bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Military Engineer: Raids, Resources and Fortifications
Authors: Welfare Humphrey
Published: September 2023

In the build-up to the Seven Years War, William joined the Corps of Engineers and remained within it for the rest of his life. He surveyed strategic roads and stretches of coastline in Wales and in South-East England, and he produced designs for fortifications. As an Engineer he took part in raids on the coast of France and, in Germany, he was a quartermaster engaged in logistics. Among his surveys during the war was a much-lauded plan of the Battle of Minden and several topographical maps of campaigns. In 1763 he devised a scheme for British national cartography and in 1765 he was appointed to inspect the coasts for the defence of the realm. Strategic assessments and surveys of South-East England and southern Ireland followed, and he also drove a difficult project to disable the port of Dunkirk. In 1766 he made renewed proposals for a British national map, framed within a geodetic framework. In 1774 he was given oversight of stores for the army in North America and in 1778 he was appointed as Commissary General. He was frequently called upon to design military camps.
Photographing Crude in The Desert: Sight and Sense among Oil Men
Authors: Hindelang Laura
Published: September 2023

The chapter explores the role of photography in prospecting for oil and the establishment of petro-modernity in the Arabian Peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century. The first case study discusses the archive of the Swiss petro-geologist Arnold Heim that documents his 1924 geological field trip to the Arabian Gulf. The second case study focuses on the travel report Im Auto nach Koweit (To Kuwait by Car, 1953) by the Austrian automobilist Max Reisch and the ways in which oil and oil infrastructure underlaid his Middle Eastern road trip. The chapter provides a typology of sights and senses related to oil explorations concomitant with specific ways of travelling and photographing. It analyzes the multi-sensory experience with naturally surfacing bitumen in the 1920s and with processed asphalt on desert roads in the 1950s through the lens of different written and visual documents. The chapter provides evidence of how prospecting for petroleum and exploring the oil boom has produced not only a visual culture of petroleum but also a visual history of Eastern Arabia.
After Oil
Authors: Ghosn Rania
Published: September 2023

The project After Oil by the architectural collaborative DESIGN EARTH presents a speculative future of the Arabian Gulf when the world has transitioned away from fossil fuels. In a series of three triptychs, After Oil renders visible the embeddedness of petroleum in a region of many oil-producing economies by charting matters of concern at three nodes in the system: an offshore oil extraction and processing facility (Das Island); a transit chokepoint (Strait of Hormuz); and the site one of the largest oil spills in history (Bubiyan Island). Such a speculative extrapolation of issues critical for today’s oil landscape favours an approach to energy transitions that upholds the geographies of technological systems – their processes, sites, objects and externalities.
Understanding Islamist Environmentalism
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 7 offers a comparative analytical discussion of the five Islamist groups and movements. It explains how they relate to each other in terms of similarities and differences. The chapter claims that there are three types of Islamist environmentalism due to different scales of environmental engagement. Moreover, it provides an analysis of three non-religious factors that account for the emergence of Islamist environmentalism: alliance building, political and military expediency, and ideological realignment.
The Amnesty Applied (I): The Trials of Agoratus and Eratosthenes
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

In the wake of the Amnesty, several trials came to light. This chapter looks at the two most notorious, those of Agoratus (Lys. 13) and Eratosthenes (Lys. 12). Of the two, the first is the most difficult to explain in the light of the Amnesty. A collaborator of the Thirty, Agoratus, was tried on multiple charges of murder in the time of oligarchy: he had not been on the board of the Thirty and therefore did not fall within the exemption zone, yet a trial was permitted because of the public nature of his liability to the whole city, not just to private individuals. The second, that of Eratosthenes, a member of the Thirty, is much easier to explain since, as a high-ranking official under the oligarchy, he fell within the zone of exemption. Though in both cases personal vendettas are in evidence, close examination of the language of the speeches shows that the trials turned on a legal, not a political or partisan, principle.
Che Guevara’s Diaries, Miguel Littín’s Adventures: Latin American Iconography in Arabic Literature
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 examines the effects of the circulation of Latin American literature and political iconography in the Arab world. This chapter traces how Latin American iconography and literature travelled in the 1960s–80s in Arabic during Third World revolutions and through the legacy of Tricontinentalism. Chapter 4 focuses on Warda (2000) by the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim (Ṣun‘ Allāh Ibrāhīm) and Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt (Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian Between Moscow and Chernobyl, 1998) by the Egyptian writer Mohamed Makhzangi (Muḥammad al- Makhzanjī). In Warda, Che Guevara’s diaries play a central role in the notebooks of an Arab woman revolutionary in the Dhofar revolution in 1960s and 1970s Oman. In Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt, Makhzangi experiments with literary reportage, a form adopted in García Márquez’s Relato de un náufrago (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, 1970) and La aventura de Miguel Littín: clandestino en Chile (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1986). Drawing on Third Worldist networks, the chapter examines how intertextuality and rewritings extend Arab Latin American ties and transnational solidarity to the twenty-first century.
Introduction: Victorian Middle-Class Status and the Negative Assertion of Value
Authors: Pionke Albert D.
Published: September 2023

