Imaginative Tradition Research Articles

The Cultural Codes of Home in Indian Cinema

The housing typology introduced by architects in India after independence departed dramatically from traditional settlement patterns. This break, as in Chandigarh, was an attempt to forge a new future. Concurrently, Indian cinema too set out to emphasize domesticity, yet one that alluded to real and imagined traditions. There were distinct differences, and between the two, it is cinema which ended up furnishing a more acceptable cultural and aesthetic model. Even today, cinema’s home contrasts sharply with the placeless geography of an actual house. This paper traces cinema’s typology of home in post-independence India.

Unearthing Practice: Networked Authenticity and Sutra Interment

abstract: In this article, I conduct a case study of sutra-interment rituals conducted at Buzōji in northwestern Kyushu. Placing twelfth-century practices of sutra burial into creative dialogue with twentieth-century practices of sutra excavation, I propose a model of "networked authenticity." Thinking about authenticity as networked—distributed across several interconnected nodes—rather than as generated from any single point provides a way of valuing devotional attention as sincere and meaningful, even when aspects of specific instances of devotion may be imperfect. This model opens a way to evaluate the efficacy of imagined traditions, rotted manuscripts, looted sites, and apocryphal texts by recognizing them as part of a larger, interconnected web whose strands may span centuries. I show that sacred texts are products of social negotiation around meaning and authenticity, not the sources of it. 摘要: 本稿では 12 世紀と 20 ・ 21 世紀武蔵寺経塚と写経埋納法会をケーススタディとして、信仰的な「信憑性」の構造を考察する。結論としては、信憑性の源流は一つ (例えば経典) ではなくて、却っていくらの要素、つまりネットワークで組み立てされる。

Reflections by C. S. Lewis on Biblical Narrative as a Literary Phenomenon: The Cathartic Example of the Youth Literary Cycle The Chronicles of Narnia

This essay provides a detailed exploration of interest in the Bible as a literary phenomenon. We start with Frye’s research in order to analyze academic perspectives that studied the Bible as a form of literary criticism. Among these perspectives, it is worth highlighting those that define biblical narrative as the principal element of the Western imaginative tradition. This phenomenon builds a set of interrelations that have shaped our specific literary tradition, imbuing it with this symbiosis between sacred and profane influences. Moving on to a second level of interpretation of the question at hand, we examine the encounter between secular and religious literatures as a consequence of the work initiated by Frye. The philological background of the writer C. S. Lewis is key and unprecedented in shedding light on the frontiers between reality and fantasy in the field of literary studies, as exemplified in The Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia books allow their readers to experience catharsis. This experience is foundational for the acquisition and cultivation of some character strengths, as the ancient Greek tradition held and put into practice centuries ago.

Reclaiming 'The Land', Restoring 'The Garden'? Georgian Georgic in the Modernist Moment and Beyond

To scrutinize georgic’s position between progress and tradition, this article will focus on the way those forces become legible in poems composed between the end of the First and Second World Wars. I will examine Vita Sackville-West’s long georgics The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) to argue that they indicate the scope of what is possible in the genre given the challenges of both modernity and modernism. Her poems demonstrate that, in seeking to navigate the changing material and cultural landscapes, the labour of maintaining an imaginative tradition can be both productive and problematic. The article will assess the way Sackville-West positions herself as a writer in relation to the figures of the agricultural labourer and gardener and to the classical tradition, as well as her claims about the language in which georgic can and should be written. Each poem will also be compared to the poetry and criticism of her modernist contemporary T.S. Eliot, with particular reference to The Waste Land, Four Quartets and his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Engaged in a struggle on both agricultural and cultural fronts, The Land and The Garden are prone to inconsistency and, even by their own standards, failure. But in these failures as well as their successes both poems are committed to finding a way of writing human engagement with the land and literature. As such, they can be instructively read in the present moment to prompt questions about the way we engage with land and language in the Anthropocene, negotiating between competing modes of writing and more broadly between natural and human agency.

