bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Ranking of Floating Charges
Authors: Hardman Jonathan , MacPherson Alisdair D J
Published: January 2023

Ranking is well-recognised as a complicated and troublesome area of law, especially when floating charges are involved. This chapter therefore seeks to provide a relatively comprehensive consideration of the ranking of floating charges, including with reference to default rules, negative pledges, ranking agreements, distribution, and issues involving circles of priority, offside goals and the doctrine of catholic and secondary creditors.
Plato on Military and Political Leadership
Authors: Rockwell Nicholas
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the views of Plato on generalship and citizen soldiers in ancient Greece. A major theme that emerges from the discussion is the relationship between rulers and ruled under various forms of government. The art of generalship ultimately consists of effectively combining theory and practice. Ideally, generals are experts deftly deploying elite warriors on the field of battle. In reality, the ability and knowledge of generals varies greatly as does the composition and quality of military forces. For Plato, the social makeup of armies and constitutions were of profound interest and informed many of their discussions on warfare and politics. In general, Plato doubted the abilities of the lower classes to make significant contributions to the stability and prosperity of the state; instead, he proposed that rulers should rely on citizen soldiers that had adequate education and training. However, most Greek states relied on citizen soldiers from all social classes and with only limited military training. As a result, there are discrepancies between the ideal and reality.
Christian Political Philosophy in Exile – Between Sobornost’ and Theocracy
Authors: van der Zweerde Evert
Published: January 2023

Is Russian political philosophy done by Russians, in Russian, and in Russia? Philosophers and other intellectuals who had ended up in Western Europe after their involuntary emigration from Soviet Russia in 1922, managed to set up institutions, to found journals, and, in cases like Nikolai Berdiaev or Semën Frank, to become part of West European philosophical culture. Many of them, however, retained their focus either on a Russia that they hoped would one day be liberated from Soviet oppression or, like m. Maria (Skobtsova), now St Mary of Paris, tried to work in and for the diaspora. This chapter highlights those thinkers who, in different ways, can be identified as part of so-called Russian religious philosophy. For them, opposition to the atheist Bolshevik regime which many of them identified as the Antichrist was self-evident. Some developed a social and political philosophy that included elements of a socialist agenda. The political-philosophical potential of their notion of sobornost’ [communality] has not been exhausted yet. Others, like Ivan Il’in, moved close to fascism in their attempt to restore a tsarist monarchy.
Afterword
Authors: van der Zweerde Evert
Published: January 2023

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Sculpting the Body, Sculpting History
Authors: Benavente Fran , Salvadó-Corretger Glòria
Published: January 2023

Chapter two focus on the body, which is one of the central themes and motifs in the works of João Pedro Rodrigues. One of his objectives as a filmmaker is to explore the body, thinking about its complex figuration. Indeed, the body in his films can have many forms and shapes (transformed and sculptural or chiselled), it is a plural body, inhabited by the ghost of history, the animal body and the spiritual body. As such, this chapter uses the body, or its traces in its absence, as the common thread to think about cinema. In order to do that this study explores the “lesser” films by Rodrigues like China China (2007); Red Dawn (2011); The Last Time I saw Macao (2011) or Mahjong (2013) looking at issues like spectral bodies and memory or experiences lived in real life.
The Injury: On Pathosformel in João Pedro Rodrigues’s Work
Authors: Cheval Olivier
Published: January 2023

This chapter proposes a structural examination of João Pedro Rodrigues’ work on the recurring theme of injury. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of image pulsion and the elementary world, João Pedro Rodrigues’ four feature films are analysed as naturalist cinema, in which the idea of an impersonal injury is central. The chapter demonstrates how the injury is not a social determination of the characters, as in a realistic aesthetic, but a vital element that contributes to their own identity. In order to proceed with this analysis, this study uses Aby Warburg’s concept of pathosformel so as to prove that these films stem from the same trope: a kiss on a wound, a figure Georges Didi-Huberman studied in the long Christian genealogy. The aim is to show how this figure is a representation of the way the singularity of queer bodies meets the Christian utopia of founding a unique flesh. This correlation will allow us to better understand the films of João Pedro Rodrigues, along with his obsessions and themes.
Other Landscapes: On the Expanded Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
Authors: Rosário Filipa
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines João Pedro Rodrigues’ and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s take on expanded cinema, evaluating the significance of experimenting with technology, classic narrative, and performance within the cinematic event (Hatfield, 2004) in the context of their oeuvre. Since 2011, JPR and JRGdM have been (re)creating diegetic worlds through video installations that communicate – in different ways – with their own cinematic world. For instance, in Today is a Party Day (2016) nine screens, displayed in three rows of three TV screens each, exhibit in loop the rushes for JPR’s short Parabéns! (Happy Birthday, 1997). By focusing on the relation between experimental and “classical narrative” cinema in this context, the chapter addresses issues such as the notion of filmic reality, cinematic apparatus, and audience’s perception. It also assesses the reconfiguration of diegetic time and space within this recent self-exploration in JPR’ and JRGdM’s eclectic cinephile universe, especially by looking at the video installations included in From the Pearl River to the River Ave, Solar – Cinematic Art Gallery’s 2018 exhibition (Portugal).
Reflections of Afrikaans in the English Short Stories of Herman Charles Bosman
Authors: van Rooy Bertus
Published: January 2023

