bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Exploding the Cosmopolitan and Treating the Foreigners’ Foreignness: Paul Leni’s The Diary of Dr. Hart
Authors: Fisher Jaimey
Published: September 2021

Fisher’s chapter examines the titular film as an important historical document that chronicles both the changing institutional context of German cinema and the evolving perspectives on the “war to end all wars.” Subsidized by the German Supreme Army Command’s wartime propaganda unit—the Photo and Film Office—The Diary of Dr. Hart is a transitional and transformative instalment in Leni’s career and the wider landscape of German cinema during the latter stages of World War I. Combining a thorough production history of the film with early cinematic trends, such as the popularization of cinematic–medical discourses and the representation of contemporary European cosmopolitanism, this chapter shows how Leni’s directorial debut combines a number of styles to transform the war genre and how such genres were already evolving at this relatively early moment in German cinema history.
The Proto-Horror-Comedy: Waxworks
Authors: Westerdale Joel
Published: September 2021

Westerdale’s chapter revisits the place of Waxworks within the canon of expressionist cinema emerging from Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Waxworks is among a key group of films, which also includes Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Carl Boese’s The Golem (1920), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), that frequently functions as metonymic shorthand for early Weimar cinema as a whole. As this essay argues, however, Waxworks is also significant for its contributions as a comedy. Though the episodes with Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper are predictably grim, the film’s longest sequence presents a Baghdad burlesque in which Emil Jannings’ lecherous caliph Harun al-Rashid is more clown than villain. Such an episode sits uneasily in the “historical imaginary” (to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s term) that continues to dominate discussions of early Weimar film.
Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary: Adaptation into Genre
Authors: Gordon Rebecca M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter argues that Leni’s first film with Universal Pictures, The Cat and the Canary, created a visual and aural iconography that was essential for its cinematic progeny: namely, its remake in 1939, and the broader trend of ‘old spooky house’ narratives in Hollywood filmmaking. An early instalment in the horror-comedy genre, Leni’s 1927 film would later lend formal and affective shape to what trade magazines of the 1920s and 1930s called the thriller-chiller-comedy. Interweaving concurrent film reviews and memos between industry executives, Gordon’s chapter details Leni’s so-called “German” or “European” influence in reference to the film’s visual style and the effect of that style on its viewers. This chapter takes the position that The Cat and the Canary’s stylistic innovations became identifiable as parts of a pattern (or, indeed, a genre) by the 1930s, and, further, that Leni himself was responsible for developing an entirely new formula for Hollywood filmmaking.
Scottish Literature, Nationalism and the First World War
Authors: Riach Alan
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers the Great War’s bearing on the rise of Scottish nationalism in political and cultural terms. Riach discusses these developments in the contexts of international imperialism, the Irish rising in Dublin, and most centrally in the Scottish literature of the era. Riach points to the international nature of Scottish literature in the pre-war era. Addressing the war’s role in shaping Scottish national identity, he notes that the devastations witnessed by Hugh MacDiarmid would underlie the vigour and ruthlessness with which he would pursue his vision for a Scotland regenerated. Riach, however, recognising patriotic unionist perspectives such as those of Ian Hay and John Buchan, concludes that the poly-vocal, multi-media and temporally mutable nature of the Scottish literary response to imperialism and world war cannot be reduced or defined to a single party, moment, poem, book or author.
‘One Who Has Sacrificed’: The Use of ‘High Diction’ in Women’s Correspondence to Scottish Newspapers during the First World War
Authors: Pedersen Sarah
Published: September 2021

Sarah Pedersen recovers an overlooked area of Scottish literary response to the war in her chapter on women’s letters to the editor published in newspapers. In these letters, ideals of sacrifice and patriotism were shaped and reused to argue for greater financial support for soldiers’ families, as well as to criticise conscientious objectors or perceived shirkers. No less than male combatants, Pedersen argues, home front women also saw themselves as making sacrifices in a righteous cause.
Gaelic Verse
Authors: Black Ronald
Published: September 2021

Ronald Black surveys an impressive range of texts, discussing Gaelic Great War songs and poets such as John Munro and Murdo Murray, Thomas Donald MacDonald, Donald Sinclair, and Sorley MacLean.
Gaelic Prose
Authors: Black Ronald
Published: September 2021

Discussing, among other examples, Murdo Murray’s wartime diary, journalism in the periodicals An Deò-Gréine and Guth na Bliadhna, and fiction by Norman Campbell, Ian MacLean, and Roderick Maclean, Black demonstrates the – previously underappreciated – extent and importance of Gaelic prose writing from the war.
Pastoral as Propaganda in John Buchan’s Wartime Writing
Authors: Houston Fiona
Published: September 2021

