Journal articles: 'Muriel Joseph' – Grafiati (2024)

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This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a hom*ogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point”, the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.

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I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1961, joining the relatively new Department of Anthropology under the direction of Joseph B. Casagrande. Muriel (Miki) Crespi (nee Kaminsky) had already been a graduate student for a full year. We became fast friends immediately. Shy, timid, quiet, and midwestern, I was not exactly a likely running buddy. But from the beginning, she was my mentor. After all, she was already wiser in the mysteries of graduate school; and as time passed, I came to know her as a wonderfully warm, intelligent woman from New York who also happened to be Jewish. I had never before connected with anyone who was so urbane and effortlessly gregarious. Mick's and my friendship further blossomed in our shared selection of Dr. Casagrande as our dissertation advisor and of Ecuador as our fieldwork area. Early on, Miki knew she wanted to study the impact of land reform on a government-owned hacienda high in the Ecuadorian sierra, working primarily with Indios or campesinos. She saw nothing out of character to live at an elevation of 11,000 feet, nor to speak Quechua. She left Illinois briefly to go to Cornell to learn the rudiments of Quechua. (Later she was devastated to find that the Quechua taught at Cornell was a different dialect altogether.)

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Critics have long noted but never adequately explained why Jonathan Edwards deliberately reordered the Northampton revival's chronology in his Faithful Narrative. This essay argues that by declaring that Joseph Hawley's suicide signified the withdrawal of God's Spirit, Edwards sought to protect his community from the social, cultural, and theological ramifications of that self-murder.

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This paper explores the life of Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1988), a famous early Soviet illegal intelligence operative, who conducted various “special tasks” on behalf of Stalin’s foreign espionage network. These included the murder of dissident Spanish communist Andreas Nin (1938), a participation in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1940), posing as a Costa Rican ambassador (1949–1952), and an abortive project to assassinate Joseph Bros Tito (1952). In contrast to conventional espionage studies that are usually informed by diplomatic, political, and military history approaches, I employ a cultural history angle. First, the paper examines the formation of Grigulevich’s communist and espionage identity against his background as a cosmopolitan Jewish “other” from the interwar Polish-Lithuanian realm. Second, it explores his role in the production and invention of intelligence knowledge, which he later used to jump start his second career as a prominent Soviet humanities scholar and a bestselling writer of revolutionary non-fiction.

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<p>In this paper we examine the way Simenon uses violent images of water in <em>Long cours</em> (1936). This exotic novel tells the wanderings of Joseph Mittel who leaves France with Germaine, wanted for murder. Through the analysis of the incipit and the passage about the first days of Mittel as a stoker on the boat of a smuggler we show that Simenon creates a network of references in order to elucidate the failure of the exotic experience of the main character. This allows us to reflect on Simenon’s writing process as well.</p>

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Koko Joseph irianto, (205130115), Faculty of Law at Tarumanagara University, with the title of the thesis "Analysis of the error factor as an element of dolus in a crime to take the life of another person in a case NO: 328 / PID / 2017 / PT.DKI ". Under the guidance of Mr. DR.DIAN ADRIAWAN, S.H, M.H. This study aims to analyze the legal arrangements regarding criminal acts of premeditated murder by a group of people in Decision Number: no: 328 / PID / 2017 / PT.DKI. This research was carried out in the city of Jakarta by selecting agencies related to this case namely in the Jakarta High Court. Data collection method used is documentation study method then the data obtained is analyzed descriptively qualitative so as to reveal the expected results and conclusions on the problem. The results of this study indicate that 1) Legal arrangements for criminal acts of murder have been regulated in general in the Criminal Code (KUHP). And the murder plans to be in article 340 of the Criminal Code 2) The application of the material criminal law to the perpetrator of the Murder criminal act is appropriate, as regulated and threatened with criminality in Article 340 of the Criminal Code. Judicial legal considerations in imposing death penalty on 2 and 1 prisoners for life of the defendants from 4 perpetrators who are still alive is correct. The conviction of the defendant was considered to have fulfilled a sense of justice for all parties.

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This case is the latest in a series of actions brought in the United States since 1984 that have resulted in court and administrative decisions on the claim of asylum by, and attempt at extradition of, the plaintiff, Joseph Patrick Doherty, a native of Northern Ireland and subject of the United Kingdom and its Colonies. He was admittedly a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and was convicted in absentia, in Northern Ireland, of murder of a British Army officer there in 1980. In the instant case, the plaintiff sought review by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit of two administrative decisions by successive Attorneys General of the United States (one by Edwin Meese in June 1988, and the other by Richard Thornburgh in July 1989).

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The First Book of Maccabees ends its historical narrative with the murder of Simon at the hands of his son-in-law, Ptolemy. Flavius Josephus offers a more elaborate narrative of the same event. According to his account, Ptolemy took Simon’s wife and two of his sons as hostages and tormented them when John Hyrcanus besieged him in the fortress of Doq. Josephus praises Simon’s wife for taking a heroic stance and stresses her willingness to die for the dynasty. A close analysis of the story suggests that Josephus drew on a popular tradition that emerged shortly after the historical events and adopted stylistic and narratological elements commonly associated with martyrdom stories. The story thus offers insights into dynastic representation in the early Hasmonean period and indicates that the wife of Simon played a prominent role in the propaganda and self-fashioning of the new ruling house.

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Abstract This article takes its cue from the public impact of the deaths of singers, artists and writers in hotels. Particular attention is paid to the murder of Nancy Spungen in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, in 1978. A long tradition of literary and filmic hotel deaths shows similarly strong links with contemporary cultures – illustrating political, social or cultural change and questioning the impact of modernity. However, as well as responding to change, death in the context of hotels is also linked with nostalgia for an irretrievable past. Such are the two poles of cultural criticism in the topos of hotel deaths: they throw modernity into relief, celebrating or criticizing it through the symbolic structure of the hotel; or they inculcate a warm nostalgia, in critical opposition to the world outside on the street. The individual authors and directors under consideration here in exploring these points include Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, F. W. Murnau, Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa and Friedrich Glauser, highlighting the importance of the theme straddling American and European cultures.

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AbstractThe institution of qasāma has intrigued both Muslim jurists and western scholars. The first were puzzled by its violation of essential legal principles, the latter by its apparent pre-Islamic origins. Because of its archaic and irrational character, western scholars assume that the institution was not applied in practice: "[I]t does not appear that this institution functioned much, even in the past, when the penal law of Islam had a certain practical application." However, the evidence of fatwa collections shows that the qasāma was indeed enforced by courts as late as the nineteenth century, and the rules connected with it have now found their way into some modern Islamic criminal codes. The qasāma, it appears, was a living institution in Islamic law and not just theory. In this essay I will try to shed some light on the origins of this institution and its reception into Islamic law. I will attempt to chart the earliest developments of Islamic jurisprudence by analyzing the available hadith material and the statements of the first generation of jurists. In the conclusion I will suggest that my analysis of the material on qasāma corroborates Motzki's and Powers' revision of the chronology of the development of Islamic jurisprudence first put forward by Joseph Schacht in The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950).

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Between 6.30 and 7.00 a.m. on Monday morning, 19 March 1945 the body of a young girl of ten was found on the beach a short distance from the town of Elmina at a popular bathing spot known as Akotobinsin. According to the coroner, she had been dead for between 24 and 48 hours. There was no water in her lungs or stomach which indicated that she had not died by drowning. Instead, her upper and lower lips, both cheeks, both eyes, her private parts and anus, and several elliptical pieces of skin from different parts of her body had been removed. Many of these wounds exposed large blood vessels and the coroner concluded that ‘death was due to shock and hemorrhage’. She was identified as Ama Krakraba who had been missing since the evening of Saturday, 17 March. Her frantic mother had immediately suspected foul play and had confronted Kweku Ewusie, the Regent of the Edina State, who was later accused of having ‘enticed’ the young girl to the third floor of Bridge House, where he lived, ‘by the ruse of sending her out on an errand to buy tobacco’. There she had been murdered so that her body parts could be used to make ‘medicine’ to help the Regent's faction win a court case that was critical for their political standing in Elmina. On the 24 March, after a preliminary investigation, the colony's attorney-general brought charges of murder against Kweku Ewusie and four others from Elmina: Joe Smith, Herbert Krakue, Nana Appram Esson, alias Joseph Bracton Johnson, and Akodei Mensah. They were tried at the Accra Criminal Assizes from 16 May to 2 June, found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to be hanged. The West African Court of Appeal turned down their appeal on 28 June 1945 as did the Privy Council on 14 January 1946. On 1 February 1946, Kweku Ewusie, Joe Smith and Herbert Krakue were hanged at James Fort in Accra, and on 2 February, J. B. Johnson and Akodei Mensah met the same fate.

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Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian theatre necessarily piece together their accounts of ephemeral performance through manuscripts, reviews, and other responses preserved in print and visual culture. However, films made between 1895 and 1935 offer frequent, unexpected, and sometimes curiously skewed glimpses of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. This essay focuses on John H. Collins’s 1917 silent film adaptation of Blue Jeans, Joseph Arthur’s melodrama, popular from its New York debut in 1890. The melodrama is perhaps most famous for ‘the great sawmill scene’. This iconic scene, an early example of an episode in which a helpless victim is tied to a board approaching a huge buzz saw, turns a mundane setting into a terrifying site for suspense, violence, and attempted murder. Whilst the film made alterations and abridgements, the overall effect was to preserve the play’s distinctive features. Our essay shows how the stage version is preserved within Collins’s film adaptation so that the cinematic artefact gives unique access to the Victorian theatrical work. Films not only preserve Victorian forms in modern media and extend the reach of Victorian culture, but also open a new resource and methodology for understanding Victorian and Edwardian theatre.

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Abstract In Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water (2016), Patrick Sumner, a young medical doctor recently dismissedfrom the British Army with his reputation and professional prospects in ruins, accepts a poorly paid position as a surgeon on a whaling ship in his attempt to flee from his past and his troubled conscience. However, contrary to his expectations, in the Arctic Circle he faces an ordeal far more demanding than anything he has hitherto endured in the form of the harpooner Henry Drax, a dangerous psychopath who is ready to abuse and murder anyone who is an obstacle to the satisfaction of his brutish physical needs. Confronted with violence and cruelty beyond understanding, within the fluid framework of the distorted ethical norms and values of the heterogeneous crew, the embittered Sumner is gradually forced to abandon his protective shell of resigned indifference and reassess the moral stances and responsibilities of a civilized person when faced with human wickedness. Though McGuire acknowledges primarily the inspiration of Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy, this paper argues that in ethical terms the novel responds to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, pushing the protagonist’s relationship to the other to an extreme by making the other an embodiment of pure evil.

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The relationship between Ireland and the Gothic goes back to the early days of the genre, when the Sublime, as identified by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, became central to the aesthetic concepts which would abound in the articulation of the Gothic as a literary form. The “dark, desolate and stormy grandeur” of the perception of Ireland which was held by the English reading public in the late eighteenth century was readily adaptable for the use of the island as a kind of pre-Enlightenment wilderness which, when combined with its linguistic, religious and cultural “otherness”, provided a fertile territory for the growth of a literature which favoured the supernatural, the uncanny and the numerous features which unite to make up the genre. As early as 1771, Elizabeth Griffin’s "The History of Lady Barton" contains elements of the Gothic, and the huge popularity of Waterford-born Regina Maria Roche’s "The Children of the Abbey"gave a definitive boost to the genre with regard to Irish writers. The success of Sydney Owenson’s "The Wild Irish Girl", and that of Charles Robert Maturin with "The Milesian Chief" and "Melmoth the Wanderer" helped foster a tradition which would be continued throughout the nineteenth century by writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, L.T. Meade and Bram Stoker. It is Le Fanu who, arguably, was the first writer to merge the Gothic with crime fiction. For Begnall, his works “oscillate between the poles of supernatural horror and suspenseful detection”, and, in short fiction such as “The Murdered Cousin” and “The Evil Guest” and novels including "Uncle Silas" and "Wylder’s Hand" Le Fanu consciously merges the emerging format of the murder mystery with the lugubrious labyrinths of the Gothic. Le Fanu’s influence was, of course, international, but the paths he trod were also followed by numerous Irish writers. One of the most successful of these is John Connolly who, since the introduction of Charlie Parker with the publication of "Every Dead Thing" in 1999 has, in the eighteen novels which have appeared to date, successfully revised the concepts and tropes which make up the Irish Gothic. In this paper these works will be analysed with reference to their debt to the Irish Gothic tradition and, most specifically, to the writing of Le Fanu.

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This paper examines Joseph Smith's construction of a racialized theology, which drew upon conceptions of Abrahamic lineage and the possibility of “racial redemption” for peoples of African descent through conversion to Mormonism. This ran against the grain of his Protestant and Catholic contemporaries’ religious understandings of race. He expanded upon earlier iterations of his ideas with the introduction of new rituals and liturgy related to LDS temples. Smith's wife may have invited a person of African descent to participate in this new liturgy before his murder in June 1844. The views he expressed about peoples of African descent before his death are inchoate, although high-ranking Mormons related to Smith seemed to have agreed with the possibility of racial redemption. After Smith's death, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders framed the LDS temple and priesthood restriction in terms of Smith's liturgy rather than any of Smith's varied teachings on race. This paper also argues that Mormonism's racial restriction arose from its roots in the sealing ritual rather than ecclesiological power structures. Mormonism's racial doctrine has often been described as a “priesthood ban,” referring to ecclesiastical authority. However, this discounts the religious contexts in which it arose and excludes the experiences of women and children, who were not allowed to participate in the endowment or sealing ordinances. This paper places Mormonism's temple liturgy at the front and center of the LDS Church's priesthood and temple restriction.

