Essay Dwells Research Articles

Violence and the Voice Note: The War for Cabo Delgado in Social Media (Mozambique, 2020)

In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks - Facebook and WhatsApp especially - became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the 'new war' in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans.

Sociology of the Contrapuntal: The Holocaust and the Rhetoric of Evil

The essay dwells on the construction of a sociology of the contrapuntal that revolves around the social and symbolic patterns concerning the representation of mass human annihilation, as in the case of the Holocaust. In this view, Roger Silverstone’s metaphor of media contrapuntuality – inspired by the analysis of some narrative masterpieces focused on imperialistic and colonial exploitation – may support the development of a sociological pathway supporting the analysis of the “rhetoric of evil” historically permeating the reflection on the refusal and the oppression of Otherness. Contrapuntuality deals with communication, memory and identity, since the rhetoric patterns of media discourse are shaped not only by the negative issues, but also by good deeds and intentions that rarely are attractive to journalists. The proposal of such a sociology of the contrapuntal, inspired by the counterbalance of good and evil in the public sphere, complies with the increasing complexity of our mediascapes, in which mass massacres and identity annihilation, including the Holocaust, are constantly media represented, in line with the need to contrast cultural marginalization and existential displacement.

Transformations: A Personal History of Introducing Complicité into Academic Life and Learning Communities

This essay documents my three-decade-long journey of connections and resultant transformations between scholarly knowledge and artistic production in my work. In reinvestigating my history with stage and visual arts, I trace the relationship between traditionally ‘alien’ practices and academic understandings of societal and political mass violence and invite the reader to reconsider what academia stands for in order to engage with borderless histories of conflict, violence, and displacement. This essay dwells on how artistic engagement is both a personal and a profoundly political process through which the experience of violence is communicated through thoughts, emotions, hopes, and expressions of trauma. There are also significant ethical concerns present concerning the portrayal of violence, death, and suffering, which the paper discusses under the aegis of ethics of witnessing as responsibility.

Risk communication in calamity society

The aim of this study is to offer a sociological communication's reflection in calamity society, divided into two closely integrated and mutually consequential parts. The first part will consid-er why a sociological approach to cyclical disasters is appropriate, and the possible application of this approach will then be outlined, leading us to the second section of this work. The sec-ond part of the essay dwells on issues concerning risk communication, considering that communicative processes play a priority role in the selection of risks, through a slow process of social construction that begins with what Beck calls the staging of risk through a metamorphic process. In this context, a decisive role is played by communication, intended here as a phenomenon affecting the risk management process.

Litus Ignotus: Lost coasts of Terra Nova in the sixteenth century

What do we do with coasts that have been lost? What are we to do with places and stories large and small which once embodied the lived experience of life and work on the fishing coats of North America? This essay, following the work of the historian John Gillis, explores lost coasts from the sixteenth-century European fishery in the northwest Atlantic, a place known as Terra Nova to the mariners who went there. The essay dwells upon imagined islands, missing harbours, enigmatic fortifications and other places that existed in the earliest years of the fishery but which have since disappeared. In so doing, it shows how coasts can change and be lost over time, and how historians can try to recover these unknown shores.

What’s in a name?

Abstract This review essay discusses Lorenzo Gasbarri’s book which purports to examine an “existential” issue – the concept of an International Organization – with a theoretical approach that makes use of tools of analysis pertaining not only to the field of international law, but also to legal philosophy. After a cursory overview of existing legal research on the subject, the essay dwells on the author’s thesis – namely, the dual nature of International Organizations, based on the dual legal character of their legal systems – and highlights merits and possible drawbacks underlying the attempt to conceptualize International Organizations.

Borth Waters and the Coastal Dreaming of a Midlander

After a critique of top-down colonizing attributes of water projects in the Arts and Humanities, the essay dwells on the communitarian, environmental, and aesthetic value of a short creative documentary about the raised marshland mire behind the ancient seaside village of Borth on the Mid-West Welsh coast. In a mode of theorized autobiography, it then divagates upon the metaphor of water in the author’s recurring dreams about this childhood holiday resort and its complex relations with his home in the English Midlands, an area supplied by Welsh water and that supplies many of Borth’s holiday-makers.