Fiona Houston looks at John Buchan’s engagement with the pastoral mode in relation to his dual Scottish/ British identity. Houston highlights Buchan’s use of pastoral tropes such as shepherds and birds, neighbourly invitation, and the sanctuary of the humble cottage – alongside traditional Scottish literary technique, such as oral folk tales and song – to create an identity that is simultaneously proudly Scottish and proudly British.
Ewart Alan Mackintosh in Memoriam: Leadership, Patriotism and Posthumous Commemoration
Authors: McLennan Neil
Published: September 2021

Neil McLennan looks at the poetry of Ewart Alan Mackintosh – a second lieutenant who won the Military Cross for valorous conduct at Arras and who was later killed at Cambrai in November 1917. Mackintosh, McLennan argues, was a devoted and conscientious leader of men, motivated more by an attachment to Scottish landscape, tradition, and loyalty to his comrades than by a hatred of the enemy. McLennan charts the course of Mackintosh’s post-war legacy, moving from near complete obscurity – through a 2004 biography, a monument at the Saint Hubert Chapel in France, anthologisation, and involvement in national centenary commemorations – towards an increasingly central role in the British Great War literary canon
‘A reflection of the contrasts’: Scottish Literature and World War I
Authors: Rennie David A.
Published: September 2021

Surveys the varying interpretations of Scottish Great War Literature put forward by scholars and suggests the critical reception of Scottish World War I literature has, at times, been too focused on generalisations of the effects of World War I on Scottish writing. The Introduction situates the collection within wider trends in World War I literary scholarship and provides a summary of Scotland’s historical role in the war – on the home and military fronts.
Classroom Discourse and Multimodal Conversation Analysis
Authors: Jacknick Christine M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides a background of classroom discourse research with particular focus on research into the interactional organization of classroom interaction. Walsh’s (200, 2011) modes are introduced as a key framework for this volume. Prior research on student participation is summarized here, including the concepts of (un)willingness to participate and classroom interactional competence. Finally, multimodal conversation analysis, the methodological framework for this volume, is presented, including brief summaries of research on gaze, gesture, body movement, artifacts, and complex multimodal Gestalts. Notes on transcription practices are presented here, as well as descriptions of the data corpora drawn upon for this study.
Multimodal Listening
Authors: Jacknick Christine M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter aims to uncover how students display (non)participation and (dis)engagement when they are meant to be listening, focusing on how students’ embodied actions can make their engagement and participation in listening public. In tracing how students’ participation displays ebb and flow over the course of extended listening episodes, the analysis shows their orientation to the need to “do listening” in some visible way, even when interactional expectations are unclear. Repair is proposed as an element of active listenership, itself a constitutive part of classroom interactional competence. Finally, the analysis in this chapter demonstrates how students engage in multiactivity during multimodal listening episodes, focusing on their own “parallel activities” (Koole, 2007) as well as the main activity occurring on the open floor of the classroom.
The Politics of Form Council Democracy between Transformatory Politics and Political Form
Authors: Popp-Madsen Benjamin Ask
Published: September 2021

