Queensbridge is the largest government-housing scheme in the US. The building opened in 1939 to house lower income families. In terms of its initial architectural structure, Queensbridge is designed to capture natural sunlight, and is a modernist state-funded venture typical of its time. This article considers the formative modernist design of Queensbridge as a backdrop to the hip-hop artist Nas’s 1994 masterpiece Illmatic. Illmatic is the focus of recent academic studies, many of which hail Nas for the formal ingenuity of his lyrics and his songs’ implicit socio-political content: the content of which deals with the systematic perpetration of criminality among black youth in the post-Reagan period. Nas’s quasi-realist account of growing up in Queensbridge, his immersion in a life of crime, to his discovery of hip-hop as an art form, has since assumed legendary status. The article considers Illmatic from the perspective of ‘time’ in two specific contexts. The first takes empirical reality as its concern, exploring the album’s coming-of-age narrative as a story about growing up in the poverty of the New York ghetto. A second iteration, the second strand, concerns anti-eschatological renderings of time. Taking this second strand to be an iteration of ‘utopian time,’ the analysis turns to Lucy Sargisson’s transgressive utopianism. Illmatic, I argue, instantiates the coming-into-being of Nas as subject and furnishes the tools to critically transgress categorical binds involved in representing subjectivity. Illmatic is an album about representation and its utopian critique.
{"title":"Time Capsule: Nas’s Illmatic (1994) as an Iteration of Utopian Time","authors":"Dara Waldron","doi":"10.16995/OLH.393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.393","url":null,"abstract":"Queensbridge is the largest government-housing scheme in the US. The building opened in 1939 to house lower income families. In terms of its initial architectural structure, Queensbridge is designed to capture natural sunlight, and is a modernist state-funded venture typical of its time. This article considers the formative modernist design of Queensbridge as a backdrop to the hip-hop artist Nas’s 1994 masterpiece Illmatic. Illmatic is the focus of recent academic studies, many of which hail Nas for the formal ingenuity of his lyrics and his songs’ implicit socio-political content: the content of which deals with the systematic perpetration of criminality among black youth in the post-Reagan period. Nas’s quasi-realist account of growing up in Queensbridge, his immersion in a life of crime, to his discovery of hip-hop as an art form, has since assumed legendary status. The article considers Illmatic from the perspective of ‘time’ in two specific contexts. The first takes empirical reality as its concern, exploring the album’s coming-of-age narrative as a story about growing up in the poverty of the New York ghetto. A second iteration, the second strand, concerns anti-eschatological renderings of time. Taking this second strand to be an iteration of ‘utopian time,’ the analysis turns to Lucy Sargisson’s transgressive utopianism. Illmatic, I argue, instantiates the coming-into-being of Nas as subject and furnishes the tools to critically transgress categorical binds involved in representing subjectivity. Illmatic is an album about representation and its utopian critique.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41868207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper takes Pride (2014) as a focal point for a discussion of a popular European cinema that looks back on key moments in the twentieth-century political past(s) through the re-enactment of queer scenarios of activism and resistance. My contention is that, as significant as identity politics is the notion of movement itself. Pride ’s intersectional retro-politics injects queer moves into heritage cinema, literally including musical moments of (camp) dance and song that dislodge characters from constraining social spaces and sedimented subjectivities. I look at Pride alongside other examples of new heritage filmmaking through their use of the movement-image (Deleuze) to retrieve the memory of political moments in history through queer moves. Encounters set to music underscore the road trip of a Swiss feminist journalist and her team of radio broadcasters adrift in the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in Les Grandes Ondes (a l’ouest)/Longwave (2013); out-of-step punk musical performances punctuate a queer coming-of-age girl narrative set in the 1980s in El Calentito (2005); dance scenes of queer female eroticism derail heteronormative trajectories of marriage and family in Anni felici/Those Happy Years (2013) and La Belle saison/Summertime (2015), two stories that intersect with the international women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. These films suggest a European heritage cinema as interzone (Randall Halle, 2014). I explore the ways in which these films eschew nostalgia via the stress on movement, queer performativity and the possibility of (not yet formed) communities. By retrieving Pride in (and for) a broader European cinematic context, this paper makes a move towards a reading of the film’s intersectional politics as a timely response to the incompleteness of the European social project of integration.
