bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Notes towards an Investigation
Authors: Bargu Banu
Published: May 2021

The uncertainty concerning Turkey’s democratic future depends not only on authoritarian tendencies of majoritarian rule and the momentous consequences of the failed coup but also on the presence and intensification of a longstanding necropolitical undercurrent of Turkey’s political constitution. This necropolitical undercurrent expresses the imbrication of Turkey’s democracy with violence. This chapter offers the theoretical groundwork of the volume, mapping the problematic of necropolitics that informs the contributions in the book. It presents Turkey as a political laboratory in which necropolitics must be understood in the plural and where various modalities of necropolitics are in the making.
‘They wrote history with their bodies’: Necrogeopolitics, Necropolitical Spaces and the Everyday Spatial Politics of Death in Turkey
Authors: Yanık Lerna K. , Hisarlıoğlu Fulya
Published: May 2021

In this piece, through an alternative reading of biopolitics and merging the literature on necropolitics with critical geography, we develop the concepts necrogepolitics and necropolitical spaces. We argue that the Turkish sovereign has very little difficulty in making death and self-sacrifice a desired behaviour by spatialising necropolitical power domestically and internationally. Necrogeopolitics emerges as a discursive practice that conditions the subject to die for the geopolitical and security interests of the sovereign, necropolitical spaces, on the other hand, are both material and discursive spaces that aim at the same goal at the domestic level. Both spaces condition the subjects for the idea that death is the appropriate behaviour if/when the state is under attack. This modification of social behaviour is engineered by the Turkish state in a very subtle, silent, and everyday manner. We discuss these instances of intervention through the necrogeopolitisation of Turkey’s territorial self, as well as the specific necrospatial changes that took place in the aftermath of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.
Neither Civilian nor Combatant: Weaponised Spaces and Spatialised Bodies in Cizre
Authors: Darıcı Haydar , Hakyemez Serra
Published: May 2021

What kind of work does the categorical distinction between combatant and civilian do in the interplay of the necropolitics and biopower of the Turkish state? This paper focuses on a time period (2015-2016) in the history of the Kurdish conflict when that distinction was no longer operable as the war tactics of the Kurdish movement shifted from guerrilla attacks of hit and run in the mountains to the self-defence of residents in urban centres. It reveals the limit of inciting compassion through the figure of civilian who is assumed to entertain a pre-political life that is directed towards mere survival. It also shows how the government reconstructs the dead bodies using forensics and technoscience in order to portray what is considered by Kurdish human rights organizations civilians as combatants exercising necroresistance. As long as the civilian-combatant distinction remains and serves as the only episteme of war to defend the right to life, the state is enabled to entertain not only the right to kill, but also to turn the dead into the perpetrators of their own killing. Finally, this paper argues that law and violence, on the one hand, and the right to life and the act of killing on the other, are not two polar opposites but are mutually constitutive of each other in the remaking of state sovereignty put in crisis by the Kurdish movement's self-defence practices.
Necropolitics, Martyrdom and Muslim Conscientious Objection
Authors: Kemerli Pınar
Published: May 2021

The war between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement has been the site of multiple forms of necropolitical violence, including killing and torture, indiscriminate exposure of the Kurdish population to state violence, and recently, the desecration of the Kurdish dead and prevention of customary burial practices. Military conscription and martyrdom discourses have been complicit in not only justifying this necropolitical violence, but also inspiring enthusiasm to participate in it as a form of national and religious duty. In this chapter, I examine the role played by militaristic invocations of Islamic warfare and martyrdom in the Turkish conscript army in the legitimisation of necropolitical violence from the perspective of those who refuse this necropoliticisation: a group of Muslim Conscientious Objectors (COs) who refuse the draft and peacefully accept the consequences of their criminalised refusal. Disputing the state’s necropoliticisation of theological concepts, Muslim COs marshal dissenting interpretations of Islamic martyrdom through their own readings of the religious texts and other resources derived from Islamic political thought and history. In the hands of Muslim COs, Islamic martyrdom becomes a form of life-affirmation to be achieved through refusing necropolitical violence, thereby suggesting conscientious objection to be a possible venue to resist necropolitics.
The Cemetery of Traitors
Authors: Balkan Osman
Published: May 2021

This essay examines the aftermath of the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey through the political afterlives of its victims and perpetrators. Focusing on Istanbul's ‘Cemetery of Traitors’ (established to inter the remains of dead coup plotters) as well as the funeral ceremonies of both soldiers and civilians who died during the coup attempt, it illustrates how corpses become politicized sites of struggle and resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates that the treatment and commemoration of the dead is a critical means through which states and other actors demarcate the contours of national, religious, and political communities.
Resistance and Empire: Star Wars and the Social Justice Reboot
Authors: Johnson Derek
Published: May 2021

