bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epilogue
Authors: Maury Corinne
Published: September 2023

The epilogue discusses the possibility of a true ‘aesthetics of place’. It shows that in some of the films of Chantal Akerman, Avi Mograbi (Part 1 & 2), the houses are not residences any more, they have become spaces where interior powers and exterior forces clash and collide. They form an archipelago of disparate poetic and political dwellings. The author further concludes that Pedro Costa, Tariq Teguia and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Part 3) create in their ‘real fictions’ an unbreakable bond, between the outskirts of the city and their characters. The epilogue also shows that Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Philippe Grandrieux, Lisandro Alonso and Naomi Kawase (Part 4) go beyond forests’ obvious symbolic function and grant them a sensory power, an existential dimension, an economic identity. Finally, it shows that filmmakers such as Bela Tarr, Bruno Dumont and Sharunas Bartas (Part 5) choose to ‘restore’ the broken, chaotic, desolate places they depict. Their narratives present a hyle, which in no way discredits or demeans the lives of the men who inhabits those ‘nowheres’.
Forays into the Wilderness: Conan Doyle as Amateur Photographer
Authors: Stiegler Bernd
Published: September 2023

Conan Doyle began his career as a writer with a series ‘Where to Go with the Camera’, which appeared in the British Journal of Photography. This chapter examines this series of essays along with the metaphorical and cultural-historical dimensions of the texts.
Sherlock Holmes: The Detective as Camera
Authors: Stiegler Bernd
Published: September 2023

In the Sherlock Holmes “Canon” photography surprisingly shows up only rarely or just marginally. It is supplanted by the protagonist, who – whether it be cocaine consumption or gaps in his knowledge or peculiar aspects of his character – certainly has various flaws, but who, despite these flaws, remains distinguished by his special powers of perception. ‘He was’, so it says pointedly in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, the first Sherlock Holmes story that was also published in The Strand Magazine, ‘the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen’. This is why there is no need for photography: Sherlock Holmes is already a camera and a photo lab in one. However, his insight needs to be expanded upon and proves itself to be more complex than it appears at first glance.
Fairies and Gnomes: A Photographic Re-Enchantment of the World
Authors: Stiegler Bernd
Published: September 2023

Conan Doyle wrote a book about photographs of fairies, The Coming of the Fairies, which involves something different than matters of the spirit, since Conan Doyle was convinced that fairies are of this world, photography having proved their existence.
Commitment: Verse Drama and Resistance
Authors: Snir Reuven
Published: September 2023

The chapter discusses the mixture of various cultures integrated into the emerging Palestinian theatrical movement through a play by Samīḥ al-Qāsim titled Qarāqash (1969) that became a junction of different sources of inspiration, such as that of the German director Erwin Piscator who, together with Bertolt Brecht, believed that conveying social and political messages was the prime aim of the theater in a dynamic modern society, and that of Israeli-Hebrew theater side by side with the inspiration of both Russian and Arabic theater. In the setting of the reunification of the two segments of the Palestinian people after the 1967 War, Qaraqāsh denoted the beginning of the professional stage in the modern Palestinian theatrical movement. It was first performed in the West Bank in 1970 by the amateur troupe ‘Ā’ilat al-Masraḥ (The Family of the Theater) from Ramallah; however, the military authorities intervened to ban subsequent staging of the play.
Spring: “We Were Like Those Who Dream”
Authors: Snir Reuven
Published: September 2023

The chapter discusses the flowering of literary Arabic activities of immigrating Arab-Jewish writers in Israel during the 1950s. Among the writers, most of them from Iraq, it was already possible to discern two streams of thought parallel to the dominant trends of the local Arabic literature. The first trend was of the writers and poets close to the Israeli governmental establishment who were steeped in national pride. The second trend, that of the leftist and communist poets and writers, did not agree that Israeli patriotism implied absolute identification with the authorities. The difference in worldview between the two trends can be seen in the concept of “spring” so frequently used by both sides. According to the writers supported by the establishment, their hopes had been realized in the Jewish, independent Israel of the 1950s, as we find in the opening two words of the poet Salīm Sha‘shū‘a’s first poem in the collection The World of Light, “The Spring Has Arrived.” In contrast, the struggle was still in full force for the Communist writers, and their eyes gazed toward the future, as seen from the name of David Semah’s collectionTill Spring Comes.
Challenge: The al-Andalus Experience
Authors: Snir Reuven
Published: September 2023

