Intertwined Narratives Research Articles

All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Canadian Eastern Arctic

Between 1912 and 1947, when it sank, the icebreaker the RMS Nascopie, a British-made vessel commissioned by the HBC to be used as a supply ship, serviced the eastern Canadian Arctic. For an eight-year period during this time it also counted tourists among its passengers, alongside HBC personnel, missionaries, medical practitioners, scientists, and government officials. Life aboard the ship, wildlife, sea ice, inclement weather, and Inuit were all documented in the reports, written diaries, and visual records that emanated from the Nascopie as it operated under the many, often contradictory, guises of icebreaker, supply vessel, cruise ship, and sovereign symbol. Looking across photography, painting, and printmaking during the 1930s through to the present day, I consider the Nascopie as an anchor between the visual arts and the coastal landscape. Here, I position Inuit and non-Inuit perceptions of cultural and environmental change and continuity along Canada’s coastline within the transformative effect of colonial modernity. Image-making, notably photography and painting, aboard the Nascopie sought to reproduce the Canadian Arctic as an object of collective history and national identity. Confronting the often-anonymous Inuit and Arctic environments throughout the photography and painting of Lorene Squire and F.H. Varley, I identify how the Nascopie, as a colonial actor in the local landscape, persists in contemporary Inuit visual and cultural memory, most notably in the work of Shuvinai Ashoona. By untangling the inter-media and multi-temporal role of the Nascopie across past and present image cultures, I explore the intertwined narratives of coastal history, visual culture, and colonial modernity in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

The Historic Bond: The South African Liberation Movement and the Palestinian Struggle

In today’s world, we are witnessing one of the gravest crises humanity has faced: the ongoing genocide by Israel against the Palestinians. This situation has compelled South Africa to initiate legal proceedings against Israel at the ICJ, seeking accountability for the severe human rights violations and acts of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people. To fully grasp the significance of South Africa’s action, it’s essential to explore the deep-rooted and historic ties that bind South Africa’s liberation efforts to the Palestinian fight for freedom. This commentary delves into the intertwined narratives of oppression, resistance, and unity shared by these movements, illuminating the striking similarities between the apartheid regime in South Africa and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Additionally, the discussion sheds light on South Africa’s rationale for approaching the ICJ. In conclusion, the commentary underscores the solidarity between South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and the Palestinian liberation struggle, highlighting the importance of global solidarity, accountability, and collective endeavor in championing justice and equality.

Queering history: palimpsestuous bodies and theirstories in Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

ABSTRACT In her fantasy novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (2020), transnational Malaysian writer Zen Cho agitates and disrupts Malaysia’s heteropatriarchal and ethnocentric history as well as Eurocentric LGBT discourses with the revisionary reinscriptions of gender and sexuality to give voice to decolonial theirstories, particularly those belonging to the minority and subaltern community of queer identities. Emphasising difference and heterogeneity, these reinscriptions not only critique and rewrite – effectively queering – Malaysia’s monolithic historical past and postcolonial present, but also reveal the palimpsestuousness of queer bodies as the discursive boundaries between history and fiction, real and fantasy, self and other, are deliberately blurred, even dismantled, in the intertwined narratives of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Drawing on the intersections of queer and palimpsest, this essay moreover examines how the queering of history involves queer retrospection through the recuperation of forgotten or erased theirstories, notably the ‘queer’ religious discourse and history represented by the gender ambiguous and fluid Buddhist figure of Guanyin. By confronting a monolithic past, the novella ultimately illuminates the path for the speculation of queer futures.

CRUEL SPEECH:

This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia’s war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions (“agitainment”) featuring state officials, hack journalists, and prowar scholars. This elaborate discursive spectacle models a sadistic affect and seems designed to crush empathy towards Ukrainian civilians and among Russia’s own citizens. Anthropological and critical discursive approaches to the circulation of utterance suggest avenues for analysing the impacts, obvious and subtle, of these rhetorical and aesthetic devices in the context of terror directed both internationally and domestically.

