bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Video-based versus educational booklet training on self-care performance of patients with cataract
Authors: Zarifsanaiey Nahid , Hedayat Maryam , Mehrabi Manoosh , Bagheri Zahra
Published: May 2022

Background and Objective: Training patients can increase their knowledge and skills in self-care performance after cataract surgery. The present study compared the effect of videobased training and educational booklet methods on the self-care performance of patients with cataracts.
Methods and Material: In this interventional study,83eligible patients a day prior to their cataract surgery were enrolledin the study based on the convenient sampling method conducted in 2020.Then, the patients were allocated into a video-based training group (n= 40) and educational booklet (n=43) group by the permuted block random sampling method. The patients completed a researcher-made questionnaire one day before and one day after the intervention to be assessed for their knowledge and self-care performance after cataract surgery. Face as well as content validity (CVR = 0.99, CVI = 0.8) and reliability (0.839) of the data collection tool were confirmed. For statistical analysis, independent t-test and analysis of covariance were used, using SPSS16 software.
Results and Discussion: Based on the results, video-based training and educational booklet had the same effect on increasing the level of knowledge among the patients. Also, the mean score of self-care performance was significantly higher in the videobased training compared to the booklet group after the intervention (P=0.014).
Conclusion: Video-based training can significantly enhance patients’knowledge and self-care performance regarding cataract than training the patients via the educational booklet.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 601-609
Maternal iron stores and its association with newborn iron dynamics and outcomes
Authors: Gupta Nikhita , Yadav Reena , Jaiswal Nishtha
Published: May 2022

Objectives: In pregnant women in developing nations iron deficiency anemia is common. The motherfetus homeostasis may be adversely affected by the demands in pregnancy. This can lead to adverse fetomaternal outcomes like intrauterine growth retardation ,premature delivery, and neonatal and perinatal death. Therefore it is important to understand the relation between maternal and fetal iron handling as this may help in further implementation of measures to prevent iron deficiency in pregnancy and infancy and improve outcomes. Thus, this study was conducted to explore the effect of maternal iron deficiency anemia on newborn iron stores.
Methods: The study was conducted in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Smt. Sucheta Kriplani Hospital, New Delhi, India between November 2014 to March 2016. It was an observational cross sectional study with sample size of 100 antenatal women diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia.We divided the mothers into groups with mild, moderate and severe anemia respectively. The maternal serum ferritin levels were compared with the newborn hemoglobin and serum ferritin levels.
Results: Between the three groups the baseline characteristics were comparable. The newborns of mothers with severe anemia had lower Apgar scores and a greater risk of admission. The birth weight did not differ among the groups. The severity of anemia increased with the parity.The cord blood hemoglobin between the groups was comparable, however the cord blood ferritin levels were directly related to maternal hemoglobin values . In those with severe anemia, a positive association was found between maternal ferritin and cord blood hemoglobin and maternal hemoglobin and cord blood serum ferritin. A positive association was also found between maternal hemoglobin and cord blood hemoglobin.
Conclusion: The study supports the fact that fetal needs dictate the placental iron demand. With increasing severity of anemia the fetus starts showing decreased serum ferritin and this finally results in iron deficiency at birth. Although the fetal weight and haemoglobin are not compromised with increasing severity of anemia in our study, increased fetal risk manifested by worsening Apgar scores and increased newborn admissions occurred as anemia worsened. This study supports the fact that maternal deficiency of iron affects the newborn iron profile and this reiterates the imperative role of iron supplementation during pregnancy.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 620-625
Comparison of neutrophil respiratory oxidative burst activity between flow cytometry using dihydrorhodamine (DHR) 123 and conventional nitroblue tetrazolium test (NBT)
Authors: Yusof Nurasyikin , Yasin Norafiza Mohd , Yousuf Rabeya , Wahab Asrul Abdul , Aziz Suria Abdul
Published: May 2022

Background: Neutrophil plays a defense role against bacteria and fungi specifically by the neutrophil phagoburst activity. The nitroblue tetrazolium (NBT) test is the gold standard method to measure this but the flow cytometry assays also have been developed. The aim of the study was to evaluate the performance of flow cytometry using Dihydrorhodamine (DHR) 123 and to compare with the conventional NBT test.
Methods: This study was carried out to determine the phagoburst activity at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre on 26 normal healthy donors and 5 chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients using both methods.
Results: In flow cytometry, higher fluorescence intensity was observed in Phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) stimulated neutrophils. Comparing the mean fluorescent intensity (MFI) between CML and healthy donor showed CML patients have significant lower MFI (312.15 vs 738.22; p<0.05) indicating poorer respiratory burst in CML patients. The PMA stimulated positive cells were higher in flow cytometry than the NBT (98.06% vs 87.5%). Although there was poor correlation between two methods, a good agreement between flow cytometry assay and NBT test results was observed in terms of positive and negative results in simulated and unstimulated cells. Moreover, in flow cytometry, >95% of stimulated cells suggest the higher sensitivity. All samples with negative NBT showed negative DHR, reflecting high degree of agreement between these two methods and eliminating possible false negative result in flow cytometry.
Conclusion: This study showed that flow cytometry assay has superior technical advantages compared to NBT test as it is easy to perform, quick, more sensitive and requires only a small amount of blood sample.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 626-633
A Study on Knowledge, Attitude and Practices among Healthcare Professionals Regarding the Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring and Reporting at a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital
Authors: N Nabi , S Rehman
Published: May 2022