This chapter deals with the way the experience of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, is used in modern Arabic poetry as a vehicle to face the decline of the Arabs’ self-image and to challenge Western cultural hegemony. Since the nineteenth century, Arab poets have been invoking the image of al-Andalus in a conscious effort to highlight the benefits that Western civilization has gained through its interaction with Arab civilization—the al-Andalus experience is seen as an epitome of that interaction, the Arabs’ greatest and most enduring success on European soil. But even more so, when poets recall the cultural achievements of the Andalusian Arab heritage during nearly 800 years of Muslim rule, they do so to remind their audience that their present bitter state is only a transitory period, a temporary clouding of the skies between a glorious past and a splendid future. Inspired by nostalgia, the picture that most frequently appears in modern Arabic literary writings is that of al-Andalus as the “lost paradise” or “God’s paradise on earth.”
Religion: “I Saw My God”
Authors: Snir Reuven
Published: September 2023

The chapter explores the role that Muslim mysticism, Sufism, plays in modern Arabic poetry. Early mystic Arabic poetry arose along with the development of Ṣūfī theory at the beginning of the ninth century ad and flourished during the next several centuries. Its origins were rooted in the spontaneous utterances of early Ṣūfī mystics, who poetically expressed their love of God and, at the same time, rejected worldly pleasures. The birth of modern Arabic secular poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century paved the way for the appearance of mystic dimensions in non-religious poetry, especially after the First World War, when poets started to emphasize personal experiences and feelings, the desire to be absorbed by nature, and pantheistic revelations and mythological elements. Following the Second World War, which undermined belief that technology and science would be able to bring about human salvation, one senses a strong tendency to return to the early pure values of Muslim mysticism. Contemporary secular Arab poets have closed a circle originally opened by the first Ṣūfī poets more than twelve centuries ago.
Divination and Philosophy in the Letters of Paul
Authors: Sharp Matthew
Published: September 2023

Biblical texts and early Christian figures have traditionally been studied from the vantage point of theological categories (such as “revelation”) that isolate early Christianity from its historical context in the Graeco-Roman world. This book restores the Apostle Paul to his ancient context by re-reading his claims to receive divine knowledge from within, not against, the context of ancient divination. Each chapter studies a particular aspect of divination in Paul’s letters in comparison with similar phenomena in the Graeco-Roman world. These include ancient philosophical discussions of the mechanics (or ontology) of divination, visionary experiences, prophecy and divine speech, the divinatory use of written texts, and the interpretation of signs. Through analysing these topics, the book illuminates the coherence and connections both between Paul and his historical context and between diverse topics of Paul’s letters that have usually been studied in isolation from each other. As such, the book forms an in-depth study of the topic of divine communication in Paul’s letters, which integrates this theme with the broader topics of ancient cosmology, anthropology, eschatology, and theology.
Texts
Authors: Sharp Matthew T.
Published: September 2023

This chapter redescribes Paul’s “use of scripture” as his divinatory use of texts comparable to the use of oracle collections and textual divination in the ancient world. I argue that Paul does not cite his Jewish scripture as a single divinely inspired text, rather he sees it as a collection of ancestral texts that contain divine oracles within them. Different texts such as the psalms, prophets, or the Pentateuch offer up divine information in different ways, but, like other collections of oracles in the Graeco-Roman world, could be seen to predict current events, or events that still lie in the future for the interpreter. They could also be seen to provide information about the general character of the gods, or to provide general wisdom in the form of proverbs or maxims. These functions of scriptural oracles are particularly illustrated in Paul by detailed analyses of his citations in Romans 9 and Romans 15.
History of Archaeological Research in Afghan Sistan
Authors: Trousdale William B. , Allen Mitchell
Published: September 2023

This chapter traces the historical and archaeological study of Afghan Sistan from the time of European travelers in the 19th century to the present. Numerous English and other European visitors to Sistan in the 19th century wrote journals of their travels. The border location of Sistan meant that the various Afghan boundary commissions of the 1880s and subsequent decades spent much time in the area, including surveyor G.P. Tate, who wrote the first extensive research volume on Sistan in 1910. Archaeological work was slow in coming: a brief French mission and excavation in the 1930s, American Walter Fairservis’s survey in 1949-50, and work by British archaeologist Norman Hammond, German scholar Klaus Fischer, and American George Dales in the 1950s and 1960s. The only archaeologist to visit Sistan after the Helmand Sistan Project was Mark Abramiuk, working with the US military in 2010-2011. Much more extensive work has taken place in Iranian Sistan by Italian and Iranian teams, though with different emphases and results than in Afghan Sistan.
Introduction: Royal Myths and Ancient Histories
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

The introduction provides an overview of the content of each chapter and explains the book’s focus on popular myths that are associated with early golf history. It describes how numerous myths and misconceptions have become entrenched in the popular history of golf. Frequently these appear to have arisen as a consequence of golf historians having made speculative claims, often with a degree of hesitancy. However, such claims can subsequently take on a life of their own by being repeated uncritically, thereby acquiring the status of established historical facts and entering into the folklore of golf history.
King James II, a Scottish Act of Parliament and some Fifteenth-century Golf Myths
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