Priestly playwright, secular priest: William Drury’s Latin and English drama

This article examines the literary career of the secular priest William Drury, with an emphasis on his drama. The Latin plays which he wrote for performance at the English College in Douai are among the best-known English Catholic college dramas of the Stuart era; markedly different from the Jesuit drama which dominates the corpus of British Catholic college plays, they suggest conscious dissociation from that imaginative tradition. Hierarchomachia: or the Anti-Bishop, a satirical closet drama which intervenes in the controversy surrounding the legitimacy and extent of England’s Catholic episcopacy, can also be attributed to Drury. In both his Latin and English drama, Drury draws imaginative stimulus from his ideological opposition to Jesuits and other regulars. Yet his characteristic blend of didacticism and comedy, and his sympathy for the plight of all English Catholics—surely fomented by the death of his Jesuit brother in the notorious “Fatal Vesper”—point to broader priestly concerns.

Dreaming Up Well Futures: Social Movements and Public Health

While much of public health history has focused on transformations stemming from biomedical discoveries, the role of social movements in public health transformation is often overlooked. Both the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements organized for better access to care and more quality healthcare for Black populations as well as other marginalized groups. It has been noted that social movements like these, that work toward social justice, are associated with improved population health. In exploring the Black Power Movement, through analysis primarily of the work of the Black Panther Party (BPP), I come to question and reflect on how a tradition and practice of radical imagination underpins the ability of social movements to be such powerful vehicles for transforming public health. And in turn, how this critical imagining must shape my own positionality and future work as a public health practitioner and physician dedicated to health, justice, and self-determination for all marginalized peoples.

Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David Wacks

Reviewed by: Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David Wacks Mary-Anne Vetterling Wacks, David. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. U of Toronto P, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-48750-501-1. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World is a very scholarly book that focuses on crusade literature written in Spain between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is carefully written, extensively researched and contains a fascinating new approach to the subject. In his introduction, Wacks situates Medieval Iberia in a multilingual Mediterranean environment. He convincingly portrays the difference between Northern European crusades (to the [End Page 135] East, especially to Jerusalem) and those located in Iberia, during the re-conquest. He mentions how the holy site of Santiago de Compostela and the relics in Seville and Toledo helped justify the conversion of Jews and Muslims in the name of a “holy war,” an ideal subsequently carried to the New World by the Conquistadores. In the first chapter, Wacks analyzes a little-known work of thirteenth-century (1250) crusade literature in Arabic (Andalusi) named Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinat in the greater context of Medieval Iberian, Latin, French and Arabic literatures. He carefully notes the Northern European (especially Arthurian), Iberian and Arabic influences on this work, in which the author’s hero converts the “pagans” (in this case, Christians) to Islam. He includes a fascinating segment on astrology. He translates into English key passages from this work, which are a delight to read, especially in the context of the background provided. The Ziyad is an example of crusader-inspired fiction from non-Christian-dominant societies. Chapter 2 focuses on the Libro del Caballero Zifar (1300). Wacks includes details about the Andalusi-French-Latin-Arabic background to this book and makes several extremely important points about its source and authorship. The Zifar is based on a tale of St. Eustace yet also draws on Arabic sources, with the use of Arabic place names and quasi-Arabic personal names and narrative motifs. Wacks convincingly demonstrates that the putative author of the Zifar, Ferrant Martínez (an elite member of the Church of Toledo) used the prologue to his book to publicize the return of the bones (sacred relics) of Cardinal Gudiel from Rome to Spain, thus strengthening the role of Christianity in Toledo. Furthermore Wacks finds two passages in the Zifar that appear to be from an imaginative tradition linked to Celtic and Arthurian literatures with parallel passages in the Ziyad. Zifar’s polygamy, argues Wacks, could also be inspired by Ziyad’s. The way in which Zifar is described as a hero-knight links him with the crusader/converter mentality. The Zifar illustrates Christian-Iberian crusading ideals being carried out in a fictionalized Eastern location. Wacks, in chapter 3, focuses on Ramon Lull’s work of fiction, Blaquerna (1287–1289), and its historical and literary background. He concentrates on Lull’s other writings as keys to an understanding of Blaquerna. He points out that Lull had a sophisticated understanding of Islam doctrine, thanks to his studies of Arabic, which he learned in order to convert the entire world to Christianity through persuasion. The hero Blaquerna is a religious person, a member of a chivalric crusading order, and even becomes Pope. Wacks has translated a number of passages from this book and provides their originals in Catalán in the footnotes. Blaquerna demonstrates a different kind of crusade mentality which is missionary in nature and consists of conquering through persuasion, not through battle. Chapter 4 includes a detailed analysis of the Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor (c. 1290) and its historical background. Wacks stresses the importance of the fact that this fictional tale (possibly translated from a manuscript in Arabic that is, however, most likely an invention of the author) is different from its French counterpart because of the role that Moorish Spain and Arabic culture play in the tale. The Crónica contains historical material interwoven with a fictional tale in such a way as to serve the political purposes of various Spanish monarchs. One fascinating detail from this story is that the daughter of Flores and Blancaflor becomes the mother of Charlemagne...

