bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Political History of Classical Hollywood: Moguls, Liberals and Radicals in the 1930s
Authors: Wheeler Mark
Published: January 2018

This explores the rift between opponents of progressive reforms associated with the New Deal (mainly the studio moguls) and its supporters in other branches of the film industry. It assesses the significance of the establishment of craft guilds to represent actors, writers, and directors. It offers a detailed analysis of how studio chiefs played a key role in defeating Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign to become governor of California in 1934. It explores the anti-fascist Popular Front alliance formed between liberals and communists in the second half of the 1930s, how this prompted congressional investigation that prefigured the 1940s Red Scare, and the collapse of left-liberal unity with the establishment of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. It also an assessment of mogul Louis B. Mayer and actor Melvyn Douglas as representatives of conservative and liberal Hollywood.
‘We’re Only Kids Now, But Someday …’: Hollywood Musicals and the Great Depression ‘Youth Crisis’
Authors: Eldridge David
Published: January 2018

A number of Hollywood social dramas had documented the ‘youth crisis’ of the Depression era – limited employment prospects, vagrancy, delinquency, deprival of normal childhood. MGM’s Babes in Arms (1939), made when the worst of the economic crisis seemed over, was the first to do so in musical form. It confronted audiences not only with visions of an angry army of youth, but with young Americans facing impoverishment, crumbling parental authority, the threat of being taken into care, and incipient delinquency. Its commercial success spawned three other musicals – Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943), each of which raised the spectre of the ‘youth crisis’ that perplexed politicians, educators and sociologists. All of them had a happy ending, however, through the utopian instrument of kds putting on a musical show that demonstrated their capacity for collective action in a good cause, for still having wholesome fun, and for demonstrating patriotism.
Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction
Authors: Wolfe Cary
Published: January 2018

Wolfe’s chapter takes up the question of species extinction in relation to a particular example, that of the Passenger Pigeon. Focusing primarily upon an art installation titled “Requiem: Ectopistes Migratorius” by Michael Pestel, Wolfe explores the poetics of extinction that are exemplified in the various elements of Pestel’s work, as well as related issues, from the technology and mass killings that led to the extinction of the species to the present discussion of “de-extinction” projects stemming from revived DNA. Installations such as Pestel’s help us to recognize species as “spaces” rather than codes or scripts, in which systems and environments—like the performances and performativity within the installation itself—continue to evolve and change.
Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene
Authors: Ahuja Neel
Published: January 2018

Ahuja calls our attention to the ways that environmentalists, artists, writers, and ecocritics have deployed the idea of “the Anthropocene” in order to critique human-caused climate change and environmental destruction. While this critique might be urgently needed, Ahuja reveals how it also tends to rely upon a universalized and essentialized construction of “the human” that glosses over major differences between various human groups, in which less privileged people are both less culpable and more vulnerable in relation to the dramatic effects that climate change will increasingly have on the planet. Exloring a range of texts emerging after 9/11, from the paintings of Alexis Rockman to Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, Junot Diaz’s “Monstro”, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Ahuja calls for paying more attention to what he calls “the human of precarious futures,” a figure that seems necessary for dramatizing the dangerous coming results of climate change, but one that also risks flattening out all the ways that racism and inequality and injustice distinguish human groups today and might continue to do so into the future.
Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia in Law and Literature
Authors: Garrard Greg
Published: January 2018

Garrard explores the idea and practice of zoophilia in recent legal and cultural discourses, with particular attention to relevant literary texts and films. He reads representations of animals in human sexual contexts not as allegories but as reflections upon interspecies sexuality, tracking examples that he believes dramatize provocative interspecies sexual encounters: David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, Robinson Devor’s Zoo, and Marian Engel’s Bear. Rather than reading the literary texts as allegories, Garrard insists upon reading the animals as animals, with particular attention to the narrative strategies that make it harder to see them as either defenseless creatures without agency and in need of protection, or as simply hypersexualized and masculinized bundles of instincts.
Modelling Systems Biomedicine: Intertwinement and The ‘Real’
Authors: Carusi Annamaria
Published: January 2018