The book's first chapter discusses the earliest known written reference to golf, which appears in a Scottish act of parliament issued by King James II on 6 March 1457/8. However, despite this being the earliest known reference to golf, several earlier dates have often been claimed to have relevance to early golf in Scotland. Five such claims (relating to the dates 1413, 1420/1, 1448, 1452 and 1456) are discussed and evaluated.
King James III and Two Poetic Fifteenth-century Golf Myths
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, a number of golf myths are discussed that relate to the reign of King James III of Scotland (1460-1488). Of particular importance to arguments concerning the origins of golf is a fifteenth-century Scottish narrative poem (The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour). It has been argued that this poem provides evidence that early Scottish golf was a violent confrontational game. However, analysis of surviving handwritten copies of the poem suggest an alternative interpretation.
Mary Queen of Scots and the Romanticisation of Golf History
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

Mary Queen of Scots has acquired a prominent place in the history of golf, with numerous claims having been made concerning her importance to the game. In this chapter, these claims are summarised and the evidence supporting them is examined. The main conclusion is that, despite the surprisingly diverse nature of the claims linking Mary to the game of golf, almost all of these lack any credible evidence. In fact, all of the claims appear to derive from a single source – a handwritten manuscript that is of rather doubtful reliability. It is a document that was prepared by Mary’s enemies with the aim of demonstrating her complicity in the murder of Lord Darnley. In this manuscript, Mary is accused of playing ‘palmall and goif’ at Seton Palace shortly after Darnley’s murder and at a time when she might have been expected to be mourning the death of her husband.
King Charles I, the Countess of Mar and Golf at Leith and Newcastle
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses early golf during the reign of Charles I (1625-1648/9). Claims that Charles learned to play golf as a child in Dunfermline, Scotland are reassessed. The frequently retold story of Charles I playing golf at Leith, Scotland in 1641 is re-examined and evidence of him playing golf at Newcastle, England in 1646 is presented. In addition, golf myth concerning the Countess of Mar is discussed.
Early Golf Balls and Golf-ball Myths
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, evidence is reviewed that indicates that early balls were made of leather stuffed with material such as feathers. Evidence for the importation of golf balls into Scotland in the seventeenth century is discussed and a frequent claim that the feather golf ball was ‘invented’ in 1618 is dismissed. In addition, claims that early golf balls were made of wood are re-examined.
Early Golf Societies and Early Women’s Golf
Authors: Millar Neil S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter reviews the emergence of golf societies in the mid-eighteenth century and discusses the contentious issue of the relative antiquity of early Scottish and English golf societies. In addition, the emergence of women's golf is discussed. There is very little evidence of golf having been played by women prior to the nineteenth century and the earliest identified evidence of women playing golf in the eighteenth century is a newspaper article from 1738 concerning women playing golf on Bruntsfield Links. In contrast, claims relating to golf being played by Catherine of Aragon (1513) and the Countess of Mar (1638) can be dismissed and claims relating to Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) have been shown to be either incorrect or questionable.
Political Agency and the Medicalisation of Negative Emotions
Authors: Degerman Dan
Published: September 2023

