bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Women in East Asian Cinema: Gender Representations, Creative Labour and Global Histories
Authors: Chan Felicia , Elliott Fraser , Willis Andy
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter positions the project of the book within the critical debates which have informed the study of women in film since the early academic interventions into the topic, noting particularly the moves across and between studies of representation, production, circulation and canonisation.
Noting the tendency for anglophone scholarship to focus on American and European contexts, this chapter then discusses those scholars whose work has begun to helpfully redress the legacies of Eurocentric, male-focused scholarship and cultivate a space in the literature for more complete studies of women working in East Asian film industries.
This introduction speaks to the rationale for this volume: to highlight understudied areas of women’s contributions to cinema and to re-direct women’s film history towards a global ‘film history’ more broadly, through a case-study focus on the cinema of East Asia, its diaspora and its spheres of influence. While critical debates continue in many socio-cultural fields on this subject, the focus of this volume remains on the issues of cinema and representation, both on- and off-screen, and particularly on historical absences and historiographical interventions in both the representation of women in East Asian cinema, and/or East Asian women in cinema.
‘Functioning on the Fringes’: Interrogating New South Korean Womanhood and Millennial Trauma in Microhabitat (2017)
Authors: McCaig Dave
Published: October 2024

Globally lauded for its bittersweet and wistful portrayal of millennial womanhood, Jeon Go-woon’s directorial debut, Microhabitat, depicts post university life for the urban dwelling ‘Sampo’ generation (literally the ‘three giving up generation’) as one of confined mobility, where high student loan repayments, unstable employment, and unaffordable housing keep this generation in a state of socio-economic precariousness. Surrounded by the temptations of modern, cosmopolitan city living that they can ill-afford to partake in, Mi-so and her peers are constantly bound by collective emotional trauma and the expectations of a patriarchal society to marry and start a family. As such, Microhabitat continues the local trend for critiquing gender and generational politics through popular culture and its dissenting narrative arrives at and aligns with an increasingly visible period of radical feminism, collectivism and millennial protest within South Korea.
As the alarming disparity in gender representation, both on and offscreen, continues within the South Korean film industry, this chapter argues for the significance of Microhabitat beyond popular and ‘wistful’ entertainment. By evaluating the film’s representations, context and production the chapter contends that it acts as an imperative political treatise on a generation of South Korean women emerging as important radical voices from the fringes.
Ichi (2008): Female Stars and Gender Representations in the Zatoichi Franchise
Authors: Wroot Jonathan
Published: October 2024

The Zatoichi film and TV series has typically been interpreted through its leading men – from Shintaro Katsu, to later iterations by Takeshi Kitano, Shingo Katori, and numerous other male actors. There was also the gender-flipped reboot released in 2008, Ichi. This entry in the long-running series is often discussed along the lines of gender representation, as well as the short-lived rival film series produced at Shochiku, The Crimson Bat (1969-70), and its 25 episode TV series spin-off (broadcast in 1971). However, female characters are equally prolific throughout all the other films and TV episodes. Questions arise with these representations, especially when examining a long-running franchise. Do representations of women change over time in these entries? If so, for what reasons?
This chapter attempts to answer these questions, which stem from the writing of a book-length history of the Zatoichi franchise and its global influence. Examining the representations of women in these films and TV episodes provides another perspective on the series’ history, and the history of Japanese media industries.
Angie Chen: Hong Kong Film Pioneer
Authors: Willis Andy
Published: October 2024

Less acknowledged within critical and academic circles than her contemporaries Ann Hui and Mabel Cheung, director Angie Chen is in many ways equally a pioneer within the Hong Kong film industry. This chapter considers Chen’s work, dividing it into three distinct periods. The first, following her training in filmmaking at the UCLA film school, saw her direct three feature films (Maybe It’s Love (1984), My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) and Chaos by Design (1988)) for major Hong Kong production companies Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest at the time of the Hong Kong ‘new wave’. Following this Chen went on to become an award winning commercials director creating advertising campaigns for the likes of Proctor and Gamble. More recently, Chen has worked on a series of award winning documentary feature films that bring a particularly personal approach to their subjects.
Turkish Paramilitarism in Northern Kurdistan
Authors: Isik Ayhan
Published: October 2024

This book focuses on paramilitary groups and the Turkish state relations during the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the 1990s. In August 1984, the PKK launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state, leading to a full-blown war throughout the 1990s. During the conflict, the Turkish state established new armed groups, many of them having a paramilitary character. This research investigates how these paramilitary groups emerged, functioned, and were deactivated. It analyses the historical background, transformations and continuities of these paramilitary groups and examines their violence against civilians, particularly in Northern Kurdistan.
Introduction
Authors: Isik Ayhan
Published: October 2024