Bertus van Rooy’s research on the English short stories of Herman Charles Bosman focuses on linguistic contact between English and Afrikaans in South African literary writing. Using an electronic corpus of Bosman’s short stories written between 1930 and 1950, he shows how Bosman uses the medium of English to create Afrikaans characters in the Afrikaans cultural setting. His use of Afrikaans elements is deemed by literary critics to be more natural – less contrived – than others writing in the same genre and thus a fair reflection of the contact between Afrikaans and English in South African English. Afrikaans elements are visible in Bosman’s use of Afrikaans proper names for different characters and hundreds of common nouns: words relating to local institutions, traditions and practices, as well as the social, natural and built environment. Other kinds of language–culture connections can be seen in Bosman’s frequent use of Afrikaans terms of address in dialogues between characters and some subtle elements of his lexicogrammar and syntax which seem to calque underlying structures in Afrikaans.
Cultural Keywords in Indian English
Authors: Peters Pam
Published: January 2023

Pam Peters’s paper on Indian English keywords presents a diachronic approach to identifying cultural keywords, in a combination of historical lexicography and 21st century data from the GloWbE corpus. She focuses on Arabic and Persian words with long histories of use from the Mughal regime (approximately 1600–1800), which managed both India and Pakistan through a Hindi-Urdu contact language (Hindustani), and continued to be used under the British Raj until the partition of India in 1947. A sample of the long-lived Persian and Arabic words show ongoing language–culture connections in references to monetary and legal institutions, as well as traditional foods, costume and entertainment. But other colonial words designating once important roles in handling money and managing large households are now degraded or neutralised in proper names. Traditional terms of reference and address from Arabic are still widely used in online Indian English, to affirm shared social and cultural relationships; and though their connotations of respect or friendship are eroded, they continue to index such values in changing social contexts.
L1 Singapore English: The Influence of Ethnicity and Input
Authors: Buschfeld Sarah
Published: January 2023

Sarah Buschfeld’s research focuses on the spoken English of Singaporean children aged from 2 to 12 years from Chinese, Indian and English background, using data from structured sociolinguistic interviews with the children. In her phonological data on vowel lengths, she found considerable variability in individual children, with a mix of longer and shorter realisations of the same vowel by the same child, even in successive utterances. Variable vowel lengths and variable rhoticity suggested inputs from both American and British English. There was no age-graded effect in their average vowel lengths. In her morphosyntactic data, the children’s realisations of the past tense and use of subject pronouns showed inputs from both colloquial and standard varieties of Singapore English and correlated with their ethnic affiliations with the Chinese and Indian communities, and possible influences from substrate languages including Cantonese and Tamil. These results show the variability of children’s language, reflecting the heterogeneity of the inputs in the Singapore speech community and the socio-ethnic matrix of the new variety.
Decolonisation and Neo-colonialism in Aboriginal Education
Authors: Malcolm Ian G.
Published: January 2023

Ian Malcolm discusses Aboriginal English from the educational point of view, analysing the deconstruction of Aboriginal culture and Indigenous languages under colonial administration. As he describes it, Aboriginal Australians have faced dispossession of their lands and been subjected to practices, laws and language that contradict their culture. Legal and educational systems imposed by the dominant culture have worked to maintain colonial domination, that is, neo-colonialism. Yet these speakers have shown their resistance to colonialism, by adapting the English language to make it express an Aboriginal rather than a colonial worldview and affirming its nexus with their culture. He presents five elements of this reconceptualisation in the changed lexical and grammatical elements of Aboriginal English. New words for identifying themselves and their group identities are elements in affirming the decolonisation of Indigenous people. The paper argues that a bicultural approach to education is needed to counter neo-colonialism, to affirm Indigenous culture and languages where possible, and otherwise develop a bidialectal approach using Aboriginal and Australian English in schools.
The Auckland Voices Project: Language Change in a Changing City
Authors: Meyerhoff Miriam , Ballard Elaine , Charters Helen , Birchfield Alexandra , Watson Catherine I.
Published: January 2023

