bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
This Room is My Castle of Quiet: The Collaborations of Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford
Authors: Danks Adrian
Published: September 2017

Adrian Danks points out that, although it is relatively common to examine the collaborations between various actors and directors working in the 1950s Western – John Wayne/John Ford, James Stewart/Anthony Mann, etc. – the series of three varied films made by Daves and Glenn Ford between 1956 and 1958 – Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy – have seldom attracted attention. While at least one of these films, 3:10 to Yuma, has been championed in terms of Daves’ spatially and tonally expressive direction and of Ford’s morally ambiguous but effortlessly genial characterisation, this extraordinary trio of films have seldom been examined in relation to one another. Danks reads the collaboration between Ford and Daves as symptomatic of the work of both actor and director, and their sympathetic, subtle, ‘benevolent’, and relatively unadorned approach to various subjects and character types. In the process, he helps pinpoint some of the key reasons why both of these important but workaday figures have remained relatively underestimated and why they need to be brought to the forefront of a more complex understanding of the variations possible in the ‘classical’ Western.
Introduction
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

The introduction sets the historiographical context for the book. It explains how the book’s arguments relate to the fields of Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history, and explores the concept of legal pluralism. It also provides an overview of the sources used in this study.
Royal justice: The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 3 examines in detail two institutions which represented the direct involvement of the empire’s executive authorities in the mundane administration of justice: the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn (Imperial Council) and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī (Ottoman governor’s tribunal). The chapter demonstrates considerable overlap in the jurisdictions and caseloads of these institutions and the sharīʿa courts. It then seeks to understand the relationship between these institutions by focusing on the role of particular officials within them. In particular, it explores the role of the qāḍī, arguing that the qāḍī’s essential role was the determination of facts through the application of procedure, and that he performed this role within or on behalf of all of these institutions. Rather than representing an alternative form of justice, in line with some theories of maẓālim and siyāsa, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī shared the same essential attitude towards evidence and proof as the sharīʿa courts.
The privatization of justice: dispute resolution as a domain of political competition
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 explores how Cairo’s political notables began to resolve disputes among the city’s population during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, encroaching on the jurisdictions of long-established Ottoman legal institutions. This development saw justice become enmeshed in the patron-client networks and factional antagonism of Cairo’s politics. Using contemporary chronicles, the chapter also explores what eighteenth-century Cairenes thought of their city’s legal system. It shows that in some cases, chroniclers were critical of the official courts’ passivity and cautious adherence to procedure, and saw powerful men using intelligence, cunning and violence to investigate wrongdoing as a superior guarantee of justice.
A Monument in Ruins: Douglas Gordon, Screen Archaeology and the Drive-in
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

Cinema’s 1990s centenary brought declarations of its demise amid the internet and digital filmmaking and viewing. Throughout this period Douglas Gordon embarked on a reconsideration—part autopsy, part archaeological dig—of film as a medium and social practice. Projecting images appropriated from amateur films and Hollywood classics, Gordon created exhibition environments that emphasized the screen as an active component by positioning it as a sometimes fragile, sometimes monumental object of presentation. This chapter considers multiple works by Gordon, culminating with close examination of 5 Year Drive-By, an installation situated like an abandoned drive-in in the California desert in 2001. By revisiting the drive-in as commercial cinema’s attempt to bring film and car culture together with political and historical narratives of landscape and conquest, the chapter argues that 5 Year Drive-By can function as both geological medium and archaeological ruin. As such, it aligns popular modes of cinema with discussions of the twentieth-first-century legacy of modernity.
The Taming of Highland Masculinity: Interpersonal Violence and Shifting Codes of Manhood, c. 1760–1840
Authors: Abrams Lynn
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that male interpersonal violence provides a way in which divergent, conflicting and shifting codes of manliness in Scottish society can be discerned. Historians of masculinity have argued that the eighteenth century saw a change in the model of manhood as male interpersonal violence in defence of honour and reputation was replaced by the advocacy of self-governance and recourse to the law. Using court records of violent assault, this chapter focusses on a type of modernizing society – the Scottish Highlands 1760-1840 - in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superceded by new cultural norms. An earlier association of masculinity with interpersonal violence in the Highlands was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities
Making a Manly Impression: The Image of Kingship on Scottish Royal Seals of the High Middle Ages
Authors: Neville Cynthia J.
Published: September 2017