This chapter attends to recent instalments in the Star Wars series as ‘social justice’ reboots. It employs this term to describe those properties – not only Star Wars, but also series such as Ghostbusters, Ocean’s and Creed/Rocky – in which industrial and commercial priorities of reproduction (sameness) mediate imperatives to address the inequities of access and representation (difference). Attending to The Force Awakens and Rogue One, this chapter demonstrates how parent companies Disney and Lucasfilm judiciously balance repetition and innovation so as to maintain a franchise in which social justice itself is rebooted as a marketable output of serialisation.
‘I only loved’: Restitution in Psychoanalysis
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a reading of texts by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein on undoing, restitution and reparation. It elaborates psychoanalytic the insights into the theory of restitution alongside two non-identical, though overlapping, trajectories—the concept of retroactive annulment (Undgeschehenmachen) and Klein’s theory of reparative action—as well as into the discussion on status quo ante, which has been very closely connected to the history of the concept of restitution. It contrasts restitution-as-undoing and restitution-as-repair in Klein’s writings and her important theory of the subject’s reparative and curative undertaking following their destructive impulse towards the love-object. It links Klein’s theory of reparation with a text by Joan Riviere, which presents status quo ante as an expression of the subject’s refusal to submit to analysis. Riviere outlines a figure of an ‘unrestitutable subject’, who refuses ‘to get better’, and obstinately clings to the neurotic state.
Are There Inherent Limits to Constitutional Amendment? An Analysis of Carl Schmitt’s Argument
Authors: Vinx Lars
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses Carl Schmitt’s argument for inherent limitations of the power of amendment under the Weimar Constitution - an argument that Schmitt thought was applicable to any constitution based on the principle of popular sovereignty. Most authors who claim that there are inherent limits to amendment base those limits on an appeal to rights or values that are perceived to put external limits on the permissible outcomes of the democratic process of legislation. In such a view, inherent limits to amendment are not interestingly or specifically democratic. Schmitt’s argument, by contrast, purports to derive limits to amendment from the idea of democracy itself, and not from a liberal concern with individual rights or human dignity that political constitutionalists are likely to perceive as extraneous to democracy. If successful, Schmitt’s case provides a more direct reply to democratic worries over the democratic legitimacy of strong constitutionalism than is provided by constitutionalist authors whose argumentative strategy consists in redefining democracy in liberal terms.
Katechontic Democracy? Carl Schmitt and the Restraining Mediation of Popular Power
Authors: Falk Hjalmar
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s conception of an ‘illiberal’ democracy is based on seemingly contradictory elements of both ‘populism’ and ‘technocratic elitism’, attempting as it does to wed the popular enthusiasm of mass democracy to a concrete order through the principle of a shared homogeneous identity and the somewhat paradoxical idea of a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’. This amalgamation of authoritarianism and popular sovereignty emanates from what can be described as Schmitt’s ‘katechontic impulse’, a name derived from a Biblical figure introduced by St Paul. The Katechon is the principle or the person that restrains lawlessness or ‘the lawless one’, often interpreted as Antichrist and his reign before the end of days. The chapter shows how Schmitt’s apocalyptic imagery of an ordered popular sovereignty can be illustrated by this politico-theological mytheme and further investigates the implications thereof for contemporary democratic politics.
The Power of the People
Authors: Hirvonen Ari , Lindroos-Hovinheimo Susanna
Published: May 2021

In this chapter Hirvonen and Lindroos-Hovinheimo argue that the revolutionary power of constituent power and popular sovereignty are relevant conditions of radical emancipatory and egalitarian politics. How the people become the people – and what makes the people in its becoming – are relevant questions in modern democracy. The article considers the power of the people as a theoretical idea and political possibility. It brings together the older tradition of political philosophy with contemporary theory by discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas together with those of Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou.
Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