The last chapter of the book synthesises the discussions of the relation between constituent power, freedom, and institutional politics throughout the book. The chapter argues that it is one thing to counter the perceived groundlessness and formlessness of constituent power with the formalism of political institutions, but that it is a more ambitious task altogether to re-conceptualise the constituent power as encompassing the dual ambition of both constituting new political regime forms and a care for the stability and durability of those institutions. The council tradition, the chapter argues, provides an excellent vantage point for such re-conceptualisation of the constituent power. Moreover, the chapter argues that democracy have always been criticised for being anarchic, formless, and volatile – starting with Plato and Aristotle and reiterated by numerous political thinkers throughout history. The ambition of institutionalising the constituent power without exhausting it, which is the object of this chapter, is thus also an attempt to defend democracy against this critique, but without relinquishing its relation to radical transformation. Council democracy, in this interpretation, becomes a way of controlling the constituent power without completely exhausting it, thereby giving the citizenry continual access to the powers of self-transformation, co-creation and constituent freedom.
Clothing and Jewellery
Authors: Ruderman Judith
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the close attention that Lawrence paid to clothing and jewellery. Lawrence had a keen eye for dress and adornment: for its utility, aesthetic qualities and assertions of identity. He saw the ‘interior decoration’ of art hung in homes, of which he wrote in his late essay ‘Pictures on the Walls’, as of a piece with the exterior decoration on/of the human body; indeed, he likened the need for changing pictures to that of refreshing one’s clothes. While at once admiring of the expressiveness and innovativeness of clothing and jewellery design, he was also critical of fashion’s perversion by consumerism and materialism: fashion for the sake of fashionability rather than beauty and renewal.
Lawrence in Biofiction
Authors: Jenkins Lee M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the ways in which Lawrence and the ‘Lawrentian type’ is represented in biofiction from 1916 to 2018. The first sections assess pen portraits of Lawrence in the fiction of friends and contemporaries including Aldous Huxley and H. D. The chapter then considers biofictional representations of Lawrence which appeared after his death in 1930 by H. G. Wells and others, tracing intersections between these novels and biographies of Lawrence. In its concluding section, the chapter assesses Lawrence’s afterlife in recent biofiction by Helen Dunmore and others. Throughout, the chapter considers how early and more recent biofictional representations of Lawrence both reflect and reflect upon his own aesthetic and legacy.
Lawrence and Twenty-First-Century Film
Authors: Greiff Louis K.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines five film adaptations of Lawrence’s works released between 2002 and 2014. Two films (Odour of Chrysanthemums and Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois) exemplify surface fidelity by preserving Lawrence's setting, plot, and character. The three remaining films (The Rocking Horse Winner, The Blind Man, and The White Stocking) seriously disturb the textual surface. This juxtaposition of strategies reveals that neither is superior. Both have resulted in remarkable films preserving Lawrence's substance even through the process of transformation. The contemporary Lawrence films illuminate his writing as both prophetic and cinematic. The three transformative films verify that his work anticipates the preoccupations and even the events of recent times. All five films reveal Lawrence as a cinematic writer despite his professed dislike of film. The intensely visual scenes all throughout his fiction prefigure cinematic techniques developed long after his death.
D. H. Lawrence: Icon
Authors: Brown Catherine
Published: September 2021

This chapter takes a double portrait by Dorothy Brett of D. H. Lawrence as Christ and Pan as the starting point for an analysis of how Lawrence has been apprehended – both positively and negatively – as resembling Christ and/or Pan, or else for failing to resemble one of them sufficiently, from his own lifetime until the 1960s. Brett’s portraiture of Lawrence also initiates a study of the painted and photographic iconography of Lawrence made chiefly but not exclusively within his own lifetime, with a focus on the extent to which these suggest a Christ-like or a Pan-like aspect. A concluding section observes that both deifying and iconoclastic responses to Lawrence are now less common, and that more secular, but still passionately-appreciative, responses to him have largely replaced them.
Islam: Between the Freedom of Expression and the Prohibition of Hate Speech1
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

At the outset, one must distinguish the Islam of the Qur’an and definitive hadith reports of the Prophet and the Ahl al-Bayt from the Islam of the “shari‘a” (i.e., the opinions of past jurists derived from the Qur’an and Sunna). The former enshrines the freedoms of religion and expression, whereas the latter places many restrictions upon these freedoms.
This chapter discusses these issues: Restrictions on Freedom in the Shari‘a, Standard for the Freedom of Expression in Islam, and Insulting (Blaspheming) as a Standard for Hate Speech.
The three principles cited below are essential to accommodating the “respect of the believer, not the belief ”, on the one hand, and, on the other, to protect belief in Islam and also the freedom of
expression: The freedom to criticise aspects of religious beliefs; A prohibition on insulting and denigrating the belief system(s) of the believers and the apostates under “hate speech”; The nullification of all punishments related to apostasy (e.g., execution).
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Challenging Precarity, Rethinking Trauma
Authors: Jela Dijana
Published: September 2021

The chapter on Bosnia and Herzegovina focuses on the country’s small film industry that still struggles with the recent history of violent conflict, but whose cinematic output has garnered international attention and widespread critical acclaim. Prominent themes discussed include the ongoing efforts to come to terms with the wounds of war trauma, and the ever-growing economic precarity. The chapter also examines the role of film festivals in the circulation of Bosnian and regional cinema, and the ongoing regional collaborations between the national film industries of the former Yugoslav countries - a transnational network of cinematic output.
Montenegro: A Small, Open and Forward-looking Film Industry
Authors: Jovanović Sanja
Published: September 2021

The chapter on Montenegro discusses the circumstances in which Montenegrin cinema developed since its independence in 2006. It highlights how rapid socio-economic development, the strengthening of national identity and Euro-Atlantic integration processes, brought opportunities for the revitalization of film industry. New policies and institutions, such as the new Law on Cinematography (2015) and the establishment of the Film Centre of Montenegro (2017) supported such growth, evidence of which is the increased number of film companies and their role in providing production services to foreign companies that choose Montenegrin locations for their shoots.
North Macedonia: A Nation and Cinema in Transition
Authors: Warner Vessela S.
Published: September 2021

