bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Outside Of Thought
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: January 2023

This essay explores the relation between the concepts of the inside and outside, especially as they relate to philosophy and life. From whatever perspective we look at our condition today, from the domains of power to those of knowledge, to social dynamics, to the substance of material life, what Foucault calls the “thought from outside” can be found at every turn. Various disciplines, artificially separated by dispositifs of power, by control and valuing, progress by virtue of their reciprocal contamination. It is not for nothing, then, that we see paradigm shifts in these disciplines that spring from the encounter or conflict with another language that forces them from the outside to modify their lexical borders and status.The light of knowledge, as Machiavelli observes, always comes from the outside to illuminate the inside, and never the reverse, but the “outside” is also the inside’s own extimacy to itself.
Stories in and about Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

Chapter 1 reviews stories in and aboutShakespeare’s Sonnets, including events that are intimated by the poet, literary-historical narratives, and tales that have accrued to the sequence over time. Many of these stories can be found in modern introductions to the sonnets; here they are examined through the lens of sequential organization. More specifically, the chapter outlines ways of reading Sonnets as a sequence. If we regard Sonnets as a highly designed work, motivated by personal ambitions, our understanding of the poetry can change dramatically; the anthology pieces and the “trivial” or “out of place” sonnets are especially subject to reevaluation. Two biographical claims are explored at the end of the chapter: that Shakespeare initially composed Sonnets for the third Earl of Southampton, and that allusions to the earl are woven into the sequence. The arguments about organization do not depend on the biographical inferences, but they are enriched by them.
The Fair-Youth Sonnets, Part 1
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter and the next one analyse the pyramid steps in the fair-youth section of Sonnets, focusing on the steps’ internal organisation and on verbal and schematic allusions. While Chapters 6 and 7 form a unit, their partition is not merely a concession to length: following the organisation of the fair-youth section, they focus on the pre-99 sonnets and the post-99 sonnets, respectively. Topics in this chapter include: Sonnet 9 and its “pivotal” position, the use of pronouns in Shakespeare’s sonnets in forms of address (and how it compares to other poets’ use), ‘centre’ poems, and Shakespeare’s allusions to his contemporaries.
The Mistress Sonnets
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

Against much contemporary scholarship, this chapter argues that the mistress sonnets are highly organised: 127–44 consist of three pyramid steps; 145 is a division marker; and 146–54 consist of three more steps. (Sonnets’ final step, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, can be regarded as part of the mistress section or as something apart.) With slight differences, the mistress poems are organised along the same lines as the fair-youth poems. Why there are slight differences, and why the sequence’s conclusion is ambiguous, are guiding questions in this and the next chapter. As with the fair-youth sonnets, the mistress sonnets can be divided into two parts, and the second part can be regarded as written later, at least in the fiction of the sequence.
Complaints of the Heart
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the final poem published in the 1609 Sonnets as integral to the sequence. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ is often neglected in discussions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even its Shakespearean authorship continues to be questioned. In the context of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, however, it fits well in the collection. What is more, it is a highly allusive and self-referential work, which ties together various themes in the sequence. The three main figures of the sequence—poet, youth, mistress—are echoed in the complaint, and echoing itself emerges as a theme. The chapter ends with a discussion of what may be the most hidden scheme in the sequence—a ‘pyramid inside the pyramid’ or ‘heart of the pyramid’—giving further emphasis to the motive for hidden organisation.
Historical Sentiment and Experience: Burke and Wollstonecraft
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

This chapter argues that Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’s accounts of the French Revolution represent not just two ideological positions but two opposing conceptions of history’s epistemological foundations. For all his emotional rhetoric and his strategic de-rationalisation of the Revolution as a historical accident without causation, Burke’s conception of experience in Reflections on the Revolution is ultimately a regulatory or disciplinary one, producing passive political subjects rather than any kind of agential or self-determining political force. Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, on the other hand, sets out to restore deep historical causes to Burke’s passional account of ephemeral revolutionary effects, rejecting the reduction of historical experience to a form of emotional intuitionism. At the same time, Wollstonecraft develops a new, agential understanding of collective experience that allows for the existence of a participatory and dynamic social world. Wollstonecraft’s understanding of historical agency and her counter-sentimental interest in cultivating cognitive (as opposed to instinctive) feelings are critical for understanding the changing role and place of feeling in historical discourse from the late eighteenth century onwards.
Historical Subjects and Ethical Character: Godwin and Carlyle
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