Charting the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution, this book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic. The book brings into relief a distinct Scottish historiography, in which a temporality of modernity takes shape in the forms, tropes and categories of a mode of historical understanding we now would term collective or cultural memory. The study traces this emergent mode in Scottish history writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as it circulated throughout the Atlantic world. It offers a threefold engagement with Scottish Romantic, transatlantic and memory studies while drawing from the perspectives and insights of other critical frameworks – such as indigenous, Black Atlantic and francophone Canada. Examining a range of writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction in various regional and national contexts, the book covers familiar Scottish writers, such as Walter Scott and John Galt, and less familiar ones, such as Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle, and John Gabriel Stedman. It follows other recent studies in making the case for the Atlantic world as a critical site in the making of a culture of modernity while bringing to light the fundamental contribution of Scottish Romantic writing to this culture.
The Conservative ‘Territorial Code’ under Strain
Authors: Hayton Richard
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that since returning to power at Westminster in 2010, Conservative statecraft has broadly followed Jim Bulpitt’s ‘territorial code’ schema. However, it also suggests this has come under increasing strain, as the political and constitutional consequences of the independence referendum in Scotland and the EU referendum vote have unfolded. The chapter’s primary focus is on the Conservative Party as a state-wide actor between 2010-19. In terms of statecraft and territorial politics, it concentrates on devolution and the centre’s dealings with Scotland and specifically the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party when it was led by Ruth Davidson between 2011 and 2019.
A Tale of Two Nationalisms: Scottish Nationalism and Unionism in the Age of Disruption
Authors: Hassan Gerry
Published: May 2021

Scottish nationalism and Scottish Tory unionism are generally accepted as two irreconcilable forces. This chapter by Gerry Hassan argues that while this might be how both movements wish to see themselves, the reality is more nuanced. It argues that for much of Scotland’s existence as part of the Union, these supposedly opposing forces have actually coalesced in what has been called ‘unionist-nationalism’, a politics of autonomy and distinctiveness within the union. Hassan’s chapter further explores the limitations of this bifurcation of Scottish politics, as well as the shortcomings of the politics it articulates in the context of Ruth Davidson’s eight-year tenure as Scottish Conservative Party leader. It assesses how her leadership was perceived in this framework and what the party’s future prospects might be.
Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur
Authors: Block Marcelline , Kirby Jennifer
Published: May 2021

In the introduction to this volume, “Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur,” editors Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby present an overview of Gondry’s career as well as this volume’s approaches to Gondry’s oeuvre. Born in Versailles, France in 1963, Gondry is an Academy Award-winning transnational (France-USA) and transcultural (French-American) auteur whose body of work as a writer, director, and producer spans multiple genres—including feature film, short film, television, documentary, music video, big budget superhero film, romantic comedy, the road movie, advertisements—and languages (English, French, Japanese). In this respect, Gondry can be considered a contemporary globalized auteur whose films and other works display continuities and eclecticism. In addition, this introduction presents an overview of each of this volume’s sections and chapters in terms of how they identify connections and continuities between Gondry’s films while placing Gondry’s oeuvre in dialogue with French and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural contexts. The introduction puts forth this volume’s main contention, namely that “Gondry is emblematic of transnational auteur filmmaking…crossing aesthetic and cultural borders between national film industries as well as between art and popular cinema and between media” and how Gondry’s oeuvre defies classification according to traditional conceptions of European art cinema.
In Dreams and in Love There are No Impossibilities: Michel Gondry’s Cinema and the Aesthetics of the Oneiric
Authors: Surace Bruno
Published: May 2021

This chapter by Bruno Surace offers an overarching framework for mapping an oneiric aesthetic across Gondry’s films. This chapter begins with a consideration of Gondry’s first feature, the English-language film Human Nature (2001), written by Charlie Kaufman. This chapter goes on to argue that in all of Gondry’s films, dreams embody three distinct but interrelated dimensions: part of the film’s diegesis, part of a broader symbolic or political system which is not purely narrative, or as a frame for innovative modules of formal film construction, which serves to connect content to a precise aesthetics of the oneiric.
On the Road to Adulthood: Michel Gondry’s Microbe & Gasoline and the French Road Movie
Authors: Block Marcelline , Kirby Jennifer
Published: May 2021

In their chapter, Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby consider cinematic lineage and influence. This chapter argues that Gondry’s most recent feature, Microbe & Gasoline, a picaresque narrative, draws from the conventions of the road movie through its focus on social outsiders, light-hearted depiction of run-ins with the police, and emphasis on male bonding. This film also provides commentary on the notion and definition of “home” in France. Microbe & Gasoline, which follows two teenage boys taking a 250-mile-long journey through France in a makeshift house on wheels, links a coming-of-age narrative to a growing awareness of the complexities and divisions within France. In this film, Gondry depicts his trademark childhood play and whimsy alongside a sobering adult realization of injustices in the world. Representing yet another form of border crossing, the film blends conventions from the American road movie with the French road movie’s potential for what Gott calls “elaborating flexible, transnational and multicultural alternatives to a monolithic version of France.” It serves to reinforce Gondry’s status as an auteur whose work is frequently transnational in character, recalling Hill’s claim that Gondry is the spiritual heir to Jean Cocteau and Georges Méliès, as well as Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg.
The Reel and Surreal of Race in America: Michel Gondry and the African–American Identity Crisis of Dave Chappelle
Authors: Taylor Monique
Published: May 2021

