bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Vein by Vein’: The Pneumatics of Retribution in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge
Authors: Crosbie Christopher
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge adopts a Galenic understanding of corporeal pneumatics to debunk Stoic apatheia and reveal it as inherently incompatible with nature. Marston’s play not only represents the body’s subtlest operations as instinctively countering the trauma wrought by tragedy through its pneumatic systems. He also, by affiliating revenge with a pneumatic process of instinctive self-healing, undercuts Stoicism's broader cosmological notion of pneuma as a “containing cause,” a pervasive force that imbues the universe with rationality and provides for the Stoic sage tranquility amid suffering. By appropriating Galen's theory of corporeal pneumatics and sharing the physician-philosopher's anti-stoic sentiment, Marston creates an ontological framework for his play that situates Antonio's final vengeance as acting in accordance with how his world, at its most rudimentary levels, operates. Drawing on Galenic medical theory and anti-stoic philosophy, Marston surprisingly figures retribution as physiologically beneficial, a visceral response to trauma that addresses the body’s intrinsic need for constitutional equilibrium. In doing so, Marston’s play introduces a therapeutic register to revenge attentive, unlike the rigors of Stoicism, to the body's inherent impulse – extending even to its most attenuated material components – toward attaining palliation for the debilitating effects of physical and emotional trauma.
Prohairesis on the Inside: The Duchess of Malfi and Epictetian Volition
Authors: Crosbie Christopher
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces the indebtedness of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi to Epictetian philosophy. For Epictetus, those who assent to false impressions, or phantasiai, enslave themselves, lessening their humanity. Conversely, those who reject false impressions remain free and fully human, however physically enslaved they might otherwise be. While the doctrines of Epictetian philosophy may seem a retreat from the political sphere into the untouchable recesses of an imperceptible interiority, Webster's play reveals the threat such a radical notion of liberty might pose to a repressive political system. For the playwright subtly depicts the prospect that solidarity across the various strata of society, built upon a shared sense of interior liberty, could prevail, where secret defiance and violent rebellion had not, in displacing systemic inequity. By aligning Bosola's revenge, as well as the Duchess' remarriage and death, with a strain of Epictetian prohairesis, Webster tethers the play's multiple acts of resistance into a complex yet coherent ontological ground. In doing so, he figures the imperceptible stirrings of human volition as a potent political force – if distributed broadly among the dehumanized and dispossessed – rife with revolutionary potential.
‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing
Authors: White Eric B.
Published: May 2021

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.
The Infamous Iraqi Majidat: Chastity, Chivalry and Collective Identity in the Novels of Saddam Hussein
Authors: Al-Hassan Hawraa
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that taken as a whole, the four novels of Saddam Hussein, written in as many years, epitomize the Ba‘thist state’s contradictory discourses on women. The chapter distinguishes between texts set in ancient Mesopotamia, with their emphasis on ‘liberal’ views on issues such as adultery and female political leadership, and more conservative texts set in modern Iraq, with their emphasis on traditional tribal and religious values. Ultimately, the tension in Saddam’s oeuvre seems to be between woman as symbol and woman as real person, whereby the former represents the Ba‘th’s supposedly progressive agendas, whereas the latter reflects the Party’s adoption of conservative discourses and policies vis a vis women.
Introduction
Authors: Melchert Christopher
Published: May 2021

‘Ḥadīth’ means ‘speech’ in Arabic. Technically, it indicates a report or a body of reports (the Arabic word is used both ways, although there is also a plural, aḥādīth) of what the Prophet or some other authoritative teacher said. From hadith, Muslim jurisprudents infer the Sunnah, the pattern of behaviour that Muslims should follow. A hadith report normally comes in two parts, the ...
Nomos Moirēgenēs
Authors: Zartaloudis Thanos
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the speculation that moira is a precursor to the semantic field of ‘fate’ and possibly so in some relation to nemein (including in the sense of an allotment of portions); as well as the relation between moira and nemein, more generally. The focus in this chapter remains within the Homeric uses, though not exclusively, and with regard also to death, birth and the practice of weaving.
Pastoral Nomos
Authors: Zartaloudis Thanos
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the pastoral practices that relate to the uses of nemō, nemein and nomós in pastoral senses. The central focus is again Homeric uses of the pastoral ways, but with some reference to earlier practices for comparative purposes. Towards the end it also reconsiders the uses of these senses by Gilles Deleuze.
Instrumental Eyes: Enacted and Interactive Perception in Victorian Optical Technologies and Victorian Fiction
Authors: Garrod-Bush Nicole
Published: May 2021

