bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Internationalism, Empire, and Peace in the Woman Teacher, 1920–39
Authors: Goodman Joyce
Published: September 2018

The chapter examines the role of the Woman Teacher, organ of the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT), in creating a public political identity and the Union’s place within the wider national feminist movement. The NUWT and the Woman Teacher were established amidst hostility from male National Union of Teachers (NUT) members over whether suffrage and equal pay were admissible professional issues and because the NUT delayed implementing its equal pay policy. The journal had a wide readership within the education and policy sectors. It covered the NUWT’s feminist campaigns, the status and views of women teachers, and professional issues around equal pay, equal access to employment opportunities, the removal of the marriage bar, and education for girls. It took an increasingly radical stance toward internationalism, militarism, and fascism during the 1930s. Its articulations of internationalism, peace, imperialism, and anti-fascism revealed dissent among NUWT members, but also facilitated opportunities for editors to continue to shape the NUWT’s egalitarian feminist message as the Union negotiated shifting understandings of feminism and rhetoric about married and single teachers linked with the pathologising of spinsters.
Providing and Taking the Opportunity: Women Civil Servants and Feminist Periodical Culture in Interwar Britain
Authors: Glew Helen
Published: September 2018

Opportunity was the publication of the Federation of Women Civil Servants (later the National Association of Women Civil Servants), an organisation which campaigned for equal pay, equal opportunity and an end to the marriage bar in the British civil service. Opportunity tried to negotiate two purposes: to place the organisation at the centre of interwar feminism and debates on women in public life, and to be a space of community and education for its membership. In the 1930s, Opportunity was increasingly at odds with a significant segment of membership which saw less of a need for the publication in its current format, and the chapter discusses the ways in which editors and writers negotiated these discussions. Eventually, it was the evacuation of women civil servants to various locations around the country during the Second World War, rising wartime costs, and shortages of resources, which ended the publication of Opportunity.
Ireland and Sapphic Journalism between the Wars: A Case Study of Urania (1916–40)
Authors: Steele Karen
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the Irish dimension of the bi-monthly (later tri-annual) periodical Urania (1916-1940) through a focus on the influence of Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926). Gore-Booth’s editorial vision and writing for Urania conveyed a radical message about gender and sexuality: ‘sex is an accident.’ On its pages, Urania assiduously collected a hidden history of lesbians, transsexuals, and intersexuality and advanced a transnational, cross-cultural critique of gender norms, gendered performances, and compulsory heterosexuality. Urania initially sought to broaden its appeal by supporting votes for women, but remained more intent on serving as a ‘queer archive’ dedicated to dismantling gender norms and documenting women’s past and present examples of transsexuality, intersexuality, cross-dressing, and lesbianism. In its remediation of the global press, Urania also constructed a composite, feminist portrait of a society free of gender essentialism and heterosexual normativity. The journal was affiliated with the Aëthnic Union, a small, radical organisation founded in 1911.
A Periodical of Their Own: Feminist Writing in Religious Print Media
Authors: deVries Jacqueline R.
Published: September 2018

In this volume’s rich survey of women’s print media in the interwar period, it might be surprising to find a chapter on feminist writing in religious periodicals – that is, if one assumes that Britain’s religious traditions were inhospitable contexts for feminist organising during this time period. But that assumption would not be entirely correct. The Anglican, Catholic, and Jewish communities in Britain – the three traditions explored here – certainly clung to theological and institutional structures that prevented women from moving freely or quickly into leadership roles. But these communities were never homogenous and their members expressed a wide range of attitudes about gender, sexuality, and women’s roles, some of which were highly progressive and found their way into print. The changing social and gender norms of the interwar period were much debated topics in Britain’s religious communities, and through their engagement with religious media, women found ways to influence those debates.
Introduction
Authors: Leeb Claudia
Published: September 2018

