bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Spiritual Progression to a New Eschatological Centre: The Taʾwīl al-daʿāʾim on the Hajj
Authors: Velji Jamel A.
Published: May 2017

There exists a rich tradition in Islamic history of exegetes who have provided symbolic interpretations to the rituals associated with the hajj. Chapter six focuses specifically on how al-Nuʿmān’s taʾwīl of hajj rituals provided a symbolic framework for creating the imam as utopian centre. Through the infusion of these rituals with symbolic correlates, this chapter also illustrates how al-Nuʿmān’s taʾwīl displaced the immediacy of an expected utopia as well as the arrival of the eschatological figure in part by linking these rituals to the arrival of another figure, al-qāʾim. The performance of the hajj, like the performance of many rituals in al-Nuʿmān’s taʾwīl, becomes at once a rehearsal of a revised notion of sacred history; the embodying of awaited mahdist expectation; and a reaffirmation of the Fatimid hierarchy.
The Crucible of Democracy: The French Revolution
Authors: Hobson Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the monumental French Revolution, when fundamental changes in the nature of international politics intersected with the modern appearance of democracy as a political force. The chapter examines in depth the way the concept of democracy was used and contested during the revolution, and how two conceptions of popular sovereignty emerged. These developments directly challenged an international society composed of monarchs, and ultimately manifested themselves in the revolutionary wars. Revolutionary changes within France are considered in reference to the international context of ancient regime Europe, arguing that France became both ‘behaviourally’ and ‘ontologically’ dangerous to the existing order.
The 'War on Terror' and American Film
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: May 2017

American film in the first decade of the 21st century became a cultural battleground on which a war of representation was waged, but did these films endorse the 'War on Terror' or challenge it? More than just reproducing these fears and fantasies, The 'War on Terror' and American Film argues that American cinema has played a significant role in shaping them, restructuring how audiences have viewed this most tumultuous of decades in particularly influential ways. This compelling and theoretically informed exploration of contemporary American cinema charts the evolution of the impact of 9/11 on Hollywood film through a range of genres-war films, superhero movies, historical dramas, horror and even alien invasion films - each revealing a cinema not of escapism but one that engages profoundly with the turbulent era in which their films were made. Through a vibrant analysis of films as diverse as War of the Worlds (2005), United 93 (2006), 300 (2007), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Marvel Avengers Assemble (2012) and many others, The 'War on Terror' and American Film explores the influence of the cultural trauma of 9/11 and the subsequent 'War on Terror' on American cinema in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond.
Boots on the Ground: The New Millennial Combat Film as Cultural Artefact
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: May 2017

This chapter is a detailed analysis of the post-9/11 war film from a variety of critical perspectives. It offers a detailed analysis of The Hurt Locker, Battle for Haditha, Redacted and Act of Valour.
Turning to the Dark Side: Challenging American Mythology in the Superhero Genre
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: May 2017

This chapter concerns itself with the renaissance of the superhero genre in post-9/11 film and asks what this might be able to tell us about contemporary America. It offers a detailed analysis of the key films from the genre The Avengers, Iron Man and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.
Remaking 9/11: Imagining the Unimaginable in the Alien-Invasion Film
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: May 2017

This chapter interrogates the alien invasion film and argues that they are able to reflect the fears and anxieties of the new millennium in a similar way to the Cold War era alien invasion films. It offers a detailed analysis of War of the Worlds and Cloverfield.
Frozen in Film: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies
Authors: Fienup-Riordan Ann
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the history of Alaskan Eskimo representations, primarily in Hollywood, as Fienup-Riordan offers a detailed analysis of the career of Inuit film star Ray Mala, who starred in the the 1933 MGM production Eskimo, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, and the first film shot totally in the Iñupiaq language. The chapter also considers the ways in which Alaskan Eskimos have worked within the Hollywood system in a sporadic manner from the 1930s to the present. Fienup-Riordan  also addresses Ken Kwapis’s Hollywood film Big Miracle (2012) before moving on to examine television (such as KYUK-TV), video, and cinematic self-representations of Yu’pik culture in the twenty first century, including as part of community activism in an age of climate change.
Cinema of Emancipation and Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
Authors: Bohr Marco
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers stylistic and thematic analyses of the  cinematography and strategies of visual storytelling of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001). Bohr provides an alternate reading of the Igloolik-based group Isuma’s best-known and Cannes award winning film. Bohr identifies distinctive narrative techniques and cultural themes of the film, which tie it both to traditional Inuit myths and legends and to European art cinema, concluding by highlighting the ways in which Atanarjuat situates local practices in a global popular culture framework. Drawing on the concept of Fourth Cinema first proposed by Barry Barclay, Bohr positions Atanarjuat in the relation to emerging global  international indigenous feature film production as well as to Michelle Raheja’s concept of visual sovereignty.
Cosmopolitan Inuit: New Perspectives on Greenlandic Film
Authors: Thisted Kirsten
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers contemporary acts of appropriation undertaken by Greenlandic filmmakers, as a local feature film industry has only recently emerged in the capital of Nuuk. While there is evidence of postcolonial protest against Denmark’s long dominance over Greenland, Thisted argues that in twenty-first century fiction feature films made in and about Nuuk, Greenland is situated as part of a global network of multicultural practices and representational techniques. Thisted examines Otto Rosing’s and Torben Bech’s Sundance-screened Nuummioq (2009), which is considered the first feature film produced in Greenland, and Angajo Lennert Sandgreen’s Hinnarik Sinnattunilu (2009). The chapter discusses these films as indications of an emerging cinematic autonomy, while Nuummioq’s international release was hampered by the fact that it had not been financed by the Danish Film Institute.
California’s Yukon as Comic Space
Authors: Sandberg Mark
Published: May 2017

