Academic literature on the topic 'Grenada, fiction'

-Selwyn R. Cudjoe, John Thieme, The web of tradition: uses of allusion in V.S. Naipaul's fiction,-A. James Arnold, Josaphat B. Kubayanda, The poet's Africa: Africanness in the poetry of Nicolás Guillèn and Aimé Césaire. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiv + 176 pp.-Peter Mason, Robin F.A. Fabel, Shipwreck and adventures of Monsieur Pierre Viaud, translated by Robin F.A. Fabel. Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1990. viii + 141 pp.-Alma H. Young, Robert B. Potter, Urbanization, planning and development in the Caribbean, London: Mansell Publishing, 1989. vi + 327 pp.-Hymie Rubinstein, Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and class in the West Indies: a genealogical study of Jamaica and Guyana, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xiv + 205 pp.-Shepard Krech III, Richard Price, Alabi's world, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. xx + 445 pp.-Graham Hodges, Sandra T. Barnes, Africa's Ogun: Old world and new, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. xi + 274 pp.-Pamela Wright, Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at work: divided labor on a Central American banana plantation, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989. xviii + 311 pp.-Idsa E. Alegría-Ortega, Andrés Serbin, El Caribe zona de paz? geopolítica, integración, y seguridad, Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1989. 188 pp. (Paper n.p.) [Editor's note. This book is also available in English: Caribbean geopolitics: towards security through peace? Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.-Gary R. Mormino, C. Neale Ronning, José Martí and the émigré colony in Key West: leadership and state formation, New York; Praeger, 1990. 175 pp.-Gary R. Mormino, Gerald E. Poyo, 'With all, and for the good of all': the emergence of popular nationalism in the Cuban communities of the United States, 1848-1898, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1989. xvii + 182 pp.-Fernando Picó, Raul Gomez Treto, The church and socialism in Cuba, translated from the Spanish by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 1988. xii + 151 pp.-Fernando Picó, John M. Kirk, Between God and the party: religion and politics in revolutionary Cuba. Tampa FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989. xxi + 231 pp.-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en la economía política del Caribe, Río Piedras PR; Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 204 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en las relaciones internacionales del Caribe, Río Piedras PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 195 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Jay R. Mandle, Jorge Heine, A revolution aborted : the lessons of Grenada, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. x + 351 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Rhoda Reddock, Elma Francois: the NWCSA and the workers' struggle for change in the Caribbean in the 1930's, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 60 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Susan Craig, Smiles and blood: the ruling class response to the workers' rebellion of 1937 in Trinidad and Tobago, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 70 pp.-Ken Post, Carlene J. Edie, Democracy by default: dependency and clientelism in Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. xiv + 170 pp.-Ken Post, Trevor Munroe, Jamaican politics: a Marxist perspective in transition, Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Publishers (Caribbean) and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. 322 pp.-Wendell Bell, Darrell E. Levi, Michael Manley: the making of a leader, Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990, 349 pp.-Wim Hoogbergen, Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: a history of resistance, collaboration and betrayal, Granby MA Bergin & Garvey, 1988. vi + 296 pp.-Kenneth M. Bilby, Rebekah Michele Mulvaney, Rastafari and reggae: a dictionary and sourcebook, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xvi + 253 pp.-Robert Dirks, Jerome S. Handler ,Searching for a slave cemetery in Barbados, West Indies: a bioarcheological and ethnohistorical investigation, Carbondale IL: Center for archaeological investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1989. xviii + 125 pp., Michael D. Conner, Keith P. Jacobi (eds)-Gert Oostindie, Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam 1791/1942, Assen, Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1990. xii + 812 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Alfons Martinus Gerardus Rutten, Apothekers en chirurgijns: gezondheidszorg op de Benedenwindse eilanden van de Nederlandse Antillen in de negentiende eeuw, Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989. xx + 330 pp.-Rene A. Römer, Luc Alofs ,Ken ta Arubiano? sociale integratie en natievorming op Aruba, Leiden: Department of Caribbean studies, Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, 1990. xi + 232 pp., Leontine Merkies (eds)-Michiel van Kempen, Benny Ooft et al., De nacht op de Courage - Caraïbische vertellingen, Vreeland, the Netherlands: Basispers, 1990.-M. Stevens, F.E.R. Derveld ,Winti-religie: een Afro-Surinaamse godsdienst in Nederland, Amersfoort, the Netherlands: Academische Uitgeverij Amersfoort, 1988. 188 pp., H. Noordegraaf (eds)-Dirk H. van der Elst, H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen ,The great Father and the danger: religious cults, material forces, and collective fantasies in the world of the Surinamese Maroons, Dordrecht, the Netherlands and Providence RI: Foris Publications, 1988. xiv + 451 pp. [Second printing, Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991], W. van Wetering (eds)-Johannes M. Postma, Gert Oostindie, Roosenburg en Mon Bijou: twee Surinaamse plantages, 1720-1870, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1989. x + 548 pp.-Elizabeth Ann Schneider, John W. Nunley ,Caribbean festival arts: each and every bit of difference, Seattle/St. Louis: University of Washington Press / Saint Louis Art Museum, 1989. 217 pp., Judith Bettelheim (eds)-Bridget Brereton, Howard S. Pactor, Colonial British Caribbean newspapers: a bibliography and directory, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiii + 144 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Annotated bibliography of Puerto Rican bibliographies, compiled by Fay Fowlie-Flores. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. xxvi + 167 pp.