Focusing on character studies of Oliver Cromwell by William Godwin and Thomas Carlyle, this chapter argues that the goal of romantic-era character studies was not to affect the reader deeply, but rather to reveal the inner constructions of the mind through rhetorical techniques such as invented orations and indirect narration. These internalising techniques reflect a wider shift within written history from the 1820s onwards from a physiological focus on the outward or bodily manifestations of affective experience towards a behaviouralist study of the historical self as an internalised subject-in-formation. The transition from external to internal characterisations emanated, in part, from literary models of character that emphasised psychological depth principles, but it also emerged from theories of the self in enlightenment faculty psychology and from revised understandings of classical rhetoric. Carlyle and Godwin’s recognition that the internal and non-verifiable elements of history, such as underlying motives, feelings, agency, and volition, could best be revealed through an examination of eyewitness accounts and other primary documents also forms part of a wider ‘archival turn’ in the 1820s, one that provided new technologies for the staging of historical selves.
The Moderation of Insecurity: Standing the Eurocentric Democratic Transition Paradigm on Its Head
Authors: El-Affendi Abdelwahab
Published: January 2023

Proposing to stand the transition ‘paradigm’ on its head by taking the Arab experience as a theoretical starting point, the chapter proceeds to build on the theory[s interactive approach to knowledge. Highlighting the interconnection between two core theoretical concepts – uncertainty and moderation – it links them to a third – insecurity, with levels of (perceived/constructed) insecurity identified as a key explanatory variable, resolving Arab region’s riddles and clarifying the broader international story of democracy.
As the paradox at the heart of the transition, uncertainty makes transitions possible, while rendering both the derivation of rules and sustainability elusive. Democracy requires a mitigated, or “bounded” uncertainty to allow genuine democratic competition. However, when the Syrian or Libyan “black hole state” prefers ruin to compromise, the concept of moderation loses sense and utility. Democracy itself becomes securitized, with both internal and international actors deeming it a threat. This spill-over of insecurity provokes interventions to prop up dysfunctional regimes. No exceptionalism here; the same dynamics can explain current threats to established democracies.
Given that most “requisites” for democratic consolidation, (national cohesion, moderation, etc.), are instances of insecurity mitigation (including economic insecurity, then we have a very powerful explanatory tool here.
Revolutions and the Colonial Question
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: January 2023

This chapter finds the transition discourse problematic: in its inability to account for developments outside its Eurocentric assumptions, and the crisis-ridden models against which the shortcomings of Arab democracy are measured (from the oldest –the United States – to the largest – India). Europe is also in trouble, while Israel, habitually designated ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ is another indictment of this discourse. As instances of Ernst Cassirer’s point of modern ‘mythical thinking’, this pursuit of superficial questions about democracy, transition, etc., is a pointless distraction. The core issue is the export of the modern state, with its violent European origins and function through its colonial and post-colonial. Doubly bereft of legitimacy in its post-colonial form, this model refutes the myth of politics as a violencefree zone. Western political discourse (including the radical versions) only notice violence when the victims happen to be white Europeans. In this instance, Aimé Césaire’s point that a Hitler unconsciously inhabits every twentieth-century humanistic, Christian bourgeois, one can say that and ISIS (“Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) inhabits every modern (globalised, neo-liberal) state. Only insurrections, like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc., offer a corrective global reaction to this resurrected fascism.
Authoritarian Regime Types as an Alternative to the Transition Paradigm: A Critical Assessment
Authors: Ali Luai
Published: January 2023

This chapter assesses the claims claim that the literature on typologies of authoritarian regimes provide a viable alternative to the transition paradigm in explaining outcomes of the Arab uprisings. Regimes are classified in the selected theories in terms of controlling elite (military, single party, personalist) modes of maintaining political power (hereditary, military-influenced, elections) or mode of elite selection (military involvement, restrictions on political parties, legislative or executive selection). On testing the theories on regime classifications and predictions, their explanatory power appeared limited for internal regime dynamics, mode and causes of collapse, and outcomes, mainly due to rigidity in classifications and errors in coding, including failure to include categories such as hybrid regimes. Ignoring the interactive relationship with society, in particular regarding stateness (the coherence of the state and commitment to the political community) was a factor. Such impact, whether inadvertent or deliberate (e.g. impact of lack of state coherence on transition in Yemen and Libya), was overlooked. Theories need not be abandoned but refined and strengthened though closer attention to coding and accurate classifications. This cannot be achieved without a careful and judicious reading of the vast literature now being produced in Arabic about these states.
Visible and Invisible Political Actors and Their Strategies During the Arab Spring Transitions
Authors: Mady Abdel-Fattah
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the strategies, core interests, alignments, and impact of key political actors in the 2011 revolutionary processes, and post-revolutionary transitions. Regimes and civil opponents dominated the revolutionary phase, while traditional political actors dominated the transition. Most interesting is the role, and inordinate influence, ascribed to “hidden” (behind the scenes) actors. Mainly state and old regime actors (the so-called “deep state”), but also present in the opposition, this category played crucial roles at critical junctures, as in the protests that paved the way to the July 2013 coup in Egypt. These were secretively orchestrated by the military and funded by Gulf states. Political polarization, exacerbated, and exploited, by secretive actors, generated mutual mistrust, becoming a factor in democratic collapse. Within the opposition, the party which won most seats in parliament and the presidency, the Freedom and Justice Party, was also seen as a puppet of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. Together with intensive foreign interference, the impact of these (only partially) hidden actors, became the greatest threat to Arab democracy at a time when democracy was facing a global crisis, exacerbated by the ascendancy of anti-democratic powers. One result was to breed cynicism and widen the gap between the political elite and the masses.
Concluding Remarks: On Viruses, Phantom Actors and Other Colonial Ghosts
Authors: El-Affendi Abdelwahab
Published: January 2023