At a conference on developing the capacity of systems biology to transform itself in systems biomedicine, several of the scientists’ presentations showcase the computational modelling methods they are developing. Drawing towards the end of his presentation, an experienced pharmacologist admonishes the audience to bear in mind that, despite the progress in modelling techniques that he has been discussing, a model is always just a representation and never reality. At this point, there is a PowerPoint slide showing Magritte’s painting, This is not a Pipe, and chuckling from the audience. It will not have been the first time that they have seen it, as the painting is by now a trope running through these events, rivalled only by the quotation from George Box: ‘Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Indeed, I have taken up this trope myself, but find that I need to judge my audience carefully when choosing what to move on with. ‘On Exactitude in Science’, but more problematic is to follow up with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, together with the quotation attributed to Picasso: ‘Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.’
Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention
Authors: Andrews Lindsey , Metzl Jonathan M.
Published: January 2018

On 26 April 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by neurocriminologist Adrian Raine promoting his newest book, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. On the newspaper’s website, an image of a black-and-white brain scan overlaid with handcuffs headed the essay. Clicking ‘play’ turned the image into a video filled with three-dimensional brain illustrations and Raine’s claims that some brains are simply more biologically prone to violence than others. Rejecting what he describes as ‘the dominant model for understanding criminal behaviour in the twentieth century’ – a model based ‘almost exclusively on social and sociological’ explanations – Raine wrote that ‘the genetic basis of criminal behaviour is now well established’ through molecular and behavioural genetics.
Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Tilley Heather , Olsén Jan Eric
Published: January 2018

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.
Man’s Dark Interior: Surrealism, Viscera and The Anatomical Imaginary
Authors: Juler Edward
Published: January 2018

Born of the sociocultural effervescence that swept through Europe in the years following the First World War, Surrealism represented a profound disillusionment towards the established intellectual order that it held responsible for the dehumanising and violent depths to which civilisation had so recently sunk. Decrying the inadequacy of postwar philosophies and politics to deal with the new, brutalised world of the interwar period, the Surrealists loudly championed a revolution of perception by replacing the certainties of prewar thought with the unpredictable discontinuities of non-Euclidean geometry, the base materialism of Georges Bataille and, most especially, the dark visions of the human psyche that emerged through Freudian psychoanalysis.
The Roots and Ramifications of Narrative in Modern Medicine
Authors: Hurwitz Brian , Bates Victoria
Published: January 2018

Narrative became a concept of great versatility and fluidity in the second half of the twentieth century, configuring multi-dimensional understandings and meanings in healthcare. The literary and social theorist Martin Kreiswirth speaks of ‘a massive and unprecedented eruption of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative’ in the period, which resulted in stories and fragments of stories gaining significant conceptual traction in many discourses and practices. Not until narrative began to be credited with such multi-disciplinary capacities were claims for a pluripotential role in medicine explicitly formulated. Yet in attempting to respond to human needs incarnated in language, narrativity and medicine have long been co-implicated. If ‘the chief characteristic of human life is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story,’ as Hannah Arendt argued, narrativity is a precondition of epitomising and reflecting on illness.6
Impressions of Africa: Desire, Sublimation and Looking ‘Otherwise’ in Three Spanish Colonial Films
Authors: Epps Brad
Published: January 2018

