Creative Energy Research Articles

Representations of the “feminine universe” in the Laozi and Jane Lead’s visions of Sophia

This article aims to compare the feminisation of the cosmos in the Laozi (Dao De Jing) with that in the spiritual and esoteric writings by the seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead (also Jane Leade, 1624–1704), based on Erich Neumann’s “the Great Mother” archetype. My study suggests that both authors celebrated female-centred cosmology, though the cosmos’ femininity is portrayed in different ways. In the Laozi, the sage-like narrator creates the image of ‘the Great Mother’ to illustrate the creative energy of the cosmos, while Lead, as Julie Hirst points out in Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (2005), develops visions of “Virgin Sophia” in Fountain of Gardens (V.2, 1697) and The Wonders of God’s Creation (1696), referring to the image of Sophia as the “virgin body” of God, who revealed the secrets of the cosmos to her. By comparing and contrasting the two authors’ narratives about a “female universe,” I hope to explore the ways in which both challenged the established male-centred cosmology in their societies through a cross-cultural critical approach.

Some Considerations on (Un)translatability of (Dante Alighieri’s and Juhan Liiv’s) Poetry

First, I would like to comment on the motto of the EACL 11th International Conference (Tartu, September, 2015) derived from Juhan Liiv’s Poem “A Coffin”, in which the poet-philosopher suspects that translation as such, instead of enriching a national culture, would curb and suppress it, if not destroying national creative energy and talent. After that I proceed to enlighten some passages of poetry translating practice from the history of Estonian literature and world literature (medieval epics, etc., and especially Dante Alighieri’s Commedia). My main purpose is to undermine and specify both claims, that is, of poetry’s translatability, as well as of its untranslatability, and to accentuate the relative yet undeniable value of poetry translation as such. In the final part of my discussion, I will concentrate on the recent attempts, in which I have myself been involved, of conveying some inkling of Juhan Liiv’s poetry to the readers in English, Spanish and Italian.

Marrying Mr. Rochester: Redeeming the Negative Father Complex

Injurious childhood experiences with one's personal father form the psychic bedrock of a negative father complex: never good enough. This complex has a part that is exciting and uses hope as its hook, and a part that disappoints and persecutes. The negative father complex can be imaged as the ghostly lover, as depicted in the fairy tale “The Singing, Springing Lark” and in Charlotte Brontë's life and famous novel, Jane Eyre. The ghostly lover holds a woman's creative energies hostage to the tantalizing possibility of being the special one who can redeem the negative masculine and win his love.To heal a complex, its contents must be personified, or imaged, so that an individual can come into conscious relationship with it. The tale of the “Singing, Springing Lark” illustrates collective roots and images of healing a wounded relationship with the masculine. Charlotte Brontë transformed her relationship with the ghostly lover through her novel Jane Eyre, with Mr. Rochester as the image of her own wounded, bewitching masculine energy. Brontë herself was subsequently able to marry, despite her father's objection, overcoming her negative father complex. The fairy tale, novel, and Brontë's life show that several attempts are usually necessary to bring the complex to light. Although consciousness seeks redemption through its pursuit of the masculine, the complex also—mysteriously—seeks its own transformation. Ego alone cannot fulfill the mission of individuation; the Self must aid the process.

Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan

Reviewed by: Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan David Arnold Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India By Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own experience of colonial imprisonment ran to almost nine years, remarked in a letter to his sister Vijayalakshmi in June 1930 that "Life is prison is not meant to be exciting—it is about as uneventful as the existence of the average turnip" (cited by Hasan in Roads to Freedom, 179). Nehru's remark was no doubt intended to be flippant, even if it revealed an inner truth about the spirit-breaking boredom and crushing isolation of prison life. But, over the last twenty years, scholars have begun to see in the history of the colonial prison something more momentous than the "existence of the average turnip." One factor in this must surely have been the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, first published in 1975, though the assiduous reader will search in vain in Mushirul Hasan's account of political prisoners in colonial India for any reference to Foucault's work. Another contributory factor, which his book does amply demonstrate, is the abundance of archival and published material relating to prison life in British India—not so much the official record of prison policy and jail administration, which is a minor concern here, as the rich and varied outpouring in poetry and prose, in letters, memoirs and histories, produced by those who suffered imprisonment for their political convictions. Many of these are works have only relatively recently come to light or been published, or they have acquired fresh significance from being considered as forms of prison testimony. Hasan's main approach in Roads to Freedom is to focus on individuals or groups of prisoners whose writing illuminates their prison experiences or more broadly demonstrates their commitment to, and suffering for, the cause of Indian freedom. Thus, there are chapters tracing the life and works of two prominent Muslim politicians, Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad, a set of "progressive" Urdu poets (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Hasrat Mohani and Maulvi Zafar Ali Khan), and the communist M.N. Roy. The largest single section of the book is devoted to the Nehru family and to the letters, autobiographical writing and histories produced by Jawaharlal Nehru during his long, often tedious, periods of incarceration. Hasan's choice of prison subjects and the written work they produced is highly significant. His interest is clearly in those who were not merely nationalistic but also "progressive" or socialistic in their outlook, like the Urdu poets or Nehru and Roy, men who saw their prison ordeal as ultimately serving the interests of the people or whose prison-born work made a significant contribution to the literature of the time. By contrast Hasan makes scant reference to those one-time prisoners, like V.D. Savarkar and Bhagat Singh, who have become heroes of the Hindu Right. By placing particular emphasis upon Muslim politicians and Urdu writers, he demonstrates the importance of the Muslim commitment and self-sacrifice to India's struggle for freedom and the attempts of figures like Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad to devise for themselves and their community a more progressive and constructive role within modern Indian society. Rather than being a place of intellectual nullity and cultural sterility—the life of the proverbial turnip—prison emerges from these chapters as a site of positive engagement with the religious diversity and cultural heterogeneity of India's past (as, preeminently, in Nehru's historical writing). That creative energy not merely exposed and reflected upon the immediate cruelty and tangible oppression of colonial rule and its prison regime but also enlarged upon the future a self-governing India might justly anticipate. In this sense, Roads to Freedom employs history to deliver a present-day message—about the need for the "younger generation" to remember the "toil and sacrifices" (5) of those who made India's independence possible and the place of Muslims, of Urdu culture, and the progressive outlook Nehru and Roy embodied, in engendering a now endangered freedom. One can but laud Hasan's intentions, but as a work...

Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place ed. by Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo

Reviewed by: Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place ed. by Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo Darren Purcell (bio) Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place. Edited by Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 432. $24.95. Writers embracing the spatial turn in several disciplines, including the humanities, often overlook a field engaged with the social processes behind spatial arrangements of power: geography. Fortunately, the editors avoid this myopia by bringing together authors engaged across disciplinary boundaries. Invoking geographical theorists such as Harvey, Massey, Mc-Cann, and Soja, the level of intellectual cross-pollination is refreshing. The editors invoke the term "spatial epistemology" to frame case studies focused on the spatially contingent nature of political power. The essays shed light on varying forms of state power and of resistance efforts in order to articulate dissent over the reconstruction of space that invariably benefits the entrenched interests driving the state. The first two sections cover the themes of contentious politics and the politics of consensus. Margo Shea's take on urban renewal and the spatial politics of governance in Northern Ireland highlights the spatial resistance after implementation of policies aimed at making a space of political resistance more governable. Kerry Chance's examination of South Africa's transit [End Page 1074] camps and the development of new slums as infrastructure highlights efforts to enhance the state's ability to govern an evicted populace. Anh-Thu Ngo provides a discussion of the reworking of Ho Chi Minh City and the contestation of those visions with art and creative energies. Fallon Aidoo's exploration of efforts to contest the reworking of spaces related to railroads that crossed class lines provides insight into how such coalitions can be forged. Biopolitics is the organizing theme for a three-essay section, including Joy Knoblauch's consideration of community mental health centers, their architectural design, and their role in communities. Melany Park looks at North Korea's penal colonies and their practices upon the body through a narrative utilizing texts from various interviews and the stage play Yoduk Story. Disabled bodies and how architecture is designed to accommodate the Americans with Disabilities Act is the focus of Wanda Liebermann's chapter, which highlights how disability was defined and then incorporated into the Architectural Graphic Standards so that only certain bodies' accommodations are addressed. The final section is the politics of expertise. Orly Linovski argues that there are clear issues with the development of a public space through the use of design consultants. Michael Mendez's narrative about Oakland's grassroots environmental efforts shows that they have been effective in articulating climate change issues in such a way as to transform them into tangible, knowable impacts that resonate with communities and drive actions at the city scale. Finally, H. Fernando Burga chronicles efforts to plan Miami-Dade County in the face of changing demographics, immigration trends, and refugee flows, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the Cuban-American political dynamics at the local scale. Two of the essays stand out for their engagement of politics at multiple scales. First is Delia Duong Ba Wendel's work on the 2004 radio program Musekeweya. The program created a fictional version of the challenges facing Rwandan society after the deployment of differences in economic status between the Hutus and the Tutsi nations during the 1994 genocide. The series narrates a parallel history through the use of spatial metaphors and fosters a space of reconciliation and a new spatial conception of the future. The value of a discursive landscape is highlighted by Ryne Clos's essay on the dormant Tiscapa volcano in Managua, Nicaragua, the site of political symbolism on the landscape in two distinct eras, the Somoza and Sandinista regimes. Contrasting Rancièrian approaches to the state with Althusserian ones, Clos highlights Somoza's efforts to insure consensus in what the author terms "… 'his' Nicaragua …" versus the Sandinistas' respatialization through democratization of the Tiscapa. The book as a whole represents a consistent engagement with various forms of spatial politics across scales, but always reminds the reader of individual-scale processes. These chapters are well-theorized case studies, as...

