bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

Italian cinema experienced its peak of domestic and international popularity in the years between the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and the social and political turmoil of the 1970s. But how did the growing development of the feminist movement in this period impact on Italian film culture? And what role did that film culture play in women’s lives?
This book explores the multiple intersections between feminism and Italian cinema from the perspective of women’s everyday lives and relationship with the medium. Drawing from a feminist approach to Gramscian cultural theory, the book builds an archival counter-history of Italian cinema in which women took part as movie-goers, activists and practitioners. By doing so, it reconstructs the many aspects of a collective historical agency that challenged cinema’s patriarchal structures and strategies of invisibilisation.
Searching for Gender in the Audience: Cultural Discourses and Opinion Surveys
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

This chapter opens the section dedicated to film spectatorship, by offering an overview of the cultural discourses about women’s spectatorship and the trends of cinema-going in post-war Italy. It combines quantitative sources (especially surveys conducted by independent agencies and the national broadcaster RAI) with an heterogenous array of examples from mass culture (popular press, films). While women appear as a minority in the cinema audience, their complex engagement with films and media reveals their numerous strategies to participate in social life.
Patterns of (In)visibility: Lesbian and Queer Counterpublics
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

This chapter recuperates the cinematic experiences of politicized lesbians and queers by reconstructing the trajectories and experiences of spectatorship of the former actress and feminist activist Giovanna Pala and the radical lesbian collective Brigate Saffo. To do so, it alternates personal testimonies with the analysis of the DIY leaflet published by the collective (1989–79) and on the gay activist magazine ‘Lambda’.
Feminists and Porn: Protests and Campaigns
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

The chapter reconstructs the actions and debates about pornography in the Italian feminist movement. It details on the feminist campaigns against Luis Berlanga’s film “Life Size” (1975), the assaults to the cinema theatres happened in several cities during the ‘Take Back the Night’ demonstrations, and a series of bombings to porn cinemas in Rome (1982). These events are contextualised in the process of sexualisation of Italian media occurred between the 1960s and the 1970s, and framed into broader debates on pornography and violence.
Ines Pellegrini: Navigating (Post)colonial Representations in the ‘Sexual Revolution’
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

The chapter addresses the re-emergence of colonial narratives in the Italian media of the 1970s, in the wake of the so-called “sexual revolution” and the feminist movement. Specifically, it considers the trajectory of Ines Pellegrini, an Italo-Eritrean actress who collaborated with Pier Paolo Pasolini, and worked in arthouse cinema, as well as in prime-time television, and soft-core films. Through Pellegrini’s figure, the chapter analyses, from an intersectional perspective, the political and gendered discourses about sexuality and race circulating of the period.
A Materialist Trajectory in Feminist Filmmaking: Rethinking Labour and Consciousness-raising
Authors: Missero Dalila
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on Italian feminist filmmakers’ attempt to work in mainstream cinema and television. It reconstructs a variety of experiences, from the radical experiments of collective filmmaking of the Cooperativa Arcobaleno and the Collettivo Femminista Cinema, to feminist attempts to break into commercial cinema, like Sofia Scandurra’s Io sono mia (I am Mine, 1977). Due to practical, political and economic constraints, these feminist attempts to impact on the Italian audio-visual production couldn’t tackle with the structural inequalities that historically affected the film industry.
The Sound of Rockumentary: A Consideration of the Documentary Soundtrack
Authors: Baker Michael Brendan
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, Michael Brendan Baker discusses the different strategies for sonic representation of musical performances in rockumentaries. Pointing out how rockumentaries are intensely mediated audio-visual representation of already mediated events, Baker show how the concepts of liveness and authenticity are problematic.
“Start Me Up”: The Place and Displacement of Women in the Cinema of The Rolling Stones
Authors: Strong Catherine , Gaunson Stephen
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, Catherine Strong and Stephen Gaunson use rockumentaries with and by The Rolling Stones as a case study for a discussion of how women have been portrayed in rockumentaries about the band.
The Freedom to Speak: The Dixie Chicks, Observational Documentary, and Shut Up & Sing
Authors: McIntosh Heather
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, Heather McIntosh uses the backlash against The Dixie Chicks in 2003 and the rockumentary Shut Up & Sing as a way to discuss how the band and the film challenge and affirm the norms of country music.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Romances: The Rockumentary as Male Melodrama
Authors: Iversen Gunnar
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, Gunnar Iversen focuses on representations of masculinity and how the rockumentary genre also contains melodramatic depictions of family relations and how rock bands have been seen as families.
U2’s Rattle and Hum : God, Sex, Rock ‘n’ Roll and God Again
Authors: Bertrand Karine
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, Karine Bertrand explores the ways in which the film Rattle and Hum represents the band U2’s fall from innocence, their attempt at exporting and incorporating the American Dream, and how the band avoids re-addressing political issues raised throughout the 1980s.
A Filmmaker’s Words: A Journey through the Archive of Jocelyne Saab’s Unfinished Work
Authors: Rouxel Mathilde
Published: September 2022