This book explores negative emotions like anger, fear and grief as important drivers of political action. It examines how treating these feelings as medical problems affects society. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book develops an original understanding of political emotions as fragile and vulnerable to attacks disputing their relevance to public life. It presents and analyses four case studies of emotional politics in the UK, ranging from assertions that UKIP supporters were emotionally primitive to diagnoses of anxiety disorder in the Brexit referendum’s aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.
The Public Shape of Emotions
Authors: Degerman Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores four broad categories of politically dis/empowering factors, specifically, affiliations, public spaces, laws and institutions, and concepts. In their empowering form, these factors support political agency in general; but one specific way they do so is by facilitating the transformation of negative emotions into public issues. Concepts can allow us to establish that our emotions are linked to an actionable issue in the world, affiliations can show that other people share our emotions, public spaces can provide us with the resources to articulate the political dimensions of our emotions to external publics, and so on. But there are also disempowering versions of each kind of factor that have the inverse effect. For example, spaces in which certain expressions of emotion appear dangerous, affiliations that chastise us for feeling strongly about the wrong things, and – crucially, in the context of medicalisation – concepts that lead us to think that our emotions are politically irrelevant.
Mad Protesters: Raging with Occupy
Authors: Degerman Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the role of anger and medicalisation in the Occupy movement. I begin with a brief discussion of recent philosophical debates contributed to the movement’s short lifespan and failure to accomplish its goals on the role of anger in politics. I then highlight the importance of anger in the movement and that Occupy provided people with the resources to transform their anger into public issues. However, I also suggest that opponents exploited the evident emotionality of the protesters to disempower the movement. Subsequent sections examine medicalising attacks on Occupy in the United States and the United Kingdom in turn. In both contexts, observers claimed that a significant contingent of protesters was mentally disordered. I argue that such claims, firstly, disempower people with mental disorder by obscuring their political anger and other reasons they might have for acting politically and casting them as a delegitimising presence in a movement. Secondly, such claims also disempower protesters generally by undermining their credibility vis-à-vis external publics, weakening their affiliations to one another, and even justifying their exclusion from public spaces.
Primitive Populists: The Fear of UKIP
Authors: Degerman Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines another political organisation whose members’ emotions appear to have been vulnerable to medicalisation: the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Analysing news coverage, I show that the party’s opponents sought to delegitimise the fear that ostensibly animated its supporters through what I call hyper-emotionalising rather medicalising attacks. I begin by considering how fear can support political agency. I then proceed to argue that because political theorists have been preoccupied with denouncing fear in politics, they have failed to recognise the empowering potential of fear as well as the disempowering potential of its medicalisation. The remainder of the chapter focuses on UKIP. After considering the role of fear in the rise of UKIP, I show that medicalising attacks against the party and its supporters appear to have been rare. Instead, hostile commentators accused them of being possessed by primitive fear and other negative emotions that had usurped their reason, claims that found backing in neuroscience and political theory. In conclusion, I suggest that, even if we think that fear is politically dangerous, efforts to exclude it from public life through hyper-emotionalisation or medicalisation are misguided.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Neighborly Encounters and the Project of Neighborliness
Authors: TIGCHELAAR JANA
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Freeman’s project of neighborliness, or the recurrent formations of non-normative kinship bonds which privilege communitarian values over individualism. By staging neighborly encounters in liminal spaces and states in stories including “Christmas Jenny” and “A Village Singer,” Freeman’s regional texts work to transform relationships both within the text and within the nation, reframing the modes by which her readers would recognize themselves and others.
Transatlantic Lloronas: Infanticide and Gender in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Alexandros Papadiamantis
Authors: Drizou Myrto
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyzes Freeman’s representation of infanticide from a transatlantic perspective. Through a comparative reading of Freeman’s short story “Old Woman Magoun” and the turn-of-the-century Greek novella A Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, the chapter argues that the murder of female infants or (infantilized) female children is an act of resistance against a patriarchal system that commodifies women on the marriage market. Both texts weave a gender critique that conveys women’s restorative power and evokes a transgressive genealogy of monstrous motherhood epitomized by La Llorona, the wailing or weeping woman in Meso-American mythology. In this sense, Freeman’s fiction can be read not only as New England or US literature but also as world literature, a broader nexus of literary and mythic texts, which retell old myths in new contexts of global historical relevance.
Redefining the New England Nun: A Revisionist Reading in the Context of Pembroke and Irish American Fiction
Authors: Paulauskienė Aušra
Published: September 2023

This chapter revisits the figure of the “nun” in Freeman’s much-debated “A New England Nun” by reading the story in the context of contemporary Irish American fiction. The essay juxtaposes the idealized image of the nun as found in Irish American fiction, to which Freeman partially subscribes, with a figurative meaning of nun that emerges from reading the story alongside Freeman’s novel Pembroke. From this perspective, the term stands for the disorder of the will that keeps Freeman’s characters in the narrow track of a habitual, yet emotionally stunted, lifestyle. Unlike the characters of Pembroke who are redeemed by selfless compassion (something that Freeman prescribes in the introductory sketch to the novel), Louisa Ellis fails to transcend her condition of loveless existence. Historicist critics have emphasized the critique of rigid Puritan will in latter day New England as Freeman’s recurrent theme. Paradoxically, in this cryptic story, the vestiges of Puritanism abide in the character of a Catholic nun, the embodiment, arguably, of New England’s religious rivals.
Deconstructing Upper-Middle-Class Rites and Rituals: Reading Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Stories Alongside Mary Louise Booth’s Harper’s Bazar
Authors: Fogels Audrey
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the ways in which the short stories Mary E. Wilkins Freeman published in Harper’s Bazar when Mary Louise Booth was its editor (1867-1899) contributed to the magazine’s covert but clear feminism. Shedding light on the ways US post-bellum consumer culture and periodical culture created rigid gender roles and delegitimized women who could not have access to those newly available commodities, Freeman’s stories underwrote the magazine’s feminist stance, providing her upper-middle-class readers with tools to question their own lives. Read in the thick cultural context of this high-end publication that made room for both fashion and its criticism, Freeman’s quaint New England stories worked as inverted mirrors paradoxically pointing to the affiliations of class, gender and race that were pre-requisite for social visibility in the 1880s.
Untimely Freeman
Authors: Roudeau Cécile
Published: September 2023