Addressing location substitution in early silent comedies such as Mack Sennett’s Homemade Movies (1922) and Yukon Jake (1924) Buster Keaton’s The Frozen North (1922) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), along with examples of lesser known films, Mark Sandberg examines the ways in which Hollywood was able to build a simulacrum of the entire world, and the Arctic in particular, on its backlots. Sandberg delineates the claims for authenticity made by these films and the publicity machines that surrounded them, despite their artificiality. Based on extensive research at the Margaret Herrick Library, Sandberg also examines in detail para-material such scenarios, adverts, and Paramount Studios’ location map, to delineate how various world geographies were delineated across the map of California.
‘See the Crashing Masses of White Death …’: Greenland, Germany and the Sublime in the ‘Bergfilm’ SOS Eisberg
Authors: Körber Lill-Ann
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.
Hollywood Does Iceland: Authenticity, Genericity and the Picturesque
Authors: Norðfjörð Björn
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses the use of location substitution by Hollywood in Iceland. Ranging from films as diverse as Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus (2012) and Lee Tamihori’s James Bond vehicle Die Another Day (2002), Nordfjörd considers how the landscape of Iceland is configured as beautiful, sublime, and fantastical. At the same time, he shows, they become generic background fodder for Hollywood cinema, precisely because of their seemingly otherworldy characteristics. By way of comparison, Nordfjörd argues that these ‘otherworldy’ Arctic environments are rarely mobilized as local sites in icelandic film production, and when they are used in films such as Dagur Kári’s Nói the Albino (2003) and Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever (1995) they are aesthetically far away from realism.
From Objects to Actors: Knud Rasmussen’s Ethnographic Feature Film The Wedding of Palo
Authors: Volquardsen Ebbe
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines one of Denmark’s best-known ethnographic fiction feature films, Knud Rasmussen’s The Wedding of Palo (1934), directed by Friedrich Dalsheim, and shot in Western Greenland. While in many ways a documentary in the salvage ethnography tradition of the first part of the twentieth century, and sharing many similarities with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Volquardsen examines the significance of this film for the contested geopolitical status of Greenland in the early 1930s. Foregrounding the venerable status of Knud Rasmussen as an explorer and ethnographer in Danish history, this chapter shows how the film continues to be both cherished and mocked as a thwarted historical document for the Greenlandic population. The legacy of this film, showcasing seal-hunts, kayaking tricks, and domestic and cultural traditions (including drum-dancing), has remained significant and occupies a complex position in Denmark-Greenland cultural relations.
Arctic Travelogues: Conquering the Soviet North
Authors: Sarkisova Oksana
Published: May 2017

