bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Personal Vision of the Hong Kong Cityscape in Anson Mak’s Essayistic Documentary Films One Way Street on a Turntable and On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing
Authors: Ingham Mike
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Anson Hoi Shan Mak's essayistic documentaries and her personal vision of the Hong Kong cityscape. Like the traditional mainstream documentary, the essay film often focuses on specific issue(s), rather than a fictional plot. However, while straight documentary makers concentrate on the ‘subject’, which is more ‘passive’ than the ‘active subject’ of the fiction film, film essayists opt to treat the subject as a theme ‘in which the subject is a particular development or an interpretation of that theme, and one that has a determining influence upon the form of the film’. The chapter argues that the radicality of Mak's film essays manifests itself both in a highly original aesthetics and in a critical perspective on Hong Kong. The independent filmmaker's discourse is articulated in a subtle way, but her political stance is, however, expressed firmly, especially in the more recent On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing (2012).
Documentary Filmmakers on the Circuit: A Festival Career from Czech Dream to Czech Peace
Authors: Vallejo Aida
Published: January 2018

This chapter reflects on the role of film festivals as nodal points for the development of the documentary, in order to identify which powers influence and challenge its independent character. Taking the professional trajectory of Czech filmmakers Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda as a case study, it focuses on the different production and distribution strategies they developed for their feature-length documentaries Czech Dream/Česk ý Sen (2004) and Czech Peace/Český Mír (2010). These films can be considered paradigmatic examples of both highly creative approaches to documentary language and activist film practices as they tackle two controversial topics: the new consumerist society in former Communist countries and international politics in the first case, and a US initiative to establish a military radar site in Eastern Europe in the second.
Ateyyat El Abnoudy: Poetic Realism in Egyptian Documentaries
Authors: Van de Peer Stefanie
Published: January 2018

The first case study deals with the ‘mother’ of Egyptian documentary making Ateyyat el Abnoudy, and traces her career as a lawyer, journalist and filmmaker. As a pioneer of politically engaged and socially preoccupied documentary, she has influenced many young female filmmakers. Since the early seventies, her films, both short and feature length, have been celebrated throughout the world at festivals and retrospectives, but remain controversial in Egypt itself. This case study looks in detail at her early short films, Horse of Mud (1971), Sad Song of Touha (1972) and The Sandwich (1975), as well as feature length documentaries Permissible Dreams (1982), Responsible Women (1994) and Days of Democracy (1996). Dealing with the lower classes, women’s issues, education and illiteracy among women, their personal status and their political situation in Egypt, the films reflect a concern with the subaltern woman. The filmmaker’s concern with the subaltern woman stems from an intellectual preoccupation with inequality and a professional insight into the unwillingness of the state to deal with women’s problems.
Jocelyne Saab: Artistic-Journalistic Documentaries in Lebanese Times of War
Authors: Van de Peer Stefanie
Published: January 2018

The second case study looks at Jocelyne Saab’s early work. She is well-known for fiction films Dunia, Kiss Me Not on the Eyes (2005) and What is Going On (2010). However, it is less well-known that she started her career as a documentary maker during the Lebanese Civil War. She recorded the war from the inside. Saab is especially effective in her attempts to deal with the trauma of the civil war for children, safeguarding a national memory that has become entrenched in amnesia. Her films, such as Lebanon in Torment (1975), Beirut Never Again (1978), Letters from Beirut (1979) and Once upon a Time in Beirut (1995) illustrate how Lebanon’s film culture is in fact defined by (civil) war. While Saab lives between Cairo and Paris, Beirut is one of the most modern cities in the Arab world, and is stereotypically known as the Paris of the Orient. It has become the centre of cinema production in the region and has inspired many young filmmakers to reconstitute their Lebanese identity through documentary. In this context, Lebanese documentary is an intellectualist art form and an opportunity to experiment.
Selma Baccar: Non-fiction in Tunisia, the Land of Fictions
Authors: Van de Peer Stefanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses a controversial icon of women in Tunisia, Selma Baccar, Tunisia’s first lady of filmmaking, an instigator and a fiercely independent woman still celebrated for her films and politics. Her first film Fatma 75 (1975) carried an intricately political statement of feminist defiance. The film looks at the time of independence and the subsequent struggle for women to gain their rights under the first president, Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia was a land of fictions, and even though Baccar roots her films in the reality of everyday life, most of them are essay films, due to restrictions put on the filmmaker by the Tunisian censor. Baccar, an intellectual artist, identifies strongly with her heroine and places her in a detailed historical context in order to analyse and critique Tunisian attitudes. She looks at past revolutions and women’s issues and in doing so, has served as women’s national memory. Her importance as documenter of the past has become central to 2011’s so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as she now sits on the Assemblée constituante (Constitution Assembly) composed of elected members who are making an attempt at re-writing the Tunisian constitution.
Izza Génini: The Performance of Heritage in Moroccan Music Documentaries
Authors: Van de Peer Stefanie
Published: January 2018