In this chapter Monique Taylor analyses the concert documentary DaveChappelle’s Block Party (2005), directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, which depicts the organization and performances of a “block party” hosted by African-American comedian Dave Chappelle in Brooklyn, New York. Chappelle’s Block Party featured performances by some of the biggest names in hip hop, rap, and R & B music, including ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, the Fugees reunited with Lauryn Hill, and Kanye West. The chapter argues that Gondry plays the role of outsider-looking-in as both a participant in as well as an observer of aspects of American cultural conversations on memory, identity and language. Taylor’s chapter draws attention to Dave Chappelle’sBlock Party’s construction of a hybrid and hyper-real community through the use of strategies such as movements back and forth in time between the entertainers’ performances and the preparations leading up to the concert which highlight the production of the event, surreal visual embellishments, and prominent allusion to symbols of African–American identity. The chapter also places the film within the context of Chappelle’s own exploration of his identity and struggle to “keep it real.”
The Kailyard Comes to London: The Progressive Potential of Romantic Convention in Annie S. Swan’s A Victory Won
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Annie S. Swan’s novel A Victory Won (1895) in the context of the generic conventions of the kailyard genre. Despite the novel’s romantic representation of the fictional ‘Barker Street Chambers’, which is based on the Chenies Street Chambers, it explores the value of the new social relationships that could emerge in such spaces. The novel focuses on a mutually supportive and egalitarian relationship between two women who share domestic space, and in so doing elaborates on the possibilities – rather than the drawbacks – of gender-segregated housing.
María de Zayas’s Good Friends
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad stands out for its representation of female friendship and for its development of a new archetype within the tradition of writing friendship: the figure of the “bad” friend. Through an innovative use of theatrical hybridity, María de Zayas contrasts the false hyperbole of Fenisa, the bad friend, with the quiet intimacy that grows up around her rivals, Laura and Marcia. Through an inversion of traditional gender roles, the figure of Fenisa emerges as a female heir to Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan who is finally condemned less for her irrepressible desire than for her failure as a friend. Her lack of solidarity with the other women in the play functions as a point of contrast to a clearly gendered representation of good female friendship that is closely associated with the rhetoric of verisimilitude and intimacy.
Guzmán de Alfarache’s “Otro yo”1
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

A version of this chapter has appeared previously in print (“Guzmán de Alfarache’s ‘Other Self’: The Limits of Friendship in Spanish Picaresque Fiction” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700). In a brief episode from the longer fictional autobiographical narrative of Guzmán de Alfarache, Mateo Alemán explores the isolation of his picaresque protagonist through the device of friendship. Echoing concerns that go back as far as Cicero’s De amicitia, Guzmán’s formulation of the problem of finding friends highlights the social isolation of urban picaresque existence, that is, of life in a world in which deception and misrepresentation serve as the currency for almost all human interactions. After several chapters in which Guzmán only partially succeeds in finding friendship, the episode ends with the suicide of the protagonist’s only friend. Despite its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recalibrate the expectations of Aristotelian perfect friendship to the demands of the picaresque world, the novel nevertheless anticipates aspects of Cervantes’s more ambitious literary experiment with the representation of friendship in Don Quixote.
Italian Vampire Cinema (1956–1975)
Authors: Guarneri Michael
Published: May 2021

The chapter details the success of the Hammer Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) in late-1950s and early-1960s Italy, and explains why, where, by whom and with which commercial results a series of vampire films were made by Italian companies from 1959 to 1975, with the cooperation of European co-production partners and/or American investors. While revealing the imported and derivative nature of 1956-1975 Italian vampire cinema, the industrial analysis conducted in the chapter shows how local factors such as distribution-fed production, time- and cost-saving shooting practices, state censorship and state aids made the Italian vampire rip-offs into variations on the theme mixing foreign models with distinctively national traits rather than into slavish plagiarisms.
Male Vampires
Authors: Guarneri Michael
Published: May 2021

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter ventures into the so-far uncharted territory of the Italian male vampires that populate horror parodies, straightforward horrors and horror-tinged adventures. It investigates how, within a masculinity-in-crisis framework, Italian makeshift Draculas act as champions of traditional virility, irresistible Latin lovers and tyrannical patres familias seeking to reassure Italian men of their gender leadership.
Scotland in the 1930s
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