A central aspect of the growing sophistication of government in thirteenth-century Scotland was the crown’s use of written deeds authenticated with the great seal as instruments through which to express the royal will. This chapter, using sigillography (the study of seals) argues that over the course of the high and later Middle Ages the rulers of Scotland demonstrated a keen interest in the images, words and symbols that appeared on their great seals, encoding into these objects a complex and constantly evolving series of messages about their conceptualisation of kingship. The decorated surface of the seal and its accompanying Latin-language legend offered the kings a unique medium through which to project powerful images of Scottish identity, masculinity and power.
Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Barclay Katie
Published: September 2017

Begging letters provide a rich source for historians of the poor, who have used them to explore their lives, constructions of identity, and regional variation in charitable giving. The rhetoric of benevolence and gratitude that pervades them, however, has often been dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ or as interfering with our access to the words of the poor. This chapter explores how Scottish beggars used the language of gratitude in their letters to patrons, contributing to both a history of letter-writing and masculinity amongst the poor. It highlights the way that an emotional-charitable language placed patron and client in a hierarchical social relationship that brought benefits to both parties. It argues that, rather than being an unmanly act, begging could provide space for poor or subordinate men to articulate their masculine identities within a society where social hierarchies were normal and understood as key to social order.
A Wartime Family Romance: Narratives of Masculinity and Intimacy during World War Two
Authors: Abrams Lynn
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.
Social Control and Masculinity in Early Modern Scotland: Expectations and Behaviour in a Lowland Parish
Authors: Cornell Harriet
Published: September 2017

The experience of everyday life in early modern Scotland was conditioned by established conventions of patriarchy. The Calvinist reformation of 1560 brought a new era of social control, where the behaviour of men and women was subject to regulation and censure by an increasingly sophisticated network of secular and ecclesiastical courts. This chapter considers how male experiences of social control were far from homogeneous in the hands of this localised administration of state authority and power. Instead, accepted hierarchies based on socio-economic status and age were central influencers, meaning not only that different men experienced authority in different ways, but that experiences were subject to change over the course of the life cycle.
A ‘Polite and Commercial People’? Masculinity and Economic Violence in Scotland, 1700–60
Authors: Paul Tawny
Published: September 2017

Classical economic theory suggests that commerce played a central role in the growth of politeness and the decline of violence. This chapter complicates commerce’s role in the civilising process by exploring economic violence in eighteenth century Scotland. Economic violence is defined as constituting a range of physical and non-physical violent acts carried out against persons and property, and economic actions interpreted as forms of violence. Drawing examples from legal records and the debtors’ prison, it considers the intersections between masculinity, economy and interpersonal violence, structured particularly around notions of honour. It argues that violence played a functional role within eighteenth-century Scottish commerce, where it supported claims to masculine gender identity. Violence was not only the property of the crowd, used to defend customary rights, but was deployed by a range of different men, including the commercial middling sorts.
Seeing with the Hands
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