Hermeneutics of Doubt

This essay dwells on atmosphere as a mediating, climatic environment to consider climate as the nexus of mind, medium, and society. An inquiry into atmosphere, I argue, opens up climate from an objective entity into a constellation of aesthetic, infrastructural, and epistemological operations. I situate this richer notion of climate in China during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath by focusing on “doubt” as a unique atmosphere caught in the transnational traffic in media practices, psychological war, and genre film. Through an intimate conversation between aesthetics and technology, hermeneutics and media ecology, this essay conducts an experimental climatology to consider climate not simply as a physical milieu but as a method. Such a climatology—bringing together infrastructural analysis, aesthetic design, and sociopolitical projects—will allow us to engage “global climate change” and “affective climate change” as interconnected and integrated projects of sustainability.

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire: A family tragedy rewritten

Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire is a reworking of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. The novel is based on the existential struggle of three siblings, Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz, who are British-Pakistani citizens living in contemporary multi-cultural British society where diversities are deemed to be tolerated as long as concerned minority groups internalise “the concept of Britishness.” Along with the process of globalisation, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, the number of immigrants from the South to the North increased rapidly. Coupled with this unwanted mobility, the chaotic aftermath of 9/11 strengthened the tendency of classifying Muslims living in the West under two distinct groups: the first group called “moderate Muslims” consists of those who act and live in accordance with Western paradigms; members of this group are seen as proper citizens, with access to all the regular privileges; the second group, however, includes those who do not deserve to be a national of the concerned country due to their extremist tendencies. Since Western security policies are built on eliminating extremists, conflict becomes inevitable whenever a presumably dissident voice is heard. In Shamsie’s Home Fire, having extremist ideas or involvement in radical activities turns not just the related person but all her/his kin into an “enemy of the State.” This essay dwells on the tragic outcomes of the erroneous surveillance policies targeting British Muslims as portrayed in Kamila Shamsie’s novel.

Oscar Wilde and the Confidence Trick

Abstract Critics have long highlighted the centrality of forgery in Oscar Wilde. This essay focuses instead on the idea of the confidence trick in Wilde’s life and work, with a special focus on ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’. The capstone of the confidence trick is the so-called long con, a type of elaborate deception that resembles an extended theatrical performance. With its properties of narrativity and plot-making, the long con subsumes forgery. Its use in literature points to literature itself as a piece of trickery. Through cultural, biographical and textual analysis, this essay dwells on the various striking ways by which Wilde’s fictions are entangled with reality as they are pervaded by the long con trope. By considering Wilde’s perceived image in his 1882 American tour and his brushing shoulders with famous conmen, the essay first suggests that the confidence trick and dandyism share common ground. It demonstrates that the confidence trick is akin to Wilde’s ‘lying’ and catalytic as an aesthetic performance. The cultural consciousness of the confidence trick is strongly present in such works as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, which are built around long cons. ‘Mr. W. H.’ features a long con and in targeting the reader operates as one. Paradoxically, because of its open exploration of forgery, the story as a confidence trick in literature is failproof, imperceptible, and so perfect.

The secrets of Arto Tapio Paasilinna’s stylistics

The article gives an overview of the literary legacy of Arto Tapio Paasilinna — one of the few Finnish authors of the second half of the 20th c. to enjoy international renown. Paasilinna’s 35 novels have been translated into 40 different languages; many of the books have been adapted to films. Russian audiences have yet to discover all of Paasilinna’s works. His books offer perfect material to study Finnish culture, humour, and enigmatic female characters. The present essay dwells on the critic’s impression of several unique stylistic features of Paasilinna’s prose. Finnish humour, attention to detail, and unexpected metaphors, along with other devices used by Paasilinna, allow for a study of Finnish culture that is shown not only through examples of typical behaviour of its remarkable representatives, but also as a mystery behind a façade of what seems like indifference and emotional inadequacy. Finland can boast hundreds of literary professionals, yet Paasilinna holds a special place in the vibrant stylistic diversity of the contemporary Finnish literary process.

C. P. Cavafy as an Egyptiote

In contradistinction to Anglophone criticism's airbrushing of all things Egyptian/Arab from the iconic image of C. P. Cavafy, this essay dwells on the poet as an Egyptiote. An Egyptiote orientation, it is argued, variously informs given poems and prose texts in his later years. Probing Cavafy's knowledge of Arabic, the essay demonstrates his affinities and solidarities with Egyptians under colonial duress as witnessed in the choice of subject matter and in the intertextual Greek-Egyptian folkloric resonances in his poem “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.” Analyzing how the poem's tropes and temporality riposte to those in extraliterary discourses about the colonial incident it depicts, the essay reads “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.” in relation to other Cavafy poems that reveal an Egyptiote “transculturated” poetics. A set of prose texts—letters, essays, interviews—by Cavafy, it is demonstrated, vest Egyptiote literati with an intercultural literary agency of acquainting the Greek public with the outlines of Egyptian Arabophone literature and the Arabophone Egyptian literati with something of their own Greek language production.