Letters

Letters Vladimir Solovyov (bio) The Text of the Protest against Antisemitism in the Press Composed by V. S. Solovyov in May 1890 [Editor’s Note: Following letter no. 23 is a version of Solovyov’s protest letter, included below. Getz’s filing of this version with the letter may witness to its date.] The movement against Jewry, propagated by the Russian press, represents an unprecedented violation of the most fundamental demands of justice and love of humanity. We consider it necessary to remind Russian society of these elementary demands. Forgetting them is the sole cause of the so-called Jewish question, while their simple and sincere recognition is the sole path to its resolution. 1. In all races there are worthless and malicious people, but there are not and cannot be a worthless and malicious race, since this would abolish personal responsibility, wherefore every hostile declaration or action, aimed against Jewry as a whole and against the Jews, as such, demonstrates either an irrational enthusiasm for blind national egoism or a personal selfishness and can in no wise be justified. 2. It is unjust to impose upon Jewry responsibility for those phenomena [End Page 144] in its life which were evoked by millennia-long persecutions of the Jews in Europe and by those abnormal conditions in which this people was placed. If during the course of many centuries the Jews were forcefully constrained to engage solely in monetary affairs, being debarred from all other kinds of employment, then the disagreeable consequences of this exclusive channeling of Jewish energies can in no way be eliminated by further constraints which only perpetuate the previous abnormal order. 3. Affiliation to the Semitic race and to the law of Moses presents nothing intrinsically blameworthy, and provides insufficient grounds for giving Jews a special civic status in comparison to Russian subjects belonging to other races and creeds. Since Russian Jews, belonging to their well-known social class, bear the same obligations as all the other representatives of the same social class, then in justice they should also hold the same rights in common. The recognition and application of these elementary truths are important and necessary first of all for us ourselves. The exacerbated excitation of racial and religious enmity, so contrary to the spirit of Christianity, corrupts society at its root and can lead to moral dehumanization, especially given the already presently noted decline of humanitarian ideas and the weakening of the juridical principle in our life. This is why even mere concern for national self-preservation should move us decisively to condemn the antisemitic movement not only as immoral in its essence, but as a radical danger to Russia’s future. Vl. Solovyov [End Page 145] “The Sins of Russia” (1887) [Editor’s Note: This essay is also letter no. 37 in Getz’s collection of letters.] So long as your national and unacknowledged sins remain upon you, you will never wage a decisive victory, you will never restore your good name.1 yuri krizhanich2 In his book Russia and Europe the late N. Y. Danilevsky,3 analyzing our history and progressiveness in his characteristic way, acknowledges that Russia is stricken by heavy illness. This illness, he states, completely impedes the realization of the great destinies of the Russian people and can end, despite all of Russia’s visible state prowess, after draining the original spring of the ethnic spirit, by depriving the historical life of the Russian people of its inner creative energies, consequently rendering useless and redundant its very existence, for all that is deprived of inner substance constitutes mere historical junk (Russia and Europe, 2nd ed., p. 316). That Russia ails with an oppressive and dangerous illness is evident, but it is also evident now for everyone that the honorable Slavophile was decisively mistaken in his diagnosis when he determined this illness to consist in the impoverishment and weakening of the national spirit in Russian society. Had he not made a mistake in his diagnosis, then the remedy he went on to suggest should have taken effect. Let us not forget that Danilevsky wrote at the end of the sixties. “Impoverishment of spirit,” he said, “can...