This chapter analyses the literature on paramilitarism, the types and definitions of paramilitarism, its Turkish context and the methodology of the book.
Unemployment and Resistance in Tunisia
Authors: Han Saerom
Published: October 2024

This book reassesses Tunisian democratization by focusing on two interrelated facets: the continuity of the unemployed struggle over social justice and the management of unemployed protests in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ within a democratic framework. It does so by asking what type of political-economic system the regime relates democracy to, and how. It also proposes an alternative approach in which (counter)terrorism is understood as a discursive tool rather than an objective threat to democracy. This way of understanding terrorism shifts our attention toward what is being practiced in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ and how such practices can serve a particular modality of democracy. Finally, instead of conceptualizing resisting actors as being in opposition to the state security policies, it explores how they become the subject to and the agent of the democracy-security nexus.
A Foucauldian Approach to Democracy, Resistance and Security
Authors: Han Saerom
Published: October 2024

Chapter 2 introduces Foucault’s notions of governmentality and counter-conduct suggesting that they help us explore mutually constitutive interactions between dominant actors and institutions upholding neoliberal economic agendas on the one hand and those in opposition to them on the other. It then elaborates how the Foucauldian approach to domination and resistance can be useful in understanding the securitization of the Tunisian unemployed in the context where the division between ‘democratic’ mobilizations and ‘authoritarian’ ruling has become increasingly obscured since 2011.
Securing the Religious a/in Place
Authors: Abillama Raja
Published: October 2024

Chapter 1 examines the concepts and procedures by which the legal incorporation of Muslims and Christians is carried out. A twofold translation of the religious into the legal accompanies incorporation: of Muslims and Christians into/as legal subjects and Christians and Muslims into/as legal jurisdictions. As groups (or communities), Christians and Muslims are claimed to possess a distinctive personal status, which translates into formal recognition. If and once granted, recognition – depending, in the last instance, on a political decision – entails the confirmation of personal status and, accordingly, the concomitant jurisdiction. Individual Muslims and Christians are ‘born into’ a jurisdiction (they are consigned to their father’s jurisdiction), but are free to transfer to another once they attain legal age.
The Religious Offended
Authors: Abillama Raja
Published: October 2024

As mentioned in the preceding chapter, the religious sentiments, the communitarian impulses, and the doctrinal or sectarian tensions are to remain contained and prevented from erupting into the public. Suppressing the causes of such eruption is one way of containment and prevention. At the other end of the chain of effects, however, their intensity could be reduced by lowering their bearers’ threshold of sensitivity to attune it to generally (socially or culturally) accepted or normal standards conducive to mutual tolerance and coexistence.
Introduction
Authors: Sigler David
Published: October 2024

This essay identifies a gap between the study of ‘sexuality’ (per Foucault) and the study of ‘perversion’ (per Lacan or Bataille) and suggests that women’s writing of the British Romantic period has gotten caught between those two epistemological frames. It offers ‘sexual transgression’ as a category poised to move between these two registers in productive and destabilising ways. In an analysis of a comic poem by Elizabeth Moody, ‘To Dr. Darwin’, it demonstrates how transgression as a concept could be rethought, given how transgression only works at cross-purposes with itself, for there is no thinkable ‘beyond’ of normative sexuality except within it.
The Necrophilia of Wollstonecraft’s ‘The Cave of Fancy’
Authors: Sigler David
Published: October 2024

Necrophilia is not a topic that often comes up in discussions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing. This essay will serve as a reminder that ‘The Cave of Fancy’, an unfinished short story of Wollstonecraft’s published by William Godwin as part of his late wife’s Posthumous Works, features an ancient hermit who painstakingly covets, to the point of fetishisation, corpses on a desolate beach. He teaches his young charge how to extract pleasure from the dead, but she already knows about these pleasures – she just has not yet learned to engage with the physicality of corpses quite yet. Both main characters praise the special gratification that arises from loving the dead, not because such love can approximate the feelings of bygone times, but because, per the story, necrophilia has uniquely exquisite pleasures. The characters are aroused by the dead not despite the partner’s deadness, but because of it, as it gives them a way to explore fantasies of immortality.
Medicalisation, Pathologisation and the Intoxicated Self
Authors: Manning Nicholas
Published: October 2024

In the increasingly medicalised context of modernity, Chapter 5 interrogates the pathologisation of emotional alterity throughout the post-war period, asking why emotions experienced under ‘altered’ states of drugs, psychotropes or pharmacology are deemed to be less true than those which originate within a hypothetical bodily purity. The conferral of truth to emotions seen as the product of an intoxicated self posits the existence of a normalised affect meant to act as a baseline for subjective evaluations. The case study of alcohol in post-war American realism, and in particular in the fiction of John Updike and Raymond Carver, highlights the complexity of this dynamic, in which characters do not simplistically penetrate into truth through derangement but rather make use of the artifices of intoxication to rupture an unbearable real.
Conclusion: The Theatre of the Affective Mind
Authors: Manning Nicholas
Published: October 2024