In this chapter Oksana Sarkisova examines the depiction of indigenous peoples in the Soviet Arctic and how these representations have changed in accordance with the ideological narrative of a communist state in the 1920s and the 1930s. Examining films both central to and outside the canon of Soviet film history, such as Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Vladimir Erofeev’s Beyond the Arctic Circle (1927) and Shneiderov’s Two Oceans (1933), Sarkisova uncovers a little-known history of Arctic indigenous representation, and how these representations fundamentally shifted with the end of Leninism and the beginnings of Stalinism. Sarkisova also explores the profound role played by Polar exploration in the Soviet imaginary during these years, tracing its shifting ideological underpinnings in the process.
The Tour: A Film About Longyearbyen, Svalbard. An Interview with Eva la Cour
Authors: Ihle Johanne Haaber
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, Johanne Haaber Ihle and Eva La Cour discuss how historical assumptions of visual anthropology, present in many earlier films of the Arctic, are both upheld and challenged by modes of participant-observer in contemporary nomadic life in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. In La Cour’s film The Tour (2012), the nomads are taxi drivers, tourists, scientists, and miners, whose stories are offset against a partially obscured and dramatic Svalbard landscape, to challenge precisely the notion that the landscape and location bear intrinsic meaning separate from cultural and aesthetic traditions of representing it.
Frozen in Motion: Ethnographic Representation in Donald B. MacMillan’s Arctic Films
Authors: Genauer Rebecca
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the explorer Donald MacMillan, who accompanied Robert Peary during the 1908-09 Polar expedition, and took tens of thousands of still photographs and exposed nearly 100,000 feet of motion picture footage during his long career as explorer, scientist, lecturer, and ethnographer. Four of MacMillan’s edited single-reel films – Hunting Musk-Ox with the Polar Eskimo (date unknown), Travelling with the Eskimos of the Far North (1930), Eskimo Life in South Greenland (filmed during a 1926 expedition), and Under the Northern Lights (circa 1928) –survive. Genauer’s chapter argues that MacMillan disavowed narrative and generic conventions of ethnographic representation, which allowed his films to break from the supposed verisimilitude characteristic of contemporary explorer films.
‘Here will be a Garden-City’: Soviet Man on an Arctic Construction Site
Authors: Bugaeva Lyubov
Published: May 2017

The trope of Arctic exploration has been used for political purposes all over the world, and the Soviet Union was no exception. In this chapter Lyubov Bugaeva examines the construction of the ‘Soviet man’ in Soviet Arctic filmmaking in the Stalinist era. Moreover, she examines how Stalinist doctrines in Soviet cinema of the 1930s was reconfigured in films about Arctic expeditions by later generations of filmmakers in the 1970s. Bugaeva offers detailed accounts of how this process of construction played itself out in a range of Stalinist and post-Stalinist films, including Sergei Gersimov’s The Seven Bold Ones (1937), City of Youth (1938), and The Love of Mankind (1972). By way of contrast, Bugaeva also considers the work of including Alexei Simonov’s The Ordinary Arctic (1974).
Reform in Context IV: Tanganyika/Tanzania (and Kenya)
Authors: Loimeier Roman
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces Tanganyika (since 1964 Tanzania) as the regional context for the emergence of both Sufi- and Salafi-oriented movements of reform. It shows that neither movement of reform was monolithic but characterized by multiple splits informed by generational dynamics as well as family disputes. The chapter presents Sufi-oriented movements of reform as the first movements of reform in Tanganyika and explains why Salafi-oriented groups developed so late, although Salafi ideas of reform had already been presented by Shaykh al-Amin b. Ali al-Mazru’i in the 1930s. Salafi-oriented groups in fact developed only as a reaction to efforts of the Tanzanian state to impose religious hegemony through the agency of state controlled Muslim institutions which were regarded as being highly corrupt by Tanzania Muslims. Since the 1980s, Tanzania’s Salafi-oriented Muslims, known under the term “ansar al-sunna” fought against the alleged marginalization of Muslims by the Tanzanian state and against the massive growth of Pentecostal churches. The chapter finally compares the development of Salafi-oriented reform in Tanganyika/Tanzania with developments in Kenya and shows that the development of Salafi-minded reform in Kenya was again linked with the Kenyan political and historical context and characterized by organizational and doctrinal fragmentation. Neither in Tanzania nor in Kenya were Salafi-minded movements of reform able to become popular mass movements.
The Progress of Feeling: The Ossian Poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
Authors: DeLucia JoEllen
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between time, feeling, and gender in two foundational texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Ossian poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It contends that Macpherson and Smith created a temporal map of emotion that gauged social development from “primitive” to “developed” cultures and offered women writers and Scottish philosophers a new field upon which they could experiment with the relationship between gender and historical progress. Despite their obvious differences, Macpherson and Smith used women’s social status and the feminine values they were thought to impart to their male counterparts as tools for charting, evaluating, and questioning emerging theories of historical change. The ambiguity surrounding feminine sentiments’ placement in these Scottish Enlightenment narratives of historical progress creates the foundation for the following chapters, which trace women writers’ engagement with the theories of feeling and historical progress articulated by these two influential writers.
Transnational Advocacy Networks and Conditionality
Authors: Vasilev George
Published: May 2017

Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued that when such actors are hostile towards principled reform and have the ability to withstand democratic challenges to their privileged position, a combination of civil disobedience and intervention by actors external to the society is required to compel them out of their intransigence. The chapter presents conditionality and transnational networking as practical expressions of this mode of structural change and considers how these practices can inform future efforts at principled reform.
Sovereignty’s Scribbled form in King John
Authors: Anderson Thomas P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores a concept of the nation-state defined in terms of leagues, friendships, and amity between England and France in King John. The play consistently describes the evolving relationship between nations in terms of friendship and hospitality. Constance’s desperate question, ‘France friend with England! What becomes of me?’ (2.2.35) after the rival nations become momentary allies, captures the challenge that national sovereignty poses to a subject’s liberty. In its depiction of this geo-political friendship, King John interrogates the powerful claims of an emerging bureaucratic network of authority exemplified by the Bastard’s relationship with what the play calls ‘borrowed majesty’ (1.1.4) and ‘perjured kings’ (3.1.33). In arguing that King John makes explicit the political condition of friendship in depicting rival nation-states, the chapter makes the case that the Bastard’s new sovereign relationship radically redefines a political subject as a bawd or broker in a bureaucratic network with radical, albeit unrealized, political potential. The Bastard—a bureaucrat with royal blood—is well aware that his fugitive survival and political efficacy are contingent on how he responds to the unintended contours of the sovereign decision, to its collateral effects that exceed ordered and absolute power, in other words, to that which allows him to act legitimately, with bureaucratic sovereignty, both inside and outside of the law.
Epilogue: Turning Away
Authors: Anderson Thomas P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reasserts the book’s central premise that fugitive politics emerges within sovereign power, not necessarily ancillary or as a reaction to it. An exploration of Shakespeare’s political philosophy suggests the sovereign exception that arbitrates survival in early modern drama about absolute power also paradoxically menaces sovereignty’s own claims to absolutism, allowing for a politics of discord to supplement resistant political expressions. Paulina’s wager in The Winter’s Tale—a wager that so menaces Leontes’ sovereign desire—illustrates both a form of resistance and redirection, a confrontation with and a turn away fromm power that seeks to define the political in Shakespeare.
On Devices and Logics of Legal Sense: Toward Socio-technical Legal Analysis
Authors: McGee Kyle
Published: May 2017

Kyle McGee argues for the enrichment of socio-legal studies by re-evaluating the operation of rules in legal enunciation, particularly in the ‘judicial Umwelt’. Opposing the tendency to black-box legal rules, prevalent in doctrinal as well as critical or socio-legal research, McGee develops a new articulation of the content of law that would not, in his view, countenance the reduction of law to information. In a departure from his more exploratory book on Latour and legal theory, he focuses here on the means of formal legal speech, walking very slowly, ‘intolerably’ slowly, through the weeds of a US trial court’s opinion in a class lawsuit concerning injuries and property damage suffered by residents of a small community allegedly resulting from a chemical company’s pollution of nearby aquifers. Narrating the slow composition of a legal trajectory out of a multitude of non-legal actors and the court’s methodical de-stratification of complicated levels or planes of enunciation, McGee introduces the jurimorph as a semiotic tool for capturing the peculiar translation that must precede entry into the trajectory and which results in a new legal figure – a value-object or, in later stages, after certain trials have been met, an obligation. The litigants propose competing sequences of value-objects, each leading to the endorsement of their respective positions; the court must submit the virtual sequences to tests, and draws out, actualises, only one pathway of obligations leading to the instauration of a principle.
‘The Crown Wears Many Hats’: Canadian Aboriginal Law and the Black-boxing of Empire
Authors: Valverde Mariana , Weaver Adriel
Published: May 2017

In this ambitious but earthbound critique of the ‘black-boxing of empire’, Mariana Valverde and Adriel Weaver adroitly trace the construction and deconstruction of the spectral corpus mysticum in Canadian legal discourse. The authors interrogate the weird legal agency of the Crown in aboriginal rights cases, disclosing the relentless production of novelty concealed beneath the conservative image of a continuous, eternal office and recalling the Latourian lesson about law’s soi disant homeostatic character: ‘even in this case [in which legal principles are modified], it will only be a matter of making the body of legal doctrine still more coherent, so that, in the last analysis, nothing will really have budged.’ These cases, Valverde and Weaver show, contract into themselves Canada’s colonial/postcolonial histories and the full weight of its legal tradition’s contradictory commitments. The sovereign gesture of recognition, offered by way of the ‘honour of the Crown’, paradoxically deprives the aboriginal nations so recognised of their very claim to existence, their nationhood: ‘the Canadian state now has obligations of sovereign/royal honour toward all aboriginal peoples … but the naming of those obligations simultaneously performs a kind of re-coronation of the very colonial sovereign whose servants caused so much harm to aboriginal peoples over the centuries’. Valverde and Weaver allow us to linger on this troubling sense of the uncanny, of the historical deja vu or phantasm of repetition that takes on materiality in the bilateral movement of the Crown through the networks of public law. It is a phantasm that reappears in the discursive techniques of judges that are, in fact, elaborating and reinventing precisely the discretionary doctrinal construct (‘honour of the Crown’) that they claim, instead, to merely appeal to, hearkening to an eternal spring of sovereign virtue through the mists of antiquity.
The Conditions of a Good Judgment: From Law to Internal Affairs Police Investigations
Authors: Bellaing Cédric Moreau de
Published: May 2017