Scotland suffered acutely from the economic and political crises of the interwar period, with industrial decline, mass unemployment and cultural uncertainty in evidence by the early 1920s. This chapter explores the consequences of this economic and social dislocation for Scottish politics in the lead up the late 1930s. Particular emphasis is given to left-wing politics and anti-unemployment activism, suggesting that the roots of a distinctively Scottish response to the Spanish Civil War lay in older radical political cultures that had survived and evolved into the interwar era.
Coalitions of the Willing: Spanish Aid Committees in Scotland
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

A distinctive feature of pro-Republican solidarity movements in Britain was the formation of local, regional and national ‘Spanish Aid Committees’, which brought together diverse groups in order to campaign and raise funds on behalf of Republican Spain. Their widespread success across Britain has been taken both as evidence of either the success of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s efforts to build progressive political coalitions in line with their aspirations for a ‘Popular Front’, or as representing their failure to do so, with such committees taking on a chiefly humanitarian rather than political outlook. By exploring regional case studies across Scotland, this chapter argues that while this communist strategy was more successful in Scotland than elsewhere, this success exposed the limitations of this model of activism, with the committee-based approach proving considerably less successful than previously assumed in key contexts such as Glasgow.
Taking the Lead? The Scottish Labour Movement and Spain
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

The labour movement represented the single most important constituency for pro-Republican activism in Scotland, representing a considerable concentration of financial resources and political influence. Yet it was far from clear how far the structures of Scottish trade unionism were suited for waging a long and sustained solidarity campaign for Spain. Despite the willingness of key local and regional institutions such as Trades Councils to take the lead in organising a Scottish response to the conflict, the increasingly centralised structures of the British labour movement often acted to limit the effectiveness of more local efforts. While innovative and increasingly effective approaches emerged over the course of the Spanish Civil War, culminating in a series of successful foodship campaigns in 1938 and 1939, the Scottish labour movement also faced considerable resistance from anti-communist elements, even in traditionally radical sectors such as mining unions.
Beckett’s Queer Time of Défaillance: Ritual and Resistance in Happy Days
Authors: Barilar Nic
Published: May 2021

This chapter draws on Beckett’s Happy Days production notebooks to argue against critical assessments of Winnie as an exemplar of British pluck. Rather, the domestic rituals she performs serve to distract her from ever-encroaching entropy. Read in queer time, as chrononormative regulators, Winnie’s rituals are recast as coping mechanisms that help to normalise her abnormal situation. Happy Days thus challenges prevailing understandings of the politics of queer time, queer failure, and performance. Happy Days is read historically as a response to late capitalism’s regulatory regimes. Winnie’s queer experience of time is the audience’s, too, and her failures implicate them in their own attachments to deadening routine. Winnie’s performance of internalised discipline models (and critiques) how commodity culture deadens existence, but also how theatre as spectacle normalises suffering.
Debt, Democracy and the Pharmacology of Money
Authors: Bissonnette Jean François
Published: May 2021

Few observers of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe have noted that the power relations it laid bare between debtor countries and their creditors stemmed from the very nature of money itself. This chapter considers money’s status as a social institution from the point of view of the democratic values of liberty and equality. Building on Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s critiques of money’s alleged neutrality as a simple appendage of market exchange, the chapter establishes that money constitutes a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon. Money’s myth of origin in barter, and its actual relation to debt, warrant a comparison with the gift, this primitive form of exchange whose potential toxicity was pointedly noted by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. Following the latter’s analysis of the “pharmakon,” the chapter concludes by sketching out how monetary reform could foster collective autonomy.
Europe’s Debt to Refugees
Authors: Siapera Eugenia , Rieder Maria
Published: May 2021

Focusing on Germany and Greece, this chapter examines the mobilization of the historical past in connection with the refugee issue. Based on an empirical analysis of news and digital media, we found that in Greece, the issue of refugees is understood through the prism of debt to humanity in general, to past generations of Greek refugees, and to Syrian people. The past debt can never be repaid but must be rolled over to future generations. The temporal horizon within which it unfolds enables social reproduction in the form of the maintenance of social bonds, among generations of Greeks and between Greeks and present-day refugees. In Germany, the debt to the past is never clearly articulated and the public/media discourse is denying that there is a debt. Germany’s concern is to liberate itself from its past and establish a relationship with refugees on a different basis. However, this ends up transferring the refugee issue from the realm of social relationships to the realm of management and logistics. In cutting off present-day refugees from those in the past, any relationship needs to be created anew, without the benefit of historical continuity. While for Germany this may have a liberating effect, for refugees the only role available is that of an eternal debtor.
The Tragedy of Recognition: Debt, Guilt and Political Action
Authors: Cossutta Carlotta
Published: May 2021