The Conclusion delves deeper into the dangers of associating the value of literature with its ability to express, represent or incarnate the true feelings of the self. Opposed to a growing tide of utilitarianism and pragmatic justifications of literary value, an alternate model of affect’s artifice, based on fluidity and ontological play, comes to replace the stable anchorages of normal, natural and true emotion. Such a vision has its associated risks, existing always on the precipice of emotional entropy. The theatre of the affective mind, as this book’s concluding motif, opens on to a new vision of the feeling subject wherein authentic affect is imagined as a spectrum of vibrant representation, expanding outwards from the self’s own fictions and fantasies, rather than a ratiocentric or dominating ideal.
The Arabesque City
Authors: Moore Ben
Published: October 2024

Starting from Gogol’s 1835 book Arabesques, this chapter proposes taking the arabesque as a conceptual framework to approach the nineteenth-century city. Ranging across philosophy, architecture, design and literature, the chapter argues that fundamental to the arabesque is an internal tension between structure and disorder, beauty and the grotesque, and the intentional and the unintentional, which aligns it with the developing modern city. After a consideration of German Romantic accounts of the arabesque, the chapter discusses Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) and George Eliot’s review of it, as well as Jones’s Alhambra Court at the Crystal Palace. It concludes with a reading of literary arabesque via Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nikolai Gogol.
Christian Beginnings
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

Instead of treating Christianity as continuing an utterly unique Judaism alien to Mediterranean religion, the book argues for a pervasive religious dynamic based on three modes; the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion and the religion of freelance literate experts. These social kinds that cut across ethnically defined cultures such as Judean, Greek and Roman open a window onto a new way of reading the earliest Christian literature and of explaining its religiosity. The chapters lay out the theory and then illustrate it in various ways with essays on sacrifice, ancient associations, the idea of common Judaism, the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. The approach provides a different way to understand Judaism and Christianity within Mediterranean religion and its intellectual cultures by drawing on powerful new tools for theorizing religion more broadly as a social kind with three interactive sub-kinds.
The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences and Textual Mysteries
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

Analysing ancient sacrificial offerings, four kinds of religiosity characterize the practices and explain the puzzles seen in the modern obsession with “the problem of sacrifice.” The everyday religiosity of exchange with gods and similar beings of most ancients has been obscured by an overwhelming focus on the religiosity of ancient writers and intellectual experts. Civic religion built directly on everyday religion and its local patterns of exchange with gods and non-evident beings who gave the gifts from the land and animals. The bookish religion of literate traditions, especially on the more autonomous pole, criticized and reimagined civic and especially everyday religion. Writers depicted sacrifice as bargaining with the gods and as too material. A fourth kind seen especially in Christianity emerged as the religion of literate experts with political power.
Locating the Religion of Associations
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

A massive amount of scholarship has focused on the political situation of associations, their club sociality, and especially their positive relations with civic culture, but only a little on understanding, rather than just cataloguing, their religious practices. Largely missed has been the central relations of many associations to everyday, rather than just civic, religiosity and especially relations to the religion of households and families. Many associations extended the everyday religiosity of the household and family that focused on exchange and reciprocity with local and approachable gods and other non-evident beings. And unlike Christian assemblies, associations did not focus on literate experts and their book culture operating in competition with other experts.
The Secrets of the Gods and the End of Interpretation
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

Secrecy and mystery have played major roles in religious traditions and in the study of religion. Whereas secrecy has agents, mystery presents itself as sui generis. The chapter addresses scholars who take mystery to be the essence of religion. They have tended to criticize not only those who seek to explain mysteries, but surprisingly those who negotiate small everyday mysteries as a normal aspect of their lives. Is religion typically about the one great mystery or is it about enduring mundane mysteries. My explanations involving cognitive tendencies to imagine one’s life full of intuitions and interactions with non-evident beings takes sides with the mundane. But many traditions including Jesus in the Gospels of Mark and John entice readers with the one and only big mystery that destroys all others. As Kafka is often read, the individual stands forever just outside the door of the impossible secret. But perhaps he was protesting against the forcing of the one great secret against the everyday.
Industrial Policy in Turkey
Authors: Toksoz Mina , Kutlay Mustafa , Hale William
Published: October 2024