Jocelyne Saab’s legacy includes more than a dozen archive boxes, sorted by project. The first collection dates from 1993: every image she shot during the war was made as a matter of urgency, because the few archives she had kept burned with the rest of her childhood during the siege of Beirut by the Israeli forces in 1982. We know Jocelyne Saab for her work on the MENA region where she saw causes to defend or people to enlighten. But her archive offers a new, fascinating, roadmap for her legacy because as a whole it questions the strict Pan-Arabism that researchers and critics assume for her. It contains, among others, six unfinished documentary and fiction projects that would have been shot in Asia if she had found the necessary funding – projects planned in Vietnam, Hanoi, India. This chapter will discuss the unfinished work and Saab’s connection with Asia. This attraction that Saab had for Asia leads us today to reconsider differently a major part of her work and engagement, from the 1980s to the end of her life.
Beirut, There Was and There Was Not 1
Authors: Westmoreland Mark R.
Published: September 2022

In the wake of the Lebanese civil war, many filmmakers turned to formal experimentation in ways that accentuated the inescapable paradox between representation and lived experience. While these works often levied critiques of the reductive ways in which Lebanon had been represented, these artists also grappled with the vexed relationship between memory, mediation, and materiality. These formal critiques often centered on the problematic status of the archive both in its conceptual and material forms and provided important models for the burgeoning art and film culture in Beirut to critically work through the complexity of preserving the effects of perpetuated political violence. Jocelyn Saab’s Once Upon a Time, Beirut (1995) serves as one notable effort to work through the dubious cinematic portrayal of Beirut through a mashup of hundreds of films, while nevertheless recognizing its sentimental pull that precludes critical distance for those personally engulfed in this catastrophe.This chapter will thus situate Saab’s film as part of a larger effort to register the instability of catastrophic legacies, which render everything both possible and impossible. In other words, as if in a fairy tale, there was and there was not (kan ya ma kan…).
Guerrillas, Border Crossings and Internationalism: The Liberation of Non-Arabs in Jocelyne Saab’s Early Documentaries
Authors: Van de Peer Stefanie
Published: September 2022

Jocelyne Saab was a pioneer in non-fiction filmmaking in the Middle East, but she was not always perceived favorably by critics or the establishment. Her documentaries were consistently creative, idealistic, activist and not usually in line with the governing parties’ discourse. Her earliest war reportage already showcased a proclivity for the poetic power of painfully truthful images. And the “osmosis” between fiction and non-fiction in her work reflects her own border-crossing reality. In this chapter, I will discuss three films, looking specifically at the revolutionary interests of Jocelyne Saab in Iraq: War in Kurdistan (1974), The Sahara is Not for Sale (1977) and Iran, Utopia in Motion (1980). These three films show how Saab rejects the label of Arab filmmaker, and how her internationalism led her to report on territories where borders were crossed, both literally and metaphorically. In all three films, Saab focuses on young people. Through a truly internationalist, feminist gaze and voice, she makes her viewers really see the wider consequences of seemingly local conflict. Her vision of the Middle East is one that showcases its diversity through language, culture, literature, art and ways of living.
One-nation Conservatism 1920s/2020s: Downton Abbey (Michael Engler, 2019)
Authors: White John
Published: September 2022

Within a genre with a long TV and film history, this is an ‘upstairs-downstairs’ style drama set against a backdrop of Empire, a rigid British class structure, and a system of attitudes built on a supposedly distinctive set of British values, norms and expectations. What is revealed is a conceptualised nation that even in its ‘lower’ reaches believes in its difference from other nations, European or otherwise. At the same time, the early 20th century fiction plays out against a backdrop of contemporary 21st century issues relating to gender and sexuality, wealth inequality, privilege, real poverty, differential access to both education and culture, and the rise of right-wing politics and nationalism.
Migration in an Age of Ideological Confrontation: God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017)
Authors: White John
Published: September 2022

Is there a new approach to realism beyond a social-realist aesthetic? Director, Francis Lee, is clear about his obsession with naturalistic detail and the cinematography is distinctively tight and restricted. Does this film modify social realism in order to take account of contemporary contexts; or does it compromise the necessity of conflict in an inevitably fruitless search for consensus? How are the central issues of sexuality and migration resolved? The rise of nationalism across Europe and the political divisions arising in the UK after the Brexit referendum have create space for xenophobia and homophobia to develop. This film places both of these axes of social division on the screen. Issues are placed within the contexts of global capital and economics as well as the rise of the Right across Europe.
Urban Poverty: Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach, 2019)
Authors: White John
Published: September 2022