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'Imperialism', Rosa Luxemburg tells us, 'is the political expression of the process of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle over the unspoiled remainder of the noncapitalist world environment'. The realities analysed by this outstanding socialist revolutionary have also found significant reflection in classic writings of such literary icons as Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell. Conrad's racist conceptualisation in The Heart of Darkness shows us an idealistic imperialist, Kurtz, whose last words - 'the horror' - can be understood in opposite ways: as an idealism grotesquely corrupted when a 'civilising' white 'goes native' or, more persuasively, as a grotesque violence emanating from 'progressive' capitalist civilisation itself. Dark horrors visited upon innumerable victims in Africa, Asia, Latin America and among indigenous peoples of Australia and North America have been generated, as Luxemburg demonstrates in The Accumulation of Capital, from the very heart of European civilisation, permeated and animated as it is by the capital accumulation process. The eloquent justifications of Kurtz can be found in the glowing prose of - for example Winston Churchill: 'Let it be granted that nations exist and peoples labour to produce armies with which to conquer other nations, and the nation best qualified to do this is of course the most highly civilised and the most deserving of honour.' Yet the actual impacts have been summarised by W. E. B. Du Bois: 'There was no Nazi atrocity - concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood - which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.' Such horrors have afflicted not only vast 'peripheries' but have also defined modern and contemporary history in the civilised 'metropolis'.

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VANITY FAIRIS A NOVEL OF ENIGMAS. In particular, after finishing the book, readers have often wondered why Thackeray refuses to tell us clearly whether or not Becky actually kills Joseph Sedley in chapter 67–a question recently given prominence by John Sutherland as one of the “Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (66–72). The explanation most commonly given for Thackeray's evasiveness on this point is that such unanswered questions inVanity Fairare part of the artistry of this unconventional work of fiction, a book that A. E. Dyson has described as “surely one of the world's most devious novels” (76). This view ofVanity Fairas a novel of narrative legerdemain–intended to keep the reader constantly alert and pondering what is being shown (or concealed)–is certainly true. However, an additional possible explanation for Thackeray's ambiguity on the subject of Jos's death also ought to be considered. This explanation lies in Thackeray's horrified reaction to the public execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier on 6 July 1840. The echoes between Thackeray's appalled description of the events of that morning and his subsequent famous novel suggest that he privately conceived of Becky as murdering Jos. The echoes also suggest that one reason why Thackeray handled this fictional murder obliquely is that, by the time of writingVanity Fair, he had come to believe that, although executions might occur, they should not take place in public. Exploring the subtle connections between Thackeray's profound revulsion at the death of Courvoisier and Thackeray's later treatment of Jos's death gives deeper meaning to the intentional ambiguities in chapter 67. These connections make the ambiguities surrounding the death of Jos part of a widespread debate over capital punishment in the 1840s and have significant ramifications in terms of the parallel between public executions and p*rnography and with regard to the role of Becky in this novel.

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Formal course instruction in mineralogy and geology began in Harvard College in 1788 with Benjamin Waterhouse. He also assembled in the 1780's a reference and teaching collection of minerals, rocks, and ores—the first natural history collection at Harvard—that, following a gift by an English friend, J. C. Lettsom, became a cynosure of the College. Following Waterhouse's dismissal in 1812, the instruction was carried on by John Gorham until 1824. Waterhouse, his colleague Aaron Dexter, and Gorham all were professors in the Harvard Medical School, established 1782. The latter two men successively held an endowed chair therein, the Erving Professorship of Chemistry and Materia Medica. They produced some notable graduates: Parker Cleaveland in 1799, Lyman Spalding in 1797, Joseph Green Cogswell in 1806, John White Webster in 1811, John Fothergill Waterhouse in 1813, and Samuel Luther Dana and James Freeman Dana in 1813. Following years of futile effort by the Administration to establish a professorship of mineralogy and geology, with Cogswell as the selected candidate, the instruction in mineralogy and geology fell to John White Webster in 1824 in the Chemistry Department. The Erving Professorship also passed to him, with a change in title to Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy. Webster's death in 1850, following his conviction for murder in a famous trial, terminated the first period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard. In this period, in spite of the early start by Waterhouse, Harvard lagged much behind the developments at Yale and other colleges in New England and beyond. The main period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard come in the latter 1800's. It was a consequence primarily of the founding of the the Lawrence Scientific School in 1848, with its emphasis on the applied aspects of the sciences, the appointments of Josiah Dwight Whitney and Raphael Pumpelly in 1865 and 1866, respectively to a School of Mines and Practical Geology endowed as a sub-unit therein, and the appointment of Josiah Parsons Cooke in 1850 as successor to Webster in the Chemistry Department.

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Since the establishment of diplomatic relations with Congo on July 7, 1960, the ties between USSR and Africa have faced a big challenge. During the difficult years for Congo, after liberation from colonial dependence, the Soviet Union has always advocated the country’s territorial integrity and the internal problems diplomatic solution. However, the bloodshed in Congo could not be avoided. Despite the Soviet support of the legitimate Congo government headed by P. Lumumba, the Western countries, which did not want to lose their positions in resource-rich Congo have found a way to achieve a victory. A military coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu took place in the country and national leader Patrice Lumumba was killed in consequence of a murder plot. Moreover, Western countries have managed to use the UN headed by Dag Hammarskjöld for their own purposes, and it only aggravated the situation in the country. The purpose of the study is to reveal the key points of Soviet-African relations in the most difficult period for Congo - the beginning of 1960s. Basing on the documents of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the fundamental works of Russian and foreign Africanist historians, as well as the author’s own work experience in a number of African countries, the author focuses on the analyses of the Soviet Union efforts during the decolonization years, which aim was to stabilize the situation and establish the legitimate rule in the country. The author applies a systematic approach to study political institutions of power, the author also rely on the historical method to study the change of political formations, and an event analysis approach to summarize the information collected about the specific political situation. The author comes to the conclusion that today Africans cooperate only with those who supports their national interests, maintains the security or sovereignty, and comes to the rescue in case of humanitarian disasters and climatic cataclysms. In contrast to 1960s, Africa from a backward continent turned into a full-fledged player on the world arena, occupying important positions in the system of international relations. The voice of African leaders is heard from the UN General Assembly. In this regard, it is important to formulate new approaches and concepts of interaction with African states giving them if not priority, then at least not the last place in the foreign policy of Russia.

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On November 2, 1850, Jeremiah Root published a “Notice” in the Sacramento Transcript offering a reward for the arrest of his wife, Emeline, who had absconded with a younger man, twelve thousand dollars, and their two-year-old daughter, leaving Root and their five sons to fend for themselves at the roadhouse they ran along the American River. When Emeline and their daughter were found three months later on a bark in San Francisco preparing to leave California, Jeremiah met with her and the couple quickly reconciled. Charges were dropped against Emeline and her associates, and Jeremiah and the rest of their family joined her on the ship to travel east. The Transcript editorialized against the apparent tawdry nature of the affair, but a deeper inspection of the history of this forty-niner family reveals in intimate detail how Jeremiah and Emeline's personal struggles emerged from the incredible physical and spiritual turmoil experienced by early Mormon emigrants, who played a seminal role in Gold Rush–era California. Emeline and Jeremiah Root were early converts to Mormonism and arrived in California having survived a twelve-year odyssey that began in Kirtland, Ohio. They were expelled first from Kirtland and then from Nauvoo, Illinois, after the murder of their church leader, Joseph Smith. They persevered through starvation and malnutrition at Winter Quarters on the Missouri River while following Brigham Young to Salt Lake. They struggled with spiritual allegiances as the practice of polygamy and economic inequities became apparent among church leadership, and they ultimately defied Brigham Young by taking the physically demanding overland route from Salt Lake through the Forty-Mile Desert and over the Carson Pass to Gold Rush California in early 1849. Finally, they lived through a tumultuous year on the lower American River, surviving among unruly miners, deadly shootouts over property rights, and a rampant outbreak of cholera. These pressures erupted into a personal crisis when Emeline escaped, escorted by a family friend who was perhaps her lover, taking her only daughter and the family fortune with her. Emeline and Jeremiah's eventual reconciliation and the way Jeremiah ultimately lived out his life revealed them to be people of personal and spiritual integrity who, in this one incident, were overwhelmed by the struggles of the times. Their story illustrates the incredible resiliency of early California pioneers and integrates in vivid detail the physical, spiritual, and emotional challenges facing families in Gold Rush–era California.

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The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, edited by Toyin Falola & Kevin D. Roberts (reviewed by Aaron Spencer Fogleman) The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker (reviewed by Justin Roberts) Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by David Eltis & David Richardson (reviewed by Joseph C. Miller) "New Negroes from Africa": Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean, by Rosanne Marion Adderley (reviewed by Nicolette Bethel) Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800, edited by Richard L. Kagan & Philip D. Morgan (reviewed by Jonathan Schorsch) Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962, by Jason C. Parker (reviewed by Charlie Whitham) Labour and the Multiracial Project in the Caribbean: Its History and Promise, by Sara Abraham (reviewed by Douglas Midgett) Envisioning Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives, by Brian Meeks (reviewed by Gina Athena Ulysse) Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian, by Maureen Warner-Lewis (reviewed by Jon Sensbach) Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Carole Boyce Davies (reviewed by Linden Lewis) Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert & Ivette Romero-Cesareo (reviewed by Bill Maurer) Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship, edited by Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel & Eric Mielants (reviewed by Gert Oostindie) Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists, by Richard Wilk (reviewed by William H. Fisher) Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution, by J.B. MacKinnon (reviewed by Edward Paulino) Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa, by Allen Wells (reviewed by Michael R. Hall) Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica, by Gina A. Ulysse (reviewed by Jean Besson) Une ethnologue à Port-au-Prince: Question de couleur et luttes pour le classem*nt socio-racial dans la capitale haïtienne, by Natacha Giafferi-Dombre (reviewed by Catherine Benoît) Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality, edited by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith & Claudine Michel (reviewed by Susan Kwosek) Cuba: Religion, Social Capital, and Development, by Adrian H. Hearn (reviewed by Nadine Fernandez) "Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad, by Timothy Rommen (reviewed by Daniel A. Segal)Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey (reviewed by Anthony Carrigan) Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, by Gary Edward Holcomb (reviewed by Brent Hayes Edwards) The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction, by Celia Britton (reviewed by J. Michael Dash) Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture, by Ignacio López-Calvo (reviewed by Stephen Wilkinson) Pre-Columbian Jamaica, by P. Allsworth-Jones (reviewed by William F. Keegan) Underwater and Maritime Archaeology in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton & Pilar Luna Erreguerena (reviewed by Erika Laanela)

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AbstractThis article traces a long-lived tradition of understanding the Eden narrative and its aftermath as a story about the birth of painful emotions, what one might translate into English as shame, fear, and, above all, sadness. The consensus reading of Genesis in the Anglo-American tradition does not reflect an underlying emotional emphasis in the fateful oracle to Eve and Adam in Gen 3:16–17. Translations and commentaries overwhelmingly interpret God’s words as physiological and material, sentencing the woman to painful childbirth and the man to onerous labor in the fields. Yet, as demonstrated by a number of scholars, God’s oracle to the pair in the Hebrew text deals with pain more broadly, with a focus on emotional pain, especially sadness, sorrow, or grief. This emotional suffering is shared by man and woman, and is the catalyst for the first murder. Hellenistic Jewish and later Christian readers embraced and elaborated on this very early emotional aspect of the Eden myth. The Septuagint translates the oracle in unmistakably emotional terms, adopting vocabulary typical of popular moral philosophy, and clarifies the thematic connection between Genesis 3 and 4 by highlighting the emotional repercussions of the emotional change wrought by the primal transgression. Authors like Philo and Josephus interpreted the Eden narrative in fundamentally emotional ways, and pseudepigrapha were particularly engaged in drawing out and elaborating on the emotions of the Eden myth. Most of all theGreek Life of Adam and Eveand 4 Ezra transform the story into meditations on emotional suffering, the former retelling the myth, the latter repurposing it into an apocalyptic vision of joy and sorrow at the end times. Both texts furthermore identify sadness (lupēortristitia, in Greek and Latin version of Gen 3:16–17) as dually significant, both as punishment and as a saving, divinizing quality, one which can also effect communion between human and divine. This way of reading Eden’s emotions dominated Christian reception of the Eden myth, from the Gospel of John on. Ptolemy, Didymus, Ambrose, Augustine, and others understood the Eden myth as primarily about the origin and meaning of emotional suffering. This style of reception remained a widespread reading until the turn of the twentieth century, when, for a variety of reasons, Christians began to read the oracle in the physiological and materialist terms (pain in childbirth and agricultural labor) that are now dominant.

