bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Jalayirids
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This book traces the origins, history, and memory of the Jalayirid dynasty, a family that succeeded the Mongol rulers in Iran and Iraq in the 14th and early 15th centuries. The story of how the Jalayirids came to power is illustrative of the political dynamics that shaped much of the Mongol and post-Mongol period in the Middle East. The Jalayirid sultans sought to preserve the social and political order of the Mongol Ilkhanate, while claiming that they were the rightful heirs to the rulership of that order. Central to the Jalayirids’ claims to the legacy of the Ilkhanate was their attempt to control the Ilkhanid heartland of Azarbayjan and its major city, Tabriz. Control of Azarbayjan meant control of a network of long-distance trade between China and the Latin West, which continued to be a source of economic prosperity through the 8th/14th century. Azarbayjan also represented the center of Ilkhanid court life, whether in the migration of the mobile court-camp of the ruler, or in the complexes of palatial, religious and civic buildings constructed around the city of Tabriz by members of the Ilkhanid royal family, as well as by members of the military and administrative elite.
The Jalayirs and the Early Ilkhanate
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the career of Īlgā Noyan, ancestor of the Jalayirid dynasty, and his sons during the early Ilkhan period. Īlgā Noyan’s family was one of several Jalayir families in the service of the Ilkhan rulers. What becomes clear from an analysis of this period is that these Jalayir families did not coordinate their activities on the basis of any tribal solidarity, but instead competed with one another for favor and influence at the Ilkhanid court, and within the households of the Chinggisids. This chapter also highlights the significant role that Jalayir amirs played in Anatolia in this period, and how failed revolts there strengthened the position of the descendants of Īlgā Noyan in particular.
From Tribal Amirs to Royal In-laws
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the career of Amīr Ḥusayn, who became known as güregen (Gūrgān), or royal son-in-law after marrying the Ilkhanid princess, Öljetey. This relationship to the Chinggisid family enhanced the status of Amīr Ḥusayn and his son, Shaykh Ḥasan, who rose to prominence within the military elite in the late Ilkhanid period, thanks in large part to his royal mother, the aunt of the last Ilkhan, Abū Sa‘īd.
Crisis and Transition (1335–56)
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the turmoil that followed the death of Abū Sa‘īd and the collapse of the Ilkhanate from the perspective of Shaykh Ḥasan Jalayir’s attempt to lay claim to the Ilkhanid ulus. Shaykh Ḥasan’s main rivals were the Chubanids, who controlled Azarbayjan. Shaykh Ḥasan established himself in Baghdad, was married to the Chubanid Dilshād Khātūn, and came to control the pasture and migration routes of the Oyrat tribe, one of the few Mongolian tribes to maintain its tribal structure after the establishment of the Ilkhanate.
A Proper Place for God: Ma Zhu’s Chinese-Islamic Cosmogenesis
Authors: Lipman Jonathan
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on Ma Zhu (1640-after 1710), a Yunnanese literatus educated in the Neo-Confucian and Islamic curricula, author of the classical Chinese text Qingzhen zhinan (the compass or guide to Islam). His intended audience included both non-Muslim elites and Muslims literate only in that language. As he justified his ancestral religion, he had to solve an intractable problem—how could he narrate creation of the cosmos ex nihilo, a necessary part of the description of the Islamic God (Ar. Allāh), in a cultural context that lacked a cosmic creator? He solved this by placing God at the beginning of the conventional Neo-Confucian progression of the cosmos’s uncaused, impersonal evolution—from the chaos of Beyond Ultimate (wuji), via the Great Ultimate (taiji), yin and yang, the Five Phases, Heaven and Earth (qiankun) to phenomenal reality. Though unsuccessful in persuading non-Muslims of God’s cosmogenetic power, Ma Zhu’s book remains popular among Sino-Muslims, who combine Chinese and Islamic cultures in their intellectual and religious lives.
Liu Zhi: The Great Integrator of Chinese Islamic Thought
Authors: Frankel James D.
Published: September 2017