Home-School Collaboration for Adolescents with Poor Wellbeing: A Qualitative Study of Parents’ Experiences

Semi-structured interviews of three fathers and nine mothers (aged 35–50) explore how parents experienced interacting with school personnel concerning their child’s wellbeing (aged 11–17). Through a thematic narrative analysis, two contrasting, intertwined narratives (collaboration and non-collaboration) were constructed. When characterized by appreciation, mutuality, and dynamics, interaction (collaboration) has the capacity to promote positive development and empower parents. Conversely, when characterized by rejection, neglect, and stagnation, interaction (non-collaboration) might impair development and leave parents in despair. To establish and maintain constructive home-school collaboration, we recommend a family-centered approach that addresses adolescents’ needs and acknowledges parents’ perspectives.

Association: A Testament to Women's Preservation Efforts and Social Reforms in the 19th Century

The Mount Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA), founded in 1853, stands as a testament to the pivotal role women played in the preservation of America's historical landmarks. This paper delves into the intricate history of MVLA's unwavering commitment to preserving President George Washington's historic home, Mount Vernon, amidst the broader backdrop of women's evolving roles and their increasing involvement in social reforms during the 19th century. By examining the association's preservation efforts, the paper highlights the intertwined narratives of historic conservation, women's empowerment, and the broader socio-political transformations of the era. Through a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by MVLA, the support from key figures like Edward Everett, and the innovative strategies employed to maintain Mount Vernon, this study underscores the significance of MVLA not just as a preservation entity but as a beacon of women's resilience, determination, and contribution to American history.

Interpreting and Power: Re-articulating Colonial Memories in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

This article investigates the damage enforced on interpreters in colonial and postcolonial settings. It explores the subordination of an African interpreter working for an American missionary in the Congo, as presented in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998). This is an unexplored area in the novel, and the article shows how the interpreter falls amongst the subaltern groups. The intertwined narratives about the colonization of the Congo and the oppression of women parallel the marginalization of the interpreter. The latter evokes former colonial memories of the subjugation, even the enslavement of translators in the former Portuguese Empire. Theoretically, the article is underpinned by Micheal Cronin’s ideas on translation and power and Lawrence Venuti’s poststructuralist views, which devalue symmetrical approaches to translation. Finally, this work argues how translation can be a means of subordination by the oppressor and empowerment by the oppressed. Ultimately, the interpreter’s independent voice becomes a symbolic revelation of the means marginalized groups should use to overcome dominance and imperialism.

Minnediplomati i grenseland. De russisk-norske patriotiske minneturene 2011–2019

This article traces the development and narrative staging in Russian media of the so-called Russian-Norwegian patriotic memory tours that took place from 2011 to 2019 to celebrate a heroic story of WWII Red Army soldiers and Norwegian partisans in Soviet intelligence service. The article concludes that the tours were initiated by Russian state and state-affiliated actors who exported military-patriotic symbols and perspectives across the border to Norway, and actively promoted several intertwined narratives; about joint Russian-Norwegian heroic war history; about historically peaceful relations in the North between Norway and Russia; and about Norway as a friendly Nato-member neighbor that rightfully honors the memory of the Soviet army and its crucial role in the victory over Nazi Germany. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, these narratives were supplemented by Russian claims about a contemporary fascist threat spreading from Ukraine and the Baltics. The statements emphasized the acute importance of the patriotic memory tours to resist allegedly growing neo-fascism in today’s Europe. The article argues that the narrative staging of the tours must be read in the context of the Kremlin’s ongoing memory wars with former Soviet republics and Eastern bloc states and Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine since 2014.