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RESUMEN:El objetivo del artículo es aproximarnos a la controvertida biografía del comisario Manuel Brabo Portillo. El trabajo está basado en fuentes primarias y secundarias. El método utilizado es empírico. En el imaginario del mundo sindicalista revolucionario, Brabo Portillo era el policía más odiado, la reencarnación de la cara más turbia del Estado. Fue, así mismo, un espía alemán relacionado con el hundimiento de barcos españoles, el asesinato del empresario e ingeniero Barret y el primer jefe de los terroristas vinculados a la patronal barcelonesa. La conflictividad que afectó a España en el período de la Primera Guerra Mundial es fundamental para entender los orígenes del terrorismo vinculado al pistolerismo, que marcó la historia político social española del primer tercio del siglo XX.PALABRAS CLAVE: Brabo Portillo, pistolerismo, espionaje, sindicalismo, Primera Guerra Mundial.ABSTRACT:The objective of the article is an approach to the controversial biography of Police Chief Manuel Brabo Portillo. The work is based on primary and secondary sources. The method used is empirical. In the imagery of the revolutionary syndicalist world, Brabo Portillo was the most hated policeman, the reincarnation of the murkiest face of the state. He was also a German spy connected with the sinking of Spanish ships, the murder of businessman and engineer Josep Barret and the first head of the terrorists linked to Barcelona employers. The conflict that affected Spain during the period of the First World War is fundamental in order to understand the origins of terrorism linked to pistolerismo, which marked Spanish social political history during the first third of the twentieth century.KEY WORDS: Brabo Portillo, pistolerismo, espionage, syndicalism, First World War. BIBLIOGRAFÍAAisa, M., La efervescencia social de los años 20. Barcelona 1917-1923, Barcelona, Descontrol, 2016.Aguirre de Cárcer, N., La neutralidad de España durante la Primera Guerra Mundial (1914-1918). I. Bélgica, Madrid, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1995.Alonso, G., “’Afectos caprichosos’: Tradicionalismo y germanofilia en España durante la Gran Guerra”, Hispania Nova, 15, 2017, pp. 394-415.Amador, A., El Terror blanco en Barcelona. Las bombas y los atentados personales. Actuación infernal de una banda de asesinos al servicio de la burguesía. El asesinato como una industria, Tarragona, Talleres gráf. Gutenberg, [1920?].Anglés, C., “Contra los sindicatos. Los procesos de la organización obrera. La impostura nunca ha sido justicia”, Solidaridad Obrera, 836 (1/8/1918), p. 1.Balcells, A., El Pistolerisme. Barcelona (1917-1923), Barcelona, Pòrtic, 2009.Ben-Ami, S., La Dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), Barcelona, Planeta, 1984.Bengoechea, S., Organització patronal i conflictivitat social a Catalunya. Tradició i corporativisme entre finals de segle i la dictadura de Primo de Rivera, Barcelona, PAM, 1994.Bengoechea, S., El locaut de Barcelona (1919-1920), Barcelona, Curial, 1998.Bengoechea, S., “1919: La Barcelona colpista. L’aliança de patrons i militars contra el sistema liberal”, Afers, 23/24 (1996), pp. 309-327.Brabo Portillo, M., Ensayo sobre policía científica, Barcelona, Gassó Hermanos, [190?].Bravo Portillo, M. y Samper, A., Programa para los exámenes de ingreso ó ascenso en plazas de oficiales de cuarta clase de la Hacienda Pública, Madrid, Mateu, 1906.Bueso, A., Recuerdos de un cenetista, Barcelona, Ariel, 1976.Burgos y Mazo, M. de, El verano de 1919 en Gobernación, Imprenta de E. Pinós-Cuenca, 1921.Calderón, F. de P. [Rico Ariza, E.] y Romero, I., Memorias de un terrorista. Novela episódica de la tragedia barcelonesa, Barcelona, [s.e.], [1924?].Carden, R. M., German Policy Toward Neutral Spain, 1914-1918, London, Routledge, 2014.Cardona, G., Los Milans del Bosch, una familia de armas tomar. Entre la revolución liberal y el franquismo, Barcelona, Edhasa, 2005.Casal Gómez, M., La Banda Negra. El origen y la actuación de los pistoleros en Barcelona (1918-1921), 2ª. Edición, Barcelona, Icaria, 1977.Calle Velasco, M. D. de la, “Sobre los orígenes del estado social en España”, Ayer, 25 (1997), pp. 127-150.D’Ors, E., “La unidad de Europa”, La Vanguardia, (1/12/1914), p. 7.Díaz Plaja, F., Francófilos y germanófilos. Los españoles en la guerra europea, Barcelona, Dopesa, 1973.Díez, P., Memorias de un anarcosindicalista de acción, Barcelona, Bellaterra, 2006.Domingo Méndez, R., “La Gran Guerra y la neutralidad española: entre la tradición historiográfica y las nuevas líneas de investigación”, Spagna Contemporanea, 34 (2008), pp. 27-44.Esculies, J., “España y la Gran Guerra. Nuevas aportaciones historiográficas”, Historia y Política, 32 (2014), pp. 47-70.Esdaile, Ch. J., La Quiebra del liberalismo, 1808-1939, Barcelona, Crítica, 2001.Foix, P., Los Archivos del terrorismo blanco. El fichero Lasarte (1910-1930), Madrid, Las Ediciones de la Piqueta, 1978.Forcadell, C., Parlamentarismo y bolchevización. 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El ascenso al poder del general Primo de Rivera, Madrid, Alianza, 1987.Val, R. del y Río del Val, J. del, Solidaridad Obrera, 787-788, 790, 794, 801, 805, 807, 811, 814, 818, 828, 829, 836, 970 (13, 14, 16, 20 y 27/6/, 3, 7, 10, 14, 23, 24 y 31/7/ y 1/8/ y 10/121918), p. 1.Vandellós, P., “Contra los sindicatos. Los procesos de la sindicación obrera. De actualidad”, Solidaridad Obrera, 791 (17/6/1918), p. 1.Vidiella, R., Los de ayer. Novela, Madrid-Barcelona, Nuestro Pueblo, 1938.Winston, C. M., La Clase trabajadora y la derecha en España (1900-1936), Madrid, Cátedra, 1989.Winston, C. M., “Carlist workers groups in Catalonia, 1900-1923”, en S. G. Payne (dir.), Identidad y nacionalismo en la España contemporánea: el carlismo, 1833-1975, Madrid, Actas, 1996, pp. 85-101.Wosky, Solidaridad Obrera, 791, 801 y 820, (17 y 21/6/ 10/7/1918), pp. 1 y 3.

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ABSTRACTIn the following article I show that in Norman Mailer's novel An American Dream cancer is everywhere. Cancer is used by Mailer to express universal madness. There is not one single instance of love in the whole book. Love is as real as murder and it has more power. Love becomes death. But there is only one instance in the novel where love seems to appear and that is in the honest attempt of the writer to convey the significance of that death. Norman Mailer loves his country. And like Joseph Heller, he is saying that Something Happened to America.

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Abstract: In Vietnamese legal science today, legal liability is approached in a negative way that is linked to the violation of law. This approach causes difficulties in acquiring specialized legal knowledge. This paper analyzes the limitations of the traditional approach and proposes a new approach to legal liability. Keywords: Legal responsibility; violation of law; willingness; legal act; legal fact. References 1. Hoàng Thị Kim Quế, Giáo trình lý luận nhà nước và pháp luật, Nxb. Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, 2015, tr.397.2. Nguyễn Văn Động, Giáo trình lý luận chung về nhà nước và pháp luật, Nxb. Chính trị Quốc gia, 2014, Chương XI; Lê Văn Cảm, Vi phạm pháp luật và trách nhiệm pháp lý, trong Hoàng Thị Kim Quế (Chủ biên), Giáo trình Lý luận chung về nhà nước và pháp luật, Nxb. Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, 2005, tr. 537-575.3. Hoàng Thị Kim Quế, Giáo trình lý luận nhà nước và pháp luật, Sđd, tr.398; Lê Văn Cảm, Vi phạm pháp luật và trách nhiệm pháp lý, Sđd, tr.550.4. Hoàng Thị Kim Quế, Giáo trình lý luận nhà nước và pháp luật, Sđd, tr.395; Lê Văn Cảm, Vi phạm pháp luật và trách nhiệm pháp lý, Sđd, tr.550.5. Đào Duy Anh, Hán - Việt từ điển giản yếu, Nxb. Văn hóa thông tin, 2013, tr. 716.6. Đỗ Minh Hợp, Tự do và trách nhiệm trong đạo đức học hiện sinh, Tạp chí Triết học, số12/2007, tr. 27-33.7. Nguyễn Văn Phúc, Tự do và trách nhiệm trong hoạt động của con người, trong: Phạm Văn Đức và các cộng sự, (chủ biên), Công bằng xã hội trách nhiệm xã hội và đoàn kết xã hội, Nxb. Khoa học Xã hội, Hà Nội, 2008, tr. 330-331.8. Cao Minh Công, Trách nhiệm công vụ và đạo đức công chức ở nước ta hiện nay, Luận án Tiến sĩ, Viện Khoa học xã hội Việt Nam, Hà Nội, 2012, tr.43.9. Xem: Christoph Eberhard, “La responsabilité en France: Une approche juridique face à la complexité du monde”, in Edith Sizoo (dir), Responsabilité et cultures du monde. Dialogue autour d’un défi collectif, Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, Paris, 2008, tr.160.10. Christoph Eberhard, “La responsabilité en France: Une approche juridique face à la complexité du monde”, Sđd, tr.161.11. L B. Curzon, Roman law, London: Macdonald & Evans, 1974, tr.131.12. Eugène GAUDEMET, H. DESBOIS et J. GAUDEMET, Théorie générale des obligations, Paris. Sirey, 1965, tr. 18; Henri, Léon et Jean MAZEAUD, Leçons de droit civil, t. 2, vol. 1. Obligations — Théorie générale, 8e éd., par François CHABAS, Paris, Montchrestien, 1992, tr. 44. Trong “Institutes” (3, 88) của Gaius viết: Nunc transeamus ad obligationes, quarum summa divisio in duas species deducitur: omnis enim obligatio vel ex contractu nascitur, vel ex delicto. Tạm dịch: Bây giờ chúng ta sẽ nói đến nghĩa vụ, trong đó sự phân biệt nền tảng gồm hai nhóm: nghĩa vụ sinh ra từ hợp đồng và nghĩa vụ từ vi phạm pháp luật.13. André Edmond Victor GIFFARD, Robert VILLIERS, Droit romain et ancien droit français — Les obligations, Dalloz, 1958, tr. 10.14. Ngô Huy Cương, Nguồn gốc của nghĩa vụ và phân loại nghĩa vụ, Tạp chí Nghiên cứu lập pháp, số 8/2008, tr.5-14.15. Robert Joseph POTHIER, Traité des obligations, Paris, Cosse et Marchai, 1821, n° 123, tr.59; François TERRE, Philippe SIMLER et Yves LEQUETTE, Droit civil — Les obligations, 5e éd., Paris, Dalloz. 1993, tr.20.16. Jean Hauser, Objectivisme et subjectivisme dans l’acte juridique, L.G.D.J, 1971, note 5, tr. 27.17. Nigel Foster, German Law & Legal System, Blackstone Press Limited, London, 1993, dẫn theo Ngô Huy Cương, Nguồn gốc của nghĩa vụ và phân loại nghĩa vụ, Sđd.18. Jacques FLOUR et Jean-Luc AUBERT, Les obligations — L'acte juridique, 6e éd., Paris, Armand Colin, 1994, tr.32.19. Xem: Benoî Moore, De l’acte et du fait juridique: un critère de distinction incertain, Revue juridique Thémis, n277/1997, tr.281—309.20. Jacques GHESTIN, Gilles GOUBEAUX et Muriel FABRE-MAGNAN, Traité de droit civil — Introduction générale, T éd., Paris, L.G.D.J., 1994, tr. 137 ; Nicole CATALA, La nature juridique du payment Paris, L.G.D.J., 1961, tr.26; Gérard CORNU, Vocabulaire juridique, 2 éd., Paris, PUF, 1990, Các từ “Acte”, “fait” et “volonté”.21. Mircea DURMA, La notification de la volonté: Rôle de la notification dans la formation des actes juridiques, Paris, Sirey, 1930, tr. 9.22. Jacques MARTIN DE LA MOUTTE, L'acte juridique unilatéral : essai sur sa notion et sa technique en droit, Paris, Sirey. 1951.23. Jacques MARTIN DE LA MOUTTE, Sđd., note 36, tr.26.24. Grégoire Forest, Essai sur la notion d'obligation en droit privé, Dalloz, 2012, tr.15 ; J. Hauser, Dictionnaire de la culture juridique, dir. D. Alland et S. Rials, Lamy-PUF, 2013, tr.9.25. Jacques MARTIN DE LA MOUTTE, Sđd., note 36, tr.27.

