bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Paper, Water, Ice: The Falling Soldier
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

Commentators have often viewed Robert Capa’s snapshot of a man supposedly felled by an enemy bullet (1936) as epitomising photography’s distinctive capacity to capture moments that assume iconic status. Chapter 1, however, contends that a full account of this image’s iconicity must pay attention to cinema. The chapter traces the passage of Capa’s picture through magazines that emulate or comment on cinema, an eclectic selection of films and moving image criticism and theory, reconsidering the photograph as a film frame, a transitory – rather than pregnant or decisive – instant and an arrested image or freeze-frame. Drawing on critical writing on the still / moving relation, the chapter argues that the ‘Falling Soldier’ evolved in the first half century of its life from a dynamic depiction of a meaningful sacrifice in the ‘paper cinema’ which first animated it into a petrified template for filmic evocations of senseless violence.
Film Frame, Film Still, Star Portrait: The Marianne of’68
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

Study of photojournalistic coverage of the French protests that peaked in May and June 1968, a pivotal moment in the history of the iconisation of camera images, has remained largely separate from analysis of cinema’s involvement in these events. This chapter connects these two image repertoires by examining how a photograph by Jean-Pierre Rey that has come to encapsulate the uprising fits into film history, highlighting links between still and moving images that scholarship on its iconicity has overlooked. With particular reference to Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the fusion of energy with still poses in star performances, the chapter examines the roles played by the photograph’s central figure, Caroline de Bendern, in a ciné-tract (1968) and the film Détruisez-vous (Destroy Yourselves, Serge Bard, 1968). It argues that cinema foreshadowed Caroline’s transformation into ‘Marianne’ in magazine photomontages by casting her as a revolutionary whose performances of stasis and silence allude intermedially to photography and intertextually to portraits of established stars or icons in the making.
Protesting Women
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

The epilogue summarises the book’s arguments and explores the return of de Bendern’s image to prominence in recent years alongside pictures of other young women protesting fearlessly against militarised states and neofascism. The viral spread of these images from Macedonia, Chile, America and the UK has disturbed the exclusionary norms of beauty which underpin what Nicole Fleetwood critically theorises as ‘iconic whiteness’ and which the ‘Marianne of ’68’ perpetuates. As these contemporary photographs and videos also suggest, the face of the crowd, which has preoccupied cinema since its early days as much as the iconic figure of the star, has become pertinent again to the iconography of protest.
Beckett’s Words and Music ‘or some other trouble’: Vaguening on the Airwaves
Authors: Jeffery Lucy
Published: May 2022

In a letter of 21 February 1957, Samuel Beckett told Donald McWhinnie that radio had ‘captured his imagination’ and had opened a new creative outlet after his post-Trilogy writer’s block. This chapter outlines how Beckett’s work with the BBC Third, the composer Morton Feldman, and experimentation with radio technology resulted in Words and Music. It then argues that radio is central to Beckett’s aesthetic enquiry into imperfection, ambiguity, and creative struggle.
Beckett and Television: Anachronism as Innovation
Authors: Bignell Jonathan
Published: May 2022

Beckett’s television dramas can be understood as reflexive analyses of television’s uneasy position as an ‘old’ and also a ‘new’ medium. The history of television can be written by describing processes of co-option of aesthetic features and processes deriving from ‘old’ media like theatre and figurative painting, which are visible in Beckett’s staging of dramatic action and his ideas for TV image composition. But television also differentiates itself from antecedent or competing media, offers a wide range of genres, modes and forms, and repudiates features associated with its competitors. This chapter analyses how Beckett’s TV dramas cite past forms anachronistically and innovate by refusing them. Their temporality of apparent liveness links the dramas to technologies for relaying live theatre, but none of the dramas is ‘live’. Beckett’s experience with filmmaking, on Film, connects his television work with cinematic concerns, such as framing and point of view, but the TV dramas disrespect conventions of filmic storytelling and the relationship of sound to image. By analyzing the aesthetic implementation of television technologies in Beckett’s dramas for TV the chapter argues that they innovate by processes of repudiation and displacement, going back to move forward.
Portals of Invention: A ‘techno-logical’ Reading of the Prometheus Figure in Beckett’s The Unnamable
Authors: Thoelen Thomas
Published: May 2022

