bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contemporary Fabrication of Pasts and the Creation of New Identities?
Authors: Ludwig Carol , Wang Yi-Wen
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the selective usage of history, relics and practice to
reconstruct specific versions of the past. The open-air Beamish Museum
in Durham, UK and the historical theme parks in Hangzhou and Kaifeng,
China are used as comparative case studies to unpack first, how ‘heritage’
is conceptualised in each context, and second, how particular versions
of the past are selected, (re)invented, disseminated and consumed for
contemporary purposes. Set within a theoretical framework of ‘living
heritage’ and an analytical framework of the overlapping themes of
authenticity, identity and national pride, tourism and education, the
chapter examines the different ways in which the appropriation of cultural
heritage takes place at each site. In doing so, we draw attention to the
disparate interpretations of conservation practice and the idea of ‘living
heritage’ in the UK and China and debate their continued relevance in
the contemporary heritage discourse.
‘Ethnic Heritage’ on the New Frontier
Authors: O’Brien David , Brown Melissa Shani
Published: January 2021

This chapter aims to explore conceptually the commodification of ‘heritage’
in ‘ethnic’ tourist sites, focusing upon a so-called ‘traditional Kazakh village’
commercial tourist attraction near Tianchi Lake in the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region (XUAR). Taking an interdisciplinary approach which
combines ethnographic methods with theoretical analysis, we consider
tourism’s role in representing the cultural heritage of ethnic groups, but
simultaneously consider how such representations also tie into wider
social discourses in which ethnic groups are themselves represented
as ‘heritage’ in being associated with ‘traditional cultures’ rather than
modernity. Drawing on a ‘toolbox’ of theoretical concepts, we consider
the village as a depiction of idealised/idyllised ethnicity, how it functions
as a visual ‘sight/site’, and how Said’s concept of ‘imagined geographies’
might also encompass ‘imagined ethnicities’. We finish with a discussion
of this tourist site in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’.
Off the Human Track : Montaigne, Deleuze, and the Materialization of Philosophy
Authors: Melehy Hassan
Published: January 2021

Responding to long-standing criticisms that theoretical readings of early
modern literary texts are anachronistic, Melehy argues that past and
present phenomena may be understood alongside one another, while still
respecting both of them. He brings together Gilles Deleuze and Michel de
Montaigne through their shared interest in Lucretius. Melehy demonstrates
a Lucretian-inflected materialism in Montaigne’s Essais that implicitly
criticizes Platonic conceptions of the primacy of thought over matter, and
concomitant human claims to dominate the physical and natural world.
Melehy signals intersections between Montaigne’s dissident philosophy
and Deleuze’s materialist re-conception of the history of philosophy in
order to point out ways that the essayist’s work speaks to questions that
are also pertinent to present-day meditations on the environment.
Du Bartas Responding to Morton’s Milton : A Bodily Route to the Ecological Thought
Authors: Shiflett Stephanie
Published: January 2021

In The Ecological Thought (2012), Timothy Morton calls us to recognize the
interconnectedness of all things by rethinking the relationship between
cosmic and local. He points to Raphael’s speech to Adam in John Milton’s
Paradise Lost, which compares Earth to the infinite cosmos, as an example
of this ecological thought. An analogous cosmic viewpoint occurs in
Guillaume du Bartas’s La Sepmaine (1578). This hexameron both highlights
and complicates ecocriticism’s applicability to early modern texts. Whereas
Milton’s text responds to Morton’s call by scaling Earth in relation to the
macrocosmic, Du Bartas’s does the opposite: it scales the cosmic to the
hyperlocal—the observer’s body. This earlier work thus offers a converse
avenue by which to arrive at the ecological thought.
Equipment for Living with Hyperobjects : Proverbs in Ronsard’s Franciade
Authors: Addis Kat
Published: January 2021

In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body
of France is aligned with
This chapter calls attention to the proverbs that punctuate Ronsard’s
unfinished epic poem La Franciade. It proposes that, as literary forms, the
proverbs share the massively distributed, viscous and non-local qualities
of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects. In Ronsard’s 1572 epic the significance
of the aftermath of the Trojan war turns out to have extended far beyond
Virgil’s Aeneid and the foundation of Rome, to the foundation of Paris and
a yet-to-be-realized early modern French empire. La Franciade’s proverbs
challenge their readers to perceive and respond to these vastly expanded
relations, even as they progress through apparently local narrative time.,
On this basis, they might also equip their readers to engage with the
dissonant scales of ongoing global ecological crisis.
Renascent Nature in the Ruins: Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome
Authors: Velázquez Victor
Published: January 2021

Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) is traditionally read
as a text about human-made culture: the grandeur and ruin of Rome.
Nevertheless, through a moral condemnation of imperial Rome’s pride and
its violent origins, Du Bellay describes the effects Rome’s fall had on the
nonhuman landscape, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the relation between
humans and nonhuman nature. His juxtaposition of the destructiveness of
history’s blindness to nature with the landscape’s re-emergence from the
ruined remains of Roman culture yields images that challenge us to rethink
conservation in relation to a nature that changes over time, and which is
inseparable from culture and its ruins, while at the same time redefining
the traditional presupposition of what we categorize as ‘nature writing’.
Reading Olivier de Serres circa 1600: Between Economy and Ecology
Authors: Conley Tom
Published: January 2021