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BASTARDYAll children born before matrimony, or so long after the death of the husband as to render it impossible that the child could be begotten by him, are bastards.– Cro. Jac. 451William Toone: The Magistrates Manual, 1817 (66)On 4 September 1832, the body of a newborn baby boy was found washed up on the shore at the port town of Fremantle, Western Australia. As the result of an inquest into the child’s suspicious death, a 20-year-old, unmarried woman named Mary Summerland was accused of concealing his birth. In October 2014, 25-year-old Irish backpacker Caroline Quinn faced court in Perth, Western Australia, over claims that she concealed the birth of her stillborn child after giving birth in the remote north west town of Halls Creek during May of the same year. Both women denied the existence of their children, both appear to have given birth to their “illegitimate” babies alone, and both women claimed that they did not know that they had ever been pregnant at all. In addition, both women hid the body of their dead child for several days while the people they lived with or were close to, did not appear to notice that the mother of the child had had a baby. In neither case did any person associated with either woman seek to look for the missing child after it had been born.Despite occurring 182 years apart, the striking similarities between these cases could lead to the assumption that it is almost as if there were a written script of behaviour that would explain the actions of both young women. Close examination of the laws surrounding child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth reveals evidence of similar behaviours being enacted by women as far back as the 1600s (and earlier), and all are shaped in response to the legal frameworks that prosecuted women who gave birth outside of marriage.This article traces the history of child murder law from its formation in England in the 1600s and explores how early moral assumptions concerning unmarried mothers echoed through the lived experiences of women who killed their illegitimate babies in colonial Western Australia, and continue to resonate in the treatment of, and legal response to, women accused of similar crimes in the present day. The Unlicensed ChildThe unlicensed child is a term coined by Swain and Howe to more accurately define the social matrix faced by single women and their children in Australia. The term seeks to emphasise the repressive and controlling religious, legal and social pressures that acted on Australian women who had children outside marriage until the mid-1970s (xxi, 1, 92, 94). For the purposes of this article, I extend Swain and Howe’s term the unlicensed child to coin the term the unlicensed mother. Following on from Swain and Howe’s definition, if the children of unmarried mothers did not have a license to be born, it is essential to acknowledge that their mothers did not have a license to give birth. Women who had children without social and legal sanction gave birth within a society that did not allocate them “permission” to be mothers, something that the corporeality of pregnancy made it impossible for them not to be. Their own bodies—and the bodies of the babies growing inside them—betrayed them. Unlicensed mothers were punished socially, religiously, legally and financially, and their children were considered sinful and inferior to children who had married parents simply because they had been born (Scheper-Hughes 410). This unspoken lack of authorisation to experience the unavoidably innate physicality of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, in turn implies that, until recently unmarried mothers did not have license to be mothers. Two MothersAll that remains of the “case” of Mary Summerland is a file archived at the State Records Office of Western Australia under the title CONS 3472, Item 10: Rex V Mary Summerland. Yet revealed within those sparse documents is a story echoed by the events surrounding Caroline Quinn nearly two hundred years later. In September 1832, Mary Summerland was an unmarried domestic servant living and working in Fremantle when the body of a baby was found lying on a beach very close to the settlement. Western Australia had only been colonized by the British in 1829. The discovery of the body of an infant in such a tiny village (colonial Fremantle had a population of only 436 women and girls out of 1341 non-Aboriginal emigrants) (Gardiner) set in motion an inquest that resulted in Mary Summerland being investigated over the suspicious death of the child.The records suggest that Mary may have given birth, apparently alone, over a week prior to the corpse of the baby being discovered, yet no one in Fremantle, including her employer and her family, appeared to have noticed that Mary might have been pregnant, or that she had given birth to a child. When Mary Summerland was eventually accused of giving birth to the baby, she strongly denied that she had ever been pregnant, and denied being the mother of the child. It is not known how her infant ended up being disposed of in the ocean. It is also not known if Mary was eventually charged with concealment or child murder, but in either scenario, the case against her was dismissed as “no true bill” when she faced her trial. The details publically available on the case of Caroline Quinn are also sparse. Even the sex of her child has not been revealed in any of the media coverage of the event. Yet examination of the limited details available on her charge of “concealment of birth” reveal similarities between her behaviours and those of Mary Summerland.In May 2014 Caroline Quinn had been “travelling with friends in the Kimberly region of Western Australia” (Lee), and, just as Mary did, Caroline claims she “did not realise that she was pregnant” when she went into labour (Independent.ie). She appears, like Mary Summerland, to have given birth alone, and also like Mary, when her child died due to unexplained circ*mstances she hid the corpse for several days. Also echoing Mary’s story, no person in the sparsely populated Hall’s Creek community (the town has a populace of 1,211) or any friends in Caroline’s circle of acquaintances appears to have noticed her pregnancy, nor did they realise that she had given birth to a baby until the body of the child was discovered hidden in a hotel room several days after her or his birth. The media records are unclear as to whether Caroline revealed her condition to her friends or whether they “discovered” the body without her assistance. The case was not brought to the attention of authorities until Caroline’s friends took her to receive medical attention at the local hospital and staff there notified the police.Media coverage of the death of Caroline Quinn’s baby suggests her child was stillborn or died soon after birth. As of 13 August 2014 Caroline was granted leave by the Chief Magistrate to return home to Ireland while she awaited her trial, as “without trivialising the matter, nothing more serious was alleged than the concealing of the birth” (Collins, "Irish Woman"). Caroline Quinn was not required to return to Australia to appear at her trial and when the case was presented at the Perth Magistrates Court on Thursday 2 October, all charges against her were dropped as the prosecutor felt “it was not in the public interest” to proceed with legal action (Collins, "Case").Statutory MarginalisationTo understand the similarities between the behaviours of, and legal and medical response to, Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn, it is important to situate the deaths of their children within the wider context of child murder, concealment of birth and “bastardy” law. Tracing the development of these methods of law-making clarifies the parallels between much of the child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth narrative that has occurred in Western Australia since non-Aboriginal settlement.Despite the isolated nature of Western Australia, the nearly 400 years since the law was formed in England, and the extremely remote rural locations where both these women lived and worked, their stories are remarkably alike. It is almost as if there were a written script and each member of the cast knew what role to play: both Mary and Caroline knew to hide their pregnancies, to deny the overwhelmingly traumatic experience of giving birth alone, and to conceal the corpses of their babies. The fathers of their children appear to have cut off any connection to the women or their child. The family, friends, or employers of the parents of the dead babies knew to pretend that they did not know that the mother was pregnant or who the father was. The police and medical officers knew to charge these women and to collect evidence that could be used to simultaneously meet the needs of the both prosecution and the defence when the cases were brought to trial.In reference to Mary Summerland’s case, in colonial Western Australia when a woman gave birth to an infant who died under suspicious circ*mstances, she could be prosecuted with two charges: “child murder” and/or “concealment of birth”. It is suggestive that Mary may have been charged with both. The laws regarding these two offences were focused almost exclusively on the deaths of unlicensed children and were so deeply interconnected they are difficult to untangle. For Probyn, shame pierces the centre of who we think we are, “what makes it remarkable is that it reveals with precision our values, hopes and aspirations, beyond the generalities of good manners and cultured norms” (x). Dipping into the streams of legal and medical discourse that flow back to the seventeenth century highlights the pervasiveness of discourses marginalising single women and their children. This situates Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn within a ‘burden on society’ narrative of guilt, blame and shame that has been in circulation for over 500 years, and continues to resonate in the present (Coull).An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard ChildrenIn England prior to the 17th century, penalties for extramarital sex, the birth and/or maintenance of unlicensed children or for committing child murder were expressed through church courts (Damme 2-6; Rapaport 548; Butler 61; Hoffer and Hull 3-4). Discussion of how the punishment of child murder left the religious sphere and came to be regulated by secular laws that were focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother points to two main arguments: firstly, the patriarchal response to unlicensed (particularly female) sexuality; and secondly, a moral panic regarding a perceived rise in unlicensed pregnancies in women of the lower classes, and the resulting financial burden placed on local parishes to support unwanted, unlicensed children (Rapaport 532, 48-52; McMahon XVII, 126-29; Osborne 49; Meyer 3-8 of 14). In many respects, as Meyer suggests, “the legal system subtly encouraged neonaticide through its nearly universally negative treatment of bastard children” (240).The first of these “personal control laws” (Hoffer and Hull 13) was the Old Poor Law created by Henry VIII in 1533, and put in place to regulate all members of English society who needed to rely on the financial assistance of the parish to survive. Prior to 1533, “by custom the children of the rich depended on their relations, while the ‘fatherless poor’ relied on the charity of the monastic institutions and the municipalities” (Teichman 60-61). Its implementation marks the historical point where the state began to take responsibility for maintenance of the poor away from the church by holding communities responsible for “the problem of destitution” (Teichman 60-61; Meyer 243).The establishment of the poor law system of relief created a hierarchy of poverty in which some poor people, such as those suffering from sickness or those who were old, were seen as worthy of receiving support, while others, who were destitute as a result of “debauchery” or other self-inflicted means were seen as undeserving and sent to a house of correction or common gaol. Underprivileged, unlicensed mothers and their children were seen to be part of the category of recipients unfit for help (Jackson 31). Burdens on SocietyIt was in response to the narrative of poor unlicensed women and their children being undeserving fiscal burdens on law abiding, financially stretched community members that in 1576 a law targeted specifically at holding genetic parents responsible for the financial maintenance of unlicensed children entered the secular courts for the first time. Called the Elizabethan Poor Law it was enacted in response to the concerns of local parishes who felt that, due to the expenses exacted by the poor laws, they were being burdened with the care of a greatly increased number of unlicensed children (Jackson 30; Meyer 5-6; Teichman 61). While the 1576 legislation prosecuted both parents of unlicensed children, McMahon interprets the law as being created in response to a blend of moral and economic forces, undergirded by a deep, collective fear of illegitimacy (McMahon 128). By the 1570s “unwed mothers were routinely whipped and sent to prison” (Meyer 242) and “guardians of the poor” could force unlicensed mothers to wear a “badge” (Teichman 63). Yet surprisingly, while parishes felt that numbers of unlicensed children were increasing, no concomitant rise was actually recorded (McMahon 128).The most damning evidence of the failure of this law, was the surging incidence of infanticide following its implementation (Rapaport 548-49; Hoffer and Hull 11-13). After 1576 the number of women prosecuted for infanticide increased by 225 percent. Convictions resulting in unlicensed mothers being executed also rose (Meyer 246; Hoffer and Hull 8, 18).Infanticide IncreasesBy 1624 the level of infanticide in local communities was deemed to be so great An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was created. The Act made child murder a “sex-specific crime”, focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother, who if found guilty of the offence was punished by death. Probyn suggests that “shame is intimately social” (77) and indeed, the wording of An Act to Prevent highlights the remarkably similar behaviours enacted by single women desperate to avoid the shame and criminal implication linked to the social position of unlicensed mother: Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoyd their shame and to escape punishment [my italics], doe secretlie bury, or conceale the Death of their Children, and after if the child be found dead the said Women doe alleadge that the said Children were borne dead;…For the preventing therefore of this great Mischiefe…if any Woman…be delivered of any issue of the Body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Lawes of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavour privatlie either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by herselfe of the procuring of others, soe to conceale the Death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it be borne alive or not, but be concealed, in every such Case the Mother so offending shall suffer Death… (Davies 214; O'Donovan 259; Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rose 1-2; Rapaport 548). An Act to Prevent also “contained an extraordinary provision which was a reversion of the ordinary common law presumption of dead birth” (Davies 214), removing the burden of proof from the prosecution and placing it on the defence (Francus 133; McMahon 128; Meyer 2 of 14). The implication being that if the dead body of a newborn, unlicensed baby was found hidden, it was automatically assumed that the child had been murdered by their mother (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rapaport 549-50; Francus 133). This made the Act unusual in that “the offence involved was the concealment of death rather than the death itself” (O'Donovan 259). The only way an unlicensed mother charged with child murder was able to avoid capital punishment was to produce at least one witness to give evidence that the child was “borne dead” (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Meyer 238; McMahon 126-27).Remarkable SimilaritiesClearly, the objective of An Act to Prevent was not simply to preserve infant life. It is suggestive that it was enacted in response to women wishing to avoid the legal, social, corporal and religious punishment highlighted by the implementation of the poor law legislation enacted throughout earlier centuries. It is also suggestive that these pressures were so powerful that threat of death if found guilty of killing their neonate baby was not enough to deter women from concealing their unlicensed pregnancies and committing child murder. Strikingly analogous to the behaviours of Mary Summerland in 19th century colonial Western Australia, and Caroline Quinn in 2014, the self-preservation implicit in the “strategies of secrecy” (Gowing 87) surrounding unlicensed birth and child murder often left the mother of a dead baby as the only witness to her baby’s death (McMahon xvii 49-50).An Act to Prevent set in motion the legislation that was eventually used to prosecute Mary Summerland in colonial Western Australia (Jackson 7, Davies, 213) and remnants of it still linger in the present where they have been incorporated into the ‘concealment of birth law’ that prosecuted Caroline Quinn (Legal Online TLA [10.1.182]).Changing the ‘Script’Shame runs like a viral code through the centuries to resonate within the legal response to women who committed infanticide in colonial Western Australia. It continues on through the behaviours of, and legal responses to, the story of Caroline Quinn and her child. As Probyn observes, “shame reminds us about the promises we keep to ourselves” in turn revealing our desire for belonging and elements of our deepest fears (p. x). While Caroline may live in a society that no longer outwardly condemns women who give birth outside of marriage, it is fascinating that the suite of behaviours manifested in response to her pregnancy and the birth of her child—by herself, her friends, and the wider community—can be linked to the narratives surrounding the formation of “child murder” and “concealment” law nearly 400 years earlier. Caroline’s narrative also encompasses similar behaviours enacted by Mary Summerland in 1832, in particular that Caroline knew to say that her child was “born dead” and that she had merely concealed her or his body—nothing more. This behaviour appears to have secured the release of both women as although both Mary and Caroline faced criminal investigation, neither was convicted of any crime. Yet, neither of these women or their small communities were alone in their responses. My research has uncovered 55 cases linked to child murder in Western Australia and the people involved in all of these incidences share unusually similar behaviours (Gardiner). Perhaps, it is only through the wider community becoming aware of the resonance of child murder law echoing through the centuries, that certain women who are pregnant with unwanted children will be able to write a different script for themselves, and their “unlicensed” children. ReferencesButler, Sara, M. "A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England." Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007): 59-82. Collins, Padraig. "Case against Irish Woman for Concealing Birth Dropped." The Irish Times 2 Oct. 2014. ---. "Irish Woman Held for Hiding Birth in Australia Allowed Return Home." The Irish Times 13 Aug. 2014. Coull, Kim. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Damme, Catherine. "Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law." Medical History 22.1 (1978): 1-24. Davies, D.S. "Child-Killing in English Law." The Modern Law Review 1.3 (1937): 203-23. Dickinson, J.R., and J.A. Sharpe. "Infanticide in Early Modern England: The Court of Great Sessions at Chester, 1650-1800." Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Ed. Mark Jackson. Hants: Ashgate, 2002. 35-51.Francus, Marilyn. "Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England." Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997): 133-56. Gardiner, Amanda. "Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia." Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Gowing, Laura. "Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England." Past & Present 156 (1997): 87-115. Hoffer, Peter C., and N.E.H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Independent.ie. "Irish Woman Facing Up to Two Years in Jail for Concealing Death of Her Baby in Australia." 8 Aug. 2014. Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. "Chapter 3: Manslaughter and Other Homicide Offences." Review of the Law of Homicide: Final Report. Perth: Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2007. 85-117.Lee, Sally. "Irish Backpacker Charged over the Death of a Baby She Gave Birth to While Travelling in the Australia [sic] Outback." Daily Mail 8 Aug. 2014. Legal Online. "The Laws of Australia." Thomson Reuters 2010. McMahon, Vanessa. Murder in Shakespeare's England. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Meyer, Jon'a. "Unintended Consequences for the Youngest Victims: The Role of Law in Encouraging Neonaticide from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries." Criminal Justice Studies 18.3 (2005): 237-54. O'Donovan, K. "The Medicalisation of Infanticide." Criminal Law Review (May 1984): 259-64. Osborne, Judith A. "The Crime of Infanticide: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater." Canadian Journal of Family Law 6 (1987): 47-59. Rapaport, Elizabeth. "Mad Women and Desperate Girls: Infanticide and Child Murder in Law and Myth." Fordham Urban Law Journal 33.2 (2006): 527-69.Rose, Lionel. The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1986. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Swain, Shurlee, and Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. Oxford: Cornell University Press, 1982. Toone, William. The Magistrate's Manual: Or a Summary of the Duties and Powers of a Justice of the Peace. 2nd ed. London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1817.