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s oeuvre has been historicized, and rightly so, but Freeman’s texts also resonate with our present. This chapter stakes out a third position between the injunction to only historicize and the pitfalls of presentism. It reads Freeman as untimely, that is, it opens up her texts to “unforeclosed possibilities” that have since her time come to pass, or not. The chapter focuses on two of her turn-of-the century collections of animal and plant stories, Understudies (1901) and Six Trees (1903) and reads them as Freeman’s testing ground for what today we would characterize as a radical critique of the ontological divide between nature and culture (Descola) and an audacious move towards alternative forms of kinships and queer assemblages (Haraway’s “oddkins”) across species. Not only does her fiction – as fiction – partly strip humans of their hegemony as social—and narrative—agents; it also sidesteps our ingrained anthropological dualisms without always eroding the boundaries between species. Freeman’s late stories do not bring us backto a pre-modern episteme nor projects us into a desirable utopia; they “speak back” to us from a present that is not ours yet uncannily continuous with it. Their contemporaneousness is a shared productive dischrony.
The Revolutionary Symbol Has No Power: A Semiotic Reading of Hybridity
Authors: Švantner Martin
Published: September 2023

The chapter explores several theoretical possibilities for gaining a more precise understanding of the multifaceted relationship between representation and the hybridity of revolutionary actors. It investigates the semiotic nature of hybrid agency with an overview of two important semiotic perspectives. The first is associated with Bruno Latour and his translation of Julien Algirdas Greimas’s structural semantics – and its notion of actant/actor relationships – to the social sciences. The second is associated with the influence of Charles Sanders Peirce. In contrast to the first case, the Peircian perspective does not understand semiotics as connected exclusively with human speech discourse. The sign stands here as a modal triadic inferential relation whose basal and most important capacity is to hybridise and aggregate the social and the natural, the human and the non-human agencies. This chapter proposes a complementary semiotic perspective on hybrid revolutionaries as symmetrically material and symbolic, dynamic, representational and relational becomings. Their representation is considered as a combination of a general tone (for example, the feeling of danger), a general type (a ‘terrorist organisation’) and a concrete token of that type (‘ISIS’). These layers are considered not as a kind of essential categories, but rather continuous moments in the hybrid process of semiosis.
Sealed with a Thumbprint: The Hybrid Politics of a Martyrdom Contract
Authors: Walshe Arran Robert
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the development of martyrdom contracts by the Islamic State of Iraq around 2006-2007, deployed to manage volunteers’ capriciousness and changes of heart when they are confronted with the practical reality of suicide bombing. Through these contracts the chapter argues that through these nascent contractual practices the managers of the Islamic State sought to assert a language of coercive authority that was legible to their culturally and territorially diverse volunteers. Their answer was to appeal not to established Islamic jurisprudence, but rather to a contract that framed the act of suicide bombing within the legal rights and responsibilities of labour, between employee and employer. The effect of this bureaucratisation was to further alienate their new jihadists. These idealistic would-be martyrs found this reality of jihad a far cry from what they had imagined at home, as they now languished for months in safe-houses and treated with distain by militant human resource managers tasked with managing the organization’s human capital.
Three Crime Films by Jia Zhangke: A Transnational Genealogy of Social and Personal Turmoil
Authors: Odabasi Eren
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes a shift in Jia Zhangke’s cinematic language that reveals that his approach to filmmaking has evolved in unexpected ways following the release of his 2013 film A Touch of Sin. It explains how, in a highly stylized crime drama, Jia openly experiments with genre elements that borrow extensively from Hong Kong triad films while also paying homage to several classics within the wuxia tradition. The film, thus, marks a shift towards violent, formally ambitious crime stories continued with Jia’s two subsequent films, Mountains May Depart (2015) and Ash is Purest White (2018). The chapter, furthermore, offers an alternative reading of Jia’s films from a genre-oriented perspective, prioritizing his interest in the conventions of the crime genre over the meditative, naturalistic cinematic language that characterized his early work by tracing the genealogy of references and intertextual elements that inform Jia’s trilogy by identifying several sources of inspiration, including John Woo and King Hu, by bringing to light cinema as a site of the ongoing processes of conflict and reconciliation between a culturally independent Hong Kong and the consolidated nationalisms of China, and by exploring how Jia utilizes multi-episodic storytelling strategies to combine crime film conventions with social commentary.
Tit for Tat: Avenging Women and Self-fashioning Femininity in Malayalam Cinema
Authors: Sreekumar Rohini , Sony Jalarajan Raj
Published: September 2023