The introduction reconstructs England’s historical language of class and its imbrication with franchise reform, positions the book methodologically with respect to both the contemporary critical interest in forms and their principal underlying sociological theories of status, and explicates the core premise of negative assertions of value. This chapter engages at length with Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, Dror Wahrman’s Imagining the Middle Class, Max Weber’s Economy and Society, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. The transatlantic reception of Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America provides an exemplary case study of the central argument in action.
Legitimizing the Subjection of Middle-Class Women in Mid-Victorian Fiction
Authors: Pionke Albert D.
Published: September 2023

Chapter five revisits many of the novels featured earlier—including Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette; Collins’s The Woman in White and No Name; Eliot’s Felix Holt; and Gaskell’s North and South—to uncover the largely unarticulated gendered assumptions that inform their constructions of status. Negative assertions of value focused on birth, wealth, force, and fact had tangible benefits for middle-class men’s status, which was, itself, predicated upon a fifth repudiation to be made by contemporary middle-class women. Chapter five argues that women’s legitimacy in the period marked by the mid-century “surplus women” crisis, widespread opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act (1870), and the formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (1872) rested upon women’s rejection of claims to equal public authority. Focusing at length upon Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), this chapter reveals how, in order to legitimate the middle-class perspective of her titular “clever woman,” Rachel Curtis, Yonge studiously strips her of any claims to masculine authority; this anti-feminist pattern, I assert, is perceptible even in novels with very different ideological investments.
Cosmopolitanism of Dissent
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the philosophy of the Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka, as expressed in his concepts of ‘permanent questioning’, ‘living in problematicity’ and ‘shaken solidarities’, provides a minimalist framework for conceiving a non-totalizing cosmopolitan theory. Animated by this philosophy, the dissident movement of Charta 77 contested the political regime in the name of values that transcended it—Helsinki Agreements—and embodied a cosmopolitanism of dissent with distinct features: a practice and action rather than an idea; a contestatory action from the below, not from above; a political form of cosmopolitanism, not a moral or cultural one, and which is historically situated. These initial findings have been tested on different case studies of dissent around the world: dissidence in authoritarian regimes, civil disobedience in (more or less) liberal states, and global resistance and protests from the last decades, and these historically situated cosmopolitanisms allow to conceive cosmopolitanism through a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation, such as totality, essence, universality.
A Radical Love of Humanity
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

A theory of cosmopolitanism is often seen as perpetuating a totalising understanding of humanity and some demanding notions such as brotherhood, responsibility towards the Other with capital O, love of the neighbour, philanthropy, peace, etc. The chapter explores how this demandingness and threatening totalisation relate to radical cosmopolitics by examining the ‘impossible’ command to ‘Love your neighbour’. Freud and Lacan detected that this ‘impossibility’ comes from a traumatic experience of locating the evil or the ‘Inhuman’ in the neighbour and in us. Kristeva included this ‘impossibility’ in an invitation to think of a ‘cosmopolitanism of a new sort’ in the very act of locating the Inhuman or ‘the foreigner’ in us. However, cosmopolitanism was already born through an act of encountering the ‘evil in us’, inherent in the Cynic’ practices of self-destitution and humiliation, aimed at liberating himself and others from the conventions that hide the evil. The Cynic loves humanity in a radical way by altering its ‘currency’ and by a permanent questioning of what it means to be human; thus, radical cosmopolitics is the very way of preventing any totalising view of humanity.
Conclusion
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

The conclusions reiterate the book’s overall arguments, concluding that to construct a political theory of cosmopolitanism that will resist criticism, one does not need to advance a conciliatory approach but, paradoxically, to radicalise it, - to alter the values of all currencies – and, through this radicalisation, the legacy of the Ancient Cynics’ militant life for thinking cosmopolitanism is reclaimed. In particular, the conclusions show that radical and militant cosmopolitics is not a new grand narrative with a ‘colonial or imperial intent’, on the contrary, it is co-substantial with the decolonization struggle, since as long as those who gained their national liberation and self-determination remain ‘illegal’ in most parts of the world, decolonisation is a failure. Equally, it shows that militant cosmopolitics is not an avantgarde of the few militating in the name of the whole world. Militant cosmopolitics is for everyone, since everyone can be a militant for another, more just and equal, world in which No One Is Illegal.
When, Where and Possibly Why Did Meta Appear?
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 begins by presenting a brief history of reflexivity and meta-phenomena according to the general consensus that emerges from the literature on these concepts. It then seeks to discuss specific points that are taken for granted in these writings: is meta specific to Western culture? did meta come from literature? did meta come from the modernist avant-garde? are the origins of meta the same in series as in film? can silent films be meta anyway? Tentative answers are provided based on existing research, but the aim of this chapter is above all to open areas for further research from a historical perspective.
Medium and Materiality
Authors: Roche David
Published: September 2023