Objective: This study was aimed to assess the knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) of the healthcare professionalsin respect to pharmacovigilance and to compare the KAP of resident doctors with KAP of staff nurses. The secondary objective of this study was to further compare the results of various other studies done till dateacross India so as to assessthe major contributors responsible for under reporting.
Materials and Methods:This is a cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study; carried out on 70 resident doctors and 71 staff nurses of Hakeem Abdul Hakeem Centenary Hospital, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi. The questionnaire was designed to assess the KAP regarding pharmacovigilance among the healthcare professionals. Statistical analysis was done using student t- test and Pearson correlation.
Results:Our study showed a considerable gap between the adverse event experienced (82.26%) and adverse event reported (39.71%) by the healthcare professionals. From the result of the study it is clearly evident that the resident doctors have unquestionably more knowledge of pharmacovigilance (67.71%) when compared to the nurses (49.85%). How so ever, the nurses showed a better attitude towards the reporting of adverse events (80.12%) and significantly far better in practices (60.71%)regarding pharmacovigilance. It has also been seen there is a significant positive correlation betweenpharmacovigilance training and adverse event reporting.Also healthcare professionals believe that regular workshops and continuing medical education (CMEs) would definitelyimprovethe reporting culture of adverse event among them.
Conclusion:From the present study, we concluded that there is a considerable gap between the adverse events experienced and adverse event reported; although our HCPs have fine knowledge and attitude regarding pharmacovigilance yet their practices are not upto the mark; good number of our HCPs are trained on pharmacovigilance yet their ADR reporting is low; there is a strong positive correlation between pharmacovigilance training and ADRs reporting.There is a need to develop a system for pharmacovigilanceand active measures,should be taken for making the HCP accountable for the ADRs, like remuneration, credit point system for each HCP reporting ADRs and appraisals of clinical departments reporting ADRs so as to inculcate the culture of ADRs reporting among healthcare professionals.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 648-658
A Dose Optimization Study of Marantodes pumilum (Blume) Kuntze Extracts for Wound Healing Effect in Animal Model
Authors: UA Shihab , A Atiqah , NS Ahmad , NM Isa
Published: May 2022

Objective: This study was done in the ovariectomized rat model to optimize the dose ofMarantodespumilum (MP) for the treatment of open wound healing activities.
Materials and Methods: Total fifty-six rats were taken for this study which was split into four groups based on four extracts such as Marantodes pumilum var. pumila (MPvp) leaf and root extracts and Marantodes pumilum var. alata (MPva) leaf and root extracts; each group contains fourteen rats. Each group was further divided into seven subgroups with equally distributed rats which consisted with one control group without treatment (Control) and six treated groups with different concentrations: 0.1% Conc, 0.5% Conc, 1.0% Conc, 2.0% Conc, 3.0% Conc and 4.0% Conc of each MP extract. After punch biopsy, rats were treated with ointment prepared by cetomacrogol emulsifying agent and MP extract on daily basis, beginning from the wound creation until healed completely. The parameters studied were the macroscopic observation andthe wound area measurement.
Results: Wounds with treated 1.0% and 4.0% Conc of MPvpleaf and root extracts and 2.0%, 3.0% and 4.0% Conc of MPvaleaf and root extracts were healed completely at day 9, whereas wounds of control groups were healed at day 12 for each extract group. The wound area was significantly reduced in the treated groups with 1.0% and 4.0% Conc ofMPvpleaf and root extracts (p < 0.05) and 2.0%, 3.0% and 4.0% Conc of MPvaleaf and root extracts (p < 0.05) than their respective control group.
Conclusion: The dose of 1.0% concentration for both leaf and root extracts of MPvp and 2.0% concentration for both leaf and root extracts of MPva exhibited the best effect to expedite for open wound healing compared to control group and other concentrations in the ovariectomized rat model.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 659-668
Activation of mental imagery neural network revealed during listening to Fatihah Chapter; a neuroimaging study
Authors: Ismail Samhani , Jusoh Mohd Hanifah , HafizanJuahir - , Idris Zamzuri , Reza Mohammed Faruque
Published: May 2022