This chapter starts by connecting 1990s postcolonial film narratives to the ‘jumbled conflux of the exotic and the erotic’ in the three 1940s Spanish films set in Africa: ¡Harka! (dir. Carlos Arévalo, 1941), ¡A mí la legión!/Follow the Legion (dir. Juan de Orduña, 1942) and Misión blanca/White Mission (dir. Juan de Orduña, 1946). The author argues that the films use desiring subjects as a propagandistic vehicle of Spain’s imperial ventures that are put at the service of the Nationalist cause. While the decidedly homosocial colonial military setting has inspired a number of homoerotic readings focused on the strong male friendships celebrated by the films, the chapter critiques the misogynistic and racialised nature of those relationships. The very sublimation of desire implied in the ‘masculine mystique’ promoted in the narratives inspires in this case a different and innovative kind of queer reading.
Sexual Horror Stories: The Eroticisation of Spanish Horror Film (1969–75)
Authors: Lázaro-Reboll Antonio
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on 1970s erotic horror films. It reveals how the Spanish film press became highly critical of what it perceived as an exploitative commercialisation of eroticism and sexuality in what it appropriately called ‘erotismo de consumo’. Rather than focusing on the well-trodden territory of the objectification of female bodies in horror cinema, Lázaro-Reboll turns his attention to the male body and the camp aesthetics of Miguel Madrid’s (aka Michael Skaife) El asesino de muñecas/Killing of the Dolls (1975) and, in particular, to the body of David Rocha as spectacle.
Undressing Opus Dei: Reframing the Political Currency of Destape Films
Authors: Pérez Jorge
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers a revealing analysis of the Opus Dei in the following 1970s Spanish films: Grau’s La trastienda/The Backroom (1976), Yagüe’s Cara al sol que más calienta/Facing the Warmest Sun (1977), and Berlanga’s La escopeta nacional/The National Shutgun (1978). The chapter demonstrates the political value of these films in their different approaches to the depiction of the secretive religious organisation. In La trastienda, for example, the casting of Czech-born actor Frederick Stafford helps associate the Opus Dei elites with modern European democracies. The other two films offer more direct criticisms of the organisation, exposing the perverse effects of the sexual repression that it fosters.
Revisiting Bigas Luna’s Bilbao: The Female Body-Object
Authors: Sanabria Carolina
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on an iconic film of the Spanish transition, Bigas Luna’s Bilbao 1978. After reclaiming the importance of this controversial film as ‘a foundational text of Spanish sex-cinema’ and an essential testament of the transition, the author reveals that despite the film’s reputation as sexually provocative and overtly erotic, Bilbao is in fact an abstract tale about the disenchantment with the body, which is quite literally turned into a lifeless, undesirable and anti-erotic object.
Masochistic Nationalism and the Basque Imaginary
Authors: Stone Rob
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates the curious absence of erotic content in Basque cinema (Julio Medem’s feature films are the obvious exception), an absence that, the author argues, extends well into the democratic period and therefore cannot be blamed on censorship or catholic repression. This research shows that the explicit content of Basque films often revolves around contexts of torture, revealing a certain fascination with masochist narratives that could be suggestive of nationalist martyrdom. This is explored in his Deleuzian analysis of his two main case studies, Estado de excepción/State of Emergency (dir. Iñaki Núñez, 1977) and Akelarre/Witches’ Sabbath (dir. Pedro Olea, 1984), and of a segment of Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra/The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (2003) among many other examples throughout the history of Basque cinema. This noticeable absence of erotic narratives could be part of a revolutionary intent to distance Basque cinema both from the erotic narratives of the Barcelona School and from the destape films associated with Madrid, but also a nationalist commitment to sacrifice individualistic desires and pleasures at the service of more collective aims.
Espionage and Exile
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.
John Le Carré’s Never-ending War of Exile
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

This chapter shows how World War II is a central thematic and political presence in le Carré’s novels. Detailed studies of the expressionist techniques in Call for the Dead (1961) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) show how Cold War intrigue is intertwined with unvanquished elements of Fascism that reappear in Britain as double agents now working for East Germany. Villainy and victimhood are also enmeshed as Holocaust survivors betrayed by western indifference turn to Communism, creating the tragic overtones of these political spy thrillers.
Conclusion
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

This conclusion focuses on the theme of suspicion as the narrative and heuristic bridge connecting espionage fiction and exile. Suspicion drives characters and plots and serves as an over-determined metaphor, designating nations, organisations, ideologies and individuals as agents as well as objects of distrust. The chapter argues that the British fictions studied in this book express the urge to provide counter-narratives to the casual prejudices, wilful ignorance and silences that constituted official and general responses to political and racialized victims of exile in their times and that reverberate today.
Introduction to Carolyn Heilbrun’s ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, 1968
Authors: Silvert Brenda R.
Published: January 2018

Brenda Silver, a noted scholar of modernism, cultural studies, and of Virginia Woolf in particular, was a friend and colleague of Carolyn Heilbrun. In this essay, Silver describes the importance of Heilbrun’s work in general and the significance of her 1968 essay, ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, a courageous and ground-breaking consideration of the role of sexuality in the work and reception of the group. For several decades, until the 1991 publication of Christopher Reed’s ‘Bloomsbury Bashing’, critical work on Bloomsbury largely ignored (at best) or deprecated Bloomsbury’s queer sensibility. Silver explains that Heilbrun’s essay was an important contribution to later scholars’ understanding of Bloomsbury because it validates sexual dissidence as an important source of Bloomsbury’s creative and intellectual energy and ethos.
Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury
Authors: Piggford George
Published: January 2018

