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The politics of loss and trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema. New York: Routledge, 2011.
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Carol Geronès, Lídia. Un bric-à-brac de la Belle Époque. Venice: Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-434-9.
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Fortuny (1983) by Pere Gimferrer is the only novel (at least to date) that the author has written in Catalan and it represents one of the most unique novels of contemporary Hispanic narrative. The aims of the present study are mainly two: to shed light on one of the most important, but least studied, works by Pere Gimferrer, the greatest representative of Hispanic creativity for the Post-War Generation, and to analyse critical reception of the work and show how the novel has evolved from the time of publication in 1983 until today. This essay consists of three major parts: the study of critical reception, the narratological analysis of the text and the unveiling of the textual, but above all visual, references that make up the novel. The latter allows us to explain two essential elements of the novel: the imaginary Fortuny on the one hand and, on the other, the novel’s intertextual concrete figure of speech, its ekphrasis. The study of this intentionally visual character of the novel not only wanted to highlight the importance of two arts to which Gimferrer has always paid special attention – we refer to cinema and painting – but has also demonstrated the desire of the writer to innovate the Catalan narrative scene, using different literary devices to push the limits of the genre novel.
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Spencer-Hall, Alicia. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462982277.
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This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.
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Aghib Levi D’Ancona, Flora. La Nostra Vita con Ezio e Ricordi di guerra. Edited by Luisa Levi d'Ancona Modena. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-5518-273-7.
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Our life with Ezio and Memories of War, written by Flora Aghib Levi D’Ancona traces the life of her husband Ezio Levi, a Jewish Italian philologist and hispanist, their experiences of exile in the US where the couple fled after the racial laws. Completed with a historiographical introduction and an appendix of unpublished letters, the volume traces Ezio’s path as a Jewish intellectual in Fascist Italy, his role as a cultural mediator of Spanish contemporary literature to Italy, the trauma of the racial laws, and the challenges of the American exile. Expression of a women’s exile literature, the pages reflect the authors experience as a mother writing for her children left in Italy and of an intellectual Italian Jewish woman dealing with the challenges of exile and memory.
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Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425261.001.0001.
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Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers examines the significance of women’s contribution to genre cinema by highlighting the work of US filmmakers within and outside Hollywood – Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Karyn Kusama and Kelly Reichardt, among others. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz interrogates questions of ‘genre’ authorship; the blurring of the borders between commercial and independent cinema and gendered discourses of (de)authorisation that operate within each sphere; ‘male’–‘female’ genre divisions; and the issue of authorial subversion in film and popular culture in a wider sense. With its focus on close analysis of the films themselves and the cultural and ideological meanings involved in the reception of genre texts authored by women, this book expands critical debates around women’s cinema and offers new perspectives on how contemporary filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre.
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Allen, Michael. Contemporary US Cinema. Routledge, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315837543.
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MacIel, David. El Norte the Us-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema (Border Studies Series.). San Diego State Univ, 1990.
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Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Cornell University Press, 2020.
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Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Cornell University Press, 2020.
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Superhumanizing Japan: Imaginaries of the US-Japan Trade War (Routledge Contemporary Japan). Routledge, 2008.
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Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501752315.001.0001.
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This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. The book adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. The book reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. The book elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. The book demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. This book reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.
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Durkin, Hannah. Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042621.001.0001.
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This book investigates African American dancers Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham’s self-inventions on screen and in writing to map the intellectual underpinnings and visual impact of their art. Baker was the first Black woman to enjoy a starring role in mainstream cinema and Dunham was the first Black choreographer to be credited for her screen work. Equally, they were the first well-known African American women to produce multivolume accounts of their lives, and their writings serve as valuable firsthand documents of Black women’s interwar experiences. Why did Baker and Dunham enjoy such groundbreaking literary and cinematic careers? What do such careers tell us about the challenges and opportunities that they encountered as African American women seeking to navigate midcentury geographical and cultural boundaries? Why did they turn to life writing and the screen and on what terms were they able to engage with these mediums as Black women? How did contemporary Black screen audiences receive their work? Where do Baker and Dunham’s films and writings fit into African American literary and cinematic histories and why are they largely absent from these histories? This book investigates these questions. In so doing, it uncovers the cultural significance of Baker and Dunham’s films and writings and interrogates their performances within them to recover their authorship.