The Pteropoetics of Birdstrike

“The Pteropoetics of Birdstrike” is a work of multimedia scholarship consisting of a curatorial essay and a twenty-five minute audio piece. Working at the intersection of Sound Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Mobility Studies, the project examines the phenomenon of birdstrike: when birds collide with aircraft. The physical and radiophonic spaces of the airport create a contact zone of human and avian aeromobilities, with birdstrikes as vivid dramas of that shared space. I consider the implications of birdstrike through a critical essay that curates an audio composition that works through the selection and juxtaposition of found sound material. That material consists of recordings of air traffic control conversions during birdstrike incidents, recorded interviews with a pioneer in the field of forensic ornithology, and several poetry recitations. The recitations include the iconic “aerial image” of a skylark’s flight-song, paired with recordings of the actual bird. The result of the whole is to redirect a tradition of aerial imagination towards a new “pteropoetics” that understands the sky as a habitat shared with others.

Island Fictions, Intellectual Fictions: Dramas of Pacific Isolation in Stevenson, Wells, and Conrad

“Consider the Island,” Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: “the idea of the island.”1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan’s entry to it in 1521. “Those of us involved in Pacific studies,” Kerry Howe writes,2 “have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization”—in Greek myth, Plato’s Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative “The Shipwrecked Sailor” from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth’s editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan’s travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West’s imaginative involvement with the “South Sea.” It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that respect is probably Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” which does a good deal of myth-inversion of its own as regards Western views (political, economic, and cultural) of the islands of the Pacific as “tiny, confined spaces” at immense distances from both each other and the cosmopolitan epicentres of the First World. The peoples of Oceania, Hau’ofa argued, “did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions”:

Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus and the Anglo-Saxon Ecological Imagination

Modern scholarship on early medieval views of nature tends to rely too heavily on binary interpretations of positive and negative representations. This article uses an early ninth-century Anglo-Latin poem, Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus (“On the abbots” of an unknown Northumbrian monastic community), as a window into the ways in which early medieval people saw their natural world not as a passive space for human activity, but as an active participant in religious life. This reading comports with ecocritical interpretations of Æthelwulf’s poem alongside contemporary Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture. An understudied text, Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus provides an opportunity to understand how early medieval people could situate nature at a narrative’s center, crediting it with the capacity to shape religious behavior and belief. Æthelwulf’s work should be seen among a rich late antique and early medieval literary and artistic tradition of ecological imagination, in which nature was an interpretive key for articulating religious identity and community.