This chapter makes a case for the importance of visual interactivity over disengaged spectacularity in the Victorian period by looking at a particular type of optical technology, the persistence of vision device (which would go on to develop into the mechanism behind cinema). They required the continual manipulation of the viewer’s hand to bring their flickering illusion of motion to life: by spinning a drum or turning a handle, the series of sequential illustrations or photographs housed in the device appeared to blend together and display a short animation.
In drawing attention to the necessary collaboration between cognition, visual perception, and bodily action when using moving-image technologies, this chapter argues that Victorian optical technologies increased awareness of how crucial physical action was to perception. Vision did not simply take place behind the eyes; the cognitive work of understanding one’s environment as a textured, dimensional space was enhanced by new devices which demonstrated how the hand could help the eye to see, or even to see in newly tactile ways. Beyond being a process of pure opticality, perception was spread through the body, as dependent on the fingers as upon the mind.
Walking, Identity and Visual Perception in Romantic and Modernist Literature
Authors: Roberts Andrew Michael , Widger Eleanore
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers enactivist theories of cognition and perception in relation to aspects of Romantic and Modernist literature, in particular how walking relates to visual perception and the representation of the visual field (sensorimotor enactivism); and how movement and visuality inflect ideas of subjectivity, identity and consciousness (autopoietic enactivism). It draws on Alva Noë’s account of sensorimotor enactivism in Action in Perception (2004), on Evan Thompson’s account of autopoietic enactivism in Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (2007), and on Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1993), to argue that, while Romantic poetry tends to an affirmative account of unconstrained walking in a rural environment, facilitating identity-enhancing interaction, Modernist literature shows a marked duality in its representation of urban walking. In T.S. Eliot’s poetry, walking constrained by an oppressive urban environment threatens to fragment identity, implying dysfunctional forms of distributed cognition. However, although women’s urban walking in the Modernist period has often been seen to be constrained by gendered power structures, Virginia Woolf’s writing at times celebrates the aesthetic and sensory pleasures of urban walking, leading to more affirmative versions of dispersed identity.
Distributed Cognition, Porous Qualia and Modernist Narrative
Authors: Cuddy-Keane Melba
Published: May 2021

This chapter’s purpose is two-fold: to propose an approach to distributed cognition as qualia and to probe modernist narratives and cultural history for insights about such qualia’s effects. Following Daniel Dennett’s distinction between scientific ontology, dependent on empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) truth, and ‘manifest ontology,’ or the truth of what someone is experiencing, the chapter takes fictional narratives as the manifest truth of ‘porous qualia,’ or what it is like to feel we extend beyond our skin. Drawing on Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the chapter defines three modes of porous qualia termed projecting, responding, and circulating, ranging from the most minimal forms to the most penetrating and innovative. Against the background of aggressively unified nationalisms, these modes culminate in Woof’s use of rhythmic repetitive touch to adumbrate a new communal modelling that combines feelings of connectiveness with respect for difference in individual lives.
Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition
Authors: Troscianko E. T.
Published: May 2021

Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing objectively to be perceived, only perspectives on objects. This thesis is expressed through evocations of space and movement that, the chapter argues, promote and depend on readerly cognition in which embodied and enactive imagining is central. In these same passages, however, the equivocations underlying the whole perspectivist enterprise are exposed: the supposed discovery of a new extra-textual moral reality through philosophical agility is undermined by rhetorical structures that turn out to merely simulate movement, and so ask readers’ imaginations not to be too enactive. This equivocation has important consequences for readers’ engagement with the interplay of rhetorical form and conceptual content. Cognitive analysis thus gets us to the heart of a grand paradox of Nietzschean philosophy – absolute assertion of the relativity of language – while also shedding light on current questions about action-based distributed cognition as an intellectual force.
Cessation and inaction externe: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp
Authors: Ladyga Zuzanna
Published: May 2021

