bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Caliph and the Sulṭān
Authors: Manzano Moreno Eduardo
Published: January 2024

This chapter explains why the Caliphate of Cordoba should be regarded as a 'state'. It builds on Hugh Kennedy's thesis that the word sulṭān was used by Arab authors to refer to the "state" before the 11th century/5th century. This chapter describes the state structure of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and, more specifically, the origins and careers of the people who were employed in the state apparatus. It identifies the various groups attached to the civil and religious administration (fatás, 'ulāmāʼ, mawālī, etc.) and describes their complex interactions. The chapter suggests that there was a muted power struggle between various groups within the Umayyad administration, one of the consequences of which was the rise to power of Muḥammad b. Abī 'Āmir, who would later become the powerful ḥājib al-Manṣūr after the death of al-Ḥakamʼ.
The Struggle against the Fāṭimid Caliphate: (I) The Background
Authors: Manzano Moreno Eduardo
Published: January 2024

Coinciding with the irreversible decline of the 'Abbāsid caliphate in the east, a new Shī'ite caliphate had emerged in Ifrīqiya a few years before the proclamation of the Umayyad caliphate in al-Andalus. The long-standing conflict between Umayyads and Fāṭimids had deep historical roots and was rekindled in the Maghrib in the 10th/ 4th century. Umayyad chroniclers, who had usually ignored the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar (al-'Idwa), suddenly turned their attention to this region, providing us with invaluable data on the existing social conditions in the Maghrib. As this region became the main battleground in the struggle between the two caliphates for hegemony in the western Mediterranean, it also changed the fate of the Umayyad dynasty in al-Andalus.
The Struggle against the Fāṭimid Caliphate: (II) The Conflict
Authors: Manzano Moreno Eduardo
Published: January 2024

The period covered in this book was full of events and unexpected political turns in the Umayyad struggle against the Fāṭimids. 'Īsà al-Rāzī conveys the changing perceptions that the caliphal court had of these events and the caliph's (mis)calculations of what turned out to be a very complex juncture at a time when the Fāṭimids were ready to leave Ifrīqiya for good after the conquest of Egypt. The most important event was the caliph's decision to send troops to the Maghrib al-aqsà to counter the influence of the Fāṭimids in the region. This was the first serious attempt by the Umayyads of al-Andalus to expand into the territories of the Dār al-islām, and it had long-term consequences, not only because it proved extremely costly, but also because it accelerated changes in the composition of the Umayyad army and in the internal structure of the caliphate.
Introduction
Authors: Shehata Samer S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces and seeks to explain the dynamics of regional turbulence in the Middle East following the 2003 Iraq war and the 2011 Arab uprisings. This period has been among the most politically unstable and violent in the contemporary history of the Middle East. The chapter argues that three overlapping and at times intersecting conflicts have produced much, although not all, of the regional instability and violence during this period. These conflicts are the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism and the conflict around political Islam and Islamist movements. The chapter traces where and how these conflicts have produced regional instability and violence during this period. Although all three conflicts remain unresolved, the chapter argues that improved relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the resurgence of authoritarianism and the seeming success of the counterrevolution, and the repression of Islamist movements has meant that the period of most intense regional turbulence is over and a new era in Middle East regional politics has begun.
Implications of the Qatar Crisis for ‘Post-GCC’ Regional Politics
Authors: Ulrichsen Kristian Coates
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how the 2011 uprisings and the differing reactions to regional turbulence by Gulf States impacted the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and relations between its members. It argues that the uprisings and the divergent reaction to region-wide popular protest by Qatar and other GCC states exacerbated existing tensions between Arab Gulf states resulting in the 2017 ‘GCC crisis’ in which Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, along with Egypt, severed diplomatic ties with Qatar. While Qatar actively supported the uprisings, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi perceived them as profoundly threatening. These differences manifested themselves in Doha and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh supporting competing sides in conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Egypt. This analysis contributes to our understanding of how regional turbulence from the Arab uprisings impacted relations between GCC member states, the GCC as an organization, and the possible longer-term consequences of the crisis on the organization and Arab Gulf state relations. The chapter then analyses the 2020 Al-Ula agreement and subsequent developments in relations between Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to assess the extent to which the crisis has been resolved and the underlying differences that remain.
Violence, Image and Victim in Bataille, Agamben and Girard
Authors: Lechte John
Published: January 2024

Bataille, Agamben and Girard are thinkers of the moment in as much as each aims to explain the basis of society and culture in the context of violence, sovereignty and the sacred. The book shows that a study of the latter categories inevitably reveals a connection between violence ant the image, a connection that also shows what it means to be a victim. The Conclusion argues that no study of violence and the image can avoid engaging with the issue of what justice and injustice mean in relation to persecution and the victim as scapegoat. The originality of the book also rests on the fact that the thought of Bataille, Agamben and Girard on violence and the image have been brought into conjunction for the first time.
Rethinking Agamben on Violence
Authors: Lechte John
Published: January 2024