Healing the Mountain’s Wounds

In this article, I present two short, critical responses to two site-specific mountain performances: Xu Zhen’s 8848 Minus 1.86 and ten artists’ To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain. By introducing social, cultural and political backgrounds and analysing the aesthetic models of the two pieces, I will discuss how performance can be an aesthetic agent that ‘inflicts’ the ‘wounds’ that humans make on the natural environment and how a similar performance strategy can also be a way of healing those wounds. Conducting a critical reflection on these two cases, I investigate a certain type of performative strategy symbolized by the metaphor of ‘wounds’ and ‘healing’ to re-engage with the issue pertaining to nature and subjectivity. I argue that a performative aesthetic manifestation of an ethical conundrum could be the instrument needed to conduct such a re-engagement. Performance in nature environment sometimes provides cultural landscapes that Adorno rejects as both cultural conservatism and aestheticism. Many current aesthetic-political modalities sometimes fuel the current environmental crisis because of a distanced objectification, which treats nature as material and resource. Although appearing to be the antithesis of such a Cartesian perspective, the Kantian aesthetic actually follows the same logic that inflicts ‘wounds’ on our environment. 8848 Minus 1.86 parodies such a cultural logic of destruction of late capitalism, while To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain performs a healing ritual with the irony of a naive nostalgia for an imagined tradition. With its shamanic ludicrousness, performance can transform the objective geographical field into a liminal space of bodily reflectivity, not to provide a total solution but to offer a possibility of re-entering the mountains.

A ‘Boy's Own’ boy zone: The making of fascist men in Emilio De Martino's children's sporting novels

Sports editor of the Corriere della Sera, Emilio De Martino was one of Fascist Italy's most vitriolic sports journalists and prolific authors of sporting fiction. Analysis of his three novels for children published from 1941 to 1943 will consider how his works contributed, first, to the regime's attempt to forge and reinvent both real and imagined traditions through literature, and, second, to Fascism's drive to create a virile, physically and mentally strong youth. Offering a new perspective on Fascism's investment in and exploitation of sport, this article will reveal how a variety of the regime's policies, ideals, myths and goals were propagated and transmitted through fictional stories and adventures. The increasingly radical content and narratives will also show the regime's growing frustration at society's failure to respond to its mobilisation campaigns and increasing desperation following Italy's disastrous entry into the Second World War. Rather than hastening the maturity of young people to create a warrior race ready to risk all for the regime, Fascism's use of ‘Boy's Own’ heroes and fantasy space will be seen to have contributed to the illusion of strength that young Italians could not match and readiness that the regime could not offer.

Think small. The construction of imagined tradition in German "Land"-magazines

This article is the first linguistic analysis of a new category of lifestyle magazines in the German speaking countries, based on methods of corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis. Since the launch of the magazine LandLust in Germany in 2005, more than twenty publications of so called "land magazines" have appeared on the market, attracting millions of readers. Our research analyses land magazines as discursive events. We examine the specific combination of discourses land magazines are serving or creating by looking at the semiotic practices – writing and images – they manifest themselves by. Our results show that the magazine under scrutiny does not simply provide new forms of escapism but also positions itself politically in subtle ways as part of the traditional-conservative spectrum by reacting to metalinguistic discourses such as purism and feminist criticism.

Toward a Revised Understanding of Young Children’s Musical Activities: Reflections from the “Day in the Life” Project