When translating L’Innommable into English, Samuel Beckett appears to have made a mistake: while, in the former text, he writes that ‘Prométhée fût delivré [...] avant [before] d’avoir purgé sa peine’, in the latter, it is stated as a matter of fact that ‘Prometheus was delivered [...] after having purged his offence’. Given that Beckett translated the French novel into English himself, the possibility cannot be excluded that the mistake was in fact not a mistake but a deliberate mistranslation. ‘A man of genius’, as James Joyce once put it, ‘makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’. This chapter examines the erroneous reference to Prometheus in The Unnamable from a related perspective: that is, as a portal of invention – from the Latin verb ‘invenire’ meaning precisely ‘to discover’. Supported by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s interpretation of the Prometheus myth, this chapter argues that the mistranslation in The Unnamable pointedly exposes the so-called ‘techno-logic’ of Beckett’s writing, which invents at least as much as it is itself invented.
Technology and the Naive Artist: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape
Authors: D’Arcy Michael
Published: May 2022

Taking Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape as its focal point, this chapter argues that the category of artistic naiveté, as it is reconfigured in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provides a crucial framework to understand late modernist engagements with narrative form and technology. Tracking the operations of artistic naiveté in the work of Schiller, Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Beckett, this intervention maintains that such naiveté becomes a linchpin for the development of modes of thought that both integrate and transcend the historical conditions of mid-twentieth century capitalism, including the current state of technological evolution. Reading Krapp’s Last Tape together with Horkheimer and Adorno’s thinking about narrative and technology, the chapter resituates these late modernist projects in the context of the European discourse of naive art, a move that allows us to account for important features of these projects that have been obscured in established critical frameworks.
Digital Poetics and Digital Hermeneutics in Beckett Studies: Toward a Manuscript Chronology
Authors: Hulle Dirk Van
Published: May 2022

This chapter investigates how digital tools – such as a digital edition – can be usefully deployed in Beckett studies, notably in terms of poetics and hermeneutics, building but also deviating from Jonathan Culler’s definition of these notions: ‘Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved’ while hermeneutics ‘starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations’. As for ‘poetics’ (Gr. poiein, ‘to make’), genetic criticism starts from the basic assumption that knowing how something was made can help us understand how it works. In this sense the digital medium can be of great help. In terms of ‘digital hermeneutics’, the chapter explores new interpretative strategies, making use of the technology of digital tools, such as the ones provided by the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), including automatic collation, intertextual and intratextual searches. Genetic criticism adds a temporal dimension to poetics and hermeneutics. It answers to Culler’s questions about new or attested meanings and ‘how they are achieved’, but from a diachronic perspective, involving traces of the creative process (such as notes, drafts and other manuscripts). The chapter’s focus is therefore on chronology as the backbone of digital poetics and hermeneutics.
The Role of Russian for Digital Diplomacy in Moldova
Authors: Yagodin Dmitry
Published: May 2022

The Republic of Moldova is ridden by political uncertainties, divided by acute language and media policy issues, and plagued by a continuous national identity crisis. This chapter discusses the country’s exposure to Russian public diplomacy initiatives, in particular those implemented with the help of social media, which have been growing in popularity and sophistication. The chapter looks into this new phenomenon from a language policy point of view. By comparing the approaches of two competing actors, the EU and Russia, in making use of social media as foreign policy tools, it raises important questions about the benefits and effectiveness of digital diplomacy.
‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel
Authors: Wagner Tamara S.
Published: May 2022

Oliver Twist, Bleak House, ‘No Thoroughfare’, King Arthur and The Fatal Three let us map how Victorian literature generated and exploited the fascination with the orphan. These narratives capitalise on the popularity and flexibility of this figure while reworking pervasive paradigms. With growing self-reflexivity, they tackle established patterns to express particular preoccupations with society and often with narrative form itself. Bleak House dismantles expectations of sentimentalised orphans and their identification as the ideal resolution in foundling tales, answering questions that Oliver Twist raises, but largely leaves unanswered. ‘No Thoroughfare’ plays with the easily clichéd significance of the double in orphan narratives. King Arthur allots unprecedented attention to the adoptive parents, while reverting to the foundling tale as an adjustable framework for adoption narratives. Conversely, The Fatal Three trades on, yet also redeploys, the sensational potential of the orphan figure in order to challenge attitudes to and representations of adoption. When Braddon challenges the representation of the orphan child as a potential threat in sensation fiction through a direct intertextual reference to Bleak House, she asserts the lasting significance of mid-century orphan narratives and further develops their potential to express changing preoccupations with society and with literature itself.
No Place Like Home: The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption
Authors: Salisbury Harriet
Published: May 2022