The chapter focuses on modernist fascination with vitality and movement to show how this “vitalocentric” tendency is matched by a cultural countercurrent of the aesthetics of cessation. The chapter uses Raymond Williams’s concept of emergent cultural value, the chapter examines modernist art and literary manifestos and essays, their deep-seated distrust towards all signs of what Filippo Marinetti called lethargy, a distrust coupled with a special privileging of vitality-as-animation. As far as the classical interpretations of modernism go, it was this valorization of vibrant vitality over lethargic inactivity that provided necessary fuel for the modernist rebellious claims to uniqueness. The chapter challenges the vitalocentric interpretation of modernism and focuses on previously unacknowledged counter-vitalist impulses within the modernist project. Such impulses can be traced in Gertrude Stein’s philosophy of art, generally considered as one of the pillars of early 20th century vitalocentrism. While apparently consistent with vitalist sensibility, Stein’s ideas -- when read through the lens of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inaction externe and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of impotency and inoperativity-- go beyond the modernist sensibility and capture in an embryonic form the structures of feeling traditionally associated with modernism’s successor, postmodernism.
Conceptualising Militarism
Authors: Rossdale Chris
Published: May 2021

This chapter sets out in broad terms how militarism has been conceptualised, both by anti-militarists and by social theorists. The chapter looks first at how anti-militarist activists recognise militarism as an institutional formation, a (localised) network encompassing militaries, branches of government, the arms industry, public institutions and more. The second part of the chapter draws on International Relations, Critical Military Studies and cognate disciplines to show how militarism can be understood as a complex of value systems, rationalities, social practices and subjectivities which tend towards the production and legitimisation of political violence. The final part of the chapter introduces two anti-militarist organisations, Veterans for Peace UK and the Peace Pledge Union, showing how they resist various forms of militarism.
Contestations
Authors: Rossdale Chris
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers how anti-militarists challenge militarised forms of contestation by prefiguring alternatives. The chapter opens by introducing again the concept of prefiguration, which holds that the means used to achieve political change will shape or become the ends that result. It then considers three distinct anti-militarist practices – peace camps, die-ins, and the use of humour – showing how each of these is guided by a desire to generate subjectivities and relationalities which do not reproduce militarism. In contrast, the last part of the chapter considers how anti-militarism is shaped not simply by opposition to militarism, but also by desire for it. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections, the discussion outlines how acknowledging the role of desire in social movements deepens the radical promise of prefiguration.
Diversity
Authors: Rossdale Chris
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at the internal movement dynamics of British anti-militarism. It first focuses on the contested organising principle known as ‘diversity of tactics’, and on the role of nonviolence within the movement, suggesting that here we see attempts to develop movement practices which do not reproduce militarism. It demonstrates the difficult but politically valuable work of building movements which refuse to establish firm limits on tactics, and makes the argument that anti-militarism should not necessarily insist on nonviolence as an organising principle. The second half of the chapter interrogates the role of whiteness in British anti-militarism. It shows how solidarity politics, direct action tactics and the particular conceptions of militarism operating within the movement reproduce both white privilege and racialised exclusion, before considering various (and variously successful) attempts to unsettle this whiteness.
Introduction – Engaging with ‘Minority’ Voices: Cultural Representation in Museums of the Middle East and North Africa
Authors: Rey Virginie
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a theoretical introduction to the question of cultural representation in museums of the Middle East and North Africa. It covers topics relating to museology, heritage development, inclusion and exclusion and community activism.
Is Tunisia Ready for a Jewish Museum? Perspectives on the Current Debates Surrounding the Status of Jewish History in My Country
Authors: Kazdaghli Habib
Published: May 2021

This chapter charts the genesis of the Museum of Jewish-Tunisian Heritage in Tunis. Jewish culture has been exhibited in Tunisian museums since the beginning of the French Protectorate in 1881. Until recently, however, the idea of a museum entirely dedicated to Jewish-Tunisian history and culture was simply unconceivable in Tunisia, as Judaism was solidly understood as being tied to Israeli politics. Kazdaghli explains how the Jewish-Tunisian community, domestically and overseas, have seized the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ and the democratic ideals it purports to push for the establishment of a joint-venture Museum of Jewish-Tunisian Heritage in Tunis. In a context of new democratic achievements, the museum project is publicised as an instrument of social change, a partner to the democratic transition. However, the chapter shows that such a project proves a difficult exercise as the organising committee navigates cultural taboos surrounding Judaism in Tunisian society, as well as conflicting patrimonial opinions within the community itself, in Tunisia and within the diaspora.
Crossing the River: Home and Exile at the River Jordan
Authors: Boast Hannah
Published: May 2021