Research by Miriam Meyerhoff, Elaine Ballard, Helen Charters, Alexandra Birchfield and Catherine I. Watson examines the impact of migration on the phonology of Auckland English, focusing on the variable realisation of the definite article in New Zealand’s largest and most multicultural city. Their research is based on conversational data from 70 people, male and female, younger and older, from three ethnographically distinct areas of the city. Their pronunciation of the was tested before a following vowel, in stressed or non-stressed NPs, to see if the standard [ði] was used rather than [ðɘ]. Multivariate analysis showed that [ɘ] is becoming more typical before vowel-initial NPs in all three areas of Auckland, even more so in South Auckland, which has been most ethnically diverse for the longest. Evidence also suggests [ɘ] is spreading rapidly among younger speakers in the other two communities. These pronunciation changes are thus associated with migration and higher levels of multilingualism in the community and support the claim that high levels of diversity in communities favour the emergence of new and distinct regional features.
Fairness and Rights in International Criminal Procedure
Authors: Rigney Sophie
Published: January 2023

This book examines two of the most fundamental precepts of international criminal justice: fairness, and the rights of the accused. These two ideas - and the relationship between them - are central, contested, and misunderstood. What exactly is 'fairness'? How do we know whether or not a trial is fair? Can a trial still be 'fair' if the rights of the accused are undermined? This book particularly examines procedural decisions made in recent trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The primary question in this book is, how are fairness and the rights of the accused connected in procedural decision-making in contemporary international criminal trials? Fairness, rights, and procedure are closely aligned, but I show that in making decisions about how these trials are run, Trial Chambers routinely invoke the idea of fairness - in order to justify decisions which may undermine the rights of the accused. Thus, we can observe a distancing between them in judicial decisions. This book ultimately calls for a renewed close association between fairness and the rights of the accused, particularly when making determinations on matters of procedure in international criminal trials.
Introduction
Authors: Rigney Sophie
Published: January 2023

The Introduction sets out the significance of this book. It locates the book in the existing literature and provides the context for the book. It also articulates the scope and boundaries of the book, and sets out what the book intends to do (and what it does not intend to do, and why). It does this with particular respect to sources and methodology used in the book. Finally, I set out the structure for the rest of the book.
Fairness, the Rights of The accused and the Protection of Witnesses
Authors: Rigney Sophie
Published: January 2023

One of the most dramatic areas in which the rights of the accused and the fairness of trials may be challenged is that of the protection of victims and witnesses. In this Chapter, I examine the use of delayed disclosure and redactions to disclosure, and the potential use of written evidence in place of oral evidence, as mechanisms to ensure the safety of witnesses. There is considerable controversy about the appropriate weight to provide to fairness, rights, and witness protection; and as I will show, several examples reveal an extension of the protection of witnesses even in situations where the rights of the accused will be curtailed, with trial fairness provided as the reason to justify this and little consideration shown to the rights of the accused. There has been a significant expansion to the use of redactions and the use of written testimony, but little regard has been provided to the rights of the accused in relation to these practices. These procedural mechanisms show the separability of fairness and rights, and the challenges for ensuring the rights of the accused in procedural decisions.
Conclusion: Little Images in the Big Picture
Authors: Renard John
Published: January 2023

Here I suggest how information available both within our three manuscripts and from the historical context in which their patrons and artists produced them provides clues to three increasingly broad questions – progressing from our three manuscripts, to the milieu that produced them, and concluding with possible links beyond the Ottoman world. First, what evidence do the texts and images themselves offer in support of an argument that religious/spiritual authority is the key to understanding these manuscripts? Second, a two-sided question asks what historical data can help explain 1) why, given the variety of Sufi organizations in Anatolia, Ottoman patronage of major illustrated hagiographic works was limited to works on Rumi and the Mawlawis; and 2) why, given the spread of the Mawlawis well beyond Anatolia, manuscripts and miniatures dedicated entirely to Rumi and his Mawlawi progeny apparently resulted exclusively from Ottoman patronage? And finally, what broader connections emerge when one envisions our subject within the wider world of late medieval Islamicate cultural settings. [163]
Conclusion: Kierkegaard and Deleuze – Philosophers of Existence
Authors: Jampol-Petzinger Andrew M.
Published: January 2023

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction
Authors: Katz Peter
Published: January 2023

Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction challenges literary studies to attend to surfaces rather than interpretation through a history of how we came to think about emotion, empathy and reading fiction as intertwined ideas. The mid-century emergence of academic literary studies exacerbated a debate over the source of literary authority. The academy and professional critics argued that to understand the truth of texts requires interpretive hermeneutic techniques acquired through labour and attention. Against professional readers, writers of popular fiction argued that emotional reading and sensational novels cultivated an ethics of care. They turned to Associationism – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science that studied mental phenomena through physiology – to understand language as a physiological process that draws bodies together. For these authors, because language is embodied, if readers could learn to care for characters, they would better care for the real people around them. Emotional reading cultivated empathy in popular readers, and imbued popular fiction with cultural value. Reading Bodies uses affect theory, surface reading, and history and philosophy of science to contextualise the intersection between scientific treatises, nineteenth-century literary criticism, and Victorian novels. At the same time, it historicizes the techniques of literary study and how the nineteenth century defined the tools of academic literary authority.
Symbolic Bodies: The Storyteller, Memory and Suffering in Boz’s ‘The Hospital Patient’
Authors: Peter J. Katz
Published: January 2023

This chapter poses the foundational ethical questions of the text: how are readers meant to understand and respond to fictional bodies’ pain – and what are they meant to do in response? To answer these questions, the chapter turns to the short story ‘The Hospital Patient’ by Charles Dickens. According to Dickens, to best understand and empathise with the anguish of those who suffer, one must read with the scientific and literary attention that turns stories into material experience. ‘Boz’, Dickens’s pen-name, appears in the text as both storyteller and Associationist scientist, but both positions require him to act on feeling. The story itself becomes a model for readers, to teach them to read empathetically – because he believes feeling is the source of literary authority. The chapter uses the physical phenomenon of light to explore memory as James Mill understood it, and memory’s connection to sympathy through Smith and Hume. These concepts help to contextualise what empathy means within medical history and the emergence of social barriers like professional, governmentally regulated medicine. Ultimately, the chapter argues that empathy best takes place in readers who read fictional bodies as surfaces.
Caring Bodies: The Reformer, Sartorial Exchange and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon
Authors: Peter J. Katz
Published: January 2023

This chapter attends to materiality, to bodies, to surfaces, and to acknowledgment rather than knowledge. Besant’s Liberalism is Associationism in action. To make this claim, the chapter focuses on how physical objects mediate between bodies in Children of Gibeon. The closer an object gets to the surface, the more it brings bodies together. One of the core preoccupations of Children of Gibeon is the degree to which the affective gravity of objects moulds social relations. In the East End, wealthy heiress Valentine seeks to connect with her working-class sisters through the objects around them. Initially, she relies on these objects as fetishes that metaphorise the affects and bodies around her. But her politics evolve as she begins to move away from mere representation. Instead, she learns an ethics of personal care that acknowledges workers rather than claims to know them. This the value of surface reading as a mode of inquiry, for it offers a route to address the material conditions of lived experience both at a systematic level and at the level of individuals and their feelings.
Aspects of the Origins of Roman Maritime Trade
Authors: Cifani Gabriele
Published: January 2023

This chapter critically discusses the potential value of archaeological evidence in reconsidering the origins of Roman maritime trading activity between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, with a particular focus upon the legal institutions involved with maritime trading activity during the archaic period and the Roman food supply during the early Republic.
Credit for Carriage: TPSulp . 78 and P. Oxy. XLV 3250
Authors: Candy Peter
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents a new interpretation of TPSulp. 78, a tablet preserved in the archive of the Sulpicii. As an imperial constitution issued by Justinian in 540 CE shows, it was not uncommon for traders and carriers to 'interlink' maritime loan contracts with contracts of affreightment. The result was a single arrangement in which a trader lent money on maritime terms to a carrier, who agreed to set off his payment of the yield on the loan against the receipt of freight money for the carriage of the trader's goods. TPSulp. 78, which contains a declaration by a certain Menelaos that he had received 1,000 denarii 'according to a sealed contract of affreightment', apparently without any demand for interest, is amenable to interpretation in these terms.
Introduction: Beyond Biopolitics – The Space and General Economy Of Esposito’s Work
Authors: Rajan Tilottama , Calcagno Antonio
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the volume and its analytic summaries of its twelve essays, including one by Esposito himself, by surveying scholarship on Esposito. It argues that the biopolitical emphasis of existing work misses Esposito’s rich engagement with intellectual history, philosophical issues, and contemporary theory of all kinds. Esposito’s work (unlike the late Foucault’s) is better described as “biophilosophy” than biopolitics.The above concerns provide the rationale for the volume’s three sections: Beginnings (essays taking up Esposito’s untranslated early work); Interdisciplinarity and the Biological Turn(essays taking up the uniquely interdisciplinary cast of his work after a turn towards the life sciences in Immunitas [2002] that deepens his existing interest in the broader vitalist category of “life” in all domains); and, capitalising on Esposito’s strategic interdisciplinarity, The Dialogue with Other Contemporary Thinkers. The Introduction stresses Esposito’s unique methodology: his notion of “diagonal” or “transversal” reading across disciplines and thinkers, and the way his books often move vertically through a sequence of (intellectual) historical moments but end with an array of thinkers that allows us to think the issues he raises in “constellation”: a Benjaminian procedure he himself describes as challenging “the concept from both the inside and outside.”
Esposito And Machiavelli: Inspiration And Affinity
Authors: Pugliese Olga Zorzi
Published: January 2023