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Atwood, Blake. Reform Cinema in Iran. Columbia University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231178174.001.0001.
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It’s nearly impossible to separate contemporary Iranian cinema from the Islamic revolution that transformed film production in the country in the late 1970s. As the aims of the revolution shifted and hardened once Khomeini took power and as an eight-year war with Iraq dragged on, Iranian filmmakers confronted new restrictions. In the 1990s, however, the Reformist Movement, led by Mohammad Khatami, and the film industry, developed an unlikely partnership that moved audiences away from revolutionary ideas and toward a discourse of reform. In Reform Cinema in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. Atwood analyzes a range of popular, art, and documentary films. He provides new readings of internationally recognized films such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love (1990), as well as those by Rakhshan Bani, Masud Kiami, and other key Iranian directors. At the same time, he also considers how filmmakers and the film industry were affected by larger political and religious trends that took shape during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005). Atwood analyzes political speeches, religious sermons, and newspaper editorials and pays close attention to technological developments, particularly the rise of video, to determine their role in democratizing filmmaking and realizing the goals of political reform. He concludes with a look at the legacy of reform cinema, including films produced under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose neoconservative discourse rejected the policies of reform that preceded him.
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White, John. The Contemporary Western. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427920.001.0001.
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The September 11th attacks in 2001 and the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ have had a profound effect on American cinema, and the contemporary Western reflects this situation. This book explores the various ways in which recent Westerns – Open Range (2003), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), True Grit (2010), Django Unchained (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013), The Revenant (2015), and Jane Got a Gun (2016) – reinforce a conservative myth of America exceptionalism. As a whole, the films are seen to endorse the use of extreme force in dealing with enemies and highlight the importance of defending the homeland. Placing their characters within a dark world of confusion and horror, these films reflect the United States’ post-9/11 uncertainties, and the tension between assumed civilised values and the brutality employed to defend those values. Frequently, outside forces of singular magnitude that threaten to overwhelm either the individual, or the community, or both, are defeated by the Western hero who in these films is restored to a position of mythic power from which he is able to deliver some sense of hope for the future.
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Prados, John. The US Special Forces. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780199354283.001.0001.
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The assassination of Osama bin Laden by SEAL Team 6 in May 2011 will certainly figure among the greatest achievements of US Special Forces. After nearly ten years of searching, they descended into his Pakistan compound in the middle of the night, killed him, and secreted the body back into Afghanistan. Interest in these forces had always been high, but it spiked to new levels following this success. There was a larger lesson here too. For serious jobs, the president invariably turns to the US Special Forces: the SEALs, Delta Force, the Green Berets, and the USAF’s Special Tactics squad. Given that secretive grab-and-snatch operations in remote locales characterize contemporary warfare as much as traditional firefights, the Special Forces now fill a central role in American military strategy and tactics. Not surprisingly, the daring and secretive nature of these commando operations has generated a great deal of interest. The American public has an overwhelmingly favorable view of the forces, and nations around the world recognize them as the most capable fighting units: the tip of the American spear, so to speak. But how much do we know about them? What are their origins? What function do they fill in the larger military structure? Who can become a member? What do trainees have to go through? What sort of missions do Special Forces perform, and what are they expected to accomplish? Despite their importance, much of what they do remains a mystery because their operations are clandestine and the sources elusive. In The US Special Forces: What Everyone Needs to Know, eminent scholar John Prados brings his deep expertise to the subject and provides a pithy primer on the various components of America’s special forces. The US military has long employed Special Forces in some form or another, but it was in the Cold War when they assumed their present form, and in Vietnam where they achieved critical mass. Interestingly, the Special Forces suffered a rapid decline in numbers after that conflict despite the fact that the United States had already identified terrorism as a growing security threat. The revival of Special Forces began under the Reagan administration. After 9/11 they experienced explosive growth, and are now integral to all US military missions. Prados traces how this happened and examines the various roles the Special Forces now play. They have taken over many functions of the regular military, a trend that Prados does not expect will end any time soon. This will be a definitive primer on the elite units in the most powerful military the world has ever known.