Liu Zhi (ca. 1660 – ca. 1730) was the consummate exemplar of the late Ming - early Qing (16th-19th c.) Chinese Muslim scholarly community that produced the Han kitāb corpus, promoting Islam as entirely consonant with Neo-Confucian norms. He continued a tradition of translating Islamic ideas into classical Chinese but added his own original thought and innovative methods. Engaged not only with Confucianism but also with Daoism, Buddhism, and the other Abrahamic traditions, he drew upon and synthesised eclectic sources and influences, from mysticism to ritualism. He also inspired subsequent generations of Chinese Muslims by constructing an identity and presenting a vision of Islam that is Chinese in its core values, yet unmistakably Islamic. He thus contributed significantly to the refinement, legitimation, and popularization of Sino-Islamic intellectual simultaneity at the meeting place of two great civilizations.
Tianfang Sanzijing: Exchanges and Changes in China’s Reception of Islamic Law
Authors: Tontini Roberta
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the implications of the legal discourse set forth by a Chinese primer for Muslims, the Tianfang Sanzijing (Three Character Classic of Islam), regarding notions of Islamic “legitimacy” and “orthodoxy.” Credited to the author of the Tianfang Dianli, Liu Zhi (1662-ca. 1736), and animated by that book’s purpose of reconciling Islamic law with the legal culture of the Qing, Liu’s concise primer on the main tenets of Islam spoke to a broader audience than its textual antecedent. This chapter argues that the Muslim Sanzijing set the ground for an independent development of Islamic law in the Chinese context, one that had the power to detach China from conventional Islamic jurisprudence outside its frontiers while remaining consistent with the overarching legal principles of Sunni Islam.
The Multiple Meanings of Pilgrimage in Sino-Islamic Thought
Authors: Petersen Kristian
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the construction of the idea of “pilgrimage” in the works of key Han kitāb authors Wang Daiyu (1590-1658), Liu Zhi (1670-1724), and Ma Dexin (1794-1874). All three advocated pilgrimage as a religious ideal, but each successive generation gave greater weight to its requirement as an obligatory observance, as Sino-Muslims gradually entered a more interconnected Islamic context. The perception of the ḥajj changed from a symbol of true belief to a potential critical practice, and it finally emerged as an essential religious duty. Wang Daiyu outlined the theological foundations of the pilgrimage and its role as a link to the time of creation and union with God. Liu Zhi underlined the physical practice of potential pilgrims, stressing the ceremonial and experiential aspects of the pilgrimage and detailing the practices it entailed. Ma Dexin emphasized the performative aspect of the journey itself, asserting its doctrinal necessity while arguing for its power to rectify and renew religious understanding.
Ethnicity or Religion? Republican-Era Chinese Debates on Islam and Muslims
Authors: Cieciura Wlodzimierz
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines internal Sino-Muslim disputes from the late Qing into later Republican China over the question of whether the Sino-Muslims were a separate ethnic group, the Huizu, or rather a religious minority within the Han ethnicity, the Hanzu. Through the writings of Huang Zhenpan, Ding Baochen, Yin Boqing, Xue Wenbo and other Sino-Muslim intellectuals it illuminates the question of Hui ethnic status as a divisive controversy among Sino-Muslim elites during the crucial formative period of modern Chinese national state and identity. Several different interpretations of the Huizu ethnicity emerged from these polemics. Some considered the Huizu as an inclusive Muslim ethnicity, encompassing all Muslim populations in both Eastern China and in the Western borderlands, regardless of linguistic or cultural background. Others regarded the Sino-Muslims as part of the global and Pan-Islamic “Muslim nation,” and still others as including only the culturally Chinese Sinophone Muslim communities. Based on modern Muslim periodicals, this chapter demonstrates the debates’ influence on the Muslim policies of all the 20th century Chinese regimes, including the Guomindang and Communist Party.
Between ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Liu Zhi: Chinese Muslim Intellectuals at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
Authors: Chérif-Chebbi Leila
Published: September 2017

This article surveys Chinese Muslim intellectuals at the turn of the 21st century, dividing them into three sociological categories: (1) officials and state-approved scholars; (2) religious clerics (imams); and (3) unofficial scholars, headmasters or laoshi (teachers) in private institutions, writers, journalists, webmasters, and more. It focuses on the divide between advocates of a culturally Chinese Islam, the “Liu Zhi tendency,” as opposed to those who view Islam as a holistic, universal religion, the “‘Abd al-Wahhab tendency.” These definitions distinguish between a national, local expression of religion and an ahistorical, non-national one. In the 1990s, the latter—sometimes called “Salafi” or “Wahhabi”—rejected the Liu Zhi defenders as acculturated non-believers, distant observers rather than members of the umma. All of these participants make use of new media on the Internet as well as print publications and electronic broadcast formats. In the new century, Chinese Muslim intellectuals have sometimes had to compromise, some of them concluding that the core of Islam must remain inviolate while its national expression can be culturally Chinese. These various tendencies are illustrated with multiple biographies of exemplary thinkers, concluding with the striking intellectual evolution of Zhang Weizhen, a charismatic headmaster and teacher.
Prologue
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