This chapter looks at the role of the orphan in Victorian stories of rescue and redemption known as waif novels. Now little studied, these were once widely read best-sellers. The key elements of the waif novel stirred young readers to pity by heaping deprivation and misery on the most vulnerable in society; orphans living in the attics and cellars of London’s worst slums. Waif novels offered their readers two routes out of misery: the evangelical elision of Heaven with home; presented as everlasting happiness of life-in-death, under the rule of a perfect Father, in a place where there is no disease, poverty or pain. Alternatively, the rescue and removal of certain ‘chosen’ children by an appropriate person or institution where evangelistic fervour is combined with transformative financial resources. In the majority of waif novels, both these routes are pursued. Prising children loose from societal interactions allowed waif novels to negate working-class parenting and community, while ascribing the effects of poverty to a class that has wilfully chosen to live outside societal norms. As Barnardo said: ‘these “Waifs” are nobody’s children. They live on nobody’s land, they pass over the boundary of civilization.’
Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens
Authors: Kingsley Joey
Published: May 2022

The bodies of orphan children merit particular attention in visual and literary portraits of the Victorian period because they suggest that physical rehabilitation and honest labour catalyse moral transformation. Both Dr Barnardo and Charles Dickens emphasize bodily neglect within narratives of physical affliction and familial loss, in order to elicit pity from an audience, whose sanctimonious philanthropy hinges upon testimonials of spiritual redemption. Ironically, Dickens’s fiction exploits the middle class’s disgust of orphans in order to solve the problem of child poverty. Similarly, Barnardo’s advertisements secured donations for welfare programmes by dramatically staging children in positions and dress that degrade them. In emphasizing bodily suffering, Dickens frames the transience of orphanhood as a state of bewilderment in which children express horror at themselves and assume responsibility for their own filth and hunger. In claiming their bodies, these fictional orphans identify themselves as the sources of their own suffering and, isolated from others, find ‘home’ in themselves. By contrast, Barnardo’s advertisements assume responsibility for the physical and moral transformations of these young charges, insinuating that orphanhood is a transitional phase obscured by Christian salvation. Barnardo and Dickens both exploit orphan stereotypes to alleviate the physical misery of the most indigent.
‘Something worse than the past in not being yet over’:1 Elizabeth Bowen’s Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity
Authors: Rea Ann
Published: May 2022

Like ghosts, orphans in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction represent what domesticity and the family cannot accommodate, whether in Anglo-Ireland, upper-middle-class England, or wartime London. Laden with a variety of simultaneous meanings, these orphans are distilled remnants of the persistent past, evidence of repressed family scandal, often the result of uncontrolled sexual passion, and often of a family’s lack of control over women’s sexuality. In Bowen’s short stories, the misunderstood past emerges as ghosts: in the novels it persists as orphans. While literary orphans throughout the nineteenth century signalled change, breaks from tradition and disconnections from the community that provoked moral confusion, Bowen’s orphans drift in modernity, severed from a troubling past, even while serving as symbols of it, while they struggle with disjunctions from not only cultural history and family traditions, but also because the future is uncertain. Reading Bowen’s orphan protagonists in the post-colonial context allows us to see that they embody the temporal traumas of Ireland and England. It also allows us to re-examine the ways in which Bowen’s orphans stand for unassimilated aspects of the past.
Coda
Authors: Warren Diane
Published: May 2022