This chapter reflects on the insights, conclusions and occasional divergences of the contributions to this volume. It also links the debate on the Arab Spring with the second wave of popular democratic uprisings in Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria (from 2019), pointing out that the new uprisings confirm the book’s central argument about the unsustainability of brutal authoritarianism in the region. It also highlights the volume’s core insight about a pivotal contrast between the optimism, altruism, solidarity and heroism that characterised the revolutions, and the insecurity, brutality and dark outlook of the despotic regimes. The former radiate hope, the latter preach and create fear. One famous activist likened the latter to harmful viruses, the former to life-enhancing enzymes. The second wave confirmed the irrepressible vitality of the democratic ethos in the Arab region, contrary to common scholarly wisdom and darkness of these times. While the first wave of uprisings was non-sectarian, the second was anti-sectarian, with protesters revolting against sectarian leaders and regimes that spoke in their names. The renewal of hope is the more remarkable given the brutality of the anti-democracy forces and, regrettable, the support they get from “established” democracies.
Introduction
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter re-evaluates Catherine Breillat’s work, often explored through Asbjørn Grønstad’s concept of the ‘unwatchable’ (2012) and rethinks her approach in terms of the ‘unlistenable’. It argues that noise provides another sensory dimension through which to think about Breillat’s key relationship with the pornographic and her appeal to little noises and listening in spectatorship. In contrast to sound in pornography which generally represents female pleasure through loud, haptic sound - often collapsing spatial realism to provide a closer sense of contact with the body on screen - Breillat withholds the aural availability of her female protagonists and preserves a sense of Cartesian space by anchoring noise back to the body. I show how Breillat appeals to and constructs the spectator as a resonant body, an open channel that is ‘traversed by, fuses with and goes towards other resonating bodies’, creating an intimate relation with the film, as we are called upon to listen to the body on screen.
The Body at Close Range: Volume and the Unlistenable in Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter re-evaluates Catherine Breillat’s work, often explored through Asbjørn Grønstad’s concept of the ‘unwatchable’ (2012) and rethinks her approach in terms of the ‘unlistenable’. It argues that noise provides another sensory dimension through which to think about Breillat’s key relationship with the pornographic and her appeal to little noises and listening in spectatorship. In contrast to sound in pornography which generally represents female pleasure through loud, haptic sound - often collapsing spatial realism to provide a closer sense of contact with the body on screen - Breillat withholds the aural availability of her female protagonists and preserves a sense of Cartesian space by anchoring noise back to the body. I show how Breillat appeals to and constructs the spectator as a resonant body, an open channel that is ‘traversed by, fuses with and goes towards other resonating bodies’, creating an intimate relation with the film, as we are called upon to listen to the body on screen.
Tracing Translation: The Genesis Of COMÉDIE and Film (Fr) 1
Authors: Beloborodova Olga
Published: January 2023

This chapter aims to demonstrate the dynamics between Beckett’s original texts and their translations in terms of their mutual influence. Secondly, it illustrates the tension that Beckett experienced as a bilingual author, namely the tension between his ostensible pursuit of abstraction and ‘vaguening’ (Pountney 1988), and the inherently explanatory nature of translation. Approaching these questions from a genetic angle, the chapter offers a comparative analysis of Beckett’s self-translations of Play and Film. The English Play and Film were originally conceived by Beckett as medium-specific exercises in abstraction. In crafting Comédie, the major challenge consisted in conveying the abstraction of the original without destroying it in the translation process. For Film, the main issue was the discrepancy between the script and the actual film, for which Beckett did not seem to have an unequivocal translation strategy. All in all, the struggle and effort that went into the translations of both Play and Film illustrate Beckett’s attention to the textual element in the works that were ostensibly designed to be seen rather than read – another tension the chapter aims to explore in its conclusion.
Are Beckett’S Texts Bilingual? ‘Long After Chamfort’ And Translation
Authors: Engelberts Matthijs
Published: January 2023