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Toma, Laura Monica. Identity Crises, Violence and Trauma. A Cultural and Psychoanalytical Approach to Post-War and Contemporary British Drama. Editura Universitara, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5682/9786062811532.
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How can one aspire to reveal the intricacies and peculiarities of a literary work without imposing his/her own interpretation as the only valid one or obscuring the intended message, if there is one? Then of course, I wrote a book on violence, trauma and identity issues, something which felt baffling at times and I faced challenges of all kinds. My purpose here is not to solve this old-age problem. I can only suggest ways of averting this danger, such us my taking into account various theories when doing research on a topic, always questioning my judgments and taking care to throw light over a subject and not obfuscate it. Literary criticism can feel sometimes like a Procrustean bed but there is nothing that a genuine passion for this field cannot solve(...) The author
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Paulina, Starski. Part 2 The Post-Cold War Era (1990–2000), 42 The US Airstrike Against the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters—1993. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198784357.003.0042.
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This contribution analyses the normative implications of the US raid against the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 1993 in reaction to a foiled assassination attempt against former President Bush. It examines the legality of the operation, its precedential value and its evolutive potential regarding the regime on the ius contra bellum and specifically the right to self-defence. After dissecting the multiple contentious dimensions of the US claim of justification, the article concludes that the raid constituted an illegal ‘armed reprisal’. In light of observable state practice, its precedent-setting nature should not be overstated. However, albeit qualified as an ‘one-off incident’ the US raid did not leave the prohibition on the use of force and the contemporary discourse surrounding it untouched. Hence, it appears essential to demystify its frequently asserted evolutive potential particularly regarding the temporal limitations of Article 51 UN Charter to which this article is dedicated.
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Jones, Craig. The War Lawyers. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198842927.001.0001.
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The War Lawyer s: The United States , Israel, and Juridical Warfare examines the laws of war as interpreted and applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in Gaza. Drawing on interviews with military lawyers and others, this book explains why some lawyers became integrated in the chain of command whereby military targets are identified and attacked, whether by manned aircraft, drones and/or ground forces, and with what results. The analysis shows how a series of political, legal, and technological developments have given rise to a targeting apparatus that requires legal input. In examining the effects of this process, the book argues that when lawyers render legal advice on targeting, they effectively put the indeterminacy of law in the service of producing and extending military violence, as well as constraining it. This is an iterative and ongoing law-making enterprise carried out in concert with the commanders whom lawyers advise. The provision of legal answers and options takes place in a highly routinized fashion under the overarching imperatives of mission success, and crucially, under pressures of time and emergent events in the battlespace. Military lawyers respond to intelligence data from widely distributed actors—but also inevitable gaps, errors, and misinterpretations in such data. The War Lawyers examines the mutual influence of US and Israeli targeting policies and shows just how important law and military lawyers have become in the conduct of contemporary warfare.
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Curtis IV, Edward E. Muslim American Politics and the Future of US Democracy. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479875009.001.0001.
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The future of US democracy depends on the question of whether Muslim Americans can become full social and political citizens. Though many Muslims have worked toward full assimilation since the 1950s, it has mattered little whether they have expressed dissent or supported the political status quo. Their efforts to assimilate have been futile because the liberal terms under which they have negotiated their citizenship have simultaneously alienated Muslims from the body politic. Focusing on both electoral and grassroots Muslim political participation, this book reveals Muslim challenges to and accommodation of liberalism from the Cold War to the war on terror. It shows how the Nation of Islam both resisted and made use of postwar liberalism, and then how Malcolm X sought a political alternative in his Islamic ethics of liberation. The book charts the changing Muslim American politics of the late twentieth century, examining how Muslim Americans fashioned their political participation in response to a form of US nationalism tied to war-making against Muslims abroad. The book analyzes the everyday resistance of Muslim American women to an American identity politics that put their bodies at the center of US public life and it assesses the attempts of Muslim Americans to find acceptance through military service. It concludes with an examination of the role of Muslim American dissent in the contemporary politics of the United States.