Background: Listening to Quranic recitation has been claimed to enhance educational performance and cognitive functionality. Unfortunately, scientific evidence for this remains scarce.
Aim: Hence, we aimed to investigate the neural mechanism underlined the psychoacoustic and cognitive enhancement effects from listening to Quranic recitation. Occipital lobe beta rhythms (14-30 Hz) were excerpted from electroencephalography (EEG) data during psychoacoustic stimulation from sham (Rest), Arabic news and the Fatihah Chapter recitation. The stimulation comes in random sequence in the same length of duration of 5,8,6,6,10, 8 and 20 seconds for verses 1 to 7, respectively. The brain’s oscillatory waveforms were pre-processed using EGI System and then were analysed by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to derive the power spectrum in the Beta frequency band (14-30 Hz). Data were analysed by repeated-measures ANOVA and Discriminant Analysis from XLSTAT statistical package.
Result: A profound and significant reduction of the power spectrum was found in the left occipital lobe while listening to theFatihah Chapter. In contrast, no significant changes were observed in the occipital lobe during listening to Arabic news. It may be postulated that listening to the Fatihah Chapter activates an oscillatory neural network associated with visual mental imagery.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 710-716
Metaphors as Tattoos on human body: Passion or Pathosis?
Authors: Gul Somia , Safeer Aashi , Obaid Ameera
Published: May 2022

Background:The trend of tattoos increases day-by-day in many of the countries but unfortunately there is no evaluation of this practice in Pakistan.The term “tattoo” is the art of making colourful designs beneath the skin. There are different types of tattoos with different colour of inks. This practice is done for many reasons including fashion, beauty, to hide skin marks, addiction to pain, to memorize something or due to any personal reasons. Some people hide their tattoos due to some restrictions. Tattooed people may face restriction in jobs. They may cause different type of skin infections and other medical conditions.
Objective:Our motive of research is to evaluate the relation of tattoos with disease conditions and reasons for adaptation of tattoos in Pakistan.
Methodology:The data was collected by online interviews and face-to-face interactions with participants and tattoo artists. All the participants (N=181) with permanent tattoos were asked about different questions regarding age, gender, motivations for being tattooed, opinions and side effects following tattooing etc.
Results: In Pakistan, tattooing is more common among males (74.03%) than females (25.96%). The highest motivation of being tattooed was found to be fashion (31.57%) and beauty (36.31%). Greater number of participants considered tattooing as harmless (66%) and less considered it as harmful (28%), while few (N=6%) have mixed opinions. Common side effect experienced by participants was inflammation (23.36%) and then allergy (11.41%) but majority of the participants did not experience any severe side effects. People belonging to any occupation were equally influenced by tattooing but it is more common in teenagers.
Conclusion:In Pakistan, tattoos trend seems to be increasing day-by-day. Most people regardless of age, occupation, religion and side effects got tattoos because of fashion and beauty and there were no severe side effects of tattooing in Pakistan.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 730-740
Mastectomy under Local Anesthesia in Locally Advanced Breast Cancer in an Unfit Patient
Authors: Irshad Kanwal , Ahmed Hajrah Hilal , Jamaluddin Muhammad
Published: May 2022

Breast cancer is the most common cancer and leading cause of death in women. Mostly it is present in old age with advanced stage. Mastectomy under generalanesthesia is the treatment of choice. But as old age is associated with some co-morbidity which increase the operative risk and contraindication for operation. Here we describe a case of 50-year female came to Outpatient Department of AbbasiShaheedHospital with complaint of left breast lump for 1 year and dry cough for 2 weeks. On examination there was a large fungating mass on left breast with palpable left axillary lymph nodes.Trucut biopsy shows invasive ductal carcinoma grade II. Mastectomy was planned under general anesthesia but due to some respiratory problems general anesthesia fitness was not obtained. So in view of patient condition, toilet mastectomy under local anesthesia was done successfully. Local anesthesia is safe and effective method in patients who have substantial risk for general anesthesia. Successful surgeries under local anesthesia have already been reported and it should be preferred when it is necessary.
Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 03 July’22 Page: 745-748
Türkiye şeker pancarı üretim alanlarından elde edilen Beet soil-borne virus izolatlarının kılıf protein genine göre moleküler karakterizasyonu
Authors: ERKAN Ebru , KUTLUK YILMAZ Nazlı
Published: May 2022