Formerly belonging to the literary canon of the French Renaissance,
and often associated with the ideology of a return to the country—even
to Maréchal Pétain’s Travail et Patrie—Olivier de Serres’s Théâtre
d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) remains a keystone in the
history of agronomy. Threading the wisdom of ancient authors through
his own experience, and staunchly Protestant in vision, Serres sets an
agenda for the country gentleman and farmer. At once art and science, it
deploys a limpid and vigorous style to argue for economy and productive
management of the earth. This essay contends that today, despite its legacy,
the work offers a vision and a savoury mode of writing vital to what we
can make of ecology in the early modern age.
Engines of Order
Authors: Rieder Bernhard
Published: January 2021

The chapter discusses central terms like ‘information’ and ‘order’, and
it proposes the concept of ‘engine’ to point toward the infrastructural
embeddings that have allowed techniques initially conceived for document
retrieval to become pervasive mediators in online environments. While
this book constitutes a humanistic exploration of technical substances
rather than their practical application, the chapter pays tribute to the fact
that the techniques under scrutiny have become prevalent in a specific
situation, in this world and not another. To this end, the chapter discusses
three critical trends: computerization, information overload, and social
diversification.
Calculating Networks: From Sociometry to PageRank
Authors: Rieder Bernhard
Published: January 2021

This chapter ventures into the field of network algorithms, using the
prehistory of Google’s PageRank algorithm to discuss yet another way to
think about information ordering. The chapter shows how algorithmic
ordering techniques exploit and integrate knowledge from areas other
than information retrieval – in particular the social sciences and citation
analysis – and demonstrates how the ‘politics’ of an algorithm can depend
on small variations that lead to radically different outcomes. The context
of web search means that the various techniques covered in the second
part of the book are brought together into a shared application space,
allowing for a more concrete return to earlier discussions of variation
and combination in software.
Braving the Waves with Francis Xavier
Authors: Strasser Ulrike
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the transoceanic voyage as a rite de passage into missionary manhood. Jesuits defined their brand of masculinity in the social microcosm of the ship, carrying out pastoral work in confinement and danger. If Ignatius was the Society’s inventor and Ur-father, Francis Xavier was its patron of mobility and a model for conduct for generations of missionaries, including many Germans. Hagiographical accounts and paintings of Xavier’s dramatic sea voyages emphasize his exemplary self-governance and ability to convert sinful fears into correct fear of God. The transoceanic ship was a site of embodied conditioning for those who followed in Xavier’s footsteps. When the missionaries reached foreign shores, they felt more ready than ever to convert and regulate indigenous others.
Writing Women’s Lives and Mapping Indigenous Spaces
Authors: Strasser Ulrike
Published: January 2021

This chapter centers on Jesuit knowledge production about the Pacific as an expression of missionary masculinity. It also explores the transformation of missionary encounters in media disseminating the Jesuit missions to readers, cognoscenti, and patrons of the Society of Jesus. The chapter discusses Lives (hagiographies) of indigenous women as exemplified by several vitae of Catarina de San Juan; cartography on the mission frontier as exemplified by Jesuit maps of (today’s) Caroline Islands in Oceania; and serial publications of missionary letters targeting the broader European Republic of Letters as exemplified by the serial missionary publication Der Neue Welt-Bott. These media of knowledge productions served to stabilize and assert the masculine self of their Jesuit authors at the expense of the feminine and the indigenous as well as to feed colonial ambitions.
Manly Missions
Authors: Strasser Ulrike
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the European origins of missionary masculinity and the affective reasons behind the phenomenal growth of the Jesuit order. It pays particular attention to the reimagined clerical masculinity that the founding father Ignatius of Loyola modeled for and generated in other men across Europe, notably in German lands. Two media of male mimesis are especially relevant: Ignatius’s so-called Autobiography and his Spiritual Exercises. Ignatian manhood lent itself to participation in European expansion due to its global orientation, high mobility, and emphasis on patri-filial ties. Jesuit masculinity made ample room for the feminine on the level of the symbolic and the affective but established firm boundaries with actual women through women’s de jure exclusion from the all-male Society of Jesus.
Missionary Men on the Move
Authors: Strasser Ulrike
Published: January 2021