This is a further expression from Loach and screenwriter, Paul Laverty, of classical confrontational British social-realism, updated in order to square up to the current state of the UK. In its political positioning of the filmmakers� art this film follows on directly from I, Daniel Blake (Loach, 2016). We are presented with an in-your-face, confrontational political stance, and with a film that is both direct and forthright in what it has to say. It takes on the neo-liberal global economy at the site of its most intensely personalised impact within the life of the individual and their family.
The Thing Itself: Performance and the Celebrity Text
Authors: Geddes Louise
Published: September 2022

Since the turn of the twentieth-century, the presumed invisibility of craft that defines dramatic theatre erases our capacity to usefully theorize the repeated use of a popular script in performance. This chapter suggests that the unrealistic expectation placed on dramatic theatre to represent events, thoughts, and feelings as if they were happening for the first time ignores the latent celebrity power of the oft-repeated play. This chapter argues that a Shakespeare play is a vibrant, archontic object. Scripted performance is not a single event, but an entelechial process of materialization that continues to grow and evolve as its own affective archive. The celebrity text, as latent with potentiality as the performing body, not only accrues value as it is repeated, but is agential in transmitting that value to the artists who engage with it. As a transmedial archontic object, the Shakespeare play as performance is caught in a process of transmission between the constrictive materialities of page and stage. Acknowledging the archontic nature of the celebrity play recognizes how its capacity to exist as its own archive affords it an affective, iterative power that navigates the production, marketing, and consumption of classical theatre without ever losing shape as “the play.”
Volontà : Workshop of Anarchist Research
Authors: Codello Francesco
Published: September 2022

Written especially for this volume, Codello provides a wonderful overview of the journal Volontà and the work of the intellectual and political milieux which surrounded and supported it, paying particular attention to the broad range of issues that the journal touched on, showing how it attempted to reinvigorate the anarchist ideal by connecting it to everyday issues as well as radical idealism. This provides an invaluable summary of the journal’s contribution to the evolution of international anarchism in the late 20th century.
Thinking Ethically about Drone Violence
Authors: Enemark Christian
Published: September 2022

In the introductory chapter, the editor situates the volume against the backdrop of contemporary political developments and academic literature relevant to the task of thinking ethically about drone violence. The chapter then explains the overall purpose of the volume. It provides an outline of each chapter, and it highlights common themes and normative fault-lines.
Riskless Warfare Revisited: Drones, Asymmetry and the Just Use of Force
Authors: Sparrow Robert
Published: September 2022

This chapter reflects upon the work of philosopher Paul Kahn as it relates to drone violence, focusing on two of Kahn’s articles: ‘War and Sacrifice in Kosovo’ (1999) and ‘The Paradox of Riskless Warfare’ (2002). Together, these articles represent a compelling expression of the intuition that there is something deeply troubling about the profound asymmetry of risk made possible by modern technologies of long-range killing. Kahn’s ideas have been influential, and much cited, in the debate that later emerged about the ethics of airstrikes using remote-controlled drones. However, as is argued in this chapter, most participants in that debate have struggled to motivate the intuition any more than Kahn did, let alone to justify it. Many have instead concluded that extreme asymmetry is something to be sought after, in order that states may better prosecute war (or defend themselves against terrorist threats) while imposing less risk on national military personnel. Taking stock of two decades of debate about the ethics of ‘risk-free’ warfare – and drone strikes in particular – the chapter assesses what we have learned from Kahn and his critics, and it returns afresh to the critical issue of whether the use of armed drones presents unique moral challenges.
‘A New Departure’: Britain’s Lethal Drone Policy and the Range of Justice
Authors: Fuller Christopher J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter problematises the assignment of drone violence to the war paradigm, shifting the discussion toward the UK experience. It assesses Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2015 authorisation of the drone-based targeted killing of Reyaad Khan, a British citizen and member of Islamic State. This attack, carried out in Syria, was the first known instance of a British drone being used lethally inside a country where the UK is not involved in a war. Accordingly, Cameron described the strike as ‘a new departure’ for the UK. The chapter provides an ethical assessment of the way in which the British government has remained vague about the purpose of its post-2015 drone policy, the legal basis which underwrites it, the associated decision-making process, and the accountability mechanisms which exist for strikes. It explores the evolution of the UK’s armed drone fleet, ministers’ statements, and government policy documents in an effort to reveal the ethos which has driven the government’s adoption of lethal drones for counterterrorism. In doing so, the chapter advances an argument that Britain’s drone policy is the product of a set of morally problematic attitudes toward self-defence, justice and the imminence of terrorist threats.
Armed Drone Systems: The Ethical Challenge of Replacing Human Control with Increasingly Autonomous Elements
Authors: Lee Peter
Published: September 2022