Industrial Policy in Turkey, develops three arguments. First, industrial policy is not a choice but a necessity for late developers to achieve structural transformation and catch up with advanced economies. Second, designing and implementing effective industrial policy is difficult, with ‘state capacity’ and the institutional ‘embeddedness’ with economic stakeholders being critical determinants. Poor institutional design and policy execution are likely to exacerbate macroeconomic imbalances, which, in turn, further undermine the very reason for industrial policy. Third, the success of industrial policies in Turkey is also shaped by the global context. The different combinations of these factors have, at various times, supported or hindered the effectiveness of industrial policies in Turkey over the last century. Lastly it is crucial to avoid a dichotomic understanding of key parameters in industrial policies of ‘market vs state’, horizontal vs vertical policy, and import protection vs export orientation for effective industrial policy in the 21st century to achieve the green transition, improve the hi-tech capacity of the Turkish economy, and better integrate with global supply chains, as all these instruments need to be combined judiciously.
Turkey’s Industrialisation: The Historical Experience, 1923–80
Authors: Toksöz Mina , Kutlay Mustafa , Hale William
Published: October 2024

This chapter is an historical account of the ‘rise’ of industrial policy in Turkey from the establishment of the Republic until the early 1980s. It is organised into six sub-periods starting with the 1920s when there was an overly optimistic assumption that the private sector could lead development. This is followed in the 1930s and 1940s by the etatist programme of industrialisation with state owned industries and Five-Year Development Plans. The 1950s saw a short-lived reversion back to economic liberalisation under the Democrat Party government, which with its haphazard policies mostly driven by political patronage undermined state capacity. In the 1960s, reforms to overcome this ‘plan-lessness’ included the establishment of the State Planning Organisation and a series of comprehensive Five-Year Development Plans focused on import substituting industrialisation (ISI). This ‘hey-day’ of industrial policies was successful in establishing a diverse industrial base. However, the lack of focus on exports and competitiveness of the heavily protected industries was exposed by the rise in oil prices leading to a major political and foreign payments crisis and a military intervention in 1980.
Industrial Policy Demoted, 1980–2000
Authors: Toksöz Mina , Kutlay Mustafa , Hale William
Published: October 2024

1980s saw a shift in development paradigms away from ISI to export oriented industrialisation (EOI) – known as the Washington consensus. Turkish economy was an early adopter of these policies within the framework of an IMF programme in the early-1980s which began to reduce state role in the economy with the liberalisation of finance, trade, and capital accounts. Industrial policies were limited to ‘horizontal’ in place of the sector-based ‘vertical’ measures and the SPO was marginalised, thus weakening state’s transformative capacities. Government policy became reactive and ad-hoc with increased centralisation of authority, and discretionary ‘off-budget funds’ used to mediate state-business relations. These led to features of state-capture and increased corruption and patronage. In the 1990s, membership of the EU Customs Union, favourable regional conditions, and the heavily deployed ‘export incentives’ helped transform Turkish exports from agricultural goods to manufactures. However, frequent policy changes by short-lived coalition governments and increased macro-economic instability and uncertainty, undermined long-term investments. This combined with extensive speculative activity in the liberalised but weakly regulated financial sector culminated in the 2001 financial crisis.
The Return of Industrial Policy after the Global Financial Crisis
Authors: Toksöz Mina , Kutlay Mustafa , Hale William
Published: October 2024

The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of the Turkish economy to global shocks and led to a reappraisal of state intervention in the economy and the “return” of industrial policy. The chapter evaluates the series of initiatives beginning with the ‘Industrial Strategy for Turkey 2011-14’ that saw Turkish industry as the medium-and-high technology production base for Eurasia, the “2012 Incentives Law’ that brought back the idea of ‘strategic investments’; and the 2016 super-incentives scheme to help SMEs. In 2019, a comprehensive tech-focus became the central feature with the ‘2023 Industry and Technology Strategy’ that aimed to cut the current account deficit with end-to-end localisation in key sectors and raise the share of high-tech exports. In 2021 a Green Deal Action Plan and a National AI Strategy were released. However, the implementation and effectiveness of these plans have been undermined by de-institutionalisation and increased discretionary interventions by the AKP governments that weakened state capacity and brought macroeconomic instability. These features of the ‘late-AKP’ era have narrowed the potential transformative capacity of industrial policy to a few sectors such as the defence industry.
Incidental Women in the Letters of Cicero
Authors: Milnor Kristina
Published: October 2024