1492 est une année clé pour l’Espagne : c’est celle de la fin de la Reconquista, avec la prise de Grenade, de l’expulsion des Juifs de la Péninsule, et du premier voyage de Christophe Colomb en Amérique. Tout au long du siècle suivant, l’Espagne fait face à une multitude de reconfigurations et cherche à se définir, avant tout, comme un royaume chrétien ; après la minorité juive, l’autre grande minorité religieuse du pays, celle des musulmans, doit alors choisir entre la conversion ou l’exil. A l’orée du XVIIe siècle, cependant, c'est un processus encore inédit qui se met en route : la monarchie décide d’expulser du territoire espagnol tous les morisques, c’est-à-dire les descendants des derniers musulmans du royaume grenadin qui se sont convertis au Christianisme de manière plus ou moins volontaire selon les cas et les régions. La mesure fait polémique : ce sont des Espagnols chrétiens que l’on prétend bannir. Selon des estimations récentes, ce sont 275 000 morisques qui prennent alors le chemin de l’exil. Pourtant, de ceux-là, beaucoup vont revenir en Espagne, malgré les décrets d’interdiction et les risques de sanctions : ils sont obligés de se cacher, de se faire discrets, et ils deviennent ainsi des clandestins dans leur propre patrie. Le phénomène des retours clandestins des morisques est amplement documenté par la critique ; nous en avons aussi des témoignages significatifs dans les textes législatifs de l’époque, ainsi que dans des œuvres littéraires. L’un des romanciers les plus connus de cette période, Miguel de Cervantès, s’empare de ce problème d’actualité dans la seconde partie, très attendue par le public, de son Don Quichotte. Au chapitre 54, en effet, l’un des personnages principaux, Sancho Panza, rencontre sur la route aragonaise un ancien voisin, Ricote, un morisque qui a dû quitter l’Espagne et qui est revenu clandestinement, à la recherche d’un trésor qu’il a laissé enterré et de sa famille. Ce travail cherchera tout d’abord à approfondir la figure de Ricote (de quelles façons les stigmates de l’exil et de la clandestinité se révèlent-ils en lui ? Comment, et à partir de quels éléments, son identité diffractée se reconfigure-t-elle ?), mais aussi à déterminer les enjeux de la mise en scène de la clandestinité par Cervantès, dans cette oeuvre de grande diffusion et de grand succès public : est-elle en mesure de proposer une autre vision de l’altérité morisque ? En quoi le personnage de Ricote se singularise-t-il par rapport à ses homologues littéraires, et qu’apporte cette vision du clandestin à la problématique morisque ? Enfin, dans quelle mesure cet épisode, qui fait de la question de la clandestinité sa pierre de touche, se constitue-t-il, paradoxalement, en une matrice au sein de laquelle se cristallise une nouvelle conception de la fiction, celle qui fera son chemin, après le Don Quichotte, sous la forme du roman moderne ?