This chapter revisits the notions in Agamben’s work of sovereignty and homo sacer. It is shown that Agamben is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘divine violence’ as a pure mediality. Mediality is a key idea in Agamben and links up with his conception of the image, which is also a mediality. Violence in relation to law, to the camp as the ‘nomos’ of the modern are also addressed, as is Agamben’s notion of history in relation to paradigm.
Girard on Violence and the Victim
Authors: Lechte John
Published: January 2024

A critical evaluation is provided in this chapter of Girard’s theory of the violent origin of society. The latter brings the scapegoat into focus, and a reading is given of Girard’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth. A critical evaluation is given of Girard’s notion of hominization and the law. Derrida’s critique of Freud and the origin as violent is analysed.
Image, Violence, Victim and the Crucifixion: Girard’s Version
Authors: Lechte John
Published: January 2024

Girard’s approach to the image, victim and violence is analysed in this chapter. It is found that the theology of the Crucifixion – of the Cross – provides a key insight into Girard understanding of the image and the scapegoat. Girard’s major thesis is that the crucified Christ as image is not a scapegoat. Instead, He reveals the truth of the scapegoat mechanism. An evaluation is given of this thesis. Girard’s interpretation of Nietzsche and Christianity is also addressed.
Introduction: Absences, Identities, Belonging: Looking Anew at Screen Ethics
Authors: Bolton Lucy , Martin-Jones David , Sinnerbrink Robert
Published: January 2024

The Introduction outlines the specific intervention being made by this anthology, foregrounding in particular the volume’s unique move to contextualize the cinematic ethics debates within the contemporary globalized world. The editors clarify the importance of considering the politics of cinematic ethics and the need to extend the terrain to screen ethics so as to more accurately understand our media saturated lives under globalization. Chapters are introduced and set in the context of diverse screen media and the connections between the pieces are identified, such as remembering conflict, ecology and capital, race/whiteness, care and everyday life.
Domestic Work, Gender, Race, Class and the Ethical Paradox of the Big House in Brazilian Cinema
Authors: Brandão Alessandra Soares , Sousa Ramayana Lira de
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the recognition, or lack of it, afforded to domestic labour. The chapter takes take a decolonizing feminist approach to representations of the housemaid in films depicting the Big House – an architectural phenomenon synonymous with colonial plantations – in Brazilian cinema, from the 1940s and 1950s to the present. Examining the figure of the black woman housemaid in this cinematic heritage, at the intersection of gender and sexuality, the chapter explores the “invisibility” which is perpetuated today, and which is shown to have roots deep within the colonial history of Brazil, and colonial modernity more generally.
Memory, Witnessing and Re-Enactment: The Look Of Silence , S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Cinematic Ethics
Authors: Sinnerbrink Robert
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the dialogue between Joshua Oppenheimer’s two films, approaching these films as contrasting cases of ‘cinematic ethics’: films that show how cinema can be a medium of ethical experience enacted through emotional engagement and cognitive reflection. The Look of Silence expresses the ethical force of the victim’s gaze, the performance of moral courage in the face of intimidation and violence, and the power of ethical questioning to yield acknowledgment of injustice. It enacts a demand for recognition of historical suffering and political injustice that together define a cinematic ethics of witnessing. These two remarkable works offer ample scope to explore contrasting approaches to cinematic ethics: reflexive performative re-enactment in The Act of Killing, versus contemplative ethical witnessing The Look of Silence.
Becoming BeyoncÉ: Disidentification and Racial Imaginaries
Authors: Chanter Tina
Published: January 2024

This chapter investigates the relationship between identification, perception and gendered and racial imaginaries, questions of visibility and invisibility, how we are embedded in worlds that are constituted through habitual and often unconscious assumptions, and how these assumptions might be disrupted and reworked. The chapter considers the racial stereotyping which surrounded the women tennis stars Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka after the final of the US Open in 2018., and an ethico-political intervention in the circulation of such stereotypes in ‘What would Beyonce do?’, a performance by comedian Louisa Omielan.
Mermaids and Superpigs: Loving Nature under Global Capitalism
Authors: Birks Chelsea
Published: January 2024