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, the author collects the “data” on women outside of Cicero’s household in his correspondence, noting who they are, where they appear, and what they seem to be doing there. Further, however, the author uses these minor figures in the correspondence to explore both the benefits and pitfalls of reading through male discourse to find the lives of ancient women. Does the information provided by Cicero in passing have greater or lesser truth value than that which appears more inflected by authorial intention? What value to history lies in the process of focusing on the backdrop rather than those who take up the centre stage in the social play? What effect does it have on our understanding of “the historical” if we embrace the idea that women appear in its narrative not just accidentally, but as representatives of a deeper anti-history, which Cicero both represents and resists in his correspondence? In this way, the chapter does not merely offer a more detailed account of the incidental women in Cicero’s letters, but also a different perspective on their role in the stories we tell about the ancient past.
What Everyone Knows: Hermeneutical Injustice in the Medieval Iphis
Authors: Hines Jessica
Published: October 2024

This chapter argues that the uneasy tensions in late mediaeval versions of the Ovidian Iphis story were inherently epistemological. Using the version in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390s) as a starting point, it situates Gower in the context of the mediaeval Ovidian commentary tradition and figurative discussions of sodomy following Alain de Lille’s De Planctu Naturae. Reading Gower within these traditions speaks to the larger epistemological questions of Iphis' myth—how does one come to know anything about a person’s identity, both the self and others? What role does desire play in the acknowledgment of that knowledge?—and it attests to the ways that the Iphis story and queer desire more broadly served in the late Middle Ages as a locus for investigating the links and disjunctures between identity and knowledge.
Schreiner and the Machine
Authors: Sanders Mark
Published: October 2024

What was Schreiner’s view of the machine? Waldo’s machine in The Story of an African Farm (1883) is figured as a work of art, and is not explicitly characterised as a device for alleviating work. In Schreiner’s Woman and Labour (1911), she explains how the invention and use of machines in industry, farming, and warfare has relieved men of manual labour, thereby freeing them for mental labour. The trouble, however, is that women, although similarly liberated by machines, are not free to enter fields of mental labour. Their reproductive labour having also been reduced in social value, in part due to mechanisation, makes them, in Schreiner’s formulation, ‘parasites’.
Schreiner is not simply for or against the machine, which is boon or bane depend on whether you can be remunerated for work that is meaningful and not degrading, once the machine has relieved you of the work you had. What makes her a thinker of modernity is that her machine is not one thing, but an entity the meaning of which changes according to its implication in a division of labour that, as she set it out, ran according to gender.
Turning Points: Olive Schreiner Changing Her Mind About Race Matters
Authors: Stanley Liz
Published: October 2024

In her middle years a number of transition points occurred that helped to change how Olive Schreiner thought and wrote about race matters. This chapter explores three such turning points or ‘epiphanies’, their reverberations in Schreiner’s writing and political activities, and the importance of networks in facilitating them. The first is Schreiner’s association with some Matjiesfontein workmen she met in 1890 when spending lengthy periods in this small railway village, feeling an affinity with them and their relationship with the karoo landscape. The second is Schreiner’s meeting in early 1893 with Eliza Brown, wife of missionary John Brown, in Taungs when visiting with her sister Ettie Stakesby Lewis. The third is the effects on Schreiner in her later 1905 of reading WEB Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, given to her by Frederick and Adela Pethick Lawrence, which she described as ‘a book I have long been seeking & waiting for’. From 1905 onwards, Schreiner became more involved with members of the black intelligentsia and political elite, including such figures as John Tengo Jabavu, Walter Rubusana, Abdullah Abdurahman, and later Solomon Plaatje. Regarding her writing, the reverberations can be glimpsed in network terms, in particular her uses of letter-writing to challenge the retrograde political views of white politicians, and support for black organisations, including trades union activities in railways, docks and mines.
The Story of an Australian Farm: Olive Schreiner in Australia
Authors: Jose Nicholas , Sutcliffe Alex , Treagus Mandy
Published: October 2024

The quotations from The Story of an African Farm (1883) that Patrick White chooses as epigraphs to the first and last sections of The Aunt’s Story (1948) signal Olive Schreiner’s importance to him. The Aunt’s Story is a seminal novel for White and in Australian literature. Our essay revisits the presence of Schreiner in White’s work – often noted by scholars, seldom explored. To do so we reconsider the publication and reception of Olive Schreiner’s work in Australia and its reading by Australians in the half-century preceding White. We thus explore the influence of African Farm on Catherine Martin, Catherine Helen Spence, Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson; and Schreiner’s connection to Australia through close personal friend, Henry Havelock Ellis. Charting the circulation of African Farm elucidates both the importance of Schreiner’s work to the development of Australian modernism and how the figures and concerns of her work were transformed in this process of circulation.
Olive Schreiner In/Beyond the Museum
Authors: Walters Paul , Fogg Jeremy
Published: October 2024