The narratives of crime films often revolve around the valiance of the traditional ‘hero’ who displays exhilarating masculine pride either through physical strength or intelligence. Hence, the crime genre has a tenacious connection with male masculinity and the concept of machismo. In other words, when male heroes control the narrative of a crime film, female characters are often portrayed as victims that need ‘saving’ or glamorous objects that act as distractions to the heroic gallantry. Indian cinema is not contrary in this regard. However, there have been some meagre attempts to portray women in unconventional gangster roles where femininity is equated with vigor, fervor and muscularity. In this rare context, this article intends to look at Malayalam cinema—a regional film industry of India—where a few films in the crime genre have portrayed women as both victims and avenging survivors. The films taken for analysis include Kannezhuthi Pottum Thottu (1999), 22 Female Kottayam(2012) and Puthiya Niyamam (2016). This study analyzes the construction of female action heroes and avenging women in Indian cinema and identifies and differentiates these female characterizations in the emerging context of new women-orientated (or feminized) versions of crime fiction cinema in Malayalam.
Franchising the Female Hero: Translating the New Woman in Victorin Jasset’s Protéa (1913), France’s First Female Spy Film
Authors: Delahousse Sarah
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that Victorin Jasset’s Protéa (1913), as the result of cross-cultural influences, reveals a cautious recognition of the New Woman that laid the groundwork for future French female spy films and allowed the production company, Éclair, to maintain economic viability in an increasingly difficult global market. It begins with an explanation of Jasset’s experience with transnational adaptation and a historical background of the small but growing feminist movement in France that demanded expanded civil rights and economic freedom; however, this movement was met with hostility because women who embraced careers over marriage were perceived as rejecting their patriotic duty to produce future male soldiers and workers. The chapter then asserts that the film’s adoption of empowering yet socially acceptable character traits evident in the American cowboy girl and female detective figure and its depiction of the title character protecting her vulnerable sovereign nation against foreign adversaries resulted in its popularity with French and, ultimately, American audiences in a way that sheds light on conflicting pre-war and colonial interests and concerns.
Shirkers (2018) Lost and Found? Tracing Transsensorial Trauma in a True-crime Road Movie
Authors: Sim Jiaying
Published: September 2023

This essay focuses on the role of women in Sandi Tan’s auto-documentary, Shirkers (2018). The premise of the film is self-referential: In 1992, a group of three 18-year-old Singaporean girls—including Tan—banded together to write, fund, and produce an independent road-movie of the same name about a teenage killer, only to have the 70 rolls of footage stolen by their teacher/original Shirkers director, George Cardona. 20 years later, the original film reels resurface when Cardona’s widow returns them to Tan. Thus, Shirkers’ narratological appeal appears to depend on the original Shirkers where found footages are interspersed with in-depth interviews of the three female filmmakers and others privy to the original Shirkers’ filmmaking process. The mystery behind the stolen intellectual property is solved not by law enforcers, but by bringing the women behind the scenes to the foreground. Shirkers’ meta-fictional and transmedia characteristics produce a film within a film, a film about making a film, that emphasises how collaborative ‘sense-making’ produces affective screen experiences. As such, the audience must look beyond any initial fixation with the mysterious theft and disappearance of the original Shirkers to consider how transnational sensoria produced through screen experience traverse time, place, cinematic form and medium.
Al-Bahithun : Sounds that Call to the (Oil) Fields
Authors: Younis Ala
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, the artist Ala Younis presents her multimedia art project Al-Bahitun which highlights the link between nationalised knowledge and oil wealth in Iraq. Modern flats in high-rise buildings, plots of land, customs exemptions on Mercedes sedans, as well as scholarships and books were part of a larger scheme of incentives offered by the Ba‘ath regime to scientists and graduates to ensure they work in Iraq after completing their education. This building up of local knowledge, and technical and industrial expertise was seen as a national asset necessary to maximise oil profits after the nationalisation of the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1972. The chapter’s title recalls the sounds that featured in a 1978 Iraqi film, titled Al Bahithun [The Searchers] in which a group of men are hired to journey south of Iraq in search of oil. Sound is also the phonetics of the names of Iraqi oil fields in Nuha al-Radi’s ceramic mural installed in IPC headquarters in Baghdad and discussed in an issue of the oil magazine Al- ‘Amilun fil Naft in the 1960s.
Petroprotein Dreams: Hydrocarbon Biotechnology and Microbial Life Worlds in the Middle East
Authors: Rogers Douglas
Published: September 2023