This chapter shifts ethical discussion toward a possible future in which drone system processes rely increasingly upon machine autonomy. Although some militaries have ambitions to develop and deploy a drone system (for example, the MQ-9 Reaper system) that incorporates autonomous functions, the expected emergence of AI-enabled drone strikes presents practical and ethical challenges. The relevant practical considerations are illustrated by the chapter’s explanation of the evolution in applications of military airpower involving piloted, remotely-controlled, and autonomous aircraft. The way we think ethically about and plan for airborne lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) is made difficult by several factors. These include the ongoing contestation among philosophers and engineers about the meaning of non-human ‘autonomy’ and ‘degrees’ of autonomy. Also, there is persistent concern about human biases possibly being transferred into machine decision-making, and the issue of how fairly to distribute moral responsibility for LAWS-generated effects remains unresolved. To address these challenges, the chapter discusses some suggested principles that could guide and restrain the future use of armed and autonomous drones.
Introduction
Authors: Gould Rebecca Ruth
Published: September 2022

The concept of the poet’s two bodies with medieval Persianate poetry is introduced as a modification of political theorist Errst Kantorowicz’s concept of the king’s two bodies which was developed to account for medieval European kingship. The situation of the medieval Persian poet is compared to that of the medieval European poet, through comparison with and discussion of material from Dante. A framework for thinking about Persian political theology emerges from the comparison. It is argued that the prison poem gene (habsiyyat) developed from earlier examples of Persian poems about the poet’s confined body by Nasir Khusrow and others. The book’s methodology is set forth and readers are advised how they can read and approach the book.
Crucifixion as Critique
Authors: Gould Rebecca Ruth
Published: September 2022

This chapter argues that Jesus’ status within Islam as a human being – who was also a prophet– made the tropes associated with his divinity more readily available to poets for creative appropriation. The argument is made through a close reading of Khaqani’s famous Christian Qasida. Although it has been studied by a range of scholars, the Christian Qasida has never specifically been examined as the crowning achievement of Persian political theology or of carceral poetics. It is argued that this poem shows how the poet’s imprisoned body was reshaped by the use of imagery relating to the body of Jesus. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Khaqani’s poem on the ruins of Mada’en (Ctesiphon) in present-day Iraq.
Epilogue
Authors: Gould Rebecca Ruth
Published: September 2022

Prison Feats (Karnameh-yi zindan, 1933) by modern Iranian poet Muhammad Taqi Bahar is introduced as a work that breaks with this classical Persian genre. Bahar’s debt to the classical tradition notwithstanding, many aspects of Prison Feats mark a sharp break with the premodern prison poem tradition. Adapting the masnavi form enabled Bahar to construct a narrative of imprisonment that engages with the historical record – and with the contingency of everyday political existence – in ways that eluded Masʿud Saʿd and Khaqani. When Bahar deploys the techniques of literary modernism, he imagines the world in prose, albeit from within the confines of a classical verse.
The Time of Friendship: Mourning, Survival, Spectrality
Authors: Uljée Rozemund
Published: September 2022

This chapter addresses the relationship between temporality and friendship in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. It pays particular attention to the “disjointed” nature of such friendship, with friendship presupposing loss and mourning. As such, friendship comes to be seen as spectral and finite. In this, we can see the possibility of a new and anachronous way of thinking history. Such a history would not follow the transcendental paths of Heidegger or Husserl, but instead would offer a new interpretation of the “living present,” one where the spectrality of friendship and time is seen as both the condition of possibility as well as impossibility of friendship and history.
Narcissus as an Anti-Narcissus
Authors: Secret Timothy
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on the varied claims across Derrida’s Politics of Friendship relating to narcissism and Narcissus, a condition and figure apparently diametrically opposed to the possibility of friendship. Secret shows how Derrida complicates this assumption by proposing what can be dubbed an archi-narcissism as the condition of possibility for any relationship to the other and for auto-affection, a condition that functions quite differently to Freud’s primary narcissism. In doing so, he deconstructs the distinction between the love of self and the love of others through the complication of self and other, inside and outside. With this proposal in hand, Secret turns back to the discussion of classical friendship in Cicero that opens the book, suggesting that this allows us to read the references to achieving immortality through friendship in a less bluntly critical manner, one far more compatible with Derrida’s dream of an ‘unusable friendship’ than standard readings would allow. Through this, it is suggested that Derrida in Politics of Friendship provides a crucial part of the model for his many texts of eulogy, his reflections on mourning and melancholia, and furthermore for understanding the community of philosophers and thinkers itself.
What Is a Just Transition?
Authors: Gerrard Elianor , Westoby Peter
Published: September 2022