Located in the small country town of Cradock, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, the Schreiner House Museum serves as the epicentre of what might be called ‘Schreiner Country’ and as the ideal site for the interpretation of that uniquely significant terrain in Schreiner’s life and works. The acquisition of the much altered and virtually derelict Schreiner cottage in 1983 provided the fledgling National Literary Museum (later NELM, now AMAZWI) with an unprecedented occasion for a literary museum to commemorate, in a highly author-specific way, the first internationally recognised South African writer in English. The restored and amplified Schreiner House offers opportunities for education, outreach, and the exercise of the historical imagination. This chapter briefly situates the Schreiner House within the history of the development of the parent museum. It elaborates on the educational and outreach programmes to which the existence of the House has given rise. The authors draw on both published material and first-hand experience: Fogg was Deputy Director of NELM from 1991-2013, and Walters served on the NELM Council and its sub-committees for over a decade and participated in some of the outreach programmes.
Pickup on South Street
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Drawing on American historico-cultural analyses, genre studies and the preoccupations of its director Samuel Fuller, this essay locates Pickup on South Street (1953) in relation to all of the above and also to the anti-communist ethos of Hollywood at the time.
Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Underworld U.S.A. was written at a moment of transition in British film culture. Auterism was still dominant though, if not totally called in question, inflected to take account of other determinations on cinematic meaning, most notably genre. It is therefore a ‘broken-backed’ book, the first four chapters written from a genre perspective, the succeeding nine devoted to directors who produced distinguished work in the gangster film and film noir: Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel and Jean-Pierre Melville. The extract reproduced here consists of the first two chapters, the first arguing for the centrality of genre in Hollywood cinema, the second describing the recurrent overlapping iconography of the gangster film and film noir, plus a summary of the two succeeding genre chapters.
The New Scottish Cinema?
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

A transcript of a talk given at the Glasgow Film Theatre’s Desperately Seeking Cinema event in 1988, this essay describes the conditions which attended/determined the most celebrated collective movements in cinema history, bemoans their absence from the Scottish film scene and offers some historically focused explanations for that absence. It also lists a series of films run in conjunction with the lecture, together with notes on them drawing attention to their particular mix of arresting mise-en-scène and, in most cases, socio-political analysis, qualities the lecture identifies as ‘thin on the ground’ in Scotland at the time.
The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Although first alluded to in the above-noted response to David McCrone, the theoretical concept of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious is presented more fully here as a phenomenon guiding the hands of any who would speak, write or make art about Scotland and the Scots. Offering several concrete examples of the functioning of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, the essay traces its origins and proliferation from pre-Romanticism to modern urban discourse. It suggests that the hegemony of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious inhibits the capacity of Scottish culture to engage productively with modernity.
Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

An account of how representations of the city, in whatever culture, are never ‘innocent’ but invariably textual and discursive with the city as ‘floating signifier’ able to change its meaning according to its discursive location. The essay follows dystopian and utopian constructions of the city primarily in the Hollywood and Weimar cinemas, although examples are drawn from other cinemas as well, for example the British and Taiwanese. Detailed accounts are given of films such as Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans (1927), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), The Fountainhead (1949) and Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) among others.
The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

This essay reinserts Hitchcock’s work into British culture particularly by tracking the question of class in his films. It contests the imperialism of psychoanalytic feminism and Freudian analysis within Hitchcock criticism, but retains certain categories derived from those traditions, such as scopophilia/scopophobia, in order to reread Hitchcock’s films in socioeconomic class-related terms. The essay also notes the absence (until recently) of the question of race in Hitchcock criticism.
Maintaining art houses in the new millennium
Authors: David Jackson Andrew
Published: October 2024

This final chapter looks at another legacy of the 1990s art film boom – the continued popularity of independent art houses in post-cinema South Korea. Art houses have distinguished their products from multiplexes, and experiences provided online. The survival of independent art houses is based on establishing an institutional identity that stands in opposition to competitors. Art houses have managed to develop and maintain a regular clientele by marketing an exclusive exhibition experience dependent upon programming, space use, and educational activities. Such strategies have come under significant pressure from multiplex chains that have adopted identical spatial and organisational tactics to draw audiences. This chapter examines the successful survival of these theatres over the last few decades. This chapter argues that one final important legacy of the mid-to-late 1990s cinephilia lies in how the boom has been memorialised. One feature of the discourse linking the art film boom to the rise of filmmakers is that it fits into ongoing critiques of the South Korean cinematic industry. This final chapter then offers an insight into independent cinematic culture in the age of downloading and discusses the place of the 1990s moment of cultural consumption within Korean media and critical discourses.
Two Tales of a Nation: Ulus as a Site of Competing Historical Narratives
Authors: Uğur-Çinar Meral
Published: October 2024