This chapter introduces the reader to the idea of embodied reflective judgment, and draws on Karl Jasper’s work (1947) to clarify the distinction between individual guilt, which is at the center of chapters two and three and collective (or political) guilt, which is at the center of chapter four and five. It also introduces the reader to the theories and methods employed in the analysis of court cases of Austrian NS perpetrators and public debates around Austria’s involvement in Nazi atrocities, and the research process. It furthermore provides the reader with a socio-political background of Austria before, during and after World War II, which is necessary to understand the analysis of the court cases and current debates. Finally, it provides an overview of the other chapters.
“Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig (I do not feel guilty)”: From Doubts to Murder
Authors: Leeb Claudia
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyzes the post-war trial case of the physician Dr. Franz Niedermoser, who murdered patients in the psychiatric hospital in Klagenfurt, Austria during the NS regime. It traces the ways in which Dr. Niedermoser, who was initially hesitant to carry out the murders in the hospital, gradually became morally disengaged, in the course of which he lost the capacity to feel guilty and critically reflect upon his actions, which arrested his capacity for embodied reflective judgment. It explains those mechanisms that made him move from initial hesitation at committing crimes, to later feeling no guilt for having committed them. It shows that to get a person to judge that he or she ought to help carry out crimes, it is first necessary to eliminate any feeling that this is wrong.
The Defense of Repressed Guilt: The Staging of Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz
Authors: Leeb Claudia
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyzes the heated and often violent debates around Thomas Bernhard’s staging of the play Heldenplatz, before it was first staged in Vienna, the capital of Austria. The play exposes the continuing and sharpened fascism of Austrian democracy in the 1980s. The chapter challenges the recent argument of Mihai Mihaela that the staging of the play turned Austrians into people with the ability for self-reflective judgment. Rather, the chapter draws on Anna Freud to expose the ways in which Austrians in these public debates used the defense mechanism of identification, impersonating the aggressor, projections, as well as displacement of anger to keep their guilt feelings around their Nazi past repressed. As a result we are confronted with flawed and often paranoid judgments.
Out of the People: J. B. Priestley’s Broadbrow Radicalism
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

While well documented in accounts of wartime broadcasting, J.B. Priestley’s status as wartime radio celebrity is too often cut off from his broader arguments about cultural democracy dating back to the 1920s. This chapter contextualizes Priestley’s famously rabble-rousing wartime broadcasts within larger debates about the relationship between popular literary forms and cultural authority, as well as placing his broadcasts in conversation with published and unpublished wartime writings. The spirit of social levelling that animates Priestley’s broadcasts in the series Postscripts and Britain Speaks resonates with his literary output both before and during the war; in particular, his broadcasts articulate, at the political level, a commitment to cultural democracy forged by Priestley’s engagements with debates about the middlebrow—or his own term, the ‘broadbrow’—in the 1920s and 1930s. The foundation of Priestley’s success as a wartime broadcaster was his ability to translate a socially democratic literary sensibility into a socially democratic political ideal through a carefully calibrated mode of address adapted to the intimate medium of radio.
James Hanley and the Shape of the Wartime Features Department
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

Under the direction of Laurence Gilliam, the BBC Features Department produced some of the most innovative radio works of the war. The department brought together producers (including D.G. Bridson, Francis Dillon, and Brigid Maas) and established and emerging literary talent with the aim of creating broadcasts that would achieve propagandistic aims without resorting to overtly propagandistic tactics. Focusing on James Hanley, this chapter examines the complicated interplay between sound and script, and between radio authority and literary authority. Though he enjoyed a growing literary reputation, Hanley struggled to find his radio voice during the war years, despite extensive mentoring and coaching by Gilliam and others and despite the fact that he would enjoy significant success on the BBC Third Programme in the 1950s and 1960s. Together with the following chapter, on Louis MacNeice’s radio dramas and features, this chapter examines how the Features Department recruited literary talent, shaped their words into sound, and challenged writers to adapt their skills to a more fleeting medium with an attentive, if often rattled, wartime audience.
The Day of Orlando
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, Bryony Randall addresses ideas of temporality, writing and delivery, in which ‘the present moment’ is revealed at the end of the book to be its publication date, ‘Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’. Showing how the concept of the day is as important to Orlando as its excursion through a time-span of 400 years, Randall draws on recent theories of narrative temporality, dailiness and the novel to make a compelling case for Orlando’s ‘final resolution into a concentrated, extended description of a single day as a key part of the text’s undoing of traditional history’.
Aftersentence
Authors: Bowlby Rachel
Published: September 2018

In this closing piece, Rachel Bowlby performs her engagement with Woolf’s sentences, and her response to the preceding chapters, in a fictional-essayistic mode which mimics, distorts, re-writes and reflects on Woolfian and academic sentences.
Site 2: Style and Encounter in Rithy Panh’s Cinéma-monde
Authors: Mai Joseph
Published: September 2018

Through an analysis of Rithy Panh’s Site 2, this chapter argues for the importance of film style in theoretical discussions of world cinema and the French-language specific cinéma-monde. Panh’s film is an eye-opening view of the Site 2 refugee camp, ten years after the filmmaker himself spent several months there himself at the end of the Khmer rouge regime in Cambodia. One of the benefits of world cinema is that it brings a viewer into the daily experiences of people with very different lives. But attentiveness to particularities of style (framing, focus, lighting, music, editing, and point of view) shows how this cinema provides a rich and tactile experience of the camp while challenging the limits of the human rights ideology that Panh’s viewer is likely to hold.
The Beautiful Fantasy: Imaginary Representations of Football in West African Cinema
Authors: Dima Vlad
Published: September 2018