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Abstract:

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circ*mstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circ*mstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. References Adger, Neil W. “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?” Progress in Human Geography 24.3 (2000): 347-64. Alarcón, Cristina. “Lo Único Real Que Tenemos Es Un Cadáver.” 2007. 12 July 2007 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/subnotas/87986-28144-2007-07-12.html>. Amar Sánchez, Ana María. “El Sueño Eterno de Justicia.” Textos De Y Sobre Rodolfo Walsh. Ed. Jorge Raúl Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Alianza, 2000. 205-18. ———. Juegos De Seducción Y Traición. Literatura Y Cultura De Masas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. American Psychological Association. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx>. Australian Government. “Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy.” 2009. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.tisn.gov.au/Documents/Australian+Government+s+Critical+Infrastructure+Resilience+Strategy.pdf>. Battista, Vicente. “¿Hubo Otra Mujer?” Clarín 2003. 26 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/26/s-03402.htm>. ———. “María Marta: El Relato Del Crimen.” Clarín 2003. 16 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/16/o-01701.htm>. Bourbeau, Philippe. “Resiliencism: Premises and Promises in Securitisation Research.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 3-17. Carpenter, Steve, et al. “From Metaphor to Measurement: Resilience of What to What?” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 765-81. Cecchi, Horacio. “Las Dos Muertes De María Marta.” Página 12 (2002). 12 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14095-2002-12-12.html>. Cecchi, Horacio, and Raúl Kollmann. “Un Escenario Sigilosamente Montado.” Página 12 (2002). 13 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14122-2002-12-13.html>. Drury, John, et al. “Representing Crowd Behaviour in Emergency Planning Guidance: ‘Mass Panic’ or Collective Resilience?” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 18-37. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 83-98. Folke, Carl. “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analyses.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 253-67. Folke, Carl, et al. “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability.” Ecology and Society 15.4 (2010). Gallopín, Gilberto C. “Linkages between Vulnerability, Resilience, and Adaptive Capacity.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 293-303. Goldstein, Sam, and Robert B. Brooks, eds. Handbook of Resilience in Children. New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2006. Grove, Kevin. “On Resilience Politics: From Transformation to Subversion.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 146-53. Gunderson, Lance H. “Ecological Resilience - in Theory and Application.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31 (2000): 425-39. Gunderson, Lance H., and C. S. Holling, eds. Panarchy Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington: Island, 2002. Handmer, John W., and Stephen R. Dovers. “A Typology of Resilience: Rethinking Institutions for Sustainable Development.” Organization & Environment 9.4 (1996): 482-511. H.A.T. “Urgente: Llamen a Agatha Christie.” El País (2003). 14 Jan. 2003 ‹http://historico.elpais.com.uy/03/01/14/pinter_26140.asp>. Holling, Crawford S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Janssen, Marco A., et al. “Scholarly Networks on Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation within the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 240-52. Joseph, Jonathan. “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 38-52. Kaufmann, Mareile. “Emergent Self-Organisation in Emergencies: Resilience Rationales in Interconnected Societies.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 53-68. Munro, Andrew. “The Belsunce Case Judgement, Uptake, Genre.” Cultural Studies Review 13.2 (2007): 190-204. ———. “The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity.” Culture, Theory and Critique 53.1 (2012). ———. “Reading Austin Rhetorically.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46.1 (2013): 22-43. Neocleous, Mark. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178 March/April (2013): 2-7. Resilience Solutions Group, Arizona State U. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://resilience.asu.edu/what-is-resilience>. Seery, Mark D., E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver. “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99.6 (2010): 1025-41. Short, Thomas L. “What They Said in Amsterdam: Peirce's Semiotic Today.” Semiotica 60.1-2 (1986): 103-28. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387-420. Stockholm Resilience Centre. “What Is Resilience?” 2007. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-resilience.html>. Ungar, Michael ed. Handbook for Working with Children and Youth Pathways to Resilience across Cultures and Contexts. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. Viau, Susana. “Carmel.” Página 12 (2002). 27 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-14651-2002-12-27.html>. Walker, Brian, et al. “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004). Walker, Brian, and Jacqueline A. Meyers. “Thresholds in Ecological and Social-Ecological Systems: A Developing Database.” Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004). Walker, Brian, and David Salt. Resilience Thinking Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington: Island, 2006.

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During times of disorder the mainstream media tends towards propaganda by hom*ogenising its representation of the ‘other’. This reduces rich histories, diverse cultures and a myriad of languages and religious beliefs down to sweeping statements, broad generalizations and inaccurate assumptions. This paper seeks to explore the representation in the media of the rich array of minority groups that make up the people of Iraq, the epicentre of today’s greatest disorder. In the interest of establishing a liberal, democratic and culturally diverse Iraq, this paper argues that the media must re-order its representation of the many peoples that make up Iraq. Historically, Iraq or Mesopotamia has been ruled by a vast array of kingdoms and empires. From the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians and Seleucids through to the spread of Islam under the rule of the Caliphates and later the Ottomans, this part of the world has seen more than its share of war, bloodshed and domination. However, history also tells us that despite the disorder, this area has mostly celebrated diversity since the ancient cities of Ur and Nineveh. Later, Ottoman sultans generally believed that a strong, civilized state was a cosmopolitan one (Mostyn and Hourani 192). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, however, much of the Middle East plummeted into an unparalleled level of disorder. A territorial crisis ensued and the fighting between a surfeit of ethnic and religious groups went unchecked. Britain and France moved into much of what are now Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Israel with an emphasis on curtailing chaos by imposing order. Nation-states were hastily designed (Jordan was famously drawn by Winston Churchill in the back of a taxi), ancient peoples were divided and new identities were born. In 1920 the many different peoples of the three previously autonomous regions, or vilayets, of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul became Iraqis (Cordesman and Hashim 60, 71). In essence, Iraq is a created or ‘imagined community’ (Anderson) that was not even imagined by the people of the region. This is, of course, common throughout the Middle East and forms the basic premise of Said’s work on Orientalism (Said) – that the Middle East does not exist other than as a powerful European ideological construct designed to help the West better categorize the ‘otherness’ of all things Eastern. Today, Iraqi society is considered “the most spiritually diverse in the Middle East” (Braude 65) and while much Western scholarly and media attention has been given to the plight of the Kurds (Robinson 20) and the rebellion of the Shi’ites (who form the majority within formerly Sunni controlled Iraq) (Keeble 12), little attention has been paid to other Iraqis. In fact, Iraq is home to “numerous racial and religious minorities…(including) Turkomans, Persians, Assyrians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Jews, Yazidihs, Sabeans, and others” (Batatu, as cited in Cordesman and Hashim 71). To put things in perspective, Hourani identified approximately 40 distinct minority groups that dwell within the Arab World (Hourani 1-2). Each of these groups has their own language, their own culture, their own religion, food, history, dress and customs. However, it seems that since the 11th September 2001 – and the political and militaristic disorder that has ensued – the Western mainstream Media have portrayed events involving the Middle East and its people by fusing Orientalism and propaganda in order to further hom*ogenize these ‘others’. The current reporting of the war in Iraq (including the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, the invasion of Iraq, the toppling and later capture of Saddam Hussein and the ongoing war against insurgents / terrorists / car and suicide bombers / kidnappings and beheadings) has rarely made reference to the plight of Iraq’s minorities. This trend therefore serves to reduce and hom*ogenize these groups into an all-encompassing Middle Eastern ‘other’. Their rich array of religions, cultures, languages etc become one. We know them only through disorder and opposition: non-white, non-western, non-Christian, non-civilized. The lack of minority representation in the mainstream media and its role in constructing minority identity has been discussed, to varying degrees, by a number of academics with a variety of approaches and results. This has included research into the people of the Acquitaine region of France (Scrivan and Roberts), the Flemish in Belgium (Van den Bulck), African Americans in the US (Goshorn and Gandy) and the Oka Indians in Canada (Grenier) to name a few. What appears to be common amongst this research is the notion that the lack of representation and the hom*ogenization of the ‘other’ negatively influence these minority groups. By investigating the representation of the Sami people of northern Finland in the Finnish press, Pietikainen and Hujanen interpret the relationship between Sami identity and the way that it is played out in Finnish news discourse. Essentially, they argue, “news representations…contribute to the construction of identities of the people and region in question” (ibid 252). While the above research does suggest that the lack of representation of minority groups in the mainstream media have serious implications for the identities of these peoples, it does not seem to address the extent to which this is effected by times of conflict, war or disorder. Nor does it address the compound result of a lack of representation in both the media of one’s homeland and the global media. More scholarly attention is therefore needed in order to understand the relationship between a lack of representation of minority groups in the media (both domestic and international), how this constructs minority identity and to what degree this shifts during times of disorder. Here, the minority groups of Iraq serve as a near perfect case study. Beyond this, there is also a need for a re-ordering of what is considered newsworthy during times of disorder. Here Arnot (as cited in Coole 847), in discussing the media representation of asylum seekers claims that journalists often fail in reporting the complexity of such situations and need to seek the truth and report on what is real. Unfortunately, journalists often omit important pieces of information “that will shock, sadden and compel readers to sympathise with victims of such atrocities in the world…” (Coole 847). In this way, an accurate representation of the many different peoples of Iraq in the mainstream media would not only serve to positively construct minority identity but may also lead to a better understanding of the conflict, and the peoples trapped within it. While the best possible scenario would obviously be the reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, followed by a peaceful withdrawal from Iraq and the development of a multifarious yet harmonious Middle East, this paper has addressed the issues surrounding the mainstream media’s lack of representation of Iraq’s minorities during this time of disorder. Here the media have hom*ogenized the many peoples of Iraq and effectively unified them under the ‘imagined’ banner of Middle Eastern ‘other’. This opens up new areas of concern regarding the relationship between the media and disorder and the consequences this has for the identity of Iraq’s minority groups. Furthermore, this paper calls for a re-ordering of what is considered newsworthy during times of disorder in an attempt to encourage a more accurate representation, construction and understanding of the many different peoples involved. By telling a more complex story, the media can play a positive role in the development of a l iberal, democratic and culturally diverse Iraq. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised ed. London: Verso, 1991. Braude, Joseph. The New Iraq: A Thought-Provoking Analysis of the Rebuilding of a Nation. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003. Coole, Carolynne. “A Warm Welcome? Scottish and UK Media Reporting of an Asylum-Seeker Murder.” Media, Culture & Society 24 (2002): 839-52. Cordesman, Anthony H., and Ahmed S. Hashim. Iraq: Sanctions and Beyond. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997. Goshorn, Kent, and Oscar H. Jr. Gandy. “Race, Risk and Responsibility: Editorial Constraint in the Framing of Inequality.” Journal of Communication 45.2 (1995): 133-51. Grenier, Marc. “Native Indians in the English-Canadian Press: The Case of the ‘Oka Crisis’.” Media, Culture & Society 16 (1994): 313-36. Hourani, A. H. Minorities in the Arab World. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. Keeble, Richard. Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1997. Mostyn, Trevor, and Albert Hourani. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa. Eds. Trevor Mostyn and Albert Hourani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pietikainen, Sari, and Jaana Hujanen. “At the Crossroads of Ethnicity, Place and Identity: Representations of Northern People and Regions in Finnish News Discourse.” Media, Culture & Society 25 (2003): 251-68. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. London: Routledge, 2002. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978. Scrivan, Michael, and Emily Roberts. “Local Specificity and Regional Unity under Siege: Territorial Identity and the Television News of Aquitaine.” Media, Culture & Society 23 (2001): 587-605. Van den Bulck, Hilde. “Public Service Television and International Identity as a Project of Modernity: The Example of Flemish Television.” Media, Culture & Society 23 (2001): 53-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Isakhan, Ben. "Re-ordering Iraq: Minorities and the Media in Times of Disorder." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/11-isakhan.php>. APA Style Isakhan, B. (Jan. 2005) "Re-ordering Iraq: Minorities and the Media in Times of Disorder," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/11-isakhan.php>.