Şeker pancarı (Beta vulgaris L.), Türkiye'de şeker endüstrisinin hammaddesi olup, yaygın olarak yetiştirilmektedir. Pancar bitkisi, plazmodiophorid vektör Polymyxa betae tarafından taşınan bazı toprak kaynaklı virüsler tarafından enfekte edilmektedir. Taksonomik olarak Virgaviridae familyası içinde yer alan ve Pomovirus cinsine ait Beet soil-borne virus (BSBV) ve Beet virus Q (BVQ) şeker pancarında enfeksiyon oluşturan toprak kökenli virüs türleridir. Bu virüslerden BSBV, Türkiye'de ilk olarak 2003 yılında kayıt edilmiş ve daha sonra şeker pancarı üretim alanlarında oldukça yaygın olduğu (% 49.8) belirlenmiştir. Bu çalışmada, BSBV ile bulaşık 10 toprak örneği coğrafik orjinlerine göre rastgele seçilmiş ve bu toprak örneklerinden tuzak bitki testi yöntemiyle elde edilen izolatlar, moleküler yönden analiz edilmiştir. BSBV kılıf protein (CP) genine spesifik primerler ile uygulanan RT-PCR yöntemi ve elde edilen DNA ürünlerinin baz dizi analizi sonrasında, tüm BSBV izolatlarının CP bölgelerinin 495 nükleotit ve 164 amino asit (aa) içerdiği tespit edilmiştir. İlginç bir şekilde, farklı lokasyonlardan elde edilen 9 BSBV izolatı birbirleriyle karşılaştırıldığında, bu izolatların aa düzeyinde % 100 benzer oldukları saptanmıştır. Bununla birlikte, Yozgat ilinden elde edilen YZT-355S izolatının, diğer izolatlarla aa benzerlik oranının % 98.17 olduğu ve 92., 121. ve 122. pozisyonlarda yer alan aa’lerin diğer Türkiye izotları ve daha önce tanımlanan BSBV dünya izolatlarından farklılık sergilediği tespit edilmiştir. Bunun yanı sıra, 24 BSBV izolatının (bu çalışmadan 10 ve GenBank'tan 14) filogenetik analizi, tüm izolatların I, II, III ve IV olmak üzere dört ana grupta toplandığını göstermiştir. Grup I'e ait Türkiye izolatları iki alt gruba (alt grup a ve c) ayrılırken, diğer Türkiye izolatları grup III ve grup IV içerisinde yer almışlardır.
Discourse and Social Change: A Theoretical Framework
Authors: Lahlali El Mustapha
Published: May 2022

This chapter reviews the main approaches to discourse analysis to give the reader a clearer insight into the main development of discourse and the main approaches and frameworks that deal with discourse and social change, which are of direct relevance to this book. Although other approaches and frameworks are introduced and discussed, the main focus is on CDA, particularly Fairclough’s approach. CDA has been chosen as the main discipline here because it offers, in my view, adequate tools and mechanisms for the analysis of discourse and social change. It offers a variety of approaches and frameworks, some of which allow us to closely study the development of discourse and its link to the wider social, cultural and political contexts. As this book is about the transition of Arabic political discourse, CDA will enable us to examine this transition by adopting a textual and social analysis of discourses. This chapter will not attempt to cover all approaches related to discourse analysis, but will be selective and only cover those that deal with language in its social context.
Doing Arabic Discourse: Micro-Analysis of Arabic Political Discourse
Authors: Lahlali El Mustapha
Published: May 2022

This chapter offers a practical analysis of extracts from both Arabic political speeches and public discourse in the context of the Arab Spring. This guide takes us through the application of key discourse analysis concepts and tools that are deemed relevant to understanding different dynamics of Arabic discourse. It also offers a clear insight into the notion of framing and positioning in the context of Arabic discourse. New concepts and terminologies such as personification, individualisation, collectivisation, foregrounding, backgrounding, metaphors and personal pronouns, amongst others, are also introduced and discussed at length.
Intermedial Texts
Authors: Boulton Maureen
Published: May 2022

The term ‘intermediality’ is applied to texts that incorporate an independent medium, and in medieval contexts may refer to the combination of text and image or of literature and music. Experimentation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France led to the creation of a variety of hybrid works. Several romances (Guillaume de Dole, Roman de Perceforest, Roman du Castelain de Couci and Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette) incorporate songs described as sung but without melodies in the surviving copies. Others (Roman de Tristan en prose, Aucassin et Nicolete) include musical notation in at least one manuscript, while Jean de Lescurel and Guillaume de Machaut wrote first-person narratives as contexts for the inserted music. In addition, Machaut wrote explicitly about the composition of words and music.
All-Sung English Opera Experiments in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Pinnock Andrew
Published: May 2022

One late-seventeenth-century English all-sung opera is world famous today, though rather obscure originally: Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, for which Nahum Tate provided words. But the wider experimental context that Dido fitted into is much misunderstood. So are the mechanisms through which Charles II sponsored experimental opera towards the end of his reign (in-kind support rather than direct subsidy). Court-affiliated poets faced a new challenge: how to write effective libretti for all-sung English opera – dramatic and musically suggestive, yet readily intelligible to audiences despite the distraction of music. This chapter focuses on two key texts: William Davenant’s libretto for The Siege of Rhodes (1656) and John Dryden’s libretto for Albion and Albanius (1683–5), the latter skilfully set to music by French émigré composer Louis Grabu and spectacularly staged shortly after Charles II’s death. Few if any of Dryden’s works for the English Restoration stage are worse regarded than Albion and Albanius. As a piece of writing it makes far more sense when considered in relation to music, but few of its critics to date have wanted to make that connection.
Thomas Arne and ‘Inferior’ English Opera
Authors: Aspden Suzanne
Published: May 2022