In the course of the Greek debt crisis, and in the relationships between Greece and Germany, the tragic dimension has often been evoked, by government representatives by the media, and common sense. The chapter analyses two different philosophical interpretations of tragedy with the fundamental Hegelian reading in the background. The chapter takes into account Heidegger’s thought to show how to turn to tragedy means to reveal the impossibility of action in favour of a manifestation of being. Then the chapter analyses how Castoriadis uses tragedy, on the contrary, to show the artificiality of human norms and therefore highlights the possibility of modifying them. The aim is to highlight that two different ways of understanding the tragedy can lead to two different readings of the debt concept and of the intertwining between political action, democracy and subjectivity.
Debating the South in Unified Italy
Authors: Nygård Stefan
Published: May 2021

The history of modern Italy is an illustrative example of the different social and spatial layers of the North–South divide. Since unification in 1861, Italy has struggled to overcome regional imbalances, mainly although not exclusively along a North–South axis. With an emphasis on the period following unification, when North-South was placed at the centre of national politics, this chapter surveys the lingering debates on Italy’s so-called Southern question and the dynamics of nation-state formation in which it is embedded. The contested history of this process includes debates over economic and moral debts caused by the uneven distribution of gains and sacrifices between North and South as a result of unification. Socio-economically, two North–South divides developed in parallel after unification; the more significant one between Italy and transalpine Europe, and the initially minor but eventually growing divergence between the northern and southern regions within Italy. The ideas of development, catching-up and “Europeanization” were recurring themes in the intellectual and political debates discussed in the chapter. The contested issue was whether the North was developing the South, or vice versa.
The Stoic Definition of Beauty as Summetria
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

The chapter is dedicated to the Stoic definition of beauty as summetria. The definition theories beauty as a property that supervenes on the composition of non-aesthetic properties. In addition to the analysis of the definition itself, the chapter also discusses the criticism that Plotinus levelled at the Stoic definition of beauty, namely, that their theory cannot account for why a well-organised virtue, but not a well-organised vice, possesses beauty. It is suggestion that the notion of functional composition, which emerged from discussions on previous chapters, would afford the Stoics a response to this Plotinian critique. The Stoic definition of beauty is best understood as the claim that aesthetic properties supervene on two aspects of an object: (i) the formal properties of the object (summetria of parts with each other) and (ii) the functional properties of the object (summetria of parts with the whole). The definition states that in order for an object to be beautiful, it must possess a harmonious composition for the kind of object that it is.
Aesthetics in Stoicism and Stoicism in Aesthetics
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

The Stoic definition of beauty and the way in which beauty vocabulary is used in various arguments are remarkably consistent. This coherence suggests that the Stoic engagement with this area of philosophy must have been thorough and substantial. The chapter also presents a discussion of various prominent beauty theories in antiquity and compares them with the Stoic views. The figures discussed include Polycleitus, Vitruvius, Philolaus of Croton, Plato, Aristotle. The comparisons show that the Stoic definition of beauty as summetria was a distinct theory that accounted for aesthetic properties in reductive terms, that is, as a functional structure. It rivalled the Platonic accounts in which Forms played the central role. Plotinus’ attack on Stoicism shows that this rivalry lasted for a long time, and that while Platonism dominated the philosophical scene in late antiquity, Stoic views survived in other contexts. An analysis of the account of beauty found in the medical writings of Galen is used to support this claim.
“Every Act of Preservation is an Act of Creation”: Paul Schrader’s Eco-theology in First Reformed
Authors: Prorokova Tatiana
Published: May 2021