This study of Jesuit masculinity as an emerging gender form in the early modern world is situated at the intersection of two intellectually vibrant fields: women’s/gender history and global/world history. The introduction explains this and the purpose of looking at an unusual cast of characters and places: German Jesuits, sea voyages, and Pacific islands. It also presents an argument for narrating global history as the history of masculinities, which requires the study of patriarchal power dynamics. The introduction further points to the importance of media, emotions, and mimesis in understanding missionary masculinity. The historical study of emotions offers a bridge between the realm of representations or ideal types of manhood and the realm of subjectivity or lived experiences of manhood.
A desire for the civic: Community cinemas and volunteer work
Authors: Vélez-Serna María A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains how film exhibition works as a civic amenity, by
examining the community cinema sector. Going back to the itinerant
beginnings of film exhibition, this chapter considers specific examples
of non-theatrical screening in the 16mm era in Scotland, as a vanguard
of ‘useful’ cinema and a point of reference for contemporary phenomena.
Focusing on exhibition activity in Scotland’s rural areas, this chapter
foregrounds the village hall or public hall as a screening space, and
discusses the organizational models that tend to produce it. The focus on
provision and access to first-run films challenges metropolitan perspectives
on pop-up exhibition which have tended to frame it in the context
of a saturated cultural market.
The Art of the Dissensual
Authors: Ma Ran
Published: January 2021

I situate ‘independent border-crossing cinema’ at the conjuncture of inter-Asia culture and media productions and the new waves of independent film movements across Asia since the late 1980s/early 1990s. Building upon the concept of translocality, and engaging with Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s framing of ‘minor transnationalism’ in tandem with other discussions on cinematic transnationalism, I have developed a theoretical framework to examine the dissensual potentiality of border-crossing filmmaking, particularly from the perspective of authorship. Japanese film collective Nihon Documentarist Union and their 1973 documentary Asia is One are examined to illustrate how an inter-Asia independent border-crossing cinema can be realigned historically. I have also paid attention to the politics of the international film festival network.
A Landscape Over There
Authors: Ma Ran
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines three border-crossing films by the Korean-Chinese (chaoxianzu) filmmaker Zhang Lu, namely Desert Dreams (2008), Dooman River (2010), and Scenery (2013). Using the conceptual framework of translocality, this study first explores how Zhang, as a translocal auteur, leveraged his multi-layered identities to engage the global film festival network. Not only does Zhang reinvent the border as a new scale to scrutinize the translocal movement of deterritorialized subjects and diasporic peoples, he also sheds light on the significance of place in identity formation and further examines the power geometry of globalization. As such, Zhang’s translocal filmmaking both intersects and challenges us to rethink Chinese independent filmmaking and Korean diasporic cinema.
Okinawan Dream Show
Authors: Ma Ran
Published: January 2021

This chapter deals with the oeuvre of Okinawan filmmaker Takamine Gō and video artist Yamashiro Chikako, with an emphasis on the former’s feature Queer Fish Lane (Hengyoro, 2016). Taking as a point of departure Gilles Deleuze’s framework of time-image, which underpins his explication of modern political cinema, this chapter examines how Takamine has experimented with textual strategies and forms of expression in configuring the ‘stratigraphic image’ apropos of Okinawa, wherein the boundaries between the actual and the virtual and between the real and the imagined are blurred. Meanwhile, I also turn to Yamashiro Chikako’s recent narrative-oriented video works that have been intricately connected to the legacies of the Battle of Okinawa and the current waves of protests against the US military bases on the islands.
Introduction
Authors: Ma Ran
Published: January 2021

Departing from the omnibus film project ‘Homeland and Diaspora’ (Yuanxiang yu lisan), this introduction outlines important questions to be explored throughout the book regarding what I have proposed as ‘independent border-crossing filmmaking’. I focus on a specific strand of auteurist independent cinema (and of image-making) emerging mainly since the late 1990s and early 2000s that project and articulate the experience of being mobile and displaced, being minority and diasporic, and/or journeying within and across various Southeast Asian and East Asian places. Detailed chapter summaries are also proffered.
Portrait of Louise de Marillac: Ensuring Resources for Moral Management
Authors: Peake Rose-Marie
Published: January 2021

The aim of the chapter is to put Louise de Marillac fully in the spotlight. It reassess her role in the success of the Company of the Daughters of Charity and examines her significance in the organization of the Company’s moral management activities. The first subchapter examines the role of Louise de Marillac’s family and dévote networks in the founding and funding of the Company of the Daughters of Charity. The following subchapters turn to the image of Louise de Marillac and study the ways her image as a living saint and a passive penitent of Vincent de Paul were critical in creating spiritual authority and an orthodox image of the Company as a whole.
A New Approach to Islamic Intellectual Tradition
Authors: Unsal Ali
Published: January 2021

This article attempts to explain the state of contemporary Islamic Intellectualism. Additionally, it proposes a set of abilities, attributes, and responsibilities that Muslim scholars should possess to develop Islamic Intellectualism. To achieve this, this article first provides an analysis of the history of Islamic civilization, and the role of traditional Islamic Intellectualism in pushing the civilization towards new heights in the realms of societal organization, politics, culture, economics, and theology. Islam, as such, had experienced its first renaissance from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Today, the Muslim world is in need of a second renaissance. This is the context in which this article situates the ‘standards’ to which contemporary Muslim intellectuals must strive towards.
The Function of Myths in the Justification of Muslim Extremism
Authors: Alatas Syed Farid
Published: January 2021