Introduction: Versions of Musical Childhoods The tradition of developmental psychology has been of fundamental importance in providing versions of childhoods, particularly for the earliest years of childhood. However, in its focus on the individual child and in its search for behaviors assumed to be common across all children, developmental psychology has tended to be insufficiently interested in wider cultural processes. At the same time, the disciplines of ethnomusicology, the sociology of music, and popular music and media studies, valuable as they are in describing and theorizing the nature of sociocultural practices in music, have almost nothing to contribute to our understanding of practices in young children's particularly before they attend school. What insights we do have into children's lives are drawn mainly from studies of play activity when are attending out-of-home care and education (Campbell 1998; K. Marsh 2005)--much less are they drawn from family life in the home. There is little indeed concerning children's everyday experiences of music once they are in elementary (or equivalent) schooling that is not simply pedagogic in purpose (Barrett 2003; Campbell 1998). We suggest, then, that the integration of interdisciplinary accounts of young children's experiences is essential if we are to acquire fuller understandings of their musicality, the diversity of their practices, and how they develop musically within heterogeneous contexts. In taking a perspective on children's practices or musical lives, we wish to signal that we are interested in both the music that is presented to or selected by the child and the nature of children's responses. As Barrett observes, such seemingly sharp distinctions are often blurred: Children's music has a double-edged meaning in the realm of music education, at times interpreted as music made by adults for children, at other times interpreted as music made by children (2003:200). Existing accounts of music for young and the versions of childhoods that they convey place emphasis on traditional repertoires of children's songs: lullabies, play songs, and ring games. These repertoires have been collected and collated, those with an interest in children's folk lore studies leading the way. How they are enacted has been documented, primarily with attention to the detail of performance and less to the use of these songs and their integration into the fabric of young children's lives in homes and families. Moreover, in earliest childhood, the performance of children's songs sits very comfortably within imagined traditions and somewhat idealized versions of childhoods and parenting. Taking a perspective informed by wider cultural processes gains extra urgency given the rapidly changing nature of contemporary young children's lives (Prout 2005), a generation that is everywhere touched by phenomena loosely grouped under the term globalization--although, with Lull (1995) and many other commentators we do not intend to imply a homogenization of material circumstance or experience. Nevertheless there can be few communities where the tremendous pace of technological innovation, the changing nature of family life, and the possibility at least of making claims as to the commodification of childhood do not have some resonance. For many children, their home is an increasingly media-rich, technologized environment (J. Marsh 2004) in which digitized and other sounds emanate in a sometimes constant, certainly varied, and copious aural landscape from TV, video, DVDs, music players of all kinds, ringtones, toys with digitized tunes incorporated, mobiles, and other sound-making domestic devices (Young, Street, and Davies 2007). In many societies such innovations often take place without any contemporary changes to living conditions (Lull 1995). …

The Subversion of Modernity and Socialism in Mu Shiying’s Early Fiction

Mu Shiying’s first short story collection, North Pole, South Pole (Nanbeiji) from 1932, is usually seen as socialist or proletarian literature preceding his later modernist writings. I argue that this view needs to be revised. In one short story Mu deliberately parodies the social agenda of contemporary leftist writers. The protagonists are neither enlightened workers nor victims of social injustice. On the contrary, they turn to rage, misogyny, and self-righteous violence, and their motives are rooted in their sexual frustrations and inability to cope with modern life. Their righteous ideals are based on fiction and an imagined tradition. Mu’s construction of the fictive tradition plays an important part in these early short stories, and, in this respect, I compare them with Shi Zhecun’s writings.

The contributions of Jung and Loyola to the Western tradition of active imagination: Reflections on an experimental study of visualisers and the Spiritual Exercises

One night in 1939 while Jung was preoccupied by his seminar on Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises… he saw at the bottom of his bed a green-gold Christ, magnificently awesome but frightening… This green gold, which resembles the natural and organic viriditas (or greenery)… expresses (the alchemical) concept of a saviour who is not purely spiritual but actually lives in metal or stone or in matter. (Gaillard, 2006, p.356)In his war-time lectures on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, Jung portrayed them as a Western Christian account of the active imagination, aiming for transformation and unification of the exercitant. Empirical work on the Exercises has focused on the nature of the transformation of the exercitant.However, in 1992, the present author attempted research on the workings of the active imagination in the Exercises.A questionnaire relating to the way in which people might (or had) set about doing the specific ‘First Week’ Spiritual Exercises was given to a group of 10 exercitants and a contrast group of 10 psychotherapists and psychologists. Results suggested that ‘visualisers’ found the Exercises more accessible and helpful than ‘verbalisers’, irrespective of religious position.In 1997, the data from the study were reflected on in the light of recent work on the Ignatian imagination, the meaning of the Richardson measure, and guided imagery in education. Today (2012) particular attention is given to similarities between Loyola and Jung, who were (arguably) not only ‘visualisers’ but sufferers from childhood trauma, and affected by three archetypes (alchemist, healer, shaman) in the light of current work on the inner world of trauma and shamanism.