Esposito's early essays, from the 1980s, on Machiavelli's The Prince and The Discourses reveal affinities between the two thinkers: the stress on innovation and originality, the goal of  concreteness and functionality, and the effective use of rhetorical modes of expression, including metaphorical language (the image of the pathway, for example). Esposito's non-conventional manner of interpreting Machiavelli, which excludes questions of chronology or biography, and presents a non-linear analysis of the texts, expressed in vivid prose, help explain the modern philosopher's view of the Renaissance author as a precursor in the Italian tradition of what he calls living thought or Italian theory.
Feudal Authority And Conflict In History: Giambattista Vico And Roberto Esposito’S A PHILOSOPHY FOR EUROPE: FROM THE OUTSIDE
Authors: Bertland Alexander U.
Published: January 2023

Esposito argues that real political union in Europe depends on substantial philosophical debate grounded in human concerns. He finds in Vico a thinker who resisted the totalization of abstract philosophy and who saw history as developing through political tension. He develops a reading of Vico's account of the giants as time of indeterminate communitas. Actoritasis formed with the creation of property when first rulers allow wandering giants to have protection in exchange for obedience. This starts the cycle of class conflict. This essay argues that there is an alternative way to read Vico's history that incorporates his theory of poetic wisdom. By looking at feudalism, it suggests that auctoritas is inherent to the mentality of the rulers who staunchly defend their institutions. Rather than portraying the aristocrats as offering an exchange, Vico presents them as extremely conservative and resistant to giving the lower classes any recognition at all. It has always been the lower classes who initiated conflict to force the rulers to exchange political rights for discipline. When read this way, Vico reveals the danger of aristocratic resistance to conflict.
Repositioning Simone Weil And Roberto Esposito: Life, The Impersonal And The Renunciant Obligation Of The Good
Authors: Calcagno Antonio
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores what is not deployed by Roberto Esposito in his thinking about Simone Weil, namely, the possibility of the good and how it comes to challenge Esposito’s own immunitary paradigm through an act of personal renunciation. The chapter argues that if we accept Weil’s notion of personal renunciation, we have before us the possibility of the arising of an embodied individual who can initiate both resistance and transformation of self, others and world. Though Weil advocates an individually and freely willed renunciation of the individual self for the Good, Esposito’s use of Deleuze uncovers the idea of a life, an impersonal life, that calls us to save it, despite the unique individuation of its form. A dialogue between Weil and Esposito brings forward two coeval ethical possibilities: a renunciant, individuated self and a virtual but collectivisable life that absorbs or even displaces the self, both of which call for ethical responses and obligation to human misery and suffering.
Esposito, Nancy And The Evasion Of Dialectics
Authors: Lauer Christopher
Published: January 2023

This essay argues that Jean-Luc Nancy’s influence on Esposito is not just thematic (in their mutual concern for the challenges of community) but methodological. Esposito’s professed aim in Communitas of distancing his work from dialectical thinking shows important resonances with Nancy’s project in The Experience of Freedom. This connection is especially apparent in Esposito’s discussion of freedom in Terms of the Political. Both thinkers recognize that a dialectical account of freedom that attempts to specify what freedom mustbe, given the incoherence of alternatives, will fail to appreciate what freedom actually is. One way that Esposito seeks to avoid a dialectical account of the development of community is by identifying “neutralizing appropriations” in which one term does not simply replace or incorporate another. Because Esposito himself acknowledges that such a move can only be provisional, this essay suggests that a further resource for extending Esposito’s thinking might be Nancy’s use of fragmentary writing not as a permanent interruption of dialectical continuity, but as a way of remaining mindful of the singularity of experience.
Historical Ethnogenesis and National Feeling: Scott, Moore, and Southey
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines how the ethnonationalist politics of identity formation permeated representations of the national past in the written history of the early to mid-nineteenth century. It considers two interrelated issues in Walter Scott’s History of Scotland and Thomas Moore’s History of Ireland: first, methodological questions surrounding the epistemological value of antiquarianism and the ways in which Celtic folklore and other vernacular sources could be endowed with historical legitimacy; and second, the representation in written history of those feelings of national belonging that were themselves often tied to vernacular sources and cultural memory. In relation to Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, the chapter examines the imbrication of racial assimilation and feelings of belonging in imperial narratives of national consolidation. Arising out of the uneven and unequal social orders of conquest, slavery, and racial capitalism, expansionist paradigms of nationhood were to become increasingly critical both to the construction of a uniquely British national history and to wider Anglo-Saxonist narratives of a ‘Greater Britain’.
Introduction: Rethinking Transition Theory After The ‘Arab Moment’
Authors: El-Affendi Abdelwahab , Al-Anani Khalil
Published: January 2023