This chapter argues that the prevalence of certain myths in Islamic tradition
predispose some Muslims into adopting exclusivist ideas that define
their religious orientations in a manner that can be viewed sociologically
and even theologically as extremist. By taking the examples of the alleged
genocide of the Bani Qurayza Jewish tribe by Prophet Muhammad and
the alleged link between a Yemeni Jew to the founding of Shiite Islam, the
chapter shows that these myths have led to justification of anti-Semitism,
violence against non-Muslims, and sectarianism in the Muslim World.
The chapter concludes by calling for a more critical reading of Islamic
tradition.
Building Trust in the Democratic Process
Authors: Saleem Saleena
Published: January 2021

Post-Arab Spring events indicate that democratic openings can result in
power shifts from secular authoritarian regimes to mainstream Islamists,
contributing to a heightened secular-religious political polarization. This
chapter considers how Tunisia’s Islamists avoided this pitfall where other
post-Arab Spring countries failed. It argues that one key factor that helped
Tunisia’s democratic transition was the building of a minimum level of
trust during pre-Arab Spring interactions between non-regime secularists
and Islamists, rooted in the common understanding that democracy in
Tunisia was desired by all political participants. The Islamists’ willingness
to trust in the democratic process and to engage in consensus building
with secular political partners helped mediate the many contentious
conflicts that arose at critical junctures of Tunisia’s democratic transition.
Regaining the Islamic Centre?
Authors: Hamid Ahmad Fauzi Abdul
Published: January 2021

This chapter chronicles factors contributing to and implications arising
from declining levels of moderation in Muslim-majority societies in the
era of global Islamic resurgence by looking at the example of Malaysia, a
country that has been classified as a moderate Muslim country. Moderation
here is understood in terms of both the intellectual conception of Islamic
doctrine and its practical application as a way of life and of relating to others,
both Muslim and non-Muslim. It is argued that moderation has taken
a beating with the ascendancy of the Wahhabi-Salafi school of thought
by especially penetrating Islamic institutions with organic linkages to
the state, a phenomenon made worse by the prevalence of authoritarian
structures and paternalistic political cultures in post-colonial Muslim
societies. In Malaysia, Middle Eastern-influenced Salafization synergized
with ethnocentric aspects of local politics to produce a socio-political
environment largely antithetical to the country’s pluralist heritage.
The Laboratory of the Picturesque
Authors: Bainbridge William
Published: January 2021

This chapter reconstructs the context of the geographical discovery
of the dolomite rock and the position of the so-called Venetian Alps in
the geological debates of the first part of the nineteenth century. This
discovery will provide British travellers with a new picturesque toolkit
to appraise the geomorphology of the Dolomites in architectural terms
and promote them as a new tourist destination. The ingredients of that
promotion were neither entirely British nor entirely contained within
the experience of the Venetian Grand Tour. Before being ‘invented’ the
Dolomites needed to be ‘discovered’ – their unique landscape features
needed to be noticed before they could be seen. They needed to be placed
on a map.
The Silver Age of Mountaineering
Authors: Bainbridge William
Published: January 2021

The Silver Age initiated a recirculation of geographical symbols that
introduced in learned and popular debates about mountain scenery a
new set of cultural images. This chapter investigates the intensity of these
symbols away from common narratives on the origin and development of
mountaineering as a sport or those linked to the dynamics of aesthetic appreciation
and cultural performance. A closer scrutiny of the first English
travel guides to the Dolomites shall provide evidence for understanding
the ways in which Victorian travellers placed the Dolomites on a tourist
map by etching geographical and historical elements of Englishness into
their landscape.
Titian Country
Authors: Bainbridge William
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on Josiah Gilbert’s Cadore, or Titian’s Country, the
book which firmly associated the Dolomite Mountains to the name of
Titian and transformed them into a site where a ‘cult geography’ could
be played out. It explains how this link emerged as a symbolic gaze cast
from Venice. It then shows how that gaze was negotiated between distinct
models of artistic landscape. Finally, it illustrates the ways in which Gilbert
embedded the cult of Titian into a Dolomite ‘Petit Tour’ that branded
the region as Titian’s Country. The practice of scenery hunting is here
introduced as mobilizing a web of hybridized geographical discourses
inspired by the artistic cult of Venetian landscape painting.
Picturesque Mountains
Authors: Bainbridge William
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on how the geomorphology of the Dolomites, characterized
by picturesque involutions and fantastic drifting, elevated them
to a pictorial extravaganza on the English art market. The ‘Dolomite
picturesque’ was the result of a particular response to landscape initially
inscribed onto the English landscape in places like the Lake District.
This chapter explores the way in which British tourists imposed on the
Dolomite landscape a picturesque signature crafted at home by the poetry
of Wordsworth, the paintbrush of Turner, and the spade of Humphrey
Repton. The chief exemplar and source for explaining this interchange
of the picturesque aesthetic and its practice is the artist Elijah Walton
who exploited the so-called ‘Turnerian mystery’ to render the Dolomites
iconic for the British art market.
Dolomite Close-Ups
Authors: Bainbridge William
Published: January 2021