This prologue to Cowboy Classics overviews the growing interest in classical receptions: the study of how the classical world has been represented since antiquity, guided by the belief that these examinations can enhance the understanding of both the receiving society and the ancient one. After distinguishing classical receptions from the earlier classical tradition movement, which focuses on influence rather than dialogue, this chapter acknowledges objections to receptions studies from scholars both outside and within the field of classics, including the particular problem of comparing classical works with modern film – collaboratively-produced visual works often considered lowbrow compared to the elite literary texts of antiquity. Drawing on the work of filmmakers, teachers, and receptions scholars, this prologue argues for cinematic productions as legitimate visual texts of comparative value not only pedagogically, but also culturally, in that mainstream film, like classical epic, embeds its culture’s most closely held assumptions and worldviews. Finally, this prologue considers the specific problem of receptions studies like the one undertaken in this book – those with no evident direct connection to antiquity – arguing that these allow more focus on meaning rather than influence while bringing past works into present relevance rather than vice versa.
Howard Hawks’s Red River
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

As the film that introduced a new psychological complexity to the genre while establishing John Wayne as a serious actor rather than merely a star, Howard Hawks’s 1948 Red River is often considered the first Golden Age Western. After brief discussion of its literary roots and the circumstances surrounding its production, release, and reception, this chapter connects this film to the broader epic tradition before turning to specific parallels with the three canonical Greco-Roman epics, first, arguing that much like Homer’s Iliad, Red River positions Wayne’s Tom Dunson as an Achilles figure – a man consumed by deadly rage provoked by a slight to his honor. Next, expanding on Gerald Mast’s identification of the film as an Odyssey, this chapter shows that in both works, a morally ambiguous hero embarks upon a quest to preserve his home, and in both, the father-son relationship is central, along with related issues of succession, status, authority, and identity. Finally, Red River’s kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid is discussed: both highlight the painful sacrifices inherent in the heroic work of nation-building – difficulties symbolized in both cases by the sacrifice of women and the hero’s compromised humanity – emphasizing the cost of empire even while promoting its glories.
Conclusion
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