Chapter 6 completes the study of meta from the perspective of the apparatus by focusing on the medium itself—that which connects the creator and the spectator. If the avant-garde has privileged the practice of experimenting with the materiality of film, in art cinema and mainstream cinema and series, concerns about the medium are regularly raised through what we would now call intermedial strategies, for instance by confronting film to other arts and media (the visual arts, video, comics, etc.). Such metamoments interrogate the medium’s ontology by asking the questions: what is cinema or television (compared to such or such medium)? Or what does cinema or television become (when it goes digital)?
At the Beginning: The Formation of the Kurdish-Ottoman Nobility of Palu in the Sixteenth Century
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the formation of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire during the early sixteenth century within the context of the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry. Sultan Selim I assigned İdris-i Bidlîsî, an experienced scribe in the Ottoman court, to persuade the Kurdish emirs to support the Ottomans against the Safavids during his eastern campaign. İdris-i Bidlîsî was given blank imperial orders (temessüknâmes) bearing the sultan's seal. The specific content of these temessüknâmes was determined through İdris-i Bidlîsî's diplomatic efforts and shaped the terms of the incorporation of Kurdish rulers into the Ottoman realm, as well as their granted privileges. This chapter illustrates the critical moment when the Ottoman state and Kurdish elites established a lasting relationship, built upon the Ottoman recognition of the hereditary privileges of the Kurdish nobility within the imperial framework.
The Weşin Incident: the Spark that Burnt a Village … and the Arsonist
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the Weşin incident, providing a micro history of this crucial event. It begins by examining the career of hâkim Abdullah Beg and the exploitative labor system he enforced in the rural sector. It then delves into the incident itself and its aftermath. The investigation of the incident involved various levels of the central and local bureaucracies, with the governor and local councils established under the Tanzimat program serving as platforms for different parties to express their interpretations of the event. The chapter explores the strategies, discourses, and actions of the Weşin inhabitants in their legal struggle, particularly how they were able to present their narratives of that tragic day and how it became a contest between competing discourses regarding the legitimacy of the Kurdish nobility's administrative and fiscal authority, as well as the nature and limits of the Ottoman state's power. Thus, the chapter demonstrates that the fate of the Palu nobility was not solely determined by the decision-makers in the corridors of the imperial bureaucracy, but also by local actors, their power struggles, and how these were reflected in the capital.
After Abdullah Beg: The Politics of Dividing the Kurdish Nobles’ Lands
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

Chapter 6 examines land ownership, focusing on the government's order to confiscate the lands of the begs and the ensuing conflict-ridden process of land sales from the 1850s to the 1870s. The exile and subsequent death of Abdullah Beg set the stage for the Ottoman state's radical efforts to transform landholding patterns in the district. In 1850, the central treasury confiscated Abdullah Beg's lands and offered them for sale to inhabitants with new title deeds. This policy was extended to all the Palu begs through a government decree. This chapter delves into the politics of land redistribution and highlights how both the Palu begs and agricultural producers worked to acquire or regain land in the following decades. The Armenian inhabitants of Palu played an active role, leveraging connections with the imperial capital through itinerant Armenian merchants, sarrafs and the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. The chapter provides a detailed account of land sales and the resulting changes in land ownership and agricultural production relationships. It demonstrates that the forces shaping the land program and the prospects of the Palu nobility were influenced by provincial negotiations and struggles, rather than being dictated by a blueprint imposed by the central Ottoman state.
Provincial Administration after the Palu Nobility
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the establishment of a new administrative order in Palu, focusing on the bureaucratic realm and the central state's efforts to extend its control. It discusses the müdür position and the conflicted process of müdür appointments, highlighting the involvement of various provincial actors in reshaping the district's structures. The chapter also examines the transformation of Palu's administration from müdürlük to kaymakamlık, a position representing the state's authority in the locality. This shift introduced the concept of meritocracy, emphasizing specific skills and training for kaymakams. The chapter further illustrates the central Ottoman state's attempts to exclude local actors from the decision-making process in provincial administration by exploring the politics surrounding the appointments of Palu's kaymakams from the 1880s to the early 1900s.
The Beginning of the Endgame? The Road to the 1895 Massacres in Palu
Authors: Özok-Gündoğan Nilay
Published: September 2023