Adjusting to the economic hardship after 2008 by tapping into international markets and business cooperation, North Macedonian cinema has maintained a steady focus on its cultural branding and world image. While the genre and thematic variety of documentaries and shorts testifies to the unceasing interest in and demand of cinematic self-expression, the few feature films produced each year display a rather safe balance between entertainment and national self-assertion. This chapter discusses several recent films which mediate the political and cultural currents in this liminal space through the categories of national-recollective, national-symbolic, and national-reflective to understand the multiple and merging national narratives.
Fairy Tales for Revolutionaries
Authors: Ó Donghaile Deaglán
Published: September 2021

Aestheticism, with its emphasis on the right to pleasure, countered late Victorian capitalism and its denial of rights to the working class. This problem is explored in Wilde’s short stories, “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”, both of. While these tales have been interpreted as Christian allegories, they offer profound criticisms of the ideologies of capital and property. Proposing the mutualist alternative of shared, collective sacrifice in the face of poverty and the social injustices that provided the structural bases for the operation of capital, these socially-committed political fantasies articulated radical ideas that subverted the late Victorian bourgeois sphere. In these works Wilde also criticised socially conservative art for exhibiting “style without sincerity”, and proposed Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist ideal of mutualism as a serious model for social cooperation.
Civil Disobedience and The Importance of Being Earnest
Authors: Ó Donghaile Deaglán
Published: September 2021

Wilde’s most successful play portrays the ruling class as being both haunted and mirrored by the spectre of disruptive politics and the threat of revolution. Centred on Lady Bracknell’s claim that the expansion of education can “prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square”, it explores the play’s engagement with late Victorian radicalism in relation to this key reference to its most shocking contemporary expression - the riot. This play parodies and subverts the concept of private property which, he warned in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, had already crushed the human spirit. Exploring the play as a text concerned with the problem of violent authority, this chapter points to its darkly subtle commentary on the readiness of the middle and upper classes to deploy coercion and maintain its political authority.
‘De Profundis’, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and the Politics of Imprisonment
Authors: Ó Donghaile Deaglán
Published: September 2021

Reading Wilde’s imprisonment as a form of political violence enacted by the state, the final chapter reads “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” as works that were formed in response to the coercive force of authority. Wilde’s deeply reflective exploration of autonomy and subversive self-awareness intensified during his incarceration. His identification with dispossession and suffering returned to him as “the very keynote of romantic art” because, in contrast to the unforgiving nature of the bourgeoisie, the poor displayed to one another “the perfect wisdom of Love”. Wilde repeated Kropotkin’s stress on the mutualism of the poor in “De Profundis”, which he amplified through his account of the intensity of his experience of self-realisation in prison. This revealed to him that official history was composed through the force of repression.
The Three Towns
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad , Shokoohy Natalie H.
Published: September 2021

In ancient times Bayana was a great fortified city. By the time of the Āʾīn-i Akbarī, the shift of population following the 1505 earthquake had left the Fort abandoned and people scavenged there for weapons and utensils. The impregnable Fort had, however, been the reason for Bayana’s strategic importance, and the first Muslim town, called Sultānkūt, founded at the time of the Ghurid conquest, was built on the plain below. Within the old Tahangar or Vijayamandargarh fort the Muslims reconfigured the defences and also built a fortified town with a citadel or upper fort, a walled town, and an enclosure with farmland, wells and reservoirs to ensure self-sufficiency in times of siege. Later, at the time of Sikandar Lodī, when Bayana was considered for his capital, he built a new walled city called Sikandra between the town and the Fort, with many mansions and orchards outside the walls: a forerunner of the garden city of Agra. The three Bayana towns are surveyed and analysed in terms of their historic development and urban morphology.
The Short Story in Wales (1937–1949): ‘Though we write in English, we are rooted in Wales’
Authors: Hughes Daniel
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the ways in which Wales magazine (1937-49) sought to cultivate a distinctly Welsh modernist aesthetic, one best embodied in the work of contributors such as Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, and Lynette Roberts. Wales published English-language writing despite its sometimes Welsh-nationalist agenda, but it also demonstrates an awareness of and connections with the ‘intra-national’ dimensions of modernism across the United Kingdom. The magazine carried advertisements for Hugh MacDiarmid’s The Voice of Scotland, while also publishing fiction by writers such as Celia Buckmaster and Wyndham Lewis. While this modernist impulse is most obviously evident in the first run of the magazine (1937-40), the chapter argues that the short fiction published in its later incarnation as a cultural miscellany (1943-49) demonstrates continued engagement with both international and ‘intra-national’ modernist paradigms.
On Blackness and Makars: What is a Black Scotland?
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