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Don’t Call It a Comeback Will Brooker, editor Beretta E. Smith-Shomade. Racquel Gates. Miriam J. Petty. Anna Everett. Allyson Nadia Field. Mark D. Cunningham. Terri Francis. Nina Cartier. Zeinabu irene Davis. At the SCMS Conference in March 2012, I visited the caucuses—the groups that, in the society’s words, aim “to provide advocacy, fellowship, and networking opportunities for those who have been historically un- or underrepresented within SCMS, professional organizations, and the academy, based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or marginalized economic status.” I started talking to colleagues like Jeff rey Masko, Miriam Petty, Patty Ahn, Dolores Tierney, and Caetlin Benson-Allott about how Cinema Journal could provide a space and platform for these scholarly communities through the In Focus section. Each group welcomed me warmly and enthusiastically, greeting my suggestions with ideas and creative energy. The times I spent at the caucus meetings were some of the most valuable I’ve had at an SCMS conference. Patty Ahn. Julia Himberg. Damon R. Young. Corey K. Creekmur. Matthew Hays. Thomas Waugh. Lynne Joyrich. Quinn Miller. Audrey Yue. Kara Keeling. By the following March, when I visited the caucuses again, the ideas for In Focus sections were firmly in shape. Editorial teams had been selected, and they were drawing up shortlists of topics, commissioning contributions. The leading queer scholar and mentor Alexander Doty had tragically died during that year, and the Queer Caucus editors adapted their section to honor him. The Women’s Caucus section was already in production. The African and African American Caucus was planning two distinct sections for two separate issues. I was so tired by the time I reached the Latino/a Caucus that I fell off my chair in the middle of their meeting. I think they forgave me. Caetlin Benson-Allott. Diane Negra. Deborah Tudor. Eileen R. Meehan. Candace Moore. Alyxandra Vesey. Kara Herold. Vicki Callahan. Ana M. López. Rielle Navitski. Nicolas Poppe. Dolores Tierney. At the SCMS conference of March 2014, we were able to look back proudly at the Women’s Caucus issue, and the Queer Caucus Cinema Journal, with its front-and back-cover tributes to Alex Doty. The African American Caucus, with an issue scheduled for that summer, had its cover projected on the wall of the meeting. The Latino/a Caucus had submitted its In Focus that month with a moving final line in untranslated Spanish, dedicated to colleague Laura Podalsky and her late mother. I met with Aboubakar Sanogo to discuss the African Caucus section he was editing. [End Page 1] The handshakes of 2012 had become hugs. It felt like we had been working on something together, for years. Jude G. Akudinobi. Lindiwe Dovey. Moradewun Adejunmobi. Aboubakar Sanogo. Brian Hu. Vincent N. Pham. Shilpa Davé. Sylvia Chong. Peter X Feng. Celine Parreñas Shimizu. LeiLani Nishime. Jun Okada. The African Caucus issue, with a stunning original cover by Sarah Zaidan, was published in February 2015. The Asian/Pacific American In Focus appeared in issue 56.3. Six sections edited by six groups that have historically been, and continue to be, marginalized and underrepresented, within society and within our Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I am incredibly grateful for what they have given the journal. The cover for the African American In Focus was a very deliberate choice on the part of its three editors. It shows Samuel L. Jackson as DJ Love Daddy, at the midpoint of Do the Right Thing, invoking a roll call of artists from black musical genres. The editors offer their own roll call throughout the section’s introduction, honoring an intertextual range of inspirational black figures, from actors to academics: from Billy Dee Williams to Donald Bogle. This “naming ritual,” as they say—naming oneself, naming pioneers, naming the dead and the living—has the power of establishing lineage and community and carries a specific meaning within African American culture and history. I pay modest tribute to that tradition here. That In Focus section opens with a quotation from LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”: again, the editors use it with a specific meaning, but it could also apply more broadly to all the...

“A Woman's Point of View”: Dialogue and Perspective in Alex Ross Perry's <em>Listen Up Philip</em>

Philip Roth's novels have reputation for being unfilmable.1 Only handful of adaptations have been made his impressive body of work, yet these have yielded mixed results and never quite seem to work as well screen as the written page. Perhaps the most egregious case in point is Ernest Lehman's 1972 Portnoy's Complaint, in which the book's subversive mischievousness is reduced to series of shouting matches and missed gags. Even relatively straight like Robert Benton's 2003 The Human Stain replaces Roth's fierce attack political correctness with staid melodrama. The issue, however, is not the films' fidelity to their source novels. As Robert Stam points out, the notion of literal fidelity is highly problematic. Not only does it carry moral overtones suggesting that cinema is necessarily secondary and derivative vis-a-vis literature,2 but it also assumes that the novel contains an extractable essence, a kernel of meaning or nucleus of events that can be 'delivered' by an adaptation (Beyond Fidelity 57). An adaptation, he argues, is rather like translation, which suggests that any text can produce an infinity of different readings.3 Nonetheless, in the case of Roth adaptations, something appears to be lost in translation. Roth's books derive much of their power not plot but their vivid voices and their exploration of the characters' inner lives. Most of the adaptations, however, have failed to express these elements in successful manner. As Ira Nadel puts it, (or individual directors) seems to be unable to shift the rhetorical resources found in Roth to the screen, making it difficult to capture the self-conscious narrative style of Roth's best (53). Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, released in 2014, is not strict of Philip Roth, yet it draws many elements his oeuvre and weaves them into the film. In doing so, Perry opens up dialogue with Roth, and the film as both playful homage to and critical reconsideration of his work. This approach is in itself tribute to Roth and the dialogical dimension of his fiction, and may best explain how the film manages to capture his writing more effectively than any other so far.Linda Hutcheon defines adaptations as deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works (xiv). Listen Up Philip does not acknowledge its relation to Philip Roth's novels in legal sense. There is no based on or adapted from disclaimer. From the outset, however, many visual clues abound. The title uses the same font that is featured prominently the cover of the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint as well as other Roth novels of the 1970s. The title card and closing credits use yellow color that is reminiscent of the background color of the same edition. And of course, the titular character and Roth share the same first name.More conspicuously, Perry borrows part of the plot of The Ghost Writer. The main character, Philip (played by Jason Schwartzman), is young Jewish author the verge of success. He is about to publish his second novel, the cryptically titled Obidant. Leaving his girlfriend Ashley Kane (Elizabeth Moss) behind in New York, he decides to accept the invitation of his literary idol, the renowned author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), to spend the summer at his residence upstate. There, in lieu of the elusive Amy Bellette, he finds Zimmerman's daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter). Zimmerman is reflection of E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer but also of Zuckerman in the American trilogy and, to certain extent, of Roth himself.4 Zimmerman's house in the woods is similar to Lonoff 's clapboard farmhouse (Ghost 3) and Zuckerman's two-room cabin (Stain 36) in the Berkshires. Like them, Zimmerman has renounced the clamor of the city: You can't get anything done here. It has creative energy, but not productive energy. Zimmerman's name, echoing Zuckerman's, means carpenter (literally room man) in German, which further associates him with seclusion. …