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Scheipers, Sibylle. On Small War. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799047.001.0001.
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Carl von Clausewitz is best known as the paradigmatic thinker of major interstate war. However, as this book demonstrates, Clausewitz developed his theory of war on the basis of his analysis of small war. He lived at a ‘watershed’ moment during which the early modern tradition of partisan warfare morphed into the modern practice of people’s war. Both his lectures on small war and his 1812 confession memorandum are evidence that Clausewitz was a keen analyst of both forms of small war. He integrated his insights in small war and people’s war in particular systematically into his magnum opus, On War. According to Clausewitz, the nationalization of war that had resulted from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had irrevocably introduced the option of defensive people’s war into the European strategic context. While people’s war always bore the risk of descending into political upheaval and revolutionary movements, it could also act as a custodian of the balance of power in early nineteenth-century Europe. The book reconstructs Clausewitz’s intellectual development against the backdrop of his contemporary political, philosophical, and cultural context. Understanding Clausewitz’s engagement with German Idealism and Romanticism is vital in order to reconstruct his thought on the role of reason and emotions in war, on military genius, and on the political foundations of war in general and people’s war in particular. However, a contextual interpretation of Clausewitz’s thought also forces us to reconsider to what extent this thought is applicable to strategic problems in the twenty-first century.
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Teschke, Benno. Carl Schmitt’s Concepts of War. Edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199916931.013.021.
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Carl Schmitt’s conceptual history of war is routinely invoked to comprehend the contemporary mutations in the concept and practice of war. This literature has passively relied on Schmitt’s interpretation of the nomos of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, which traced the transition from early modern ‘non-discriminatory war’ to the US–American promotion of discriminatory warfare as a new category in liberal international law . This chapter provides a critical reconstruction of Schmitt’s antiliberal narrative of war and argues that his polemical mode of concept formation led to a defective and, ultimately, ideological counterhistory of absolutist warfare, designed to denigrate liberalism’s wars as total while remaining silent on Nazi Germany’s de facto total wars. The historical critique is supplemented by an interrogation of his theoretical presuppositions: decisionism, the concept of the political, and concrete order thinking. It shows that Schmitt’s history of warfare is not only empirically defective but also theoretically unsecured by a succession of arbitrarily deployed and hyperabstract theoretical registers. At the center of Schmitt’s work yawns a huge lacuna: the absence of social relations as a category of analysis.
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Field Jr., Thomas C., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettiná, eds. Latin America and the Global Cold War. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655697.001.0001.
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Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region’s past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America’s ongoing political struggles.
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Murray, Jonathan, and Nea Ehrlich, eds. Drawn from Life. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694112.001.0001.
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Documentary cinema has always drawn from real life. However, an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers go further still, drawing onscreen images of reality through a range of animated filmmaking techniques and aesthetics. This book is the first of its kind, exploring the field of animated documentary film from a diverse range of scholarly and practice-based perspectives. The book’s chapters explore and propose answers to a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: What are the historical roots of animated documentary? What kinds of reasons inspire practitioners to employ animation within documentary contexts? How do animated documentary images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of multiple forms of reality – public and private, psychological and political? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging many orthodox definitions of both animated and documentary cinema.
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Duckett, Victoria. Conclusion. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039669.003.0008.
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This book has explored Sarah Bernhardt's films in an attempt to recuperate a cinema that has been lost to us, not materially but perceptually. Through an analysis of Bernhardt's films, it has enlarged not only what we know of her biography, her performance on the live stage, and her engagement with film but also our understanding of what we can achieve through the practice of film history today. It has shown that, until World War I changed the political imperative of filmmaking in France, an actress of Bernhardt's stature had no qualms in adapting her performances to film, in presuming that she could creatively engage with the cinema, and in attending screenings in cinema theaters themselves. The book has also argued that Bernhardt's films demonstrate the cinema's capacity to engage with art nouveau, to collaborate and re-present art nouveau performance and mise-en-scène to new audiences, publics, and cultures. In conclusion, the book suggests that Bernhardt is a visible reminder that excess in acting was an available, potent, and performative choice in the silent film.