Introduction The coronation of King Charles III was steeped in the tradition of magic and ritual that has characterised English, and later British, coronations. The very idea of a coronation leverages belief in divinity; however, the coronation of Charles III occurred in a very different social environment than those of monarchs a millennium ago. Today, belief in the divine right of Kings is dramatically reduced. In this context, magic can also be thought of as a stage performance that relies on a tacit understanding between audience and actor, where disbelief is suspended in order to achieve the effect. This paper will examine the use of ritual and magic in the coronation ceremony. It will discuss how the British royal family has positioned its image in relation to the concept of magic and how social changes have brought the very idea of monarchy into question. One way to think about magic, according to Leddington (253), is that it has “long had an uneasy relationship with two thoroughly disreputable worlds: the world of the supposedly supernatural – the world of psychics, mediums and other charlatans – and the world of the con – the world of cheats, hustlers and swindlers”. While it may be that a magician aims to fool the audience, the act also requires audiences to willingly suspend disbelief. Once the audience suspends disbelief in the theatrical event, they enter the realm of fantasy. The “willingness of the audience to play along and indulge in the fantasy” means magic is not just about performances of fiction, but it is about illusion (Leddington 256). Magic is also grounded in its social practices: the occult, sorcery, and witchcraft, particularly when linked to the Medieval Euro-American witch-hunts of the fifteenth to seventeenth century (Ginzburg). Religion scorned magic as a threat to the idea that only God had “sovereignty over the unseen” (Benussi). By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectuals like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber argued that “increases in literacy, better living conditions, and growing acquaintance with modern science, would make people gradually forget their consolatory but false beliefs in spirits, gods, witches, and magical forces” (Casanova). Recent booms in Wicca and neopaganism show that modernity has not dismissed supernatural inquiry. Today, ‘occulture’ – “an eclectic milieu mixing esotericism, pop culture, and urban mysticism” – is treated as a “valuable resource to address existential predicaments, foster resilience in the face of the negative, expand their cognitive resources, work on their spiritual selves, explore fantasy and creativity, and generally improve their relationship with the world” (Benussi). Indeed, Durkheim’s judgement of magic as a quintessentially personal spiritual endeavour has some resonance. It also helps to explain why societies are still able to suspend belief and accept the ‘illusion’ that King Charles III is appointed by God. And this is what happened on 6 May 2023 when millions of people looked on, and as with all magic mirrors, saw what they wanted to see. Some saw a … victory for the visibility of older women, as if we did not recently bury a 96-year-old queen, and happiness at last. Others saw a victory for diversity, as people of colour and non-Christian faiths, and women, were allowed to perform homage — and near the front, too, close to the god. (Gold 2023) ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’ In 1867, English essayist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) wrote “above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it … . Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic” (cited in Ratcliffe). Perhaps, one may argue sardonically, somebody forgot to tell Prince Harry. In the 2022 six-part Netflix special Harry and Meghan, it was reported that Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have “shone not just daylight but a blinding floodlight on the private affairs of the royal family” (Holden). Queen Elizabeth II had already learnt the lesson of not letting the light in. In June 1969, BBC1 and ITV in Britain aired a documentary titled Royal Family, which was watched by 38 million viewers in the UK and an estimated 350 million globally. The documentary was developed by William Heseltine, the Queen’s press secretary, and John Brabourne, who was the son-in-law of Lord Mountbatten, to show the daily life of the royal family. The recent show The Crown also shows the role of Prince Phillip in its development. The 110-minute documentary covered one year of the royal’s private lives. Queen Elizabeth was shown the documentary before it aired. The following dialogue amongst the royals in The Crown (episode 3, season 4 ‘Bubbikins’) posits one reason for its production. It’s a documentary film … . It means, um ... no acting. No artifice. Just the real thing. Like one of those wildlife films. Yes, except this time, we are the endangered species. Yes, exactly. It will follow all of us in our daily lives to prove to everyone out there what we in here already know. What’s that? Well, how hard we all work. And what good value we represent. How much we deserve the taxpayer’s money. So, we’ll all have to get used to cameras being here all the time? Not all the time. They will follow us on and off over the next few months. So, all of you are on your best behaviour. As filming begins, Queen Elizabeth says of the camera lights, “it’s jolly powerful that light, isn’t it?” In 1977 Queen Elizabeth banned the documentary from being shown in