L'identità rinnovata in Va e non torna e M di Ron Kubati

Migration and identity are the issues around which the social, anthropological and cultural discourse has developed in recent years. The migratory flows that have affected Western countries in recent decades have posed numerous questions on issues such as social cohesion, integration, education, culture. In this perspective, the essay dwells on the relationship that binds the experience of migration to literature, highlighting the role of writing as a place of identity processing. In particular, it analyzes the stories told by the writer Ron Kubati. In Va e non torna and in M, the writer goes in search of the otherwise and redemption, in which the relationship with the past, with his mother tongue, with the future follows a difficult path made of denial and estrangement, of hope, of pain and dream.

George Herbert’s “The Flower” and the Problem of Praise

AbstractThis essay dwells on George Herbert’s “The Flower” and on how its speaker can love and praise God. Writing of praise and doubt, Stanley Cavell remarks that the problem of skepticism is partly a problem of finding an object that one can praise, a search that certainly occurs in “The Flower.” While Herbert’s speaker seeks God as that object, his own memory impedes him, making him question God’s goodness and forcing him not only to abandon forms of remembering that Herbert’s sources—from psalmists to theologians—employ so as to rise to praise, but also to use form in order to forget. The essay’s conclusion compares Herbert’s poem with another strange praise poem, Paul Celan’s “Psalm.” The essay claims that if Cavell sees praise as signaling a triumph over doubt, “The Flower” shows, as only verse can, how praise and doubt accompany each other, using doubt to keep praise at a distance from both psalmic theology and skeptical philosophy.

A Note from the Editor: Essentials

A Note from the Editor: Essentials John Fletcher As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and space. That was in March 2020. By April, it became clear that the year would turn the comfort of familiar intimacies into aching nostalgia. Remember seeing a live show in a crowded theatre? Remember reconnecting with friends over drinks at a conference or a party? Remember hugging someone? Of course, 2020–21 inflicted deeper wounds: lives snuffed out, justice undone, incomes suspended, and political stabilities frayed. Losing touch—refraining from physical closeness with others, especially indoors—only made these traumas harder to endure. The idea of essentials as a replacement special issue topic grew out of the absence of intimacy. I realized, first, that many in our society—the so-called essential workers—did not have the privilege of isolation. For people like delivery drivers, grocers, food staff, medical personnel, and custodial workers, continued contact was obligatory, often without the necessary gear to keep them safe. The pandemic reminded us again how badly we as a culture do at valuing those whose labors we depend on every day. What other essentials, I wondered, do we take for granted? I saw also how theatre artists and teachers were adapting to the prohibition on proximity. How does a live artform go remote? How do I perform a scene with you when even our smallest interactions suffer a microsecond’s time delay? How do I connect with students when all we can see of one another are glitchy Brady Bunch boxes, many of which are blank? How do I enjoy that organic exchange with colleagues about work and lives when every Zoom session feels like a strained, excuse-my-mess/children/pets/stress performance of perseverance? What remains when we have stripped away so much that we would normally define as essential to theatre, teaching, and even everyday interactions? Some pandemic lessons have proved valuable. We have all acquired an appreciation of personal boundaries, a change that intimacy-awareness specialists have long argued for. Classes and conferences (and even in some cases productions) have become much more accessible for many thanks to lowered costs, universal recording, and audio captioning. So many old practices and conventions we thought indispensable now seem optional or even retrograde. Although I like being able to handle certain interactions with Zoom, even I worry about how the technology imposes troubling renegotiations of privacy and work–life balance. On a different level, all of us are much more conscious now of the fragility of our social and political norms. Most of us, hopefully, are more careful about recognizing the injustices against BIPOC folk and others that such norms can mask. As we emerge from the pandemic, we find ourselves sad, tired, and frazzled. But I hope we have also grown wiser and defter, inoculated against certain kinds of ignorance and poised to respond to future challenges. How long will such wisdom and dexterity last, I wonder? What booster shots may be required to reinforce them? [End Page ix] The fourteen pieces in this issue each capture a bit of the stress and isolation since the pandemic began. Each essay dwells on something essential about theatrical practice, teaching, and research, and each gestures beyond the present, lifting up durable reflections and questions for us to carry out of quarantine. I love how our three peer-reviewed essays for this issue represent the different forms that “scholarship” can take in our field. Nathan Stith, Aria Gastón-Panthaki, and Rachel Morris get us started with an impressive mixed-method study, “The Theatre Industry’s Essential Workers: Catalysts for Change.” Combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, the authors provide a snapshot of the pandemic year’s impact on professional theatre workers. Yet, far from relaying a list of laments...