Matthijs Engelberts appoints “Long after Chamfort” as the only work in Beckett’s oeuvre that has “structuraly been published as a bilingual text”. The Chamfort poems consist of eight short pieces, adaptations of a series of maxims by French playwright and conversationalist Sébastien Chamfort, written by Beckett in the first years of the 1970s. This work might be considered as “minor” within the Beckett canon, but for Engelberts it could rather be discussed in other “productive ways”. For this purpose, Engelberts analyses the short doggerel poems and addresses three fundamental questions: “Is Beckett’s work bilingual?”, “What does ‘translation’ amount to (when it is apparently not a burden) for Beckett?” and “Must Beckett mean what he translates (and writes)?”. According to the author’s close examination of these hypotheses, the very short “Long after Chamfort” can contribute to offer new perspectives to the interrogations addressed in this chapter.
Speeds, Generations and Utopias: on The Swamp
Authors: Amado Ana
Published: January 2023

This chapter shows how, among the corpus of Argentine films of this millennium, The Swamp (2001) is the one that shows an exceptional sense of temporality expressed through attitudes and body language, through the ritualised repetition of the most routine and trivial actions. In this film, temporality operates through the direct dramatization of bodies, whose positions appear to determine by themselves the plot of events, a plot which is subjected to the slow cadence of detention, or repetitions, but also to other rhythms and speeds. It could be said that in The Swamp there is a double speed, inasmuch as the distinct generations of the protagonists (adults, children, and teenagers) associate their respective gestures and movements with different rhythms.
Sounding Class, Race and Gender in The Swamp
Authors: Niebylski Dianna C.
Published: January 2023

This chapter engages new affect theory, ethnomusicological and sound studies to argue that Martel’s use of popular music in The Swamp (2001), although minimalist, fissures the film’s images with sociocultural and political footnotes. The first part of the essay focuses on the rhythms and lyrics of the cumbias heard (mostly in snippets) to argue for the counterintuitive use of both. While the Andean-inflected cumbia rhythms heard in the film allow audiences to affectively experience the indigenous characters’ collective physiological resistance to the ethnic oppression to which they are subjected, the lyrics of these cumbias complicate the film’s treatment of gender relations in unexpected ways. The second part of the essay proposes that the version of the ballad heard in two of the film’s scenes will call forth a collective memory of Argentina’s last dictatorship and its brutal tactics for silencing dissenting voices. Throughout, the essay repeatedly stresses the fact that by compromising the quality of the music heard, and by creating ironic counterpoints between lyrics and image, the director ensures that the musical soundtrack enhances, rather than reduces, the film’s commitment to reticence and ambiguity.
Fevers, Frights and Psychophysical Disconnections: Invisible Threats in the Soundtracks of Zama and The Headless Woman
Authors: Cunha Damyler
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the particularities of the soundtrack in Zama and The Headless Woman, taking into consideration some techniques in the use of sound effects and ambient sounds that are employed repeatedly. It pays special attention to the offscreen sounds, which build the world as the presence/absence of the other, in addition to showing themselves as non-diegetic sounds: sounds that do not occur in the world of the characters; an invasion that, in previous films, had not yet appeared so prominently. These absent presences lead to an intensifying sense of vertigo in the face of an uncontrollable element like an accident, an illness, or another’s decision. Martel brings us closer to her characters’ hearing through the editing of these sounds, creating an atmosphere of continuous and ever-increasing discomfort, which is displayed by the inability to recognise the objects and sound events that surround the protagonists of these films.
Democracy and the Indyref Novel
Authors: Hames Scott
Published: January 2023

Scott Hames examines the first wave of indyref novels, registering the passions and divisions of 2014. Drawing on Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism, he examines fictions by Allan Cameron, Effie Deans, Kirstin Innes, Mary McCabe, and Craig Smith, arguing that the modes of social representation we encounter in these texts mirror the plebiscite which inspired them. These novels tend to reproduce indyref’s tendencies toward massified speech and reified group identity, and their novelistic failures are as interesting as their historical content. Though indyref was made possible through the success of Scotland’s admirably inclusive strain of liberal nationalism, the culture of argument that defined the political novel in English – argument as a ‘lived relation’ between liberal political subjects, compromising and compromised – is seldom to be found in this fiction. Instead, dramatic interest centres on the instrumental chessboard and its word-games, a Great Debate elevated to its own discursive ‘sovereignty’, unmarked by human dialogue or ethical doubt. Straining for narrative and emotional resolution, indyref fiction mirrors the echo-chambers of contemporary social media even as they resort to weak allegory and didactic archetypes drawn from the pre-history of the modern novel.
Religious And Political Implications Of The HOMO SACER project
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: January 2023