The chapters in this volume emphasise that orphanhood is far more than a state of bereavement, although it is, of course, that too. Our contributors demonstrate that being orphaned is a state of mind, which informs the perceptions of the individual and remains throughout life. Contributors trace the influence of orphanhood through debates about legal representation, charity, the role of benefactors, and into debates about gender, agency and the limits of humanity. The role of inheritance frequently recurs in these discussions, interrogated as both a resource and a burden. The question of inheritance is frequently combined with the analysis of gender roles, as our contributors show that female paternal bereavement was an especially challenging condition to negotiate. The chapters also chart and explore the often redemptive role of care giving in orphan narratives, and use this to examine the ways in which orphan narratives redefine the family. Read collectively then, the chapters of Rereading Orphanhood prompt a thorough reassessment of the role of the literary orphan, and in the process, shed new light on the construction of social, literary and cultural bonds.
Exclusiveness and Eugeneia in the Myth of Autochthony
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter uses the myth of autochthony to illustrate the dynamic nature of Athenian democratic ideology. The myth of autochthony originated from the combination of two traditions: the earthborn kings of Attica and the indigenous Athenians. It thus potentially endangered the unity of Athens’ citizen body, because the earthborn kings could be perceived as more autochthonous than the rest of the Athenians. Through an analysis of funeral speeches, Euripides’ Ion and Apollodorus’ Against Neaera, this chapter shows that institutions enabled the Athenians to resolve the ambiguity within the myth of autochthony by moving the focus away from or onto the earthborn kings, or to exploit the myth’s contradictory aspects. The Athenians could thus attribute the nobility of birth (eugeneia) and exclusiveness associated with autochthony to larger or smaller sections of their citizen body and produce more or less inclusive ideas about their community. The chapter also stresses the evolving nature of ideology, which could incorporate newly developed ideas and values. This is the case in Lysias’ Funeral Oration, where the Athenians’ collective eugeneia is complemented by the relatively novel notion of concord (homonoia).
Combining Hybris and Philanthrōpia : The Myth of Adrastus
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on Athens’ recovery of the corpses of the Seven against Thebes on behalf of Adrastus. It argues that democratic institutions enabled the Athenians to combine hybris and philanthrōpia and emphasise, downplay, deconstruct or recompose these values to different ends. This resulted in a dynamic ideology which accommodated and resolved potential contradictions within and between values. Under the influence of the state funeral, Lysias’ Funeral Oration emphasises Athenian philanthrōpia as a harmonious combination of justice and altruism, and reinforces it through the contrast with Theban hybris. Euripides’ Suppliant Women portrays both Argives and Thebans as guilty of hybris. The dramatic festivals enabled Euripides to enact and recompose a fracture between justice and altruism within Athenian philanthrōpia and reconcile philanthrōpia with Athenian interests. Procles’ speech in Xenophon’s Hellenica shows how the Assembly enabled him to disregard both Adrastus’ culpability and Theban hybris while incorporating Athenian philanthrōpia into an advantageous chain of acts of reciprocity. Other variations were possible in private settings. Theban hybris could be ignored, while conceptualising Athenian philanthrōpia mainly in terms of justice (Isocrates’ Plataicus), or it could even be denied (Isocrates’ Panathenaicus).
Introduction: The Paradoxes of Children’s Literature; or Making Sense of Children’s Literature
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This chapter introduces the synergies between and paradoxes Deleuzian scholarship and the study of children’s literature. This chapter introduces the key terms of molecular child and encounter which underpin the analysis to follow. To read Deleuze in children’s literature embraces the molecular child that emerges from the curious and paradoxical sense of children’s literature, which constantly pulls the reader in two directions at once: towards both adult and child.
Pure Repetition and Aiôn
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers highly repetitive children’s texts through Deleuze’s concept of pure repetition. With Deleuze, such texts are no longer caught up in the seemingly paradoxical bind of a a return of the same, but reveal the liberating nature of repetition for itself. This chapter also looks to the concept of the ritournelle or refrain which aligns itself closely with the home-away-home motif structure of children’s literature. This chapter proposes that Aiôn, the unique temporality of pure repetition, allows a molecular child to emerge through reading.
Becoming-animal, Becoming-molecular, Becoming-imperceptible
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This chapter turns to the idea of growth or growing-up which dominates children’s literature and shows how the concept of becoming can give alternatives to this uni-directional movement of growing-up. This chapter considers children’s texts which present examples of becomings -animal, plant and molecular – before turning to Lewis Carroll’s Alice who epitomises pure becoming. This chapter shows how reading children’s literature through Deleuzian becoming can shift the focus of growth in children’s literature from linear progression to creative involution, effacing the binary categories that contain us.
Lines, Maps and Islands
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This chapter journeys through the landscapes of children’s literature. It considers child cartographers who create literal or internal maps and how these cartographies are represented as endpaper maps, allowing child readers to embark on motionless journeys. This chapter also considers nomadic child protagonists in search of territories which are always beyond reach. Lastly, this chapter considers the desert island landscape which is not only a world without others but also a world out of time.
Conclusion: Children’s Literature on a Witch’s Broom
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

Deleuzian philosophy often speaks of witches and sorcerers. To conclude, this chapter takes up the idea of the witch’s line. Inviting Deleuze into the genre of children’s literature is synonymous to mounting a witch’s broom and embarking on an exhilarating witch’s flight bringing forth intensive encounters. To close this study, this chapter returns to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the picture-book, L’Oiseau philosophie. The figure of Alice eptiomises the invigorating witch’s line of the reading experience. Her becomings, repetitions and stutterings alongside the cartographies she composes reveal the potential of the molecular child – a child of the ‘people to come’ with its molecular text, L’Oiseau philosophie.
Women and Islamisation in Malaysia: Contestations on the Practice of Islam
Authors: Alatas Syed Imad
Published: May 2022