Britain. The full-length version is currently available on YouTube. Released at a time of social change in Britain, the film focusses on tradition, duty, and family life, revealing a very conservative royal family largely out of step with modern Britain. Perhaps Queen Elizabeth II realised too much ‘light’ had been let in. Historian David Cannadine argues that, during most of the nineteenth century, the British monarchy was struggling to maintain its image and status, and as the population was becoming better educated, royal ritual would soon be exposed as nothing more than primitive magic, a hollow sham ... the pageantry centred on the monarchy was conspicuous for its ineptitude rather than for its grandeur. (Cannadine, "Context" 102) By the 1980s, Cannadine goes on to posit, despite the increased level of education there remained a “liking for the secular magic of monarchy” (Cannadine, "Context" 102). This could be found in the way the monarchy had ‘reinvented’ their rituals – coronations, weddings, openings of parliament, and so on – in the late Victorian era and through to the Second World War. By the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, aided by television, “the British persuaded themselves that they were good at ceremonial because they always had been” (Cannadine, "Context" 108). However, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation was very much an example of the curating of illusion precisely because it was televised. Initially, there was opposition to the televising of the coronation from both within the royal family and within the parliament, with television considered the “same as the gutter press” and only likely to show the “coronation blunders” experienced by her father (Hardman 123). Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Prince Phillip as Chair of the Coronation Committee. The Queen was opposed to the coronation being televised; the Prince was in favour of it, wanting to open the “most significant royal ceremony to the common man using the new technology of the day” (Morton 134). The Prince argued that opening the coronation to the people via television was the “simplest and surest way of maintaining the monarchy” and that the “light should be let in on the magic” (Morton 135). Queen Elizabeth II considered the coronation a “profound and sacred moment in history, when an ordinary mortal is transformed into a potent symbol in accordance with centuries-old tradition” (Morton 125). For the Queen, the cameras would be too revealing and remind audiences that she was in fact mortal. The press celebrated the idea to televise the coronation, arguing the people should not be “denied the climax of a wonderful and magnificent occasion in British history” (Morton 135). The only compromise was that the cameras could film the ceremony “but would avert their gaze during the Anointing and Holy Communion” (Hardman 123). Today, royal events are extensively planned, from the clothing of the monarch (Hackett and Coghlan) to managing the death of the monarch (Knight). Royal tours are also extensively planned, with elaborate visits designed to show off “royal symbols, vividly and vitally” (Cannadine 115). As such, their public appearances became more akin to “theatrical shows” (Reed 4). History of the ‘Magicalisation’ of Coronations British coronations originated as a “Christian compromise with earlier pagan rites of royal investiture” and in time it would become a “Protestant compromise with Britain’s Catholic past, while also referencing Britain’s growing role as an imperial power” (Young). The first English coronation was at Bath Abbey where the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned King Edgar in 973. When Edward the Confessor came to the throne in 1043, he commissioned the construction of Westminster Abbey on the site of a Benedictine monk church. The first documented coronation to take place at Westminster Abbey was for William the Conqueror in 1066 (Brain). Coronations were considered “essential to convince England’s kings that they held their authority from God” (Young). Following William the Conqueror’s coronation cementing Westminster Abbey’s status as the site for all subsequent coronation ceremonies, Henry III (1207-1272) realised the need for the Abbey to be a religious site that reflects the ceremonial status of that which authorises the monarch’s authority from God. It was under the influence of Henry III that it was rebuilt in a Gothic style, creating the high altar and imposing design that we see today (Brain). As such, this “newly designed setting was now not only a place of religious devotion and worship but also a theatre in which to display the power of kingship in the heart of Westminster, a place where governance, religion and power were all so closely intertwined” (Brain). The ‘magicalisation’ of the coronation rite intensified in the reign of Edward I (Young), with the inclusion of the Stone of Destiny, which is an ancient symbol of Scotland’s monarchy, used for centuries in the inauguration of Scottish kings. In 1296, King Edward I of England seized the stone from the Scots and had it built into a new throne at Westminster. From then on, it was used in the coronation ceremonies of British monarchs. On Christmas Day 1950, four Scottish students removed the stone from Westminster Abbey in London. It turned up three months later, 500 miles away at the high altar of Arbroath Abbey. In 1996, the stone was officially returned to Scotland. The stone will only leave Scotland again for a coronation in Westminster