The introduction highlights the important challenges posed to scholarship by the ‘Arab Moment’ of 2011, when democratic uprisings made the region an inspiration for the rest of the world, and cause academics and policy makers to rethink many assumptions and preconceptions. It also underlined the discrepancy between the global centrality of the Middle East and its peripherality and ghettoization in scholarship. The region’s wars, revolutions, oil embargoes, violence, turmoil, etc., continue to shape and transform the world, but figure only sketchily in political studies. Ascribing this marginality to the underperformance of the region’s theoreticians and its students, reflects selective inattention to major theoretical contributions, such as Edward Said’s, and some authors in this book (Bishara, Bayat, Dabashi, among others). The work builds on many of these contributions to help theory catch up with the momentous changes in the region, which are neither ephemeral nor sustainably reversible. refute perceptions about regional passivity or stagnation. The Arab revolutions, the book argues, had forced a radical rethinking in Comparative Politics, and vindicated the troubled transition paradigm, and stood it on its head. It also took up the Binder challenge by showing that Middle East Studies can produce theory. Summaries of the book’s chapters are also provided here.
Rethinking Religion and Democratic Transition: Lessons from the Arab World
Authors: Al-Anani Khalil
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the role of religious actors, mainly Islamists, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and to what extent it has shaped the outcomes and trajectory of the Arab uprisings. By doing so, the chapter helps to better understand three key issues: (a) the role of religion during political upheavals and whether it hinders or facilitates democratic transition; (b) the impact of the Arab Spring on Islamist groups and movements during and after the Arab Spring; and (c) some theoretical conclusions with relevance beyond the Arab World and could improve understanding of the relationship between religion and democratic transitions. The chapter concludes that it is not religion, but the conduct and political choices of various political actors, including Islamists, during the transition that was decisive during and after the Arab uprisings. This was particularly salient in Egypt and Tunisia.
Listening at the Limit: Nonhuman Noise in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter asks whether we can ever hear the nonhuman on its own terms and why the auditory is such a pervasive register for imagining access to an ‘outside’ or exteriority, beyond human perception. It draws on Deleuze’s concept of the ‘impossible ear’, while remaining critical of the potential instrumentalisation of the auditory within this model. Throughout, the chapter tests the extent to which cinema might constitute a site that allows for the amplification of and attunement to non-human bodies through its placement of sound. This is done through an analysis of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), which is approached as an eco-film. The chapter analyses the film’s distribution of sound between the diegetic and the non-diegetic and demonstrates how the film constructs an ‘impossible ear’ through its sound design that disturbs anthropocentrism by having sound move across species boundaries. Gainsbourg’s character displays a cinephilic subjectivity, one that allows us to understand cinephilia as a form of resonance, a mode of listening that might be sensitive to nonhuman bodies.
Listening to Things: Foley as ‘Alien Phenomenology’ and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter moves on to consider the practice of Foley artists themselves and their own form of listening, bringing this in line with contemporary non-anthropocentric philosophy. It asks if the Foley artist, in their attention to the interactions between things and their interobjectivity, could be said to be practicing a form of ‘alien phenomenology’ as defined by Ian Bogost (2012). These ideas are then taken back to film itself, to consider Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) which purports to make the sound production process visible within the film. However, I argue that sound challenges a logic of phenomenological manifestation and operates outside of the film’s audio-visual economy. In showing the workings of sound, the film gestures towards an exterior sitting at its heart, the Foley performance, that remains invisible. I argue that this performance becomes palpable, as felt or sensed, in the relation of sound to image that the film thematises.
‘A Stone Of Sun’: José Juan Tablada’S Poems In Samuel Beckett’S Translation
Authors: Carrera María José
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, Mª José Carrera contextualizes the specific challenges posed by one of the authors included in the Mexican Anthology – José Juan Tablada – proving that Beckett’s struggle to translate these poems go beyond their Mexicanness or absence of it, eventually widening the general conception on Beckett’s contribution to the 1949 UNESCO commission. Tablada was a Mexican poet who embodied the transition from Modernism to avant-garde. Some of his poems are present in the Mexican Anthology and Beckett had to undertake their translation lacking important information or being confronted with disarranged lines. In spite of these shortcomings, Beckett’s English versions prove not only adequate renderings, but also “extremely successful ones”. Such an accomplishment might need a thorough revision by the part of the academia due to the complexities and paradigms the Mexican poems represent.
Gwendolyn Brooks: From Bronzeville to the Warpland
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the centrality of Bronzeville, Chicago and its people to the late modernist poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, paying particular attention to her representations of living spaces and the public spaces of the city’s streets. When considered as a whole, Brooks’s work reveals Bronzeville – the heart of Chicago’s Black Renaissance – to be a mutable and transient phenomenon, a place-in-process that is shaped and reshaped by the city’s histories of migration, racial segregation, and urban redevelopment in the period from the end of the First World War until the 1960s. During the period of the struggle for Civil Rights, however, her geographical imagination is largely decoupled from the streets and kitchenette buildings of Bronzeville, turning instead to the allegorical landscapes of the American Warpland and the wider solidarities of the African diaspora.
Introduction:: SUPERHERO Blockbusters, Seriality, and the Politics of Audience Engagement
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter outlines the volume’s interest in superhero blockbuster cinema and its contemporary popularity, discusses the shared characteristics of the films that make up the book’s central corpus, and develops the notion of a politics of audience engagement to conceptualize the mobilizing potentials of movies based on DC- or Marvel superhero comics properties. It also addresses the concept of non-human agency that informs its understanding of popular seriality and offers a brief overview on the following chapters.
Being Unable to see and Being Invisible: Unrecognisable, Inaudible Voices in Fish , New Argirópolis and Muta
Authors: Forcinito Ana
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the use of sound in three short films directed by Lucrecia Martel: Fish (2010), New Argirópolis (2010), and Muta (2011), and analyses the recurrent use of whispers and distorted and unrecognisable voices as the key for grasping what remains invisible (or at least opaque and blurry). Martel’s short films made in the new millennium might be read as experimental attempts to point to what remains outside the visual field or what, if within the frame, is blurred, by depicting the disjunction between sound and image. It is precisely through this emphasis on opacity and the difficulty of seeing, that the aesthetics of the visible (the use of the frame, the exposure of a blurry visuality) enters in dialogue with the aesthetics of the audible, and in particular, with non-discernible voices that point to marginal subjects that are either invisible or inaudible.
Masculinity, Desire and Performance in The Holy Girl
Authors: Aguilar Gonzalo
Published: January 2023