The threat of impending ecological catastrophe poses problems on an enormous scale; eco-critic Timothy Morton goes so far as to suggest that phenomena such as climate change are so complex as to be irreducible to human frameworks of understanding. This chapter explores how cinema can contribute to an ethics of the Anthropocene, looking specifically at how two films – Okja (Bong Joon-ho 2017) and The Mermaid (Stephen Chow 2016) – negotiate the tensions between large-scale environmental problems and personal responsibility. Both films address the ecological consequences of global capitalism through the lens of a love story: in the former, a young girl befriends a “superpig” who was bred for meat by a multinational corporation; in the latter, a billionaire commits himself to environmental conservation after falling in love with a beautiful mermaid. Both films suggest possibilities for a posthumanist ethics of love.
Do You See What I See? The Ethics Of Seeing Race in Get Out
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: January 2024

This chapter analyses Jordan Peele’s comedic indie horror, Get Out (2017) with respect to how its exploration of seeing, in its active and passive components, performs an ethical act. Get Out succeeds in “making whiteness visible” (Dyer 1997), foregrounding how whiteness is blind unto itself even as it unleashes a blinding terror to those it subjugates. This is uncovered, aesthetically, at two levels: in its narrative – in the role of photography in enhancing understanding of the real – and in the cinematography, via the alignment of the viewer with the point of view of African-American protagonist, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), as he transforms from paralysed child victim, to observing photographer, to one able to act in (violent) self-defence.
Logos. The Language and Thought of Man and the World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

The ‘dialogue’ human and world in the becoming-thought of the world ‒ becoming-world of thought. Grammar, lexicology, linguistics, logic, gnoseology (theory of knowledge), methodology, epistemology (theory of science), dialectics, logistic, thinking machines seeking to explore their secrets. Logical research is conceived as a sort of propaedeutic to and of the instrument ‒ organon ‒ of general philosophy and regional ontologies, but ‘logic’ is also and above all the centre from and towards which fundamental ontology and the dimensions and the disciplines of the metaphysica specialis converge: divine logos, cosmic logos, human logos. The logos thinks all that is and poses itself in general as its core and sense (signification and direction). The tasks and the problematic of the unifying and fragmentary thought of fragmented and fragmentary totality, of multidimensional, open, questioning, combinatorial thought. Words, thoughts, writings. The silence.
That. The Play of the Being in Becoming of the Fragmentary and Fragmented Totality of the Multidimensional and Open World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

That has been posed as being, time, becoming, totality, world. First and general philosophy, fundamental ontology, metaphysica generalis are all names of the same. The search for being as being: this research ramifies, with the three ontologically regional branches of the metaphysica specialis, in theology, cosmology, anthropology; it already makes itself, before its ramifying ‒ inspiring it and conditioned by it ‒, of God (or of the divine logos of ontotheology), of nature (or of the cosmic logos), of man (or of the human, transcendental or historical logos), the being of all that is, its foundation, its (ideal or material) truth. ‘That’ however can be grasped, since it grasps us, as a play without foundation, play of time, play of the open, fragmentary and fragmented totality, play of the world ‒ through the deployment of errancy. The era of the end of philosophy ‒ equal metaphysics and ontology ‒ sees this explicating itself in science, while a kind of fourth branch of the metaphysica specialis, technology, is not metaphysically edifying.
The World of Poetry and Art
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

The word and the works. Techné. Poetics, aesthetics and theory of the particular arts. The common focus of all the arts and their specificities. Poetry and art, partial-total world in the world from which it emerges and which it rejoins through the death of the work of art.
The Game of the World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

The plays in the world, the world of play, the play of man and the play of the world. All interpretations of the world try to give name and figure to this play, yet ‘it’ surpasses them. It takes up again ‒ without recuperating them ‒ logos, being and nothingness, everything and nothing, god and physis, the human and history, poetry and art, which deploy themselves through its play. Finally, it itself does not ‘exist’: neither its names nor its occultations exhaust it, because it plays them and us.
From Fidelity to Creativity: Benegal and Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda
Authors: Shastri Sudha
Published: January 2024

This chapter examinesShyam Benegal’s adaptation of Dharamvir Bharti’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda (first published 1952) into a film (2001), focusing primarily on the changes that the film has made to the story and investigating the outcomes of these changes. The novel, which predates the film by almost half a century, was hailed for its technical experimentation and inventiveness, in which a narrator presumably tells the story of three women he has known, but which may well be the same story told three times, from three different entry-points into the narrative.In light of this being an adaptation, the attention of the chapter has been on the way in which the film is mindful of its medium while addressing and developing the themes and techniques of representation deployed by the book. What modes of engagement in turn, are expected of the spectator who watches such a film as this? How would a reader-spectator – aware of both textual versions – engage with the movie? Within the larger rubric of the above questions, this chapter will do a close reading of the creative turn that Benegal gives Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda.
Adapting Gandhi/Kasturba in The Making of the Mahatma
Authors: Sachdeva Vivek
Published: January 2024