This chapter delves into the 1895 Massacres in Palu and explores their connection to the declining wealth and authority of the Palu begs, as well as the growing animosity between them and the Armenian population in the district. Despite changes in fiscal, administrative, and political domains, the begs maintained their claims of ownership over Palu land. Their disputes with the Armenian villages persisted for several decades, as the begs refused to recognize the rights of those who purchased their confiscated lands and continued to enforce sharecropping on the cultivators. Simultaneously, the internationalization of the Armenian Question and the politicization of Palu Armenians brought increased attention to these villages. This analysis reveals that the violence and massacres that occurred in Palu in 1895 unfolded against the backdrop of these ongoing conflicts. The begs perceived the widespread anti-Armenian sentiment in the empire as an opportune moment to settle their grievances with the Armenian villages. In the aftermath of the massacres, the majority of the Armenian population were once again compelled to work as sharecroppers, cultivating the lands controlled by the begs.
The Public Intellectual
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

The intellectual as someone who ‘speaks truth to power’ and therefore lacks power does not initially seem to accord with the philosopher king who combines both. Yet as this chapter shows, intellectuals have power, albeit one derived from their distance from political authority. The tragedy for intellectuals is that the more their advice and counsel is heeded and even adopted, the closer they come to political power, losing the distance that sustained their moral and political legitimacy and therefore authority. The chapter examines intellectuals as modern philosopher kings who confront and need to negotiate a new paradox of wisdom and power. It starts by defining an intellectual by drawing on the reflections of intellectuals. It then investigates whether the separation of truth and power they seek is feasible, before evaluating its merits from the perspective of both the intellectuals and politics. It concludes by assessing the claim that due to critiques of Enlightenment progress and advances in modern communication technologies, intellectuals are in decline, challenging their prospect as modern philosopher kings.
The Artist as Creator
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

The artist as Romantic genius or creative Künstler-philosoph who promulgates ‘tablets of values’, making new myths and thereby transforming politics is the most striking version of the modern philosopher king. This chapter examines the artist-philosopher by first confronting the claim, most cogently and powerfully made by Marxism that artists are always subject to the prevailing political orders and will never be able to rise above these class interests. It then recovers Socrates’ ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry in Plato’s Republic, to see what is distinctive about artists and philosophers. Drawing on Socratic and Aristotelian concepts of mimesis, it argues that artist may be a philosopher king but in two divergent ways, as philosophical and religious founders, though they can only be called philosopher king in the attenuated sense, if writing is presumed to be political.
Modern Philosopher Kings
Authors: Patapan Haig
Published: September 2023

The conclusion shows how the detailed exploration of paradox and promise of the philosopher king in modernity reveals valuable insights into the relationship between wisdom and power. It outlines how ambitious attempts to instantiate modern philosopher kings have met significant obstacles, indicating that though politics is open to wisdom and philosophy, there are also powerful elements within it resistant to such a union. Though each case study has revealed the success and specific forms of such resistance, the overarching factors that appear to limit the philosopher king are the brevity of a wise person’s life, the unpredictability of chance, and the very constitution of humanity, where a few are philosophical, while most are moved by a diversity of interests derived or shaped largely by a powerful sense of dignity and concern with physical welfare. The chapter then explores whether it may be possible to address these limitations through other means. It suggests that philosophers as authors, where writing is a form of political rule, either in foundational philosophical works or in the enactment of laws and constitutions that defend and accommodate wisdom, provides the more long-lasting means for securing modern philosopher kings.
Organs, Instruments and Insects
Authors: Whistler Daniel
Published: September 2023