This chapter identifies the River Jordan as a major feature of Israeli and Palestinian environmental imaginaries. It argues that the Jordan’s role as a water resource and a contested border gives it crucial material and symbolic functions in imagining the past, present and future of the Israeli and Palestinian nations. The first half examines the meanings of the Jordan to early twentieth-century Zionist ‘pioneers’, including its role in cultivating a sense of home and belonging. The second half identifies representation of the Jordan as dried-up or polluted as a strategy used in recent Palestinian literature to depict Palestinian exile. Texts examined include Moshe Smilansky’s short story ‘Hawaja Nazar’ (1910), Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ (2008) and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997).
‘Current Liquidisations Ltd.’: Israel’s ‘Mediterranean’ Identity in Amos Oz’s The Same Sea
Authors: Boast Hannah
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean Sea came to play in Israel’s national identity from the 1990s onwards. Through a reading of Amos Oz’s The Same Sea (1999), it counters claims that a turn to the Mediterranean offered a ‘post-ideological’ identity appropriate to the era of the Oslo Accords. It shows instead that the phenomenon of ‘Mediterraneanism’, or Yam Tikhoniut, was continuous with earlier Zionist goals, notably in reaffirming Israel’s affiliation with Europe and its distance from the ‘Orient’. Oz’s novel is further identified as depicting the arrival of global capitalism in Israel through its portrayals of tourism, and through its use of liquid metaphors and formal techniques that connect economic growth at home to underdevelopment abroad.
Conclusion
Authors: Boast Hannah
Published: May 2021

The Conclusion identifies future directions for research on Israeli and Palestinian hydrofictions, and in hydrocriticism more broadly. It examines the implications of the monograph for Postcolonial Studies and the Environmental Humanities. It underlines the contribution of literature to campaigns for environmental justice in Israel/Palestine and beyond.
(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’
Authors: Nardelli Matilde
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.
Adoption of Children
Authors: Norrie Kenneth McK.
Published: May 2021

The practice of adoption of children, and the terminology, existed in Scotland long before it was created as a legislative process. This chapter looks at the roots of adoption of children, in the benign informal adoption arrangements families and communities made, and in the malign money-driven practice of “baby-farming”. Demands for regulation grew after the First World War, and the Parliamentary debates on what became the Adoption of Children Act 1926 is covered in some detail. Thereafter the chapter explores all the legislative changes, bringing in forbidden degrees, damages for wrongful death and succession, this presented to show how adoption only gradually embraced the “full-transference of parenthood” model that it has today. The change throughout the 20th century from an essentially private arrangement to the end-game of public law child protection processes is analysed in some detail, especially in relation to the court’s ability to dispense with parental consent. Finally, the motivations behind the sub-adoption order, known as the Permanence Order, created in 2007, is examined.
Forging a nation: the spurious histories of Charles Bertram and James Macpherson
Authors: Montgomery Alan
Published: May 2021

Chapter eight examines two texts which would have a dramatic impact on early modern attitudes towards ancient Scotland. The so-called De Situ Britanniae, ‘discovered’ by Englishman Charles Bertram in Copenhagen, purported to be a medieval manuscript copy of an ancient Roman source that radically rewrote the Roman history of Scotland. Widely disseminated and cited in antiquarian circles, it was only in the nineteenth century that the text was identified as an elaborate forgery. The 1760s saw the publication of poetry attributed to an ancient bard named Ossian and ‘translated’ from the Gaelic by James Macpherson. The verses told of the heroic deeds of Fingal and recounted tales of Caledonian battles against the Romans. Immediately denounced as a forgery by many, the poems would nevertheless become a worldwide sensation, reframing the ancient Caledonians as courtly and cultured figures whilst perfectly satisfying the growing taste for the Romantic and sublime.
After Ossian: changing interpretations of Roman Scotland
Authors: Montgomery Alan
Published: May 2021

In the wake of the global success of Ossianic poetry, attitudes towards Scotland’s ancient history would change. The growing fashion for Primitivism switched the focus from the classical to the Romantic and sublime. A more whimsical and Romantic interpretation of early history, which was clearly influenced by the poems attributed to Ossian, can be detected at this time. The new approach of key Enlightenment historians such as David Hume saw antiquarianism sidelined, while the antiquarians who studied the remains of Roman Scotland tended to focus more on regional, rather than national history. The debate regarding the influence of Rome in northern Britain continued, but its role in defining Scotland’s national identity faded.
English in the United Arab Emirates: Status and Functions
Authors: Sadek Saeb
Published: May 2021