The ‘man born blind restored to light’ was one of the foundational myths of the Enlightenment, according to Foucault. With ophthalmic surgery in its infancy, the fascination by the sighted with blindness and what the blind might ‘see’ after sight restoration remained largely speculative. Was being blind, as Descartes once remarked, like ‘seeing with the hands’? Did evidence from early cataract operations begin to resolve epistemological debates about the relationship between vision and touch in the newly sighted, such as the famous ‘Molyneux Question’ posed by William Molyneux to John Locke? More recently, how have autobiographical accounts of blind and vision impaired writers and poets advanced the sighted public’s understanding of blind subjectivity?
Through an unfolding historical, philosophical and literary narrative that includes Locke, Molyneux and Berkeley in Britain, and Diderot, Voltaire and Buffon in France, this book explores how the Molyneux Question and its aftermath has influenced attitudes towards blindness by the sighted, and sensory substitution technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.
Contemporary Complex Cinema
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including the relation to recent developments in a techno-economical context, as well as this changing context’s impact on modes of viewing. This introductory chapter also briefly reviews existing studies on taxonomies that have so far offered formal-structural approaches to narrative complexity.
Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 2 focuses on a cognitive approach as a pertinent method to address complex narratives’ ‘difficult’ viewing experiences. As it argues, complexity does not only lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaning-making routines. Noticing that some films pose more conspicuous impediments to sense-making efforts than others, this chapter differentiates movies in regard to their relative complexity in cognitive terms – that is, their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers. The cognitive approach will lead to reconsider the classificatory accuracy of existing concepts, such as the umbrella term of puzzle film. From there on, the chapter proposes more refined categories within the overarching division of narrative complexity, aiming to discern between different types of film that offer various degrees of complexity.
Neorealist Narratives
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, according to the author, distinguishes the postwar period. As a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, neorealism has especially appealed to filmmakers who aimed at telling stories about ordinary, often poverty-stricken people, despite insufficient budgets. The chapter argues that the neorealist mode of production travelled across national and even continental borders in the postwar era, reaching developing film countries and their urban centres in India, Brazil or Mexico, thus becoming one of the very first truly global film or ‘world cinema’ styles. The chapter provides a close reading of Los Olvidados (Buñuel 1950), a fictional story of a boy’s struggle for motherly love in a Mexico City slum. It asks in what way it effectively represents a variety of postwar films that have been, to a larger or lesser extent, influenced by Italian neorealism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of films that have, just like Los Olvidados, employed the narrative perspective of abandoned or homeless street children – a narrative device that is still often employed today (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire).
Jimmy Carter and the Anglo-American 'Special Relationship'
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

This books draws on a wealth of recently declassified documents to reveal that relations between Britain and the United States were riven by far more antagonism than is generally believed. Jimmy Carter the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ reveals that even the special intelligence and nuclear relationships shared between London and Washington were not immune from the high level tension. Thomas Robb explores the competitive nature of the relationship during Carter’s presidency and provides an original interpretation to how both countries dealt with the breakdown of superpower détente; the subject of international human rights promotions and the Anglo-American nuclear and intelligence relationship.
Introduction
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

In Britain we know how much we owe to America. We understand how close our countries are. America’s cause is, and always will be, our cause.1

We share a lot in common. Although our cars, or our automobiles, may drive on opposite sides of the highway, our people generally move in the same direction. And we share, or at least attempt to share, a common language. Sometimes we don’t succeed. But in the most important things, we do see issues and ideas, challenges, hopes, and expectations in the same way....
Thatcher Comes to Power
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

Margaret Thatcher’s coming to power threatened to bring with a radically different British foreign policy. In her public speeches prior to assuming office she had spoken about how superpower détente was akin to a policy of appeasement and should be abandoned. Her Conservative Party manifesto of 1979 hinted that the Anglo-American agreement on Rhodesia should be dropped and the Salisbury Accords accepted as a basis of a political solution in Rhodesia. Washington was troubled by Thatcher’s likely foreign policy trajectory. This chapter explores this first crucial year of Thatcher’s premiership and her handling of the Anglo-American relationship.
The End of Détente
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

With the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, superpower détente broke down. With it came a hardening of U.S. foreign policy towards Moscow. Efforts to implement a series of sanctions against Moscow are explored within this chapter and highlights how London decided to protect its narrow commercial interests against the wishes of Washington. This chapter also surveys Anglo-American cooperation and competition as it pertained to the boycott of the 1980 summer Olympic games, the Iranian hostage situation and the Trident nuclear weapons agreement between London and Washington.
Introduction
Authors: Aitken Ian , Deprez Camille
Published: September 2017

The Introduction sets out an overview of the book and summaries of the individual chapters in the book. In addition, the Introduction also provides a justification for the geographical scope and time frame of the book, attempts to arrive at a definition of the colonial documentary film, and seeks to establish and analyse the encounter between colonialism and documentary cinema in South and South-East Asia. In addition, the Introduction also attempts to reassess current understandings of the colonial documentary film.
The People’s Action Party Government of Singapore and Berita Singapura
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: September 2017