Callaloo: A Forum for Academics and Creative Writers

Callaloo: A Forum for Academics and Creative Writers* Margo Natalie Crawford (bio), Vievee Francis (bio), Joshua Bennett (bio), Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), and Jeremy M. Clark (bio) Brent Hayes Edwards was also a presenter on this panel. He provided Callaloo with an essay version of his remarks (see pgs. 67–71 in this issue). CRAWFORD: I am Margo Crawford and I am at Cornell University. I’m going to start today with a real focus on Charles Rowell’s interviews. When I think about the tremendous work that you have done, Charles Rowell, with Callaloo, I think we need an entire book or more than one book that puts together the interviews. The interviews set me in motion. The interviews made me understand the connection between the academic and the creative. Charles Rowell’s interviews break the boundaries between the creative and the critical. I want to start today with two moments (in two of his interviews) when the practice of a black feminist archive emerges in the interviews. For example, when he is interviewing Octavia Butler, and he asks, “Will you talk about what it was like for you in the early days as opposed to present times? You, a Black woman, writing science fiction?” Another example (in another interview of Butler) is the moment when he takes us to an interiority of black feminist praxis, and asks, “Will you allow me to enter the privacy of your writing space and stand over your shoulder while you’re working and observe the process while you work?” Think about such humility. We hear, “Will you allow me?” I think of those tremendously interesting moments when Charles Rowell’s interviews become so much more than just the standard interviews. We see all of the creative and critical energy coming together. His editing of Callaloo as this thriving and prominent journal continues to gather the most innovative, diasporic literature is indeed that zone that Fred Moten describes as “frames cutting frames” without any settlement. As Fred Moten teaches us, they keep cutting. Rowell’s 1974 interview of Larry Neal was the gem that sparked my first engagements with Neal’s dual position as theorist and poet. And today, I want to use—in these fifteen minutes I have—Larry Neal’s Hoodoo Hollerin’ Beebop Ghosts of 1974 as a means of opening up the Callaloo hoodoo hollerin’ beebop practice of creating liminal spaces, where the creative and the critical become what Larry Neal in his afterword to Black Fire considers the post-double consciousness state of decolonizing the mind. Larry Neal’s worrying of the lines—thank you, Cheryl Wall—takes the form in his visually experimental essay “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic” of intersecting rows and columns, instead of [End Page 54] the typical paragraph structure. The layering and crossing of lines in “Some Reflections” create a visual and verbal sense of depth. As Neal the poet meets Neal the critic in this manifesto, it is clear that he is using lines and layers to dramatize the title of his poetry volume, Black Boogaloo. In Charles Rowell’s interview of Neal, Rowell asks, “What do you mean by ‘Black Boogaloo’? I know Boogaloo to be a dance. You also use the adjective, black, before it. Boogaloo suggests something black or something related to Black people.” [Laughter] As this interview becomes the co-creation of Boogaloo, Larry Neal hears the redundancy in “Black Boogaloo.” I think Charles Rowell teaches him. [Laughter] Neal tells Rowell, “Maybe I should’ve just called it Boogaloo, it’s superfluous.” [Laughter] “It’s superfluous to put black on Boogaloo.” Like this interview, Callaloo has always been that space of co-creation of the creative and the critical. Neal saw Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts after Black Boogaloo as the letting go of the superfluous, as a move to Boogaloo that did not have to announce itself as black. Neal argues in his afterword to the 1968 foundational Black Arts anthology, Black Fire, that the Black Arts Movement is a conscious move past the trauma of double consciousness. Larry Neal insists, “Most contemporary black writers of the last few years, the literature of the young, has been aimed at...