This short conclusion reiterates the main thesis of Cowboy Classics: that Westerns help us grapple with identity issues in a culturally relevant way while providing the comfort of chronological distancing, much as Homer and Virgil’s epics did for their societies. As a result, the Western has proven remarkably resilient, with the past decade seeing a number of big-budget films, both originals and remakes, as well as successful TV series. And just as the characterization of epic heroes shaped notions of idealized masculinity in antiquity, the Western hero remains a pervasive model for ideal manhood in America more generally, as is evident both in other film genres – from science fiction and fantasy to detective and gangster films to post-apocalyptic narratives – and in real world scenarios where men are engaged in heroic action on behalf of society (or want to be seen as such). Indeed, the model of masculinity Westerns provide is so deeply ingrained in the American cultural consciousness that it in turn colors our reception of ancient epic, which is itself now often filtered through a “Western” lens.
Luxury: A Dialectic of Desire?
Authors: Berry Christopher J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores luxury in a Hegelian tripartite framework (moralisation, de-moralisation, re-moralisation), to consider whether there is a viable Aufhebung, a move beyond the second phase or ‘Moment’. It first outlines the view that luxury as part of a moralised vocabulary was considered bad or dangerous; this view persists until about the seventeenth century. The chapter then discusses the rejection or negation of this, the process is considered here as the ‘de-moralisation’ of luxury. Finally, this chapter examines what might be said about a ‘re-moralisation’, that is, whether there is a viable or sustainable critique of luxury in the contemporary world. Underscoring these topics is the role played by, and assessment of, human desire.
‘Life’s Little Luxuries?’ The Social and Spatial Construction of Luxury
Authors: Mansvelt Juliana , Breheny Mary , Hay Iain
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers how the concept of luxury is deployed in both talk and practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with older New Zealanders from a range of socio-economic positions, ethnic groups, and geographic locations across New Zealand, the chapter demonstrates how understandings of luxury are materially grounded and morally constituted. It provides some insights into how and why constructions of luxury are drawn upon to describe a range of consumption practices, and vary across people, place, and time. By examining the heterogeneity and construction of luxury beyond the consumption practices of the wealthy, this chapter shows that a ‘little bit of luxury’ in everyday life matters and more critically reveals how the manifestations and moralities of luxury consumption vary greatly.
Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Silk Shiki for Hermès
Authors: Serdari Thomaï
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the artistic experimentations carried out by artist Hiroshi Sugimoto examining luxury products as part of a collaboration with Maison Hermès. When examined as part of Sugimoto's artistic and intellectual work, these items illuminate aspects of luxury production that have not been examined in the literature of the field, mainly because the frameworks that have already been developed rely heavily on subjective theories that shift with time. This chapter thus relies on a different argument — one which explains the power that luxury exerts over humans and why this is still relevant on both the experiential and discursive level.
Online Luxury: Geographies of Production and Consumption and the Louis Vuitton Website
Authors: Rocamora Agnès
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at the Louis Vuitton website, a site devoted to luxury fashion which in turn forms part of a so-called ‘luxury web sphere’. It situates the brand in the context of the luxury fashion industry. The chapter then focuses on the idea of production and consumption, for both discourses inform much of the website. It interrogates the ways a luxury brand produces, and reproduces, online the logics of distinction and social differentiation that underpin luxury and finally looks at how exclusivity is built into a site, and, in the process, identifies the actors who are included in, as well as those excluded from, luxury as defined by Louis Vuitton.
Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter outlines the topography of extreme cinema: what it is, and the films that are discussed in the book. The initial chapter outlines the existence of a trend in post-millennial international cinema toward extreme cinema, which in some cases turns away from conventional narrative structure and its appeal to our emotions, favoring instead a cinema of physical affect. The chapter situates these trends within the longer tradition of what Linda Williams termed “body genres”: films of genres such as horror, melodrama, and pornography that are designed to elicit a response in the bodies of spectators. Further, building off of Williams’ relation between the “numbers” in musicals and in pornography, this chapter argues that the structure of extreme cinema tends to be episodic. Its power lies not in narrative, but rather in episodes of great spectacle: in scenes of tremendous violence and explicit sex.
Pain: Exploring Bodies, Technology, and Endurance
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses depictions of pain in the cinema, and at the same time attempts to demonstrate how the graphic exhibition of bodies in pain wields the potential to elicit an affective response in the spectator. The films discussed in this chapter include films from the American torture porn genre (e.g., Saw, and Hostel), as well as Martyrs, and A Serbian Film. Describing torture porn’s depiction of violence, along with its obsession with rust and ruin, the chapter argues that the genre mourns the loss of an industrial past to a world of digital technologies—and calls for a violent return to the body. This violent return to the body is also taken up by European films that depict explicit violence, blood, and gore. Pain is used in these films to show the human body taken to its absolute limit: at the threshold between human and animal, and between flesh and meat.
Arousal: Graphic Encounters
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the inclusion of graphic sexual content in post-millennial cinema. Art films have increasingly incorporated scenes of unsimulated, hardcore sex acts—traditionally associated with pornography—into their narratives in recent years. Arousal, perhaps more so than any of the other themes explored in Extreme Cinema, wields the potential for affective dissonance. In these films, sexual transgression and eroticism might turn towards disgust, signifiers of pain might be confused for signifiers of sexual arousal, or morally objectionable content might elicit sensual arousal—at the intersection of violence and fetishism. The films discussed in this chapter include: Wetlands, Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II, 9 Songs, Helter Skelter.
Crying: Dreadful Melodramas—Family Dramas and Home Invasions
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

Much of this chapter focuses on the melodramatic genre and its application in contemporary extreme cinema. Melodrama typically involves loss, and/or a character that arrives too late. In Linda Williams’s notion of the “body genres,” these are films designed to elicit tears, and they frequently revolve around family. However, these are narrative concerns and therefore speak to emotions—particularly sadness. Extreme Cinema attempts to demonstrate how contemporary practices might embellish emotive narrative content with affecting cinematic techniques. Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist, for instance, is about the death of a child and how the parents of the deceased child negotiate their grief, anger, and guilt. Von Trier visualizes the overwhelming anxiety and suffering by means of hyper-stylization—exaggerated colours and lighting, audio design, slow-motion, rapid-fire editing, extreme close-ups, etc. Also discussed is the work of Japanese filmmaker Shion Sono, particularly his films Strange Circus and Why don’t you play in hell?.
The End of Extreme Cinema?
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

The end of the book posits that recent trends towards the extreme do not constitute a cinematic style as such, but rather an international explosion of stylized cinema. There is, however, a genuine risk that such an endeavour might encourage spectators to lose sight of the unique cultural context from which it comes, in favour of a trendy cinematic lingua franca. In the Asian context in particular the London-based DVD label Tartan distributed a line of Asian films under the banner of “Asia Extreme.” While Extreme Cinema acknowledges that this is a perilous tightrope, what the book finally wants to call attention to is the expansive nature of extreme cinema that can be found in nearly every corner of our global media culture.
Reinventing Liberty
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