This chapter expands our understanding of oil’s lifeworlds by recounting efforts to create a single-cell protein (or “petroprotein”) industry in the Middle East. In the 1960s, British Petroleum pioneered research into the use of petroleum as a feedstock for the fermentation of protein-producing yeast. The processed protein was to be used as an animal feed supplement, but the company could not find a way to make production affordable in Europe. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries took up this project in the late 1970s and 1980s, hoping that conditions in the Middle East would be more favourable and that petroprotein would spur regional development and create biotechnological expertise. Research into petroprotein was undertaken at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research until Iraq’s invasion in 1990.
Oil, Mobility And Territoriality in The Trucial States/United Arab Emirates, Muscat and Oman
Authors: MacLean Matthew
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses how oil-fueled automobility challenged and displaced older forms of transportation in the northern Trucial States/United Arab Emirates and Muscat and Oman in the middle of the twentieth century. The power and speed of the automobile necessitated new modes of governance, making processes of state formation visible and tangible in the form of roads, boundaries, and travel regulations. Automobility and road construction sparked occasionally violent confrontations between various sheikhs, the British-led Trucial Oman Scouts, and ordinary people. Resolution of these conflicts resulted in further extension of state power into hinterland regions. Special attention is paid to the demarcation of the border between the Sultanate of Muscat and the various Trucial States, which would eventually become the border between Oman and the United Arab Emirates. For these new states, road construction was a key tool with which to shape space and reshape regional patterns of migration, circulation, and settlement.
Contestation and Co-Optation in The Desert Landscapes of Oman
Authors: Chatty Dawn
Published: September 2023

Nomadic pastoralist (mobile herders) communities in the Middle East have faced government land expropriation and sedentarisation efforts for most of the 20th century. In Oman, a more ‘enlightened’ state policy regarding settlement was articulated in the late 1970s by Sultan Qaboos bin Said. However, in spite of this radical policy, it has become clear five decades on, that the pastoral communities in Oman have continued to be generally neglected and poorly understood by government bureaucrats as well as by some oil company employees in comparison with the rest of Oman’s citizens. Furthermore, it is the general lack of a meaningful relationship with some of the oil companies whose concession areas extend over most of their traditional tribal lands that has exacerbated and highlighted the fundamental disadvantage of these mobile herding ‘stakeholder’ groups.
Why Islamists Go Green
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

The environmental policies of Islamist groups have received scant scholarly attention. While there is a growing body of literature regarding Islam and nature, we know very little about how Islamists view the environment. In the era of globalization, however, Islamist groups have increasingly addressed environmental problems and suggested relevant solutions. More and more Islamists talk about protecting water supplies, planting trees, and reducing pollution. The book focuses on the emergence of Islamist environmentalism as a new phenomenon that requires an interdisciplinary investigation. It is imperative to understand the causes of this new environmentalism as Islamists maintain a claim to authenticity and legitimacy. The question that arises is whether Islamist environmentalism is motivated by religion, politics, or both. The book seeks to expand the academic inquiry into Islamist environmentalism through the combined lens of political science and Islamic studies. Therefore, it focuses on the environmentalism of six Islamist groups: Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hamas, Hizbullah, Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Introduction
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

The Introduction briefly examines contemporary Muslim environmentalist debates and the state of environmentalism in the Muslim world. It describes the contributions of Seyyed Hosein Nasr, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Iqtidar Zaidi, Mawil Izzi Dien, Mustafa Abu-Sway, Osman Bakar, and Tariq Ramadan. Then it unpacks the phenomenon of Islamist environmentalism by setting two research questions: what is the environmental policy or approach of Islamist groups and what role does religion play in Islamist environmentalism? Finally, the introduction describes the methodology of the research.
Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Environment
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 discusses the environmentalism of Hizb ut-Tahrir based on the writings of its founder, Taqiuddin an-Nabhani. It first describes the group’s general perspective on environmental issues. It also investigates the group’s understanding of water management. Moreover, the chapter examines Hizb ut-Tahrir’s view of animal issues, pollution, and energy. Lastly, it assesses whether the group’s proposed environmental policy is faith-based or not.
Hamas and the Environment
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 examines the environmentalism of Hamas. The chapter first describes Hamas’s general perspective on the environment, particularly the religious significance of Palestine. Moreover, it details the group’s understanding of water issues that have serious political implications in the region. Next, the chapter probes Hamas’ understanding of trees, animals, pollution and energy. Finally, it analyses whether Hamas’s environmental policy is based on religion or politics.
Conclusions
Authors: Karagiannis Emmanuel
Published: September 2023

The Conclusion summarises the main findings and sets out some concluding points about political Islam and Islamist environmentalism in the Middle East and beyond. It emphasises the adaptive and constantly changing character of contemporary Islamism. Finally, the Conclusion stresses the technocratic approach of Islamists vis-à-vis the environment which ignores the unity of religion and science.
Civil Strife at Athens, 404–403
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

Democracy at Athens fell in autumn 404 after the defeat of the city at the hands of Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War. Democracy was replaced with an oligarchic junta of thirty men, known in tradition simply as ‘The Thirty’. The oligarchic interlude lasted eight months and was replaced by democracy in late summer 403. The explanation of democracy’s fall and subsequent restoration lies in the question of authority: should authority lie with the magistrate or with the lawcourt? Because the courts had discredited themselves under Cleon, the Thirty argued for their suppression and the rise of unaccountable government. The abuse of power by the Thirty, in turn, led to the restoration of the rule of law through the authority of the courts and the accountability of magistrates. This was only possible if mechanisms were put in place to ensure that the courts would adhere to legal principle and would not be abused as venues for political feuding.
Oaths and Covenants
Authors: Joyce Christopher J.
Published: September 2023