本文以《骄傲》（2014）为焦点，讨论了一部受欢迎的欧洲电影，该电影通过再现激进主义和抵抗的酷儿场景，回顾了20世纪政治史上的关键时刻。我的论点是，与身份政治一样重要的是运动本身的概念。Pride的交叉复古政治为传统电影注入了酷儿的元素，从字面上讲，包括（营地）舞蹈和歌曲的音乐时刻，这些音乐时刻将角色从约束的社会空间和沉淀的主观主义中驱逐出来。我将《骄傲》与其他新传统电影制作的例子放在一起，通过他们使用运动图像（德勒兹），通过酷儿的动作来找回历史上政治时刻的记忆。音乐背景下的邂逅突显了一位瑞士女权主义记者和她的广播团队在Les Grandes Ondes（a l’ouest）/Longave（2013）的葡萄牙康乃馨革命中的公路之旅；不合时宜的朋克音乐表演打断了20世纪80年代《El Calentito》（2005）中关于成年女孩的酷儿叙事；安妮·费利奇/《那些快乐的岁月》（2013）和拉贝勒·赛森/《夏日时光》（2015）中酷儿女性色情的舞蹈场景破坏了婚姻和家庭的非规范轨迹，这两个故事与20世纪70年代的国际妇女解放运动相交。这些电影暗示了一个欧洲传统电影院作为中间地带（Randall-Halle，2014）。我探索了这些电影通过强调运动、酷儿表演和（尚未形成的）社区的可能性来避免怀旧的方式。通过在更广泛的欧洲电影背景下检索《骄傲》，本文对电影的交叉政治进行了解读，作为对欧洲社会一体化项目不完整性的及时回应。
{"title":"From Europe with Pride: Heritage, Community and Queer Moves","authors":"Belén Vidal","doi":"10.16995/OLH.386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.386","url":null,"abstract":"This paper takes Pride (2014) as a focal point for a discussion of a popular European cinema that looks back on key moments in the twentieth-century political past(s) through the re-enactment of queer scenarios of activism and resistance. My contention is that, as significant as identity politics is the notion of movement itself. Pride ’s intersectional retro-politics injects queer moves into heritage cinema, literally including musical moments of (camp) dance and song that dislodge characters from constraining social spaces and sedimented subjectivities. I look at Pride alongside other examples of new heritage filmmaking through their use of the movement-image (Deleuze) to retrieve the memory of political moments in history through queer moves. Encounters set to music underscore the road trip of a Swiss feminist journalist and her team of radio broadcasters adrift in the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in Les Grandes Ondes (a l’ouest)/Longwave (2013); out-of-step punk musical performances punctuate a queer coming-of-age girl narrative set in the 1980s in El Calentito (2005); dance scenes of queer female eroticism derail heteronormative trajectories of marriage and family in Anni felici/Those Happy Years (2013) and La Belle saison/Summertime (2015), two stories that intersect with the international women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. These films suggest a European heritage cinema as interzone (Randall Halle, 2014). I explore the ways in which these films eschew nostalgia via the stress on movement, queer performativity and the possibility of (not yet formed) communities. By retrieving Pride in (and for) a broader European cinematic context, this paper makes a move towards a reading of the film’s intersectional politics as a timely response to the incompleteness of the European social project of integration.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48575304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984–5 miners’ strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retro-heritage . By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia’s presumed conservatism sits alongside the ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future. 1
{"title":"Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage","authors":"L. Bayman","doi":"10.16995/OLH.324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.324","url":null,"abstract":"Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984–5 miners’ strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retro-heritage . By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia’s presumed conservatism sits alongside the ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future. 1","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48550974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In December of 2014, when Pride was released on DVD in the United States, a number of critics and activists criticised discrepancies between the film’s earlier promotional materials and the DVD’s cover, namely the omission of certain details from the synopsis and imagery. Erasing a banner brandishing the slogan ‘gays and lesbians support the miners’ and omitting explicit references to queer people from its synopsis, the DVD’s packaging drew extensive criticism and was labelled an example of ‘straightwashing’ (Child, 2015). As the US DVD release of Pride demonstrates, paratexts, the various ancillary materials that