Walter Scott is often regarded as the first historical novelist. Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning the formulation of political change and British national identity and its response to political change. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as ‘land of liberty’. Drawing on the new ways of writing history in this period, upon stadial history, antiquarianism, and debates concerning historical evidence, Reinventing Liberty analyses the anxieties caused by the rise of commerce and the demands for political change. It explores how historical novelists from Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe interrogated the idea of an ancient constitution. It examines the radical energies of the historical novel in post-French Revolution debate and the genre’s position as forerunner to the national tale. It then demonstrates how such ideas recuperated by more conservative historical novelists, who redirected historical concern from issues of individual liberty to matters of nation and empire and who emphasized a Christian version of chivalry. Finally, it positions Scott in relation to this complex tradition. The result is a new definition of the historical novel and of its role in the construction of the national myth of Britain as nation of gradual political change.
Uneasy Alliances: Liberty and the Nation
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

In imagining the safe politicisation of the ‘mass’ in commercial modernity, the idea of the nation as a focus for enthusiasm is key. Yet in the British context the nation itself was a troubled concept. Hence, as Chapter 3 explores, historical novelists drew upon the comparative potential of stadial history, trying to reimagine British liberty in relation to the competing nationalisms of the sister kingdoms and the empire. As novelists like Henry Siddons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, James White, Anna Millikin, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Porter realised, such competing nationalisms would have to be carefully balanced, shaped by new historical narratives, if national feeling were not to be as threatening to the emergent state as class identity. As such, the historical novel is an important forerunner to the national tales of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth.
Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

Chapter Four explores how, in the years leading up to the publication of Waverley, historical novelists recuperate the radical and reformist readings of history that had emerged during the post-French Revolution debate. Two overlapping strategies of reclamation emerge. First, as in the works of Anna Maria Porter, Jane Porter and Sarah Green, the radical emphasis on (non-chivalric) sensibility becomes an emphasis on chivalric morality. Second, the radical emphasis on rational historiography is co-opted, as seen, for all their differences in political perspective, in works by Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane West, which gesture towards scientific history. This absorption of reformist and radical energies into more conservative or cautious historical fictions facilitated a myth of modern gradualism against a background of secure commerciality; this myth would be problematized by Walter Scott.
The End of History? Scott, His Precursors and the Violent Past
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

The fifth chapter examines how Scott would finally be unable to erase the unease evident in the earlier historical novel. Having attempted to calm the post-French Revolution debate concerning history in The Antiquary, in Ivanhoe (1820) Scott is unable to escape its tropes, giving a coded response to ancient constitutionalism; to the call for the redistribution of sensibility; to radical readings of stadial history and even to the more conservative narrative of history as a kind of scientific medicine for the national body. Moreover, as he responds to previous points of historiographic and political tension, his sense of the inherent violence of commerce and its fit with governmental structures grow. Finally analysing St. Ronan’s Well (1823) (a novel in which the transitions of modern commerciality are themselves seen as violent), this chapter explores how Scott negotiates the historiographically-shaped economic apprehensions of his predecessors.
Don’t Be Too Quick to Dismiss Them: Authorship and the Westerns of Delmer Daves
Authors: Nelson Andrew Patrick
Published: September 2017

Andrew Patrick Nelson offers a revaluation of Broken Arrow, which is often credited with helping to inaugurate a cycle of ‘pro-Indian’ Westerns featuring more sympathetic and even heroic portrayals of aboriginal characters. As a counterpoint to reflectionist readings of the pro-Indian cycle, Nelson explores an alternative explanation for the character of the famous Chiricahua leader, Cochise. He argues that Cochise is, in fact, a common character in Daves’ Westerns: the stoic secondary hero who steadies, strengthens, and defers to the mildly neurotic leading man who, rather than being a natural agent, proceeds based on reason. Re-conceiving Cochise as a ‘Davesian’ character is a small step towards reclaiming Daves’ pivotal role of the development of the Western in the 1950s.
Bent, or Lifted Out by Its Roots: Daves’ Broken Arrow and Drum Beat as Narratives of Conditional Sympathy
Authors: Jaskulski Józef
Published: September 2017

Józef Jaskulski examines Broken Arrow and Drum Beat, considering the perspective that the latter perpetuates the very Native American stereotypes that the former attempted to amend. He links these two narratives through a contrastive analysis of their respective Native American protagonists: firstly, the noble, articulate Cochise and the obstinate, inarticulate Modoc, Captain Jack; secondly, the female characters of Sonseeahray and Toby. Though it is easy to discard Drum Beat as an essentialist step back in Hollywood’s century-long struggle with the so-called ‘Indian problem’, Jaskulski suggests that Drum Beat serves as a latent supplement to Broken Arrow, which can be read as an important document of Hollywood’s conflicted sentiments toward Native Americans in the late-Truman/early-Eisenhower eras. In particular, reflecting a critique of the major about-face in Federal Indian Policy during the 1940s.
Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America
Authors: Berns Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni
Published: September 2017