The chapter centers on struggles over (re)defining a nation through historical narratives by specifically focusing on the case of Ulus, Ankara. Ulus, which literally means “the nation” in contemporary Turkish, became central first to the Kemalist modernization efforts and later to the political Islamist goals of reshaping the nation once the political Islamists captured first municipal and then state level rule. The chapter compares how the secularist and Islamist versions of Turkish nationalism turned this place into an epicenter of hegemonic struggle by writing different historical narratives thorough different museums, “pilgrimage” sites, and monuments.
French Westerns
Authors: Scheie Timothy
Published: October 2024

There are hundreds of films that could be called both “French” and “western.” Their production spans the history of filmmaking, and celebrated stars and directors have worked in the genre. However, with the exception of early silent production, these films are overlooked in studies of French cinema, of film genre, and even of the “transnational” western. French Westerns: On the Frontier of Film Genre and French Cinema is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to these films. This study advances the recovery of popular European cinema neglected by a narrow focus on “art films,” and adds new dimension to the understanding of the western genre. However, the purpose is not to stretch existing definitions of a genre or a national cinema to accommodate these films. It is to expose the acts of imagination to which the logics of “French Cinema” and “western” owe their coherence: acts that in these films fail repeatedly, productively, and at times spectacularly. The focus lies on an unresolved dissonance between the western genre and key French cinematic referents: landscapes, regional traditions, post-war modernization, language, stars, and a watershed event in political and cultural history, May 1968.
The return of the western repressed
Authors: Scheie Timothy
Published: October 2024

When explicit evocations of the American West return in films made in the Camargue after World War II, it is not as an alien element but as tropes and situations that are already at home in filmed representations of this setting. In a study of two of these pictures (Vendetta en Camargue and D’où viens-tu, Johnny?) this chapter exposes how the “re-westernization” of the Camargue parallels the modernization of France in the post-war decades. Through this association with “westernness,” American-style spectacle and consumer culture are constitutive of the “traditional” Camargue on film and set these representations of the region in an elegiac mode.
Little colony on the prairie
Authors: Scheie Timothy
Published: October 2024

The conceit of having a French character travel to the American West provides justification for stars to speak with their familiar voice, language, and inflection in a western setting. This mode of address to a French-speaking public also guarantees continuity with the star persona established in other films, spectacles, and media. However, the logic of this linguistic ploy stumbles when it meets the tropes, settings, and situations of the western genre, including the registration of racially and ethnically marked speech (here, the speech of the Native American characters on this francophone frontier). The sociolinguistic study of dramatic dialogue brings focus to how the French language in FernandCow-boy, a Fernand Raynaud vehicle, becomes an agent of ambiguity in displays of both “Frenchness” and “westernness.”
Attempted Rape as Rite of Passage: Constructing the Christian Feminine Ideal
Authors: Passaro Kimberly , Sowers Brian P.
Published: October 2024

Kimberly Passaro and Brian Sowers look at the stories of Thecla and Saint Justina to explore how late antique Christianity increasingly pushed manifestations of toxic masculinity onto non-Christian communities in novels and other writing and used stories of Christian women resisting rape to effeminize Christianity's rivals and construct an image of the ideal Christian male as protector and leader of the community. They outline the development of late antique toxic masculinity by tracing its perpetuation in the early Christian male imagination, a precursor for the continuity of themes of sexual assault in medieval, renaissance, and modern literature.
Real Roman Men and the Greeks Who Hate Them: Disciplina , Cato the Elder and Plutarch
Authors: Manwell Elizabeth A.
Published: October 2024

Elizabeth Manwell examines the Roman virtue of disciplina, as exercised by men to enhance their duritia (hardness) and virtus (manliness), which is exemplified by Cato the Elder in Plutarch’s biography of him. Disciplina is a notable and durable guiding principle for Roman self-conceptualization, but this chapter looks at an instance of resistance in the way that Plutarch interrupts his biography to critique Cato, specifically in terms of his adherence to a Roman masculinity that Plutarch finds not only unseemly, but even immoral.
Criticism of Roman Men and the Conspicuously Moral Masculinity of Scipio Aemilianus
Authors: Goldberg Charles
Published: October 2024

Charles Goldberg examines criticism of the conduct of Roman elite men in the political and military spheres during the 160’s BCE, both in prose historical works as well as on the stage. He then investigate how one politician, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, navigated this challenging political and social environment as a young man beginning in the 160s. Publicly disavowing the typical manly traits of aggression and competition, Scipio embodied a masculine ethos marked by Greek Stoic philosophy and general moral excellence. His conduct acknowledged the validity of critiques of Roman manly conduct while distinguishing him as singularly worthy of political power.
Toxic Manhood Acts and the ‘Nice Guy’ Phenomenon in Ovid
Authors: Marturano Melissa
Published: October 2024