Climate change requires a rapid change in the way energy is created worldwide because there will be no jobs on a dead planet. However, this transition to cleaner energy sources will also lead to job losses. In shaping such policy that shifts away from a fossil fuel economy, the ethics of the procedural and distributional impacts must be assessed. The term just transition refers to the social justice issues that need to be considered in developing climate change policy and protecting the environment. Therefore, just transition can be understood as a framework for navigating the political, practical, policy, and ethical complexities of inequality in a carbon-constrained future. Just transition programmes’ gendered and ethnic dimensions need to be better understood. A just transition for Emalahleni will entail broadening the parameters of current labour and trade union policy. Broadening the concept should include reflections on public space, land and alternative economic options to coal.
Municipal Finances
Authors: Hendriks Chris
Published: September 2022

Mining municipalities are experiencing an influx of migrant workers searching for employment at the mines and other related industries. Large-scale internal migration mostly into unprepared municipal jurisdictions is regarded as one of the legacies caused by mining. These municipalities are experiencing a form of distress, which is associated with the inadequate provision of decent housing and living conditions as well as bulk services and reticulation infrastructure. This chapter investigates the effect of mining activities on the financial health of Emalahleni Local Municipality. It assesses the current situation and concludes by outlining the threats to a just transition when the mines close. The chapter shows that local financial management improvement could help ensure a base for a just transition.
The Rhetoric and Politics of Land Redistribution in Southern Ireland, * 1919–1923: National and Local Perspectives
Authors: Dooley Terence
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the political movement to preserve remaining fragments of unenclosed common land in England from the middle of the Nineteenth Century to the early decades of the Twentieth Century. It explores the significance of common land, the long history of resistance to its enclosure, and the application of statutory and regulatory controls over such spaces in the Victorian period. Using the example of Runnymede in Surrey, the chapter shows how acquisition of common land by the National Trust was one means of guaranteeing preservation. Tensions remained, however, as exemplified by an act of vandalism against a memorial for Runnymede that the National Trust commissioned from Sir Edwin Lutyens after the site was acquired in 1929.
The Case for Separate Agricultural Legislation for Wales
Authors: Owen John Gwilym , Jones Nerys Llewelyn
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores the particular relationship that existed between 'unbought' northern Protestant tenants and their landlords in Northern Ireland following partition and the creation of the new state. It examines the campaign for land reform, the progress of the Act, and its implications for landed estates in Northern Ireland. By exploring the responses to the Act among northern tenants, many of whom were Protestant unionists, it seeks to highlight the complexity of social, religious and economic relationships in the north of Ireland during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation
Authors: Varty Anne
Published: September 2022

This book explores how poetry by women acquired the public authority necessary to take on a role in the cultural leadership of the United Kingdom and Ireland. By scrutinising the careers of four poets, Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead and Paula Meehan, it assesses how each one was elected to Poet Laureate or National Poet roles and what changed as a result of their concurrent tenures in these public offices during 2013-2016. It presents historic rifts between women, poetry and nation which prevailed before and during the twentieth century and which contributed to the marginalisation of women’s voices. It looks at how the careers of these poets accommodated campaigns for inclusive and diverse poetic voices and subject matters which overturned a 400 year exclusion of women from the UK laureate role. The book explores how poetry by Clarke, Duffy, Lochhead and Meehan intervenes in questions of contemporary geopolitics and national self-understanding, particularly in light of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, and the 2016 referendum on Brexit. The authority of their poetry extends to the prescribed study of their works on school curricula, and this book examines the often fraught relationship between these poets’ work, and the way it has been placed on the school syllabus. It considers how their pioneering careers help to shape the articulation of national belonging in four-nations Britain and Ireland, and cultural landscapes of the future.
Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation
Authors: Varty Anne
Published: September 2022

This examines the ground-breaking nature of the appointments of Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead and Paula Meehan to Poet Laureate roles. It sets the scene of the triangulated tension between women, poetry and nation, in order to see the cultural context from which these poets emerged to assume the authority of public voice. The first subheading, Outside History: Women and Nation from Virginia Woolf to Eavan Boland contrasts Virginia Woolf’s rejection of the claims of national belonging in the 1930s with the case made by Eavan Boland since the 1970s, of the vital importance for women poets to find their place within national tradition. The second subheading, Women and Poetry: A Question of Authority scrutinises two contrasting critical views of the authority of women’s poetic voice, both centring on critiques of Eavan Boland’s work. The chapter concludes by contending that expressions of psychic and social exchanges that take place within cultural margins in poetry by Clarke, Duffy, Lochhead and Meehan, advance the shifts which the growing acceptance of their poetry both represents and enables.
Turning to History, Edinburgh, 1850–70
Authors: Beveridge Craig
Published: September 2022