In his chapter on the Singaporean official newsreel series Berita Singapura (1963-1969), Ian Aitken explores how this film series embodied and propagated the ideas of the Singapore People’s Action Party (PAP), and those of the Party’s leader, Lee Kuan Yew. Aitken provides an outline of the political context involving Britain, Malaya and Singapore which led to the ascendancy of the PAP, and also relates the films of Berita Singapura to particular key PAP policies, such as housing and education. Aitken also shows how the films presented the authoritarian capitalist agenda of the PAP within a visual rhetoric of ‘modernisation’, and describes tensions which arose between the film producers, who were European expatriates, and the authoritarian and interventionist PAP leadership.
Two Films and a Coronation: The Containment of Islam in Flores in the 1920s
Authors: Ray Sandeep
Published: September 2017

In his chapter, Sandeep Ray explores two films shot in 1926 in the under-studied region of Flores in eastern Indonesia by a Dutch catholic priest turned film-maker. In addition to setting out the more predictable propaganda deployed by these evangelical films in a local context of fierce confrontation between Catholics and the Muslims to gain religious control over the native population of Flores, and against the larger background of Dutch colonial expansion, Ray also argues that this only surviving visual record of the events that took place provides a unique source of insight into the modes of evangelism deployed in the area, as well as into details of local customs and mores.
Screening the Revolution in Rural Vietnam: Guerrilla Cinema Across the Mekong Delta
Authors: Win Thong
Published: September 2017

In his chapter on guerrilla film-making and exhibition in colonised Vietnam, Thong Win explores how underground documentary film practices informed Vietnamese communist ideology and established support for the revolutionary cause in rural areas of the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam during the First Indochina War against France (1946-1954), and, after 1948. Win unravels the ways in which these alternative film practices dictated by the Viet Minh in Hanoi established a counter-model to French colonial film-making and policy in Vietnam, and how they were also aimed at unifying the diversified regions of the country into an idealised coherent pro-revolutionary entity.
Ho Chi Minh in France: An Early Independence Newsreel
Authors: Wilson Dean
Published: September 2017

Dean Wilson continues the investigation of colonial Vietnam by focusing on the film Ho Chi Minh in France (dir. Mai Thu, Tan Viet, 1946). This documentary was produced by two Vietnamese émigrés living in France and combined three short newsreels about nationalist political leader Ho Chi Minh’s visit to France on the eve of the First Indochina War, a war which eventually led to the withdrawal of French colonisers from Vietnam in 1954. By presenting the social and film historical context in which the film was produced, Wilson demonstrates how this first indigenous attempt in documentary film-making created a strong visual and ideological connection between political leader Ho and the Vietnamese, projected the possibility of an independent Vietnam to the Vietnamese audience, and thus served the project of decolonisation and independence.
Imagining the Arabs
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

Who are the Arabs? When did people begin calling themselves Arabs? And what was the Arabs’ role in the rise of Islam? Investigating these core questions about Arab identity and history by marshalling the widest array of Arabic sources employed hitherto, and by interpreting the evidence with the aid of theories of identity and ethnicity, Imagining the Arabs proposes new answers to the riddle of Arab origins and fundamental reinterpretations of early Islamic history. It is revealed that the time-honoured stereotypes which depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin are entirely misleading because the essence of Arab identity was in fact devised by Muslims during the first centuries of Islam. Arab identity emerged and evolved as groups imagined new notions of community to suit the radically changing circumstances of life in the early Caliphate. The idea of ‘the Arab’ was a device which Muslims utilised to articulate their communal identity, to negotiate post-Conquest power relations, and to explain the rise of Islam. Over Islam’s first four centuries, political elites, genealogists, poetry collectors, historians and grammarians all participated in a vibrant process of imagining and re-imagining Arab identity and history, and the sum of their works established a powerful tradition that influences Middle Eastern communities to the present day.
Arabness from the Qur’an to an Ethnos
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

Pursuing the references to ‘Arabs’ in the Islamic-era poetry examined in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the processes by which Arab identity developed as a new form of community in early Islam. Analysis begins with the Qur’an, the first extant text to use the word ʿarabī to describe itself. It is revealed that the Qur’an’s Arabness is not a marker of ethnic identity, but it does mark key shifts which were amplified by new social processes following the Muslim Conquests. Employing models of ethnogenesis to interpret early Islam, this chapter demonstrates how the spread of Muslim communities and the centralisation of the Caliphate fostered an environment conducive to rethinking identities. The new social processes prompted early Muslims to experiment with various terms to define their community, and ‘Arab’ gradually gained traction during the later Umayyad period. The rise of Arabness as an ethnic identity thus closely intertwines with the maturation of Muslim community, but conflicting social pressures and imperfect communal cohesion meant that Umayyad-era Arab identity developed very unevenly in this formative period.
Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