One of the central observations of the Homo Sacer project concerns the inherently fictional nature of sovereignty. Though it is crucial to the historical legacies of politics and religion, it is not entirely clear if this fiction is a necessary illusion of some sort, if it can be permanently eliminated from our world or if there is another way to live in relationship to it. Agamben’s fundamental political re-conceptualization of sovereignty involves new perspectives on language, oaths, processes of exclusion, separation and sacrifice, all of which are pursued in detail in this chapter. It is, for Agamben, the purely arbitrariness or contingency of human life and of a choice that escapes the realm of sovereign decision (parallel to the difference between demand and command) and so is opened toward recognizing a form-of-life lived outside the law that humanity must embrace. As such, the discussion of the fiction of sovereignty, understood through traditional arguments and representations of the divine being and its substance in the West, gives way in Agamben’s thought to a (Pauline) weak messianic force that searches for a form-of-life lived beyond the inscriptions of sovereign power.
Introduction: A Systematic Inquiry Into Kinship Politics
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Gives an overview of the book’s theory that kinship group access to vital and limited resources before state building determines the salience of kinship authority at the end of state building. Existing models of state formation, often rooted in literature on the rentier state, cannot account for variation in the salience of kinship authority in the Arabian Gulf states. As an alternate explanation, the book introduces the hypothesis that a state’s capacity to provide infrastructure, bureaucracy, and a nationalist idiom shapes the salience of kinship authority. Finally, the chapter introduces a road map of the book and explains the importance of the puzzle for comparative politics and studies of the Arab Gulf states.
Defining Kinship
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Synthesizes definitional debates to provide the reader with a comprehensive but useful understanding of kinship. Kinship is visible, especially in the Middle Eastern context, because an individual’s name indicates their kinship lineage. It is sticky because it gives an individual not only an in-group (member of family X), but also a specific orientation within that in-group (son of A, grandson of B, member of family X). As such, kinship is a useful social identity marker because it is easy to determine and difficult to falsify. The chapter shows how these kinship politics manifest in the Arab Gulf States.
Text and Transport
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

The first chapter deals with the bicycle’s tangible interaction with fiction, text and publishing, drawing attention to the connections between texts and cycling. This is explored through an examination of texts by a group of touring cyclist ‘pilgrims’ including F. W. Bockett, Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855–1936) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). Subsequently, a parallel reading of two cycling novellas by H. G. Wells and Maurice Leblanc allows us to engage with the narrative role of the bicycle at close range. The vehicle’s interaction with various genres, styles and formats is examined, with a focus on its role in adventure, detective and comic fiction. I then turn my attention to the publishing context in order to argue that the emergence of the cheaply produced pocket classic was symptomatic of a democratisation of knowledge that accompanied major changes in people’s everyday mobility at the turn of the century._
Xenophon Didaskalos: Leaders and Leadership in Anabasis
Authors: Brennan Shane
Published: January 2023

Leadership is a concern that runs through Xenophon's diverse body of writings. In Anabasis, the story of an army on campaign, the focus is on military leadership, with an important sub-theme being the problem of how to manage mercenary soldiers. Three different commander styles are showcased. The Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, rules on an absolute model; Klearchos, the Spartan commander who becomes de-facto leader after Cyrus’ death, relies on discipline and his own example, while Xenophon's character in the story draws primarily on his democratic background and training with Socrates. Notable qualities that emerge are his highly effective use of speech and his ability to foster willing obedience. A case is made for a close link between Xenophon's leadership performance and the guidance on the subject provided by Socrates in Memorabilia 3.1-5. Through its ultimate success, Xenophon's style, mapping on to the Athenian paradigm of ‘orator and general’, is demonstrated to be the optimal of the three.
The Brazilian Case
Authors: Furtado Henrique Tavares
Published: January 2023