Creativity: does place matter?

This article argues that creativity has the greatest potential to flourish if a learning environment is embedded within a community that emphasises a deep sense of place. Yet in a globalised world, rootedness is often regarded as antithetical to creativity. But far from representing dead artefacts that are anti-modern and non-economic, culture and tradition provide the ideal base for innovation. Ireland's creative potential will only be realised if its strong tradition of metaphor, storytelling and imagination is fostered. Education that emphasises the arts rooted in place, provides the condition for an innovative self-reliant country, unique while cosmopolitan, well positioned to compete in a turbulent global economy.

The Lure of the Archive: New Perspectives from South Asia

The LureoftheArchive: New Perspectives from South Asia RubyLai The question of the archive has long occupied historians and non-historians alike, who have theorized the politics of archival research, unfolded the many meanings of the "archive," and questioned the politi cal and intellectual implications of its enticements. For a while now, scholars of South Asia have made key contributions to this critical explo ration. They have investigated the question of the archive and its relation to historiography; challenged the grand narratives (nation, empire, community, history, "family"1) assumed to be easily visible in the official archives; worked with the idea of the "fragment" (as something that inter rupts and opens up new questions and avenues of inquiry); raised critical questions about speech and silence ("the woman question"; "can the subaltern speak?"); and focused on understanding and troubling everyday forms of resistance and theorizing on behalf of the other.2 This array of writings has not only contested the category of what is "admissible" into the historical record but has also raised profound concerns about what constitutes the "real," problems of representation and chronology, the boundaries of history, and history's relationship to modernity. So why turn to the question once again? Perhaps because the question of the archive is not—and cannot be— obsolete. Three recently published studies that I discuss in this article are a testimony to its compelling power as concept and as material reality. The FeministStudies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Ruby Lai 93 94 RubyLai archive continues to obsess the historian and the non-historian (one of the authors under discussion here is a literary critic; the other two are historians) in productive ways. What we have in the writings of these three authors are three rather different kinds of engagement with the archive and with the question of the archive. In this essay, I underline the innovative possibilities for thinking histories, lives, figures, spaces—and the archive—that they open up. Even though only one of the three books under review deals directly with the question of the archive, all these works engage with archival uncertainties and conundrums in ways that make their projects even more fascinating. The subjects that these authors investigate are not "obvious" in any way. Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India opens with a discussion of a report on the male brothels of Karachi Books Discussed in This Article For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic." By Michael Fisher. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. By Rochona Majumdar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. that nineteenth-century scholar and explorer Richard Burton is supposed to have written but which has never been located; Michael Fisher, in The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic," analyzes the "identity" of a "prince" (who is not a prince by birth) in nineteenth-century colonial India; and Rochona Majumdar, in Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, examines the imagined tradition of arranged marriages. These are not the standard stories or familiar figures we usually meet in accounts of imperialism and of the colonial archive. When the sexual practices of colonized subjects, Begum Sombre, David Dyce, or the "traditional" Bengali family—what might be classed as the general subjects of these books—come into view in the colonial record, it is often as evidence of debasement, backwardness, insanity, or orientalness, as RubyLai 95 if they were already fully known and justifiably disparaged. What is more, even the most complex scholarly involvement does not always avoid an orientalized construction of people such as harem folk or "prostitutes." Often, in cases such as these, scholars have simply assumed that we already know all there is to know. Or perhaps the real problem is that we have failed to investigate many of these themes and figures on the assumption that there is little that they can tell us about "real" history. Arondekar's For the Record is...