Members of the Bloomsbury Group wrote biographical texts influenced by the camp style of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria. The most noticeable effect of this style is the subversion of Victorian biographical conventions. Stracheyesque qualities can be found in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush, John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Old Friends, and E.M. Forster’s early nonfiction sketches and his biographies of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Marianne Thornton. Especially in their biographical writings these figures felt free to emphasize exaggeration, even silliness, in contrast to the psychological realism prevalent in their own and others’ fictional literary experiments. The Stracheyesque note in Bloomsbury biography provides a common quality and arguably queers readers’ expectations of modernist literary practices. As with the pervasive irregularity of their sexual practices, such textual play might be understood as liberatory and subversive.
Clive Bell, ‘a fathead and a voluptuary’: Conscientious Objection and British Masculinity
Authors: Hussey Mark
Published: January 2018

Hussey shows that Clive Bell was a lifelong rebel. His tireless championing of individual liberty as the paramount value of political and social organisation, and of subjective experience as the proper basis for aesthetics pervades his writings on art, society, history and politics. He proselytized for the radically new art of the early twentieth century and for pacifism before and during the First World War. He excoriated the puritanical strictures of post-war England and its appeasement and adherence to untenable ideals in the late 1930s and Second World War. In his close identification with the conscientious objector issue, Bell, though heterosexual, is representative of queer Bloomsbury’s challenge to heteronormativity and the patriarchal family. As nationalist and homophobic rhetoric converged at war’s end, Bell’s writings deplored the lasting effects on British society of the government’s suppression of thought and expression during the war, including queer thought and homosexual expression.
‘I didn’t know there could be such writing’: The Aesthetic Intimacy of E. M. Forster and T. E. Lawrence
Authors: Jodie Medd
Published: January 2018

Medd examines the correspondence between E.M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, in which new possibilities of both male intimacy and masculine self-understanding were achieved through an exchange of writing and reading. This epistolary literary exchange eschewed conventions of published literary circulation and reconfigured the traditional reader-writer dyad. As Forster and Lawrence forged a friendship through the exchange of literary materials – including Forster’s ‘unpublishable’ fiction – and a self-reflective dialogue over their experiences of reading one another’s literature and absorbing their interlocutor’s response to their own writing, they negotiated the tricky landscape of male intimacy heightened with homoerotic possibilities, while also discovering and re-imagining new possibilities of (homo)sexual and literary self-understanding. The correspondence constitutes an alternative queer circuit of literary exchange, in which scenes of reading and writing form bonds of male intimacy that re imagine both the terms of masculine identity and desire and the very terms of the literary itself.
Virginia Woolf’s Queer Time and Place: Wartime London and a World Aslant
Authors: Coates Kimberly Engdahl
Published: January 2018

Coates employs queer phenomenology proposed by Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed to explore the ways Virginia Woolf’s modernist aesthetic queers events, characters, affects, and the phenomenological experience of time and space. Examining queer angles of vision in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and The Years, Woolf depicts a London irrevocably queered by war or its anticipation. Rendering familiar temporal and spatial frames suddenly askew, Woolf’s queer analysis of wartime London calls us to heed the destructive consequences of a militancy facilitated by patriarchy and heteronormativity, while simultaneously inviting us to inhabit a city capable of offering radically alternative modes of social gathering.
Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
Authors: Ginty Roger Mac
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at the pros and cons of peace formation in Northern Ireland; a case where many would suppose that international, elite-level, and social claims had moved close together during the peace process, having been at least partly reconciled mainly by various international and state-level initiatives. This translates as a form of oligarchy between domestic political parties and the British and Irish governments which did its best to stage-manage popular input. Indeed, the agency of local actors was encouraged when deemed useful but was ignored if it fell outside of the intentions of the elite peace oligarchy unless it threatened a reversion to violence. At the same time, however, party politics managed to channel popular support into the peace process, even as popular legitimacy for the outcomes of this process was waning. The chapter argues that this level of peace process — elite negotiations and party politics — has not brought about reconciliation.
International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
Authors: Bøås Morten , Tom Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses international peacebuilding and local agency in Sierra Leone, asking whether it is tactical or strategic. The peacebuilding and statebuilding in Sierra Leone have not made a genuine attempt to adjust to context. They still do not facilitate equal representation and rarely address structural constraints beyond political power-sharing. The chapter then gives the examples of organisations such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone as agential and innovative local actors which have built extensive local–global networks more in sync with local realties and ideas and within the limits of the standards set by international actors. Sierra Leone's agency is thus both strategic and tactical: able to create spaces for locally driven peace initiatives yet disciplined by donors. International actors still refuse or fail to incorporate figures of authority on the ground, bypassing social configurations of power, including the state, preferring civil society and private sectors.
Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
Authors: Netra Eng , Hughes Caroline
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the case of Cambodia. Local agency is evident in efforts by Cambodian people to cope with the immensity of the events overwhelming them. For example, much initial restoration of basic infrastructure and rudimentary services, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, was the result of local agency as much as central direction. Nevertheless, throughout postcolonial Cambodian history, Cambodian governance has been characterised by high levels of surveillance and repression. This has been accompanied by an explicit concern by elites to manipulate ideas of the Cambodian tradition into a politics of populist authenticity that significantly affects possibilities for emancipatory forms of peace formation. The chapter then examines two areas: the reform of village-level political structures and the restoration of Buddhist rituals.
André Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality
Authors: Sorlin Pierre
Published: January 2018