The career of Thomas Augustine Arne, one of the most significant composers of eighteenth-century English opera, demonstrates how important national literature of various kinds became in shaping both the genre and artists’ careers. A survey of Arne’s operatic output shows that he made significant use of several different classes of story with ‘national’ or patriotic overtones: stories derived from or popularised in ballads, canonic English literature, and topics invoking British history and patriotism. Examination of three works, Alfred (1740), Britannia (1755) and Thomas and Sally (1760), demonstrates both how Arne and others sought to accommodate well-known stories, literature and patriotic tropes to the conventions of English opera, and how Arne used musical form to reflect or enhance the text in ways that also enhanced the status of English opera, in part through establishing its connection with related genres.
Music and the Rise of Narrative
Authors: Kramer Lawrence
Published: May 2022

Instrumental works of Western ‘classical music’, especially since the turn of the nineteenth century, are now widely understood to follow narrative models – to constitute forms of musical narrative. Concert music participated in a general rise in the cognitive value and cultural influence of narrative, understood as a form of knowledge, which has persisted into the twenty-first century, sometimes in the form of a narrative nostalgia working against modernist resistance. Instrumental music supported the rise of narrative by concentrating on the general condition of narrativity instead of the content of any specific narrative. Musical narrativity frequently expressed itself in formal designs that required the construction of narratives in order to be understood – for example in the ‘scherzo’ of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. The result helped foster narrative migration, the remediation of independent features of narrative across art forms, media, and communications technologies.
From English Literature to Italian Opera: A Tangled Web of Translation
Authors: Gallo Denise P.
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the intricate lineages of Italian operas claiming ancestry back to English literature. Italian libretti have been criticised for distorting the plots and characters found in their English models. In truth, although librettists were tempted by the popularity of British literature on the Continent, their knowledge of English generally was limited or non-existent. Thus, libretti were routinely based on secondary and tertiary resources. For example, adaptations of Walter Scott’s works created for the French dramatic stages offered convenient models. Operas based on Shakespeare proved more complicated, causing even the most erudite librettists to employ translations. The cleverest eschewed those in Italian, turning to the most respected editions: the German by August Wilhelm Schlegel and the French by François-Victor Hugo. The chapter’s discussion of Verdi’s Macbeth touches on how a ‘translation’ should cross cultural and temporal divides.
Origins and Destinations: A Future for Literature and Music
Authors: Klein Michael L.
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers the extent to which the joint discipline of literature and music constitutes a separate area of study. The essay begins with a consideration of the origins of literature and music separately as areas of scholarly study. The modern study of literature is a product of the nineteenth-century devotion to an ideology of moral values. The modern study of music comes from the same period, with a focus on Bildung, the aesthetic and moral development of the modern citizen. The shared focus and historical time period of these areas of study is less suggestive than the fact that literature is always resorting to music, and music is always using literature (the song being the most obvious example). To illustrate how the two disciplines might become one, the essay examines two scenes in literature that involve music: one from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and another from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Short Form American Poetry
Authors: Montgomery Will
Published: May 2022

Discussion of the modernist line in American 20th century and contemporary poetry has been dominated by such long-form monuments as Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, and Olson’s Maximus. This study analyses and discusses a countervailing tradition of short-form work. Beginning with Imagism, it argues that the short and short-lined poem is a central feature of American 20th-century poetry, lacking neither the intellectual ambition nor the expressive range of the well known epics. The counter-tradition it suggests runs from imagism through such key figures as Williams, Oppen, Niedecker, Creeley and Grenier, to the recent Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout. The book aims to expand our understanding of the speculative reach of poetry, combining discussion of themes of objecthood, cognition and language with insightful analysis of many short-form poems.
Robert Creeley
Authors: Montgomery Will
Published: May 2022

This chapter describes the effects of compression in Robert Creeley’s poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Creeley made his name during this period with short and short-lined poems that place great pressure on the linebreak and on small swerves and feints of syntax. Drawing on Creeley’s correspondence with Olson, the chapter argues that Creeley looks for a new articulation of American space in an extremely compact version of poetic form. I discuss the motif of refusal in the writing and take issue, in an argument that is central to my overall thesis, with Charles Altieri’s attack on short form as adequate vehicle for philosophically ambitious poetry.
Robert Grenier
Authors: Montgomery Will
Published: May 2022

Grenier, like Larry Eigner, is strongly influenced by Creeley and it ushers in some of the experiments of language writing. This discussion of his work focuses on his Sentences, a box containing five hundred index cards, each containing a brief poem. This is read in two contexts: as a development of Pieces-era Creeley, but also read it in the context of Fluxus, notably George Brecht’s FluxboxWater Yam.
A Tale of Two Gothams: Revolution, Sacrifice and the Rule of Law in The Dark Knight Rises
Authors: Peters Timothy D.
Published: May 2022