While Islam has been practised in the Malay world from as early as the thirteenth century, the Islamisation of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated the salient visibility of Islam in socio-political life. The presence of more hardline Islamic elements in the Malaysian government and society at large has posed a challenge to the image of moderate Islam. Integral to the contestations on the practice of Islam was the status of Muslim women and how they were being treated, from the legal recourse available to them, to their everyday experiences. Female Muslim activists began to debate about Malaysian society and the role of women in Islam. These groups differed from each other in their approaches to religion in modern society. This chapter looks at some responses among female Muslim NGOs and activists to state discourses on Islam and religiosity. Their views exist in a social milieu where state interpretations of Islam hold authority, albeit not an unchallenged one. This chapter demonstrates that such contestations on what it means to be Islamic are emblematic of national attempts to define what being an ideal Muslim means.
Securing Muslim Boundaries: Religious Freedom and Public Order in Pakistan and Malaysia
Authors: Nelson Matthew J.
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the construction of religious identity boundaries via the identification of outsiders (here, so-called ‘heretics’) in Muslim-majority Pakistan and Malaysia. Specifically, it shows how constitutional formulations concerning religious freedom are politically operationalised in a boundary-defining description of heretics as ‘a source of public disorder’. As a source of ‘disorder’, heretics are relegated to the margins of each country’s constitutional community: situated on the margins of the community, they help to define those who remain inside.
Migration and Islamism in Bangladesh: the Rise of Transnational Identities
Authors: Mohsina Nazneen
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the instrumental role that migration has played in shaping Islamist movements in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi diasporas have not only returned with ideas to change the system in their homeland, but also traveled to foreign lands to participate in violent conflict (termed jihad) and to serve the Muslim ummah (the global community of Muslims). The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the political implications of globalisation on Islamist movements in Bangladesh. The second part offers a historical overview of the geopolitical context in which Bangladesh became an independent nation-state and how the dependence on Middle Eastern petro-dollars has led to the endorsement of an Islamic element to nationalism in the country. It surveys the conflicts at the heart of the country’s search for a national identity. The third part looks at the phenomenon of international migration and the transformations in identity that it brings about, particularly how the Bangladeshi diaspora turns to the global ummah as a renewed source of political identity. Addressing the patterns of Islamism and the migration-Islamism nexus within a historical perspective, this chapter argues that the unevenness of globalisation and international migration has strengthened Islamist movements in Bangladesh and the appeal to transnational identities.
Islamism in Mindanao, Southern Philippines: Moderates, Radicals and Extremists
Authors: Quimpo Nathan Gilbert
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on the development of Islamism in the Moro struggle – its emergence, the inroads of jihadism, the deradicalisation of the MILF and the possible resurgence of jihadism – and the factors that have brought about the twists and turns in Islamism’s development. It also discusses the roles that the Philippine state and other actors have played in how Islamism has evolved in Mindanao. International developments, such as the spread of Islamist ideas, especially those of radical Islamist thinkers, and the Soviet-Afghan War and its immediate aftermath, as well as domestic developments – breakdowns in the Mindanao peace process – were the main factors for the rise of Islamism in the Moro struggle, and also later, for the major inroads of its violent extremist form, jihadism.
Revisiting Collective De-Radicalisation: A Comparative Perspective
Authors: Ashour Omar
Published: May 2022

The chapter acts as a theoretical framework explaining global transformations from armed to unarmed activism. It also acts as a brief introduction to the 20 empirical case-studies. The chapter introduces the concepts, critically reviews the literature, and highlights some of gaps, and defines the causal variables. It distinguishes between the causal variable impacting the initiation of the transformation, and those sustaining the transformation. It elaborates on four micro- and meso-level causal variables determining the success or the failure the initiation of the transformation. Then it defines three macro-level variables critical for the sustainability of the transformation. The chapter concludes by introducing the case-studies.
The Collective De-Radicalisation of the Islamic Group in Egypt: A First-Hand Testimony *
Authors: Rushdi Osama
Published: May 2022

This chapter is a testimony that focuses on the history and multiple transformations of Egypt’s Islamic Group (IG). The testimony is provided by Osama Rushdi, the former spokesperson of the IG and the current political advisor of its party (Construction and Development). The chapter provides the history of the formation of the IG in the mid-seventies in Egyptian universities, resulting from many societal interactions after the June 1967 defeat. It attempts to explain the various developments within the group's ideology and structure, from an unarmed student movement providing services, to developing its jihadist ideology in Upper Egypt, to assassinating President Anwar Sadat and leading a long national and transnational insurgency against the Mubarak regime in Egypt. This was followed by a process of de-radicalisation and transformation into a political party that managed to win 13 seats in the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections.
From Arms to Talks: Transformations of Three Syrian Armed Islamist Movements
Authors: Almustafa Hamzah
Published: May 2022

This chapter delves into the most salient transformations undergone by three Syrian armed Islamist movements in the past 10 years: Ahrar al-Sham (Freemen of the Levant), Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam) and the Faylaq al-Sham (Levant Division). It identifies the most significant features of these movements before exploring their behavioural, ideological, rhetorical, and organisational changes and dynamics. Although there is no current opportunity structure for these movements to turn into political parties or unarmed social movements in Syria, the chapter analyses how leadership, war pressures, interactions with foreign forces and inducements have affected their discourses, behaviours and structures. It assesses how these factors influence current and future strategy(ies) of these three organisations, especially after the increasing involvement of international and regional state-actors following the Russian intervention in 2015, and after the balance of power/terror tipped back in favour of the Assad regime.
The Afghan Taliban and the Peace Negotiations: Are The Taliban ‘De-Radicalising’? *
Authors: Johnson Thomas H.
Published: May 2022