This case study looks at a much overlooked and ignored filmmaker from Morocco, Izza Génini: the first woman to be truly dedicated to making documentaries in a country where documentaries were actively discouraged. Morocco’s political, economic, cultural and social devastation during the Years of Lead in the eighties determined censorship and prevented any sort of filmmaking for a long time. People were disappeared or killed by government spies, and production was at an all time low. It was moreover determined by an exceptionally strict censorship board. Nevertheless, as producer and director, since the eighties Génini has managed to make pertinent observations of celebratory aspects of her mixed culture. Her family is Jewish, and it is a hidden aspect of Moroccan society that a large contingency of Jewish people used to live peacefully side by side with the Moroccan Arabs. Through depictions of traditional music and dance, celebrating hidden customs, her films defy national timidity and homogeneity. She was the first woman to make documentaries in Morocco that were not sponsored by the state, and remained so until well into the nineties.
The Contested Politics of Iraq’s Oil Wealth
Authors: Billon Philippe Le
Published: January 2018

The Iraq War of 2003 set in motion a series of events that was to have enormous consequences for Iraq's oil sector, its use by political factions, and the distribution of its revenue to populations. The United States destroyed much of the Iraqi state, turned the country towards ill-defined constitutional federalism, failed to provide a stable security environment, and pushed hard for a liberalisation of the oil sector. This chapter discusses how a foreign take-over of Iraq's oil wealth and the application of neo-liberal policies — premised on the failure of statist policies, the inefficiency and corruption of the public sector, and the need for foreign capital — are at the core of the contested politics of Iraq's oil wealth.
The Dangerous Legacy of a Flawed Constitution: Resolving Iraq’s Kurdish ‘Problem’
Authors: Anderson Liam
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the complex trajectories of Kurdish politics since 2003 with an emphasis on the problematic legacy of the 2005 Iraqi constitution. At the time that Iraq's constitution was drafted, few Arab Iraqis seriously questioned that a high level of autonomy for the Kurds was both justified and inevitable. What derailed the constitutional drafting process and has subsequently thwarted all efforts to clarify and complete this unfinished document was the refusal to limit this level of autonomy to the Kurds. The potential application of Kurdish levels of autonomy to an Iraq-wide system of federalism is deeply disturbing to many Iraqis and, so long as the constitution continues to allow for this eventuality, it cannot form the basis of durable sectarian reconciliation and a stable political order.
Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq: Internal and External Displacement
Authors: Adelman Howard
Published: January 2018

This chapter documents both the internal and external displacement of Iraqis since the onset of the war. The Iraqi refugee exodus has been examined at four-year intervals, beginning in 2002 before the onset of the Iraq War, then in 2006 before the upsurge in Sunni–Shiite violence that lasted until 2008. The 2010 examination took place after the separation of most Sunnis and Shiites and the flight of minority populations but before both the March 2010 Iraq elections and the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. These cross-sectional historical and ethno-religious slices dealing with internally displaced peoples and refugees over twelve years depict the dimensions and character of the Iraqi refugee problem and its legacy in Iraq. They also demonstrate that the war has changed the human geography of Iraq, probably for decades to come, as a direct result of the failure of the United States and its allies to provide a stable and secure environment for its people.
The Nordic Welfare Model in Norway and Scotland
Authors: Hilson Mary , Newby Andrew G.
Published: January 2018