Cosmopolitan ideals and pluralist tendencies have been employed creatively and adapted carefully by Muslim individuals, societies, and institutions in modern Southeast Asia to produce the necessary contexts for mutual tolerance and shared respect between and within different groups in society. Organised around six key themes that interweave the connected histories of three countries in Southeast Asia — Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia — this book shows the ways in which historical actors have promoted better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the region. Case studies from across these countries of the Malay world take in the rise of the network society in the region in the 1970s up until the early 21st century, providing a panoramic view of Muslim cosmopolitan practices, outlook, and visions in the region.
Everyday Cosmopolitanism in the Marketplace
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at spaces where societal actors interact as they buy and sell all sorts of everyday products and services. In the marketplace, where economic activities take place, Muslims and non-Muslims speak, exchange, and bargain with one another and thereby sustain peaceful relationships. This chapter looks back at history and explores how Southeast Asia developed its reputation of being a region of trading hubs and settlements for diverse communities. Such historical legacies along with the built character of marketplaces in Penang and Kelantan, for example, set the stage for fluid interactions between businessmen, traders, and customers, and between Muslims and non-Muslims, each learning the subtleties of their respective cultures while appreciating one another's differences and commonalities alike.
Hijabis as Purveyors of Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that women have contributed extensively to the promotion of gender cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia. It showcases hijab activists as well as female intellectuals and their interrogation of the excesses of Western feminism. These women have questioned the insularity of a segment of the Southeast Asian community and have courageously campaigned for their inclusion in workplaces that are prejudiced against women who wear headscarves. In campaigning for the hijab and presenting the modesty of Muslim women in innovative ways and styles, these women have revolutionised the concept of modesty in modern societies while reformulating commonplace understandings of gender justice in Muslim Southeast Asia.
Constricting Cosmopolitanism: Secular States in Muslim Southeast Asia
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks back at the history of Southeast Asian Muslim states prior to the advent of secular modernity. It proposes that the Muslim polities that existed in Southeast Asia before the arrival of European colonialism displayed a high degree of inclusivity and encouraged Muslim cosmopolitanism in the region. The chapter then considers the modern period, which saw the weakening and breaking down of local polities under colonial rule. Moving on to the postcolonial period, a time of intense struggles between secular states and Muslim cosmopolitans across Southeast Asia, the chapter contends that the three states that this book considers — Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia — have displayed differing stances towards Muslim cosmopolitanism.
Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This book offers an interpretation of the first 500 years of history writing as a moral-didactic genre, and argues that this does not invalidate ancient Greek historiography as history. In Part I, it offers a thorough analysis of the moralising techniques and moral-didactic lessons of Polybius and Diodorus Siculus and then analyses the fragments of a range of less well-preserved Hellenistic works of historiography (Timaeus, Phylarchus, Duris, Hieronymus, Agatharchides, and Posidonius) to see how far it is possible to trace similar techniques and lessons in these works. In Part II, the roots of Hellenistic historiographical moralising are traced in the Classical works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and the fragments of the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus, and Theopompus. The book concludes that the Greek genre of historiography was moral-didactic from its inception, like most of the Classical Greek literary genres, and that this purpose became explicit and its techniques formalised in Hellenistic times, but that neither the writers nor the readers of the genre believed this moral-didactic purpose to be detrimental to the truth-value of historiography. Ancient historiography was history writing with an agenda: it was Moral History (in the same way that some modern historiography can be defined as, say, Feminist History or Postcolonial History), but it was still History.
Herodotus
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the moralising techniques and moral lessons of Herodotus. Using the moralising techniques found and analysed in Polybius and Diodorus as its point of departure, it discovers that Herodotus uses a root version of many of the techniques found in more developed form in the two Hellenistic historiographers, but that he also moralises on the macro-plane by means of a structure of subtly repeating patterns. In terms of moral lessons, the chapter concludes that Herodotus is more interested in the relationship between human beings and superhuman forces than in relationships between human beings, and that the justice exercised by his superhuman forces is not always obvious to his human actors. His over-all moral lesson is one of caution and moderation, and it is less clear-cut than the moral messages of his Hellenistic successors.
The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015)
Authors: Lawrence John Shelton , Jewett Robert
Published: September 2017