This chapter outlines a sociolinguistic history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and considers the complexity that this history poses to the postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes categorisation. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the status and functions of English in the UAE, and it studies the roles of the English language in the country. Considering these elements, the text applies the EIF Model to the variety and hypothesizes the direction in which the variety is likely to develop. This application suggests that the variety is entering phase 3, and that any further development to the variety is strongly tied to future social and economic developments in the country.
Women in Scottish Policing
Authors: Jackson Louise A. , Davidson Neil , Fleming Linda , Smale David M. , Sparks Richard
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the gradual appointment of female police officers in Scotland from 1915 onwards, the political and social context that shaped these initiatives and the work of women as volunteer patrols and auxiliaries. The chapter highlights the gendered construction of women’s police work in the interwar period, as well as the development of expertise in rape and sexual abuse cases. The authors consider the persistence of the marriage bar in Scotland until 1968 (two decades after its removal in England and Wales), as well as the effects of the closure of Policewomen’s Departments with ‘integration’ in the 1970s. Ideas about gender difference remained crucial in the construction of police identities into the late-twentieth century. Until the bedding in of equal opportunities strategies in the 1990s, the authority associated with policing was assumed to be derived from physical strength and, concomitantly, the male body.
Resisting Realism
Authors: Craig Cairns
Published: May 2021

For Sartre writing has to be guided by an ethics of freedom. Characters in novels, however, may be representations of free human beings but they cannot themselves be free, since they are governed by the choices of their author and the nature of their medium. The world represented in novels is thus the opposite of a world of Sartrean freedom: it is a pre-determined world. It is a paradox that Spark employs to allow her characters to reveal their own status as the products of fiction and thus challenge the apparently mimetic medium in which they exist. All of her early novels – particularly Robinson and The Ballad of Peckham Rye – present her characters as explorers of the limitations of the mimetic tradition which was taken, in studies such as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, to be fundamental to the genre of the novel.
Blackwood’s Pastoralism and the Highland Clearances
Authors: Dick Alexander
Published: May 2021

This chapter shows how, through a recurring discourse of ‘pastoralism’, Blackwood’s used the lingering traumas of the Highland Clearances as an opportunity to develop new literary conventions. Rather than seeing pastoral as merely concomitant with the Blackwood’s circle’s reactionary Toryism, we should recognize that Blackwood’s and its authors were operating in a more complex ‘post-pastoral’ register that challenged modernity’s exploitation of the natural world while conceding art’s reliance on modern, exploitative, destructive impulses. Such post-pastoral tensions were especially pronounced in Blackwood’s running commentary on agrarian reform, rural economics, and the Highland Clearances.
Prosthetic Hands in King John
Authors: Griffiths Huw
Published: May 2021

The word “hand” occurs more times in King John than in any other Shakespeare play. This is no accident. This play imagines sovereign agency through forms of prosthesis, and figures sovereignty through synecdoche: parts standing in for wholes. The word “hand” comes to the fore at moments in the play where the transactional nature of sovereign power is being accentuated: in John’s uncomfortable second coronation and, most concentratedly, in the peculiar circumstances of Prince Arthur’s death, a death that is willed by many but enacted by none. In the disputes between King John and Hubert over their relative responsibility, the word “hand” becomes a focus for a drawn-out meditation on the extent to which sovereign power is alienable or always located in the person of the King himself.
The Use of Blood Money in the Establishment of Non-Justice: Necrodomination and Resistance
Authors: Özatalay Cem , Nüfusçu Gözde Aytemur , Zeren Gülistan
Published: May 2021