This presents Hemsterhuis’ epistemology and metaphysics through an organological lens. It consists of five sections: the first on his late ‘Letter on Optics’, the second on his refashioning of empiricist methodology, the third on his theory of educating organs, the fourth section on his notorious doctrine of the moral organ, and the final section on what all this means for his writing practices. The first section reconstructs Hemsterhuis’ argument that insects are able to see in ‘a more saturated, more compact, denser, fuller way’ than the naked human eye can, and this implies a demand for the insectification of human vision. On this basis, the second section looks to how these changes to human organs affect the practice of philosophy: by giving organs a history, Hemsterhuis attempts to expand the range of possible knowledge. The third section considers this history of the organs in terms of a Bildung of the senses and faculties. The fourth section turns to the moral organ and the fifth section brings out why this organology matters stylistically, what Hemsterhuis’ organological imperatives entail for the writing of philosophy itself.
After Informational Logic: Rethinking Information/Rethinking Rights
Authors: Bowsher Josh
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter attempts to move beyond the current depoliticized articulation of human rights. It argues that if the human rights project is an informational politics, then the specific conception of information it is grounded upon, especially as it is materialized in infrastructures, technologies and practices, becomes an important terrain of struggle. In this vein, the conclusion suggests not that the human rights movement abandon informational politics altogether but that rethinking some of the epistemological assumptions underpinning its conception of information could productively inform renewed attempts to realize the radical potential of human rights. To do so, the chapter brings Donna Haraway’s work on ‘situated knowledges’ and Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent work on ‘counter-expertise’ into dialogue with postcolonial theories of human rights to propose a new approach to information politics. This approach, I argue, functions by bridging theoretical conceptions of exploitation with the experiences of the exploited.
The Making of an Effendi Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter two investigates the transition from social reform to social justice in Egypt, and hence, from the conservative-liberal social contract to a statist social contract with the middle class. After the mid-1930s, but more so after World War II, effendi commentators from across the political spectrum called upon the state to engage with socioeconomic development, which many associated with socialism. To explore this, the chapter studies contemporary political discourse in the press and in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary debates. It also outlines a hierarchy of social justice in the political discourse that implicitly emphasized justice for the effendi middle class over other social categories. Social reform and social justice in the effendi social contract were not mutually exclusive. Over time, principles of social reform merged into the public discourse on social justice and became interconnected with it, and they hence also constituted a part of the effendi social contract. However, an analysis of state development goals and their implementation demonstrates a bias toward an effendi vision of and interest in state measures of socioeconomic development.
Old Regime, New Regime
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter three narrates policy trajectories between the old and new regimes—before and after the 1952 revolution. The chapter outlines the continuity in Egypt’s official social contract as found in the state’s 1956 constitution, as elaborated in the First Five Year Development Plan, and as culminated in the National Charter. It first compares and demonstrates many similarities between the1954 draft for a new constitution—also known as “the pashas’ constitution”—and the 1956 Egyptian constitution. The pashas’ constitution here refers to a draft put forward by members of Egypt’s prerevolutionary legal and political elite. The chapter then studies an overly ambitious First Development Plan, to further demonstrate the continuity between the stated goals of the old and new regimes. It concludes with an analysis of the National Charter, which is considered the foundational document of Egypt’s Arab socialism. In contrast to past research, which argues that the revolutionary Free Officers came to power lacking a coherent ideology regarding what they were trying to achieve, the chapter demonstrates much ideological continuity in the aims of the old and new regimes. Egypt’s radicalization was not about changing goals, but rather about achieving them faster.
The Social Contract Broken Twice
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

Chapter five argues that during the oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, the effendi social contract failed politically as an agreement between the state and the middle class, and socially as a framework for maintaining social solidarity. It documents how this happened in an unlikely period in which the Egyptian state had regained resources that allowed it to sponsor this social contract as never before. Moreover, the chapter further demonstrates that the oil boom facilitated rapid socioeconomic mobility—the result of informal liberalization of the economy—which saw the making of a broad middle class, despite the seeming demise of the effendi middle class in Egyptian public discourse. Chapter five explains this puzzle through a close analysis of the newly introduced Open Door (infitah) policy and the reaction to this policy in Egyptian public discourse.
Old Social Contract, New Social Contract
Authors: Shechter Relli
Published: September 2023

The concluding chapter explains the relative failure to bring a new social contract to Egypt, through a comparison between the historical conditions that facilitated the making of the effendi social contract, and those that forestalled the contract’s replacement. Central in the latter, there was not enough of a socioeconomic transformation to facilitate a new political coalition for change.
A Tomb in Town: The Design and Operation of a Royal Mausoleum
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 interprets the baroque architecture of the exterior façade and interior décor of the tomb, including the calligraphy program on the walls, in particular the spectacular frieze running entirely around the interior walls, and including the Sacred Footprint of the Prophet exhibited here. It presents brief biographies of the architect, Tahir Ağa, and calligrapher, Mehmed Emin Efendi. The chapter introduces the cenotaphs (sanduka) over the royal graves in the mausoleum and the gilt embroidery or Marash work (Maraş işi) on the cenotaph palls. Staff duties at the tomb are explained, and descriptions of the tomb as foreigners saw it are addressed and interpreted.
The Men and Boys in the Garden: Courtiers, Eunuchs, and the Palace Milieu
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 presents the males buried in the garden around the tomb, nearly all courtiers in service at Topkapı Palace; the burials constituted an act of benevolence by the reigning House, in fitting with the image the dynasty aimed to project. Working life at Topkapı is described, along with the three divisions of the staff at the palace: the Harem, the Outer Service, and the Inner Service, the latter headed by the senior-most courtier, the Silâhdar Ağa (Sword-bearer), whose duties the chapter describes. Tutors or governors of princes are represented here. A subchapter addresses the use of enslaved black and white eunuchs in palace service, presenting their likely origins and paths to palace service, their hierarchy of titulature, and their jobs, culminating in a discussion of the Chief Black Eunuch’s role and his vast wealth, as recounted in an archival document of the possessions left at the death in 1825 of the one Chief Black Eunuch here, Ebu Bekir Ağa.
Conclusion: Benevolence in Stone
Authors: Brookes Douglas Scott
Published: September 2023