The idea of the Nordic model has been discussed as part of debates on Scottish independence for over four decades and featured prominently in the 2014 independence campaign. This chapter examines the idealized Scottish portrayal of Nordic and especially Norwegian society and the welfare state. The chapter summarises the main developments in the historical evolution of the Norwegian welfare state in a Nordic context and examines how the image of Norway and the Nordic countries have been used rhetorically in recent political discourse in Scotland. The authors note how constructions of these images are profoundly shaped by Scottish autostereotypes or self-images. For both sides in the independence debate, Norden and Norway are pliable entities that can be used either to support or to undermine specific visions of the future of Scotland.
Norway and the United Kingdom/Scotland after the Second World War
Authors: Petersen Tore T.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines events following, the Second World War, and argues that Norway and the United Kingdom have not had as close a relationship as the official rhetoric suggests. Although the countries do share common interests, Petersen argues that they lack “real-life alliance politics and relations”, using as material the details of state visit by Norwegian Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen and his wife Werna to Britain in 1956. The major issues discussed in the press at the time dealt largely with simple matters of protocol, and the visit did not even include discussion of the imminent Suez conflict, in which many Norwegian owned cargo ships were involved. Like Scotland, Norway was a small client state and although World War II presented the countries with a common enemy, and Norway’s king governed in exile from London during the Nazi occupation of his country, Petersen argues that the difference in size, power and influence between the British Empire and Norway overshadowed bilateral relations between Britain and Norway, as well as those between Scotland and Norway.
Conclusion
Authors: Joo Woojeong
Published: January 2018

Conclusion reemphasises the historicity of the everyday in Ozu’s films, which is not a void entity but characterized by various modern subjects – distinguished in class, gender and generation – with conflicting views, the interaction among which changes throughout history. Temporality (permeation of the past into the present) and spatiality (deviation) are also importantly discussed in relation to the working of Ozu’s everyday, especially in the postwar period when historical experience of wartime presents more complex layer of social critique. The role of the Japanese film industry (namely, Shochiku) is reiterated in terms of establishing Ozu’s everyday realism, which is constantly placed in negotiating relationship with the former’s commercial concerns. Lastly, a question is raised about whether Ozu should be regarded as conservative in representing the social reality, for which the particularity of his everyday realism is suggested as an answer.
Scotland’s Changing ‘Community of the Communicators’: The Political Commentariat and the Independence Referendum
Authors: Hassan Gerry
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins by considering the concept of the ‘commentariat’ in broad terms, discussing its emergence and attributed characteristics. It notes in particular some overlap between journalistic and commentariat identities, then considers the composition of the Scottish commentariat, also analyzing the role of collective memory in its discourse. The role of the Scottish commentariat in the independence debate is then discussed, and its future considered.
‘Liked’, ‘Shared’, Re-tweeted: The Referendum Campaign on Social Media
Authors: Buchanan Margot
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the independence referendum debate on Facebook and Twitter before and after polling day, noting the multi-modal nature of communication on social media through the use of visual forms such as photographs and video clips. It analyzes the Yes for Scotland and Better Together Facebook and Twitter accounts and notes the participative nature of social media in the political context, reaching many who may not normally be receptive to political discussion. The chapter discusses specific web and social media presences such as the highly visible Wings over Scotland, and notes demographic tendencies among social media users, also considering the fashion in which they respond to each other online critically about traditional media political coverage. The discussion additionally looks at how social media use encourages continued campaigning beyond the phase of electoral results.
English Television News Coverage of the Scottish Referendum
Authors: Tolson Andrew
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers English TV news coverage of the referendum aimed at the UK as a whole but from south of the border. The analysis is in two main subsections, respectively focused on the nature of editorial policy, and on journalistic practice. The nature of the cross-border reach of English TV journalism is questioned, and the process of English journalists conducting vox pops with Scottish voters suggested as ‘a kind of drama of cross-cultural interaction’. A number of difficulties posed for British TV institutions by the prospect of Scottish independence are addressed, and specific instances analyzed. The chapter provides some analysis of evidence for editorial strategies which may arguably have resulted in an over-emphasis on negative consequences of Scottish independence for English politics and the UK economy. However, the discussion of journalistic practice notes both more room for variant approaches, on the one hand, but also at times a tendency for English journalists to allow a tourist dimension to enter into their excursions to Scotland. This reinforces a sense of the overall ‘Englishness’ of the British TV news presence in the referendum.
The Islamic University of Medina since 1961: The Politics of Religious Mission and the Making of a Modern Salafi Pedagogy1
Authors: Farquhar Mike
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers an analysis of how the Islamic University of Medina (IUM) was from its very inception meant to function as a Saudi state-backed Salafi missionary project with global reach. The goal was for students to return to their home countries or to travel on elsewhere after graduation for du'a, or as missionaries, to promote spiritual commitment and “correct” religious knowledge and practice. As the university president and future Grand Mufti Abd al Aziz bin Baz wrote in a prospectus published in 1971, emphasising the sacred geography of Medina and suggesting a parallel between this Saudi-backed project and the Prophet's own mission, the university was to operate as a source of modern Islamic propagation from the source of the first Islamic propagation.
Protector of the “al-Wasatiyya” Islam: Cairo’s al-Azhar University
Authors: Bano Masooda
Published: January 2018