Joseph Sanger Davies’s Dolomite Strongholds offers as a distinct way to
market the Dolomites as ‘prominent mountains’ in the Victorian period.
The chapter reveals how increasingly haptic dimensions of mountaineering
complicate the visual space created by a ‘modern’ mountaineer such
as Sanger Davies. It explores conflicting and complementary views on
the Dolomites offered by English mountaineers and their local guides,
describing their encounter as an intimate exchange between two cultural
world-views from the very surface of the rock itself. The relationship between
Ralph King-Milbanke and his Dolomite guides renders the Dolomite
landscape fluid in terms of intercultural exchange whereas Gertrude
Bell’s visits to the Dolomites offer up further clues on the portability of
landscape through naming peaks.
The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

Focusing on the theme of Chinese familialism, this chapter recasts the
notion of “filiality,” foundational to the familial-kinship system, as a
discursive formation, calling attention to the way filiality has been differently
maneuvered by different regimes at different historical moments.
Foregrounding the strengthened links between filiality and loyalty in
the reinforced “family-state” discourse of martial law-era Taiwan, this
chapter argues that the family-state discourse is pivotal to what I term
the “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary,” symptomatic of the insoluble
tension between Chinese tongzhi/queer subjects and their family-based
social settings. This Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is expressed
through an array of tropes – including niezi, Nezha, AIDS, ghosts, and
Chinese/Taiwanese opera – in various queer-themed films, beginning
with Outcasts (Yu Kan-ping, 1986).
Two Stage Sisters: Comrades, Almost a Love Story
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

Chinese opera is a prime focus of Chapter 2, which analyzes Two Stage
Sisters (Xie Jin, 1965), a film classic from socialist China based on the
evolution of Shaoxing opera. Paying special attention to the tension
between the film’s text as a political melodrama and its subtext, replete
with homoerotic overtones, my analysis invokes a queer intervention that
rewrites the historical “surplus” of homoeroticism back into the official
history of the socialist “seventeen years” (1949-1966). My integration
of the social history into the textual analysis represents an alternative
historiography intended to counter the ahistorical tendency underlying
certain queer reading practices.
Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

This chapter considers Hong Kong’s particular socio-historical context
since the 1960s, which has been imperative to the diffusion of a local
mass camp impulse characterized by a self-conscious, often parodic
attitude toward the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated
with art, gender behavior, and media representation. It then investigates
the particular ways in which mass camp has at once informed and been
informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema from the 1970s onward. A
crucial point made throughout lies in the intimate relationship between
mass camp and the proliferating gender parody of contemporary Hong
Kong cinema, culminating in films of the early 1990s (e.g. Swordsman II).
This process, importantly, has also been coupled with the critical articulation
of camp discourse since the mid-to-late 1970s.
Toward an Aesthetic of Tongzhi Camp
Authors: Chao Shi-Yan
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates the significance and articulation of tongzhi camp.
It first unpacks the nebulous concept of “gay sensibility” by supplementing
it with a structure of feeling mediated by gay shame and gay melancholy,
alongside their particular ramifications in a Chinese cultural setting.
It then examines how such a queer structure of feeling is potentially
transformed into camp expressions in Corner’s (2001) and Splendid Float
(2004), directed by lesbian-identifying filmmaker Zero Chou. This chapter
finally analyzes the way camp is adapted by Tsai Ming-liang in The Hole
(1998) into a powerful implement that negotiates heteronormativity by
playing on the mechanism of the homosexual closet: homosexual presence
thus becomes imbricated in the audio-visual expressions that characterize
the film’s patent tongzhi camp style.
The Astral Messenger, The Lunar Revelation, The Solar Salvation : Dualist Cosmic Soteriology in The Early Qur’ān
Authors: Beck Daniel A.
Published: January 2021

Daniel A. Beck interprets the cosmological imagery of several archaic
quranic passages, with special attention to their depiction of the moon as
an eschatological sign and soteriological mechanism. The parallel celestial
messenger’s oaths embody Manichaean cosmological concepts, in which
the sun and moon were the primary cosmic vehicles of redemption during
our human era. By comparing archaic quranic cosmology, ancient North
Arabian devotional epigraphy, and Manichaean cosmology, he suggests
that the divine speaker’s oaths were discontinuous with Old Arabic pagan
devotional structures, and were instead closely related to contemporary
forms of late antique Manichaean eschatology.
Messalianism, Binitarianism, and the East-Syrian Background of the Qur’ān
Authors: Segovia Carlos A.
Published: January 2021

The theology of the earliest quranic layers displays a puzzling characteristic: it is overtly binitarian. Through the interplay and alignment of quranic discourse analysis, structuralist-Marxist epistemology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Segovia uncovers the most plausible historical setting of the early binitarian theology of the Qur’ān in light of the east-Syrian monastic crisis of the early seventh century and the role played in it by the Messalians.
Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān
Authors: Tesei Tommaso
Published: January 2021