Mahatma Gandhi has been a favorite subject with many filmmakers, historians, and writers. Lately in Bollywood, noted directors have made films that deal either with Gandhi’s eventful life or his much-discussed thoughts. Fitting into the larger nationalist discourse, Gandhi in popular Indian imagination stays either as one who, after coming from Africa, led the nation’s struggle for freedom from the front or whose ideas of non-violence have been found relevant in different times. Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (1996) is based on a book by Fatima Meer and tells the story of a rather lesser-known part of Mahatma Gandhi’s life. Historical biopics give us a new interpretation of history and a new image of the historical personality through cinematic images. Benegal’s film is no exception. Using ideas of Deleuze and Rancière, this chapter explores the relations between history, narrative, and image with special reference to The Making of the Mahatma.
In Search of Zubeidaa
Authors: Samaddar Ramit
Published: January 2024

Zubeidaa revolves around Riyaz’s (Rajit Kapoor) quest to understand his dead mother, an emotional subject tailor-made to suit the taste of an Indian audience brought up on a staple diet of maudlin melodramas. He attempts to solve the mystery that shrouds his mother by gleaning information about her from multiple sources. As a result, the filmic narrative progresses through analeptic flashback sequences presenting slices of Zubeidaa’s tumultuous life from her formative years to her unfortunate death. However, despite these long flashbacks, the narrative manages to move forward at an interesting pace. Riyaz’s search brings him into contact with six individuals who knew Zubeidaa at various stages of her life.This chapter discusses the significance of Benegal’s Muslim trilogy lies in its delineation of the strength of spirit that characterises the eponymous heroine of each film. Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa are moving dramas about women who fight against the barriers set around them. They are rebels who dare to carve out their own destinies, for better or worse. Together, they remind the viewers that Benegal, celebrated as the trailblazing father of parallel cinema, is a progressive feminist who unflinchingly prioritises agency-seeking women in his cinema, delving deep into the female psyche with astonishing sensitivity.
Shyam Benegal in Conversation with
Authors: Dingwaney Needham Anuradha
Published: January 2024

In this interview, Anuradha Needham has placed many questions before Shyam Benegal related to his personal and professional lives. The focus has been on how Benegal has evolved as a filmmaker from the 1970s till date and how in different phases of his career he has delivered films that not only depict pertinent social, cultural, political and economic issues in India but also use the techniques and vocabulary of cinematic tools and conventions to experiment with the various forms and genres of filmmaking.Benegal has patiently answered many questions related to his understanding of class, caste, gender and religion as conveyed in his films and has articulated how his upbringing and ideological understanding has made him produce his kind of thought-provoking and meaningful parallel as well as Bollywood films.
Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This is a scholarly translation and commentary on Leibniz’s seminal work. Composed in 1686, the Discourse on Metaphysics consists of 37 articles, each 1 to 3 pages in length. For each article, the translator provides footnotes indicating the variants from the Akademie Edition and original manuscripts, glosses on specialized terms, references to important persons and doctrines, and other clarifying remarks. The commentary on each article provides the philosophical context for the ideas and an analysis of the arguments. The introduction includes an account of Leibniz’s life and work, the historical and intellectual context of the work, and a guide for reading the variants, notes, and symbols. Two additional contexts are provided: a detailed chronicle of Leibniz’s activities during the year prior to and after composing the Discourse, and six previously untranslated letters from 1685. A bibliography of primary and secondary material provides the reader with additional resources for a deeper understanding of the work. While this aims to be a scholarly edition of Leibniz’s Discourse, the commentary is designed to be undergraduate friendly.
The main theme of the Discourse on Metaphysics is how this world, our world, is the consequence of God’s perfection. The subthemes are divine concurrence, morality, divine and human free-will, the compatibility of miracles with God’s orderly laws, the degrees and limits of knowledge, innate ideas, the metaphysics of substances and souls, the laws of nature, the commerce of soul and body; the metaphysics of sin: God’s permission of it, human responsibility for it, and God’s grace.
God’s actions are most orderly. Nothing occurs without a determinable order.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This article follows up on the criterion of simplicity by focusing on order. Suffice it to say that nothing in the universe occurs in a disorderly way. Following Malebranche’s terminology, all events correspond with God’s ordinary or extraordinary volitions. What seems extraordinary to us, or miraculous, is ordinary relative to God’s perfect volition. Apparent irregularities contain a hidden or unperceived order within. Here the rule of perfection is restated as ‘the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in in phenomena.’ To those who say that this rule dangerously supposes we can understand God’s mind, or that it anthropomorphizes God, Leibniz counters that conceiving apparent disorder as ordered should simply elevate the mind to appreciate God’s wisdom.
On whether the complete notion entails a fatal necessity; on distinctions between necessary and contingent propositions and consecutions; on God’s foreknowledge of future contingents; on inclination without necessitation.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz hits on several of his major philosophical positions in this article, which together amount to a defense of free will. First, Leibniz returns to the ‘complete notion of an individual substance’ in order to ward off an anticipated attack (from Arnauld) that it leads to fatalism, that is, the view that the actions of all substances are unavoidably necessary and thus not freely willed. He attempts to deny fatalism by means of his distinction between necessary and contingent propositions. Accordingly, the actions of individual substances follow with hypothetical, but not absolute necessity. The notion of Caesar, for example, is freely chosen by God, and while his actions are certain, they are not necessary, since the notion contains many actions that follow only contingently. This raises the problem of whether God’s foreknowledge of future contingents entails that the actions of individuals substances are unavoidably necessary, which Leibniz denies, by claiming their actions are at least logically contingent. Finally, Leibniz claims that substances are ‘inclined’ to act by reasons they take to be best, but are not necessitated by those reasons. It is suggested that Leibniz’s arguments for the contingency and hence freedom of individual substances do not clearly succeed.
On the causal and moral implications of expression, perfection, and accommodation.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz revives the effort, struck from the previous article, to explain the relationship substances have with each other in terms of the Aristotelian categories of activity and passivity. The aim is the same, to avoid characterizing substantial relations as causal relations. The reason Leibniz wants to avoid relations in terms of causes is given in article 33. Leibniz also asserts that substances ‘accommodate’ each other through their actions, and the moral implications of this notion are drawn out. Roughly speaking, the more active a substance is, in terms of its rationality, the more it can accommodate itself to the actions of other rational substances. Perfection means an increase in accommodation. Increased perfection entails increased compatibility.
Thus, the soul is not a ‘blank tablet’.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