This chapter first intends to explain the socio-political importance of football in West Africa (and its connections with Europe) as made evident by filmic representations. Second, it aims to construct a psychoanalytical model for neocolonial subjectivity as it emerges from the clutches of fantasy. West African cinematic representations of football offer a doubling of fantasy: the fantasy of football is mediated by the fantasy on screen, the fantasy that is cinema. This double layer of fantasy physically translates into the fetish object of the football jersey—a second skin—as several secondary characters in West-African films wear (knockoff) football jerseys. Starting from this observation this essay explores the connections between football, fantasy and cinema in films by three contemporary West African directors, Moussa Touré (Senegal), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), and Mahamat Saleh Haroun (Chad).
Merry Christmas in No Man’s Land: European Borders, Language Barriers and Front Lines in Christian Carion’s Joyeux Noël
Authors: King Gemma
Published: September 2018

A geographic and symbolic space characterised by borders and barriers, Europe is the site of plural cultural identities and complex multilingual interactions. What constitutes the European continent, who belongs within it and who should possess the mobility to travel across it, are questions which have been most intensely scrutinised during wartime and are frequently broached in cinema. This chapter explores Christian Carion’s quadrilingual 2005 film Joyeux Noël, based on the 1914 Christmas truce, in which European borders and territories are radically redefined. In this film, no man’s land becomes a common ground for translingual communication. This chapter examines the film’s representation of border-crossing and transgression as central to a constructive European experience, and investigates ‘the play of external borders and internal boundaries’ (Marshall 2012: 50) central to cinéma-monde through its transnational production and multilingual narrative.
Accented Mappings of France in a Globalised World: Le Havre (2011) and Samba (2014) through the Lens of Cinéma-monde
Authors: Ennaïli Leïla
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses two recent, and very different, films about illegal immigration to and through France: Le Havre (2011) by Aki Kaurismäki and Samba (2014) by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. This comparison between examples of alternative cinema (Le Havre) and mainstream cinema (Samba) is facilitated by the concept of cinéma-monde, which acts as a levelling field allowing all ‘accents’ as defined by Hamid Naficy – be they dominant or alternative – to be connected. Each of the two films selected for this analysis offer valuable mappings of France’s global situation. These mappings are revealed by an analysis of issues of language, accents, working practices, and mobility, and offer new ways of framing French identity.
Youth and Média-engagé: Is This West Africa’s Heterolinguistic Cinéma-monde?
Authors: Yervasi Carina
Published: September 2018

This chapter investigates the heterolinguistic cinema of West Africa. Focusing on what the author designates as média-engagé, a collection of politically-engaged documentaries, videos and reportages produced by young activist citizens in Burkina Faso and Senegal, the chapter analyses four documentaries and concludes that their very presence ought to expand our understanding of cinéma-monde so that it embraces what it might otherwise disregard as marginal forms of filmmaking. The four documentaries discussed areAvec le Balai Citoyen, au coeur de la lutte (Droit Libre TV, 2014,) and ‘Le Balai Citoyen’: Smockey et Sams’K le Jah veulent assainir le Burkina! (The Citizen’s Broom’: Smockey and Sams ‘K want to sanitise Burkina Faso!) (Droit Libre TV, 2013) from Burkina Faso and Y en a marre/Fed-Up (Adams Sie, 2013) and Yoole (Le sacrifice)/ Yoole: The Sacrifice (Moussa Sene Absa, 2010) from Senegal.
Worlds Within; In the World
Authors: Marshall Bill
Published: September 2018

This epilogue underscores the fact that 'cinéma-monde' always came with a question mark: it was a hypothesis, a heuristic device, conjuring up a 'what would happen if' we looked at Francophone film production through a slightly different lens. Moving forward from this mapping of the possibilities of cinéma-monde while at the same time highlighting the persistence of the national, the essay proposes that one way to take ‘monde’ seriously is to situate Francophone film production within world history. An example taken is Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (2016, Canada), filmed in an Atikamekw community, which raises questions of colonialism, indigeneity, ecology and the cosmos. It suggests that connections can be formed in terms of parts of wholes, in other words of the worlds within, for example, Quebec or French national cinema.
Cinéma-monde and the Transnational
Authors: Higbee Will
Published: September 2018