This Chapter continues Chapter 3’s critique of modern secular legality, and the argument for an alternative theological jurisprudence based on trust. In conforming to the genre of the ‘sacrificial film’, the Chapter reads Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises as a legal mythology re-presenting the French revolution as a founding event of modern secular legality. However, whilst drawing explicitly on Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the revolution instituted by the villain Bane is more of a carnival that inverts social roles, rather than an exercise of constituent power. This insight is critical, not only because of the way in which the ‘sentencing trials’ of Bane’s revolutionary tribunal highlight the presumption of guilt deployed by modern neoliberal legality and the security state, but also because of the film’s examples of what Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘destituent’ power or potential: Selina Kyle’s search for a technological ‘clean slate’; Batman’s mask as a collective symbol that renders inoperative legal identity. In contrast to the secular legal mythology that privileges the sacrifice of the individual, the Chapter concludes by turning to the more orthodox Christian position in which the sacrificial economy itself was destituted by Christ’s sacrifice, privileging life over death.
Pauline Science Fiction: Alex Proyas’s I, Robot , Universalism and Love Beyond the Law
Authors: Peters Timothy D.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 5 is the first of two chapters that considers law and science fiction. This chapter focuses on Alex Proyas’s cinematic rendering of the work of Isaac Asimov in the film I, Robot. Situated within the tradition of hard sci-fi that explicitly imagines a technologized, scientific and dis-enchanted world, the film presents a vision of law as rule without exception encapsulated in the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’. Whilst such a vision of law would appear to exclude political theology, with its miraculous exception, we find in Proyas’s rendering theological allusions that highlight essential limitations: both of its technologized world-view and the vision of legality that undergirds it. In examining these theological allusions, this chapter draws upon the ‘return to Paul’ in critical theory, particularly the work of Alain Badiou and his philosophy of ‘the event’. St Paul’s message calls us ‘beyond the law’, overcoming its limits and inviting us to step outside the differences its ‘letter’ institutes. The Chapter concludes by examining how ‘the event’, as rendered by a robot not subject to the three laws, rejects an abstract universalism—associated with modern law—in favour of a universal singularity that, instituted by love, founds a freedom beyond the law.
The Other Side of Glamour
Authors: Lee Vivian P.Y.
Published: May 2022

Since its inception more than a century ago, Hong Kong cinema has been a pre-eminent form of local entertainment and a site of ideological contentions propelled by colonial, national and international politics at different historical junctures. The Other Side of Glamour is a study of the historical development of the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong. In particular, it seeks to reconstruct a more dynamic picture of left-wing film production through closer attention to the entwinement of ideological, artistic, institutional and corporate agendas that informed the practices of filmmakers on both sides of the political divide. The inquiry is informed by the following questions:
What does it mean to be on the “left” of the Hong Kong film industry during the Cold War era?
How did the left-wing studios balance their artistic, ideological, and commercial agendas in their production and exhibition strategies?
What makes a film “left-wing” or “right-wing”?
How did national, colonial, and international politics intervene in the ‘making of’ the popular left-wing cinema in Hong Kong?
How did the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong reinvent itself in the post-Cold War, post-Cultural Revolution era?
What are the nuanced legacies of the classical left-wing in Hong Kong cinema today?
It argues that the left-wing’s institutional character and corporate strategies in the making of a ‘popular left-wing cinema’ are indispensable to an understanding of their nuanced (and often overlooked) legacy in Hong Kong cinema today.
The left-wing film apparatus in postwar Hong Kong
Authors: Lee Vivian P.Y.
Published: May 2022

The formation and consolidation of the left-wing film apparatus in Hong Kong coincided with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China and increasingly proactive steps undertaken by the US and Taiwan governments in strengthening their positions in the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong. Beginning with an overview of the cultural landscape against the backdrop of intensifying KMT-CCP rivalry, the discussion will bring to light the systematic eff orts of the CCP in mobilizing the left-wing film community in Hong Kong as a branch of the Party’s “cultural brigade.” Th e formation and further extension of this network alongside the local and regional advancement of the right-wing’s film and cultural enterprises would have a far-reaching impact on the structure and practices of the Hong Kong film industry in years to come.
Epilogue
Authors: Lee Vivian P.Y.
Published: May 2022

This book poses a set of questions that seek to unpack the meaning of “being on the left” in the cultural realm during the turbulent decades after the Second World War. It argues that “being on the left” of the filmmaking world encompasses not only political affiliation or conviction alone but also the processes of infrastructural and systemic construction that formed the basis of the production, distribution, and exhibition of left-wing films in and through Hong Kong. It considers how a “middle ground” positioning has become deeply ingrained in the film industry, if not the field of cultural production, in Hong Kong up until today. Without downplaying the ideological-political and ethical dimensions of the cinematic left, the preceding chapters have tried to reinterpret the cultural politics of the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong through a closer scrutiny of its institutional affiliation and corporate practices, which nonetheless are inseparable from the CCP’s cultural policy toward Hong Kong.
Slaves and Highlanders
Authors: Alston David , Cox-Westmaas Juanita , Westmaas Rod
Published: May 2022