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Murphet, Julian. Todd Solondz. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042768.001.0001.
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This book is a comprehensive study and appraisal of the career of Todd Solondz, one of the key figures of independent cinema in the 1990s, whose box office fortunes have been in decline ever since that heyday. The book argues that this decline is a fitting analogue for the story of American independent cinema more generally and the declining rate of US corporate profit at large. Tracking the long arc of Solondz's seven major feature-length films, the book isolates certain persistent motifs and themes—the fascination with suburban “junkspace,” the logic of repetition with disappointing variations, the stylistic and formal category of “left classicism,” the indulgence of subjective fantasy counterpointed by an insistence on discomfiting long takes, and the thematic obsession with the “gift of shit”—to account for Solondz's art of diminishing returns under the rubric of satire. The book is more than a simple auteur study in that it establishes a new understanding of the stakes of independent cinema in today's context of economic crisis and decline. It argues that no other contemporary film artist has explored as astutely and perversely the contradictions of aesthetics under the conditions of senile capitalism.
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Lewis, Hannah. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0008.
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The conclusion summarizes the book’s main points and themes, particularly the range of diverse responses to the arrival of synchronized sound film in France, and music’s significant role within those responses. It further suggests that examining the interaction between music and cinema during the critical technological juncture of the early 1930s not only nuances our understanding of 1930s French musical and artistic culture more broadly but also provides a new perspective on the development of poetic realist audiovisual practices, revealing “classic French” cinematic conventions as one among many possible directions that sound cinema might have taken. We can additionally reconsider postwar French cinematic innovations, particularly those of the New Wave, as outgrowths and developments out of these earlier audiovisual experiments. Lastly, it encourages a nonteleological approach to examining moments of technological transition, which can help us better understand artistic responses to contemporary and future media transitions.
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Fay, Jennifer. Inhospitable World. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190696771.001.0001.
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Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.
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Donnar, Glen. Troubling Masculinities. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496828576.001.0001.
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The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil. The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.
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Fraunhar, Alison. Mulata Nation. University Press of Mississippi, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496814432.001.0001.
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Mulata Nation traces the figure of the mulata, the woman of mixed racial heritage in Cuban artwork and performance from the colonial era through the modern to the contemporary. While perhaps most widely linked with sensuality and sexual desirability, the mulata also serves as the embodiment of Cuba’s spirituality, and as emblematic of Cuban identity. Through close readings of representations of the mulata in fine and graphic art, mulata performers and the performance of mulata characters at distinct historical and ideological moments, the book claims that far from being a static, flat figure, images of the mulata have shifted over time and continue to find new expressions. Different expressions of the mulata are linked to specific historical moments. Representations of the mulata on cigarette packaging, marquillas cigarreras, and in the musical theater form zarzuela of the late colonial era, cabaret performance, fine art and popular magazine covers during the Republic, as an icon of Mexican cinema in the first wave of the diaspora of Cuban artists and Cuban cultural forms, and as an icon of the new (wo)man of revolutionary Cuba in Cuban cinema of the 1960s and 70s all figure the mulata as crucial figures in national culture. At present, both the significant diaspora of Cuban artists and others to the US and other countries have been re-inscribing the mulata and mulataje to bear, contest and sometimes reinforce the tropic positions explored in previous chapters. Furthermore, the performance of mulataje on and off the island is no longer limited to women; the performance of mulataje is prominent in highly popular drag shows and film in contemporary Cuba.
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Hee, Wai-Siam. Remapping the Sinophone. Hong Kong University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888528035.001.0001.
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In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author unfolds the complexities produced by British colonialism and anti-communism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema. Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War deftly shows how contemporary Sinophone studies can only move forward by looking backwards.
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Lurie, Peter. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199797318.003.0006.
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This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.
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Waddell, Calum. Cannibal Holocaust. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325116.001.0001.