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns argues that the clash between different cultures is a key element of the films of Delmer Daves. He offers a dialectical account of these cultural clashes, suggesting that Daves dramatises social progress by conceiving it as the passage from one social stage to another that supplants, in an act of improvement, the preceding one. Through analysis of three of his films from three different decades and representing three different genres – The Red House, The Hanging Tree, and Spencer’s Mountain – Berns demonstrates the sustained and consistent authorial concern that Daves felt for the betterment of society. What was required, Daves felt, was a community constantly willing to work to achieve social concord. In this regard, Berns’ analysis is one that is contextualised in America’s post-War years, representing a period in which hope was held out for a better society.
Partial Rehabilitation: Task Force and the Case of Billy Mitchell
Authors: Howe Andrew
Published: September 2017

Andrew Howe provides an account of one of Daves’ war films. Task Force is a biopic of General Billy Mitchell who, during the 1920s, tirelessly advocated for the concept of the aircraft carrier as the future of naval warfare. In his analysis, Howe posits three central figures: Daves as writer-director, Billy Mitchell as historical inspiration, and lead-actor Gary Cooper, who plays Mitchell’s fictional treatment in the film, Jonathan L. Scott. The chapter situates its analysis of ‘Mitchell’ within the context of the early Cold War years and of the Hollywood of the time. In the case of the latter, it discusses Hollywood’s post-War obsession with the subject of aerial warfare. In contrast to other contributors in this collection, Howe suggests Daves’ greater quality was as a writer, rather than a director, and ranks his best scripting efforts – Task Force included – alongside those of Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray.
“This Is Where He Brought Me: 10,000 Acres of Nothing!”: The Femme Fatale and other Film Noir Tropes in Delmer Daves’ Jubal
Authors: Carter Matthew
Published: September 2017

Matthew Carter offers an in-depth examination of Delmer Daves’ Jubal. He contextualises the film within both the Western and Hollywood more generally and argues that, both formally and thematically, it and other prominent Westerns of the time are more closely aligned with film noir than is generally acknowledged to be the case. Applying a psychoanalytical-informed feminist analysis that considers the ideological intent of Jubal’s use of the femme fatale, he evaluates its critical-, or, counter-ideological capacity. From such a reading, he argues that the film’s narrative focus on repressed sexual desires and on the plight of the main female protagonist provides enough material to justify Jubal as constituting a critique of the excesses of patriarchal power.
Islamic Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empire’s richest provincial city
What did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists’ law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law – religious scholarship and royal justice – undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shari‘a and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.
Key features
Offers a new interpretation of the relationship between Islamic law and political power
Presents law as the key nexus connecting Egypt with the imperial capital Istanbul during the period of Ottoman decentralization
Studies judicial institutions such as the governor’s Diwan and the imperial council that have received little attention in previous scholarship
Integrates the study of legal records with an analysis of how legal practice was represented in contemporary chronicles
Provides transcriptions and translations of a range of Ottoman legal documents
Cairo’s legal system: institutions and actors
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the various institutions, actors and practices that made up Ottoman Cairo’s legal system. It discusses the sharīʿa courts, the Ottoman governor’s tribunal (al-Dīwān al-ʿĀlī), the Imperial Council (Dīvān-i Hümāyūn), the market inspector (muḥtasib), Janissary Āghā and associated officials, policing and punishments, Christian and Jewish courts, and the practice of mediation (ṣulḥ). The chapter portrays Cairo’s legal system as a complex network of overlapping forums and practices, in which jurisdictional boundaries were often obscure, and which offered litigants the ability to choose.
Government authority, the interpretation of fiqh, and the production of applied law
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the Ottoman executive authorities attempted to influence and control the legal doctrines, drawn from fiqh, that were used in Cairo’s courts. Although the government could not produce fiqh, which was the domain of scholars, the authorities could shape applied law by intervening in the reading of fiqh, and instructing judges to favor particular doctrines from within the fiqh tradition. The chapter focuses in particular on one site where this occurred, Cairo’s madhhab pluralism, showing that the Ottoman authorities attempted to privilege Ḥanafī doctrines at several points, but often faced resistance from Egyptian scholars. As examples of this Ḥanafizing process, the chapter focuses on the issues of judicial divorce (faskh) and long-term rental contracts (al-ijāra al-ṭawīla). More broadly, the chapter argues that regardless of the debates about ijtihād and taqlīḍ, change in applied law was possible in pre-modern Islamic societies without doctrinal innovation, through manipulation of the diversity within the vast accumulated body of fiqh.
Introduction: Cinema’s Grey Spaces
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space and the “black box” of the movie theatre. This introduction challenges that approach, arguing that new methods and research drawn from media and cultural studies—rather than art history—are critical to contextualizing the origins and significance of such art. It demonstrates how these works and the terms of their display may diverge from the standards of the move theatre while including aspects of other forms of popular film and video culture, from the drive-in to the peep show. It concludes by laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and historically rooted approach to the relationship between art and popular media, one better suited to identifying and measuring the artistic influence of an extraordinary range of popular media forms and practices.
A Wider Audience: Robert Rauschenberg, the White Paintings and CinemaScope
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings have been interpreted as enigmatic “blank slates” that question the meaning of painting and the gallery experience. First shown in New York in 1953, at the same time that widescreen cinema was launched with the CinemaScope film The Robe, the White Paintings created a dialogue between movie theatre and art gallery as places of popular spectacle. Despite the competing aesthetic claims of modernist painting and widescreen cinema in mid-twentieth-century America, both addressed the spectator as active participant. Ideas of “action painting” competed with attempts at producing screen action requiring a ranging eye. This chapter demonstrates how, at the moment Hollywood sought to promote movie-going as a “serious”, engrossing art form through widescreen picture formats, Rauschenberg sought to relegate painting to a supporting role in the activity of the everyday as shadows of the surrounding world would move across it screen-like surface.
Private Dis-Pleasures: Mona Hatoum, Mediated Bodies and the Peep Show
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