Burton’s traumatised response to the sudden death of his first wife, declaring that he wished to throw up everything and become a ‘Wild Man’ is taken as a cue to examine, in Burton’s own experience and psyche, the tension between romantic conceptions of Nature and the ‘noble savage’, and contrasting notions of primitive savagery as articulated in ‘historical sociology’. His response in the 1850s to broader events including the Crimean War and other internal and external threats is associated with a gradual withdrawal from ‘society’, and increasing focus on historical research. This focus is associated with the influence of two long-standing friendships: with Professor Cosmo Innes, the leading orchestrator of the extensive work on records scholarship which had been proceeding for some decades; and with John Blackwood, his publisher. The role of Blackwood, and his publishing house, in promoting Scottish historical material and its incorporation in a narrative history of the nation, is highlighted. The great effort in reclamation of Scottish historical source material, including the contributions of French scholars, and its impact on Burton as anticipating his approach to Scottish history, is then examined.
Music, Poetry, and Composition in the Ayin
Authors: Feldman Walter
Published: September 2022

As the longest individual section of the ayin, the First Selam demonstrates the vision of the ayin’s composer. It also signals the start of the ‘whirling’ of the semazens. This chapter compares three compositions for the First Selam; the anonynous Dügah, Mustafa Dede’s later 17th century Beyati, and Ismail Dede’s early 19th century Saba Ayini. Almost all existing First Selams utilize the usul devr-i revan in 14/8. By comparing a variety of theoretical and poetic texts in both Persian and Turkish we learn that this usul had already characterized Sufi sama’ practices in Greater Iran, at least by the 16th century. A further comparison of notated examples of secular Ottoman music from both 17th century notated and later oral sources with, and the earliest of the Mevlevi ayins, reveals major differences in compositional techniques. Thus the Mevlevi First Selam emerges as a key locus for the creation of a ‘mystical’ musical form. İt may also be the sole survivor of a lost tradition of Iranian Sufi composition for the sama’.
The Sema’ i in the Third Selam and the Son Yürük Sema’i: Nucleus of the Antecedent Sam ā ’?
Authors: Feldman Walter
Published: September 2022

The sema’i usul in 6/8 characterizes the latter half of the Third Selam of the ayin. The name implies its history within earlier forms of Sufi dance. Sema’i as both term and musical form has also been adopted into the Ottoman secular repertoire, both as vocal and as instrumental music. This usul also characterizes many of the hymns (nefes) of the Bektashi dervishes, but not the ilahis of the Sunni Dervish Orders. In the ayin its appearance is always signaled by the singing of a hymn in the Turkish language, praising Rumi’s son Sultan Veled (d. 1312). This chapter compares 17th century and later versions of this Turkish hymn, and then old sema’i items in both the Ali Ufuki and Cantemir Collections with Bektashi and also Khorezmian ritualistic vocal and instrumental music. The manifest structural similarities among all of these items, strongly suggest an origin within antecedent Central Asian sufistic practices, harking back to yet earlier Turkic shamanism. Thus this single Turkish language hymn of the 14th century appears as a key unlocking the earlier history of larger shamanistic and sufistic practices that became acclimatized among the Mevlevis in Anatolia, prior to their consolidation in Ottoman Istanbul.
What is Alevism? Contemporary Debates vis-à-vis Historical and Systematic Considerations
Authors: Dressler Markus
Published: September 2022

In Turkey, the question of defining Alevism (Alevilik), especially with regard to its relationship to Islam, is highly political. Due to the hegemonic role of the state in the regulation of religion and its investment in the assertion that the Alevis are Muslims, formulations of Alevi identity are highly contested. Against the backdrop of such contemporary contestations on the nature of Alevism and its place within Turkish society, the chapter attempts to provide an introduction into the contours of Alevism as a set of socio-religious traditions that developed in Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans at the margins of Ottoman society, related to historical currents such as the Babai, Bektaşi, and the Kızılbaş. The chapter further provides a summary description of Alevi faith and from there addresses the contested question concerning its relationship to Islam.
Alevism as a ‘Majority’: Alevi and Sunni Communities in Dersim
Authors: Gültekin Ahmet Keri̇m
Published: September 2022

Alevis are often presented as a religious minority subjected to suppression and in alliance with the Kemalist state. This chapter gives an alternative understanding of Alevis in Tunceli (Dersim) where Kurdish Alevi (Kırmancki- and Kurmanci-speaking) communities constitute the majority of the population. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the dynamics between Alevi and Sunni communities in Dersim. The chapter describes Alevi and Sunni communities’ geographical distribution, gives a short history of their relations, and explains their (self) descriptions about each other. Understanding the relationships between Alevis and Sunnis in a region where Alevis have been the majority is crucial for apprehending how the minority has been shaped by the majority and the background of common practices and shared understandings between the communities. The chapter concludes by pointing out its contributions to the broader Alevi studies.
The Alevi Diaspora in France: Changing Relations with the Home and Host States
Authors: Arkilic Ayca
Published: September 2022