This chapter illustrates how al Azhar, established by the Shi'i Fatimid empire in 970, was eventually to become one of the most respected centres for Sunni Islamic learning around the globe. It shows how the emphasis on a “middle way,” as reflected in al Azhar's emphasis on teaching all four Sunni madhāhib, has been central to the rise of al Azhar as a global centre of learning. A number of factors led to the rise of the university to this prominent leadership position within Sunni Islam, including its location in Cairo, the exodus of scholars from places such as Andalusia due to political instability and their settlement in Cairo, the university's ability to harbour multiple discourses, and the controversial state led reforms enacted since the 1960s.
Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition
Authors: Woodward Ashley
Published: January 2018

This book offers an incisive argument for the contemporary importance of Lyotard in light of posthuman trends. Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the leading French philosophers of his generation, whose wide ranging and highly original contributions to thought were overshadowed by his association with 'postmodernism.' This book demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are now discovering: that Lyotard's work is incisive and essential for current debates in the arts and humanities, especially those concerning the posthuman and the information society. The book presents a series of studies which explain Lyotard's specific interventions in areas such as information theory, new media arts, and the changing nature of the human, and assesses their relevance and impact. It brings to light new aspects of Lyotard’s work by focusing on underappreciated themes and connections, particularly around the topics of nihilism, information, and art. Lyotard's thought is positioned in current debates through critical comparisons with contemporary philosophers such as Paul Virilio, Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, and Ray Brassier.
Creative Involution
Authors: Gontarski S. E.
Published: January 2018

This book focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. The book explores how the work of Samuel Beckett intersects with such preoccupations of time as a ‘double headed monster’, of memory and multiplicity, of being and becoming that continue in an involutionary turn through the work of Gilles Deleuze. The book discusses Modernism; it examines the adaptations of Samuel Beckett's prose texts; it looks at the nature of memory, consciousness, dreams and perception; time and motion, intuition, and imagination.
The Invention of the Modern: A Symbiotic Remapping
Authors: Gontarski S. E.
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins with a remapping of an early-twentieth-century mode of discourse about the nature of memory, consciousness, dreams and perception, and their political implications for religion and science as well as for philosophy and literature. This remapping offers something of an enhancement of and so a symbiotic encounter with (and not a replacement for) the development of what is loosely called Modernism, particularly in literature, and Samuel Beckett's relationship to it. The remapping, furthermore, engages with an emerging empiricist, materialist science in the early years of the twentieth century that rejects what might be called speculating or theorizing about what cannot be measured, consciousness in particular, even as such theorizing will finally come to lead, if not dominate, the advances of twentieth-century physical science.
The Emergent Scottish Constitutional Tradition
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

Continuing the examination of the contextual constraints that would bind Scottish constitution-makers in the event of independence, this chapter discusses the existing political and legal institutions of Scotland and their development from the beginnings of the Scottish national movement to 2016. It examines the emergence of distinctly Scottish constitutional ideas and institutions, from the legacy of the pre-Union Scottish kingdom, through the years of the ‘Union-state’ prior to devolution, to the design and operation of devolved bodies. It also examines responses by the Scottish national movement – both devolutionists and supporters of independence – to developments in British politics, especially the reaction against the winner-take-all and executive-dominated politics associated with the period from 1979 to 1997. The chapter concludes the first half of the book by summarising the basic conditions and requirements of a viable and acceptable constitution for Scotland in the event of independence.
2002 Draft II: Head of State and the Executive Branch
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

This, the second of three central chapters examining the SNP’s 2002 constitutional text, focuses on the roles and powers of the head of state, the government and the executive branch. It discusses the position of the monarchy in an independent Scotland, both in terms of its symbolic-ceremonial function and its constitutional powers, as well as examining the relationships between the prime minister, cabinet, and Parliament, in the proposed constitutional draft. A number of problems are identified, including inconsistencies and ambiguities surrounding the government formation process and reserve powers of the monarch in relation to government formation and the refusal of royal assent.
The SNP’s Constitutional Policy 2002–14: From Liberal Procedural Constitutionalism to Democratic Populism?
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the constitutional policy of the SNP since 2002. The SNP government’s 2013 White Paper and 2014 Draft Interim Constitution are discussed, and contrasted with the earlier 2002 text. The chapter argues that the interim constitution reflected a subtle shift in the SNP’s constitutional policy, away from a legal-procedural constitutionalism in which the constitution serves mainly institution-defining and rights-protecting functions, and towards a more populist constitutionalism in which the constitution serves nation-building and agenda-setting functions. It nevertheless argues that there a distinct Scottish constitutional tradition is emerging, which is a national derivation of the global Westminster model. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the state of constitutional thought in Scotland today, especially in light of the Brexit referendum.
The End of the Road? Dark Routes and Urban Passageways
Authors: Gott Michael
Published: January 2018