3 June 2015: the ‘Ni una menos’ march against gender violence and femicide takes place in Buenos Aires and eighty other Argentine cities. Although the topic was already present in social debates, the march gives a powerful voice not only to the denunciation of violence against women, but also to the questioning of how affective relations between men and women have been historically conditioned. From her first short film in 1995, Lucrecia Martel has focused on the situation of women and on their perception of affect, as had María Luisa Bemberg and Raúl de la Torre before her. However, Martel introduces factors that had been absent in the work of those previous directors: provincial life, extreme violence within the family, sexual harassment in public spaces, its links to popular culture, and ellipsis as a narrative form of the unsaid and hidden. In 2004, The Holy Girl is released. This chapter analyses the film as viewed from the rupture produced by the ‘Ni una menos’ movement, which transformed the way in which we value, observe and judge affective relations between men and women.
‘A Kind Of Bliss, A Closing Eyelid, A Tiny Fainting Spell’: Zama and the Lapse into Colour
Authors: Martin Deborah
Published: January 2023

In Chromophobia, David Batchelor shows how Western culture is characterised by a fear of the corrupting, contaminating potential of colour, and how the art historical obsession with the containment of colour by line and form is expressive of socio-cultural anxieties about race, gender and sexuality, with colour coded as feminine and primitive, dangerous and alien. Of colour, Barthes writes that it is ‘[…] a kind of bliss […] a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell’. This chapter analyses Zama, a film in which colour is used decolonially, to challenge the subjective and corporeal boundaries of colonial white masculinity, and to create an enunciative position for a subaltern voice. Over the course of Zama, ochres and pinks give way to more intense and noticeable greens and reds, with Diego de Zama’s deteriorating mental state – dream, nightmare, fall, undoing – unfolding as a descent into colour, and accompanied by tactile moments of colouring, painting and daubing, instances in which the subordination of colour to the rule of line is overturned, along with the colonial imperative to demarcate and control, and in which narrative and representation give way to abstraction and absorption, the colonial to the Indigenous.
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer Series
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: January 2023