A provocative account of police internal affairs investigations by a leading legal sociologist. Such investigations concern accusations of wrongdoing made by civilians against police officers. By deploying analytical resources drawn from Latour’s work, it becomes quite possible to make such ordinary administrative procedures reveal something essential about the nature of state violence, what counts as legitimate authority, and how law fits into the modern architecture of power. What entities, Moreau de Bellaing asks, must be enlisted, and what relations must be established between them, in order to produce a ‘good judgment’ in these inquiries into alleged police misconduct? Having followed the police investigators in their work for several months, the author is in a position to tell us. Confronting the ‘enigma’ of a severe disproportionateness between the frequency of reports of illegitimate violence and the frequency of the imposition of sanctions for such misconduct, Moreau de Bellaing notes that the compiled data themselves give no hint of the qualitative details of any particular case: as Garfinkel showed long ago, statistical reports reveal, at most, the management techniques of the organisation that prepared the reports. Thus we must plunge into the disciplinary records to extract the phases of investigation and to assemble a logic of the case grounded not in numerical abstractions but in the ‘torturous progression’ of concrete transformations, the interplay of leads, dead ends, ulterior motives, defensive strategies and proliferating uncertainties, and the circulation of value-objects required for the generation of an acceptable conclusion warranting closure of the disciplinary file. Moreau de Bellaing’s conclusion is stark and sobering: the establishment of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of police violence has nothing to do with the magnitude of force applied, as civilians would expect, but only with the successful capture, by the investigators, of the many moving pieces composing the relational situation in which any quantum of force was applied in the first place.
The Production Funds
Authors: Doyle Gillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the UK Film Council managed and organised the allocation of public funds for film production, after taking over the administration of Lottery funding from the Arts Council of England and incorporating existing film investment bodies British Screen Finance and the BFI’s Production Department. It outlines how a distinctive model was pursued through the creation of three separate streams led by industry professionals, in the form of the Development, New Cinema and Premiere Funds. Drawing on interviews with the Heads of Funds and key stakeholders from the independent film sector, it traces how the funding schemes developed over two phases while reflecting on the often difficult relationships between fund heads and independent producers in the UK.
Introduction
Authors: Coombs Nathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the science of history has been misrepresented by postmodernists as a monolithic relic of modernity. If history and event are seen not as binary opposites but as a complementary pair, then both classical Marxism and a strand of French theory after Louis Althusser offer unique sciences of history. Although there is greater stress on historical discontinuity in post-Althusserian theory, this body of contemporary thought has commitments consistent with the Marxist understanding of revolution as a quantity to quality leap. The political stakes of Marxist and post-Althusserian theories are then introduced. The Hegelian influence on Marxism is presented as supporting political gradualism and technological determinism. Althusser is shown to set in motion a self-referential rationalism that shores up the authority of theorists. Chapter abstracts follow.
The Empire Thesis and its Critics
Authors: He Baogang
Published: May 2017

Chapter 3 examines the historically-based thesis on empire that argues that the democratic process evolving from ‘empire’ to nation-state presents a challenge for China’s territorial integrity. It analyzes the impact of China’s national identity question on Chinese democratization, and explores why China has difficulty establishing democracy. Through demonstrating the conflictive logic between democracy and state nationalism in the context of China’s national identity issue, it provides an explanation or an understanding of, not a justification for, the Party/State’s resistance to democracy. The chapter also argues against a strong historical determinism and emphasizes the importance of agency. It explores the possible democratic solutions through which China could avoid the logic of “the empire thesis”.
Nationalism, Democratisation and the Taiwan Question
Authors: He Baogang
Published: May 2017

Chapter 4 compares nationalism and democratization in Taiwan and China, and, in particular, seeks to develop an understanding of the rise of Taiwanese nationalism and its impact on democratization, as well as the impact democratization has on the politics associated with the national identity question. It examines the effects of democratization and nationalism that continue to contribute to the outcome in managing the national identity conflicts across the Taiwan Strait.
Beyond Socialist Autonomy in Tibet
Authors: He Baogang
Published: May 2017