Chapter 5 changes directions to consider the flip side of the European mobility boom. The chapter analyses three films whose protagonists are migrants from beyond the European Union: Hope (Boris Lojkine, 2014, France), Illégal (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2010, Belgium/France/Luxembourg) and Marussia (Eva Pervolovici, 2012, France/Russia). It argues that these films – even when they narrate the lives of protagonists already in Europe – are filmed as road movies or continuations thereof. In earlier chapters it was argued that road cinema is defined first and foremost by an emphasis on ‘travelling shots’. This chapter considers how the generally panoramic vantage points of road cinema are represented in migrant road films, in which travellers are often granted solely or primarily limited viewpoints and sightlines.
Introduction: Hollywood and the Great Depression
Authors: Morgan Iwan
Published: January 2018

This examines the economic impact of the Great Depression on Hollywood’s profitability in 1930-34 and how the film business changed in the course of seeking renewed financial success. It considers technological advances associated with the new dialogue-based medium, changes in movie genres and how particular studios became identified with these, the adaptation of the star system and its significance for studio profitability, and the move towards industry self-regulation with the establishment of the Production Code Administration in 1934.. It finally considers the New Deal’s response to monopoly in Hollywood and the Justice Department’s filing of the U.S. v Paramount et al suit in 1938
Embodying the State: Federal Architecture and Masculine Transformation in Hollywood Films of the New Deal Era
Authors: Siomopoulos Anna
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyses how Hollywood focused on recognizable and venerable architectural representations of federal institutions to symbolise the new relationship that had developed between the citizenry and the national government under the aegis of the New Deal. Through case studies of three films respectively featuring the executive, legislative and judicial edifices of the national state – Gabriel over the White House (1933), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and The Talk of the Town (1942) – become sites of masculine transformations, as the three male protagonists each experience private revelations that help them take on new roles as president, senator and Supreme Court Justice respectively. Though each contains a romantic sub-plot, none of the movies ends with the expected scene of romantic coupling whose trajectory was established in the early scenes. Accordingly the male leads become defined less by private heterosexuality than by public involvement in the Roosveltian state.
Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities
Authors: Lundblad Michael
Published: January 2018

The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.
Looking the Beast in the Eye: Re-animating Meat in Nordic and British Food Culture
Authors: Syse Karen Lykke
Published: January 2018

Syse defends Nordic and British chefs, cookbooks, television shows, and food magazines advocating for meat-eaters to face up to the animals that must be killed before they are eaten. Slaughtering one’s own pig and eating all parts of an animal from nose to tail, for example, are put forth as better ways of “respecting” animals, and as a critique of industrial food production and factory farms. In this kind of food culture, looking back nostalgically to times when people were more likely to live on farms and slaughter their own animals is seen as a way of finding “authenticity” in the modern world. This desire to “re-animate” one’s meat can construct traditional forms of masculinity and gender roles, but in Syse’s analysis it is more important to focus on the stated intentions of the chefs and writers at hand, which includes condemning the distance between carnivores and the real lives of the animals they consume.
Entangling the Medical Humanities
Authors: Fitzgerald Des , Callard Felicity
Published: January 2018

The medical humanities are at a critical juncture. On the one hand, practitioners of this field can bask in their recent successes: in the UK, at least, what was once a loose set of intuitions – broadly about animating the clinical and research spaces of biomedicine with concepts and methods from the humanities – has become a visible and coherent set of interventions, with its own journals, conferences, centres, funding streams and students. On the other hand, the growth, coherence and stratification of this heterogeneous domain have raised the spectre of just what, exactly, the medical humanities is growing into. In particular, scholars have begun to worry that the success of the medical humanities is tied up with being useful to biomedicine, that the medical humanities has been able to establish itself only by appearing as the domain of pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.
Paper Technologies, Digital Technologies: Working with Early Modern Medical Records
Authors: Kassell Lauren
Published: January 2018

