolution in 2018 due to the municipal government’s decision to cut its funding. This chapter argues that SLG was a successful case of neoliberalism-oriented public administration, pursuing decentralization and reduced costs; at the same time SLG did not encourage independent, citizen-oriented activities. This chapter documents current discussions at SLG, reflecting the reality of a Japanese civil society landscape in which NPOs are central.
Introduction
Authors: Pacey Scott
Published: January 2021

The introduction outlines the study’s historical context and main questions. Beginning with a discussion of a 1981 conference on Buddhism and politics, it asks why elite Buddhist figures, in the decade after Chiang Kai-shek’s death, aligned KMT ideology with Buddhism—especially when the two figureheads of the party, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, were both Christians. Stepping back, and having outlined a phase of Christian growth in the early postwar era, it then describes the party’s modern Chinese cultural vision and values, which it promoted in the postwar period and which elite Buddhists aspired to in their competition with Christians for adherents. It then outlines the focus of the study: how Buddhists defined themselves as patriotic, “Chinese” and “modern”, in contrast to Christians, as a way of generating socio-political acceptability.
Remembering the Martyrs of National Liberation in Timor-Leste
Authors: Leach Michael
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the way martyrs of the independence struggle are remembered in the independent nation of Timor-Leste. It examines the changing nature of definitions of martyrdom during the Portuguese and Indonesian colonial eras, and beyond independence, through an examination of changing patterns of memorialisation, commemoration, and cultural heritage. It also examines how the concept of martyrdom has becomes a site of struggles for official recognition in the postindependence state, with frequently strong distinctions between the type of state recognition afforded to military resistance veterans, and to civilian victims of human rights abuses.