The idea that the soul is a blank tablet has a long history, stemming from an interpretation of a passage said to appear in Aristotle, and continuing among empirically minded philosophers like John Locke. In his 1706 New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz engaged Locke’s arguments against innate ideas by showing that several key ideas could not have been derived only from experience (being, substance, action, identity, for example). Leibniz makes a similar observation in the Discourse. But the main reason the soul is not blank is that all ideas are in the individual substance already. At the same time, Leibniz recognizes the difference between ideas buried within the depths of the soul and ideas consciously known. We can derive the latter from the former by means of our capacity to form ‘relations of ideas’. This can be understood in terms outlined by his contemporaries, the Port-Royal Grammarians (as noted by Chomsky), who showed how complex propositions could be analysed into simple ideas and then combined to form new ideas present to the mind.
The sense in which God is the immediate object of our perceptions.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This article and the next are concerned with the dispute between Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche over the epistemic role of ideas and whether they require divine illumination. Malebranche had argued that ‘we see all things in God’, while Arnauld countered that this view distorts the nature and function ideas, which is not to stand in the way of our perceptions, but to allow us to see through to the object in a particular way. On this issue Leibniz takes the side of Malebranche, but by claiming that his doctrine of expression, which says that each substance expresses every attribute of God more or less distinctly, is consistent with Malebranche’s argument. Thus, Leibniz maintains along with Malebranche that our perceptions depend on God. Yet they must also be our own, in some sense. Leibniz makes brief reference to the Averroists, who supposedly claim that when we die the soul becomes one with God. Leibniz objects that this would dissolve the soul’s individuality. The likely reason he raises this point is to suggest that even if we see all things in God, this cannot mean that we understand everything perfectly, since we must also be distinct from God.
Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This book explores abstraction as a complex keyword in the intellectual life of modernity, and in artistic modernism. Collapsing the distinction between abstraction as thought and as art, it reveals that abstraction’s contradictory work is invariably concerned with mediating the relationship between the human and the inhuman. The book surveys this contradictory work in the discourses of critical Marxist thought and of modernist visual art. It then examines the fortunes of abstraction in the writing of three literary modernists: Stein, Stevens and Beckett. In these writers, it is argued, the challenge to humanistic norms is undertaken via a refashioning of abstraction. Abstraction becomes associated with the impossibilities confronted by this modernist experimentalism, but also with the pleasures of difficulty in a newly-democratic model of intellectual work. This new modernist abstraction accompanies a marked inversion of the philosophical orientation of abstraction, from the cold, distanced and general to the warm, living and particular. The change is traced, from a formula for involuntary memory in Proust, through the process and activist philosophies of James, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze. In its constant revaluation of human and inhuman, this book concludes, abstraction can work to confront the forces of anti-intellectualism and to endorse a notion of intellectual and artistic equality beyond the boundaries of elitism, class and education, an ‘abstraction for all’ which is finally seen to be figured in Lee Hall’s 2008 play The Pitmen Painters.
The Missing Keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul ValÉry
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This chapter demonstrates abstraction’s elusiveness, or its capacity to hide in plain sight, by juxtaposing the work of Raymond Williams with a specific essay by Paul Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’. Why does abstraction loom large in Williams’s critical vocabulary, yet fail to be theorised by Williams as a ‘keyword’? The answer proposed by the chapter, placed in the context of critical work by Leavis and Eagleton, is a distrust of modernism on Williams’s part, whereby structuralist thought and the defamiliarisation of aesthetic distance are misconceived as forms of abstraction threatening the human from the perspectives of the ‘stranger’. However, even in the short space of an essay which sets out to define abstraction in contradistinction to poetry, Valéry equally demonstrates abstraction’s tendency to slippage and contradiction. The chapter therefore suggests that both Williams and Valéry encounter in their own writing the contradictory work of abstraction within modernism and modernity,
The Force of Abstraction: Marx and Marxism
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This chapter surveys the contradictory work of abstraction in Marxist critical thinking since Marx. First, it explores the paradox in Marx that abstraction is both the inhuman alienated intellectual form of commodity capitalism, and the human means or ‘force’ by which such alienation can be overcome, through an analysis of the term’s instability across the Early Manuscripts, Grundrisse and Capital. The paradox and the instability are bound up in the difficulties of reading Capital, which were overtly addressed by Marx and Althusser, and of communicating the revolutionary nature of abstract thought, as this is addressed in Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The chapter then explores what happens when aestheticians trained in Marxist abstraction – Brecht and Lukâcs, Adorno, and Negri – encounter the emergence of abstraction as a defining term in modernist art. In all of these cases, the Marxist writing of abstraction reveals the desire to rethink abstraction’s inhumanism as precisely the source of its revolutionary human potential.
Abstract, ‘Abstract’: Modernist Visual Art
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