surround a film and its release, harbour the capacity to ‘neutralize and domesticate potential threats a narrative poses to a social or cultural status quo’ (Cavalcante, 2013: 86). Andre Cavalcante explains that whilst materials like promotional posters and DVD covers may be used to ‘highlight themes identified as attractive by marketers and promoters’ such materials may also serve to ‘subvert those [aspects of a film] designated as culturally troubling’ (2013: 87). Reflecting on this latter issue of paratextual domestication and its impact on queer cinema and visibility, this paper takes the US DVD release of Pride as a case study. Analysis of the US DVD cover and the controversy it attracted serves to highlight both the problems with the US DVD release as well as the immense attention and visibility it unintentionally instigated.
{"title":"Pride and Pudency: Paratextual Domestication and the US DVD Release of Pride","authors":"Chloe Benson","doi":"10.16995/OLH.318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.318","url":null,"abstract":"In December of 2014, when Pride was released on DVD in the United States, a number of critics and activists criticised discrepancies between the film’s earlier promotional materials and the DVD’s cover, namely the omission of certain details from the synopsis and imagery. Erasing a banner brandishing the slogan ‘gays and lesbians support the miners’ and omitting explicit references to queer people from its synopsis, the DVD’s packaging drew extensive criticism and was labelled an example of ‘straightwashing’ (Child, 2015). As the US DVD release of Pride demonstrates, paratexts, the various ancillary materials that surround a film and its release, harbour the capacity to ‘neutralize and domesticate potential threats a narrative poses to a social or cultural status quo’ (Cavalcante, 2013: 86). Andre Cavalcante explains that whilst materials like promotional posters and DVD covers may be used to ‘highlight themes identified as attractive by marketers and promoters’ such materials may also serve to ‘subvert those [aspects of a film] designated as culturally troubling’ (2013: 87). Reflecting on this latter issue of paratextual domestication and its impact on queer cinema and visibility, this paper takes the US DVD release of Pride as a case study. Analysis of the US DVD cover and the controversy it attracted serves to highlight both the problems with the US DVD release as well as the immense attention and visibility it unintentionally instigated.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46720902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores compelling and specific cases from France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which animals were formally executed for crimes. The so-called ‘medieval animal trials’ were cases in which animals were accused and sentenced for harming persons or property. In secular cases, a domestic animal (generally pigs, horses, and bulls) could be charged for killing a human and consequently be condemned to death, usually by hanging. Receipts relating to such cases can be found in seigneurial accounts which duly note the costs associated with the execution. An under-studied source on the animal trials, these records reveal the rhetorical strategies used to inform the treatment of an animal accused of committing a crime. This article looks specifically at the role of procedure as a discursive frame that transformed an offending animal into a criminal. A close examination of the receipts reveals that the trials share several features, which not only highlights the importance of following certain legal procedures, but also places the animal and its actions into pre-existing legal categories (that of ‘criminal’ and ‘crime’). These procedures include providing the appropriate judicial personnel and the right equipment for the execution. The condemned animal thus occupied an ambiguous space as a nonhuman that had been placed in legal categories made by and made for human subjects. By treating the animal as a criminal, these records provide a window into the medieval story of legal personhood and the fluidity of its borders, while also challenging the history of the human-animal relation as one built on difference and inferiority.