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It’s a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn.—— Tom Junod, “The Man Who Invented 9/11”The nearly decade-long attempt by families of 9/11 victims to reclaim the remains of their relatives involves rhetorics of bodilessness, waste, and virtuality that offer startling illustrations of what might be termed “the poetics of grief.” After combining as the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. in 2002, the families sued the city of New York in 2005. They lost and the case has been under appeal since 2008. WTC Families is asking for nearly one million tons of material to be moved from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in order to sift it for human remains. These remains will then be reclaimed and interred: Proper Burial. But the matter is far less definitive. When a judge hearing the appeal asked how one would prove someone’s identity, the city’s lawyer replied, “You have to be able to particularise and say it’s your body. All that’s left here is a bunch of undifferentiated dust.” The reply “elicited gasps and muttered ‘no’s’ from a crowd whose members wore laminated photos of deceased victims” (Hughes). These laminated displays are an attempt by WTC Families to counteract the notion of the victims as “undifferentiated dust”; the protected, hermetic images are testimony to painful uncertainty, an (always) outmoded relic of the evidentiary self.In the face of such uncertainty, it was not only court audiences who waited for a particular response to the terrorist attacks. Adam Hirsch, reviewer for the New York Sun, claimed that “the writer whose September 11 novel seemed most necessary was Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo, more than any other novelist, has always worked at the intersection of public terror and private fear.” DeLillo’s prescience regarding the centrality of terrorism in American culture was noted by many critics in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre. The novelist even penned an essay for Harper’s in which he reflected on the role of the novelist in the new cultural landscape of the post-9/11 world. In an online book club exchange for Slate, Meghan O’Rourke says, “DeLillo seemed eerily primed to write a novel about the events of September 11. … Rereading some of his earlier books, including the terrorism-riddled Mao II, I wondered, half-seriously, if Mohamed Atta and crew had been studying DeLillo.” If there was any writer who might have been said to have seen it coming it was DeLillo. The World Trade Center had figured in his novels before the 9/11 attacks. The twin towers are a primary landmark in Underworld, gracing the cover of the novel in ghostly black and white. In Players (1977), a Wall Street worker becomes involved in a terrorist plot to bomb the New York Stock exchange and his wife works in the WTC for the “Grief Management Council”—“Where else would you stack all this grief?” (18).ClassificationsAs the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. trial demonstrates, the reality of the terrorist attacks of September 11 offered an altogether more macabre and less poetic reality than DeLillo’s fiction had depicted. The Fresh Kills landfill serves in Underworld as a metaphor for the accumulated history of Cold War America in the last half-century. Taking in the “man-made mountain,” waste management executive Brian Glassic thinks, “It was science fiction and prehistory”; seeing the World Trade Center in the distance, “he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one” (Underworld 184). But the poetic balance DeLillo explores in the 1997 novel has been sundered by the obliteration of the twin towers. Fresh Kills and the WTC are now united by a disquieting grief. The landfill, which closed in 2001, was forced to reopen when the towers collapsed to receive their waste. Fresh Kills bears molecular witness to this too-big collective trauma. “‘They commingled it, and then they dumped it,’ Mr. Siegel [lawyer for WTC Families] said of the remains being mixed with household trash, adding that a Fresh Kills worker had witnessed city employees use that mixture to fill potholes” (Hughes). The revelation is obscene: Are we walking and driving over our dead? The commingling of rubble and human remains becomes a collective (of) contamination too toxic, too overwhelming for conventional comprehension. “You can’t even consider the issue of closure until this issue has been resolved,” says the lawyer representing WTC Families (Hartocollis).Nick Shay, Underworld’s main character, is another waste executive who travels the world to observe ways of dealing with garbage. Of shopping with his wife, Nick says, “Marion and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?” (121). This attests to the virtuality of waste, a potentiality of the products – commercial, temporal, biological – that comprise the stuff of contemporary American culture. Synecdoche and metonymy both, waste becomes the ground of hysteron proteron, the rhetorical figure that disorders time and makes the future always present. Like (its) Fresh Kills, waste is science fiction and prehistory.Repeating the apparent causal and temporal inversion of hysteron proteron, Nick’s son Jeff uses his home computer to access a simultaneous future and past that is the internal horizon of Underworld’s historical fiction. Jeff has previously been using his computer to search for something in the video footage of the “Texas Highway Killer,” a serial murderer who randomly shoots people on Texan highways. Jeff tries to resolve the image so that the pixels will yield more, exposing their past and future. “He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter” (118). Searching for something more, something buried, Jeff, like WTC Families, is attempting to redeem the artifactual and the overlooked by reconfiguring them as identity. DeLillo recognises this molecular episteme through the “dot theory of reality”: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true” (177). Like the gleaming supermarket products Nick and Marion see as garbage, the unredeemed opens onto complex temporal and rhetorical orders. Getting inside garbage is like getting “inside a dot.” This approach is not possible for the unplanned waste of 9/11. Having already lost its case, WTC Families will almost certainly lose its appeal because its categories and its means are unworkable and inapplicable: they cannot particularise.PremonitionsIn his 9/11 essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in Harper’s a few months after the attacks, DeLillo says “We are all breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan where traces of the dead are everywhere, in the soft breeze off the river, on rooftops and windows, in our hair and on our clothes” (39). DeLillo‘s portrait of molecular waste adumbrates the need to create “counternarratives.” Until the events of 11 September 2001 the American narrative was that of the Cold War, and thus also the narrative of Underworld; one for which DeLillo claims the Bush administration was feeling nostalgic. “This is over now,” he says. “The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative” (34).DeLillo was already at work on a narrative of his own at the time of the terrorist attacks. As Joseph Conte notes, when the World Trade Center was attacked, “DeLillo, had nearly finished drafting his thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis [… and] shared in the collective seizure of the American mind” (179). And while it was released in 2003, DeLillo sets the novel in 2000 on “a day in April.” If the millennium, the year 2000, has been as Boxall claims the horizon of DeLillo’s writing, the tagging of this “day in April” at the beginning of the novel signals Cosmopolis as a limit-work (4). 9/11 functions as a felt absence in the novel, a binding thing floating in the air, like the shirt that DeLillo will use to begin and end Falling Man; a story that will ‘go beyond’ the millennial limit, a story that is, effectively, the counternarrative of which DeLillo speaks in his 9/11 essay. Given the timing of the terrorist attacks in New York, and DeLillo’s development of his novel, it is extraordinary to consider just how Cosmopolis reflects on its author’s position as a man who should have “seen it coming.” The billionaire protagonist Eric Packer traverses Manhattan by car, his journey a bifurcation between sophistication and banality. Along the way he has an onanistic sexual encounter whilst having his prostate examined, hacks into and deletes his wife’s old money European fortune, loses his own self-made wealth by irrationally betting against the rise of the yen, kills a man, and shoots himself in the hand in front of his assassin. Eric actively moves toward his own death. Throughout Eric’s journey the socially binding integrity of the present and the future is teased apart. He continually sees images of future events before they occur – putting his hand on his chin, a bomb explosion, and finally, his own murder – via video screens in his car and wristwatch. These are, as Conte rightly notes, repeated instances of hysteron proteron (186). His corpse does not herald obsolescence but begins the true life of waste: virtual information. Or, as Eric’s “Chief of Theory” asks, “Why die when you can live on a disk?” (106). There are shades here of Jeff’s pixelated excursion into the video footage of the Texas Highway Killer: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information.” Life at this level is not only virtual, it is particularised, a point (or a collection of points) Eric comes to grasp during the protracted scene in which he watches himself die: “The stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him” (207). In Falling Man, the work in which DeLillo engages directly with the 9/11 attack, the particularised body recurs in various forms. First there is the (now iconic) falling man: the otherwise unknown victim of the terrorist attack who leapt from the WTC and whose descent was captured in a photograph by Richard Drew. This figure was named (particularised) by Tom Junod (who provides the epigram for this essay) as “The Falling Man.” In DeLillo’s novel another Falling Man, a performance artist, re-enacts the moment by jumping off buildings, reiterating the photograph (back) into a bodily performance. In these various incarnations the falling man is serially particularised: photographed, named, then emulated. The falling man is a single individual, and multiple copies. He lives on long after death and so does his trauma. He represents the poetic expression of collective grief. Particularised bodies also infect the terror narrative of Falling Man at a molecular level. Falling Man’s terrorist, Hammad, achieves a similar life-after-death by becoming “organic shrapnel.” The surviving victims of the suicide bomb attack, months later, begin to display signs of the suicide bombers in lumps and sores emerging from their bodies, too-small bits of the attacker forever incorporated. Hammad is thus paired with the victims of the crash in a kind of disseminative and absorptive (rhetorical) structure. “The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation” (80). RevisionsThe traces of American culture that were already contained in the landfill in Underworld have now become the resting place of the dust and the bodies of the trauma of 9/11. Rereading DeLillo’s magnum opus one cannot help but be struck by the new resonance of Fresh Kills.The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not…. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?The wind carried the stink across the kill…. The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us. (184-5)The landfill looms large on the landscape, a huge pile of evidence for the mass trauma of what remains, those that remain, and what may come—waste in all its virtuality. The “omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows” is a picture of dust-blanketed Downtown NYC that everybody, everywhere, continually saw. The mediatory second sight of sifting the landfill, of combing the second site of the victims for its “sodden second thoughts,” is at once something “you wanted ardently and then did not.” The particles are wanted as a distillate, produced by the frameline of an intentional, processual practice that ‘edits’ 9/11 and its aftermath into a less unacceptable sequence that might allow the familiar mourning ritual of burying a corpse. WTC Families Inc. is seeking to throw the frame of human identity around the unincorporated particles of waste in the Fresh Kills landfill, an unbearably man-made, million-ton mountain. This operation is an attempt to immure the victims and their families from the attacks and its afterlife as waste or recycled material, refusing the ever-present virtual life of waste that always accompanied them. Of course, even if WTC Families is granted its wish to sift Fresh Kills, how can it differentiate its remains from those of the 9/11 attackers? The latter have a molecular, virtual afterlife in the present and the living, lumpy reminders that surface as foreign bodies.Resisting the city’s drive to rebuild and move on, WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. is absorbed with the classification of waste rather than its deployment. In spite of the group’s failed court action, the Fresh Kills site will still be dug over: a civil works project by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation will reclaim the landfill and rename it “Freshkills Park,” a re-creational area to be twice the size of Central Park—As DeLillo foresaw, “The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us.”ReferencesBoxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006.Conte, Joseph M. “Writing amid the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis”. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 179-192.Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.DeLillo, Don. Players. London: Vintage, 1991.———. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1992.———. Underworld. London: Picador, 1997.———. “In the Ruins of the Future”. Harper’s. Dec. 2001: 33-40.———. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2003.———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.Hartocollis, Anemona. “Landfill Has 9/11 Remains, Medical Examiner Wrote”. 24 Mar. 2007. The New York Times. 7 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24%20/nyregion/24remains.html›. Hirsch, Adam. “DeLillo Confronts September 11”. 2 May 2007. The New York Sun. 10 May 2007 ‹http://www.nysun.com/arts/delillo-confronts-september-11/53594/›.Hughes, C. J. “9/11 Families Press Judges on Sifting at Landfill”. 16 Dec. 2009. The New York Times. 17 Dec. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/nyregion/17sift.html›.Junod, Tom. “The Man Who Invented 9/11”. 7 May 2007. Rev. of Falling Man by Don DeLillo. Esquire. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/delillo›.O’Rourke, Meghan. “DeLillo Seemed Almost Eerily Primed to Write a Novel about 9/11”. 23 May 2007. Slate.com. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2166831/%20entry/2166848/›.