Tommaso Tesei addresses questions of quranic intertextuality which
contribute to clarifying, among other things, the Qur’ān’s undeniably
scribal nature. The first part of this article focusses on Enochic elements
(drawn from pseudepigraphical literature) in the quranic corpus. Specifically,
it deals with the quranic characters of Idrīs and ‘Uzayr and the
fallen-angels – traditions the echoes of which can be heard in the Qur’ān.
Did the people in the Qur’ān’s environment know those books which we
tend categorise under the label of ‘Pseudepigrapha’ directly? Or did they
merely encounter themes and motifs which happened to trace back to
pseudepigraphical literature?
Perpetual Contest
Authors: Bal Mieke
Published: January 2021

Mieke Bal examines the first autobiographical text written by a woman
which concerns the life of the Carthaginian martyr Perpetua. The analysis
combines narratology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, in a voluntarily
anachronistic appropriation of this unique document. Scenes of martyrdom
are etched on our retina, because there are so many artworks that
represent them. The case Bal analyses, however, is literary, although some
of its metaphors and descriptions are vividly visual. Bal speculates that a
contest shapes the one that informs Perpetua’s choice for this particular
martyrdom: the contest between male and female, or rather, the contest
for masculinity. Perpetua’s move away from femininity would lead her,
not so much to give up sex as to enjoy it in the only way she could have
access to it, turns this story of victimhood into a story of victory: over
gender-limitations and over narration.
The Scarecrow Christ
Authors: Middleton Paul
Published: January 2021

Paul Middleton deals with the contested homosexual martyr Matthew
Shepard. Matthew Shepard, a gay twenty-one year old political science
student at the University of Wyoming, was robbed and brutally beaten
by two other men on the night of Tuesday, 6 October 1998. The men tied
him to a fence after the attack, while he was bleeding profusely in freezing
temperatures. He died a few days later, on 12 October 1998, and was
called a martyr in Time Magazine, just a week after his death. Middleton
examines the popular martyr-making process in respect of Matthew
Shepard, arguing that both the making of the martyr and the reaction it
provoked reflect American ‘culture wars’, because martyrology is conflict
literature, foremost about the conflict between the story-tellers and
their opponents. Ironically, both LGBT activists and right-wing religious
groups have in some ways sought to undermine Shepard’s martyr status
by focusing on his life rather than his death. Such efforts, as Middleton
argues, had a limited effect because in martyrologies any interest in
the lives of their heroes is incidental, merely setting up the scene for a
significant death.
Icons of Revolutionary Upheaval
Authors: Pannewick Friederike
Published: January 2021

Friederike Pannewick examines the public memorialisations of the
martyrs of the Arab Spring in Egypt as expressed in graffiti and murals in
Cairo. The state tried to censor and destroy them, but the memorial spaces
were re-appropriated by the public and functioned as visual narratives of
the history of the revolution. This artwork not only aimed at counteracting
forgetfulness through public remembrance, but also enshrined the
remembrance of more than once unpunished crimes and tragic events.
The commemoration of these martyrs oscillates thus between personal
efforts to cope with inescapable suffering and political strategy. From the
perspective of previous commemorations of martyrs in Arab contexts
the remembrance of the Arab Spring martyrs displays a major shift: this
time the Arab citizens themselves engaged in self-empowerment and
establishing and defending their own national history, instead of the
political or religious institutions. In addition, a semantic transformation
took place through a reconfiguration of religious ideas in the context of
secularised modernity that transcends the particularities of specific
groups and simultaneously builds on Muslim and Christian imageries.
‘Female Martyrdom Operations’
Authors: Saloul Ihab
Published: January 2021

Ihab Saloul investigates the phenomenon of ‘female martyrdom operations’
in relation to the issue of women’s agency in society, particularly women’s
political participation and gender roles in contemporary Palestinian
society. In the context of the conservative social climate promoted by
the Islamists through their emphasis on the religious rather than the
nationalist dimensions of martyrdom operations, female martyrs had
nationalist motivations and aimed at restoring their position as politically
active participants in Palestinian society. Three operations in 2002 (Wafa
Idris, Dareen Abu Aysheh and Ayat Al Akhras) managed to open up new
spaces for women’s participation on the nationalist front and women
were indeed accepted as active participants in the military struggle. On
a religious level, these three female martyrdom operations represented
a significant challenge to the interpreted religious notions of women’s
political participation in relation to contemporary Islamic discourse of
martyrdom and warfare. A fourth operation (Hanadi Jaradat, 2003) was
carried out on behalf of the Islamic Jihad Movement, which justified her
operation also from a religious point of view.
Playing the Doctor, Playing the Patient: The Performance of Health Identities in Live Medical Television, 1958
Authors: Boon Timothy M.
Published: January 2021