The Right to Access Consular Assistance and Protection and its Relevance to the Architecture of a Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration

This essay dwells upon the right to access consular assistance and protection and its relevance to the architecture of a safe, orderly, and regular migration. The work first examines the relationship between the state and its citizens abroad, concentrating particularly on the concept of nationality as the legal bond connecting state and individual. It then presents an overview of the main international legal documents prescribing the right to consular assistance and protection; special emphasis is placed on the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The third and final part of this essay is dedicated to analyse the scope of the right to access consular assistance and protection in connection with Objective 14 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration. The essay concludes that the relevance of consular assistance and protection to a safe, orderly, and regular migration cannot be underestimated, once consular officials play a pivotal role in the implementation and safeguarding of fundamental rights of all migrants at all times.

A Traveller in One’s Homeland: Local Interest in Archaeology and Travel Writing in the Ottoman Greek World in 19th Century Anatolia

This article examines local scholarly interest in archaeology and travel writing in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. It concentrates on the work of an Ottoman Greek intellectual from the provinces, i.e. a travelogue entitled Periegesis eis tin Pamphylian (“Travels in Pamphylia”) written by Dimitri E. Danieloğlu, who belonged to one of the leading Greek families of Antalya in southern Anatolia. By examining this work and focusing on the profile of an Ottoman Greek writer in the provinces, this essay explores the practical meanings and outcomes of modernization, intertwined with a civilizational discourse and modes of local Orientalism. Particularly, the essay dwells on what was possibly local and Greek in this story and aims to situate Periegesis in a broader historical context. It discusses the connection of Periegesis to the European travelogue genre, the emergence of an investigative attention to ancient remains and contemporary society among the educated classes of the empire, and developments in the Ottoman Greek intellectual milieu in the 19th century.

The Abject Genealogies of Kenneth Halliwell (and Joe Orton)

Staging a queer methodological provocation, this essay brings together Julia Kristeva’s abject and Michel Foucault’s genealogy, formulating the concept of “abject genealogy.” By doing so, it argues for pursuing combinations—of ideas, individuals, language, and methodologies—that do not necessarily “fit” with each other. In order to make this theoretical argument, the essay dwells on the figure of Kenneth Halliwell, the boyfriend and eventual murderer of the British playwright, Joe Orton. It examines archival materials in order to construct a microgenealogy of Halliwell, and of particular interest are the library books that Halliwell and Orton defaced in the early 1960s. This essay contends that these artworks dramatize the queer methodological provocation described above. In the spirit of Halliwell and Orton, this essay uses their abject genealogical collage method to think through the political and intellectual potential of the improper, queer, and conflictual juxtapositions their artistic practice enacts.

CONDIÇÕES DA HOSPITALIDADE EM “THE DISPLACED PERSON” DE FLANNERY O’CONNOR

“The displaced person” (1954), conto da escritora norte-americana Flannery O’Connor, problematiza a questão do acolhimento de refugiados através do desen-cademento de zonas de conflito desmascaradores de feridas interculturais e sociais. Para além das decisões políticas, existe a mais difícil conciliação de vontades, pro-piciadora da transformação do refugiado em homo sacer, pelo não reconhecimento dos seus direitos, ou em força de trabalho a explorar. A hospitalidade convertida numa travessia de perigosidades várias constitui-se, assim, como topos privile-giado deste conto. O presente ensaio debruça-se sobre as irradiações resultantes das especificidades que a condição de refugiado implica tal como percecionado por Flannery O’Connor através de “The displaced person”

MGNREGA and Economic Empowerment of Women - Study of Indian Women

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was enacted in India in 2005. It guarantees 100 days of work and ensures at least 33 per cent of the women participation. Even though MGNREGA has played a substantial role in economically empowering women, it faces major challenges that restrict their participation. This essay dwells into the complexities faced by women in India and exposes various factors that limit the success of MGNREGA. The study finds that tenacious social norms, continued illegal presence of contractors, lack of proper childcare facilities and delayed payments are the crucial factors that restrict women participation. Policy implications for Indian Government are also put forward.