Chapter 8 examines in detail the current practice of autonomy in China. It first examines current Chinese official practice of autonomy, followed by a discussion of the Dalai Lama’s proposal on the Middle Way to achieve genuine autonomy. It then discusses and explains why Beijing rejects the Dalai Lama’s proposal and offers several explanations for the current deadlock. Finally it makes some suggestions on how to make a breakthrough.
Introduction
Authors: Evans Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the book. It offers an overview of Davis’s career as a writer and as a translator before putting forward the main argument of the book that translation is central to understanding Davis’s work. The chapter then discusses the role of translation in a writer’s œuvre, arguing, based on a literature review, that there are three main trends: 1) translation that has no relation to the rest of their work, 2) translation as influential on a writer and 3) translation in dialogue with their other writing. In Davis’s case, there are examples of translations which have no relation to her other writing, but the book focuses on those where a dialogue can be perceived. The chapter ends by summarising the upcoming chapters.
Translation as Composition
Authors: Evans Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyses where Davis uses practices that are like translation in her stories and where Davis uses translation as a narrative focus of her stories. In the first half, Davis’s work is read through the paradigms of collage, quotation and pastiche. Through close readings of stories such as ‘Once A Very Stupid Man’ and ‘Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho’, the chapter argues that Davis’s writing problematizes the notion of the unitary text and questions understandings of authorship. As with the stories from Flaubert and her Marie Curie story, the original text is never full incorporated into her work, yet is part of it. The second half of the chapter analyses the stories ‘Foucault and Pencil’ and ‘The Letter’. In the former, a reading of Foucault stands in for understanding an argument with another character; emotion is displaced into intellect. In ‘The Letter’, this process involves the central character trying to decipher the meaning of a poem in French which has been sent as a letter. In all these stories, translation is central to Davis’s narrative production and, at the same time, serves to highlight the connection between translation and writing in her work in general.
Introduction
Authors: Davison Claire
Published: May 2017

The introduction offers an up-to-date survey of translation as both praxis and trope in contemporary modernist studies. These include the languages and figures of translation: polyphony, dialogue, idiolect and theatricalisation; representations of the translator as a liminal figure-cultural ambassador or intermediary; the linguistic, stylistic and political borders being confronted for translation to take place; the cultural networks and publications via which translations and foreign literatures transited and became accessible to new readerships. These dimensions are summarized by what Renken calls ‘the pleasures of Babel’, challenging the age-old figures of translation as a divine curse, condemning it to entropy, failure or confusion. This conceptual introduction is followed by succinct presentations of the various chapters in the yearbook, and their different contributions to the field.
‘Among Wolves’ or ‘When in Rome’?: Translating Katherine Mansfield
Authors: Kimber Gerri
Published: May 2017

Following a brief discussion of what constitutes a ‘good’ translation, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how the translation of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction into French is a complex process, which has rarely been executed well.
There are fundamental problems in translating fiction such as Mansfield’s, where literary nuances such as the use of free indirect discourse, her very precise punctuation, together with her particular brand of humour, which includes specific idiolects, seldom survive translation from English to French. An examination will also be made of more than one translation of the same text, where such translations exist, to determine whether these newer translations offer a more accurate rendering of Mansfield’s original texts.
Financial Contributions
Authors: Wold Atle L.
Published: May 2017

What did Scotland contribute in terms of financial support for the war effort, and did the Scots pay their ‘fair share’ of taxes in the 1790s? This chapter addresses the question of Scotland’s relative financial contribution to the war effort, by first looking at attitudes to taxation, and then Scotland’s actual contribution to war time finances. The main arguments presented here is that attitudes to taxation in Scotland focused more on individual cases such as the Coal tax, than on the overall tax burden and Scotland’s relative contribution to war-time finances, and that the contemporary view that Scotland was lightly taxed when compared to England, is largely supported by the surviving evidence on tax revenues.
Loyalist Ideology
Authors: Wold Atle L.
Published: May 2017

The final chapter of this book explores the pro-government argument presented in Scotland in the 1790s, under the heading of loyalist ideology. The chapter focuses on the central elements in this argument, such as the conservative defence of the British constitution, and the attack mounted on the British radicals and French revolutionaries, arguing that loyalist ideology in Scotland was much in line with that presented elsewhere in Britain. Ministers of the Church of Scotland, however, played a prominent part in writing of loyalist pamphlets, and in their writings, a clearer Scottish voice can sometimes be detected. Some pamphleteers also included more specifically Scottish elements in their texts – such as arguing that the Union and its political system was to the particular benefit of the Scots – but, overall, such Scottish adaptations were rare, and no concerted attempt seems to have been made to develop a separate Scottish loyalist ideology.
Gender, Genre and More General Indie Dimensions in Megan Griffiths’ The Off Hours and Eden
Authors: King Geoff
Published: May 2017