The introduction establishes the critical and historical basis for the idea of a Black Scotland, beginning with a brief history of Black life in territorial Scotland and in the ‘Scottish Empire’, both crucial to a post-imperial national consciousness. The introduction also reads selected examples of Blackness in Scottish literature and criticism, including some of the ways Black history has been analysed in comparison to Scottish culture. It outlines critical definitions of racialisation and of Blackness specifically: its discursive character and its relationship to the literary imagination. Defining ‘devolutionary’ as a distinct phase in the political and cultural history of Scotland, the introduction also establishes the evolving critical field of Black literary studies as it has emerged in post-war Britain, up to the multicultural moment of New Labour, and situates Scotland within and against that historical trajectory.
The Britishness of Black Britain
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 1 argues that articulations of Black Britain, in general and specifically in literary terms, have been imbricated with state-led attempts to redefine Britain and the Union in the light of a new racially-defined diversity: ‘elaborated Britishness’. The chapter traces a shift in Black politics towards inclusion in the British national project, symbolised by Stuart Hall’s urging to ‘put the Black in the Union Jack’, and matched by government efforts to naturalise a new narrative of Britishness premised on inclusivity. This has a pronounced correlation in the institutional and disciplinary formation of Black British literature, and the chapter reads a number of prominent works in the field for their ‘British nationalist’ character. The chapter culminates in an examination of one of the most significant recent works of Black scholarship, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia. Reflecting on its unconscious British national character from a Scottish critical perspective, the chapter argues for an approach to Blackness informed by sub-national formations in Britain.
‘You Got a White Voice’: Blackness in Devolutionary Scotland
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 2 tracks the emergence of Black writers and a visible Black politics across Scottish literature in the ‘devolutionary moment’ following the referendum of 1979. The chapter proceeds chronologically, beginning with Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden (1972) as a model of Black Scottish writing, before working through the intellectual and literary context of Blackness in Scotland in the period. This history provides a two-fold excavation in order to show the under-recognised importance of Blackness in late twentieth-century Scottish writing. The first is of the significant work, particularly poetry and plays, of early Black Scottish writers Maud Sulter and Jackie Kay; and their relationship to national Scotland. The second is the expanding consciousness of Blackness both domestically and globally in the work of other Scottish writers such as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh.
The Black Jacobeans: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 3 reads Jackie Kay’s influential novel Trumpet (1998) in the light of its historical moment: the aftermath of the 1997 referendum on a Scottish parliament and the post-Thatcher context of British neoliberal governance. Trumpet provides clear evidence of the way that Black writing is recuperated into a narrative of Britishness at a key moment for the Union, which the chapter illustrates via critical readings of Kay’s work by C. L. Innes, Alan Rice, and Peter Clandfield. Against the prevailing tendency to read Trumpet as an endorsement of a fluid and post-racial Britishness, the chapter argues for its Scottish national and Black political character, drawing out its relationship with British constitutional history and Black radicalism.
Mad as a Nation: Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 5 is centred on the continued entanglement in Scotland between categories of ‘Black’ and ‘Asian’. Psychoraag positions itself explicitly in the terrain of New Labour multiculturalist discourse, between the contradictory poles of post-racial ‘culturalism’ and the continuation of racialised inequality and racist abuse. In the novel, this contradiction provokes a literary ‘madness’, which is at once the psychopathology of race channelled through Frantz Fanon, and a counter-rational lyricism familiar from Michel Foucault, and aimed at the constraining ‘logic’ of British multicultural governmentality. Ultimately, Psychoraag testifies to the persistence of race and racism in opposition to a state-led narrative of resolved multiculturalism.
Conclusion: Anchoring in 2020
Authors: Jackson Joseph H.
Published: September 2021

The conclusion of Writing Black Scotland addresses developments in the decade to 2020. It tracks the changing pattern in the publishing of Black writers, suggesting that the period after the 1997 referendum was a particular fertile and nationally ‘necessary’ point for such publishing. The conclusion reflects on the current state of Black writing in Scotland, noting its strong grassroots presence and the work of writers like Hannah Lavery, as well as acknowledging the role race played in the 2014 referendum on independence. Meanwhile, ongoing developments in ‘Black Britain’ such as celebratory accounts of the Markle-Windsor wedding and the Stormzy Glastonbury set, suggest that the practice of refurbishing Britishness via appeals to post-racial commonality remains an ongoing political strategy for the state. The book concludes with an observation about the complexity of Blackness as a formation in Scotland with reference to the respective work of Lavery and the Edinburgh band Young Fathers.
Asian Cinema
Authors: Khoo Olivia
Published: September 2021