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Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has achieved success as “the new Rain Man” or “the new definitive, popular account of the autistic condition” (Burks-Abbott 294). Integral to its favourable reception is the way it conflates the autistic main character, the fifteen-year-old narrator Christopher Boone, with the savant, or individual who exhibits both neurological problems and giftedness, thereby engaging with the way autism is presented in popular culture. In a variety of contemporary films and television series, autism has been transformed from a disability to a form of giftedness by relating it to abilities associated in contemporary media with a genius, in particular by invoking the metaphor of an autistic mind as a type of computer. As a result, the book engages with the current association of giftedness in mathematics and science with social awkwardness and isolation as constructed in popular culture: in idiomatic terms, the genius “nerd” figure characterised by an uncertain, adolescent approach to social contact (Kendall 353). The disablement of the character is, then, lessened so that the idea of being “special,” continually evoked throughout the text, has a transformative function that is related less to the special needs of those with a disability and more to the common element in adolescent fiction of longing for extraordinary power and control through being a special, gifted individual. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time relates the protagonist, Christopher, to Sherlock Holmes and his methods of detection, specifically through the title being taken from a story by Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in which the “curious incident” referred to is that the dog did nothing in the night. In the original story, that the dog did not bark or react to an intruder was a clue that the person was known to the animal, so allowing Holmes to solve the crime by a process of deduction. Christopher copies these traditional methods of the classical detective to solve his personal mystery, that of who killed a neighbour’s dog, Wellington. The adoption of this title allows a double irony to emerge. Christopher’s attempts to emulate Holmes in his approach to crime are predicated on his assumption of his likeness to the model of the classical detective as he states, “I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be,” pointing out the similarity of their powers of observation and his ability, like Holmes, to “detach his mind at will” as well as his capacity to find patterns in events (92). Through the novel, these attributes are aligned with his autism, constructing a trope of his disability conferring extraordinary abilities that are predicated on a computer-like detachment and precision in his method of thinking. The accessible narrative of the autistic Christopher gives the reader the impression of being able to understand the perspective of an individual with a spectrum disorder. In this way, the text not only engages with, but contributes to the construction of this disability in current popular culture as merely an extension of giftedness, especially in mathematics, and an associated unwillingness to communicate. Indeed, according to Raoul Eshelman, “one of its most engaging narrative devices is to make us identify with a mentally impaired narrator who is manifestly not interested in identifying either with us or anyone else” (1). The main character’s reference to mathematical and scientific ideas exploits an interest in giftedness already established by popular literature and film, and engages with a transformation effected in popular culture of the genius as autistic, and its corollary of an autistic person as potentially a genius. Such a construction ranges from fictional characters like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, Charlie and his physicist colleagues in Numb3rs, and Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, to real life characters or representative figures in reality series and feature films such as x + y, The Imitation Game, The Big Short, and the television program Beauty and the Geek. While never referring specifically to autism, all the real or fictional representations contribute to the construction of a stereotype in which behaviours on the autistic spectrum are linked to a talent in mathematics and the sciences. In addition to this, detectives in the classical crime fiction alluded to in the novel typically exhibit traits of superhuman powers of deduction, pattern making, and problem solving that engage with the popular notion of genius in general and mathematics in particular by possessing a mind like a computer. Such detectives from current television series as Saga from The Bridge and Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds exhibit distance, coldness, and lack of social awareness or empathy with others, and this is presented as the basis of their extraordinary ability to discern patterns and solve crime. Spencer Reid, for example, has three PhDs in Science disciplines and Mathematics. Charlie in the television series Numb3rs is also a genius who uses his mathematical abilities to not only find the solution to crime but also explain the maths behind it to his FBI colleagues, and, in conjunction, the audience. But the character with the clearest association to Christopher is, naturally, Sherlock Holmes, both as constructed in Conan Doyle’s original text and the current adaptations and transformations of it. The television series Sherlock and Elementary, as well as the films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows all invoke a version of Holmes in which his powers of deduction are associated with symptoms to be found in a spectrum disorder.Like Christopher, the classical detective is characterised by being cold, emotionless, distant, socially inept, and isolated, but also keenly observant, analytical, and scientific; one who approaches the crime as a puzzle to be solved (Cawelti 43) with computer-like precision. In what is considered to be the original detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe included a “pseudo-mathematical logic in his literary scenario” (Platten 255). In Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes, too, adopts a mathematical and scientific approach to construct patterns from clues that he alone can discern, and thereby solve the crime. The depiction of investigators in contemporary media such as Charlie in Numb3rs engages with these origins so that he is objective, dispassionate, and able to relate to real-world problems only through the filter of mathematical formulae. Christopher is presented similarly by engaging with the idea of the detective as implied savant and relying on an ability to discern patterns for successful crime solving.The book links the disabling behaviours of autism with the savant, so that the stereotype of the mystic displaying both disability and giftedness in fiction of earlier ages has been transformed in contemporary literature to a figure with extraordinary powers related both to autism and to the contemporary form of mysticism: innate mathematical ability and computer-style calculation. Allied with what Murray terms the “unknown and ambiguous nature” of autism, it is characterised as “the alien within the human, the mystical within the rational, the ultimate enigma” (25) in a way that is in keeping with the current fascination with the nature of genius and its association with being “special,” a term continually evoked and discussed throughout the book by the main character. The chapters on scientific ideas relate to Christopher’s world view, filtered through a mathematical and analytical approach to life and relationships with other people. Christopher examines beliefs such as the concept of humanity as superior to other animals, and the idea of religion and creationism, that is, the idea of humanity itself as special, with a cold and logical approach. He similarly discusses the idea of the individual person as special, linking this to a metaphor of the human mind being a computer (203, 148). Christopher’s narrow perspective as a result of his autism is not presented as disabling so much as protective, because the metaphorical connection of his viewpoint to a computer provides him with distance. Although initially Christopher fails to realise the significance of events, this allows him to be “switched off” (103) from events that he finds traumatising.The transformative metaphor of an autistic individual thinking like a computer is also invoked through Christopher’s explanation of “why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers” (147). Indeed, both in terms of his tendency to retreat or by “pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting” (178) in times of stress, Christopher metaphorically views himself as a computer. Such a perspective invokes yet another popular cultural reference through the allusion to the human brain as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, sitting in his captain’s seat looking at a big screen” (147). But more importantly, the explanation refers to the basic premise of the book, that the text offers access to a condition that is inherently unknowable, but able to be understood by the reader through metaphor, often based on computers or technology as a result of a popular construction of autism that “the condition is the product of a brain in which the hard drive is incorrectly formatted” (Murray 25).Throughout the novel, the notion of “special” is presented as a trope for those with a disability, but as the protagonist, Christopher, points out, everyone is special in some way, so the whole idea of a disability as disabling is problematised throughout the text, while its associations of giftedness are upheld. Christopher’s disability, never actually designated as Asperger’s Syndrome or any type of spectrum disorder, is transformed into a protective mechanism that shields him from problematic social relationships of which he is unaware, but that the less naïve reader can well discern. In this way, rather than a limitation, the main character’s disorder protects him from a harsh reality. Even Christopher’s choice of Holmes as a role model is indicative of his desire to impose an eccentric order on his world, since this engages with a character in popular fiction who is famous not simply for his abilities, but for his eccentricity bordering on a form of autism. His aloof personality and cold logic not only fail to hamper him in his investigations, but these traits actually form the basis of them. The majority of recent adaptations of Conan Doyle’s stories, especially the BBC series Sherlock, depict Holmes with symptoms associated with spectrum disorder such as lack of empathy, difficulty in communication, and limited social skills, and these are clearly shown as contributing to his problem-solving ability. The trope of Christopher as detective also allows a parodic, postmodern comment on the classical detective form, because typically this fiction has a detective that knows more than the reader, and therefore the goal for the reader is to find the solution to the crime before it is revealed by the investigator in the final stages of the text (Rzepka 14). But the narrative works ironically in the novel since the non-autistic reader knows more than a narrator who is hampered by a limited worldview. From the beginning of the book, the narrative as focalised through Christopher’s narrow perspective allows a more profound view of events to be adopted by the reader, who is able to read clues that elude the protagonist. Christopher is well aware of this as he explains his attraction to the murder mystery novel, even though he has earlier stated he does not like novels since his inability to imagine or empathise means he is unable to relate to their fiction. For him, the genre of murder mystery is more akin to the books on maths and science that he finds comprehensible, because, like the classical detective, he views the crime as primarily a puzzle to be solved: as he states, “In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book” (5). But unlike Christopher, Holmes invariably knows more about the crime, can interpret the clues, and find the pattern, before other characters such as Watson, and especially the reader. In contrast, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the reader has more awareness of the probable context and significance of events than Christopher because, like a computer, he can calculate but not imagine. The reader can interpret clues within the plot of the story, such as the synchronous timing of the “death” of Christopher’s mother with the breakdown of the marriage of a neighbour, Mrs Shears. The astute reader is able to connect these events and realise that his mother has not died, but is living in a relationship with the neighbour’s husband. The construction of this pattern is denied Christopher, since he fails to determine their significance due to his limited imagination. Such a failure is related to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Theory of Mind, in which he proposes that autistic individuals have difficulty with social behaviour because they lack the capacity to comprehend that other people have individual mental states, or as Christopher terms it, “when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds” (145). Haddon utilises fictional licence when he allows Christopher to overcome such a limitation by a conscious shift in perspective, despite the specialist teacher within the text claiming that he would “always find this very difficult” (145). Christopher has here altered his view of events through his modelling both on the detective genre and on his affinity with mathematics, since he states, “I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it” (145). In this way, the main character is shown as transcending symptoms of autism through the power of his giftedness in mathematics to ultimately discern a pattern in human relationships thereby adopting a computational approach to social problems.Haddon similarly explains the perspective of an individual with autism through a metaphor of Christopher’s memory being like a DVD recording. He is able to distance himself from his memories, choosing “Rewind” and then “Fast Forward” (96) to retrieve his recollection of events. This aspect of the precision of his memory relates to his machine-like coldness and lack of empathy for the feelings of others. But it also refers to the stereotype of the nerd figure in popular culture, where the nerd is able to relate more to a computer than to other people, exemplified in Sheldon from the television series The Big Bang Theory. Thus the presentation of Christopher’s autism relates to his giftedness in maths and science more than to areas that relate to his body. In general, descriptions of inappropriate or distressing bodily functions associated with disorders are mainly confined to other students at Christopher’s school. His references to his fellow students, such as Joseph eating his poo and playing in it (129) and his unsympathetic evaluation of Steve as not as clever or interesting as a dog because he “needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick” (6), make a clear distinction between him and the other children, who despite being termed “special needs” are “special” in a different way from Christopher, because, according to him, “All the other children at my school are stupid” (56). While some reference is made to Christopher’s inappropriate behaviour in times of stress, such as punching a fellow student, wetting himself while on the train, and vomiting outside the school, in the main the emphasis is on his giftedness as a result of his autism, as displayed in the many chapters where he explains scientific and mathematical concepts. This is extrapolated into a further mathematical metaphor underlying the book, that he is like one of the prime numbers he finds so fascinating, because prime numbers do not fit neatly into the pattern of the number system, but they are essential and special nevertheless. Moreover, as James Berger suggests, prime numbers can “serve as figures for the autistic subject,” because like autistic individuals “they do not mix; they are singular, indivisible, unfactorable” yet “Mathematics could not exist without these singular entities that [. . .] are only apparent anomalies” (271).Haddon therefore offers a transformation by confounding autism with a computer-like ability to solve mathematical problems, so that the text is, as Haddon concedes, “as much about a gifted boy with behavior problems as it is about anyone on the autism spectrum” (qtd. in Burks-Abbott 291). Indeed, the word “autism” does not even appear in the book, while the terms “genius,” (140) “clever,” (32, 65, 252) and the like are continually being invoked in descriptions of Christopher, even if ironically. More importantly, the reader is constantly being shown his giftedness through the reiteration of his study of A Level Mathematics, and his explanation of scientific concepts. Throughout, Christopher explains aspects of mathematics, astrophysics, and other sciences, referring to such well-known puzzles in popular culture as the Monty Hall problem, as well as more obscure formulae and their proofs. They function to establish Christopher’s intuitive grasp of complex mathematical and scientific principles, as well as providing the reader with insight into both his perspective and the paradoxical nature of an individual who is at once able to solve quadratic equations in his head, yet is incapable of understanding the simple instruction, “Take the tube to Willesden Junction” (211).The presentation of Christopher is that of an individual who displays an extension of the social problems established in popular literature as connected to a talent for mathematics, therefore engaging with a depiction already existing in popular mythology: the isolated and analytical nerd or genius social introvert. Indeed, much of Christopher’s autistic behaviour functions to protect him from unsettling or traumatic information, since he fails to realise the significance of the information he collects or the clues he is given. His disability is therefore presented as not limiting so much as protective, and so the notion of disability is subsumed by the idea of the savant. The book, then, engages with a contemporary representation within popular culture that has transformed spectrum disability into mathematical giftedness, thereby metaphorically associating the autistic mind with the computer. ReferencesBaron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Berger, James. “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 271–88. Burks-Abbott, Gyasi. “Mark Haddon’s Popularity and Other Curious Incidents in My Life as an Autistic.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 289–96. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Eshelman, Raoul. “Transcendence and the Aesthetics of Disability: The Case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 15.1 (2009). Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Random House Children’s Books, 2004. Kendall, Lori. “The Nerd Within: Mass Media and the Negotiation of Identity among Computer-Using Men.” Journal of Men’s Studies 3 (1999): 353–67. Murray, Stuart. “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present.” Literature and Medicine 25.1 (2006): 24–46. Platten, David. “Reading Glasses, Guns and Robots: A History of Science in French Crime Fiction.” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 253–70. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

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I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the co*ckpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html

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Abstract:

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisem*nt and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, hom*ophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. 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Introduction In this paper, I examine the practices of representing Deaf ‘voices’’ to hearing audiences in two recent US television crime dramas. More literally I look at how American Sign Language is framed and made visible on the screen through various production decisions. Drawing examples from an episode of CSI: New York that aired in December 2006 and an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that aired in April 2007, I examine how the practices of filming Deaf people and the use of American Sign Language intersect with the production of a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen. The problem of representing a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen is akin to the problem of representing other minority languages. Film and television producers in the United States have to make choices about whether the majority audience of English speakers will have access to the minority language or not. In the face of this dilemma media producers have taken several approaches: subtitling foreign speech, translating foreign speech through other characters, or leaving the language inaccessible except to those who use it. The additional difficulty with representing national sign languages is that both the language and the recording medium are visual. Sometimes, filmmakers make the choice of leaving some portions of the signed dialogue inaccessible to a non-signing hearing audience. On the one hand this choice could indicate a devaluing of the signed communication, as its specific content is considered irrelevant to the plot. On the other hand it could indicate that Deaf people have a right to be visible on television using their own language without accommodating hearing people. A number of choices made in the filming and editing can subtly undermine positive representations of Deaf ‘voices’ particularly to a Deaf audience. These choices often construct an image of sign languages as objectified, exoticised, disjointed, incomplete, or a code for spoken language. Simple choices such as using simultaneous speaking and signing by Deaf characters, cropping the scene, translating or not translating the dialogue have powerful implications for the ways that Deaf ‘voices’ are becoming more visible in the 21st century. Typical filming and editing conventions effectively silence the Deaf ‘voice.’ Over 20 years ago, in the comprehensive book, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (1988), Schuchman’s complaint that the filming and editing techniques of the day often did not attend to preserving the visibility and comprehensibility of sign language eon the screen, still applies today. As editing techniques have evolved over the years, fr om reliance on wide and medium shots to frequent intercutting of close-ups, the tendency to cut sign language off the screen, and out of the comprehensible view of the audience, may have even increased. Recent Portrayals of Deaf People on Television During one television season in the United States between August 2006 and April 2007, 30 episodes of six different serial television programs portrayed signing Deaf characters. Three of these programs had on-going Deaf characters that appeared in a number of episodes throughout the season, while three other programs portrayed Deaf people in a one-off episode with a Deaf theme. Initial air date for the season Program and Season # of Episodes 1 14 Aug. 2006 Weeds, Season 2 5 2 20 Sep. 2006 Jericho, Season 1 13 3 28 Jan. 2007 The L Word, Season 4 9 Table 1. Dramas with Ongoing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Season Initial air date Program, Season, Episode Episode Title 1 13 Dec. 2006 CSI: New York, Season 3, Episode 12 “Silent Night” 2 3 Apr. 2007 Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Season 6, Episode 18 "Silencer" 3 12 Apr. 2007 Scrubs, Season 6, Episode 16 “My Words of Wisdom” Table 2. One-off Episodes with Signing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Seasons Ironically, although the shows with ongoing characters sometimes allow the Deafness of the character to be incidental to the character, it is only the one-off crime dramas that show Deaf people relating with one another as members of a vibrant community and culture based in sign language. Often, in the ongoing series, the characters remain isolated from the Deaf community and their interactions with other Deaf people are sparse or non-existent. For example, out of the 27 episodes with an ongoing Deaf character only two episodes of The L-Word have more than one Deaf character portrayed. In both Weeds and The L-Word the Deaf character is the love interest of one of the hearing characters, while in Jericho, the Deaf character is the sister of one of the main hearing characters. In these episodes though some of realities about Deaf people’s lives are touched on as they relate to the hearing characters, the reality of signing Deaf people’s social lives in the Deaf community is left absent and they are depicted primarily interacting with hearing people. The two episodes, from CSI: New York, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, focus on the controversial theme of cochlear implants in the Deaf community. Though it is true that generally the signing Deaf community in the U.S.A. sees cochlear implants as a threat to their community, there is no record of this controversy ever motivating violent criminal acts or murder as portrayed in these episodes. In the episode of CSI: New York entitled “Silent Night” a conflict between a young Deaf man and Deaf woman who were formerly romantically involved is portrayed. The murdered young woman who comes from a Deaf family does not want her Deaf baby to have a cochlear implant while the killer ex-boyfriend who has a cochlear implant believes that it is the best option for his child. The woman’s Deaf parents are involved in the investigation. The episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, entitled “Silencer,” is also ultimately about a conflict between a Deaf man and a Deaf woman over cochlear implants. In the end, it is revealed that the Deaf woman is exploring the possibility of a cochlear implant. Her boyfriend projecting the past hurt of his hearing sister leaving him behind to go off and live her own life, doesn’t want his girlfriend to leave him once she gains more hearing. So he shoots the cochlear implant surgeon in the hand to prevent him from being able to perform the surgery. Then he accidentally kills him by crushing his voice box to prevent him from screaming. Analyzing Two Crime Dramas In both television dramas, the filmmakers use both sound and video editing techniques to mark the experiential difference between hearing and Deaf characters. In comparing the two dramas two techniques are evident : muting/distorting sounds and extreme close-ups on lips talking or hands signing. Though these techniques may heighten awareness of deaf experience to a non-signing audience they also point to a disabling stereotyping of the experience of being Deaf as lacking — framing their experience as hearing loss rather than Deaf gain (Bauman & Murray; Shakespeare 199). By objectifying sign language through extreme close ups American Sign Language is portrayed as something strange and unusual that separates Deaf signers from hearing speakers. The auditory silences can either jolt the hearing non-signer into awareness of the sensory aspect of sound that is missing or it can jolt them into awareness of the visual world that they often don’t really see. In the opening few scenes of the episodes both CSI: New York and Law and Order: Criminal Intent use sound editing alternately muting or distorting sounds as they cut between a ‘deaf’ auditory perspective and a ‘hearing’ perspective on the action as it unfolds. Even though the sound editing does play a part in the portrayal of Deaf people’s experience as lacking sound, the more important aspects of film production to attend to are the visual aspects where Deaf people are seen authentically signing in their own language. Scene Analysis Methodology In taking a closer look at a scene from each episode we can see exactly how the filming and editing techniques work to create an image of sign language. I have chosen comparable scenes where a Deaf individual is interviewed or interrogated by the police using a sign language interpreter. In each scene it can be assumed that all the communication is happening in both English and ASL through an interpreter, so at all times some signing should be occurring. In transcribing the scenes, I noted each point when the editor spliced different camera shots adjacent to each other. Because of the different visual aesthetics in each program where one relied heavily on continuous panning shots, I also noted where the camera shifted focus from one character to another marking the duration of screen time for each character. This allowed for a better comparison between the two programs. In my transcripts, I included both glosses of the ASL signs visible on the screen as well as the flow of the spoken English on the audio track. This enabled me to count how many separate shifts in character screen time segments contained signing and how much of these contained completely visible signing in medium shots. CSI:NY Witness Interview Scene In the first signing scene, Gina (played by Marlee Matlin) is brought in for an interview with Detective Taylor and a uniformed officer interpreter. The scene opens with a medium shot on Detective Taylor as he asks her, “What do you think woke you up?” The shot cuts to an extreme close up of her face and hands and pans to only the hands as she signs FOOTSTEPS. Then the scene shifts to an over the shoulder medium shot of the interpreter where we can still see her signing VIBRATIONS and it cuts to a close up of her face as she signs ALISON NOISE. Though these signs are cropped, they are still decipherable as they happen near the face. Throughout this sequence the interpreter voices “Footsteps, I felt vibrations. I thought maybe it was Alison.” Next we have a close-up on Detective Taylor’s face as he asks her why her family moved and whether she had family in the area. During his question the camera shifts to a close up reaction of Gina listening and then back to a close up on Taylor’s face, and then to a medium shot of the interpreter translating the last part of the question. Next, while Gina responds the camera quickly cuts from a medium shot to a close-up side view of the hands to a close-up bird’s eye view of the hands to a close up of Gina’s face with most of the signs outside of the frame. See the transcript below: [medium shot] NOT PLAN HAVE MORE CHILDREN,[close-up side view of hands] PREGNANT,[close-up from bird’s eye view] DECIDE RAISE ELIZABETH[close-up Gina’s face signs out of frame] SAFE While this sequence plays out the interpreter voices, “My husband and I weren’t planning on having any more children. When I got pregnant my husband and I decided to raise Elizabeth outside of the city where it’s safe.” The kind of quick cuts between close-ups, medium shots and reaction shots of other characters sets the visual aesthetic for this episode of CSI: NY. In this particular clip, the camera shifts shot angles no less than 50 times in the space of one minute and 34 seconds. Yet there are only 12 conversational turns back and forth between the two characters. This makes for a number of intercut reaction shots, interpreter shots as well as close-ups and other angles on the same character. If only counting shifts in screen time on a particular character, there are still 37 shifts in focus between different characters during the scene. Out of the 22 shots that contain some element of signing — we only see a medium shot with all of the signing space visible 4 times for approximately 2 seconds each. Even though signing is occurring during every communication via the interpreter or Gina, less than half of the shots contain signs and 18 of these are close ups from various angles. The close ups in this clip varied from close-ups on the face, which cut out part of the signs, to close ups on the hands caught in different perspectives from a front, side, top or even table top reflected upside-down view. Some of the other shots were over the back shoulder of Gina catching a rear view of the signs as the camera is aimed in a medium shot of the detective and interpreter. The overall result from a signing perspective is a disjointed jumble of signs leaving the impression of chaos and heightened emotion. In some ways this can be seen as an exoticisation of the signs making them look surreal, drawing attention to the body parts displaying the signs and objectifying them. Such objectification may seem harmless to a non-signing hearing audience or media producer as a mere materializing of the felt amazement at signed communication moving at such a pace. But if we were to propose a hypothetical parallel situation where a Korean character is speaking in her native tongue and we are shown extreme close ups and quick cuts jumping from an image of the lips moving to the tongue tapping the teeth to a side close up of the mouth to an overhead image from the top of the head – this type of portrayal would immediately be felt to be a de-humanization of Korean people and likely labeled racist. In the case of sign language, is it merely thought of as visual artistry? Law & Order: Suspect Interrogation Scene Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a different film aesthetic. The scene selected is an interview with a potential suspect in the murder of a cochlear implant surgeon. The Deaf man, Larry is an activist and playwright. He is sitting at a table with his lawyer across from the male detective, Goren, and the interpreter with the female detective, Eames, standing to the side. Unlike the CSI: NY scene there are no quick cuts between shots. Instead the camera takes longer shots panning around the table. Even when there are cuts to slightly different angles, the camera continues to pan in the same direction as the previous shot giving the illusion that almost the entire scene is one shot. In this 45-second scene, there are only five cuts to different camera angles. However, the act of panning the camera around the room even in a continuous shot serves to break up the scene further as the camera pulls focus zooming in on different characters while it pans. For the purposes of this analysis, in addition to dividing the scene at shifts in camera angles performed through editing, I also divide the scenes at shifts in camera angles focusing on different characters. As the camera moves to focus on a different interlocutor (serving the same purpose as a shift done through editing), this brings the total shifts in camera angles to ten. At several points throughout this Law & Order: CI episode, the cinematographer uses the technique of zooming into an extreme close-up on the hands and then pulling out to see the signer. But in this particular scene all of the visible signed sequences are filmed in medium shots. While this is positive because we can actually see the whole message including hand and face, the act of panning behind the backs of seated characters while Larry is signing blocks some of his message just as much as shifting the edit to a reaction shot would do. Of the ten shots, only one shot does not contain any signing: when Detective Eames reacts to Larry’s demands and incredulously says, “A Deaf cop?” While all of the other shots contain some signing, there are only two signed interchanges that are not interrupted by some sort of body block. Ironically, both of these shots are when the hearing detective is speaking. The first is the opening shot. The camera, in a wide shot on 5 characters, opens on their reflections in the mirrored window located in the interview room. As the camera pulls back into the room, it spins around and pans across Detective Eames’ face to settle on Detective Goran. While Goran begins talking the shot widens out to include the interpreter sitting next to him and catch the signed translation. Goran says, “Larry? There’s a lot of people pointing their finger at you.” With a bit of lag time the interpreter signs: A-LOT PEOPLE THINK YOU GUILTY. Overall Comparison of the Two Scenes For both scenes there were only four segments with unobstructed medium shots of signers in the act of signing. In the case of Law & Order: CI this might be considered a good showing as there were only nine segments in the entire scene and 8 contained signing. Thus potentially yielding 50% visibility of the signs during the entire stream of the conversation (however not all signs were actually fully visible). In the case of CSI: NY, with its higher ratio of segments split by different camera shots, 22 segments contained signing, yielding a ratio of 18% visibility of signs. Though this analysis is limited to only one scene for comparison it does reveal that both episodes prioritize the spoken language stream of information over the sign language stream of information. CSI: New York Law & Order: CI Time duration of the clip 1 min 34 sec 45 sec # shifts in character conversational turns 12 times 10 times # edited camera shots to different angle 50 5 #shifts in screen time of the characters (edited or panned) 37 9 Total # screen time segments with signing 22 8 # medium shot segments with signing fully visible 4 4 # segments containing close ups of signs, cropped off signs or blocked 18 4 Table 3. Count comparison between the two scenes Filmmakers come from a hearing framework of film production where language equals sound on an audio track. Within that framework sound editing is separate from video editing and can provide continuity between disjointed visual shots. But this kind of reliance on sound to provide the linguistic continuity fails when confronted with representing American Sign Language on the screen. The sound stream of translated English words may provide continuity for the hearing audience, but if left to rely on what is available in the visual modality Deaf viewers may have to rely on closed captioning to understand the dialog even when it is portrayed in their own language. Disjointed scenes showing quick cuts between different angles on a signed dialog and flashing between reacting interlocutors leaves the signing audience with a view on a silenced protagonist. Recommendations How can media producers give voice to sign language on the screen? First there needs to be an awareness and concern amongst these same media producers that there is actually value in taking the care required to make sign language visible and accessible to the signing Deaf audience and perhaps raise more awareness among the non-signing hearing audience. It may be entirely possible to maintain a similar visual aesthetic to the programs and still make sign language visible. Hearing producers could learn from Deaf cinema and the techniques being developed there by emerging Deaf film producers (Christie, Durr, and Wilkins). In both examples used above careful planning and choreography of the filming and editing of the scenes would make this possible. With the quick cutting style of frequent close up shots found in CSI: NY, it would be necessary to reduce the number of close ups or make sure they were wide enough to include enough of the signs to maintain intelligibility as with signs that are made near the face. In addition, medium shots of the interpreter or the interpreter and the hearing speaker would have to become the norm in order to make the interpreted spoken language accessible as well. Over the shoulder shots of signers are possible as well, as long as the back of the signer does not obscure understanding of the signs. In order to avoid objectification of sign language, extreme close-ups of the hands should be avoided as it de-humanizes sign languages and reduces language to animalistic hand gestures. In addition, with adopting the visual aesthetic of panning continuous shots such as those found in Law and Order: CI, care would need to be taken not to obstruct the signs while circling behind other participants. Other possibilities remain such as adapting the visual aesthetic of 24 (another United States crime drama) where multiple shots taking place simultaneously are projected onto the screen. In this manner reaction shots and full shots of the signing can both be visible simultaneously. Aside from careful choreography, as suggested in previous work by scholars of Deaf cinema, (Schuchman, Hollywood; Jane Norman qtd. in Hartzell), hearing media producers would need to rely on excellent ASL/Deaf culture informants during all stages of the production; typically, cinematographers, directors and editors likely will not know how to make sure that signs are not obscured. Simultaneous signing and talking by Deaf and hearing characters should be avoided as this method of communication only confirms in the minds of hearing signers that sign language is merely a code for spoken language and not a language in and of itself. Instead, hearing media producers can more creatively rely on interpreters in mixed settings or subtitling when conversations occur between Deaf characters. Subtitling is already a marker for foreign language and may alert non-signing hearing audiences to the fact that sign language is a full language not merely a code for English. Using these kinds of techniques as a matter of policy when filming signing Deaf people will enable the signing voice some of the visibility that the Deaf community desires. Acknowledgements This article is based on work originally presented at the conference “Deaf Studies Today!”, April 2008, at Utah Valley State University in Orem, Utah, USA. I am grateful for feedback that I received from participants at this presentation. An earlier version of this article is published as part of the conference proceedings Deaf Studies Today! Mosaic edited by Brian K. Eldredge, Flavia Fleischer, and Douglas Stringham. References Bauman, H-Dirksen, and Joseph Murray. "Reframing from Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain." Deaf Studies Digital Journal (Fall 2009). < http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/ >. Chaiken, Ilene (writer). The L Word. Television series. Season 4. 2007. Chbosky, S., J. Schaer, and J.E. Steinbert (creators) Jericho. Television series. Season 1 & 2. 2006-2007. Christie, Karen, Patti Durr, and Dorothy M. Wilkins. “CLOSE-UP: Contemporary Deaf Filmmakers.” Deaf Studies Today 2 (2006): 91-104. Hartzell, Adam. “The Deaf Film Festival.” The Film Journal (May 2003) < http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue5/deaf.html >. Kohan, J. (creator), M. Burley (producer). Weeds. Television series. Lawrence, B. (creator), V. Nelli Jr. (director). “My Words of Wisdom.” Scrubs. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 16. 12 Apr. 2007. Lenkov, P. M., and S. Humphrey (writers), A.E. Zulker (story), and R. Bailey (director). “Silent Night.” CSI: New York. Television series episode. Season 3, episode 12. CBS, 13 Dec. 2006. O'Shea, M. (writer), D. White (director), M.R. Thewlis (producer). "Silencer." Law and Order Criminal Intent. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 18. New York: Universal, 3 April 2007. Schuchman, John. S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Entertainment Industry. Urbana & Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. 1988. ———. “The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community's Response.” Sign Language Studies 4.3 (2004): 231-238.

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Abstract:

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

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Abstract:

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Wildwood Enterprises. 1976.Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. “Oliver Stone- Satire and Controversy.” 23 Mar. 2013. 30 Juy 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2gBKApxyk>.Bauman, Zygmunt. Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.Born on the 4th of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Ixtian, 1989.The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, Legendary Entertainment. 2008.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.The Fifth Estate. Dir. Bill Condon. Dreamworks, Anonymous Content (a.o.). 2013.Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. Guilford, Lyons P, 2011.Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2011.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.Moretti, Anthony. “Whistleblower or Traitor: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Power of Media Celebrity.” Moscow Readings Conference, 14-15 Nov. 2013, Moscow, Russia.North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Warner Bros., Industry Entertainment (a.o.). 2005.On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures. 1954.Oushakine, Sergei A. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 191-214.Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

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Abstract:

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchco*ck’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male p*rnographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circ*mstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sad*stic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. 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