If one has any doubts about film's ability to function as a both a barometer and a catalyst of national discourse one only needs to turn to Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, here discussed by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in the opening chapter of the volume. Lawrence and Jewett return to the terrain of their ground-breaking and influential works on the relationship between American film and culture, The American Monomyth (1988) and The Myth of the American Superhero (2002), in "The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015)" in which they explore how far Eastwood's film can be regarded as reaffirming the tropes of heroic narratives about American wars, or whether it offers a challenge to them. Their lucid and multi-layered engagement with the figure of Chris Kyle, both the person and the film's vivid incarnation of him, examines the reasons why the film has resonated so profoundly with vast sections of the American public to the extent that it was not only able to earn more money at the domestic box office than every single war film set in Iraq and Afghanistan before it combined, but as of writing is now the most financially successful American war film ever made. More complicated than many gave it credit for American Sniper marks a shift in how the 'War on Terror' has come to be remembered and creates a very different vision of the conflict compared to films like Battle for Haditha (2007) and Redacted (2007). It is arguably part of a conscious effort to reframe the events of the Iraq War and reclaim the conflict in the national imaginary in a very similar way to the process in which Hollywood engaged with the Vietnam War in films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986) and more recently We Were Soldiers (2002). The cumulative effect of these portrayals, both of the Vietnam War and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the depiction of the American soldier as the primary victim of their respective conflicts, not, as one might expect, the Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghanistanis who died and were wounded in their hundreds and thousands, if not millions.
Responding to Realities or Telling the Same Old Story? Mixing Real-world and Mythic Resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Authors: King Geoff
Published: September 2017

In Chapter Two "Responding to realities or telling the same old story? Mixing real-world and mythic resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)" Geoff King also explores the specificity of post-9/11 American film by situating his two case studies in a rich cultural and historical landscape. As he argued in his seminal Spectacular Visions: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000), King maintains than many American films can be read as simultaneously of their time and as a part of the American mythological tradition. While the Western genre is long gone as a cultural force, traces of its DNA remains embodied in many contemporary American films, and both The Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate the efficacy of the cinematic medium to embody cultural understandings of the 'War on Terror' era at the same time as they evoke the tropes of the American frontier narrative, despite being set very firmly in the contemporary Middle East. Like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty proved to be one of the most culturally resonant films of the period, but King largely sidesteps the well-travelled debate about whether the film endorses torture or not in favour of a detailed reading of how Bigelow's affectual drama (and also Peter Berg's The Kingdom) imposes fictional or mythic-ideological frameworks onto their real-world narratives (see Westwell, McSweeney, Chaudhuri).
Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the ‘War on Terror’ in Hollywood Film
Authors: Knee Adam
Published: September 2017

Adam Knee continues this discussion of the action/adventure genre in Chapter Seven, "Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the 'War on Terror' in Hollywood Film", offering a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity and agency in two Hollywood films, Unstoppable (2010) and Source Code (2011), which exhibit striking similarities at a range of levels, from their narratives to deeper structures of gendered character function, theme, and geo-political perspective that, he contends, are a manifestation of distinctly post-9/11 American concerns. Like Vincent M. Gaine's chapter on James Bond, Knee analyses both the variations inherent in the genre in the wake of 9/11 and the consistencies of the parameters of American mainstream film, and, more specifically, a developing conceptualization of modes of disciplined masculinity necessitated by the nation’s 'War on Terror' narrative. Knee then concludes with a comparative analysis of a pre-9/11 film and its post-9/11 remake in which these parameters are brought to the fore: the original Paul Verhoeven RoboCop (1987) and RoboCop (2014) directed by José Padilha.
Nowhere Left to Zone in Children of Men (2006)
Authors: Redmond Sean
Published: September 2017