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This book is one of the most controversial horror films ever made. Despite not achieving huge success when it was first released, the Italian production found an audience on home video in the 1980s and became a 'must-see' for connoisseurs of extreme cinema. Indeed, Cannibal Holocaust's foremost legacy is in the United Kingdom, where it obtained its reputation as one of the most harrowing and offensive 'video nasties' — a term used to refer to a group of films deemed to be 'obscene' by the Department of Public Prosecutions. However, as the years have progressed, Cannibal Holocaust has been re-evaluated, mainly as the forefather of the 'found footage' film, and recent home video re-releases have added some valuable perspective to the onscreen violence with extensive cast and crew interviews. What is missing from this contemporary activity is contextualization of Cannibal Holocaust's style, affirmation and discussion of its locations and any extensive discourse about its representation of third world inhabitants (i.e. as 'primitives'). In addition, and also amiss from previous dialogue on the production, is that Cannibal Holocaust can be seen as one of the key post-Vietnam films. It is the spectre of war — and an explicit warning about Western involvement in civil conflict — which progresses Deodato's story of jungle adventurers in peril. By approaching the film from a more formalist position, this book provides an insightful discussion of this groundbreaking film.
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Piekut, Benjamin. Afterword. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190842741.003.0016.
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This chapter discusses how a US-focused mainstream concept of American experimental music within the art music tradition was cemented in the 1950s through the work of John Cage at a moment when he established professional connections with the European avant-garde. The chapter recognizes that before this moment, composers such as Henry Cowell had thought of American experimentalism in a more hemispheric way and included the activities of composers like Carlos Chávez, Alejandro García Caturla, and Amadeo Roldán in their genealogies. Rather than arguing for a revisionist type of history to include Latin Americans in these narratives about American experimental music, the chapter’s goal is to show that taking into account historical and contemporary Latin@ and Latin American understandings of experimentalisms not only may help us in redefining the social and political meaning of what has been constructed as mainstream musical experimentalism but also may play a central role in critically rethinking post–World War II narratives about music.
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Moore, Celeste Day. Soundscapes of Liberation. Duke University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478021995.
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In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.
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Fischer, Beth A. The Myth of Triumphalism. University Press of Kentucky, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813178172.001.0001.
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Virtually no one anticipated the ending of the Cold War. Understanding how this long-standing conflict was peacefully resolved can give us insight into how to conclude other seemingly intractable conflicts. Triumphalists believe that President Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War by building up US military power and threatening the USSR. His hard-line policies forced Moscow to reduce its arsenal, adopt democratic reforms, withdraw from its war in Afghanistan, and ultimately collapse. Triumphalists assert that contemporary leaders should follow Reagan’s example bycompelling adversaries into submission. However, triumphalism is a myth, a series of falsehoods about Reagan’s intentions, his policies, and the impact his administration had on the USSR.Drawing upon American and Soviet sources,this book demonstrates that Reagan’s initial hard-line policies brought the superpowers to the brink of war and made it more difficult for Moscow to disarm and reform. Compellence failed miserably. The Cold War was resolved through diplomacy, not threats. President Reagan eventually engaged in dialogue so as to ease Moscow’s security concerns, build trust, and focus on the superpowers’ mutual interest in eliminating nuclear arms. For his part, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to end the arms race so as to divert resources to democratization. He too sought dialogue and trust. The ending of the Cold War demonstrates the importance of moral leadership. Reagan and Gorbachev both rose above their differences and introduced radical new ideas about nuclear disarmament. Consequently, both encountered domestic opposition. Each persevered, however, leading their nations toward a safer, more humane future.
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Scheipers, Sibylle. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799047.003.0001.
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During his early years, Clausewitz spent a large amount of time and effort on analysing small wars. Yet his legacy as a thinker of small war has been neglected by the mainstream traditions of Clausewitz scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrow interpretation of Clausewitz as a paradigmatic thinker of major interstate war was largely a result of a lack of engagement with Clausewitz’s historical intellectual context. The introduction gives an overview of both the mainstream Clausewitz reception and Clausewitz’s contemporary context. Finally, it discusses methodological perspectives that allow us to analyse Clausewitz’s engagement with his context, that stretch beyond the crude concept of ‘influence’.