As the digital revolution takes hold, historians have begun to reflect on the ways in which paper technologies – the codex, notebook, printed book and their indexes, annotations and tools of ordering – have come into being and contributed to the production of knowledge. Objects that were once considered evidence for historical inquiry have become their subjects.1 The same reflexivity applies to notions of evidence, observation and objectivity, often labelled as facts and data, which have themselves been historically studied. This chapter is about what happens when historians use digital technologies to understand paper technologies. It draws on my work to digitise one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history, a series of 80,000 seventeenth-century astrological cases bound in sixty-four thick volumes. I call this the Casebooks Project. This work, as this chapter explains, is an experiment in the history of medicine and digital humanities.3 It uses new digital technologies to understand what were, in the seventeenth century, new paper technologies. Questions of evidence and its representation and analysis are central to this endeavour.
Reframing Fatness: Critiquing ‘Obesity’
Authors: Evans Bethan , Cooper Charlotte
Published: January 2018

Over the last twenty years or so, fatness, pathologised as overweight and obesity, has been a core public health concern around which has grown a lucrative international weight loss industry. Referred to as a ‘time bomb’ and ‘the terror within’, analogies of ‘war’ circulate around obesity, framing fatness as enemy.2 Religious imagery and cultural and moral ideologies inform medical, popular and policy language with the ‘sins’ of ‘gluttony’ and ‘sloth’, evoked to frame fat people as immoral at worst and unknowledgeable victims at best, and understandings of fatness intersect with gender, class, age, sexuality, disability and race to make some fat bodies more problematically fat than others. As Evans and Colls argue, drawing on Michel Foucault, a combination of medical and moral knowledges produces the powerful ‘obesity truths’ through which fatness is framed as universally abject and pathological. Dominant and medicalised discourses of fatness (as obesity) leave little room for alternative understandings.
The Anatomy of the Renaissance Voice
Authors: Richards Jennifer , Wistreich Richard
Published: January 2018

Dissection Might Be Thought Of As A Self-Explanatory Term.’ So Begins Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection And The Human Body In Renaissance Culture (1995), One Of The Earliest Cultural Histories To Contribute To The Burgeoning Field Of Medical Humanities In The 1990s. ‘In Its Medical Sense’, He Explains, ‘A Dissection Suggests The Methodical Division Of An Animal Body For The Purposes Of “Critical Examination”.’ But The Term Can Be Used In A ‘Metaphoric Sense’ Too, And When It Is We Are Led ‘To An Historical Field Rich In Cognate Meanings’ In A Period When A ‘ “Science” Of The Body Had Not Yet Emerged’. These Rich Meanings Are The Focus Of His Study, Which Aims To Recover The ‘Violent, Darker Side Of Dissection And Anatomization’ Before Its Meaning Became Fixed As ‘A Seemingly Discrete Way Of Ordering The Observation Of The Natural World’. This Darker Side Includes The Partitioning Of Knowledge, Surveillance Of The Body, Eroticism And A Deep-Rooted Fear Of Interiority. Rereading Sawday’s Pioneering
Morphological Freedom and Medicine: Constructing the Posthuman Body
Authors: Dolezal Luna
Published: January 2018

The notion that the body can be changed at will in order to meet the desires and designs of its ‘owner’ is one that has captured the popular imagination and underpins contemporary medical practices such as cosmetic surgery and gender reassignment. In fact, describing the body as ‘malleable’ or ‘plastic’ has entered common parlance and dictates common-sense ideas of how we understand the human body in late-capitalist consumer societies in the wake of commercial biotechnologies that work to modify the body aesthetically and otherwise. If we are not satisfied with some aspect of our physicality – in terms of health, function or aesthetics – we can engage with a whole variety of self-care body practices – fashion, diet, exercise, cosmetics, medicine, surgery, laser – in order to ‘correct’, reshape or restyle the body. In addition, as technology has advanced and elective cosmetic surgery has unapologetically entered the mainstream, the notion of the malleable body has become intrinsically linked to the practices and discourses of biomedicine and, furthermore, has become a significant means to assert and affirm identity.
On Pain of Death: The ‘Grotesque Sovereignty’ of the US Death Penalty
Authors: Guenther Lisa
Published: January 2018