Using the example of contemporary Moroccan cinema, this epilogue contends that cinéma-monde is best approached as a subset of transnational cinema. Thinking through the transnationality of cinéma-monde offers a way to bring crucial cultural, linguistic, political and economic relationships into critical focus. The epilogue further argues that cinema has been transnational from its very inception, and that recent trends in production and circulation of film have made it virtually impossible to think or theorise cinema solely within the framework of the nation-state.
Colour, Design and Medieval Optics
Authors: Bush Olga
Published: September 2018

Today the Alhambra appears mostly devoid of colour, but the recent work of conservators demonstrates that the interior spaces were vibrantly coloured in Nasrid times. This chapter takes up the much-neglected use of colour in stucco, wood, marble, glass and, above all, ceramic tiles, seeking to establish a new balance with geometry, heretofore the leading element in scholarship on design principles in the Alhambra. The first step is to distinguish between the colours in the Nasrid Alhambra and the work of nineteenth-century restoration, focusing on the baths in the Palace of Comares, often dismissed as an Orientalist fantasy. The second step is to consider medieval optics, exemplified by the eleventh-century scientific treatises of Ibn al-Haytham, as a source of design principles circulating within Nasrid culture. Ibn al-Haytham's account of the mental processes leading from perception to cognition, supported by the findings of contemporary neuroscience, illuminates the way that colour introduces a kinetic dimension into static geometric designs in such features as the muqarnas vaults in the Palace of the Lions and the dadoes of ceramic tile mosaics in the Palace of Comares.
Qalahurra of Yūsuf I: A Case Study of a Tower-palace
Authors: Bush Olga
Published: September 2018

This discussion of the tower-palace Qalahurra al-jadïda (known as the "Tower of the Captive"), among the least studied buildings in the Alhambra, begins with a history of the restoration of the precinct, as well as the typology of the tower-palace as found elsewhere in the Alhambra and other Nasrid sites. The overall architectural analysis leads to the main hall, the chief site of inscriptions. After commenting on the Qurʾānic and formulaic epigraphy, attention focuses on the inscriptions of four interrelated poems composed by Ibn al-Jayyāb. The preceding chapter grounds a move beyond the prevailing mimetic presuppositions of previous scholarship to an examination of his references to medieval Arabic badīc poetics and his own figurative language. The chapter argues that the poetic inscriptions serve to articulate the aesthetic principles embodied in the hybrid architecture of the tower-palace and also to explain the interrelationships between the geometric, vegetal and epigraphic motifs in its architectural decoration. Most broadly, in speaking for the analogy between poetic figures and the forms of architectural decoration, the poetry inscribed in the Qalahurra al-jadïda gives explicit expression to the role of inter-medial relations in the aesthetic of the Alhambra.
Integrating Aesthetic and Politics: The Mawlid Celebration in the Alhambra
Authors: Bush Olga
Published: September 2018

The book closes with a study of the only extant Nasrid account of the Alhambra, Ibn al-Khaṭïb's text on the mawlid, the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet. The chapter begins with a comparative analysis of mawlid celebrations in other medieval Muslim courts focusing on the role of processions and threshold spaces, such as discussed in chapter 2. Ibn al-Khaṭïb also describes a royal tent, now lost, but refrained here, in light of chapter 4, as a case of textile architecture. The key to the analysis of the text, then, is the inter-medial relationship between the temporary tent and the permanent buildings as a ceremonial setting. This temporal dimension was thematized in the "poems of the hours" recited to measure the time of the event, elucidated here in connection with the poetic figures studied in chapter 3; as an instance of the relationship between static and kinetic elements introduced in chapter 1 ; and, further, with respect to the political and ideological dimensions of the ceremonial. Ibn al-Khaṭïb's account thus testifies to the inter-medial conception of space: an integrated aesthetic experience of architecture, poetry and textiles in the court ceremonial of the Alhambra.
Liveable Interruption
Authors: Dubreuil Laurent
Published: September 2018

The life that politics is concerned with follows the order: procreation, subsistence, direction. The sovereign still announces, ‘I am master of myself as of the universe’;1 the contemporary individual learns to manage his or her existence and feelings. Salvation of life is but its prolongation in an ancestral biozoopolitics. But every life is mortal, outside of any and all politics. Whether it is the patrimony, liberty – or death – and even when death lives (!Viva la muerte!), nothing political can alter mortality. When a body is kept breathing by the technicomedical machine, treatment only consists in postponing the announcement of an end. We may prolong existence because we’re ‘pro-life’, give a social significance to a glorious or ignominious death, change the mode of accounting [comptage] by which the City counts lives (in demanding, for example, that from now on great apes, dolphins, parrots are people), include in human governance, the preservation of the living (ecosystem, animal species, the planet); none of this changes, indeed nothing can change, the persistent political inability when faced with mortality. Solon observed that on this question no human is lucky.
Forms of Experience
Authors: Dubreuil Laurent
Published: September 2018