This chapter challenges essentialist assumptions often imposed on female-directed films by analysing two features by Megan Griffiths. Where her first feature The Off Hours (2011) supports the expectation that the female sensibility results in a film with a realistic, low-key aesthetic focused on characterisation and relationships and fostered by collaborative filmmaking, these same characteristics and production methods account for much of the (predominantly male) indie sector in general. Moreover Griffiths’ Eden (2012) adapts the male thriller genre to one woman’s experience as a victim of the international sex trade. As Griffiths’ practice suggests, rather than sharing some essential predisposition, female filmmakers transform and hybridise ‘indie’ modalities and existing genres to their own feminist ends.
Falling Hard: The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
Authors: McElhaney Joe
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Preston Sturges’s independent production after leaving Paramount.Diddlebock is an idiosyncratic film that takes many of the implications of Sturges’s cinema in some new directions. An expensive film that nevertheless looks low budget, Diddlebock is a film in which American ideals of money and social and economic success are the targets of ruthless satire. In addition, Sturges is obsessed here with temporality, the film’s images dominated by stasis, decay, and decline. In the title role, the aging silent comedy star Harold Lloyd embodies this idea of decline with a particular clarity. The film, while self-consciously drawing upon the “Harold” myth of Lloyd’s classic silent period, relentlessly exposes the fact that Harold has aged, his words and gestures now reduced to the level of cliché.
The Crux
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

Gerard Manley Hopkins called John Duns Scotus the rarest-veinèd unraveller of realty (sic). But unravelling and ravelling call for unravelling in order to lay bare that their meanings turn on the crucial antagonymy that throughout this book will be named chiasmus or chiasm. Another example of such crossover is a certain middle-voiced relation of activity and passivity which, subsequent chapters will show, meshes with the relation between intention and attention in which the latter is seen to have at least as much importance as its less neglected partner, phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological intentionality.
From Method of Ignorance to Way of Love
Authors: Llewelyn John
Published: May 2017

Although against Giles of Rome Scotus holds that existence is not necessarily the cause or ground of thisness, he maintains that thisness may entail existence. When this entailment is associated with the propositions that the existence of a thing is a good for that thing and therefore to one’s own at least prima facie obligation not to be indifferent to its survival and wellbeing. But this argument for what we have named blank ecology glides from metaphysics to theology when Scotus maintains that the cause or ground of the thisness of finite worldly things is ultimately the will of the Creator. That is, the only undogmatic mode of facing this claim is to engage with the arguments of the theologians, even if our arguments amount to an adoption of the via negativa. Following that route is tantamount to following what in this chapter is referred to as the method of learned ignorance, docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa). A method is a means that is voluntarily applied, like Descartes’ typically Western Enlightenment method of doubt. A way is usually more passively pursued, as in Oriental religious practices. Via admits either interpretation, ideally a combination of both, right-brained ratiocination and left-brained waiting attentiveness, without which there is no love—and therefore no God, if, as we are told by theologians and poets like Hopkins’ favourite George Herbert in the poem by him that Hopkins liked most, God is verily Love.
The Schedule of Reserved Occupations, Oral History and Other Methodologies
Authors: Chand Alison
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins by discussing important theories of masculinity underlying the arguments in the book, before defining the policy of reservation in Second World War Britain and its implications. The geographical boundaries of the study are also defined here, with the areas understood as being incorporated into ‘Glasgow’ and ‘Clydeside’ discussed. The chapter also defines the notions of ‘lived’ and ‘imagined’ subjectivities, which centrally underpin the arguments made in the book, before considering the methodologies used in conducting the research involved, primarily oral history. The chapter moves on to look at uses of oral testimonies in previous historical research before examining the different kinds of oral testimony used for this study, including those held in existing oral history archives and newly conducted oral history interviews. Finally, the chapter examines other primary source materials used in this research, including cultural materials such as newspapers, novels and films.
Narrative and Becoming
Authors: Askin Ridvan
Published: May 2017

What is narrative? Ridvan Askin answers this question by bringing together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn. Through this process he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Against the established consensus of narrative theory he argues for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive. Narrative and Becoming provides close readings of a number of contemporary North American fictions, most prominently Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), showcasing their genuine metaphysical quality.
Sensational Realism: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist
Authors: Askin Ridvan
Published: May 2017