In surveying the discourse on abstraction in the writings of modernist painters, and of critics such as Barr and Greenberg, this chapter discerns the regular scare-quoting of ‘abstraction’ as a term only for a new formal language of painting, and the effort instead to denote a more complex yet authentic abstraction. In writer-painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and in theorists such as Worringer, this abstraction is closely associated with an affirmative revaluation of the inhuman and the inorganic as forming the basis of human art and its utopian potential. This case is developed in an extended comparison of what abstraction meant for Cézanne and for Barnett Newman. A pivotal transformation in the meaning of abstraction is identified in Cézanne’s private letters, the only real source of his writing; in Newman, who by contrast sustained a voluminous campaign of published writing in the name of abstraction, a constant struggle in language to extract a new intellectual abstraction from a field of existing meanings and contradictions is observed. For both, an abstraction of the Lyotardian sublime beyond humanism, whether in writing or in painting, figured an intellectual complexity that could be held in common, rather than as the preserve of the academy.
Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

The fortunes of Shakespeare’s characters are often bound up with their need to know. In turn, their predicaments heighten audiences’ awareness of themselves as finite, fallible knowers. By investigating how Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ dramatize and effect a sense of the urgency of knowing, Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self illuminates both the playwright’s and the modern West’s indebtedness to the model of subjectivity forged from the theological keynotes of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. The Reformers’ self is an interpreting self. Interpreting selves need to know and know through interpretation – their experience of the world is hermeneutical. This book argues that Shakespeare’s absorption of this prevailing, theologically informed account of human subjectivity of his day both contributes to and challenges our sense that his plays speak to present-day human experience. As Hans-Georg Gadamer describes it, interpreters of historically distant texts should seek understanding in the interplay of familiarity and strangeness. On one hand, the assumption that interpretation is basic to being emerges from a hermeneutic tradition inclusive of the Reformers’ theological hermeneutics and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, of Shakespeare’s selves and the modern self. Conversely, some facets of the Reformers’ interpreting self cut sharply against the grain of our (post)modern narratives of selfhood. Elucidating a different way of understanding Shakespeare’s representations of selfhood, this book offers fresh perspectives on critical questions about human beings’ finitude, agency, motivations, self-knowledge and ethical relation to others, questions which continue to frame present-day dilemmas and debates about human experience and human being.
Not Knowing Thyself in Troilus and Cressida
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