On 16 January 2014, Ohio prisoner Dennis McGuire was put to death with an untested mixture of lethal injection drugs. According to witnesses, McGuire gasped, snorted and appeared to struggle for air for ten minutes before dying. The entire execution lasted up to twenty-six minutes – the longest since Ohio resumed executions in 1999. McGuire’s family is suing the state and the drug manufacturer Hospira for what they claim was ‘unnecessary and extreme pain and suffering during the execution process’, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.
Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine
Authors: Sabroe Ian , Withington Phil
Published: January 2018

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).
Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine
Authors: Jolly Rosemary J.
Published: January 2018

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be
Broadmoor Performed: A Theatrical Hospital
Authors: Harpin Anna
Published: January 2018

Broadmoor Hospital is a problem. Located on the edge of the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire, it is an enduring and intransigent edifice that bears witness to a knotted medical and human history. In the sediments of its 153-year-old frame lie wasted both the humanitarian psychiatric innovations and the cruel barbarities of a period of profound change in mental asylums. Both architecturally and culturally the site is, in some ways, marked: it is a melancholic monument to madness and its chequered past. While almost all other asylums in Britain are closed, Broadmoor Hospital remains. It is, of course, no longer an asylum in either form or purpose. Yet, as indicated above, it is one of the remaining relics of the asylum movement that is still in operation as a long-term facility for mentally distressed men, many of whom, though by no means all, have committed crimes.
The Colour of Kisses: Eroticism and Exoticism in Spanish Film Culture of the 1920s and ’30s
Authors: Peiró Eva Woods
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the erotic allure of the kiss in 1920s Spanish films, paying special attention to discussions about the cinematic kiss in the Spanish specialised press at the time. It reveals an obsessive fascination with the technological mediation of the Hollywood kiss on the one hand, and, on the other, a highly racialised discourse about Japan’s prohibition on kissing, used by the Spanish printed media to present a comparatively modern image of 1920s Spain.
The Desarrollismo Years: The Failures of Sexualised Nationhood in 1960s Spain
Authors: Martín Annabel
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the transformative power of newly introduced neoliberal economic policies in 1960s Spain. Focusing on films including Jaime Camino’s Los felices sesenta/The Happy Sixties and Jorge Grau’s Noche de verano/Summer Night, the chapter teases out the tensions that the films establish between the allure of capitalism, consumerism or the potential for social upward mobility on the one hand, and erotic frustration on the other. Moreover, while the films suggest a certain sexual liberalisation both of the characters and 1960s Spanish cinema and Spanish society more widely, they also commodify bodies. In the new neoliberal regime, bodies become consumers as well as consumer objects.
Middlebrow Erotic: Didactic Cinema in the Transition to Democracy
Authors: Faulkner Sally
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores what the author calls ‘the middlebrow erotic’ in Spanish cinema. It argues that after the abolition of censorship in 1977, eroticism in Spanish film ‘extended beyond subject matter and became the very grammar by which a new film language was constructed’. In turn, that new language was used to express the new freedoms afforded by democracy. The author illustrates this theory with a fresh reading of an important film of this period, Eloy de la Iglesia’s El diputado/Confessions of a Congressman (1978), demonstrating how the erotic is used to didactically explain previously forbidden political and sexual tendencies and, indeed, how these go hand in hand with each other.
Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity
Authors: Helt Brenda
Published: January 2018

Helt argues that Virginia Woolf’s literary depictions of bisexuality oppose theories of desire, eroticism, and identity in terms of sexual ‘types’, such as the lesbian. For Woolf, bisexuality and androgyny are common to most women. In A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, Woolf contradicts theories of the writer or artist as androgynous genius, or as member of the intermediate sex or third sex. Woolf refutes the idea that thinking ‘like a man’ and ‘like a woman’ intermittently is an identifying feature of a rare type; rather, everyone does it, so it is nobody’s distinguishing characteristic. Helt shows that Woolf takes up the consideration of the androgynous mind only to expose its misogynistic conceptual underpinnings and its material impossibility. For Woolf, it is not the possession of an androgynous mind that enables artistic creativity, but one’s ability to contemplate openly all desires and all pleasures, including those socially proscribed.
The Bloomsbury Love Triangle
Authors: Marler Regina
Published: January 2018