The primary purpose of this chapter is to discuss the implications for the Taliban of participating in and signing this agreement with the US. Some of the explicit questions that will be addressed by this chapter are:
1. Whether or not these negotiations been accompanied by explicit transformations of the Taliban and, especially, their leadership?
2. Whether the talks caused or resulted in disagreements within Taliban leadership;
3. What the role has been of external actors in these negotiations;
4. Whether we have witnessed any state-level structural reforms (political, constitutional, security sector or civil-military related, transitional justice issues or any other relevant reforms to encourage the initiation
5. Whether the ‘negotiations’ have suggested any significant events or policies to indicate that the Taliban may be de-radicalising.
Hence, the purpose of this chapter is how the Afghan Taliban have transformed, if at all over the years, especially in view of the ‘peace negotiations’ and following their victory in 2021. An additional research objective is to explore why and how the inclination towards these negotiations, escalation and de-escalation happened.
Negotiated Revolution in South Africa: 1990–1994
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: May 2022

This chapter follows the course of the subsequent negotiations between the ANC, the MK and the South African government from the initial attempts at peace-making to the initiation of constitutional negotiations that enabled the non-racial multi-party elections in April 1994, which swept the ANC to power. The chapter attempts to understand the macro-conditions within the transformation towards non-violence had occurred.
Transformations in Ethiopia: From Armed Struggle to the Politics of Coalition
Authors: Maru Mehari Taddele
Published: May 2022

The chapter analyses the transition of Ethiopian armed organisations to the political ruling coalition. It provides an overview of the military victory against the former regime, the transition of the coalition partners from armed guerrillas to statesmen, and the challenges of transition towards unarmed politics and, generally, to democratisation in Ethiopia. The analysis is based on interviewing leaders of former armed organisations, reviewing the external interactions between these leaders, their grassroots and international parties, and a focus on the opportunity structures and incentives for sustaining the transitions.
Between Realism and Project: The Political Treatise
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

Written after the defeat of the republican faction (and interrupted by Spinoza's death), the Tractatus Politicus appears to be characterised by a new "realism", which does not renounce the political project. Compared to the polemical opposition of democracy and tyranny that animated the TTP, the PT proceeds to a broader examination of the three traditional forms of government, each of which, under particular conditions, can perform a positive function. Of the infinite variants of these forms, Spinoza chooses, not by chance, those that are in some way closer to the Dutch condition. On the philosophical-political level, the TP places at the centre the notion of multitudo, the set of natural relations of a human aggregate on which (on its power, its patience) the determination of imperium also depends. The radical immanence of this relationship represents a peculiar Spinozian variant within modernity, as an alternative to the "representative" constructions prevalent in it. Spinoza keeps the tensive plurality of the modern open, always on the ridge of power and crisis. Precisely for this reason, his political philosophy becomes the most lucid and preventive awareness of the "removed" of modernity, of its logic and dynamics.
Carousel: Gendering Through Controversy
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The chapter proposes the metaphor of the carousel to explore Girls’ gendered identities, highlighting both the show’s tendency to omit crucial moments in character's plots as well as to position certain cultural types as – often insufficient – points of orientation for a character’s gender performance. The model of carousel gendering charts how characters move in and out of their critics’ (analytical) gazes, as well as run circles around certain cultural types and tropes. Drawing on the sociological framework of gender relations and hegemony by Raewyn Connell and its refinements by Mimi Schippers and Amanda Lotz, the chapter provides readings of how certain genders are positioned as preferred within the narrative.
Navigating Discourses of Universality and Specificity: The (Feminist) Voice of a Generation?
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The third chapter provides an exploration of Girls's larger cultural contexts. It traces the show’s participation in gendered discourses of universality and specificity and finds these to be indebted to its position within a postfeminist marketplace. Taking up feminist media scholar Charlotte Brunsdon’s observations regarding feminist criticism, the chapter further suggests the notion of an ur-feminist impulse which current postfeminist media texts propagate to benefit from the relatively recent (commercial) popularity of feminism. The chapter demonstrates how, for Girls, this specifically impacts its viewer-critics discussions of race and bodily representations within a binary of critique or redemption. As such, Girls’s investment in its viewer-critics’ conversations is exemplary of a new 'wave' of postfeminist co-optation and commercialization of feminism in popular culture.
The Looped Seriality of How to Get Away with Murder
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