In subject and mode of presentation, Mona Hatoum’s 1980s and 90s video works centring on the body drew on the history of pornographic and medical imaging techniques. Making comparisons to porn peepshows and MRI, both of which were newsworthy in Britain (for very different reasons) when Hatoum left Lebanon to study art in London in the 1970s, this chapter provides a close analysis of a handful of her installations, chief among them her Corps Etranger of 1994. It examines how Hatoum’s heavily mediated images and carefully constructed environments raised questions about gender, sexuality, and the identity politics of social space. Just as peepshows became political battlegrounds eliciting heavy government regulation by testing the rules of public space and social interaction, Hatoum’s installations tested the rules and expectations of art exhibition spaces. These works opened zones where visitors would become equally aware of the potential for transgression and surveillance in their own daily performance of body and self.
Introduction: Interrogating Men and Masculinities in Scottish History
Authors: Abrams Lynn , Ewan Elizabeth
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the study of masculinities in Scotland and Scottish history. It discusses the importance of considering gender when examining the lives and actions of men, before providing a brief historiography of the study of masculinity in recent decades, including such concepts as hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy. The chapter provides a summary of the themes discussed in the three parts of the book – Models, Representations, and Lived Experiences. It briefly describes individual chapters as well as the types of sources contributors have used. Among the important issues raised by the contributors are male subjectivity, masculinities and power, violence, images of masculinity, the relationship between prescription and practice, and the intersection of age, social status, and economic and social factors with gender. The extent to which the Scottish experience is distinctive is discussed.
‘That Class of Men’: Effeminacy, Sodomy and Failed Masculinities in Inter- and Post-War Scotland
Authors: Meek Jeffrey
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the men that used the nation’s urban spaces for soliciting sex, for pleasure or for money. The effeminate homosexual, in particular the male prostitute, was marked out by his failure to perform expected norms of masculinity, and his deviance was perceived to be inscribed upon his body. Attitudes towards the effeminate homosexual continued in the post-war period and such men were the continued subject of scrutiny and derision from wider society and from homosexual men, the latter group perceiving effeminacy to be a discreditable form of homosexual identity
Speaking to the ‘Hard Men’: Masculinities, Violence and Youth Gangs in Glasgow, c. 1965–75
Authors: Bartie Angela , Fraser Alistair
Published: September 2017

This chapter unites perspectives from history and sociology in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind the persistent image of the Glasgow ‘hard man’, while also interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Drawing on oral history interviews with individuals involved in violent territorialism – specifically through street-based ‘gangs’ of young men – c. 1965-1975, it contrasts popular representations of the Glasgow ‘hard man’ with the lived experiences of those living and working in the city at that time. Focusing specifically on Easterhouse, it highlights the prominence of ‘the street’ in narrative accounts of masculine identity formation for young working-class men and links this to the specific social, cultural and economic composition of the locale. Overall, it argues that such ‘street’ masculinities should be understood in historical context, recognising the influence of local cultures of machismo on the persistence of forms of masculine identity.
‘Seeing with the Hands’: Descartes, Blindness, and Vision
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