{"title":"Criminalising Animals in Medieval France: Insights from Records of Executions","authors":"Lesley B MacGregor","doi":"10.16995/OLH.319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.319","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores compelling and specific cases from France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which animals were formally executed for crimes. The so-called ‘medieval animal trials’ were cases in which animals were accused and sentenced for harming persons or property. In secular cases, a domestic animal (generally pigs, horses, and bulls) could be charged for killing a human and consequently be condemned to death, usually by hanging. Receipts relating to such cases can be found in seigneurial accounts which duly note the costs associated with the execution. An under-studied source on the animal trials, these records reveal the rhetorical strategies used to inform the treatment of an animal accused of committing a crime. This article looks specifically at the role of procedure as a discursive frame that transformed an offending animal into a criminal. A close examination of the receipts reveals that the trials share several features, which not only highlights the importance of following certain legal procedures, but also places the animal and its actions into pre-existing legal categories (that of ‘criminal’ and ‘crime’). These procedures include providing the appropriate judicial personnel and the right equipment for the execution. The condemned animal thus occupied an ambiguous space as a nonhuman that had been placed in legal categories made by and made for human subjects. By treating the animal as a criminal, these records provide a window into the medieval story of legal personhood and the fluidity of its borders, while also challenging the history of the human-animal relation as one built on difference and inferiority.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42679183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The role of institutions and judicial procedure in conflict resolution is a significant theme in recent scholarship on the later medieval Italian communes. It is usually difficult, however, to trace these themes in their broader social context, especially in rural communities. This article demonstrates judicial procedure’s role in a conflict between the notary Andrea and the magnate Bartolomeo in the parish of Latera during the 1340s. Its evidentiary basis consists of civic tribunals’ procedural registers, notarial cartularies, and legislation. The article excavates the relationship between institutional procedures, social networks, and local conflict on the eve of the Black Death.
{"title":"Between Courtoom and Castello: A Tuscan Dispute’s Social and Procedural Profile","authors":"Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm","doi":"10.16995/OLH.331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.331","url":null,"abstract":"The role of institutions and judicial procedure in conflict resolution is a significant theme in recent scholarship on the later medieval Italian communes. It is usually difficult, however, to trace these themes in their broader social context, especially in rural communities. This article demonstrates judicial procedure’s role in a conflict between the notary Andrea and the magnate Bartolomeo in the parish of Latera during the 1340s. Its evidentiary basis consists of civic tribunals’ procedural registers, notarial cartularies, and legislation. The article excavates the relationship between institutional procedures, social networks, and local conflict on the eve of the Black Death.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44569689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article identifies the ephemeral documents that were crucial to the operation of criminal business in the ecclesiastical courts of late-medieval England. It proposes a loose definition of ephemera, focusing on their material qualities as small, transient, and disposable documents. It then looks at different types of legal ephemera generated in the course of ecclesiastical legal processes, and the ways in which they framed – and inflected – the different relationships of power between clergy, parishioners, and the institutions of church discipline. As the material interface between church authority and the laity, ephemera were strangely fragile, a quality that was clearly noticed and sometimes exploited by disgruntled parishioners who ripped up citations. But they were nevertheless vital in conveying information and power. It was their collective weight – the capacity of church courts clerks to produce so many of these documents – that made them sharp instruments of regulation.