Իսլամիդերըքրդականազգայնականությանառաջացմանմեջ

This article delves into the intricate relationship between Kurdish nationalism and Islam during its formative years and subsequent development. The historical backdrop reveals a profound interconnection, with profound implications for the shaping of Kurdish national identity. Kurdish nationalism's emergence and evolution were deeply enmeshed with Islamic influences. This connection found its expression through the pivotal roles played by Sufi brotherhoods and Islamic educational institutions known as madrasas. Sufi brotherhoods occupied a central position in the lives of Kurds, and it is notable that a significant majority of prominent Kurdish nationalist figures were devout followers of Sufism, nurtured within the nurturing embrace of these brotherhoods. In their turn, medreses, functioning as indispensable Islamic educational establishments, exerted a substantial influence on the rise of Kurdish national sentiments and the eventual crystallization of Kurdish nationalism. Notably, the inclusion of Kurdish language instruction within the curriculum of medreses played a pivotal role in fostering a distinct national identity, thereby providing a sturdy foundation for the emergence of Kurdish nationalism. This article sheds light on the intertwined narratives of religion and nationalism in the Kurdish context, offering valuable insights into the complex historical forces that have contributed to the shaping of Kurdish identity and the enduring relationship between Kurdish nationalism and Islam.

Indonesian Nationalism in Three Acts: The Intertwined Narratives of National Identity and the Subaltern Woman in Three Iconic Indonesian Novels

This article examines the evolution of the intertwined narratives of nation and womanhood in three iconic Indonesian novels: Belenggu (1940), Sri Sumarah (1975), and Durga Umayi (1991), each of which, respectively, depicts female protagonists wrestling with life challenges during three different historical epochs of the Indonesian nation-state. I argue that these novels portray three distinct conceptions of an evolving Indonesian nationalism as reflected through the struggles of these characters. The first of these, Belenggu, highlights the hybrid nature of emerging Indonesian nationalism through the symbolic deployment of hybrid music–keroncong–as a central trope. The second novel, Sri Sumarah, depicts the culturally idealized qualities of a submissive woman–embodied in its titular character–and the gendered nature of nationalism. The third, Durga Umayi, kaleidoscopically maps the biography of its heroine onto the triumphs and defeats of the nation as experienced from the perspective of the subaltern subject, thus depicting the project of nation-building as seen, experienced, and lived from an inferior social position. Taken together these three novels dramatize three different stages of Indonesia as “imagined community”: from the promise and the peril of the early years as an emerging nation-state, to its division along ideological lines before and after the 1965 coup, and ultimately to the failed promises attending the spread of neoliberalism and globalization in subsequent decades.

A Glance into Public Memory: Which Public? Whose Memory? The Demise of Red Location Cultural Precinct

AbstractIn 2021, the international award‐winning South African Red Location Museum (RLM), situated within the Red Location Cultural Precinct and termed a ‘national site of struggle’ by Noero Wolff Architects, remains derelict. This paper is about the continuing narrative of state‐built infrastructure being held hostage to community protests. It focuses on the museum and its depiction of the public/s that made Red Location. The intensity of community protest has had a significant impact on the Red Location Cultural Precinct with the museum's closure in 2013. As I shall argue in the paper, more attention should be paid to the questions of museum public/s and whose memory heritage projects intend to document. Furthermore, the place of cultural institutions such as township museums requires a review of the idea itself. Given this context, I discuss two intertwined narratives, one, the concept of the promise of infrastructure, and the second, the impact of politics on heritage.

Between Commerciality and Authenticity: The Imaginary of Social Media Influencers in the Platform Economy

AbstractInfluencers are highly visible tastemakers who professionally publish content on social media platforms. In their work, influencers are tasked with reconciling their contradictory positioning—they are both promoters of consumption, and marshals of “authentic” sociality and community. Influencers thus organize their social world in ways that enable them to justify moving between two contradictory poles of commerciality and authenticity. In this article, we argue that these navigations necessitate “influencer imaginaries.” This concept was drawn from, first, in-depth interviews with 35 Chilean social media influencers, and second, from participant observation with advertising agencies who hire them. The influencer “imaginary” sheds light on how individuals experience and justify the commodification of the self and forms of knowledge as subject to valuation in markets when they communicate their brands. Thus, the imaginary was shown to emerge from three intertwined narratives: to resolve information asymmetries in markets; differentiate influencers from celebrities and advertisers as average people; and negotiate self-definition with regard to agencies, audiences, and themselves.

Same way you became Cesar."