The Conclusion analyses the status of the Hamidiye Tomb Complex among Ottoman royal graveyards. It discusses the effects of Mahmud II’s reforms on tombstones for males, as the fez replaced the turban, in contrast to the lack of change for female tombstones. It examines the role of this graveyard in royal iconography to support and strengthen the claim of the Ottoman dynasty to rule: through manifestations of royal benevolence, piety, magnificence and humility, concern for their subjects’ welfare, and support for the decorative arts. These manifestations range from the tomb’s religious inscriptions, the presence of the Sacred Footprint, and its water fountains, to its providing a beautiful place for quiet contemplation in the heart of the city.
Self-mortification
Authors: Gray Biko Mandela , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2023

As the third moment of Unhappy Consciousness, self-mortification is a striving to self-annihilate that evokes the extreme asceticism of the medieval church and Luther’s Protestantism. Malcolm X’s life was a structurally similar process of self-mortification. During his early years, the Black self that the white devil told him to believe was liquidated as he entered the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X erased his changeable individuality so that nothing is left but a mere X, which was replaced by the will of the mediator. Malcolm X later broke with the Nation of Islam and became his own mediator to Allah. Through his pilgrimage, Malcolm X became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Yet Angela Davis offered and still offers a more radical approach -- that selfless commitment requires that one be willing to erase oneself in service to the collective. Davis’s life is one of collective commitment. Unlike X, Davis moved in step with the various groups of which she was a part -- such that her fate was linked to the fate of the group. X lived a life of isolated (near)asceticism; Davis lives a life of collective commitment.
Plastics: What Are They Good For?
Authors: Dennis Louise
Published: September 2023

In order to understand the relationships individuals have with plastics today, it is useful to reckon how people related to those materials in the past. Thus, the author traces the history of consumption to the 1950s, when the post–World War II society was encouraged to consume products to facilitate economic growth and to improve their lives more generally. Disposability, the notion of using something once and then throwing it away, grew to become a sign of wealth and cleanliness as consumers were encouraged to use disposable products. This has led to certain new meanings of plastic: the popular understanding that plastics are low value and therefore disposable, Dennis argues, has been built up over a history of misuse of long-lived materials as short-lived products. The author examines the value placed on plastics through an exploration of their uses and misuses, their consumption and, significantly, their conspicuous non-consumption, and how consumers relate to products made from them at the end of their useful life.
The Anti-Plastic City: Local Governments, Plastic Waste, and the Undoing of the Weak Recycling Waste Regime in the United States
Authors: Pollans Lily Baum
Published: September 2023

The essay focuses on attempts to regulate material consumption of plastics in the United States. For example, in 2016, New York City passed a landmark ordinance to levy a five-cent fee on single-use plastic shopping bags. The ban had widespread support in the city, but the state legislature, under pressure from industry lobbyists, quickly organized a preemption bill. New York City was unable to implement the fee. Pollans notes that, historically, attempts to regulate material consumption in the US have only been successful in moments of extreme crisis. Currently, however, fourteen states have preemption laws, similar to the one New York approved in 2017, that do not allow local governments to regulate plastic consumption. Despite widespread preemption, bans and fees on single-use plastics have become symbols of responsible municipal environmental governance. In this essay, Pollans explores why cities are regulating plastic consumption and what it really means for both the environment and the waste regime. Pollans uses the case of New York City’s failed attempt to regulate single-use plastics to explore municipal aspirations and the limits of municipal-scale environmental governance.
From Plasticity to the Aesthesis of Queer Toxicity
Authors: Boetzkes Amanda , Feldman Dana
Published: September 2023