Utopias are the places of no place. During the European Renaissance, part of the fragmentation of the collective that marked the Middles Ages disappeared in favour of concentric governance. This moment enabled the success of the word ‘utopia’, put forward by Thomas More. The place that doesn’t exist at all, by the simple fact of its appellation, asserted itself as a point of reference in political thought. More did not invent the project of describing a different world, but the fate of his book propagated its malleable image, as well as the long shadow that went along with it. The Utopia event, which surpassed the treatise as such, is far from unitary, and I will only sketch out a few points: Utopia is not of this world; it represents a tearing away from contemporary politics, under the guise of its differences; it comes to fill in for a relative loss of marginal spaces; it thus takes a place left empty while also emptying out places; it represents the perfection of politics, which is no longer politics as usual; in this way, it is paradigmatic of all possible reform.
Introduction
Authors: Beránek Ondřej , Ťupek Pavel
Published: September 2018

In various parts of the Islamic world over the past years and decades virulent attacks have targeted Islamic funeral and sacral architecture. These attacks, which have destroyed graves and other artefacts in the Islamic world should not be viewed as random acts of vandalism, but as acts associated with ‘performing one’s religious duty’. The requirement to level graves (...
The Founding of the Society
Authors: Bowman Stephen
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides an analytical narrative of the precise details of the Society’s founding and sheds light on the network of elite Britons and Americans who established the organisation. It examines the Society’s stated aims of improving Anglo-American relations and introduces the Society’s membership and principal characters, including people like the British Pilgrims’ hyperactive organiser and first secretary, Harry Brittain. It also explains that the Pilgrims was the most significant of all the Anglo-American clubs and societies formed around this time (including the Anglo-American League) because it managed to combine exclusivity with its advantageous locations in the British political and diplomatic capital, London, and the American commercial capital, New York. The Pilgrims was a part of the elite social scene of both cities and benefited from existing social, cultural, and associational links between its members and other influential individuals. As a result, the Pilgrims Society was able to act as a conduit between official and unofficial elements in Britain and the US.
The Pilgrims and the First World War
Authors: Bowman Stephen
Published: September 2018

This chapter demonstrates that the First World War created circumstances in which state-private cooperation in public diplomacy was able to flourish more than ever before. In so doing, this chapter analyses the Pilgrims’ activities during the conflict, with a particular focus on the period after the US’s entry into the conflict in April 1917, a moment regarded by the Pilgrims as the culmination of all the work it had done since 1902 in support of UK-US international cooperation. This chapter analyses the ways in which the Pilgrims Society sought to consolidate what it regarded as significant progress towards lasting British-American friendship. It does so by providing an analytical account of the Pilgrims’ creation in autumn 1917 of the American Officers’ Club; the link between the Pilgrims and the official British propaganda body the National War Aims Committee; and the Society’s involvement in the large-scale public celebration of Britain’s Day, which took place across the US in December 1918. The chapter argues that the First World War resulted in greater cooperation between the Pilgrims and official propaganda bodies, meaning that the Society contributed in new ways to the development of public diplomacy.
The Decline of the Great Rapprochement
Authors: Bowman Stephen
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the activities of the Pilgrims Society against the backdrop of official international relations in the immediate post-war years, in particular during the presidency of Warren Harding. It analyses the Pilgrims Society’s role in many of the most pressing issues in the Anglo-American relationship, for example the US refusing to join the League of Nations, the war debt question, and naval disarmament. It focuses on a banquet held in London in 1921 for the US Ambassador George Harvey, whose remarks at the event about the League of Nations caused controversy and resulted in significant levels of press coverage. This chapter also looks at the growing anti-Britishness in the US in this period and examines how this impacted upon the Pilgrims Society. The chapter ultimately establishes that the Pilgrims Society consolidated its position as a semi-official public diplomacy actor while at the same time coming under increasing public scrutiny.
Public Diplomacy Ascendant
Authors: Bowman Stephen
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces the Pilgrims Society’s contribution to the history of public diplomacy across the later 1920s, the 1930s, and the early 1940s. It does so in part by analysing the content of a speech given to the Society in 1925 by the new US Ambassador in London, Alanson Houghton. This speech paved the way for the Locarno Conference and provides evidence of a senior diplomat using a Pilgrims’ event to make a major intervention in European diplomacy. In addition, the chapter examines how further developments in American nativism continued to impact upon the Society. The chapter also analyses other significant Pilgrims’ events at which diplomats used the Society as a vehicle for public diplomacy, including Ambassador Charles Dawes’ speech in 1929 about naval disarmament, and a number of events during the Second World War at which figures including Winston Churchill sought to manage the relationship between Britain and the United States during the tense period leading up to the latter’s entry into the conflict. The chapter also demonstrates how the US Pilgrims sought to mobilise American sentiment in favour of the Allied cause and that it did so alongside the Committee to Defend America and the Century Group.
Borders: Russia and Eastern Europe as a Crime Scene
Authors: Estera Mrozewicz Anna
Published: September 2018