Asia’s film industries have undergone significant transformation in the last 30 years. From bilateral co-production agreements to pan-Asian financing, Asian cinema has assumed a regional identity beyond its constituent national cinemas. This book examines the dynamic industrial and cultural developments that have enabled greater co-operation and integration between Asia’s film industries. It brings a much-needed focus on how collaborative Asian film industries are affecting models of financing, distribution, exhibition and reception in the region and beyond.
Politics, Big Data and Opacity Respect
Authors: Fox Carl
Published: September 2021

In his chapter, Fox argues that citizens deserve “opacity respect” in which the state withholds from peering into citizens’ lives to determine their capacities, for good or ill. Governments should assume that we are rational agents, barring certain obvious exceptions such as infants and people who are mentally incapacitated, in the same way that we assume this of each other. To dig deeper, without permission, is to undermine human dignity and that which renders us equal as humans, thereby forming a foundation of the democratic ideology.
Gated Communities of the Digitised Mind
Authors: Brønholt Thorsten
Published: September 2021

Brønholt here introduces the concept of gated communities of the digitised mind. These draw on the notions of echo chambers and filter bubbles to suggest that there are regions for at least some of us that function in the same way as a gated community in which we only mix with those least likely to challenge our views. He supports this argument with original analysis of 15 Danish politicians which summarises the results from semi-structured interviews with the respondents, and an analysis of their personal social media (Facebook and Twitter) feeds, as well as identical Google Searches on their private devices.
Scotland’s Atlantic Visions, 1660–1691
Authors: Sandrock Kirsten
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on Scottish Atlantic literature from the 1660s to the early 1690s. It explores how colonial utopian writing broadened in the mid-seventeenth century to include drama, life writing, legal sources, and abolitionist texts, including not only literature directly linked to Atlantic expansion but also texts usually associated with domestic Scottish literature, such as Thomas Sydserf's Tarugo's Wiles: Or, the Coffee-House (1668) or Archibald Pitcairne's The Assembly; Or, Scotch Reformation (1691). Engaging with recent works on Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery and the Black Atlantic, the chapter seeks to broaden understandings of how Scottish literature and culture participated in the development of the Black Atlantic and Eurocentric thought. The chapter further looks at legal and governmental sources relating to New Jersey and the Middle Colonies from the 1680s onwards, at abolitionist writings, and texts that pertain to the Six Nations and indigenous populations of the Americas. All of these bring out the paradoxes of possession versus dispossession and of freedom versus enslavement in Scottish colonial literature. They illustrate how aesthetic devices of utopianism work towards spatializing the colonial sphere and trying to stabilize boundaries between colonizing and colonized subjects.
Motivating Metaphysics: From Radical Empiricism to Process
Authors: Duvernoy Russell J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.
Feeling as Creation: Affect and Tertiary Qualities
Authors: Duvernoy Russell J.
Published: September 2021

The chapter focuses on the early modern distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities. The chapter first discusses Quentin Meillassoux’s efforts to rehabilitate the primary-secondary distinction in his critique of “correlationism”. Despite Meillassoux’s claim that correlationism applies to all modern philosophy since Kant, the chapter argues that Whitehead’s reworking of the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction, based in his unusual reading of Locke, avoids the correlationist charge while opening a different kind of realism. This reworking amounts to an ontological inversion of the three qualities, such that tertiary quality becomes ontologically primary. A key consequence is that “feeling,” for Whitehead, names a metaphysical process constitutive of the real. This is neither a humanist nor psychological claim, but rather a metaphysical one. The chapter closes by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s use of affect along similar lines. However, where Whitehead is largely content with a technical metaphysical result, Deleuze and Guattari explore ensuing existential possibilities in their concept of “becoming-imperceptible”.
Attention, Openness and Ecological Attunement
Authors: Duvernoy Russell J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter translates Whitehead’s metaphysical results into existential implications, with Deleuze and Guattari’s work considered as one example. Attention is implicated in both of Whitehead’s forms of passage: the concrescence of actual occasions and the global passage of nature, thus arguing that attention is ontological in consequence and function. This requires further exploration of Whitehead’s conception of “society”. For Whitehead, societies as repeatable patterns of events tend either towards creative response to changing conditions (open) or limiting responsiveness to such conditions in the interest of conformity (closed). The chapter reads Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous “lines of flight” as closely resonant, though they additionally consider potential prescriptive recommendations towards intensifying affective capacity. However, the structure of becoming renders efforts to extract stable normative representations of such recommendations paradoxical. The chapter concludes with critical discussion of this paradox in the context of statistical norms and algorithmic data-mining, arguing that one stake of attention is resisting such closed loops in the interest of creative alternatives.
Growing Bellies, Failing Mothers, Scary Offspring
Authors: Pisters Patricia
Published: September 2021