Introduction: New Directions in Kentucky Sport History

Introduction:New Directions in Kentucky Sport History Andrew Doyle (bio) While few can doubt the outsized importance of sports in American culture, sport history was virtually ignored as a field of academic study for most of the twentieth century. Sport seemed one of the more trivial aspects of society: it was the "toy department of life," according to sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. The growing emphasis on social history in the 1970s and 1980s led to a burst of creative energy in the field of sport history, but there remained an implicit and sometimes explicit defensiveness in much of the early literature in the field. Yet, as the field has grown in size and scope, sport historians have demonstrated that it provides a useful, and in some ways unparalleled, means of exploring political, social, and economic configurations, cultural expression, and hierarchies of race and gender dominance. Any human activity that has commanded the attention of huge audiences across time and across cultures is, by definition, a worthy field of study. The power of sports to attract collective focus and stir human passions has grown dramatically over the course of the modern era, as has its power to change the relations of individuals to their societies and to one another. The symbiotic relationship between mass media and spectator sports was established in the late nineteenth century, and this has only grown in scope with the qualitative and quantitative expansion of the media landscape from print to electronic to digital. For the present, anyway, there is no end in sight. Jackie Robinson's desegregation of baseball was clearly a landmark [End Page 461] event in U.S. history, the annual spectacle of the Super Bowl speaks to who we are as a society and culture, and the Olympic Games and World Cup are events of global political, cultural, and economic significance. Spectator sports with mass audiences are clearly worthy subjects for the historian's focus, but sporting practices rooted in communities the world over provide other rich avenues of historical analysis. The competitive and non-competitive sporting pastimes of diverse human communities reflect value systems that often thrive in the interstices of a hegemonic culture. Sport thus offers a means of examining the sources and expressions of cultural power. It is a form of mass entertainment that both reflects and helps to shape the values of any society, past or present. Like such scripted forms as television, movies, and popular music, sport is an expression of social power and cultural values, but unlike them, sporting competition is unscripted. The passion and excitement of the arena is not a product of a filmmaker's artistry; the physical struggle of competition is real, as are the injuries. Both elite athletes and their fans experience the joys of winning and the pain of losing. They both share in the fleeting moments when a world record performance transcends previous human limits. A dramatic seventh game in a championship series and a Tuesday night game between two mid-major college basketball teams are each genuine in a way that is unmatched in any other form of mass entertainment. While sport holds no attraction for many, untold millions find no other form of entertainment that touches their spirit as deeply. Others find in sport an expression of group identity, especially marginalized groups who have used sport to challenge existing hierarchies of power. However, the fundamental reality of competition is true for those who compete at a much lower level or for those who compete only against their personal limitations. This was true for women in the early twentieth century who dared to play baseball or ice hockey, African American community groups who sponsored baseball leagues in the Jim Crow South, an ordinary worker who through-hikes the Appalachian Trail, or a weekend fitness enthusiast who builds her [End Page 462] strength and endurance in order to face the challenge of a triathlon. They all find something in sport that they can find in no other human endeavor, and historians have produced valuable scholarship on these and myriad other athletic activities. In this age of transnational and global history, there are still valuable perspectives to be gained by focusing on a...

«PRODUCING» AS A TECHNOLOGY OF CREATIVE EDUCATION MANAGEMENT

This article contains the results of research work conducted by the members of project team «Personnel policy» as part of implementation of the programme «Leaders of change for global universities», Moscow Management School Skolkovo in 2015-2016. The aim of this research was the analysis of personnel policy at Russian universities during the last decade first of all in the field of managing educational activities as creative ones with their peculiarities. Research results allow for drawing a key conclusion on possible borrowing of project models of creative teams management from cultural sphere with the aim of using them in modern dynamically changing and complex university management in order to improve university personnel policy. At present educational process requires project methods of educational programmes management by ensuring voluntary involvement of creative people with individual interests and aims into the environment of vertically integrated and hierarchically administered organizations. At present personnel policy in this field replicates standard managerial instruments (KPI, control, structural and functional organization) which destroy talent and restrain creative energy of specialists. This article is based on the experience of other branches where the function of involving self-organized creative teams into the process is called «producing» and is focused on organizing the work of supporting service structures engaged in selecting creative teams and providing them with resources. Authors believe that at Russian universities such creative teams should be built around educational programme heads, whereas «programme portfolio» creation should be organized on the basis of selection model presented in the article. Selection model improvement can become the topic of the following research. Nevertheless the implementation of the model suggested by the authors can change the situation with university personnel policy for the better by means of forming the strategy of managing teaching and academic teams and systematic personnel policy facilitating competitiveness of the Russian universities. Materials of the article are of interest for university administrators, lecturers and researchers, educational authorities’ representatives, external experts.

Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature by Christopher Pizzino