This chapter offers a historical account of the Brazilian case. Working as a bridge between the theoretical and empirical contributions of the manuscript, it traces the historical changes and ruptures of ideas about violence and justice produced by the emergence of the anti-impunity movement in Brazil (1970–9). The chapter explains the atmosphere of radicalisation that preceded the 1964 coup. It describes the explosive rise of far-right anti-communism across society, the effects of the Cuban Revolution in the imaginary of the radical left and the adoption of French theories of counterinsurgency by the armed forces. The chapter recounts the overthrowing of Goulart’s labour administration in 1964 and the ensuing Years of Lead (1968–79), when torture, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances became institutionalised. It then moves on to show how the gruesome actions of the military unintentionally paved the way for a new form of democratic resistance. The violent repression of political dissidents, the repression of strikes, the deterioration of wages, the expansion of censorship to the most banal dimensions of everyday life united various societal grievances (the struggles of survivors, family members, workers, legal practitioners, feminists) around the amnesty movement in the mid-1970s.
The Search for Truth
Authors: Furtado Henrique Tavares
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the first part of the manuscript’s analysis of the CNV (2012–14), focusing on the implementation of truth-seeking and the mandate, composition and size of the truth commission. The text assesses two instances where the CNV was accused of failing to deliver justice: the failure to give survivors a voice, based on the lukewarm relations between the CNV and local activists, and the failure to bring about reconciliation, given the armed forces’ refusal to accept the conclusions of the final report. The central argument of this chapter is to redirect responsibility for these failures away from the members of the truth commission and to dispute claims that truth-seeking was mishandled. Instead, the chapter argues that both ‘failures’ were a direct result of the CNV’s acceptance of the global, common language of justice with a specific theory of accountability defined by technocratic methods and contradictory demands. The objective is to connect the problems of implementation faced by the CNV to problems at the heart of the conditions of possibility of the discipline of transitional justice.
Over a Barrel: Ellison and the Democratic Politics of Black Laughter
Authors: Giamario Patrick T.
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores laughter’s role in American racial politics by turning to Ralph Ellison’s remarkable yet largely overlooked 1985 essay, “An Extravagance of Laughter.” In this piece, Ellison tells a joke about “laughing barrels” – barrels into which Black Southerners were supposedly required to laugh during Jim Crow – to illustrate how the distinctive sounds, styles, and tonalities of Black laughter are shaped by white supremacy and how the latter constructs and maintains itself by regulating this laughter. While Ellison shows that the American racial order produces and is sustained by a white supremacist regime of laughter, he also demonstrates that Black laughter can democratize that order when it obeys the rules of the white supremacist regime in such a way that generates a dissensus within it. Ellison’s account of laughter in turn illuminates his distinctive conception of democracy as a mode of political life featuring jazz-like processes of “antagonistic cooperation” among individuals, collectivities, and the social order as a whole.
The End of Laughter? Gelopolitics and the New Agelasty
Authors: Giamario Patrick T.
Published: January 2023

In response to the recent rise of neofascist deployments of laughter and the failures of liberal and leftist laughter to successfully combat reactionary politics, many liberal and Nietzschean thinkers who once celebrated laughter now worry that it has run out of political steam. These “new agelasts” seek to limit laughter’s role in politics as a way of restoring its critical and emancipatory power. The Coda argues that this new discourse hinges on the same misunderstanding of the relation between laughter and politics that the previous chapters all seek to remedy: it is impossible to secure the polis from laughter because the polisdoes not exist apart from the gelōsthat helps constitute it. Those seeking to resist neofascist laughter should abandon the illusory and ultimately counter-productive goal of re-establishing limits between laughter and politics and instead engage today’s enormous quantity and variety of laughter as a unique, albeit danger-ridden opportunity to imagine and build new, more democratic ideologies, institutions, and forms of social life.
Introduction The Speculative Realist Challenge And The Limits Of Phenomenology
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

The starting point for the present study is the speculative realist critique of what Meillassoux has called correlationism. Focusing on the critique of phenomenology as anti-realist, the Introduction explains the disagreement between speculative realism and phenomenology in terms of their respective understanding of the relation between being and sense. Rather than adopting a defensive posture, the book proposes to take the speculative realist challenge seriously and show how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy resist the collapse of being into sense we find in the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. After laying the context for the present study, the author outlines the possible influence and resonances between the two thinkers.
Jumping on the Bandwagon: The Ensemble of Hong Kong Film Directors
Authors: Yiu-Wai Chu
Published: January 2023

Various Hong Kong directors have joined the main melody ensemble, including but not limited to John Woo, Oxide Pang and Alan Mak. They are good examples of how Hong Kong filmmakers sang different kinds of main melodies in cross-border ventures. Besides films with overt political undertones, there have also been works singing the main melody in a less explicitly manner. Similar to those of mainstream genre films, the themes of these films, such as anti-drug and anti-corruption, are in harmony with the main melody. This chapter engages different “quasi-main melody” projects of various Hong Kong directors, showing how they contributed different dimensions of entertainmentisation and blockbusterisation to the main melody genre.
Zoopolitics in Deconstruction?
Authors: Briggs Robert
Published: January 2023

In lieu of an introduction properly speaking, this brief opening chapter outlines the book’s ‘approach’ to the animal question and foregrounds the argument’s predominantly speculative tenor — its endeavour to think the politics of animals and animality beyond the critique of anthropocentrism and the potential limitations of biopolitics. In doing so, it clarifies what — and who — the book takes to be involved in the ‘deconstruction’ of animality as well as providing an initial orientation towards the meaning of zoopolitics analysed and developed over the course of the discussion.
Political Animals
Authors: Briggs Robert
Published: January 2023