This chapter addresses so-called ‘gynaehorror,’ the type of horror that deals explicitly with female reproductive bodily functions. While first addressing Woolf’s childlessness, the chapter opens with references to the early work of Agnes Varda, Diary of a Pregnant Woman (1958) and One Sings the Other Doesn’t (1977) to then turn to the female version of Rosemary’s Baby with Lyle (Stewart Thorndike, 2014) and Alice Low’s pregnancy-horror film Prevenge (2016). Jennifer Phillips’s film Blood Child (2017) is a chilling story based on true events where a miscarriage is translated into the raising of a ghost child. Furthermore, this chapter looks at complicated mother-daughter relations in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful (1991) and in Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion (2017); and at mother-son relations in We Have to talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey 2011), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala 2015). The chapter also discusses some other family relations from hell as depicted Dark Touch (Marina de Van 2013), System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt 2019) and Family (Veronika Kedar 2017). Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution (2015) takes pregnancy to a post human level and in that sense resonates with some of Butler’s writing, especially her short story ‘Blood Child’.
Bloody Red: Poetics, Patterns, Politics
Authors: Pisters Patricia
Published: September 2021

The conclusion returns to the poetics, aesthetics and politics of blood, showing that there are many different blood types in the poetics of horror made by women, but that each drop contains a world of pain, sorrow, and rage but also laughter and wonder, consolation and insight; each gush embodies a world of stories to convey, wisdom to impart and emotions to share. The overarching pattern is that female directed horror often addresses inner demons and extends the emotional spectrum of the genre beyond fear and disgust, and stretches the genre boundaries to introduce a poetics of horror in many different genres.
Towards a Spectral Theory of World Literature
Authors: Mattar Karim
Published: September 2021

In the Introduction, I provide a detailed exposition of my spectral theory of world literature. After discussing the parameters of the contemporary world literature debate, I then seek to redress what I note has been its general lack of attention to the concept of “literature” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s and Karl Marx’s original formulations of a “world literature” were founded. I outline a genealogy of this concept that traces it back to the conditions of European society in the early 19th century, and on these grounds suggest that global capitalist modernity be identified as the repressed origin and condition of possibility of world literature. From here, I proceed to elaborate on the historical constitution of world literature with reference to world-systems analysis, Orientalism, and the theory of spectrality. I argue that premised on their superseding of alternate global practices and modalities of “literature” and “the literary” in modernity, yet always-already haunted by these, world literature and its forms – the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play – are constituted in the logic of spectrality. To flesh out this argument, I demonstrate the spectral infection and inflection of the novel form itself as initiated by Miguel de Cervantes.
The Shabaḥ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace
Authors: Mattar Karim
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides a new reading of Abdelrahman Munif’s five-volume epic of Gulf petro-modernity, Cities of Salt, in the context of the world literature debate. Considering how this novel has been framed for international audiences since its translation into English, I start with John Updike’s response to Munif as “insufficiently Westernized” to have produced a novel. This response, I argue, is symptomatic of a world literature that conceives of “the literary” only according to “Western” norms and models. I then offer a corrective based on what I show to be Munif’s spectral characterization of Bedouin resistance leader Miteb al-Hathal. A “shabaḥ” (specter), this figure hovers at the interstices of modern oil state that had overwritten or incorporated his world, and, unassimilable, haunts it – indeed, the novel – with the revolutionary memory of its own abuses. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, I trace Munif’s spectral inf(l)ection of novelistic form through a discussion of questions of indigeneity; Bedouin oral poetic tradition; and the dialectics of Gulf “petro-modernity” in relation to Bedouin history, politics, and culture. In sum, this chapter articulates the linkage between world literature, Orientalism, modernity, the novel, and spectrality at the heart of this book.
Designing Research on Radicalisation Using Social Media Content: Data Protection Regulations as Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Sold Manjana , Gaspar Hande Abay , Junk Julian
Published: September 2021