Reviewed by: Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature by Christopher Pizzino Louie Dean Valencia-García (bio) Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. University of Texas Press, 2016. 248 pp, $29.95, $90. Christopher Pizzino begins Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature with the premise that even though news stories have proclaimed the arrival of comics as legitimate literature for more than thirty years, comics are still a marginalized medium that resists legitimation, and will be for the foreseeable future. Pizzino argues, "while comics are less reviled now than they were in the worst years of censorship, the medium is still designated illegitimate by default" (3). The claim might surprise some, especially given forays into comics by the likes of acclaimed authors such as Margaret Atwood (Angel Catbird), Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club 2), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Black Panther). This is to say nothing of MacArthur fellow Jonathan Letham and Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon, who both draw heavily on comics in their novels, and have written comics as well. How can comics not be legitimate [End Page 257] literature? This question potentially threatens the legitimacy of the cultural producers of comics, the readers, the purveyors, and even the scholars. For Pizzino, works like these are considered exceptional, or transcendent. They do not legitimate comics as literature. To this end, he argues, the usage of the term "graphic novel" to describe a comic that "transcends" the medium functions to delegitimize comics as a whole. Ironically, in Spain, the word "comic" has replaced the Spanish word "tebeo," and is used in the way that "graphic novel" is used in the Anglophone countries to designate legitimacy. Pizzino argues against what he terms a "Bildugsroman discourse"—a narrative that contends that comics have grown into "a medium fit for adults; from crudely and functionally produced commodities, often the product of multiple and interchangeable creators, to aesthetically complex work created by self-directed writer-illustrators; from adventure-romance serials to closure-oriented narratives modeled after the novel—and thus, so goes the logic of this narrative, from despised medium with little to no credibility as an art form, a literature or a mode of literacy to a respectable kind of reading with an earned measure of cultural legitimacy" (30). Pizzino's claim that comics still hold an illegitimate position both in the popular press and in academia is a provocative one. He argues his is "a book about how cultural status, and the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption … still influence not only the status of the books we read, but also the value of the act of reading, and the cultural and social standing of readers" (4). For Pizzino, the simple act of reading comics can alter readers' status and respectability. Choosing to focus his study on critically acclaimed "graphic novelists"—Frank Miller, Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, and Gilbert Hernandez—Pizzino explores what he describes as "autoclasm," or what can be described as the way comic authors "address status problems with extraordinary creative energy" despite its being "a divided and self-opposed energy, split by the pressure of the very problem it confronts" (4). Arresting Development argues that through this autoclasm "creators picture the disenfranchisement that, to one degree or another, comes with the very act of making comics" (5). Pizzino points to the ways that comic writers often have secondary jobs to support their artistic careers. By looking at ways in which acclaimed artists and writers of comics have encountered questions of legitimacy, Pizzino proves the existence of a Bildungsroman discourse, and shows how those who have found critical or financial success still struggle for legitimacy. Even Neil Gaiman has said, "I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter."1 In chapter three, Pizzino looks at Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) to argue that the work is not exemplary of a literary evolution of the genre, but rather that Miller embraces the "action-packed, lascivious stories" that "abetted the conviction of public figures of the 1950s that comics are unfit reading...

Hierarchical Grammatical Tagging for Tinai (Landscape) of Cankam Tamil Literature

Tiṇai poetics from the ancient Tamiḻ literature has significantly contributed to the environmental literary theory. The ancient Cankam poets belong to pre-Christian era, known as Cankam poets, because of their involvement with Tamil literary academies. They had remarkable success in cultivating their creative minds with the rudiments of landscape, which they belonged to. These enshrined landscapes are known as Tiņai. The integration of Tiņai into the poems requires the poetics to pull their creative energy from the space that nature had allocated for everyone. They believed that poetry is way of communication and the images and metaphors in their poems develop from the natural subjects that may be deliberated as artistic objects. These natural objects consist of Mutalporuḷ, Uripporuḷ, and Karupporuḷ which determine the type of the tiṇai. This paper deals and suggests how to tag the Tamiḻ Kurinci tiṇai system in Tag set structure.

Leadership aiming at innovation: suggesting and discussing four roles of an innovation leader

Organizations often experience problems and challenges due to the development of rigid bureaucratic rules and procedures, which may represent obstacles to creativity and innovation. In a global knowledge economy, innovation is an important competitive parameter. Consequently, anything that may stimulate innovation in an organization’s creative energy fields is valuable. This paper addresses one question: What management roles of an innovation leader may enhance the development of innovation in an organization’s creative energy fields? Methodology used is conceptual generalization. The article suggests, clarifies and discusses four roles of an innovation leader’s that may have a positive impact on an organization’s innovation performance in creative energy fields. The roles are conceptualized as “the innovation leader as an expert”, “the innovation leader as a reputation builder”, “the innovation leader as a relationship builder”, and the “innovation leader as a creative change force”. The article argues how these four roles are important in promoting innovation in organizations. By doing this, the article contributes to the extant knowledge on how four different roles of an innovation leader’s may enhance an organization’s innovation performance in creative energy fields. Keywords: the knowledge society, innovation in organizations, creative energy fields, innovation leaders, roles of an innovation leader. JEL Classification: O31, O33, D83

Madhya Pradesh Housing & Infrastructure Development Board: affordable housing via public–private partnership mode

The Madhya Pradesh Housing & Infrastructure Development Board (MPHIDB) is a state‐owned entity in Madhya Pradesh State of India with the mandate of providing housing for citizens, particularly for those in the low‐income segment. MPHIDB has been constructing houses on its own using the traditional engineering and procurement contract (EPC) model. In July 2015, it was exploring the possibility of creating affordable housing units via public–private partnership (PPP). The advantage of involving private sector is that MPHIDB can tap into creative energy and construction efficiency of the private sector and deliver the best results within the given set of time and resource constraints. The proposed structure of PPP is that the private partner will be given a portion of land in lieu of the affordable housing units that it will build and transfer to MPHIDB. However, there are trade‐offs involved in doing the project in PPP mode instead of EPC mode. The main advantages of a government body like MPHDIB doing the project on its own are as follows: (a) It is able to better manage regulatory risks in terms of getting clearances, land acquisition, and so forth; (b) it can raise finances at lower interest rates than what is charged for private sector entities; and (c) the entire land parcel is available to construct houses, and hence it can get more housing units per unit of land. The Commissioner (CEO) of MPHIDB had to decide whether to go for PPP or EPC model, and if he opted for PPP, how should the PPP be structured?