Prevailing models of animal politics largely take the form of (human) representatives acting or campaigning on behalf of oppressed (animal) others. Diverging from this model, this chapter pursues a double objective: considering the conditions under which animals may appear otherwise within the space of politics, while reconsidering what might otherwise come to define the space of politics once animals and animality can be engaged as political figures on their own right. Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological recovery of the original Greek conception of politics is taken up for the way her account of the Greek polis as a space of appearance enables an approach to zoopolitics that can go beyond the representational model. Diverging in turn from Arendt’s own critique of mediated politics, the chapter turns to Jacques Derrida’s work on teletechnology and Vinciane Despret’s philosophical ethology in order to affirm the political potential of social media to enable the public appearance of animal action and initiative, as well as the potential of such appearances to promote other ways of relating to nonhuman animals, other forms of interaction, hence another kind of collective, even transformative action.
Richard Hooker’s Theistic Naturalism
Authors: Kennedy Simon P.
Published: January 2023

In the opening chapters of his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1689, John Locke quotes the Elizabethan divine
Richard Hooker at some length in support of his anthropology and his doctrine of the state of nature. Humans, writes Locke,
are equal ‘by Nature’, something which ‘the Judicious Hooker looks upon as self-evident’. Locke begins to paint Hooker as a proto-contractarian in this passage. Later, Locke goes on to bring this assertion home with a long quote about the truth of his own conception of the state of nature. Locke’s method of rebuttal to those who object to his conception of the state of nature is to paint his opponents as also opposing ‘the Authority of the Judicious Hooker’. Was Locke citing him accurately? Or was he, as Robert Eccleshall put it, ‘unacquainted with the substance of Hooker’s thought’, and was instead using him ‘as a stick with which to beat Anglican royalists’? This chapter argues that Hooker ought to be understood as a political naturalist rather than a harbinger of liberal contractarian thought.
Cultural Citizenship Vs Identity
Authors: Bal Mieke , Mitchell W. J. T.
Published: January 2023

As participants in culture and interested in art and thinking, “we” have developed attitudes of interest and engagement, responsiveness and responsibility, towards the world around us as much as to the art it generates and shows. The result is called here, “cultural citizenship”. The documentary Becoming Vera, where the main character is a three-year-old child of a triple cultural background, questions identity politics in its frequently rigid and essentialising effects. Vera is able to deflect essentialist attempts at boxing her in. Her tool is fiction indeed. Narrative, dance, song, and image-thinking are among her skilful ways of defending herself against sometimes overbearing although well-meaning adults. In connection to the questions raised, especially concerning identity, two other documentaries are briefly discussed. The film State of Suspension is a critique of cultural attitudes in contemporary Israel. Installed across from it, Separations, also a documentary, engages a Jewish family afflicted by a post-holocaust trauma. The two large screens facing each other do justice to the difficulty of dealing with cultural identities on an everyday basis. The viewer is invited to make the experience of the one film into a tool to bring a nuancing view onto the other.
Affect As An Artistic-Political Strategy
Authors: Bal Mieke , Mitchell W. J. T.
Published: January 2023

Another special issue that gains relevance when we are confronted with cinematic image-thinking, is affect. The “affective turn”, as academic fashion-speak would call it, is one of the tendencies that come and go as being “in” or “hot” for a while. But this one is not so easily dismissed once we immerse ourselves in what we study. The case of the Flaubert-based project Madame B offers the opportunity to reconsider both the fashionable use and the facile dismissal of “affect” as an important tool for political thinking in cultural criticism. The concept of affect is examined in its conceptual meaning, but also in the way it helps or hinders detailed analysis of cultural texts. The affective charge will be especially explored in how the videos present the most political, as well as “pre-posterous” (anachronistic) bond between Flaubert's time and ours: “emotional capitalism” (a concept so named by Eva Illouz). Madame B foregrounds affect in its aesthetic. The role of “beauty” – in landscapes as well as figures – is made prominent in the cinematography, in order to raise the question of the affective charge of the combination with sadness, frustration, and despair.
Iconography of the School Uniform
Authors: Pugsley Peter C.
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the links between school uniforms and disciplinarity, detailing the linear progression from Western military outfits to Japan’s iconic sērā-fuku (sailor suit) schoolgirl uniforms. It shows how uniforms act as an iconic symbol for characters and how costume designers are increasingly moving from realist portrayals of drab school uniforms to fashionable colourful uniforms that tie in with broader cinematic palettes.
Conclusion
Authors: Pugsley Peter C.
Published: January 2023

The conclusion to this book reiterates the importance of Japanese high school films as a mainstay of the Japanese film industry, and in terms of reflecting how Japanese youth may see themselves. The identity-making that transpires through adolescence can be difficult in any society or culture, but in Japan the ability for young people to see representations of themselves on screen may validate their fears and apprehensions as they enter adulthood. Capturing the often-tumultuous final years of institutionalised schooling (pre-university), often delivered through a romanticised, heavily nostalgic, lens, this book argues that the popularity of Japanese high school films is because of their ability to capture a mood that is culturally specific and age dependent.
The Corporeal Urn
Authors: Roth Zoë
Published: January 2023