In Chapter Fourteen Redmond contends that Alfonso Cuarón's richly symbolic dystopian drama Children of Men is a film haunted by the dread of both the traumatic diegetic incident that leads to the film's storyline (women not being able to conceive children for some unexplained reason) and the events of 9/11, which leaves its mark on the film's narrative and imagery in a range of ways.
Return Statements
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

Gregg Lambert examines the internal relationship between the return of overtly religious themes in contemporary philosophy over the past decade and another sense of the ‘post-secular’ turn that has been taking place globally following the events of 9/11. He asks how these two ‘returns to religion’ can be taking place simultaneously without appearing as the same horizon of the West viewed from opposing perspectives of the globe? Through a series of reflections on the ‘return statements’ performed by such contemporary philosophers as Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Lambert discovers the unique sense of the term ‘religion’ that belongs exclusively to our contemporary perspective - a sense whose bio-political meaning is both unprecedented and foreboding.
tacitly, the caress, in a word, the Christian body”
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement takes up Jacques Derrida’s seminal work on the themes of the body and touching in the philosophy of Jean Luc Nancy. It explores the evolution of post-phenomenological and Christian themes and Derrida’s commentary.
Semiramis' Legacy
Authors: Stronk Jan
Published: September 2017

In Semiramis’ Legacy, the history of Persia (in its widest sense) is followed as it has been described by the Greek author Diodorus of Sicily (first century bc) as a part of his Historical Library. Diodorus starts his description with the legendary Queen Semiramis, an Assyrian queen who was said to also have ruled ancient Persia and ends it with the situation in his own days. This makes it the fullest description of ancient Persian history we have from antiquity, subsequently focusing on the vicissitudes of Assyrians (from their legendary rulers Ninus and Semiramis onward) and their direct successors, the Medes and Chaldeans, then the Achaemenid kings, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and the arrival of Rome in the Ancient Near East. Semiramis’ Legacy is the first complete translation of Diodorus entirely focused on the historiography of Persia (apart from the translation of his whole work in the Loeb Classical Library). Different from that edition, this book has been provided with an array of comments to give the reader the maximum of background information. As such, this study, therefore, contains as first the selected comprehensive account of ‘Ancient Persian History’, its contacts, and its context as seen by a relatively well informed Greek.
Alexander the Great Defeats Darius III
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

After discussing the rise to power of Darius III, Diodorus extensively relates the first stages of the war between Alexander III the Great of Macedon and Darius III up to the Battle of Gaugamela. Subsequently Alexander’s crossing into Asia and his performance at Troy, the Battle of the Granicus and its aftermath, the Battle of Issus, the siege of Tyre, the invasion of Egypt, and the Battle of Gaugamela come to the fore, followed by Alexander’s entry into Persepolis and the fate of this city.
Introduction
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter outlines the theoretical approach with which this volume develops a Marxian, psychoanalytic, and schizoanalytic programme. The foundations for this programme is an overall engagement with the science-fictional thought of Deleuze, Baudrillard, and other noted intellectuals who have contributed to science fiction (SF) studies, and the grounds for this engagement is called ‘becoming-Deleuzian’, the transition from late capitalism to biocapitalism, and their cognate expressions, cyberpunk and biopunk. After establishing how Deleuze and Baudrillard will underpin a Marxian analysis of SF, the chapter then goes on to identify the parameters of their contributions to Marxism, and their relationship to SF.
Viddy and Slooshy
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at how the assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. It takes up Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), a meditation on control over language, expression, and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, through the ‘Ludovico technique’ — an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Though Deleuze never cited Burgess, he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. Hence, this chapter shows how Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allows us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations.
Biocapitalism and Schizophrenia
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's ‘becoming-animal’. Deleuze and Guattari's animal is one of the specific concepts that attracted Baudrillard's critical attention. His ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ developed a sustained critique of their position. Here, the chapter takes Deleuze and Guattari's thesis that there are three animals — Oedipal, State, and demonic; and far from being a general taxonomy, they are ontological categories defined by the intertwinement of desire, technoscientific experimentation, and investments of capital. This chapter thus establishes the organising theme — contagion. In so doing, it seeks to show how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Baudrillard and SF acquire a new relevance in biocapitalism.
Organic (De)Composition of Biocapital
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the second, constitutive pole of biopower, simultaneously transitioning from the second- to third-order simulacrum: simulation. Exemplary of this pole and order is Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005) as well as its 2010 film version directed by Mark Romanek — both versions develop their biopolitical themes differently. Regardless, Never Let Me Go imagines an alternative England in the late 1990s in which a cloned population is born and reared for the sole purpose of having their organs harvested for therapeutic use by humans, or ‘normals’. From here, the chapter reveals the labour and surplus-value of ‘necrocapital’, the negative image of biocapital, and how the system itself cancels the difference between the dead and the living, and kills only to resurrect.
‘Dying to Live’: Remembering and Forgetting May Sinclair
Authors: Raitt Suzanne
Published: September 2017