André Bazin, a teacher and a film critic, was intent on making his students and readers realize that the cinema offered them a unique tool to discover the world. After his premature death at the age of 50, his friends collected some of his articles, republishing them in a variety of formats. However, the variable nature of this series of montages sometimes provoked misinterpretations. For example, a sentence on the “irresistible realism” of film was considered a proof that, for him, cinematic images copied reality. However, this chapter will argue that Bazin’s conception of both film and reality was far more elaborate and sophisticated than that. Bazin argued that there are so many things around us that we cannot see them all, we thus only ever know a small portion of the surrounding reality. Human beings have long drawn portraits and landscapes in order to observe at leisure what interests them. Unlike drawings, biased by the artist’s feelings, photography is “objective” since it is merely the effect of a chemical reaction and, beside its target, for instance a person, it registers, unwillingly, aspects of the surroundings such as they are. Film is as unbiased as photography and in addition gives faithful motion reproduction. While watching a long sequence taken in distant shot we may become aware of people, actions, situations appearing in the background and that we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Thanks to its realism a film can help us to gain a less narrow vision of reality.
The Moving-image Redemption of Orality and Lukács’s Early Writing on the Cinema
Authors: Yaping Apple Xu
Published: January 2018

This paper analyzes the early film writing of Georg Lukács, particularly ‘Thoughts Towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’ (‘Gedanken zu einer Ästhetic des Kino’, 1913), from the perspective of the oral mode of communication and expression, or, orality. It considers that the essence of the orality lies with the embodied engagement of human beings, basing on Walter J. Ong’s ideas of the orality-literacy hypothesis. With such understanding, it argues that the moving image can be the technological redemption of the orality, and suggests that the visual revival of the orality depends on but beyond the optical perception, necessarily involving the spectatorial embodiment. Lukács’s understandings towards the primitive moving-images imply that the revived orality in the visual can reside in two aspects: the mimetic representation of the moving image, and the intersubjective engagement between the two-dimensional screen world and the three-dimensional real world in the cinema experience. Additionally, this paper elucidates such hypothesis of the moving-image redemption of orality with a case study on a digital documentary Life in a Day (dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2011, 95 min.), for the purpose of suggesting the relevance of Lukács’s early thoughts to the recent digital culture and scholarly-discussions on the cinematic ‘affect’.
John Grierson: From the Poster Movement to the Informational State
Authors: Anthony Scott
Published: January 2018

Much critical writing on the British 'documentary film movement' has tended to examine Grierson's legacy in terms of issues of 'realism', politics and ideology. In contrast, this chapter focuses on Grierson's career as an art critic during the inter-war period, placing a particular focus on his interest in sculpture, and the ‘new sculpture’ movement. The chapter contrast and compare Grierson’s writings on film with his writings on the new sculpture movement, and, by doing so, emphasise a very different lineage of Grierson's thought to that which is generally held. Thus, rather than reaching back into Grierson's biography over the 1910s-1920s to frame his thinking on film in terms of the School of Social Sciences in Chicago, this chapter reframes Grierson’s thinking on films within the terms in which he evaluated the art of the inter-war years, that is, within the terms of a broadly Ruskinite social mission.
Assemblies in the Longue Durée
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