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.
Money for Life: Border Killings, Compensation Claims and Life-Money Conversions in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands
Authors: Bozçalı Fırat
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the state’s necropolitical management of cross-border mobility and the border killings that border patrols committed in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands. Based on ethnographic research among Kurdish litigants and human rights lawyers in courtrooms and border villages of Van Province, the chapter examines compensation claims that Kurdish litigants pursued for the border killings at Turkish courts. Although most of the killing cases resulted in criminal impunity and individual perpetrators were often exonerated from criminal liability, compensation claims can still be pursued to hold state authorities financially responsible for the killings. The chapter discusses how Kurdish litigants and their lawyers articulated the state’s financial responsibility as an alternative form of justice-seeking and gave political-symbolic meanings to compensation claims. Examining the ways in which Turkish courts converted the lost lives into money value through factual as well as counterfactual legal, social, economic and biological assumptions, it further documents that the compensation awards often fell short of compensating the lost livelihoods and Kurdish litigants were compelled to engage back in smuggling and face a constant risk of death. The chapter ultimately shows the co-constituted and co-exercised political and economic subjugation of lives and livelihoods in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands.
Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance
Authors: Islekel Ege Selin
Published: May 2021

This chapter develops a conception of necropolitics as a power/knowledge assemblage by focusing on the games of truth and regimes of knowledge produced around death in the cases of mass graves and disappearance in Turkey. In particular, I am interested in the relations drawn between death, memory, and knowledge in necropolitical spaces, in spaces where life and the living are subsumed under the active production, regulation, and optimisation of death. The chapter consists of three parts: the first part analyses the relation between necropolitics and knowledge production, in order to establish necropolitics not only as a political technology, but also an epistemic one. The second section investigates the specific techniques of knowledge deployed in necropolitics, i.e., necro-epistemic methods, which target the temporal and logical coherence of memory in necropolitical spaces. The last section focuses on the practices of epistemic resistance, which work through mobilising perplexing realities in order to instigate counter-discourses. Overall, I argue that these counter-discourses, which I call ‘nightmare-knowledges,’ constitute necropolitical spaces as spaces of epistemic agency.
Live Long and Prosper: Rebooting Star Trek and Reimagining Fandom
Authors: Hanna Erin
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks to Star Trek, a reboot that employed a time travel narrative to simultaneously cast the Star Trek universe as a new continuity and strategically recast iconic characters in a parallel timeline. The chapter asserts that the reinvention of Star Trek property as a twenty-first-century blockbuster required an investment not only in its narrative strategies, but also in a discursively reimagined audience, one that included both pre-existing and future fans. It demonstrates the way in which Star Trek highlights the intersecting logics of the film reboot and the mainstreaming of fandom in popular culture, both of which grow out of serial strategies designed to exploit new and established markets.
Gender, Genre and the Reboot: From Ocean’s 11/Eleven to Ocean’s 8/Eight
Authors: Forrest Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates the case of Ocean’s films – Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13 – and its Ocean’s 8 reboot. As in the case of some other new millennial reboots, Ocean’s 8 is a ‘gender reversal’ reboot of (in this case) a typically male-oriented heist genre that reinterprets collaboration to emphasise feminine bonding. In addition to marking out the film’s gender transformation, the chapter outlines the intricate textual and intertextual network that exists among the series of films – including its unofficial ‘reboot’, Lucky
Logan – to describe Ocean’s 8 as an auteur-reboot, one that playfully absorbs commercial imperatives into the structure and narrative of each installment.
Rebooting the Politics of the Sports Melodrama: Creed vs Rocky
Authors: Tryon Chuck
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes Creed as a sequel-reboot which functions as a politically ambivalent, but textually reverent, reboot of the Rocky franchise (1976–90). It asserts that Creed is a film that at one and the same time celebrates the franchise’s deployment of the tropes of the boxing picture and male melodrama, while also updating the racial and sexual politics of the series. Developing ideas on the way film reboots mediate the tension between familiarity and novelty, the chapter demonstrates how Creed rewrites aspects of the original Rocky films so as to create a new political narrative, one that explicitly challenges stereotypes of African-American athletes.
Introduction
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

THIS BOOK CONSIDERS a complex artistic medium in a complex historical and geographical setting. It is about illuminated Islamic manuscripts produced in the Lands of Rūm between the 1270s and S1370s – a time of profound political fragmentation and frequent outbreaks of violence. In addition to analysing the manuscripts’ visual and physical characteristics, this study considers their production and patronage circumstances and what these may reveal about the wider contemporary artistic, intellectual and cultural context. Most of the fifteen illuminated manuscripts discussed are religious in nature and include Qur’ans and Sufi texts. However, advice literature and historical chronicles also form part of the corpus. All of the manuscripts are dated or dateable, and all are written in either Arabic or Persian. Most were produced in Konya, the former capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm, although some were copied in other towns, such as Sivas and İstanos (today known as Korkuteli)....
Epilogue
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