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural.
However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.
Disembodying Desire: Ontological Fantasy, Libidinal Anxiety and the Erotics of Renunciation in May Sinclair
Authors: Pickrem Faye
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Sinclair’s writing through an analysis of desire, anxiety, and the process of subjectivization. I begin with markers of anxiety that haunt both Sinclair’s fiction and theory. These textual tics betray abhorrence, disgust, and even contempt for the body with respect to base carnality and the “unharnessed libido,” as well as an insistent need to corral and discipline the libido into what she deems to be a higher, sublimated form. I argue that the formulation of Sinclair’s theory of sublimation is necessitated by this underlying anxiety and the need to erase the body and the libido in their carnal, appetitive forms. Simultaneously, despite Sinclair’s loss of religious faith, her writing displays a profound uneasiness with the alienation and isolation of the individual in a Godless world. She attempts various substitutions to fill this void, ranging from sublimation to her theory of genius and a “poetics of celibacy” (Raitt), but despite this, the longing for unity internally and within a larger context remains.
Rather than channeling the libido into higher aims, I argue that Sinclairian assertions of sublimation fail. Sinclair’s ontological fantasy is revealed qua fantasy and remains performance rather than enactment, encapsulating symptoms of an ever-deferred, idealized desire.
Dolls and Dead Babies: Victorian Motherhood in May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean
Authors: Beyer Charlotte
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines representations of mothering, class, and maternal affect in May Sinclair’s 1922 novel Life and Death in Harriett Frean, paying particular attention to the critique of social constructions of motherhood articulated in the novel. The discussion focuses specifically on social and cultural constructions of femininity and class and the portrayal in Sinclair’s novel of mothering practices and the (in)visibility of maternal figures. As part of my investigation of Sinclair’s critique of the social construction of motherhood, I examine her portrayal of the maternal in relation to class and marital status. Here, my chapter focuses on what I see as Sinclair’s couched portrayal of the controversial practice of baby-farming. I argue that baby farming is implicitly referred to in Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean, through the figure of Harriett’s maid, Maggie, and the fate of her baby born outside wedlock. My chapter demonstrates that Sinclair’s portrayal of this topic foregrounds the hypocrisy at the heart of Victorian constructions of femininity and motherhood, and forms a central part of her critique of class and social inequality for women.
The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This book explores how Deleuze's thought was shaped by Lucretian atomism — a formative but often-ignored influence from ancient philosophy. More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Gilles Deleuze considers himself an apprentice to the history of philosophy. But scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Deleuze's encounter with Lucretius sparked a way of thinking that resonates throughout all his writings: from immanent ontology to affirmative ethics, from dynamic materialism to the generation of thought itself. Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, this book tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism.
Differentiation, Individuation, Dramatisation and Actualisation
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter shows how both of the ontological accounts discussed previously produce a physics of emergence and individuation. It argues that the processes of individuation that emerge from them are ways of solving such problems. What emerges is not simply more atoms but the unlimited varieties of colours, sights, sounds, and so on characterising our world. Filling in a lacuna in Lucretius' text with Deleuze's formulation of the process of genetic conditioning, the chapter reveals that the problematic status of the atomic and Deleuzean idea is simultaneously transcendent and immanent: the solution never completely resolves the problem, such that the problem is transcendent to the solution; and yet the very insolvability of the problem holds because the problem insists in the given solution.