In chapter 9, it is again shown that the Norse thing organisation was neither new nor unique, but situated within a Germanic tradition of law and assembly, which can be traced back to the first century AD; thus long predating the earliest Frankish laws. This chapter also demonstrates that outdoor thing sites seem to have been the norm until the late sixteenth or the seventeenth century. Occasional indoor meetings are known in earlier times, but it was not until the early modern period that specific buildings were designated, and at times created specifically, for these gatherings. Finally, the reasons why some assembly sites remained in use for many hundred years, while others were used only for very short periods of time, are examined, as well as the links between assembly sites and central places, and the legacy of the major thing sites on the administrative landscape of today.
‘Man Produces Universally’: Praxis and Production in Agamben and Marx
Authors: Whyte Jessica
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the engagements with Marx that appear in Agamben’s analyses of praxis, history and inoperativity. Whyte begins by analysing Agamben’s treatment of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Man without Content and Infancy and History, before turning to his claim, in The Kingdom the Glory, that Marx secularises the theological paradigm of oikonomia. The chapter then draws on Althusser to argue that there is a major break between the young Marx’s analysis of labour and his later analysis in Capital Volume 1, and that the former obscures the historical specificity of labour under capitalism. Whyte charges Agamben’s genealogy of oikonomia, which traces a continuity between the Greek oikos and contemproary capitalism, with a similar lack of historical specificity, for conflating the labour of the slave with that of the proletarian.
Agamben, Badiou and Affirmative Biopolitics
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: January 2018

This Chapter argues that the thought of Badiou and Agamben is much closer than most people, including themselves, recognise. Prozorov shows that there is a striking similarity between Badiou’s concept of the body of truth and Agamben’s notion of the form-of-life and that, despite their manifold differences, the two thinkers are united by the attempt to rethink politics on the basis of the brute facticity of being. The chapter concludes by arguing that, while Badiou has shown little interest in the problematic of biopolitics, his militant ‘politics of truth’ is nonetheless a version of the ‘affirmative biopolitics’ that Agamben has painstakingly developed.
Law and Life beyond Incorporation: Agamben, Highest Poverty and the Papal Legal Revolution
Authors: Vatter Miguel
Published: January 2018

The final chapter this the book reconstructs and problematises Agamben’s account of form-of-life in The Highest Poverty’s by situating it in the context of the ‘papal legal revolution’ of the 12th and 13th Centuries. It begins by comparing Agamben’s analysis of law and life in State of Exception and that in The Highest Poverty. Vatter argues that Agamben’s account of the conflict between the Franciscans and the Papacy is problematic because it fails to address the legal dispositif that ultimately spelled the defeat of the Franciscan project to emancipate life from law, that of incorporation. The chapter concludes by reconstructing the history of the common-law apparatus of the ‘trust’ as an alternative to the corporation, and argues that this can provide an understanding of group action that is neither sovereign nor anti-nomian.
About Time
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the element of time in music and poetry. Being sequential, music and poetry, fiction and films, theatre and dance all take time to ‘take place’. But, of these, music and poetry are the least able to dress up their reliance on temporal order as the need to reflect the world's constant patterns of ‘and then…and then’. They offer us a particularly unmediated encounter with time. Moreover, music and poetry have a relationship with the time they themselves take. Paintings, sculpture and buildings do not, generally speaking, know they are going to be degraded by the actions of time. But musical scores and written poems are plans for particular passages of, or in, time.
Chromaticism
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the uses of chromaticism in music and poetry. Chromaticism is a concept drawn from Western Classical music, and refers to the tonal or harmonic variations in terms of colour. Chromaticism is guilty of revealing how porous the boundaries are between a work of art and the social conditions under which that work was produced. But it also reveals something about the musical project itself. But the concept goes much further than that. In the context of Western music and poetry, ‘chromatic’ can mean not merely what is formally disobedient, but more broadly whatever is put in the poem for sensory, rather than grammatical or denotative, reasons. Chromaticism represents a principle of ‘give’ — of flavour, or even of deviation — within poetic language, and this principle has a number of aspects.
The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers whether one can think of the semiotic or ‘musical’ elements in language, particularly in poetry, as meaning-laden in their own terms. The previous chapters have shown how abstract formal elements such as texture and formal proportion can supplement literal, denotative meaning. They have also revealed how a richer sense of ‘meaning’, and richer meanings, can be found in discourses such as poetry, which try to harness the semiotic elements in language, than in those such as instruction manuals, that do not. A distinctive characteristic of the semantic in language is the syntactic relationship it makes with the objects of experience. This orderly sense-making turns out to be the engine of denotation, and it is the very element of language that this chapter explores.
And Story Came Too: From Epic to Opera
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the associations between the epic and the opera. The epics that remain with us were not the first human expressive practice, but early examples date back more than four millennia. They offer surprising insights into opera, which is in certain ways their successor: both forms grapple to combine the same trio of constituents. Though occurring across centuries and cultures, all epics have in common a public storytelling role that relies on both linguistic and ‘musical’ — that is, at least pitched or incanted — tropes to make it more absorbing for its audience, and memorisable for the performer. Additionally, opera is a highly specialised form compared to the song; one that's frequently portrayed, by both admirers and critics, as having at least as much cultural significance off the stage as on it.
The Consolations of Tradition
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how, since the millennium, certain trends in Anglophone poetry have echoed the ‘turn’ in Western art music away from what we might think of as mid-century ‘scholasticism’ towards such conventional musical rewards as readily detectable patterning, or euphony. Artistic credibility and a response by non-specialist audiences no longer appear inimical. It has once again become possible to develop serious original work using traditional verse forms such as the ballad, or musical tropes as familiar as the rising or falling scale on which Arvo Pärt's famous Fratres is built. This shift, from the complex and unfamiliar to material that is distilled and empirically accessible, makes us ask whether it is cultural conditioning, or some innate human capacity, that lets us experience certain tropes as more accessible than others.
Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the post-nationalist and post-cosmopolitan diagnostic work of Roger Bartra, leading public intellectual figure in contemporary Mexico, in relation to what he calls the ‘melancholic post-Mexican condition’. ‘Bartra’ stands here both for the conceptual persona of the Anthropologist and for a sign of a slow and patient disarticulation of the historically constituted racialized citizen-subjects and media-objects staged by post-revolutionary cosmopolitan modernism and avant-garde art/film practices. Bartra has evaluated the dominant forms of affectivity transmitted by the nationalist and national tradition of Mexican anthropology: a composite of pride, abjection, enthusiasm, and melancholia. The chapter considers the mutual intrusions between Bartra and the author as well as Bartra's intellectual vocation and anthropological motion in and out of Mexico, along with the implications this has with regard to the assemblage at work in the anthropological turn in contemporary art.
‘Do you Think you’re Clever? Solve this Riddle, then!’ The Comic Side of Byzantine Enigmatic Poetry
Authors: Beta Simone
Published: January 2018