THIS BOOK HAS uncovered the aesthetic variety and documentary richness of the Islamic arts of the book of the late medieval Lands of Rūm and produced new ways of understanding this material in its proper cultural and intellectual contexts. It has done so by considering the manuscripts as ‘whole’, complex objects. This approach has entailed looking closely at the codicological and visual properties of the manuscripts themselves, reading their inscriptions and analysing this material within a framework that accounts for patronage beyond dynastic confines – a facet that is sometimes overlooked in the wider scholarly field of Islamic art history. The manuscripts discussed here show that some of Rūm’s cities (particularly Konya) were home to dynamic artistic communities that consisted of local and émigré craftsmen, including converts to Islam and, possibly, Christians. This material also reveals that patrons were often drawn from the political classes, but were, generally speaking, otherwise not well-known from historical sources. In some cases, patrons’ affiliations and intellectual interests challenge simplistic or unambiguous conceptions of the ‘frontier’ and the role of ‘Turkishness’ in late medieval Rūm....
‘Enemies of the People’? The Judiciary and Claude Lefort’s ‘Savage Democracy’
Authors: Minkkinen Panu
Published: May 2021

The chapter attempts to, first, clarify the position of human rights in Claude Lefort's unique blend of phenomenologically and psychoanalytically inspired political theory. Human rights, and by extension rights more generally, are in this account an integral element of a 'savage democracy' that Lefort envisioned as the only plausible challenge to the totalitarian tendencies of neoliberalism. From this starting point, the chapter will then discuss the position of the judiciary in contemporary democracies. Standard accounts of the separation of powers reduce the courts' constitutional functions to the application and interpretation of laws issued by an elected legislator. But as the relationship between the legislator and the executive has changed, so, too, has the relative position of the judiciary. A strong executive as the engine of legislative initiatives, supported by a weak 'rubber-stamp' legislature, has highlighted the need to emphasise the democratic potential of the judiciary that goes beyond the 'deferential' role of standard accounts. The chapter will provide a theoretical framework for understanding this democratic role through Lefort's account of human rights.
‘Standing up for Scotland’ at Westminster?
Authors: Gourtsoyannis Paris
Published: May 2021

Until 2017, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party and its leaders north of the border would barely have registered with journalists and politicians operating from the UK Parliament, but in Ruth Davidson they appeared to see a different sort of Scottish Tory leader and, after the 2017 general election, a Scottish Tory Party with thirteen MPs that had the potential to alter the parliamentary balance. Journalist Paris Gourtsoyannis argues that this influence was used only cautiously, rather than with the force promised in 2017. The chapter also examines internal Westminster Scottish Conservative group dynamics, as well as considerable speculation as to Davidson’s prospects of becoming UK Tory leader, or at least pursuing a political career in London rather than in66 Edinburgh.
The Scottish Conservatives and Local Government
Authors: Toner Lauren , Lamprinakou Chrysa , McGarvey Neil
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s experience in local government in the contemporary era, with a review of the post-1974 period, traditionally viewed as the inception of modern Scottish local government. It also analyses the impact of the Conservative Party over the past 40 years, and then shifts the focus to how Scottish Conservative local government election manifestos and electioneering has changed, looking in particular at the 2017 local government election in Scotland, when the party increased its representation in town halls across the country.
Riding the Unionist Wave: Ruth Davidson, the Media and the Re-emergence of the Scottish Conservatives
Authors: Patrick David
Published: May 2021

Although for decades the Scottish media was rather hostile towards the Scottish Conservatives, over the past few years more sympathetic voices (and even cheerleaders) have emerged for Ruth Davidson in particular and the party more generally. This chapter, by the media academic David Patrick, explores the influence of media representations of the party on the perceived Conservative revival in Scotland. It presents findings from an overview of media coverage of the Scottish Conservative Party between 2011 and 2019, drawing liberally from comment and opinion pieces, political sketches, blogs and magazine profiles. With a particular focus on Ruth Davidson, the chapter argues that the 2014 independence referendum – and a parallel polarisation of Scottish politics – provided Davidson and her party with a necessary platform upon which to build a new identity and relevance.
Rethinking Romantic Comedy through the Art Film: Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Authors: Ariano Raffaele
Published: May 2021