The analysis of data retrieved from social media has become more and more important. However, working with social media and audio-visual formats as data sources has its own challenges. Communication patterns are increasingly diverse shifting to closed spaces and between platforms, not only but in particular for those who are radicalized or becoming radicalized. Consequently, ethical and legal issues are pertinent to discourses about the feasibility and acceptance of scientific studies in online environments. However, despite limitations and challenges, legal and moral guidelines provide also opportunities and flexibility particularly for researchers aiming to explore virtual space. This chapter summarizes the current debates on weighing legal and moral principles. It provides guidance of the various requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and related ethical considerations researchers face when designing empirical research using data from social media platforms. In a solution-oriented way, we give an overview of some key ethical and legal considerations that can serve as a basis for prudently designed empirical research projects. The overview is informed by our research experiences in the field of Salafist jihadist radicalisation in Germany.
Appropriation in Islamic State Propaganda: A Theoretical and Analytical Framework of Types and Dimensions
Authors: Zywietz Bernd , Beese Yorck
Published: September 2021

The concept of ‘appropriation’ offers an insightful analytical approach to so-called Islamic State’ (IS)’s media work and texts as propaganda. However, ‘appropriation’ bears a vast ambiguous range of meanings. Therefore, we propose three broad types of appropriation in order to clarify the term: interpretative, practical, and expressive appropriation. After discussing the notion of ISIS as an ideologically and epistemologically threatening ‘appropriator’ and criticizing the notion or metaphor of IS’s “Hollywood” propaganda we distinguish and exemplify different dimensions of appropriation in the area of IS’s ‘public relations’. By doing so and based on our research of IS video propaganda we aim to offer a systematic framework to describe and analyse jihadi communication as strategic or rhetoric communication as much as a cultural representative means of production and expression.
Visual Performativity of Violence: Power and Retaliatory Humiliation in Islamic State (is) Beheading Videos Between 2014 and 2017
Authors: Krona Michael
Published: September 2021

The significance of visual propaganda in war has never been as debated as since the Islamic State (IS) started gaining global attention for its sophisticated media campaigns in 2014. Although IS propaganda contains several narratives, the videos of beheadings have for years been at the centre of attention. This graphic violence involves deliberate choices in terms of image composition, lighting, camera-angles, and overall editing techniques deployed to reach maximum effects its targeted audiences. These videos are not only evidence of tactical choices in hybrid warfare, but also mediated communicative artefacts. This chapter aims to dissect this mediation of performative violence: the visualization of beheadings as multi-layered media artefacts, produced with the dual objective to incite fear among adversaries and strengthen the in-group identity of the organization. How videos of IS beheadings are designed is crucial to understand the role of visual propaganda in IS contemporary warfare. The chapter is based on qualitative visual analysis of beheading videos produced by IS official media wings between 2014 and 2017 with particular focus on image composition and sequencing, contextualized through a theoretical discussion about how power and retaliatory humiliation are constructed through the visual performativity of violence.
Re-Enacting Violence: Contesting Public Spheres With Appropriations of is Execution Videos
Authors: Pfeifer Simone , Fuhrmann Larissa-Diana , Wevers Patricia
Published: September 2021

Since the height of ISIS media production from 2014-2017 their promotional videos have become known for their graphic violence and drastic portrayal of beheadings. These iconic executions have been widely appropriated and re-enacted in different contexts by Muslim artists and activists in Europe and the SWANA region as well as by the right-wing “identitarian” movement. In this contribution, we examine the iconic features of IS beheadings in selected re-enactments, ranging from humour to serious (religious-)political engagements, as well as the creative techniques and practices that different actors use in their reinterpretations of that violence. We point to similarities used in different re-enactments while showing how re-enactments of violence may differ according to the perspective of the actors and contexts in which they are set. We relate our examples to discussions on cultural resistance, power and hierarchy, and discussions on (digital) public spheres, to argue that re-enacting images of violence can not only be used as a memetic form of cultural resistance to counter IS iconography but can also be used to transform those ‘operative’ images into different forms of resistance and hatred. We therefore recognise that re-enactments and their mediations can become actors with an existence in their own right.
Introduction: English Spreading at the Grassroots
Authors: Meierkord Christiane , Schneider Edgar W.
Published: September 2021

This chapter highlights the novelty of the approach of investigating English at the grassroots in World Englishes research, as opposed to the traditional view of associating English with access to higher education and high status in a society. The notion of "grassroots" is defined, and historical patterns of the spread of English in different types of communities are outlined. A distinction is drawn between a wider notion of "English at the grassroots", heterogeneous language forms produced by non-elitist speakers, and the narrower concept of "grassroots Englishes" proper, typically associated with acquisition through natural interaction, driven by a strong instrumental motivation to obtain better jobs, characteristic social settings in the service industry and in tourism, and typical structural patterns, often perceived as reduced. The paper briefly surveys earlier work on related topics, research gaps, and the contributions offered by the papers in this volume.