This essay considers how plastic produces reaction formations: schemas, behaviors, and ultimately a topology of affect. This topology precisely characterizes the dilemma of plastic, that it can be both the condition of thinking as well as the character of thought; plasticity produces plastic thoughts and plastic orientations. In materialist terms, plastic matter replicates the capitalist logic that brought it into being, and this very logic continues to reproduce itself as a planetary topology that retroactively affirms the supremacy of capitalism. Boetzkes and Feldman ask: What, then, counts as a plastic resistance to plastic? They argue that in retrieving plastic’s antithesis, its material recalcitrance and dysfunctionality, we might arrive at the limit of the plastic paradigm and thereby imagine its unlimitation.Boetzkes and Feldman consider how resistance to plastic is emerging from a reflection on forms of planetary resistance to its topological spread. Additionally, they suggest that plastic’s toxicity is a signal to its queer ontology. The authors, therefore, differentiate ontological toxicity from other forms of subjective distortion, diffraction, and play with normativity.
Microplastics in Arctic Sea Ice: A Petromodern Archive Fever
Authors: Mitchell Chantelle , Waterhouse Jaxon
Published: September 2023

Following the spread of plastic waste into every corner of the globe, they view its “storage” in sea ice and animal bodies as an alternate archive, an obfuscation of ecological agency and the diminution of our own bodily autonomy. Approaching this through a Derridean “hauntological” frame, the authors posit that the presence and persistence of microplastics in sea ice are a manifestation of a global agential community of commodities archiving itself. This palimpsest of ecological histories (in terms of how traces of petrocultures write over one another) subsists as traces and samples of new industrial, cultural, and ecological realities. Considering the personal and affective impacts of this petromodern archival landscape, Mitchell and Waterhouse frame the ensuing melancholia as an Anthropocene equivalent of the Derridean archive fever: a sickness unto the death of ecosystems.
The Performance of Plasticity: Method Acting, Prosthetics, and the Virtuosity of Embodied Transformation
Authors: LaRocca David
Published: September 2023

The essay investigates plasticity in film, specifically the plasticity of performers. As film critics make their appraisals known in each new season, it is so often those actors who “transform,” who “become” whom they play, who “inhabit” their roles, or who—as the saying goes—simply “disappear,” leaving nothing but the character, who are most vaunted. In these moments, we seem to discover not a respect for the character so much as an infatuation with the virtuosity of the actor. Hence, LaRocca asserts, the public favors, celebrates, and stands in awe of the plastic artist—the more plastic the better. And yet, differences should be struck between Meryl Streep’s accent, weight gain and loss by Charlize Theron and Joaquin Phoenix, and variations of costuming—from cosmetics and prosthetics to the digital “skins” afforded by motion capture technology. LaRocca thus critically explores this taxonomy with the aim of making a case for why these differences in plasticity matter for the aesthetic appreciation and ethical assessment of cinematic performances.
Polymeric Thinking: Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography
Authors: Keller Lynn
Published: September 2023

Keller claims that the distinctive approach to autobiography in Allison Cobb’s hybrid text, Plastic: An Autobiography (2021), both reflects the conditions of this Anthropocene moment and offers a generative model for responding to them, challenging outmoded ideas of boundaries between species, nations, generations, individuals, and between bodies and their material environments. Cobb is the daughter of a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, so her life story necessarily includes the story of the bomb’s development. Because the deployment of the atomic bomb depended on the development of plastic, her autobiography tracks those responsible for plastic’s invention. Entangled in the global accumulation of plastic waste and the trans-corporeal movement of toxins from plastic, Cobb’s story incorporates the poisoning of albatrosses and of human communities where plastics are produced. Importantly, it is Cobb’s way of insisting on elaborate chains of thought linking seemingly distant events and beings—what Keller calls polymeric thinking—that propels her journey of discovery. It draws Cobb into relation with activist communities of color in environmentally degraded and impoverished areas of Texas and Louisiana where petroleum is processed and plastics are made. Keller thus explores what Cobb reveals about the resources of polymeric thinking for confronting current environmental challenges.
Better Learning through Plastic?: The Moby-Duck Saga and Pedagogy
Authors: Gessell Donna A.
Published: September 2023

Gessell draws on an accident that took place during a 1992 storm in the Pacific Ocean, when falling cargo containers from a ship launched 28,800 plastic bath toys into the ocean. The losses, a fourth of which were yellow ducks, have had large ripple effects for both scientific research and the popular imagination. For months, stories in the popular press publicized spottings of the PVC bath toys on far-flung beaches, following their movements. Organized communication among those tracking the spill’s progress caused oceanographers to revise their modeling of ocean currents; instead of separated and independent, the spill showed the currents as one huge interrelated system. As sightings of the “Friendly Floatees” continued to capture the public imagination, others who were monitoring plastics in the ocean, particularly the huge garbage patch east of Hawaii, used the phenomenon—which had morphed into rubber duckies in the popular imagination—to raise awareness of the immensity of the plastic problem. Surveying the array of stories from the original accident through to all of the resulting representations, this essay explores the evolution of the pedagogy at stake. Even though these constructions sought to educate people of all ages about environmental issues using yellow ducks to publicize the seriousness of plastic waste in the ocean, they have unintentionally normalized the phenomenon.
Songs of the Forge
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: September 2023