In this chapter, Rafaele Ariano examines Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014) as a hybrid of the art film and the romantic comedy. Ariano conceptualizes the “art romantic comedy” as a sub-genre that targets audiences that would typically reject the romantic comedy based upon conventions of taste and cultural hierarchy. The chapter places Gondry in a cohort of contemporary auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola and Alexander Payne, whose romantic comedies are characterized by qualities drawn from art and indie cinema. These characteristics include the expressive use of film style and implementation of metafictional devices, complex “sensitive” protagonists, and endings that are ambiguous and thus only partially “happy.” Ariano applies this genre framework to an analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but also places the film within wider trends in the genre of romantic comedy.
Playing with Superheroes: Genre, Aesthetics, and Deconstruction in The Green Hornet
Authors: Kirby Jennifer
Published: May 2021

In this chapter, Jennifer Kirby analyses Michel Gondry’s big-budget superhero film The Green Hornet (2011). The film generally provoked a negative critical response due to its seemingly insignificant subject matter. However, Kirby here argues that the vitriolic criticism fails to acknowledge the extent to which this film can be read as a deconstruction of the generic codes and aesthetics of the predominantly American superhero genre from an outsider’s perspective. She demonstrates how, just as The Green Hornet’s incompetent playboy, Britt Reid (Seth Rogen), plays at his childhood ambition of being a super-hero in the film, Gondry plays with the conventions of the superhero movie through both humorous revisionism and, more successfully, the use of analogue visual effects rather than using predominantly digital visual effects as is typical in most Hollywood superhero films.
‘Out of its torpid misery’: Plotting Passivity in Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel A City Girl (1887). It describes the emergence of the Model Dwellings Movement, and considers Harkness’s time living in a model dwelling in London’s East End: Katharine Buildings. This chapter studies the fictional representation of Katharine Buildings in A City Girl to engage with questions about the social effectiveness of model dwellings movement and its program of ‘capitalist philanthropy.’
Boccaccio’s Tale of Two Friends
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century tale of perfect friendship from Day Ten of the Decameron is paradigmatic in its plotting of the Aristotelian ideal as narrative and thus serves as an important touchstone for later friendship literature. In Boccaccio, the requirements of storytelling and, in particular, narrative conflict transform the test of friendship between Tito and Gisippo into the archetypal plot device for all later instantiations of the tale of two friends tradition. At the same time, the story also exposes some of the limitations of translating static Aristotelian categories into narrative form. In the case of Boccaccio, these limitations find expression in a pervasive ironic undercurrent that cuts against the universalist pretentions of the main storyline, leading to an internal tension that is reproduced, as Robert Hollander notes, in long-standing critical debates over the tale’s ultimate meaning.
The End of an Ideal: Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente”
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

Avalle-Arce argues that the interpolated story from Don Quixote, “El curioso impertinente,” marks “the final step in the development of the tale of two friends and, at the same time, its destruction.” Here the test of perfect friendship, rather than affirm the Aristotelian ideal, exposes its insufficiency through a series of betrayals that leads to the final deaths of both friends and their contested lover. Not satisfied with merely critiquing the tradition of writing perfect friendship, Cervantes reveals the essential vacuity of the Aristotelian ideal, the fact, indeed, of its utter incompatibility with life in the world beyond the text. That this final destruction occurs in the midst of a radical reconceptualization of narrative friendship—the novel Don Quixote, the subject of the last chapter of this book—underscores the formal significance of Cervantes’s powerful repudiation of the traditional tale of two friends.
Introduction
Authors: Guarneri Michael
Published: May 2021

The aim of the introductory chapter is threefold. Firstly, the chapter points out the monograph’s originality by contextualising the book in relation to ongoing scholarly debates about vampire fiction and Italian film history. Secondly, the chapter presents the corpus of thirty-three films to be studied, outlining the thematic and industrial criteria behind the selection. The corpus goes from vampiric/Frankensteinian monster-mash I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), which is generally considered the first Italian horror film, to horror parody Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza / Dracula in the Provinces (Lucio Fulci, 1975). Thirdly, in order to introduce some key elements of Italian cultural specificity, the chapter provides a brief history of literary and cinematic horror fiction in Italy prior to 1956, with particular attention to vampire-themed works.
The Italian Film Industry (1945–1985)
Authors: Guarneri Michael
Published: May 2021

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.