The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a border discourse and imagine Russia (and thereby often Eastern Europe) as a crime scene. In these crime narratives, Russia is essentialised as a crime scene, where the traces of crime comprise evidence of an omnipresent evil emanating from the centre of power. The chapter argues moreover that whereas Russia serves as the ‘great Other’, in whose gaze the small nations from the Nordic region are controlled and overseen, Eastern Europeans function merely as unfamiliar, rather than threatening, ‘others’. By juxtaposing diversity of genres, including popular Nordic action films (Orion’s Belt and Born American), two documentaries and a television series (Occupied), the chapter shows that the hegemonic Eastern noir narrative, although persistent in mainstream cinema, functions across various modes of cinematic expression. The analyses corroborate the fact that border discourse affords the viewers a sense of safety in the increasingly globalised reality.
Boundaries: Infiltrated Identities
Authors: Estera Mrozewicz Anna
Published: September 2018

Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut national identities, Chapter 2 reconsiders the hard border promulgated by the master narrative of the Cold War. Devoted to a set of films which address historical themes (late 20th-century and 21st-century productions looking back to the Cold War and earlier periods), the chapter focuses on spies and double agents, who by default operate by navigating across borders. The films analysed do not utilise typical spy film formulas and their protagonists are nowhere near the affirmative James Bondian narrative. The films re-examine a range of historical issues which during the Cold War qualified as inconvenient (and were therefore censored), often relating to the complicated past of the border regions (such as Finnmark) and involvement of Nordic citizens on the wrong side of the global conflict. Using the concept of infiltration, the analysis follows the spies that embody the discourses of boundary, ‘contaminating’ an assumed pure national community. These films (such as Jörn Donner’s The Interrogation or Knut Erik Jensen’s Ice Kiss) produce affective and relational spaces, alternatives to arbitrary maps, and highlight the protagonists’ entanglement in identities which might be defined as transnational.
Guilt and Shame in (Trans)national Spaces
Authors: Estera Mrozewicz Anna
Published: September 2018

While Chapter 3 analyses how the Baltic morphs from a border to a boundary, Chapter 4 concentrates on the less illustrious aspects of neighbourhood and movement of commodities across the Baltic. In the first part, two Swedish films are discussed (Lilya 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson and Buy Bye Beauty by Pål Hollender), which stage the Baltic as a moral and economic border/boundary, delving into sex-tourism and sex trafficking. The analysis follows the discourse of guilt which these two pictures epitomise, arguing that the ostensible ‘admission of guilt’ is rooted in narcissism. The second part of the chapter explores the narratives of shame – an emotion often confused with guilt – in a transnational, Nordic/Russian context. Relying on ethical-philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of guilt and shame, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that narratives of shame allow limits of the ‘self’ to be questioned to a greater extent than guilt does. This is particularly palpable in The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, a documentary by Pirjo Honkasalo. Using examples of other Nordic films, the chapter also shows that transnational shame is – more often than not – activated with respect to Russia, whereas the ‘weaker’ Baltic neighbours trigger guilt narratives.
Polish Spectres in our House: Revisiting the Nordic Metaphor of the Home
Authors: Estera Mrozewicz Anna
Published: September 2018

This chapter looks at films revolving around Polish migrations to Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden) after 2004 (Poland’s accession to the European Union). It utilises the concept of spectral agency (theorised by Esther Peeren) – that is, the agency of the dispossessed, the marginalised (the ‘living ghosts’), and those made socially invisible by ongoing spectralising processes, most prominently the processes of neoliberal globalisation. The analysis focuses on how Polish guest/ghost workers (or the notorious spectre of the ‘Polish plumber’), cleaning and repairing Scandinavian houses, contribute to reimagining the most ubiquitous political metaphor encapsulating the Scandinavian welfare state – the people’s home (Swedish folkhem). Looking at the Scandinavian people’s ‘home’ from the ghosts’ perspective helps to expose the borders (or walls) implicit in this metaphor, opening up the potential for a reimagining of both the political metaphor and the social reality it reflects and shapes. Although recent films present a particularly unflattering judgement on the capability of Scandinavians to reimagine their home(s), the Polish ‘living ghosts’ are represented as powerful – though not idealised – figures, resisting spectralisation through their capability to produce a qualitative change in the (discourse of the) home.
‘I am a schizophrene’: Narrative Identity, Affective Disorder and White’s Stories of Self
Authors: Moran Patricia
Published: September 2018