Using the example of ‘Machines for Living’ (8 April 1958) from the BBC’s
‘Your Life in Their Hands’ series, I explore doctors’ and patients’ performances
on live medical television. The point is to examine how the
grammar and technology of live television provided affordances and
constraints to the representation of medicine, here the high-tech medicine
of dialysis and heart-lung bypass at Leeds General Infirmary. I use several
theoretical lenses to focus attention on the participants’ performances,
including work by Erving Goffman, Richard Schechner, Espen Ytreberg,
Judith Butler, and Paddy Scannell. Although the analysis is tightly focussed
on a single programme, it is intended to be generally applicable to the
analysis of medical, and indeed non-fiction television of all kinds.
Let’s Talk about S… : The Influence of Cinéma Vérité on Sex Education in French National Television around 1968
Authors: Bonah Christian
Published: January 2021

Studying the French audiovisual mediascape the contribution asks
when and how the issue of sexuality and sexual education surfaced on
TV. As direct cinema micro-trottoire techniques met sex education they
challenged classical talk shows. Thereby they reframed who could be a
speaking subject in front of the TV camera. Contrasting official TV shows
used in a systematic fashion as principal primary source the contribution
moves on to look at school television and amateur videos, used as counterarchives.
How did these multiple screens differ in informing or educating
about sexuality? Their comparative and integrated analysis emphasizes
how intimate, ordinary, and ‘real’ self-exhibition in intimate confessional
scenes and unscripted street interviews became key portraits and tropes
situated on the fence between exploring and exploiting.
Inside Magoo (1960): Comedic Commentary on 1950s America and Cancer
Authors: Cantor David
Published: January 2021

This chapter traces the role of humour in Inside Magoo (1960), an educational
film released by United Productions of America (UPA) for the
American Cancer Society (ACS). Humour, I suggest, provided 1) a response
to ACS’s concerns that public fears of cancer led people to avoid appropriate
medical help, and 2) a commentary on 1950s America from the perspective
of someone – Mr. Magoo – who rejected the post-war world of white, male,
middle-class, consumerist suburbia. This film was thus not only about
cancer. It wrapped the ACS message within humorous observations on
life in the 1950s to charm audiences into adopting ACS approaches to the
disease; a technique, I suggest, that was common to other UPA cancer
educationals of the 1950s.
Circulations in shadow corridors
Authors: Berthet Samuel
Published: January 2021

The Northern Bay of Bengal has a legacy of human trafficking from at least
the seventeenth century. It has left its footprint in the popular culture of
Bengal. Today, human trafficking is still running very high but is almost
invisible. This invisibility thrives on the pre-modern sea transportation
system being unrecorded and considered as part of the informal economy.
In turn, this invisibility facilitates the luring of job seekers by middlemen
and slavery across the Bay towards Thailand. The dramatic situation
of the Rohingya in the Arakan State in Myanmar and the instability at
the border with Bangladesh strengthen the trafficking network along
unsettling borders.
Formal versus informal practices
Authors: Chapagain Arjun
Published: January 2021

The trading of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) is a traditional means
of livelihood in rural areas along the Trans-Himalayan Silk Road and is
an important source of revenue for the government of Nepal. Researchers
estimate that the officially recorded export value of Nepalese MAPs is
many times less than the amount actually exported. MAPs in Nepal
are harvested by individuals mostly from the wild and are channelled
through intermediate actors within a confusing policy environment.
An official permit is required to collect ‘non-timber forest products’
and the Department of Forestry is responsible for regulating the MAPs
trade in Nepal by issuing permits and collecting revenue. The hidden
economy and informal practices are thus more likely to be used in sectors
where permissions are necessary for harvesting, locally transporting, and
exporting any commodity.
Formal versus informal Chinese presence
Authors: Gledić Jelena
Published: January 2021

The turbulent history of the Western Balkans has led to both diverse economic development in the region and complex relationships with China, particularly for ex-Yugoslav countries. Examining the shadow economies associated with local Chinese communities in the region is therefore of particular interest. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the complex interplay of official policies and unofficial rules, regional tensions and global interests, and the local socio-economic problems and international aspirations of countries in the region in terms of their position in the so-called Belt and Road Zone.
Committed to the Past: Memory Activists in Search of Dignity and Justice
Authors: Melchior Inge
Published: January 2021

Chapter 5 questions why the ‘memory activists’ are so committed to the past and what the emotional rupture narrative means to them. Their friendship ties with former nationalists and martyrs and their fears for modernity, make them long for a politically strong yet emotional history. They perceive a pluralist or settled, constructive narrative to create citizens who become unreceptive to danger. Citizens need to be prepared to fight for their nation, guarantee democracy, and ensure that history will not be repeated. Despite their seemingly radical worldview, the memory activists occupy a rather legitimized and credible position in society, due to their historical roots in human rights activism, their political ties, and the moderates among them who function as a bridge.
Two Auteurs in the Indonesian Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s : Sjuman Djaya and Teguh Karya
Authors: Hanan David , Gaston Soehadi
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses key films by Sjuman Djaya and Teguh Karya, two Indonesian writer-directors who emerged in the early Suharto era of the 1970s. Sjuman Djaya was trained in the Soviet Union, and on his return to Indonesia made films that engaged – in very spirited and original ways – with the popular culture of the poor and with social issues and Indonesian history. Teguh Karya founded a collective that trained young people in theatre arts but quickly branched into filmmaking. His early films were popular romantic melodramas, which established an audience and created major stars. Later, Teguh made a celebrated historical film, addressed poverty and dislocation in the society, the position of women, and even made one political allegory.
Locating Mike de Leon in Philippine Cinema
Authors: Campos Patrick F.
Published: January 2021