{"title":"Legal Ephemera in the Ecclesiastical Courts of Late-Medieval England","authors":"T. Johnson","doi":"10.16995/OLH.334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.334","url":null,"abstract":"The article identifies the ephemeral documents that were crucial to the operation of criminal business in the ecclesiastical courts of late-medieval England. It proposes a loose definition of ephemera, focusing on their material qualities as small, transient, and disposable documents. It then looks at different types of legal ephemera generated in the course of ecclesiastical legal processes, and the ways in which they framed – and inflected – the different relationships of power between clergy, parishioners, and the institutions of church discipline. As the material interface between church authority and the laity, ephemera were strangely fragile, a quality that was clearly noticed and sometimes exploited by disgruntled parishioners who ripped up citations. But they were nevertheless vital in conveying information and power. It was their collective weight – the capacity of church courts clerks to produce so many of these documents – that made them sharp instruments of regulation.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46575914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates the role of utopian and dystopian spaces in the construction of social realism in Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal (Pradipta Bhattacharya, 2013). The inherent contradiction between the implausible fictional construct of utopian and dystopian spaces and the existing socio-political reality is finely foregrounded through multiple loci of narrative actions. The film, based in Kolkata, revolves around Pramit, an aspiring documentary film-maker, and his quest for love. There are two spaces in the depiction of Kolkata: the city that contains the contemporary socio-political reality which is neither utopic or dystopic, and its dystopic underbelly that embodies the absence of hope for redemption or respite for its inhabitants. Pramit meets a fraudulent astrologer who occupies the dystopian space of ‘darkened shadows’ but knows about the utopian space that remains beyond his reach. The dystopian space is riddled with poverty, deprivation, unfulfilled desire, and hopelessness, along with fear and volatility. The final locus is a village called Mohini, a utopian space representing absolute harmony and undiluted bliss. Only the chosen ones have the privilege to enter the village. Everyone is happy in this space and prone to falling in love that lasts a lifetime. This is commemorative of arshinagar (‘the mirror city’), a coveted space in baul practices and a metaphor for a utopian space that stands in stark contrast with the reality. By interweaving these spaces in his cinematic experimentation, Bhattacharya addresses issues such as folk-cultural practices and community, economic crises and class, caste hierarchy, and social relationships, while attempting to create an alternative cinematic language to counter the filmmaking practices in Bengal that rendered itself vestigial.
{"title":"Interweaving Dystopian and Utopian Spaces, Constructing Social Realism on Screen: Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal","authors":"Sanghita Sen","doi":"10.16995/OLH.410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.410","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the role of utopian and dystopian spaces in the construction of social realism in Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal (Pradipta Bhattacharya, 2013). The inherent contradiction between the implausible fictional construct of utopian and dystopian spaces and the existing socio-political reality is finely foregrounded through multiple loci of narrative actions. The film, based in Kolkata, revolves around Pramit, an aspiring documentary film-maker, and his quest for love. There are two spaces in the depiction of Kolkata: the city that contains the contemporary socio-political reality which is neither utopic or dystopic, and its dystopic underbelly that embodies the absence of hope for redemption or respite for its inhabitants. Pramit meets a fraudulent astrologer who occupies the dystopian space of ‘darkened shadows’ but knows about the utopian space that remains beyond his reach. The dystopian space is riddled with poverty, deprivation, unfulfilled desire, and hopelessness, along with fear and volatility. The final locus is a village called Mohini, a utopian space representing absolute harmony and undiluted bliss. Only the chosen ones have the privilege to enter the village. Everyone is happy in this space and prone to falling in love that lasts a lifetime. This is commemorative of arshinagar (‘the mirror city’), a coveted space in baul practices and a metaphor for a utopian space that stands in stark contrast with the reality. By interweaving these spaces in his cinematic experimentation, Bhattacharya addresses issues such as folk-cultural practices and community, economic crises and class, caste hierarchy, and social relationships, while attempting to create an alternative cinematic language to counter the filmmaking practices in Bengal that rendered itself vestigial.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46994789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is concerned with the distinction between acceptable race talk in social media and organised, extreme or ‘frozen’ racism which is considered hate speech and removed. While in the literature this distinction is used to point to different variants, styles and mutations of racism, in social media platforms and in European regulatory frameworks it becomes policy. The empirical part of the article considers this distinction drawing upon a series of posts following a stabbing incident in a small Irish town, which organised Twitter accounts sought to connect to terrorism. The empirical analysis examines the tweets of those accounts and the comments left on the Facebook page and website of one of the main Irish online news outlets. The analysis shows few if any differences between the two, concluding that there is a blending of supremacist and everyday, ambient racist discourses. This blending indicates the operation of a transnational contagion, given the shared vocabularies and discourses. It further problematises the distinction between ‘illegal hate speech’ and ‘acceptable race talk’, and throws into question the principle underlying both the policies of social media as well as the European efforts to de-toxify the digital public sphere.