This chapter contextualises White’s stories of self within contemporary scholarship on narrative identity. White’s search for an exploration of her illness that would account for her psychic turmoil and inexplicable behaviour is consistent with the emphasis in such scholarship that narrative is a central aspect of identity formation. The possession of an identity narrative plays a key role in both public and private presentations of self. Yet the very principles an identity narrative embodies—principles of coherence, plausibility, causality, motivation and agency—conflict with the chaos and havoc created by severe bipolar disorder. The chapter explores how illness in general and manic-depression in particular destroyed White’s sense of a coherent self and motivated her to construct identity narratives through the master narratives of psychoanalysis and Catholicism.
Master plots: Psychoanalysis and Catholicism
Authors: Moran Patricia
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the two main interpretative frameworks White adopted to conceptualise a sense of self in the face of her recurrent psychic distress and inexplicable behaviour. White’s entrance into psychoanalytic treatment coincided with a moment in psychoanalytic history in which the thinking about female sexuality centred upon the ‘female castration complex’. White’s diary provides unmistakeable evidence that she developed an explanation for her illness that was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Abraham, who initiated this line of psychoanalytic theorising and who profoundly shaped British psychoanalysis. The recurrence of symptoms following her supposed ‘cure’ impelled White to reconvert to Catholicism at the end of 1940. White’s letters and diary show how she superimposes Catholic doctrine on that of psychoanalysis. Together these interpretative frameworks worked to affirm the centrality of father-daughter eroticism in White’s identity narrative.
Celebrity/Activist/Photographer: Mia Farrow
Authors: Summerhayes Catherine
Published: September 2018

The chapter is focused primarily on Farrow’s compassionate motivation and how her compassion is embodied in her photographic work whilst it is also, inevitably, compromised by distribution and internal content. Farrow’s photographs and videos show a deep compassionate understanding of her subjects. Her work provides a rich context for examining how such compassion and care might be used also to contribute towards a broader discussion of the documentary image as an ethically responsible object.
The Pencil of Identity: Instagram as Inadvertent (Female) Autobiography
Authors: Fallon Kris
Published: September 2018

The author charts the development of self-portraits from the painted canvas to Instagram’s selfies. Revolving around autobiography as a multifaceted genre over the centuries, the author claims that the desire for greater visibility further enhances our wishes to leave our mark on history, and in society. It also brings to light a new type of arbitrary documentary discourse based on self-performance and self-branding.
Archetype and Authenticity: Reflections on Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections
Authors: Kinsey Cadence
Published: September 2018

In 2014, the performance artist Amalia Ulman created a three-part performance work entitled Excellences & Perfections, which explored how women present themselves online. In this chapter the author considers ‘the importance of authenticity as a category for mediating the construction of gendered identity’ in social media. She concludes that the tension between the archetype and authentic figure ‘is central to the functioning of social media’.
‘Scriptrix Narrans’: Digital Documentary Storytelling’s Radical Potential
Authors: Vanstone Gail
Published: September 2018

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.
Record Keeping: Family Memories on Film – Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige and Wisdom Gone Wild
Authors: Ely-Harper Kerreen
Published: September 2018

In this essay, the author proposes to demonstrate how Rea Tajiri in History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashig (USA, 1991) moves through three stages in her filmmaking process; (1) embodiment (2) distillation and (3) re-representation. These processes (as distinct from the commercial stages of producing a film) can be seen to parallel the narrative and trauma theory models of transformation from incoherence to coherence through the reconstruction of the autobiographical memory narrative. The author concludes that “Tajiri’s work demonstrates that the documentary film format can be a space for working through transgenerational trauma, difficult and forgotten histories.”
Other Women: Thinking Class and Gender in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary Film
Authors: Maia Carla
Published: September 2018