Mike de Leon, whose films helped define the ‘second golden age’ (roughly
from 1975 to 1984) of Philippine cinema, has been hailed as ‘local cinema’s
only living film master.’ This essay analyses how the discourse of the
golden age came about by interpreting the meaning of De Leon’s location
in this discourse. Tracing the director’s career in chronological fashion, it
discusses how his films contributed to a progressive nationalist cinema
during the period of martial law under Marcos but also how they increasingly
and reflexively interrogated the significance of the golden age in
the post-Marcos era. Finally, it evaluates the conceptual boundaries of
the golden age through an appreciation of the trajectory of his cinema
from 1985 to 1999.
Transnational Exploitation Cinema in Southeast Asia
Authors: Barker Thomas , Imanjaya Ekky
Published: January 2021

Under authoritarian rule, Indonesia and the Philippines developed
production systems to facilitate the export of films to the global exploitation
and B-grade markets. Framed by the colonial relationship with
the United States, independent Filipino producers in the 1950s began
working with mostly American partners on diverse low-cost titles. By the
1970s, the Philippines had become the choice location for many foreign
co-productions. In Indonesia in the early 1980s, a group of local producers
similarly pursued exploitation production for global export as a means to
generate income. Production in both countries is framed by the Manila
International Film Festivals (1982-1983), which marked Imelda Marcos’s
attempt to formalize the co-production industry and make Southeast
Asia a new hub for co-production and export.
Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers
Authors: Vaughan Theresa A.
Published: January 2021

Women have served as providers of food and basic medical care for their
families both in the European Middle Ages and worldwide, especially
for the majority of people who do not have the means to hire either a
physician or servants. These roles have significant symbolic meanings
within cultures. Uncovering the reality of women in domestic spaces
in the Middle Ages has its challenges, especially for the lower classes,
for reliable information is scarce. The everyday lives of women were not
typically thought important enough to document. A look at a variety of
textual and non-textual evidence through the lens of the disciplines of
folklore and anthropology can help suggest interpretations which fill in
some of the gaps in our knowledge.
Who Makes a Foster Sibling?
Authors: O’Donnell Tom C.
Published: January 2021

The figure of Cú Chulainn is used to define and examine the foster sibling relationship. The first relationship is created at a very early stage when Cú Chulainn is nursed by Finnchóem and starts his relationship with her son Conall Cernach. The two warriors express their loyalty to one another, which is demonstrated through Conall’s actions at the death of Cú Chulainn. Conall does not appear as a foster brother in Táin Bó Cúailnge, where Cú Chulainn’s foster brothers fight against him. These foster brothers are created later in life through the shared education they all had with Scáthach in Alba. Both early association and shared education can create foster bonds.
Identity within Fosterage
Authors: O’Donnell Tom C.
Published: January 2021

Foster bonds are created within family units, but they are also expressed in other settings. This chapter examines the use of fosterage language to describe, define and create emotional relationships within monasteries and the warrior bands of the fían. Outside of the monastery the language of fosterage was used to express care responsibilities, power and affection among other corporate bodies, including the fían. When seniority was in question among supposed equals, the language of fosterage could be used to express subtle power differences. Among the fían, status was shifting so the changing vocabulary of fosterage was best placed to describe their bonds.
Objects in Time
Authors: Butler Alison
Published: January 2021

As artists’ films have become more common in museums, artists have
begun to film the museum and its objects with increasing frequency. The
artists’ museum film opens up a dialogue between the moving image
and the museum object, in which the medium’s capacity to preserve
and remodel time resonates with the object’s power as a repository of
past time. Through two examples, Tacita Dean’s Day for Night (2009)
and Elizabeth Price’s A Restoration (2016), this essay explores the ways
that these artists’ understanding of the temporalities of analogue film
and digital video underpin their poetic expression of the temporality
of objects. Rather than dematerializing its objects, the museum film is
rematerialized by them, through the encounter between their specific
temporalities.
The Cinematic Dispositif and Its Ghost
Authors: Baschiera Stefano
Published: January 2021

This chapter will engage with the work of the artist and photographer
Hiroshi Sugimoto in order to reflect on the nature of the cinematic apparatus
in the digital era. Sugimoto’s photographic work Theatres consists
in a series of photographs of cinema theatres taken by the artist from
the 1980s applying a wide-open aperture and an exposure as long as the
film itself, capturing de facto an average of 170,000 frames in a single
shot. The result is a ‘film in a single frame’, and a profound reflection
on the role that time, lights, and the space of the audience play in the
cinematic experience. The chapter looks from a cinematic perspective
at the regenerative aspect of the photographic medium in its after-shot,
a question called by Sugimoto a ‘resurrection’.