{"title":"Organised and Ambient Digital Racism: Multidirectional Flows in the Irish Digital Sphere","authors":"E. Siapera","doi":"10.16995/OLH.405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.405","url":null,"abstract":"This article is concerned with the distinction between acceptable race talk in social media and organised, extreme or ‘frozen’ racism which is considered hate speech and removed. While in the literature this distinction is used to point to different variants, styles and mutations of racism, in social media platforms and in European regulatory frameworks it becomes policy. The empirical part of the article considers this distinction drawing upon a series of posts following a stabbing incident in a small Irish town, which organised Twitter accounts sought to connect to terrorism. The empirical analysis examines the tweets of those accounts and the comments left on the Facebook page and website of one of the main Irish online news outlets. The analysis shows few if any differences between the two, concluding that there is a blending of supremacist and everyday, ambient racist discourses. This blending indicates the operation of a transnational contagion, given the shared vocabularies and discourses. It further problematises the distinction between ‘illegal hate speech’ and ‘acceptable race talk’, and throws into question the principle underlying both the policies of social media as well as the European efforts to de-toxify the digital public sphere.","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44859717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The re-greening of post-industrial sites creates distinct landscapes, perhaps a new form of idyllic retreat. For example, Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in the Ruhr, Germany, is a 230-hectare site on which redundant industrial structures have been preserved and in some cases given new leisure uses, surrounded by a decontaminated landscape combining natural (succession) regrowth with new planting. The outcome is a landscape which reconciles a past of exploitation and pollution (but also of work) with a greener future; but this seemingly happy state masks the site’s histories and conflicting contexts. And while the re-greening of such sites denotes the end of Europe’s industrial era, the beginning of that era – in England in the eighteenth century – was also marked by what was then a new kind of landscape: the landscaped park. In both cases, natural growth is shaped by human artifice to produce vistas and views. In one, focal points are provided by statues and fake ruins; in the other, by the relics of an industrial past. A series of paradoxes emerges: the past in the present (or the present reconfigured as a past); nature reconfigured as culture (or culture in the form of natural growth); and a narrative of time and place which is not exactly what it seems. But do wastelands transformed into post-modern idylls reconcile or merely erase the industrial past? Does the glimpse of arcadia they offer represent escapism, or a better post-industrial world?
{"title":"Paradoxical Idylls: Post-industrial Ruinscapes and Pre-industrial Arcadias","authors":"M. Miles","doi":"10.16995/OLH.165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/OLH.165","url":null,"abstract":"The re-greening of post-industrial sites creates distinct landscapes, perhaps a new form of idyllic retreat. For example, Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in the Ruhr, Germany, is a 230-hectare site on which redundant industrial structures have been preserved and in some cases given new leisure uses, surrounded by a decontaminated landscape combining natural (succession) regrowth with new planting. The outcome is a landscape which reconciles a past of exploitation and pollution (but also of work) with a greener future; but this seemingly happy state masks the site’s histories and conflicting contexts. And while the re-greening of such sites denotes the end of Europe’s industrial era, the beginning of that era – in England in the eighteenth century – was also marked by what was then a new kind of landscape: the landscaped park. In both cases, natural growth is shaped by human artifice to produce vistas and views. In one, focal points are provided by statues and fake ruins; in the other, by the relics of an industrial past. A series of paradoxes emerges: the past in the present (or the present reconfigured as a past); nature reconfigured as culture (or culture in the form of natural growth); and a narrative of time and place which is not exactly what it seems. But do wastelands transformed into post-modern idylls reconcile or merely erase the industrial past? Does the glimpse of arcadia they offer represent escapism, or a better post-industrial world?","PeriodicalId":43026,"journal":{"name":"Open Library of Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41726669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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