Reflective of the anthropological pessimism of Shakespeare’s Protestant England, Troilus and Cressida scorns its ensemble of classical and medieval heroes for their collective pride, deficient self-knowledge and indifference to their moral being. Shakespeare’s culture reframed masculinist classical virtues like pride by following Augustine, for whom pride was pivotal to humanity’s Fall. The Reformers stressed the inverse relationship of pride to their dialogic, intersubjective model of self-knowledge. A want of self-understanding causes hermeneutic blindness – the propensity to misjudge, hence not act morally in response to, what or who is before one’s eyes. In Troilus, eyes and sight trope characters’ hermeneutic blindness. To analyse the fragmentation of self, intersubjective relations and societies which ensues, this chapter employs Gadamer’s conceptualisations of phronesis, synesis and real dialogue, interwoven from Aristotelian and Protestant ethics and hermeneutics. Troilus situates audiences to mistrust its characters. Cressida stands apart from the male characters. But Shakespeare’s underlining of her personhood by showing her acute consciousness of her moral being suggests that we can neither fully blame nor fully excuse her for not acting in line with this knowledge. Hector’s about-face over Helen implicates him in the (blinded) masculinist hermeneutic that ultimately accelerates his own and Troy’s demise.
Anna Kavan
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This first book-length study of Anna Kavan’s writing contradicts earlier critical approaches that have figured her writing as sui generis by reading her comparatively alongside her contemporaries, especially Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing. Taking Kavan’s fiction as pivotal to understanding trends of experimentalism that emerged across the middle of the twentieth century, it offers close readings of her distinctive prose including her early Helen Ferguson texts, her writing of asylum incarceration, her wartime stories, and her postwar novels. Observing how her fiction challenges perceived divisions between experimental and realist writing, literary and popular genre and (late) modernist and postwar literatures, it focuses on the ways that Kavan’s writing undermines fixed or knowable identity and explores the relationship between reality and fiction. This study not only brings necessary attention to a neglected writer, but also suggests new taxonomies for reading experimental fiction in the mid-twentieth century.
Psychiatry, Anti-Psychiatry and the Asylum at Mid-Century
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter addresses how Anna Kavan’s narrative experiment began with writing the encounter with psychiatric treatment and the asylum, and focuses on her 1940s texts Asylum Piece (1940), I Am Lazarus (1945), and The Horse’s Tale (1949). Mindful of how developments in mid-century psychiatry both reflected and effected wider changes in subject formation and social relations, it draws evidence from her article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) to demonstrate that her writing of psychiatric treatment was political rather than purely subjective in focus, strongly anticipating the work of the British anti-psychiatry movement. Examining Kavan’s experimental narrative strategies to formally represent the existential experiences of depression, psychiatric treatment and incarceration, it explores how these factors subtly alter the reader’s relationship to the text, its narrators and protagonists. It offers close readings of Kavan’s asylum stories, especially her representations of psychiatric drugs, and explores the frequent association of her writing with that of Franz Kafka.
Blackout: Hearts and Minds Under Aerial Bombardment
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the impact of the Second World War on Anna Kavan’s writing, with reference to her time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital. Considering how the psychosomatic symptoms of the syndrome inflect the increasingly hallucinatory and surrealist prose of her I Am Lazarus (1945) stories, blurring divisions between mind/body and person/object, it observes how these factors manifest too in the work of other Blitz writers, especially Elizabeth Bowen.
The Crowding of Dreams: Postwar Time and Experimentalism
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the importance of dream to Anna Kavan’s postwar writing, and the psychoanalytical and existential inflections in two of her postwar novels, Sleep Has His House (1947) and Who Are You? (1963). Taking Kavan’s thoughts on a postwar cultural impulse to look backwards as a starting point, it considers how the concept of the postwar inflects her experiments with time, and those of her contemporaries. Examining the influence of heroin and surrealism on her representations of the unconscious, it suggests that her earlier representations of ontological uncertainty become a conscious engagement with existential angst.
Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

The first full-length study of postcolonial, settler-colonial and Indigenous film adaptation, encompassing literary and cinematic texts from Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, British, and US cultures, this book rethinks adaptation in the context of race and nation. It interrogates adaptation studies’ rejection of ‘fidelity criticism’ to consider the ethics and aesthetics of translating narratives from literature to cinema and across national borders for circulation in the global cultural marketplace. It traces the circulation of cultural power through these adaptations as they move into new contexts and find new audiences, often at a considerable geographical remove from the production of the source material. Further, this book assesses the impact of national and transnational industrial contexts of cultural production on the film adaptations themselves. Individual chapters focus on feminist inflections, where the adaptation foregrounds a postcolonial or settler-colonial positioning at the same time as it produces a feminist critique of canonical fiction; salvaging slavery subtexts, where the adaptation enhances the canonical literary text’s subtle invocations of slavery; relocating racism, where the national setting changes from source text to film, enabling an interrogation of race relations and cultural hierarchies; magic realism, where the literary text’s blurring of realism and fantasy presents opportunities and challenges for visual representation; cultural appropriation, where Indigenous peoples’ culture is represented by settler-colonial culture; ‘told-to’ adaptations, where non-Indigenous filmmakers adapt Indigenous texts; and Indigenous self-representation and self-determination, where Indigenous peoples represent their own cultures, producing the original text and its adaptation.
Salvaging Slavery Subtexts in Mansfield Park and Wuthering Heights
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