This chapter scrutinizes the complex relationship between climate change and theology, as represented in First Reformed, as well as Paul Schrader’s understanding of humanity’s major problems today. Analyzing the issue of ecological decline through the prism of religion, Schrader outlines the ideology that presumably might help humanity survive at the age of global warming. Through the complex discussions of such issues as despair, anxiety, and hope, Schrader deduces the formula of survival in which preservation is the key component. Equating humans to God, Schrader, on the one hand, censures those actions that led to progress but destroyed the environment, yet, on the other hand, he foregrounds the fact that humans can also save the planet now. Schrader portrays both humans and Earth as living organisms created by God. He draws explicit parallels between the current state of our planet and the problems that we experience – from political ones, including war, to more personal ones like health issues.
Revitalisation, 1975–96
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the period from 1975 to 1997, when significant government support for Gaelic development was granted for the first time and the basis of a modern language planning regime for Gaelic began to emerge, particularly in relation to education, media and strategic language development. The creation of a new local authority for the Western Isles, Comhairle nan Eilean, led to the implementation of a bilingual policy for council operations, a major bilingual education project and a range of Gaelic-related community activities. In 1984 the first dedicated Gaelic language agency, Comunn na Gàidhlig was established, bringing a new energy and strategic focus to Gaelic development. Gaelic-medium immersion education began in 1985 and rolled out to many parts of Scotland. Provision for Gaelic television and radio increased very dramatically, particularly after a successful campaign led to a major injection of government funding from 1992 onwards.
Restructuring, 1997–2005
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the long and ultimately successful campaigns for Gaelic language legislation and a dedicated Gaelic television service between 1997 and 2005. The opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 ushered in a new political era in Scotland, and this brought opportunities for more focused policy-making in relation to Gaelic. The government initially resisted calls for Gaelic language legislation but ultimately relented, so that the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005, was enacted in 2005. Proposals for a Gaelic television service took several years to come to fruition due to political and financial constraints, but agreement was ultimately reached to develop the digital service BBC ALBA. The first dedicated Gaelic school opened in Glasgow in 1999, and the presence of Gaelic in the linguistic landscape expanded, as bilingual signage was authorised for wider use.
Achieving Coherence: Diegesis and Death in Holy Motors
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter consists of a close reading of David Lynch's 2006 film INLAND EMPIRE. It proposes that the film is best regarded neither as a puzzle to be solved nor as a bewildering experience that cannot be approached fully rationally. Rather, the ways that it both responds to and resists our inquiries contribute to its distinctive aesthetic, affective, and narrative texture. This is demonstrated by means of three different reading strategies, each of which develop out of gaps, or persisting disorientations, in the preceding strategy. It is concluded that INLAND EMPIRE demonstrates how orientation can be in tension with completeness. There are many ways in which we can grasp Lynch's film, but each of them leaves out one or more aspects of the film, and which things are left out can drastically affect our interpretation.
Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

There are more than 15 million people over age 65 currently living in the Arab world, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of growing old. The book recognizes the widespread silence by countering the critical corpus that reads the modern Arabic novel as a political discourse with an emphasis on youth achievement. By offering close readings of 16 fictional works from different parts of the Arab world such as novels by Alia Mamdouh, Sahar Khalifah, Iman Kachachi, Rashid al-Daif and Alaa al-Aswany, the study utilizes biological and cultural theories of ageing- particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism- that shed light on the representation of ageing in the Arabic novel. The study makes use of feminist theories of ageing and gerontology that focus on sexism and ageism, including works by Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Marganroth Gullette to present aging as a relational formation between men and women, and their idiosyncratic experiences of the process of ageing, revealing that there is no prototype of oldness in the Arabic novel and that older men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns and experiences. The study challenges the ungendered image generally attributed to older persons and examines how they navigate old age and subvert it. As they grow older men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns, and experiences revealing that the ageing process is an ongoing inherently unstable project.
Introduction
Authors: Riehle Kevin
Published: May 2021

The introduction defines the parameters for choosing the study population and the types of information that are used to analyse them. It identifies the screening questions used to sort defectors’ information and draw out the priorities in the Soviet national security system, including what information the officers were tasked with collecting; what types of people they were tasked with recruiting, harassing, or in some cases, assassinating; how the defector’s service was organized and where it allocated its resources; and what liaison relationships the service established. In addition to this information received directly from defectors, the book also analyses the circumstances surrounding the defector’s choice to leave, including the location and timing of defection and defector’s personal background, which reflect the situation inside the Soviet Union at the time of their defection and their elite access to Russian national security threat information.
Yezhovshchina-Era Defectors, 1937–1940
Authors: Riehle Kevin
Published: May 2021

The second group includes eight officers who were the first to violate the new rules regarding defection. Their revelations identify Soviet political intelligence priorities directed toward Great Britain, followed by Germany, while foreign science and technology collection cast a wider net, to include the United States. Most of the officers in this group had joined a Soviet intelligence or state security service at about the same time as the defectors in Chapter 1, but they persevered through most of the 1930s, sometimes participating in the very actions that led earlier officers to defect. The Great Purge, or what came to be known as the Yezhovshchina, prompted these officers and their families to defect. They left because they saw their own colleagues being arrested and executed, and they felt the need to save their own skins.
Introduction: Anxious Flesh
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: May 2021

Laying the intellectual groundwork for the book, this chapter gives an in-depth introduction to new materialist philosophy and its relationship to other 20th and 21st century theoretical movements and discussions, as well as to key concepts used in the study: affect, old and new materialism, dramatic and postdramatic theatre, biopolitics, sovereignty and economics, fascist immunitarianism, and others. This Introduction also announces the book’s focus on modern theatre: The plays explored map the universality of the “flesh” in (politically democratic, post-Darwinian) modernity, an ontological anxiety located at the threshold between materiality and human sovereignty, in other words the danger -- or, depending on the writer, the promise -- posed in post-transcendental modernity by the inability of keeping human subjectivity separate from nonhuman vitality. Rather than considering them in isolation, the book explores the entanglement of human culture with diverse forms of agentive materiality – economic, embodied, and inorganic.
Introduction
Authors: Stjernholm Simon , Özdalga Elisabeth
Published: May 2021