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Scheipers, Sibylle. Conclusions. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799047.003.0006.
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The conclusion summarizes the arguments of the book and evaluates them with respect to contemporary strategic problems. Even though the book highlights the role of small war for Clausewitz’s theory of war, we cannot draw any straightforward lessons for small wars in the twenty-first century. Clausewitz’s thinking on small war was geared towards defensive people’s war on European territory—a situation that is not likely to arise in the near future. However, taking Clausewitz as a starting point can help us ask questions about other timely strategic problems—namely, the dilemmas of deterrence, the role of the armed forces in late-modern democracies, and the responsibilities of the military commander in the process of strategy-making.
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Joop, Voetelink. Part II Commentaries to Typical Sofa Rules, 10 Contractor Personnel. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198808404.003.0010.
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This chapter explores the rights and obligations of contractors under contemporary status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) provisions with a particular emphasis on criminal jurisdiction. Initially, it describes the origin of civilian involvement in military operations and discusses it from a historical perspective. The focus then turns to present day practice. First, the term contractor is explained and defined. Next, the post-Cold War practice with respect to the legal status of contractors and their employees is explored by taking the example of SOFAs concluded by States and organizations that are in particular involved in contractor support of deployed operations, i.e. the US and NATO, UN, and EU. The chapter then analyses current SOFA practice by comparing the position of contractors and troops under international law.
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Browne, Victoria, Jason Danely, and Doerthe Rosenow, eds. Vulnerability and the Politics of Care. British Academy, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266830.001.0001.
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Vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of existence, giving rise to the need for care in various forms. Yet we are not all vulnerable in the same way, and not all vulnerabilities are equally recognised or cared for. This transdisciplinary volume considers how vulnerability and care are shaped by relations of power within contemporary contexts of war, development, environmental degradation, sexual violence, aging populations and economic precarity. It proposes that care for vulnerable populations or individuals is inseparable from other political processes of recognition, welfare, healthcare and security, whilst also exploring vulnerability as a shared, generative condition that makes caring possible. Ethnographic and narrative accounts of vulnerable life and caring relations in various geographical regions – including Japan, Uganda, Micronesia, Iraq, Mexico, the UK and the US – are interspersed with perspectives from philosophy, International Relations, social and cultural theory, and more, resulting in a compelling series of intellectual exchanges, creative frictions and provocative insights.
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Prestholdt, Jeremy. Icons of Dissent. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190632144.001.0001.
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The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.
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Gillick, Liam. Industry and Intelligence. Columbia University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231170208.001.0001.
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The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art’s engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.
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Franko, Mark. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503324.001.0001.
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This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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Masters, Ben. Novel Style. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198766148.001.0001.
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Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.
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Ferguson, Rex. Identification Practices in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198865568.001.0001.
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The task of identifying the individual has given rise to a number of technical innovations, including fingerprint analysis and DNA profiling. A range of methods has also been created for storing and classifying people’s identities, such as identity cards and digital records. Identification Practices and Twentieth-Century Fiction tests the hypothesis that these techniques and methods, as practised in the UK and US in the long twentieth century, are inherently related to the literary representation of self-identity from the same period. Until now, the question of ‘who one is’ in the sense of formal identification has remained detached from the question of ‘who one is’ in terms of the representation of unique individuality. Placing these two questions in dialogue allows for a re-evaluation of the various ways in which uniqueness has been constructed during the period and for a reassessment of the historical and literary historical context of such construction. In chapters ranging across the development of fingerprinting, the institution of identity cards during the Second World War, DNA profiling and contemporary digital surveillance, and an analysis of writing by authors including Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, J. G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, and Jennifer Egan, Identification Practices and Twentieth-Century Fiction makes an original contribution to Literary Studies, History, and Cultural Studies.
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Handelman, Matthew. The Mathematical Imagination. Fordham University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823283835.001.0001.