This examines Canadian director Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and British director Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, focusing on the adaptations’ extrapolation from the suggestions of slavery in the novels in order to foreground it within the cinematic narrative. This chapter argues that these films represent acts of salvage through foregrounding slavery as an essential context, allowing narratives suggested or buried within the novels to rise to the surface. Problematic associations of white women and enslaved people surface in the films, in particular, requiring scrutiny. The chapter also reads the two adaptations in relation to hospitality, given the class-inflected and racialised relations within the narratives of accepting ‘strangers’ into the family homes whose names double as the novels’ and films’ titles. Further, the chapter analyses the films not only in relation to the nineteenth-century contexts in which the original novels were produced but also in the context of their moments of cinematic production: namely Mansfield Park’s use of Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire to represent Mansfield Park, implicitly drawing attention to the slavery-based wealth of English country houses; and Wuthering Heights’s semiotic invocation of white supremacist politics in Britain in general and Yorkshire in particular.
Visibility and Veracity: Magic Realism in Midnight’s Children and Life of Pi
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the working of magic realism in Indo-Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2012) and Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2012), both transnational adaptations. Both novels are Booker Prize-winners, both have narratives that respond, in varying ways, to the Emergency in India in the 1970s, and both deploy magic realism. If the visualisation of narrative lies at the crux of adapting literature into cinema, these two films raise questions about visibility and veracity in the context of adapting magic realism for the screen. Whereas Meta’s film downplays the visual possibilities of magic realism, Life of Pi largely depends on the opulence of its visuals, considerably reconfiguringthe narrative. Although the radically different production contexts of Canadian cinema and Hollywood impact upon the resources and visual effects offered by these films, questions of transnational production and post-production complicate these films’ insertions into national cinemas. For Midnight’s Children, border crossings feature in both the narrative and the cinematic production, with this film located within the Indian diaspora mostly having been filmed in Sri Lanka. Life of Pi’s relationship to Hollywood is complicated by its multiple international locations of production and post-production.
Cultural Appropriation: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith , Black Robe and Dance Me Outside
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on literary and cinematic texts in which Indigenous peoples have been appropriated by non-Indigenous authors and filmmakers: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), written by Australian author Thomas Keneally and adapted by Australian director Fred Schepisi; Black Robe (1991), written by Northern Irish-Canadian author Brian Moore (1984) and adapted by Australian director Bruce Beresford; and Dance Me Outside (1994), stories written by Canadian author W.P. Kinsella and adapted by Canadian director Bruce McDonald. The chapter probes the ways in which settler-colonial culture borrows from Indigenous cultures. These case studies were produced either prior to or in the midst of debates surrounding the legitimacy of non-Indigenous representations of Indigenous culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter also discusses multiple adaptations through historical antecedents to the novels (Keneally’s novel’s basis in the historical figure of Jimmy Governor, a mixed-race man who, along with his brother, murdered several white people in early twentieth-century Australia; Black Robe’s use of the Jesuit writings in New France) and the continuation of Dance Me Outside’s narrative and characters in Nick Craine’s graphic-novel version of the screenplay ultimately used to shoot the film (1994) and CBC television’s The Rez (1995-1997).
Indigenous Representational Sovereignty: Once Were Warriors and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses films adapted by Indigenous filmmakers from Indigenous source material: Once Were Warriors (1994), adapted by Māori filmmaker Lee Tamahori from Alan Duff’s novel and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), adapted by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk for the Inuit production company Igloolik Isuma from an Inuit Traditional Story. This chapter examines the adaptations’ relationships Indigenous representational sovereignty and Barry Barclay’s notion of Fourth Cinema. Both internationally successful adaptations largely made with crew members from their respective communities, these films demonstrate that there is no monolithic version of Indigenous self-representation and self-determination. Controversial in both its incarnations, Once Were Warriors focuses on late-twentieth-century urban Māori life. Although the novel and film grapple with the legacy of colonialism, Pākehā presence is minimal in the novel and virtually absent from the film. Atanarjuat eschews non-Indigenous presence completely in its setting centuries prior to colonial contact, focusing on the fallout of homicidal discord within a community. Adapting an Inuit Traditional Story, entirely in Inuktitut, Atanarjuat derives from a source ‘text’ that exists in several different versions, with different resolutions to the community’s crisis. Both these adaptations alter their sources’ narrative resolutions, complicating questions of fidelity with respect to Indigenous culture.