Melissa Marturano explores the role in Ovid’s work of the ‘nice guy’, men who style themselves as chivalrous, generous, and even compassionate towards the women they pursue sexually and expect to be rewarded for this behaviour. Focusing especially on the Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses, Marturano considers Ovid’s purpose in systematically representing sexualized violence: does he do so to criticize the violent means of masculinity, or does he revel in said violence? Can his writings be used to resist and better fathom that violence, or do his writings uphold it? Marturano argues that Ovid’s poetry can help us to better discern the origins and survival of misogyny and its ally, toxic masculinity, as it reflects our own world’s violence against women.
Remaking Humanity: The Body Snatchers
Authors: Alpert Robert , Eisenberg Merle , Mordechai Lee
Published: October 2024

This chapter follows the transformation of disease through the five movies based on Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), periodically remade over the past seventy years. These remakes depict cultural changes through a series of shifting narratives: from alien invasion reflective of a feared threat of conformity to individuals of small-town America to the aggressive threat of infection by a global, militarized America and ultimately to the acceptance of a posthuman world in which conflict disappears through conformity. The source of the disease evolves from extraterrestrial seeds from which ungainly pods develop to biochemically engineered flowers that effortlessly duplicate humans. Where the protagonist initially fights against the invasive disease, they eventually develop and bring home the infectious virus. The feared conformity of the 1950s which erased emotions becomes a welcoming of sameness to advance a global, capitalist culture.
Popularizing the Pandemic: The Resident Evil Franchise
Authors: Alpert Robert , Eisenberg Merle , Mordechai Lee
Published: October 2024

The six Resident Evil movies (2002-2016) were hugely profitable. That popularity, both in the United States and globally, underscores the franchise’s reflection and advancement of mainstream ideas and audience expectations about disease movies. If the early films in this franchise present disease as a containable biological weapon, the later films depict the biologically created disease as inevitably leading to a global pandemic and, in the concluding film, an apocalyptic, posthuman transformation. The franchise shifts from a clichéd critique of global capitalism to an endorsement for evolutionary change of the species to erase social and biological differences among humans, thereby furthering the goals of global capitalism.
Conclusion
Authors: Alpert Robert , Eisenberg Merle , Mordechai Lee
Published: October 2024

This chapter summarizes the historical development of disease movies from the advocacy of science and the public good under managed capitalism to apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic landscapes in which society ceases to exist, each person is alone and the posthuman becomes the new American hero under global capitalism. It discusses how human myths reflect, define, and inform the human species so that movie stories about disease shape our experience not only in their factual accuracy (or inaccuracy) but also in how people perceive themselves within their community. These movie stories increasingly depict dark images of humanity. While these stories cannot immediately change reality, they can alter the direction of our future by changing our collective perspective of the world that we share.
Intermezzo: Censorship of Cinematic Crime and Violence in Colonial Hong Kong
Authors: Van den Troost Kristof
Published: October 2024

The Intermezzo shows how the colonial government’s changing practice of film censorship shaped genre filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, playing a role in the successive fads for swordplay, kung fu and crime films. Hong Kong censors in the 1970s became more responsive to the public, with archival documents shedding light on the ways they mediated between different social, economic and political forces and interests. The chapter argues that the censors’ approach during this time can be described as one of ‘liberal (de)colonisation’—a somewhat counterintuitive double process whereby senior British officials were able to impose their comparatively liberal views on the censorship of sex, violence and crime in spite of persistent media criticism, while simultaneously also overseeing an effort towards localising the censorship bureaucracy and giving Hong Kong citizens a greater say in how the city should be run. In this way, the film censors played an important role in the appearance of the modern Hong Kong crime film and a new form of criminal realism.
Reformulating agonistic democracy and its subject
Authors: Helander Sofia Anceau
Published: October 2024

The chapter returns to the theory of radical democracy to integrate the new concept of alienation. The main argument is that the subject can indeed be reformulated to include alienation – and, at the same time, remain potentially open and radical. However, this involves a reformulation of both the subject and of the normative model of agonistic democracy.

The resulting theory both resists and retains elements of Mouffe’s model. It remains agonistic in the sense that it regards conflict as ineradicable and central to democracy. However, it differs from Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism in that the agon is not singular – stemming exclusively from the ontological condition of the political – but multi-scalar. It can no longer exclusively focus on taming antagonism by channelling ‘the political’, constitutive conflict, through the political institutions. Instead, it becomes a form of democracy which also continuously interrogates its social conditions of existence, in order to maintain them. Resistance to alienation is conceived as both a condition for and a part of the agonistic democratic struggle.