The overthrow of the Thirty was followed by the restoration of democracy and the rule of law. The covenants of reconciliation were sworn into effect on 12 Boedromion 403. The amnesty treaty counterbalanced tradition with innovation and blocked vexatious litigation in the courts by giving, with stated exceptions, legal protection to all who had committed offences in the time of oligarchy, to prevent the city descending into renewed civil conflict. The clause me mnesikakein was one of many and should not be regarded as a mere formality which sealed the others. The overriding aim of the Amnesty was to grant protection to those who otherwise would have had the most to lose.
Born Radical. Then What Happened?
Authors: Caraus Tamara
Published: September 2023

This chapter shows that cosmopolitanism of dissent reiterates the first cosmopolitan stance of the Ancient Cynics. Through a sustained critique of every aspect of life, guided by the principle 'Alter the value of currency!', the Cynics unveiled the roots of all conventions and of the polis itself as the ultimate convention. The Cynics’ radical cosmopolitics is ‘forgotten’ in the histories of cosmopolitanism that usually start with the Stoics’ concentric circles of allegiances and duties. By examining Cicero’s De Officis, the chapter shows how cosmopolitanism as exchange (and expansion) was born, a notion developed further in the intellectual exchanges of the Enlightenment and in the 'renaissance' of cosmopolitan theory after the Cold War. Although the initial radicalism was tamed in the subsequent affirmations, it remained in the internal dynamic of a cosmopolitan stance, because the antagonistic interaction between the ideal cosmos and the current order of the polis is the ontological template of every cosmopolitan theory.
“He’d Like to be Savior of the National Pastime”: Bill Clinton and the 1994–1995 Baseball Strike
Authors: Birkett Chris
Published: September 2023

Over the winter of 1994–95, Bill Clinton became the first president to get publicly involved in a labor dispute in sport when he attempted to end the strike in baseball which had seen the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years. For many Americans this bitter stand-off between Major League Baseball owners and players symbolized a more general national malaise – one of a fractured country beset by social anxiety, conflict, and the depletion of common ideals in the face of irreconcilable political polarization. In his efforts to bring peace to baseball’s labor wars, Clinton performed as both a politically motivated actor keen to re-invigorate his struggling administration, and as civil religious leader with a duty to “get baseball back for the people” and so preserve the game for future generations. Clinton’s failure to broker a deal exposed the powerlessness of the presidency to negotiate the inherent tension between professional baseball as a capitalist enterprise and the national pastime as a mythical symbol of American ideals. It also revealed that connections between the presidency and sports do not necessarily result in mutually beneficial outcomes – that successful engagements with sports are contingent upon factors beyond presidential control.
Fit to Govern? The Presidency, Running, and Perceptions of Strength
Authors: Rees Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

Since Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy of the “strenuous life,” the notion of physical fitness has been an underlying factor in public perceptions of the presidency. However, with the boom of running as an activity in the 1970s, presidents in the latter half of the twentieth century have been scrutinized in the media for their regimens. This chapter argues that there is a significant link in the public consciousness between the president’s ability to run physically, and his ability to run the country, which is particularly influenced by the press. Three sections form the core of this chapter: struggling, striving, and campaigning. Struggling presidents include Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush; coverage of these presidents running respectively became emblematic of the era of malaise and issues plaguing the presidency. In contrast, for the striving presidents – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – running instead was an outward display of strength of character and the embodiment of the health of the nation during eventful administrations. Finally, running as an activity became significant on the campaign trail, particularly in the 1992 race, as a means of canvassing and developing the public personae of the candidates.
Emissaries of Toughness: How Coaches Teamed with U.S. Presidents to Politicize College Football during the Cold War
Authors: McGregor Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon embraced college football during the Cold War to advance their own political agendas. It traces the relationship between college football and the presidency through their friendships with college football leaders and analyzes how they contributed to the politization of the sport. Kennedy used college football to help bolster his fitness program when he tapped the University of Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson to direct his President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Wilkinson, who maintained relationships with presidents from both parties during his career, came to symbolize the politicization of the sport and how presidents increasingly sought public figures to improve their image. During Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Wilkinson played a key role in Nixon’s youth outreach efforts and later as a special consultant. Nixon befriended many other coaches, including Woody Hayes, who he eulogized in 1987, as he sought to connect the sport’s toughness with his “Law and Order” politics. By the end of the Cold War, college football had become solidly conservative thanks in large part to these relationships.