The Rebranding of Francoism's Originary Violence in José Antonio Nieves Conde's Balarrasa

The originary violence of the Francoist state bore the mark of fascism--of the Falange, and of Italian and German assistance in the Civil War--but by 1950 geopolitical events had forced the regime to refashion its image to appeal to the West. Understandably reluctant to relinquish its capacity for the kind of violence needed to guarantee its preferred social order, the regime needed to legitimize its violence. I will argue that Jose Antonio Nieves Conde's 1950 film formulates a prescriptive allegory that endorses what today might be called a rebranding of the regime: the use of constituted structures--the most important of which, the Church, was already a pillar of the state--to legitimize the regime by transforming its image from military to church-oriented, and its doctrine from fascism to anti-communism, while retaining its capacity for violence. In Francoist Spain the cinema had been established as a site for the negotiation of national identity by films like Raza (Jose Luis Saenz de Heredia, 1942) and the historical epics produced by Cifesa in the late 1940s. But Balarrasa's engagement differs radically from its predecessors: where they displayed redemptive heroism in the face of past episodes of national decadence, here the decadence is relocated to the Francoist present, thus creating a space for the film to formulate its prescription. Produced by the expressly Catholic company ASPA, the film tells the story of Javier Balarrasa Mendoza (Fernando Fernan-Gomez), a Nationalist officer during the Civil War, who in a crisis of conscience decides to leave the military to become a priest. What is supposed to be a brief visit home before taking his final vows turns into a successful civil cruzada to reform the corrupted members of his family. The family was a common metaphor for the nation in the cinema of the time, and here familial disintegration suggests societal decadence. Importantly, after having renounced his weapons to become a priest, Mendoza retains the capacity to employ violence, and in situations where religious moral persuasion alone fails to reform the corrupted, he resorts to threats or even real violence by proxy, only fully retiring to religious life when familial order is restored. So while on its surface is in step with the paradigm shift away from militarism--a supposed transition from a policy of violent coercion intended to rid Spain of foreign contaminants to one of moral persuasion to keep Spaniards on a proper Catholic path--it formulates the clear but implicit message that when the state is faced with religion's inability to correct moral ills, a violent state of exception is necessary, the capacity for which must be retained by the regime. The prescription, in other words, is for a preservation of the regime's capacity for the originary--or constitutive--violence employed a decade earlier in the Civil War, and its legitimization through association with the church. By 1950, after a decade of Francoist rule--and the defeat of its Axis allies several years before--serious cracks appeared in the facade of what was supposed to have been a post-Republican return to the imagined tradition of a prosperous Catholic Spain, isolated through the policy of autarky from the ills of modernity that had contaminated the nation during the 1930s. As Carolyn P. Boyd writes, this self-imposed isolation was intended to reverse social and cultural modernization by extirpating the sources of contamination at home and preventing their further penetration from abroad (96), but a more immediate effect was the extension of the disastrous economic conditions of the war years throughout the decade of the 1940s: El constante incremento de los precios y el estancamiento de los salarios traen consigo, como inevitable consecuencia, un acusado descenso del nivel de vida de la poblacion y activan un sordido mercado negro. La miseria y la desnutricion alcanzan a elevadisimos porcentajes de la sociedad y el comercio ilegal favorece todo tipo de estafas y fraudes, desde las mermas en las cantidades a la adulteracion de los productos. …

If you speak fashion you speak Italian: Notes on present day Italian fashion identity

What is the meaning of national fashion in a globalized world Having or not having a national fashion upon which to rely seems to matter more and more for the success of brands operating in the contemporary market. This is so despite and perhaps because of production being increasingly transnational. The following article investigates how the project of a distinctive Italian fashion identity (made in Italy) is produced through discursive formulations and industrial practices in China and in Italy. It explores the meaning of made in Italy based on the perceived reproduction of historical or imagined traditions.