This is Chapter 5 of The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940. The chapter discusses the turn towards craft in relation to the figure of the blacksmith, evoked from different standpoints by Dickens, Ruskin, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dickens and Ruskin detail a process of self-forging that relies on linguistic versions of fire-welding and quenching, and ultimately the violent hammering of materials (and people) into shape. Hopkins is equally concerned with violence, albeit focusing on divine creation; his example reveals a complex transmutation of Protestant work ethics into a neo-Catholic theology of craft.
What is a Critic?: Weak Thought, Weak Theory, Italian Theory
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2023

Thinkers from a variety of critical and philosophical orientations (postcritique, realism, Italian Theory) converge today on a momentous conceptual shift from rupture to a vast plane of ideas. The chapter outlines the shift drawing on Italian Theory and Roberto Esposito’s formulation of the plane of coelvaness. Replacing the logic of the avant-garde with a logic of circulation, Esposito’s pensiero vivente carries modernism all along, reactivating the central conflict of life vs form and thereby moving beyond the sovereignty of language decreed by the linguistic turn. The keyword in this chapter is “critic,” and Esposito’s work illuminates the profoundly altered self-representation of the critic. Emancipated from the exigencies of pluralism and the notion of a rhetorical communion between authors and readers, freed from the need to counter the skepticism of deconstruction with the notion of a “discursive community,” the contemporary critic has evolved beyond the task of producing persuasive readings and is instead concerned with his/her epistemic stance. Having disentangled his/her mission from the demands of argumentation, the critic is interested in a practice that feels less like a procedure and more like the wonder one associates with genuine moments of thought.
Frameworks and Genealogies: Macpherson the Historian in Context
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 situates Macpherson’s history writing in the context of eighteenth-century historiography. It does this in two ways: first, through the scholarly frameworks of J. G. A. Pocock, Mark Salber Phillips and Karen O’Brien in their studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history writing; and, second, through tracing the intellectual genealogies that inform Macpherson’s work, from the early historiographical writings of Hume, Blair and Smith to the later Enlightenment history writing of Robertson and Gibbon.
Poetry: James Macpherson’s History Writing in The Highlander and Ossian
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 begins our detailed analysis of Macpherson’s writings with his early poetry: The Highlander (1758); and the Ossianic Collections (1760-1763). The first half of the chapter examines The Highlander, Macpherson’s neoclassical epic poem about the tenth-century Viking invasion of Scotland. This section demonstrates how Macpherson used historical sources to versify the past, translating the fourteenth- and sixteenth-century history writing of John Fordun and George Buchanan into neoclassical verse. The Highlander also explores Macpherson’s engagement with the British imperial state, which prepares us for our analysis of Macpherson and empire in the rest of the book. This chapter explores Macpherson’s ‘Whig constitutionalism’ and places this in the context of Macpherson’s imperialism. The chapter then examines the paratextual material to the Ossianic Collections. In sections on the Fragments (1760, Fingal (1761/62), and Temora (1763), we analyse the advertisements, prefaces and dissertations that accompany these works, with a particular focus on Macpherson’s methodology and historiographical practice, where Macpherson demonstrates his engagement with the latest Enlightenment thinking.
Politics and Empire: James Macpherson’s Political Writings and the Crisis of Empire in the Late 1770s
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 examines Macpherson’s three political book publications of the late 1770s, in which he defends the interests of the British state against the American colonists and the East India Company. While his writing focuses on contemporary politics, Macpherson’s approach and methodology is that of history writing. The History and Management of the East India Company combines a narrative of the Indian and imperial past with philosophical reflection, all underpinned with erudite and scholarly footnotes. The purpose of the History and Management is to defend the interests of the British state against the increasingly powerful (and corrupt) EIC, and to support his wealthy patron, the Nawab of Arcot. Yet, Macpherson uses techniques of Enlightenment history writing that are closer in approach and methodology to Robertson’s and Gibbon’s works on empire. The second half examines Macpherson’s political writing about the American revolutionary war, where he defends British imperial policy and attacks the American colonists (and their British supporters). Yet each pamphlet is written as history, and Macpherson uses the past to make an argument about the present, creating historical narratives that valorised the British imperial state and to cast its opponents as not just wrong, but as outwith history itself.