In this essay, Marler shows how queer connections and fluid identities served to foster more lasting bonds among the Bloomsberries, making lifelong loving and working partnerships possible where by stricter definitions no such connection could have been made. While the young group of friends may have launched into love triangles experimentally, or as the expected outcome of romantic rivalries, the triangle would often prove to complicate but bolster the original dyads. At a time when sodomy was a felony, primary heterosexual relationships also nicely concealed homosexual relationships. Or the presence of a desirable woman in a triangle sometimes allowed a physical relationship to bloom between a homosexual man (Lytton Strachey or Duncan Grant, say) and a mostly-straight man, such as Ralph Partridge or David Garnett. The Bloomsbury triangle not only rejected Victorian sexual mores but, more radically, placed sexual and celibate love on equal footing.
‘[T]here were so many things I wanted to do & didn’t’: The Queer Potential of Carrington’s Life and Art
Authors: Gerzina Gretchen Holbrook
Published: January 2018

Carrington’s life has often been viewed as tragic because of her suicide at the age of thirty-nine after Lytton Strachey’s death, and her relationship with him has been understood as of consummate importance. But her letters to women were among her most flirtatious and playful – similar to those she often wrote to cheer Strachey in his love affairs. This essay uses Carrington’s artwork and letters from archives and private collections to examine Carrington’s relationships with women: Poppet John, Julia Strachey, and her affair with the troubled American heiress Henrietta Bingham. Despite Virginia Woolf’s now well-publicized relationship with Vita Sackville-West, there is reason to believe that Carrington’s class and background made Bloomsbury less accepting of her tangled loves, unclear about her dedication to her art, and wary of the life she worked so hard to maintain with Strachey.
Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
Authors: van Bijlert Martine
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the signals for peace formation in Afghanistan. Divisions in Afghan society have long been managed through co-operation across different groups to maintain social, economic, and political capital across networks of factional relations. The chapter then illustrates a range of ‘conflict-calming behaviours’ that try to circumvent zero-sum politics, including customs and norms of reconciliation, mediation, face saving, and forgiveness, which are also built into what would be regarded as good leadership. It argues that Afghan political bargaining is a more sophisticated form of peace formation. This form of peace formation is termed as ‘everyday diplomacy,’ adept at maintaining complex power relations but clearly also regularly breaking down and limited in its prospects of counteracting the negative effects of failed statebuilding, violent state formation, and ineffective peacebuilding.
Realism is to Think Historically: Overlapping Elements in Lukácsian and Brechtian Theories of Realism
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2018

The Brecht and Lukács debate constitutes one of the most important theoretical disputes in the history of Marxist criticism. Generally, Lukács is seen as an outmoded orthodox Marxist scholar, while Brecht is viewed as a champion of political modernism who managed to flee from the shackles of Marxist Orthodoxy and renew our understanding of politics and representation. Nonetheless, there are a number of overlapping elements in Brechtian and Lukácsian theories of realism. Telling in this respect is that in their definition of realism both theorists endorse Friedrich Engels’ assertion that realism is ‘the reproduction of typical people under typical circumstances’. This chapter analyses common elements in Brechtian and Lukácsian cinematic realism. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, the chapter explores intersecting elements in Brecht and Lukacs’ critical writings on cinema, whilst, in the second part, the chapter explores case studies of films by Miklos Jancso and András Kovács. Both filmmakers have been previously discussed through a Brechtian lens, while Lukács also considered their films to be models of cinematic realism. In focusing both on the theoretical and practical paradigms of Brechtian and Lukácsian cinematic realism, this chapter sets out to rethink the Brecht and Lukács debate, and identify the common features in their understanding of politics and representation.
Assembly Research: Past and Present
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

This chapter sets out the aims of the book and examines the three main themes of landscape, time and memory and how they relate to Norse assembly sites. The importance of the recent developments in landscape archaeology as well as earlier thing site research for the results of this study is explained. Based on this work, a new interdisciplinary research methodology, drawingon archaeological evidence, written sources and place-names, has been developed.Through this approach, the meaning and use of thingsites across the Norse world is explored. This book therefore moves beyond assembly site descriptions and analyses and also investigates the activities enacted at the assemblies, and how these were experienced by the people gathered. Other significant themes includeexplanations of chronology and the terminology used.
Early Germanic and Norse Assembly Organisations
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 examines the function of assemblies in Vikingage society and provides a detailed analysis of the assembly institution in Scandinavia and how this fitted into earlier Germanic assembly systems in Mainland Europe. This is important as the thing organisation is at times seen as an isolated phenomenon related to Norse society only. It is shown that many of the traits present in Vikingage society are found in early medieval sources from Frankia and Saxony. This chapter also investigates which groups in society could actively participate in assembly-meetings, demonstrating that the elite was the most influential. The traditional male-female binary division of ‘included’ men and ‘excluded’ women is, moreover, shown to be invalid.