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The Mathematical Imagination is an archaeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of the Second World War. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative and argues that it has obscured how mathematics provided three lesser-known German-Jewish thinkers—Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer—with metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Their theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique borrowed ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. This vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing in the intellectual history of critical theory—from the work of second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas to contemporary critiques of technology. Building on the work of Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss, The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us confront and intervene in our digital, and increasingly mathematical, present.
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Suganami, Hidemi, Madeline Carr, and Adam Humphreys, eds. The Anarchical Society at 40. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779605.001.0001.
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Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society was published in 1977. Though considered as one of the classics in International Relations, it does not address many world political issues that concern us deeply today—volatile great power relations after the end of the Cold War, the rise of terrorism, financial crises, climate change, the impact of the Internet, deep-rooted racial inequalities, violence against women. Moreover, through the evolution of International Relations as an academic pursuit, various limitations of the type of approach followed by Bull are coming to light. Against this background, eighteen contributors to this collection, with diverse intellectual orientations and academic specializations, have revisited Bull’s book forty years on to assess its limitations and resilience. A number of contributors point to certain fundamental problems stemming from Bull’s a historical conceptual theorizing. However, several others find arguments and insights developed or hidden in his text which are still relevant, in some cases, highly so, to understanding contemporary world politics while others explore ways of augmenting Bull’s intellectual repertoire. An intricate tapestry of ideas emerges from the criss-crossing contributions to the volume and, through this, it becomes clear that there is more to The Anarchical Society than the ‘international society’ perspective with which it is conventionally associated. The contemporary relevance of Bull’s work is clearest when we recognize the flexibility of his conceptual framework and, in particular, the often overlooked potential of his concept of the ‘world political system’ of which, Bull acknowledges, modern international society is only a part.
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Kjeldgaard-Pedersen, Astrid. The International Legal Personality of the Individual. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820376.001.0001.
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This book scrutinizes the relationship between the concept of international legal personality as a theoretical construct and the position of the individual as a matter of positive international law. By testing four main theoretical conceptions of international legal personality against historical and existing international legal norms that govern individuals, the book argues that the common narrative about the development of the role of the individual in international law is flawed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, international law did not apply to States alone until the Second World War, only to transform during the second half of the twentieth century to include individuals as its subjects. Rather, the answer to the question of individual rights and obligations under international law is—and always was—solely contingent upon the interpretation of international legal norms. It follows, of course, that the entities governed by a particular norm tell us nothing about the legal system to which that norm belongs. Instead, the distinction between international and national legal norms turns exclusively on the nature of their respective sources. Against the background of these insights, the book shows how present-day international lawyers continue to allow an idea, which was never more than a scholarly invention of the nineteenth century, to influence the interpretation and application of contemporary international law. This state of affairs has significant real-world ramifications as international legal rights and obligations of individuals (and other non-State entities) are frequently applied more restrictively than interpretation without presumptions regarding ‘personality’ would merit.
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Arthurson, Kathy. Social Mix and the City. CSIRO Publishing, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/9780643104440.
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Concern about rising crime rates, high levels of unemployment and anti-social behaviour of youth gangs within particular urban neighbourhoods has reinvigorated public and community debate into just what makes a functional neighbourhood. The nub of the debate is whether concentrating disadvantaged people together doubly compounds their disadvantage and leads to 'problem neighbourhoods'. This debate has prompted interest by governments in Australia and internationally in 'social mix policies', to disperse the most disadvantaged members of neighbourhoods and create new communities with a blend of residents with a variety of income levels across different housing tenures (public and private rental, home ownership). What is less well acknowledged is that interest in social mix is by no means new, as the concept has informed new town planning policy in Australia, Britain and the US since the post Second World War years.
Social Mix and the City offers a critical appraisal of different ways that the concept of ‘social mix’ has been constructed historically in urban planning and housing policy, including linking to 'social inclusion'. It investigates why social mix policies re-emerge as a popular policy tool at certain times. It also challenges the contemporary consensus in housing and urban planning policies that social mix is an optimum planning tool – in particular notions about middle class role modelling to integrate problematic residents into more 'acceptable' social behaviours. Importantly, it identifies whether social mix matters or has any real effect from the viewpoint of those affected by the policies – residents where policies have been implemented.