The first engagement with blindness in modern philosophy, Descartes’ famous work ‘On Optics’ (1637)is introduced here. In his observation of a hypothetical blind man walking with a stick, Descartes makes the analogy between hands and eyes such that the blind are conceived as “seeing with their hands”. Descartes’ initial analogy therefore neatly solidifies an influential conceptualization of blindness for several centuries, initiating a philosophical relation between blindness, vision and touch.
‘Suppose a man born blind…’: Cubes and Spheres, Hands and Eyes
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

In 1688 the Irishman William Molyneux posed his famous question to John Locke: if a man born without sight, and who already knew a solid cube and sphere through direct tactile experience, was now able to see, would he be able to tell which was which by sight alone, without touching them? The reason Ernst Cassirer called it “the central question of eighteenth century epistemology and psychology” in 1951 is the crux of this chapter.
Voltaire, Buffon, and Blindness in France
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

After Voltaire introduced an enthusiastic French readership to Molyneux’s question and Cheselden’s case study, there followed intense interest in blindness in La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749), and Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (1749). To illustrate his ideas Buffon considers a hypothetical neonate who must correlate hands with eyes in order to see, the hand is “constantly measuring” so that distance and perspective can be learnt, implying that the blind still have spatial concepts.
The Testimony of Blind Men: Diderot’s Lettre
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

In 1749 Diderot composed his celebrated Letter on the Blind that dealt directly with blindness and what the blind supposedly ‘see’. Diderot sought out the testimony of an actual blind man in the French town of Puiseaux. Referring back to Molyneux’s question, and having considered Cheselden’s post-operative evidence, Diderot’s contribution here is a somewhat wide-ranging and multi-stranded essay that includes the marriage of blind testimony of spatial perception to now-familiar philosophical issues, suggests possible ways of communicating through touching on the skin. Diderot argues for a haptic language, the “clear and precise language for the touch” that would prefigure development of embossed scripts and eventually the systematic characters of Braille a century later.
Reading with the Fingers: Tactile Signs and the Possibilities for a Language of Touch
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

The accidental discovery in 1786 by Valentin Haüy that embossed script could be read by the fingers paved the way for the concrete development of a fully-fledged haptic reading system. The story of tactile writing systems is spurred in part by shame, a means to include the blind in literate culture. Haüy’s ‘An Essay on the Education of Blind Children’ of 1786 summarized his purpose: “to teach the blind reading, by the assistance of books, where the letters are rendered palpable by their elevation above the surface of the paper” (1894:9). Here the evolution of competing writing systems and their role in education and access to literature and mathematics is detailed, as Braille’s system spread to other countries including Britain and the US, and was famously endorsed by Helen Keller whose own remarkable story of reading and communicating through the skin is so compelling.
Seeing with the Tongue: Sight through Other Means
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

Can a conceptual framework developed to theorize one sense modality generalise to transfers between other modalities? Expanding from the formulation of Molyneux’s original question about vision and touch, or eyes and hands, this chapter concerns research in the technology of sensory substitution. Paul Bach-y-Rita has experimented since the 1960s with his TVSS (Tactile-Visual Sensory Substitution) devices which transcode optical information from a camera feed onto the surface of the tongue and the back. Recent examples such as the BrainPort™ by WICAB (a spinoff of Bach-Y-Rita’s lab) leads to insights into the nature of ‘seeing’, extends the Molyneux problem into more recent technological territory, and speaks to the possibilities of cross-modal perception raised throughout the book.
Blindness, Empathy, and ‘Feeling Seeing’: Literary Accounts of Blind Experience
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

Since Descartes, most discussions of blindness have been in terms of what Kleegecalls ‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’, a blank-blind figure, rendered mute. In contrast, the twentieth century offered a number of personal accounts of blindness and the process of going blind, at once furthering the fascination by the sighted reader of what the blind supposedly ‘see’ whilst also personalizing the testimony. We start with what Jorge Luis Borges terms the ‘pathetic moment’ of his own becoming blind (1973) along with other first-person accounts of going blind, including the so-called ‘Blind Traveller’ James Holman, RN, Helen Keller’s celebrated autobiographies, and Oliver Sacks’ recent account of progressive blindness through ocular cancer.
Medical Humanism and Blackwood’s Magazine at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

If Blackwood’s helped to generate a recuperative medical humanism in the first half of the nineteenth century, what was its legacy? This ‘Coda’ turns to the fin de siècle to trace some key examples of a resurgence of the magazine’s mode of medical humanism at a time of perceived crisis for the medical profession, when many began ‘to worry that the transformation of medicine into a science, as well as the epistemological and technical successes of the new sciences, may have been bought at too great a price’....