‘Comic’ is not an adjective one would normally use in connection with or ancient Greek Byzantine riddles. Yet Greek riddles began to show their comic side after the fifth century BCE, when they became typical sympotic pastimes. At some point, ainigmata turned into griphoi and, according to the definition given by the Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus of Soli, became a ‘a problem put in jest’. The comicality we see in in the many griphoi Athenaeus took from Attic comedy in the tenth book of the Deipnosophists is more evident, and less dangerous; and it is generally agreed that such drollery is mostly absent from Byzantine riddles. A survey shows how the unknown Byzantine authors who took pleasure in composing these little conundrums were even able, in some circumstances, to jest with Holy Scripture and to linger on topics more suitable for Old Comedy.
‘Messages of the Soul’: Tears, Smiles, Laughter and Emotions Expressed by them in Byzantine Literature
Authors: Hinterberger Martin
Published: January 2018

Both in real life and in literature, tears and laughter only rarely carry an ambiguous message: usually tears express sorrow, and laughter joy. This chapter investigates whether this is also the case in Byzantine texts, focusing on texts where doubts about the emotional meaning of these bodily signs are explicitly voiced or where their ambiguity is exploited for literary aims. The emotions elicited in turn by these bodily signs as well as the relation of tears and laughter (usually but not always constituting opposite emotional states) are also explored. Apart from sorrow, Byzantine tears are primarily associated with the religious emotion ‘contrition’. Tears of contrition, however, may also be experienced as joyful, because of their cleansing effect. Not surprisingly, Byzantine tears arouse compassion, mercy and pity in the onlooker’s soul. Whereas laughter appears as generally negative and almost as the opposite of the highly valued contrition, it is also characteristic of kindness. Apart from joy, it often expresses contempt. Smiling, on the other hand, is the virtuous relative of the morally questionable laughter. It expresses a calm attitude and is related not so much to emotions as to their absence.
Mime and the Dangers of Laughter in Late Antiquity
Authors: Webb Ruth
Published: January 2018

This chapter asks why joking and laughter were perceived as so dangerous and problematic by early Christians. Condemnations of laughter in the sermons of John Chrysostom refer to Paul’s rejections of eutrapelia (wittiness) in his Letter to the Ephesians and seek to create an association with Late Antique stage practices, particularly the comic performances of the mimes. In so doing, Chrysostom plays on widespread social prejudices against the mime. He also activates the root meaning of eutrapelia or ‘versatility’, thus identifying it firmly with theatrical role play. One result of this move, however, is to highlight a particular aspect of humour and its effects: much humour, including that of the mimes, demands a degree of intellectual versatility, the ability to see situations and practices from a different perspective and it may be precisely this that underlies the ban on laughter and wittiness pronounced by Paul and taken up by Chrysostom and others
Comforting Tears and Suggestive Smiles: To Laugh and Cry in the Komnenian Novel
Authors: Nilsson Ingela
Published: January 2018