The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show that Deleuzian sensations likewise underpin and constitute explicitly representational and verisimilar narration. Tracing the novel’s African American protagonist’s progressive immersion in becoming the chapter draws out how she engages in what Isabelle Stengers has termed speculative constructivism—the facilitation of events—in order to create the future to come. Since the protagonist’s speculative trajectory is created by poetic means it is tantamount to the figuration of the narrative’s very own speculative-creative activity and thus emblematic of narration’s own construction work.
Real Folds: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
Authors: Askin Ridvan
Published: May 2017

This chapter is dedicated to the most explicitly self-referential narrative exploration of difference scrutinized in this book. It shows how Danielewski’s narrative meticulously works towards unearthing its very own building blocks, the very stuff it is made of. In short, House of Leaves is explicitly engaged with unearthing the virtual Idea of narrative. For this end, the novel unfolds a spectacle of disintegration on all levels, from the disintegration of characters’ minds to that of its own plot and narrative discourse. At the same time, the novel presents a veritable cosmogony suggesting an inherently fractured, fractalized and differential world. Difference thus becomes the guiding principle of both the created world and its creation. What Danielewski’s novel ultimately proposes, then, is not only the becoming of narrative but also the narrativity of becoming.
Suspect Devices – Metadrama and the Narcissism of Small Differences
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: May 2017

The devices of metadrama allow the theatre to reflect upon itself in a way which reveals the preoccupations of writers, and it is a curious fact that the proliferation of metadramatic structures in the early modern theatre coincides with an increasing sense of the ubiquity of the informer in society. The introduction identifies the defining characteristics of early modern metadrama and the informer-figure, and explores the connections between them. It explains how this hauntingly present figure, often indicative of the potential venality of the audience, also becomes a shady representation of the author, through its involvement in the generation of narrative. This often causes authors to protest too much about the distinction between themselves and these despised individuals. In this way early modern metadrama contains discourses of production and reception which mirror authors’ perceptions and experiences of their own authorship, their audiences, and the nature of early-modern authority itself.
Hamlet’s ‘lawful espials’: Metadrama, Tainted Authority and the Ubiquitous Informer
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: May 2017

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the subject of my first chapter, is a play whose metadramatic structures are entirely suffused with the figure of the unseen informer, generating a duplicitous atmosphere which is integral to the movement of the narrative. Its vicious nature obscured by its own corruption, it is so much the very air that Denmark breathes that the court’s ubiquitous ‘espials’ come to seem ‘lawful’. The chapter argues that informing overtakes authorship, and self-authorship, as the means by which narrative is generated. So, Hamlet arrives at his and Claudius’ denouement as if washed there on a tide of circumstance, lashed into place by this perfect storm of informing and duplicity. In Hamlet, informing functions as a social hamartia which the play projects from the personal experience of the character onto the world of the whole court, operating as a critique of contemporary mechanisms of authority, which are based on informing. Conversely, Hamlet’s own supposed hamartia, his vacillation and procrastination, arises in fact from a self-conscious reluctance to submit to the full implications of his own role in this homicidal system. The metadramatic carnage of the play’s ending, meanwhile, has a tale to tell about the fate of such a system.
‘Ministers of Fate’: Politic Oversight and Ideal Authorities
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the ambivalent use of informer-figures found in the metadrama of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and argues that the magical setting of these plays may facilitate a more revealing picture of authorities’ reliance on these than Jonsonian realism, or tragic form, might allow. Exceptionally, a discourse of ‘illusion and reality’ is useful in interpreting the metadrama of these plays, since in both cases it is authority which is displaced into the licentious landscapes of magic and fantasy. MND argues for an ideal of dramatic authorial power in a world where a relatively beneficent authority, free of hierarchical dysfunction, oversees agents acting in playful mischief rather than insidious paid malignity. The Tempest’s dramatic and magical setting, meanwhile, demonstrates a greater concern to control representation. In this case the interplay of metadramatic levels of ‘reality’ mirrors early modern conditions of production for the teller of tales, in which authority requires both authorship skills and those of unseen observation. The fact that the dominant imagery of authority and informing persists in these texts despite the fantastic content may suggest an inherently political aspect to metadramatic form itself.
Painting, Music, Touch: D. G. Rossetti’s Ekphrasis and Competing Temporalities
Authors: Thain Marion
Published: May 2017

The first of the two case studies on aesthetic poetry and lyric temporality, this chapter explores D. G. Rossetti’s ekphrastic poetry. Through an analysis of the operation of meter in some of Rossetti’s major poems, the chapter argues that poetry can be seen to offer, metrically, a response to some of the key shifts in the understanding of time that challenged the very foundations of a Romantic conceptualization of lyric. The chapter ends with a coda on the temporalities modelled in the poetry of W. B. Yeats (a poet temporally at the margins of the period studied), complicating his invocation of a timeless lyric eternity through an appeal to the modes of metrical reading provided in this chapter.