Explores the prominent role of Highland Scots in the exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cotton, sugar and coffee plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Pays special attention to the new colonies of the southern Caribbean, including Grenada and Guyana, and to Suriname in the years to 1863
Contributes to the debate on reparation by reappraising the idea of Scots complicity in the slave trade
Includes a short foreword by Rod Westmaas and Juanita Cox-Westmaas, co-founders of Guyana Speaks, an organisation for the Guyanese diaspora in London
Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims’ stories are silenced – reduced to numbers and listed as property.
David Alston gives voice not only to these Scots but to enslaved Africans and their descendants – to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s.
As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with.
Jumbies
Authors: Alston David
Published: May 2022

An account of how the author became aware of the Highland involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and the plantations of Guyana, with an outline of the absence and then gradual recovery of awareness of this history in Scotland. A meditation on the ghosts of the enslaved and their descendants, which begins here with the folk tale ‘The White Lady of Bayfield’, is taken up in the Afterword to the book.
Jamaica–‘As much gold as will fill a flagon’
Authors: Alston David
Published: May 2022

Describes the growing presence of Scots in what had been the English – but now British – ‘sugar island’ of Jamaica from 1707. With detailed examination of links between the county of Sutherland and Jamaica; and between the island of Rasay and the Colbeck plantation.
Northern Scotland–Investments
Authors: Alston David
Published: May 2022

Describes how wealth from the Caribbean was used in attempts to transform the Highlands and how the economy of the Highlands was intertwined both with trade to and from the British colonies and with the financial systems on which the slave plantations depended. Includes arguments against the view that the Highlands in the era British colonial slavery can be thought to be a colony of, or an ‘internal colony’ within, the British Empire.
Landowners, Caribbean Wealth and Highland Identities
Authors: Alston David
Published: May 2022

Five case studies of Highland landowners used to capture the varieties of ways in which they used wealth from the slave-plantations not only to transform the economy of the Highlands but to to sustain, develop, adopt, invent or abandon, as an elite, their Highland identity. These are: Lord Seaforth, the Malcolms of Poltalloch, Macleod of Colbecks, Mackinnons in Antigua, and Gordon of Cluny.
The Counterculture Squared: Albert Brooks’s Saturday Night Live
Authors: Menne Jeff
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers how Albert Brooks’ conflicts with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and the films Brooks produced for the show represent a key moment in the counterculture and the role the professional class would play not just in entertainment, but also in American political life from the 1970s onward. With Brooks’ anxious conformity appearing only in pre-filmed shorts, the more anti-statist energies of the live-in-New-York performers both on screen and in production. The success of the show on television and some of it performers in film promoted not Brooks’ anxious responsiveness to the requirements of his job—such as a comic pleasing an audience—but instead a posture of indifference toward work, and in doing so helped to put in place a structure of feeling that would accompany the economic restructuration of the neoliberal era.
Modern Romance : Albert Brooks’s Anatomy of Love
Authors: Stubin Enid
Published: May 2022

This chapter traces the ways in which film editing and romance swirl around each other in Modern Romance(1981). Through a close reading of Modern Romance, this chapter tracks the overlaps and intersections of love and the perfectibility that movie-making holds out as possible. Modern Romance’s film editing scenes, which show the negotiations required to create a film provide a professional analog for Robert Cole’s personal (but not private) emotional world. For a film professional like Robert, security and stability requires working within and against the hierarchy of a studio that both thwarts and reflects the demands of love. Much the same is true in his relationship with Mary Harvard, showing how a self-reflexive film like Modern Romancedeploys notions of aesthetic control in film making to understand life and love outside of business hours.
Debt, Payback, and Economics in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive
Authors: Ue Tom
Published: May 2022

This chapter reveals how primary Bernie, the character Albert Brooks plays, is to Drive (2011) notwithstanding his limited share of narrative time, and how Bernie makes pronounced the challenges of successfully reconciling with the story’s criminal system. Seen in this light, Bernie’s narrative offers fresh commentary on Driver’s (Ryan Gosling) and that, by attending more closely to the mobster, we can learn more about both the central protagonist and his world. After establishing the dialogic relationship between the Driver and Bernie, Drive is juxtaposed with The Godfather films (1972, 1974, 1990) to show how Nicolas Winding Refn’s borrowings and exploration of similar concerns help us understand both Driver’s and Bernie’s positions to offer insights into the film’s understanding of monetary exchanges and its criminal world.
The Invisibilities of Political Torture
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