The first chapter provides a fuller analysis of embodied form in relation to institutions of criticism, phenomenology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. It explores how a series of formal figures and interpretive devices enable us to read for embodied form beyond representations of specific bodies. These devices include the notion of 'logical forms' - or figures that project embodied experience - as well as poetic tropes like chiasmus, prosopopoeia, catachresis, metalepsis, and aporia. Through these different figures and formal constellations, the chapter demonstrates how a return to older formalist methods reinvigorates our understanding of the body and its relationship to politics.
La Pensée incarnée : Embodying the Unrepresentable in Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx
Authors: Roth Zoë
Published: January 2023

The second chapter analyzes the French author and academic Anne F. Garréta's novel Sphinx (1986), the first novel to entirely eschew any use of gendered language, including pronouns. Since gender is a discursive construct, Sphinx's 'genderless' language seems to lack both a body and form. The genderless body sharply contrasts with the novel's overdetermination of the black body, which reduces the protagonist's love interest to a racialized object. The novel thus exemplifies the postmodernist binary of a body that either escapes or is reduced to representation. Shifting attention to form, however, allows a different body to emerge, while also deconstructing both discursive and biological categories of race. Through an exploration of rhetorical figures like prosopopoeia, the chapter demonstrates how the body is given form beyond representation in ways that speculatively offer new political relations.
“All life is figure and ground”: Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Embodied Form
Authors: Roth Zoë
Published: January 2023

The third chapter explores a range of works by Samuel Beckett, a writer who exemplifies the failure of language and the fracturing of the body. Against this emphasis on failure, lack, and withdrawal, the chapter explore how dismembered body parts and organs are figures for the embodied foundations of speech and language. Through a focus on the figure of metalepsis, it argues that Beckett's texts produce form as a ground through which different conceptions of the body emerge that would be unintelligible when read through representation. Metalepsis is the trope for extension and elision, simultaneously drawing in and stretching language into an embodied form. Whereas deaf, blind, mute, and dismembered bodies are often excluded from the literal grounds of representation - speaking, acting, and appearing - this chapter demonstrates how seemingly fractured bodies produce literary forms that make this embodied experience graspable, even as it is distributed in unexpected ways.
Political Journalism: Confidence and Impunity
Authors: Munro Lachlan
Published: January 2023

Graham’s political writings for small socialist journals. His writing style develops. Graham’s attacks on respectability and the bourgeoise. Graham’s evocation of life in less developed societies – ‘primitive communism’.
Labour: An Aristocratic Minority
Authors: Munro Lachlan
Published: January 2023

Graham’s financial tribulations. Graham’s increasingly troubled relationship with Hardie. Graham’s elitism and disdain for working-class attitudes. Graham’s incongruous position in the Labour party, and his disillusionment. His split with Hardie.
Introduction
Authors: Rebeiz Mireille
Published: January 2023

The introduction offers a brief history of Francophonie in Lebanon, Arab and Lebanese feminism, and the Lebanese civil war. It examines the role and evolution of Lebanese women’s writings in wartime. It also studies the theories of narratology (classical and postclassical) and makes the distinction between the narrative voice and the narrative body.
The Feminine ‘I’
Authors: Rebeiz Mireille
Published: January 2023

Chapter 1 focuses on the two novels Les Absents (2014) by Georgia Makhouf and Sitt Marie Rose (1977) by Etel Adnan. These novels go against tradition and assign the narrative voice to a first-person female narrator. This feminine I plays multiple roles. It bears witness to the narrator’s trauma and the trauma of others. In the absence of recorded history, it tells war stories and transgresses male spaces.
Molecular phylogeny and taxonomy of the remarkable genus Leptoporus (Polyporales, Basidiomycota) with description of a new species from Southwest China
Authors: Liu Shun , Sun Yi-Fei , Ji Xing , Song Chang-Ge , Xu Tai-Min , Cui Bao-Kai
Published: January 2023

Leptoporus is a rare and remarkable genus, mainly occurring in coniferous forests in the Northern Hemisphere. Recent phylogenetic studies showed that Leptoporus belongs to Irpicaceae in the phlebioid clade. It is worth noting that most species in the phlebioid clade can cause white-rot decay, except for the Leptoporus species, which can cause a brown-rot decay. In this study, we performed phylogenetic and taxonomic studies of Leptoporus and related genera. Molecular phylogenetic analyses were conducted based on sequences from multiple loci including the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions, the large subunit of nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (nLSU), the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II gene (RPB1), the second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II gene (RPB2), and the translation elongation factor 1-α gene (TEF1). Combined with morphological characteristics, a new species, Leptoporus submollis sp. nov., is discovered and illustrated from Southwest China.