This short book delivers an overview of the most significant concepts and histories as presented in the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s magnum opus, the nine-volume Homo Sacer series. In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on sovereignty, the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, Pauline messianism, the boundary between the human and the animal, the task of inoperativity, the impossibility of stating the existence of language in words, the role of the oath in public and religious life, glory and liturgy, the form-of-life lived beyond all forms of law and a modal ontology of demand that reconceives of western philosophy entirely, among other themes. Helping alert readers to the importance of the series while also pointing toward the major implications which Agamben’s philosophy entails for politics, theology, economics, history, law and global philosophical trends, these accessible and introductory essays provide a guide for those looking to understand why this series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century.
Between Philosophy and Biology
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

The book opens with an introductory overview of Bergson’s philosophical trajectory, organized around the basic shape of the author’s reading of Bergson as a post-vitalistic philosopher of biology. By way of motivation for what is innovative and significant about the study at hand, the introduction situates Bergson along the following three axes: (1) the vitalism controversy that helped contribute to the initial decline of his reputation as well as the residual opposition still felt towards him by philosophers of science (among others); (2) the current resurgence of interest in Bergson to which this book will make a signal contribution; and (3) the contemporary life sciences, which are in the process of defining themselves along a number of new avenues of study, from deep homology, developmental constraint, and convergence, which all testify against traditional understandings of the contingency of adaptation to a kind of unity and directional pattern at the heart of evolutionary processes, to the widespread efficacy of symbiosis, which re-centers association and cooperation over competition and accords a new significance to transversal alliances and transindividuality over arborescent descent with modification and the programmatic development and behaviour of closed biological individuals.
The Actual: Mechanism, Finalism, Modality
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

The first chapter begins with Bergson’s criticisms of the scientific conceptions of life and explanations for evolutionary convergence of his time. The chapter reconstructs them on metaphysical grounds, showing how they take for granted assumptions that negate the reality of time and the novelty of evolution. The chapter presents Bergson’s criticisms as arguments against the metaphysics of the ‘actual’ and the ‘possible’ in mechanist and finalist biology. The chapter concludes by tracing the arguments against mechanism and finalism through some of their contemporary iterations in gene-based understandings of development and evolution. This chapter will appeal to philosophers of biology concerned with reductionism in the sciences of evolution and development, as well as those who are curious about the metaphysical assumptions that those sciences take for granted.
The Virtual: Instantiation, Implication, Dynamics
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents and explains Bergson’s alternative to the modal category of the actual. This is the virtual. The idea is that if mechanism and finalism both fail to capture the dynamic nature of evolution, then a different metaphysical modality is required. This chapter initiates the book’s development of that metaphysics by drawing a conception of virtual existence from Matter and Memory. The virtual refers throughout this text to wholes that tend towards the actuality of parts while both structuring and exceeding them. The whole is in each case always open, in a dynamic and coexistent relation with the parts into which it is dissociated, in which it is contracted, and in response to which it changes. The book uses the idea of virtuality to provide a systematic reconception of Bergson’s views on tendency, creativity, the structure/function distinction in biology, convergent evolution and deep homology, the source and directionality of variation, the dynamic nature of metabolism, and a number of other crucial topics besides. Philosophers of science engaged by discussions of actuality and possibility will find an alternative metaphysical framework for thinking about issues like unactualised capacities, dispositions, genetic information, evolutionary novelty, and organic memory as well.
Finalism Inverted
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

This chapter argues that Bergson’s élan vitalis best understood as a psychological image for a form of evolutionary tendency. This interpretation distinguishes the élan vitalfrom traditional vital principles, which are supposed to secure the autonomy and individuality of organisation, as in Hans Driesch’s embryology. Bergson’s élan vitalis an image for the evolutionary movement as a single event. This means that organisation is not a fact in need of a principle that would explain it, but a temporary form of stability composed of processes interacting at a number of time scales, taking place within the global movement of evolution. This reading should appeal not only to scholars of French philosophy, but also to those interested in what role there can be for introspection and lived experience in the construction of a philosophy of nature, such as scholars of German Idealism and American Pragmatism. For philosophers of science sceptical of Bergson’s psychological interpretation life, this chapter provides a reading that dispenses with the usual commonplaces regarding Bergson’s subordination of empirical research to subjective experience. Philosophers of biology should find Bergson’s anti-reductionist commitment to accounting for the dynamism, novelty, and directionality of evolution particularly appealing as well.