Law environment: post-classical interpretation

Article is devoted to research of law environment as one of components of law reality. On the basis of post-classical method- ology the conclusion is drawn that the law environment, representing the complete complex of the law phenomena, actions and events, interrelations and relations caused by objective regularities of humanity development, conscious and constantly designed (recreated) by individuals, local communities and society in general which can be used for achievement of definite purposes, satisfaction of re- quirements and interests or realization of claims, characterizes the extent of aspirations, creative energy and real law actions of the subject (the individual, local community, society in general, the state) in a certain existential continuum and defines borders of life of the individual in law reality.

Claude Vivier: A Composer's Life by Bob Gilmore

Claude Vivier: A Composer's Life, by Bob Gilmore. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2014. xiv, 295 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). The most important Canadian composer in the second half of the twentieth century is almost certainly Claude Vivier. From the early 1970s until the early 1980s, Vivier produced some of the most innovative pieces of music this country had ever heard; he also attained a level of international recognition that few Canadian composers ever had. When composing he spent much of his time in Europe and Asia, seeking out cultures and experiences he felt were necessary for his creative energy. His works during these years, including Lonely Child, were often brooding and dark, and have long been understood by critics to be deeply autobiographical. They were said to come from a tormented soul who was in constant motion, as if running away from a troubled childhood toward an identity and a home he suspected he could never really find. In this full-length biography, Bob Gilmore, noted musicologist and biographer of Harry Partch, argues, as most observers have, that Vivier's work reflected his life, and so turns to Vivier's life to understand his music. Gilmore does more than simply reveal the childhood traumas that shaped the mature composer. He situates Vivier's early life firmly in the context of a postwar Quebec defined by the autocratic regime of Maurice Duplessis and the powerful Catholic Church. He then places Vivier's development as an artist against the backdrop of the liberal reforms associated with the province's Quiet Revolution. By grounding his subject this way, Gilmore suggests that Vivier spent a lifetime attempting to escape the province associated with childhood trauma but ultimately realized that whatever success he achieved as an artist was the result of the life that he had created for himself in 1960s Montreal. By framing his study in this way, Gilmore reclaims Vivier as a Canadian composer. Vivier was bom out of wedlock in 1948 Montreal, a time when such births were considered shameful. Vivier spent the next two-and-a-half years in a church-run orphanage before being adopted by a couple that already had older children. It was hardly a loving household. The parents were distant and when he was eight years old Claude was raped by an uncle. When he told his mother about the incident, she could not come to terms with it and effectively held Claude responsible. Not long after, Claude was sent to a boarding school known as a training ground for a life in the Church. Vivier never really fit in at the school and was eventually asked to leave. In 1967 Vivier enrolled in the Montreal Conservatory of Music. The Conservatory, a state-run music school established in 1943, offered Vivier a way to escape his troubled past. …

Bakhtin and the Russian Avant Garde in Vitebsk: Creative understanding and the collective dialogue

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917–1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bakhtin’s Circle (and associated animations with other intellectuals of tis era), and Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS—all in fierce dialogue with one another—made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin’s subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy.

An Interview with David Dabydeen on Literature and Politics

Professor David Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born writer, critic and academic at the Centre of Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. In 1993 he became Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is still a member of their Executive Board. He has been Guyana's ambassador to China since 2010. Professor Dabydeen has also won several international and national prizes such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Quiller-Couch Prize, and the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India). Among his works are Slave Song (1984), The Intended (1991), Disappearance (1993); and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). He also co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History in 2007.

Affective values in international relations: Theorizing emotional actions and the value of resilience

This article critically examines the interrelationship of values and emotions in international relations. It focuses on the different meaning of affects and emotions, and theorizes about the affective qualities of values in world politics. It defines affective values as values that arise from the ceaseless, unconscious striving(s) to contest the outside control over one’s life. In doing so, it distinguishes between negative affective values, which represent the evocation of fear, shame, and distrust to shape and project the creative energies of resistance, and positive affective values that signify the material and practical strategies that convert these energies into an awareness of one’s insecurity in the world. The article argues that the tension between positive and negative affective values allows us to understand the transformative link between emotions and values. By focusing on the norm of humanitarian intervention, it contextualizes positive affective values in terms of the new resilience initiative of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).