For its conceptualization of How to Get Away with Murder’s serial storytelling as looped seriality, the chapter highlights the show’s investment in temporal loops, as well as the loops between viewer responses and the show itself, recalling the “feedback loop” of seriality studies. The research of feminist audience studies, for example, on soap operas, feminized ‘guilty pleasures,’ fandom, or viewer communities, provides relevant starting points. Additionally, the chapter utilizes methodological conceptions of ‘Black Twitter,’ second screen viewing, and social television.
Three areas emerge as especially relevant to explore how the interactivity of looped seriality surfaces in the show’s Twittersphere. First, the chapter relates the 'Who Dunnit'-hashtags to the conventions of detective fiction or murder mysteries. Second, the chapter interrogates internet humor and specifically memes and GIFs as another crucial site of looped audience engagements. In a third instance, looped seriality is applied to understand the show and the viewers' interactive reciprocity when it comes to the ritualized consumption of (alcoholic) beverages and snacks as a different kind of TV dinner.
Evoking Discourses of Progressivism, Social Activism, and Identity Politics: Such an Important Episode!
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The chapter demonstrates how with How to Get Away with Murder network channel ABC stakes its claim to the ‘brand’ of politically progressive television, and by doing so, it joins a group of shows interested in exploring gender as intersectional and highlighting televisually – and socially – marginalized identities. To claim to be a part of a discourse of progressivism, social activism, and identity politics, a serialized television show has to keep up with current developments and needs the affirmation of certain institutions as well as their viewers’ acknowledgment of its exceptionality and political impact. Viewer responses to such plots and characters often take a purely affective, emotional route of affirming How to Get Away with Murder's as ‘political television’ much needed in the current political crisis felt by so many of its viewers confronted with the Trump administration and involved in the hashtag activism of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.
The Paratext Seriality of The Walking Dead
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The chapter explores how television authorship is developed as a gendered and serial narrative which accompanies – and seeks to influence – reception practices. Beyond the suggestive approaches of adaptation studies or transmedia storytelling, it argues that any analysis of The Walking Dead television show has to consider how the show aspires to a superior status over the chronologically earlier comic book series which it resigns to the status of paratext. Based on work on paratexts by Gérard Genette, Jonathan Gray, and Jason Mittell, as well as the academic and popular discourse on (television) authorship, the chapter focuses on processes of authorization in the franchise. Paratext seriality describes how the show instrumentalizes paratexts (especially serialized ones like the comic book’s letter column and its accompanying talk show Talking Dead) to telegraph textual authority. Aside from an analysis of the gendered serial authorship practices, two specific case studies dealing with character deaths and with sexualized violence serve as illustrations of paratext seriality.
Neoliberalising Discourses of Serialised Survivalism: You Make It … Until You Don’t
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

Building on the previous analysis of popular, long-surviving characters, the chapter focuses on The Walking Dead’s participation in a larger discourse of survivalism driven by the cultural phenomenon of the zombie apocalypse. Through a variety of paratexts and textual depictions, the franchise casts survival struggles and preparedness as entertaining, interactive pastimes. However, the chapter suggests that these practices prepare viewers less for survival within a zombie apocalypse, or any kind of disaster as a matter of fact, but for survival and competition within a neoliberal, capitalist marketplace. The chapter elaborates on this understanding in regard to three specific themes, genre knowledge-related ‘zombie literacy,’ ‘zombie consumerism,’ and ‘zombie workout.’ Moreover, aside from such dominant participations, the chapter searches for alternatives to such neoliberal, capitalist competition within the show and its paratexts. The notion of survival failure here can be reframed as disruptive refusal of capitalist survivalism.
An i for an Eye: The Collective Shaping of Experience in the Age of Machine-Mediated Art
Authors: Saethre-McGuirk Ellen Marie
Published: May 2022