In this essay, we debate the image of the Roman Empire represented in films produced by mainstream Hollywood cinema, whose Jewish-Christian ideological matrix placed Rome as the image of evil instead of an excellent idea in the North American version. In contrast, we will analyze Fellini's film Satyricon, which, distanced from the conventions of the historical film produced during the Cold War, created a dreamlike image of Rome and its Empire. Secondly, we will see the historical context of Petronius' work situated at the end of the reign of Emperor Nero. At the time, diversified sexuality presented man's power as a phallic power, which penetrates and rapes as a supremacy strategy. The Emperor is an actor-governor employing wiles and violence to reach the throne and maintain himself there. Petronius portrays the emergence of a new female sensuality whose morals oscillated between Vestal's virginal purity, the wife's pudititas, and sexual bestiality. At the same time, Fellini's film recreates the cultural environment of the classical world shaped by literature and the image of the city of Rome as Cosmopolis or Anthopolis. The ambiguous characters move freely and incessantly through the corners of the Roman Empire. The struggle for power and the representations of pagan religiosity show human beings surrendered to their cunning as a strategy for survival and overcoming existential evils. In conclusion, we will see that both works, Petronius' Satyrica and Fellini's Satyricon, present themselves with their independent and intertwined narratives, composing the account of a journey like the Odyssey, metaphor of the incompleteness of human life and the impermanence of the sexual pleasure and the transience of power.

Individuation in The Seventh Day of Creation: A Jungian Analysis

Jung's individuation process is associated with the shadow, anima, self, sage, and persona archetypes, during which the protagonist achieves self-discovery and self-awareness. Abdel Khaliq al-Rikabi’s The Seventh Day of Creation is one of the most popular Arabic novels in the twentieth century which has postmodern techniques including polyphony and time travel to present two main distinct narratives. If these intertwined narratives are considered separately, one can detect therein the archetypes informing Jung's idea of individuation. Most notably, the function of these archetypes in advancing the author's goal, which is a kind of self-discovery and creation of the novel, could be recognized in the novel’s first narrative, namely, Kitab al-Kotob (Sirah al-Zatiyeh). The psychological analysis of this narrative shows that the author encounters unconscious archetypal elements such as shadow, anima, and sage; toward the end of the process of individuation, he becomes aware of how the form and content of the narrative are created. The first story is Sirah al-Zatiyeh which presents the process of self-discovery of the author himself, undergoes the process of individuation in order to collect the manuscripts of Rawouq. In a three-step process, the novel’s protagonist sets out on a symbolic journey to know himself and achieve self-discovery, after encountering the archetypes of the shadow (Badr and the poet), the anima (Warqa), and the sage (Shabib).

Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing, by Heather Tilley

Reviewed by: Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing by Heather Tilley Karen Bourrier (bio) Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing, by Heather Tilley; pp. xiii + 272. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.99. In the nineteenth century, blindness assumed new meanings as the number of people with visual impairments increased, and new technologies, especially those in book printing, arose to meet this need. Almost twenty years after Mary Klages's Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (1999), which examined blindness in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Heather Tilley's Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing examines both the material and metaphorical implications of blindness on the other side of the Atlantic. Her analysis is set against the backdrop of an increase in the number of blind people in the nineteenth century, only one in twelve of whom were born blind, through causes varying from industrial accident and poor working conditions, to smallpox, scarlet fever, and ophthalmia, an infectious disease that travelled to England from Egypt via the Napoleonic Wars. Tilley's careful analysis undermines common misconceptions about blindness as a disability, including the idea that blindness means a lifetime of complete darkness; instead, she demonstrates a continuum of visual impairment in the nineteenth century, from myopia to cataracts, and shows the ebb and flow of vision throughout individual lifetimes. In response to the increasing number of people with visual impairments, nineteenth-century inventors developed new technologies aimed at increasing literacy, from William Moon's embossed type to braille. Tilley analyzes visual impairment in the nineteenth century through what she calls a phenomenological approach, which shifts our attention from an idealized, metaphorical understanding of blindness to one that is attentive to the material circumstances of disability. She proceeds to analyze blindness and writing in two parts, which are organized roughly chronologically. Part 1, "Blind People's Writing Practices," traces the intertwined narratives of visual impairment and writing, including chapters on William Wordsworth, the development of raised print systems, and memoirs by the blind. In her work on blind memoir, Tilley uncovers a networked community of visually impaired writers, including William Hanks Levy, John Bird, and Hippolyte van Landeghem, who used writing to make money and advocate for the blind community. In part 2, "Literary Blindness," Tilley [End Page 490] turns to several canonical examples. Her chapter on Jane Eyre (1847) and Aurora Leigh (1856) challenges the critical chestnut that blinding is a form of symbolic castration, reading blindness in the context of biographical material from Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She then moves to Charles Dickens, reading his encounter with Laura Bridgman, a young deaf and blind girl whom the novelist met on his 1842 tour of North America, as well as his depiction of Esther Summerson's brief and often overlooked loss of sight in Bleak House (1852–53). Her choice to focus in this chapter on David Copperfield (1849–50), whose protagonist she reads metaphorically as a "blind" writer, is puzzling, given that there is no dearth of characters with visual impairments in Dickens, and that her stated intention in the book is to recover the material circumstances of blindness in a critical tradition that often reads disability only metaphorically (13). By contrast, Tilley achieves such a materially grounded reading of blindness and writing in her fascinating recovery of Frances Browne, who lost her sight after contracting smallpox as an infant and was contemporarily known as "The Blind Poetess of Ulster." Tilley offers a reading of Browne's little-known novel, My Share of the World (1861), alongside Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872), which is now a central text in Victorian disability studies. Interestingly, Browne's novel contains a tragic blind heroine, while Collins, the sighted novelist, offers a more positive representation of a blind heroine. The book concludes with a reading of George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). Throughout Blindness and Writing, Tilley is attentive to the relationship between blindness and literary form, arguing that new technologies, such as embossed print, which aimed to make literature accessible to those with visual impairments, shaped both the experience of blind people as...

The Complex Racial Politics ofSmart People

Working from the premise that theatre and performance can yield valuable insights about the operations of race, this article explores the dramaturgical strategies Lydia R. Diamond deploys in her 2014 comedy, Smart People, to interrogate the complexities of racial politics in the twenty-first century. I trace how, through the intertwined narratives it weaves for its four protagonists, Smart People engages important debates about the rebiologization of race, the psychic costs of stereotyping, and the vexed representational politics of US theatre, thereby bringing into sharp relief the ways in which narratives of racial progress obscure the material ramifications of race in contemporary life. Even as it trades in the signs of progress the United States has made on race matters, Smart People illustrates for its audiences why a proper reckoning with racial formations, ideologies, attitudes, practices, and beliefs remains as urgently needed as ever. In so doing, the play participates in and extends a long tradition within black expressive culture of using theatre and performance to provoke social action and change.