On 4 July 2014, about a month after Islamic State had conquered the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the jihadist group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (1971–2019), now declaring himself caliph, led the Friday sermon – the khuṭbat al-jum ‘a – from the city's famous al-Nuri mosque. The fact that this ...
Preaching and the Problem of Religious Authority in Medieval Islam
Authors: Berkey Jonathan P.
Published: May 2021

Popular preachers, known by various terms including qāṣṣ (storyteller) and wā`iẓ (admonisher), played an important role in medieval Islamic society as conveyors of religious knowledge to the common people. Their prominence, and what their critics viewed as their unreliability and corruption, provoked an effort by the `ulamā’ (religious scholars) to restrict their activities. The scholars’ campaign against the popular preachers was part of their larger struggle against what they viewed as illicit innovation (bid`a). The popular preachers, however, had their defenders, including some prominent Sufis. The preachers were able to take advantage of the persistent informality of religious authority in medieval Islam, and so remained influential figures in shaping Islam as it was experienced by the general Muslim populace.
Looking for Thistles in Stone Gardens: The Cemeteries of Nova Scotia’s Scottish Immigrants1
Authors: Stanley-Blackwell Laurie , Linkletter Michael
Published: May 2021

By focusing on the burial sites of northeastern Nova Scotia’s Scottish immigrants, this article demonstrates that their cemeteries were varied and complex places, which defy a uniform reading.  An analysis of such metrics as Gaelic language use, stated place of origin (i.e., parish, county, Scotland or North Britain), prevalence of thistle images and Christian iconography gives a verbal and visual dimension to the discussion of whether death was a catalyst for conformist expression among Scottish immigrants and whether they opted for pictorial or linguistic signifiers of identity. In their cemeteries, Scottishness was negotiated, new meanings of belonging forged, status aspirations articulated, and religious differences spatially enforced. It is in their last resting places that one sees vividly displayed the forces of change and continuity, tradition and innovation, and retention and adjustment, which reshaped their lives and deaths as immigrants.
Memorialising the Diasporic Cornish
Authors: Payton Philip
Published: May 2021

And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? asked Professor Charles Thomas in his seminal book of the same name (University of Wales Press, 1994), arguing that in the early medieval period, with its paucity of documentary records, the inscribed standing stones of Cornwall were the best evidence for the existence of early Cornish people. The inference was that, in the modern era, with its multiplicity of sources and data, it was hardly necessary to resort to such devices. However, the ‘mute stones’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cornish diaspora – the grave stones of Cornish emigrants in cemeteries as disparate as Pachuca in Mexico and Moonta in South Australia – are vivid insights into the Cornish diasporic experience. Their location in often remote areas are testament to the extent of Cornish diasporic dispersal, while the inscriptions on individual gravestones are themselves important sources of social and cultural history. Moreover, these cemeteries and gravestones have served collectively and individually as memorials to the diasporic Cornish, often organised into distinctive ‘Cornish’ sections in graveyards, and are today explicit sites of remembrance – as in the ‘Dressing the Graves’ ceremony performed at Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina during the biennial ‘Kernewek Lowender’ Cornish festival on South Australia’s northern Yorke Peninsula.
The Autonomous Object of Concrete Poetry
Authors: Kosick Rebecca
Published: May 2021

In the concrete poem, language is not a representation of extra-poetic objects, feelings or ideas but an object all its own. In this chapter, Brazilian concrete poetry by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari is compared with other analogous forms – from Hellenistic pattern poems to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and Louis Zukofsky’s objectivism – to emphasise that what’s unique about Brazilian concrete poetry has to do with an insistence on the object as resistant to relation. In critical conversation with object-oriented ontology, this chapter shows that Brazilian concrete poetry manages to think the object’s resistance by thinking language. Without renouncing language’s ‘virtuality’ – its ability to mean – early concrete poetry stakes out a space for the poem-object to achieve a mode of autonomy akin to what theorists like Graham Harman describe. Though the poem relates by nature to the things it represents and to its writer and reader, this chapter explores concrete poetry’s self-theorisation and practical realisation as a form capable of existing autonomously from its representation of external objects. Ultimately concrete poetry even finds ways of existing apart from an authorial or reading subject when the poem, and its materiality, creates itself and determines its own readability.