This chapter concerns the way in which the incessant and exponential use of photography in social media, as a means to form and visually communicate experiences, not only permeates our lives, but also shapes our experience of the world. On the basis of the visual research outputs and findings in the form of the exhibition Norwegian Sublime: Landscape Photography in the Age of the iPhone (Frank Moran Memorial Hall Gallery, Brisbane, Australia), this chapter is an in depth look at our contemporary aesthetic experience of nature and the world around us, through photography and Instagram in particular. Drawing on Susan Sontag and Alva Nöe, this chapter discusses how the digital, social media landscape and our addiction to it does more than merely amplify dissociative seeing. It makes dissociative seeing a new normal.
Truth, Performance and the Close-Up: Paradoxical Candour in Errol Morris’s ‘Interrotron’ Interviews
Authors: Sinnerbrink Robert
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores what happens when documentary films focus on human subjects, hoping to reveal their subjectivity via the cinematic gaze. Many recent documentaries use interviews and re-enactments to reveal the ‘truth’ of their subjects as they attempt to conceal, justify, or rationalize their attitudes or actions. Werner Herzog’s, Errol Morris’, and Joshua Oppenheimer’s works expose what could be called paradoxical candour: the more a subject attempts to control an interview, the more their hidden ‘truth’ is unintentionally disclosed via subtle physical and emotional expression, with facial close-ups a key element in the interviews. This self-presentation, articulated through interview sequences, involves an exchange between filmmaker and subject, where the filmmaker’s characterization of a documentary subject as truthful or authentic—or as deceptive or inauthentic—can clash with the subject’s attempts to convey an image or control the narrative. Filmmakers like Morris and Oppenheimer exploit the dialectic between controlled self-disclosure and unintentional revelation, involving an interplay between performance, appearance, and imaginative engagement. Drawing on contemporary accounts of facial expression and close-ups’ role in cinematic presentation, this chapter examines how two of Errol Morris’s ‘Interrotron’ political documentaries, The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, exploit paradoxical candour with remarkable ethico-political results.
Interactive Documentary, Narrative Scepticism and the Values of Documentary Film
Authors: Nannicelli Ted
Published: May 2022

This chapter critically assesses some of the claims that have been made about interactive documentary’s putatively special capacity to yield a variety of values – epistemic, ethical, and political – and to defend a moderately pessimistic view of interactive documentary’s ability to realise any of those values in a way that is superior to traditional, narrative documentary film. The chapter also rebuts the corollary claim that linear narrative – in documentary film and more generally -- is unable or ill-equipped to realise those values. The chapter closes on a more positive note by highlighting the various virtues narrative documentary can realise at its best.
Principles of Exchange: Free Speech in the Era of Fake News
Authors: Fallon Kris
Published: May 2022

While free speech and freedom of the press are often treated as eternal rights in democratic systems, the protections they offer individuals and their role in society are in constant flux. For much of the past century, the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor justified these protections and provided the working model for their implementation. Within a democratic framework, this is intended to give citizens various ideas and opinions to critique and elect their political leaders. Recently, however, a series of contested elections have exposed deep, long-simmering rifts in the political frameworks of many western democracies. Simultaneously, the emergence of new digital platforms capable of spreading individuals’ speech at mass media scale have upended the traditional roles of media and ordinary citizens. This chapter explores the interplay of new digital technologies and the abstract political ideals of free speech and a free press, treating the debates around “fake news” as symptomatic of a wider shift on both fronts. Although many political and legal theorists have critiqued the “marketplace of ideas” framework as now inadequate or outmoded, the chapter argues it offers an acutely accurate description of the economic, political and technological contexts where speech—real and fake, professional and individual—take place.
Adonis: Writing Where the World Begins and Begins Again
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 3 traces trace Adonis’s ventures in the prose poem from his early experimentations in the collection Awrāq fī al-Rīḥ (Leaves in the Wind, 1958) to his seminal contribution, his book-long poem Mufrad bi s̩īghat al-jamʿ (Singular in Plural Form, 1977) passing through the major poetic stations in his career including Aghānī Mihyār al-Dimashqī (The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, 1961). This chapter also traces a parallel thread of discovery through translation and anthologizing which informed and expanded Adonis’s vision of the prose poem as a framework for re-reading and creating. From Aghānī to Mufrad, Adonis gradually traces, not the disintegration of poetic form from verse into prose, but rather charts the emergence of poetic composition (kitāba) and arrives at form as a consequence of language, away from the binary of verse and prose.
Salim Barakat: Poetry as Linguistic Conquest
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores Kurdish-Syrian poet Salim Barakat’s (b. 1951) conflation of poetry and prose and his arrival at a definition of the poetic based in jarring and transgressive interventions in language, from his vantage point as an ‘other’ writing in Arabic. Barakat’s work in poetry and in prose posits a distinct definition of the poetic rooted in the interrogation of and close attentiveness to the meaning of grammar and syntax.
Afterword
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

Studies of Arabic poetry often look back at either the near or the distant past. Few are the academic studies, Arabic or English, which arrive at the present moment of Arabic poetry. This book grounds itself in the present moment and approaches the Arabic poetic practice as it is, in fact, live and urgent, informed and shaped by the experiences and challenges of life in the twenty-first century. Although the focus of the book is the prose poem, the scope it covers necessarily involves other genres of modernist poetry and prose with which this new genre was involved, as well as the long tradition of Arabic poetry and prose against which it both defined and sought to legitimise itself. It traced threads of continuity and convergence, as well as points of disconnect and divergence among the poets writing under the aegis of the prose poem....