This chapter analyzes the repercussions of the changing political atmosphere in France and Turkey since the early 2000s for French Alevis. More specifically, it examines how the leadership of the Federation of Alevi Unions in France (Fédération Union des Alévis en France, FUAF) has responded to critical political developments, including the Alevi Opening (Alevi Açılımı), the Sunnification of Turkish domestic and foreign policy, and the French government’s increasing interest in Alevis. The chapter is based on a careful examination of organizational documents and news sources in English, French, and Turkish, and interviews with Alevi representatives as well as with Turkish and French officials. It shows that, since the early 2000s, FUAF leaders’ relations with the Turkish government have deteriorated against the backdrop of the rise of political Islam in Turkey and the development of a biased diaspora engagement policy that favors Sunni Islamic and newly established Alevi organizations over the FUAF. As FUAF leaders have felt increasingly excluded by their origin country, they have established closer relations with French authorities. The FUAF has reinforced its ties with French policy-makers by serving as a key dialogue and project partner and an ally in the French government’s fight against religious extremism.
From Particularistic Organisation to Federation: Mobilisation for Alevi Identity in Britain
Authors: Akdemi̇r Ayşegül
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses Alevis’ migration to Britain and their social mobilization to gain recognition in their new country. The England Alevi Cultural Centre and Cemevi (EACC) was initially founded in 1993 as an apolitical community center. Since 2008, with the change of the chairperson and administrative board, Alevi mobilization in Britain has embraced an inclusive membership policy and maintained softer boundaries with previously excluded groups, namely Kurds and leftist associations. By borrowing the conceptual tools from the literature on social movements, the chapter argues that the social and political opportunities and constraints at national, supranational, and transnational level and the framing of collective identity have facilitated the Alevi mobilization in recent years. The chapter shows that framing a unifying collective identity has been the most effective factor in the EACC’s success in mobilizing Alevis in Britain.
The Socio-spatial Meaning of Cemevi s in Istanbul’s Public Space
Authors: Kurtarir Erhan
Published: September 2022

This chapter presents the findings of a research project called The Istanbul Cemevis Inventory, which was conducted between March 2013 and April 2014. The project aimed to map the active cemevis in Istanbul to explore Alevis’ cultural geography in the city. The cemevi occupies a central role in the social organization and religious practices of Alevi communities. However, the lack of a legally recognized status leaves it in a state of limbo. Looking at the past and recent attempts at establishing and maintaining the existing cemevis, despite all the legal and political restraints, the chapter shows that Alevis have succeeded in changing the public space in line with their needs, at least in some districts of Istanbul, without any governmental support. The study is an attempt to explore Alevi cultural geography and cultural identity relations with their place-making experiences. This is an important case for urban diversity politics, as a spatialization process on public land. This study contributes to urban planning and Alevi studies literature.
The Mediatised Reproduction of Alevism: Alevi Television Networks and their Audiences
Authors: Özkan Nazli
Published: September 2022

As the state governance in Turkey shifted towards a “disciplined liberalization” in the post-1980 era, Alevism achieved an unprecedented media visibility. In the 2000s and early 2010s, this visibility gained more momentum with the opening of Alevi television networks. This chapter explores the consequences of this “disciplined liberalization” that encouraged Alevis to express their identities by focusing particularly on two arenas: the objectification of Alevism on major newly emerged Alevi television networks and the circulation of such objectification within the Alevi community. These televised renditions of Alevism both confirmed and challenged the official portrayal. The circulation of these televisual representations, then, operated in the daily lives of Alevis by shifting how the community conceived of their marginalization and by creating a sense that, compared to the past, it was easier for Alevis to embrace their Alevi identities publicly. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted in Alevi neighborhoods and major Alevi television stations in Istanbul, the chapter concludes that Alevi audiences considered Alevi networks and the attendant media visibility to be signs of a more secure public footing that had not existed before.
Back to Anatolia: Reflections on Twenty-five Years of Alevi Research
Authors: Shankland David
Published: September 2022

This chapter recalls twenty-five years of Alevi research and remarks upon the fact that life among the rural Alevi communities has been surprisingly little covered. Though there has been much research of significant value conducted amongst the diaspora communities, both in Turkey and in Europe, the author argues that we still do not have a systematic knowledge of the Alevi rural areas. However, as the importance of the Alevis grows, we do need accurate empirical research to take place in Anatolia. This chapter gives three instances of many where this may become significant: maps and population distribution, changing Alevi social structures and religious understanding, and the reconfiguring of Alevi ritual. In each case, we can discuss these matters accurately only if we have developed knowledge of Alevilik as it is lived and practiced in Anatolia.
Nationalisms and Interest-Driven Identities: Theoretical Perspectives
Authors: Kolstø Pål
Published: September 2022