In this book, I analyse how torture committed during the War in Iraq and under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was documented and dramatised across a range of material, including photographs, nonfiction films and television series. Beyond addressing the representational ethics of such images, my work explores affect as critical mode. I demonstrate how some audiovisual texts succeed in making emotional and collective consequences of torture experientially available to the audience, thereby expanding epistemological approaches towards torture to include such long-term and seemingly ‘invisible’ repercussions.
Visible Torture: The Case of Zero Dark Thirty
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), drawing from its critical reception and existing scholarship on torture, pain and its representational challenges, such as Elaine Scarry, Jennifer Ballengee, and Page DuBois.
Detailed textual analysis demonstrates how the film is strategically laced with ambivalences, which helps us understand why its position on torture has been subject to so much controversy. Further analytical emphasis is given to the alliance of documentary and fictional aesthetic and the kind of cinematic experience generated through the film’s protagonist as affective proxy for the audience.
Witnessing Torture, and Mediated Witnessing in War-on-Terror Films
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins by problematising the notion of cinematic identification with either perpetrator or victim and of witnessing, especially in technologically mediated form.
The theme of the witness is key to both torture and to cinema. The potential to be or act as witness is explored for the protagonists, viewers, diegetic truth-telling machines, and the film itself.
Close readings of Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) and Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008) explore how the films address this key visual metaphor. Contemporary violence and the mediated forms in which it is witnessed are reflected through different media images.
Television Torture, Made in Chile
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores how the widely popular Chilean television shows Los Archivos del Cardenal (TVN, 2011–14) and Los 80 (Canal 13, 2008–14) approach their historical subject matter. Both shows address social memories of the Pinochet dictatorship, which remain largely absent from the movie screen. The analysis focuses in particular on how archive material is handled, allowing for an examination of the contrasting emotional impact on the audiences.
Cinema as Poetic Archive
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

Building on scholarship of nostalgia, media archaeology and cinema as archive, Nostalgia de la luz (Patricio Guzmán, 2010) and NO (Pablo Larraín, 2012) are contextualised within a global and local memory and memory studies landscape. Close textual analysis explores how these films employ profilmic people, spaces, objects and the material body of the film in order to anchor themselves to the real. Aesthetic strategies such as use of historical footage and digital archive are discussed in the context of the scholarly debates on indexicality generated by the digital turn.
Conclusion
Authors: Jung Berenike
Published: May 2022

The conclusion draws together the various results of this investigation into what the films explored here do, beyond telling historical facts on specific torture cases.
The films’ formal explorations are contextualised within their respective national contexts and as responses to a more general challenge to the domination of a visual epistemological paradigm. The transnational link illuminates something about the current self-aware and performative image landscape. But it also reframes the ethical question about torture on-screen from the focus on how to avoid appropriation and to create empathetic identification in the viewer towards the question of how to legitimise belief in the truth of a representation – whether documentary or fiction – in light of often unreliable, biased or contested evidence, and how affective and material registers can expand what is perceived as existing.
Introduction: Bark at the Moon
Authors: Mann Craig Ian
Published: May 2022

The introduction discusses the aims of Phases of the Moon, and particularly its intention to move the study of the werewolf in screen media beyond the conception of the werewolf as ‘the beast within’. To do so, it examines the history of the werewolf myth and scholarly responses to it, with particular emphasis on cultural interpretations of literary werewolves and their 'real' counterparts: individuals accused of werewolfism throughout history. The second half of the chapter then establishes the work's aim to perform a similar task for film studies, where psychoanalytical readings have remained dominant. It discusses the concept of 'the beast within' and proposes that an alternative cultural approach to werewolves in popular culture allows for the monster to be understood as a diverse and evolving metaphor.
Dogs of War
Authors: Mann Craig Ian
Published: May 2022

Chapter 2 concentrates on wartime themes in werewolf films of the 1940s through to the Cold War era, with a particular emphasis on the American home front. It initially discusses several 1940s pictures that depict werewolfism as a hereditary affliction of invariably European descent. It then closely analyses Cat People (1942), Cry of the Werewolf (1944) and She-Wolf of London (1946) and suggests that they concentrate on female werewolves to negotiate wartime gender politics. The second half of this chapter explores The Mad Monster (1942) and The Werewolf (1956), two films in which werewolves are created by science, and argues that they articulate a deep-seated fear of the new and highly destructive weapons developed during the war years.
Cross-Channel Modernisms
Authors: Davison Claire
Published: May 2022

Described by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as ‘a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure’, in the early twentieth century the English Channel, or ‘la Manche’ in French, represented both a political and intellectual barrier between European avant-gardism and British restraint, and a bridge for cultural connection and aesthetic innovation. Organised around key terms ‘Translating’, ‘Fashioning’ and ‘Mediating’, this book presents ten original essays by scholars working on both sides of the Channel. Cross-Channel Modernisms historicises artistic exchanges in Britain, France and beyond, and proposes a rich conceptual apparatus of ‘crossings’ and ‘channels’ through which we can read modernism and understand it as emerging from, and intervening in, an always-already shifting, multivalent, international context.