Focusing on the relational dimension of some selected works, this essay proposes to consider the subject matter as films with women rather than films of women. The main effort is to understand something that takes place in-between spaces – before and after the camera, but also between viewer and film – and critically reflect on the aesthetic, ethical and political potential that a cinema marked by different women’s perspectives can bring to light. The author concludes that instead of reflecting a certain proximity between women, most films by contemporary female documentarists in Brazil, are suffering from the impact of the difference in social station between the director and the women being filmed.
From Visceral Style to Discourse of Resistance: Reading Alka Sadat’s Afghan Documentaries on Violence Against Women
Authors: Misiak Anna
Published: September 2018

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.
Documenting Georgia in Transition: The Films of Salomé Jashi and Nino Kirtadze
Authors: Riley John A.
Published: September 2018

‘If visual culture is central in not only creating, but maintaining the imagined community of a nation, what happens when the community is newly emerged, and a collective imagination has not yet solidified?´ As an answer to that question, this essay analyses the ways in which Georgian women documentary makers have conceptualised Georgia as a country in the midst of a multifaceted transition through the work of two key filmmakers. The author situates their work in their socio-political and cultural context by discussing the competing narratives of post-Soviet Georgia from different perspectives and time periods.
Introduction
Authors: Armond Kate
Published: September 2018

Explains the term baroque, and its established fascination for writers concerned with analysis of post-modern theory and culture. Explains how my own study of the earlier period of modernist culture shifts the terms of that engagement with the past, identifying a very different period of modern history, with different texts, productions and individuals. Explains how my monograph forms part of an emerging trend in modernist studies examining links between these two periods.
Baroque Europe
Authors: Armond Kate
Published: September 2018

This chapter aims to offer an overview of those resurgences of the baroque that are most significant for my study – Germany’s rediscovery of the Trauerspiel and allegory, the colourful legacy of the Italian commedia dell ‘arte and the monist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza that informs Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary science at the turn of the century. Anglo-American modernism’s debt to the baroque has already been discussed in some detail in the context of English metaphysical poetry, and this interest stemmed from T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921). The essay is a review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), and between them the two works were responsible for a reappraisal of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley during the 1920’s and 1930s.
Women’s Poetry in the Magazines
Authors: Batt Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.
The Lady’s Poetical Magazine and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space
Authors: Cox Octavia
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a detailed account of the place of women poets in the Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781–2), a periodical that ran to four volumes under the editorship of the entrepreneurial James Harrison. Octavia Cox begins by interrogating the physical space that women writers occupy in the Lady’s Poetical Magazine as well as other contemporary publications (especially George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s Poems by Eminent Ladies and Oliver Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies), as well as considering the periodical’s contribution to eminent women’s canonisation in the late-century. The chapter proceeds to detail Harrison’s own poetic contributions before turning to the many poets the magazine published and the self-circumscription these writers performed and the self-liberation they attempted. In light of the case of writers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Susan Scott (Susan Carnegie) and Elizabeth Carter, Cox concludes that Harrison’s publication constructed a vital space in which women poets contested and challenged authorial ‘female-ness’.
‘A moral paper! And how do you expect to get money by it?’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Journalism
Authors: Grundy Isobel
Published: September 2018

A standout example for the earliness of her periodical work, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu cut her journalistic teeth in secret with contributions to the Spectator and Flying-Post before launching her own venture, the Whiggish Nonsense of Commonsense (1737–8), intended to oppose the popular Opposition vehicle Common Sense (1737–9). Grundy offers a detailed exploration of Montagu’s periodical career, which is defined by her allegiances, often in tension, to her identity as a woman and as a member of the aristocracy—as well as a wish for literary fame that was at odds with both sides. Her male eidolon in Nonsense in particular is a study in contrasts: economically minded, politically suspicious, but also alert to gender issues and sympathetic to women in a way that the periodical culture set by titles such as the Spectator or Common Sense was not.
Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in Wartime
Authors: Ingrassia Catherine
Published: September 2018

Eliza Haywood’s index The Female Spectator (1744–6) does not include an entry for ‘war’. Yet that periodical like The Parrot (1746), published in the middle of a tumultuous decade in which Britain was involved in global military conflicts as well as a violent domestic rebellion, clearly engages the discourse of war. Catherine Ingrassia’s essay explores the role of war – and its attendant political dimensions – in the Female Spectator and the Parrot and reveals how each periodical engages the subject in distinctly different ways. The Female Spectator, which discusses the complex events known War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) and many specific incidents that received extensive publicity, often seamlessly weaves descriptions of soldiers, military commanders, military equipment, battles, and political events into broader discussions of cultural, social, and political events. By contrast, the Parrot discusses global and domestic military events. Reading the war in both these periodicals, Ingrassia contends, enriches our understanding of Haywood and her strategic structuring of her periodicals, and also complicates women’s periodicals of this time.