State of the Field: New Directions for American Jewish Migration Histories

State of the Field:New Directions for American Jewish Migration Histories Libby Garland (bio) Jewish Migration Histories in the Present Moment On April 13, 2017, several hundred local Jewish activists, together with allies from New York's Muslim community and city government, rallied in lower Manhattan for a "seder in the streets." Organized by the group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the event linked the themes of Passover—the intertwined narratives of Jewish wandering and liberation—to the urgent issues of the present. Displaying pieces of blue fabric to evoke the waves of the Red Sea, protesters marched from City Hall to Foley Square and the federal courthouse. They called on the city to make good on its promise to remain a "sanctuary city" in the face of the Trump administration's increasingly harsh immigration law enforcement. Activists also linked the protection of immigrant residents to local police reform, calling for changes such as an end to "broken windows" policing strategies.2 "Broken windows" policing practices, meaning the aggressive policing of minor infractions, sweep many New Yorkers of color into the criminal justice system, and can wind up funneling undocumented New Yorkers from there into the federal immigration machinery of detention and deportation.3 [End Page 423] "Seder-in-the-streets" protesters explicitly drew not only on the biblical story of Exodus but also on the more recent history of Jewish migration as a frame for their stand on current immigration politics. Dania Rajendra was one of six protesters arrested for blocking the streets in an act of civil disobedience during the "seder in the streets." She told Haaretz, "I'm the proud daughter of an immigrant and see around me how my immigrant friends and neighbors are scared about the collaboration between police and ICE. I need New York to be the kind of city that it was for my Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms and Eastern Europe, and for my own dad. That's the city I want to be a part of, the vision of liberation I see when I do seder with my friends and family."4 The JFREJ "seder in the streets" was one of many protests in the past year at which American Jews mobilized their own migration history in service of a pro-immigrant politics. At rallies against new policies limiting refugee admissions, for example, Jewish protesters have donned buttons and carried signs proclaiming messages such as "my people were refugees too."5 Such connections made in the realm of politics raise important questions for scholars who study the role of migration in American Jewish history. I do not mean questions about the validity of historical claims activists make on their signs or buttons or in statements to the press (if "my people" means "Jews in general," for example, then such statements as "my people were refugees too" are clearly a historical stretch, even if they are powerful statements of solidarity). Rather, I mean that the language of the protesters pushes us toward questions about the relationship between American Jewish migration histories and other histories–legal, political, cultural and social histories of movement and settlement, alienness and citizenship, belonging and exclusion. The protesters' language points us, as well, toward questions about the meanings American Jewish migration histories might hold in the present, supercharged moment.6 [End Page 424] American Jewish Migration Histories To the readers of this journal, "American Jewish immigration history" is bound to be the more familiar phrase. But I want to suggest that "American Jewish migration histories" could be a more productive term. The words "American" and "migration" might seem to jostle uncomfortably in that formulation, or to suggest a certain instability about where the borders of inquiry should lie for historians of Jews. "Migration" gestures at international or transnational histories; "American," classically, to nation-based ones. Yet, as recent scholarship makes clear, the study of global migrations and the study of American Jewish history matter for each other, and can continue to matter. I will return to this below. For many years, historians of American Jews who studied migration were most focused on immigration—the stories of successive waves of Jews arriving from overseas, especially the...

«Strange Means of Governing»: The Spanish Restoration in European Perspective (1813–1820)

«Strange Means of Governing»: The Spanish Restoration in European Perspective (1813–1820) This article proposes a reassessment of the Spanish Restoration through a study of its connections with, and departures from, European post-war strategies. Dominating accounts focus on two intertwined narratives: the definitive displacement of Spain from the category of great power, and the political involution of King Ferdinand VII's reactionary monarchy. These aspects were highlighted by numerous contemporaries and have been considered by most historians, yet they would benefit from a reappraisal that is comparative and considers transnational entanglements. This article addresses whether the character of the Spanish Restoration differed from the processes that were experimented in other parts of Europe and, if so, what the consequences of its particular situation were both for Spain and the international order.

Competing Demands, Intertwined Narratives: Ethnic, Gender and National Identities in Alison Wong�s

This article focuses on Alison Wong’s 2009 novel As the Earth Turns Silver , the first published by a New Zealand writer of Chinese descent, and considers the expectations and pressures placed on the author as a result of her ethnic background. As argued in the article, the “competing demands” affecting her as a novelist are solved by reconstructing Chinese New Zealand history as interrelated to the history of other New Zealanders. This is done, primarily, by fictionalising the interracial love story between the two protagonists, a Chinese man and a Pakeha woman, but also by contextualising their romance within a range of interrelated debates on ethnic, gender and national identity. Ultimately, Wong’s creative choices allow her to recover the silenced Chinese voice while exploring issues that were and continue to be of upmost importance for New Zealanders of all ethnic backgrounds.

Shadowland: Swiss Identity and Urs Faes’s Ombra

Published as the discussion of stolen wealth and Switzerland’s complicity in the events and aftermath of the Holocaust had begun in earnest, Urs Faes’s 1997 novel Ombra is read here as an intricate critique of Switzerland’s long-held identification as a neutral power. This article argues that the three intertwined narratives featuring ekphrastic explorations of fifteenth-century paintings by Piero della Francesca bring attention to the duality of Switzerland’s complicated contemporary identity.