In chapter 1, I discuss the relationship between ideas, identities and interests in nationalism in general, and in the former Soviet Union in particular before I narrow in on two specific nationalist strategies and how they can be used to pursue political interests: the construction of boundaries between ethnic/national groups, and the creation and manipulation of national symbols.
According to boundary construction theory, it is in the contrast and interaction with outsiders, with ‘the Other’, that group identity is constructed and maintained. But the boundary is not a self-functioning mechanism that perpetuates itself. Boundary maintenance is a matter of power relations, and hence of politics. Weaker and smaller groups are likely to distinguish themselves as much as possible from stronger, overweening neighbours, whereas stronger groups will de-emphasise their identity distance from culturally similar neighbouring groups, subsuming them under their own instead.
Symbols and rituals function as important nation-building instruments. Social life is a repository of symbols, which mark, celebrate and glorify social groups. The meaning of a symbol cannot be deduced. Symbols have value and meaning only for those who recognize them. The inherently ambiguous character of symbols makes them eminently usable for nation-building purposes.
Imperialism and Ethnocentrism in Russian Nationalism
Authors: Kolstø Pål
Published: September 2022

The trajectory of Russian nationalism under Putin illustrates two important mechanisms in the strategic use of nationalism. Firstly, ethnic nationalism, which previously had been a marginal phenomenon, moved to center stage. As long as the Soviet Union was a large, multinational empire, Russians tended to link their collective identity to that state rather than to their ethnic group but this changed when the USSR was dissolved: Russians increasingly identified more with the smaller state they were now living in – the Russian Federation – as well as with their ethnic group. At the same time, hankering for the lost supranational state lingered on in parts of the population as “empire nostalgia. ”
Secondly, Russian nationalism under Putin shows how political leaders can tap into and exploit popular nationalist sentiments. Kremlin ideologues have had no inhibitions against switching to nationalist rhetoric when the occasion has called for it, as when Russia in a surprise move decided to invade and the Crimean peninsula in 2014. This flagrant breach of international law needed a justification, and Putin for a while latched onto parts of the rhetoric of the Russian nationalists and managed to steal the thunder of both the Russian ethnonationalists and the imperialists.
LEGAL FOUNDATIONS AND PROBLEMS OF ENSURING NATIONAL SECURITY IN MODERN RUSSIA
Authors:   North Caucasus Institute Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration of the Russian Federation, Pyatigorsk, Stavropol region, Russian Federation, MANKIEVA AZA , VOROPAEV IVAN , RESHETNYAK SERGEY
Published: September 2022

The article discusses national security in the context of the transformation of Russian legislation. National security is important for any state to ensure its own security, for which sovereignty is fundamental and for the interests of citizens living in a particular state, as well as the integrity of the entire state. National security prioritizes strategic goals and the protection of the interests of the entire state. It is also a manifestation of independence, where the state as a separate entity acts in international relations and determines its own internal and suggestion policy. The main goal of ensuring national security is to create and maintain a certain political, economic, military-strategic and international position of the state, which would create favorable conditions for the development of society, the state and the individual, as well as eliminate the danger of weakening the importance and role of the Russian Federation as a subject of international law, undermining the ability of the state to realize its own national interests on the international stage.
STATE STRATEGY TO SUPPORT ACTIVE LONGEVITY AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OF ELDERLY CITIZENS
Authors:   Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russian Federation, VORONINA LUDMILA , ZAITSEVA EKATERINA , KASYANOVA ТATYANA
Published: September 2022

Older citizens are considered in the article as a socio-demographic community, and the implementation of a specific state strategy as a mechanism of public administration to achieve the task. The relevance of the topic of the article is due to the creation of conditions for the quality of life of citizens, including to increase life expectancy, physical and social activity. Currently, in the Russian Federation, to create such conditions, the state strategy and projects are being implemented at the federal and regional levels. Values of active aging according to respondents,% Of great importance for achieving active longevity is the involvement of citizens of different age groups, and especially the elderly, in various types of physical culture and recreation activities, including classes according to special programs, which provide for the risks of age-related diseases and ways to minimize them. For the successful implementation of such programs, the efforts of various program participants are combined, including volunteers who train themselves and then teach others. By expanding the number of participants, a social effect is achieved: the number of elderly citizens participating in programs is increasing. An economic effect is achieved from the implementation of such programs: the risks of age-related diseases are minimized, and opportunities for physical and social activity are extended. The authors of the article, in addition to analyzing traditional methods, use sociological methods: a survey of 331 elderly citizens living in the Sverdlovsk region was conducted, an expert survey of specialists in active aging and physical activity was conducted. Information sources such as the websites of Rosstat, the websites of the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Social Policy of the Sverdlovsk Region were used.