The stories of the Komnenian novels, written in imitation of ancient Greek models during the mid-twelfth century in Constantinople, display a significant mixture of happiness and sadness, or rather a combination of tears and laughter. While a modern reader may expect tears to represent sadness and laughter happiness, both laughing and crying can take on quite different functions and meanings in ancient and Byzantine novels. Not only tears and laments but also laughter and smiles are here investigated in relation to the workings of Eros. Smiles and laughter often indicate the presence of desire and sometimes create confusion, departing from but at the same time closely adhering to the basically sad story of the loving couple’s misfortunes. Tears and laughter are not opposites in the novels; they work together under the influence of Eros.
Belisarius in the Shadow Theatre: The Private Calvary of a Legendary General
Authors: Stavrakopoulou Anna
Published: January 2018

The favourite character of the Greek shadow puppeteer, Vassilaros (1899–1979), one of the most productive and best-known artists of his generation, was the sixth century Byzantine general Belisarius (c. 505–565). Vassilaros created a number of variations of plays, in which Justinian’s general was the protagonist of a love-and-betrayal drama, against the historical backdrop of a most successful military career. According to historical sources Belisarius was disfavoured on several occasions by Justinian, but restored to power thanks to the support of Empress Theodora, who was a friend of Belisarius’ wife, Antonina. This riveting story has inspired a number of plays, novels and operas, long before its twentieth-century debut in the shadow theatre. In Vassilaros’ play, Belisarius’ story is adapted to the conventions of this art form to involve the trickster Karaghiozis, who is the leading member of the shadow theatre cast. The dramatic circumstances of Belisarius’ life are spiced up with comic episodes involving Karaghiozis, who is always after food and money. At the height of battle scenes, Karaghiozis stuffs his pockets with meatballs, to appease his never-ending hunger, even at the threshold of death.
Aesthetic Revolution and Modern Democracy: Rancière’s Historiography
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns to the work of Jacques Rancière, who has, perhaps more than any other prominent living philosopher, extended the historical and historiographical work of Foucault by proposing an archeology of aesthetics, with a particular concern for its relationship to the history of politics. In doing so, however, he has stalwartly refused to provide a genealogical account of the emergence of aesthetics, which appeared at more or less the same time as modern democracy. This chapter thereby sets as its task a critical reassessment of the genealogical limitations of Rancière’s account of the historical relationship between art and politics. It is in this light that it advances an alternative account of historical causality by examining the variable conjuncture of determinants that contributed to the emergence of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art.
The Art of Talking Past One Another: The Badiou–Rancière Debate
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

The opening chapter in this final section explores what is arguably one of the most important contemporary debates between living French philosophers (a controversy that echoes, in interesting ways, the earlier debate between Derrida and Foucault). It begins by highlighting the extent to which the Badiou-Rancière controversy has largely been an exchange in which they talk past one another (un dialogue de sourds), since they each tend to criticize the other from a privileged citadel—politics for Badiou, aesthetics for Rancière—without responding to the criticisms of their adversary. Against this backdrop, the chapter seeks to provide a comprehensive account of their respective positions on aesthetics and explain where their projects overlap as well as where they definitively part ways.
The Forgotten Political Art Par Excellence? Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

With a few rare but important exceptions, it is arguable that major contemporary debates on the historical relationship between art and politics—from the work of Lukács and Adorno to that of Lyotard and Rancière—have generally favored the visual arts and literature over and against architecture and urban design. However, as a few thinkers like Benjamin and Foucault have recognized, if there is one art that appears to be prototypically political (in the sense that it is almost inevitably the site of collective decisions that directly shape the social body while simultaneously being subject to multifarious communal appropriations), it is surely architecture. This paradox leads to a question of central importance, which serves to guide the analysis in this final chapter: why have many of the foremost philosophic debates on the historical relation between art and politics sidelined what is perhaps the political art par excellence? This leads to a critical re-examination of the metaphilosophical assumptions undergirding many of the standard historical narratives regarding the development of art and its relationship to politics.