Abbey (Edinburgh Castle). The Stone is believed to be of pre-Christian origin and there is evidence to suggest that it was used in the investitures of pagan kings; thus, modern coronations are largely a muddle of the pre-Christian, the sacred, and the secular in a single ceremony (Young). But the “sheer colour, grandeur, and pageantry of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 was such a contrast with the drabness of post-war Britain that it indelibly marked the memories of those who watched it on television—Britain’s equivalent of the moon landings” (Young). It remains to be seen whether King Charles III’s coronation will have the same impact on Britain given its post-Brexit period of economic recession, political instability, and social division. The coronation channels “the fascination, the magic, the continuity, the stability that comes from a monarchy with a dynasty that has been playing this role for centuries, [and] a lot of people find comfort in that” (Gullien quoted in Stockman). However, the world of King Charles III's coronation is much different from that of his mother’s, where there was arguably a more willing audience. The world that Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in was much more sympathetic to the notion of monarchy. Britain, and much of the Commonwealth, was still reeling from the Second World War and willing to accept the fantasy of the 1953 coronation of the 25-year-old newly married princess. By comparison today, support for the monarchy is relatively low. The shift away from the monarchy has been evident since at least 1992, the annus horribilis (Pimlott 7), with much of its basis in the perceived antics of the monarch’s children, and with the ambivalence towards the fire at Windsor Castle that year demonstrating the mood of the public. Pimlott argues “it was no longer fashionable to be in favour of the Monarchy, or indeed to have much good to say about it”, and with this “a last taboo had been shed” (Pimlott 7). The net favourability score of the royal family in the UK sat at +41 just after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Six months later, this had fallen to +30 (Humphrys). In their polling of adults in the UK, YouGov found that 46% of Britons were likely “to watch King Charles’ coronation and/or take part in celebrations surrounding it”, with younger demographics less likely to participate (YouGov, "How Likely"). The reported £100m cost of the coronation during a cost of living crisis drew controversy, with 51% of the population believing the government should not pay for it, and again the younger generations being more likely to believe that it should not be funded (YouGov, "Do You Think"). Denis Altman (17) reminds us that, traditionally, monarchs claimed their authority directly from God as the “divine right of kings”, which gave monarchs the power to stave off challenges. This somewhat magical legitimacy, however, sits uneasily with modern ideas of democracy. Nevertheless, modern monarchs still call upon this magical legitimacy when their role and relevance are questioned, as the late 1990s proved it to be for the Windsors. With the royal family now subject to a level of public scrutiny that they had not been subjected to in over a century, the coronation of King Charles III would occur in a very different socio-political climate than that of his mother. The use of ritual and magic, and a willing audience, would be needed if King Charles III’s reign was to be accepted as legitimate, never mind popular. As the American conservative commentator Helen Andrews wrote, “all legitimacy is essentially magic” (cited in Cusack). Recognising the need to continue to ensure its legitimacy and relevance, the British royal family have always recognised that mass public consumption of royal births and weddings, and even deaths and funerals are central to them retaining their “mystique” (Altman 30). The fact that 750 million people watched the fairytale wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, that two billion people watched Diana’s funeral on television in 1997, and a similar number watched the wedding of William and Catherine, suggests that in life and death the royals are at least celebrities, and for some watchers have taken on a larger socio-cultural meaning. Being seen, as Queen Elizabeth II said, in order to be believed, opens the door to how the royals are viewed and understood in modern life. Visibility and performance, argues Laura Clancy (63), is important to the relevance and authority of royalty. Visibility comes from images reproduced on currency and tea towels, but it also comes from being visible in public life, ideally contributing to the betterment of social life for the nation. Here the issue of ‘the magic’ of being blessed by God becomes problematic. For modern monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth II, her power arguably rested on her public status as a symbol of national stability. This, however, requires her to be seen doing so, therefore being visible in the public sphere. However, if royals are given their authority from God as a mystical authority of the divine right of kings, then why do they seek public legitimacy? More so, if ordained by God, royals are not ‘ordinary’ and do not live an ordinary life, so being too visible or too ordinary means the monarchy risks losing its “mystic” and they are “unmasked” (Clancy 65). Therefore, modern royals, including King Charles III, must tightly “stage-manage” being visible and being invisible to protect the magic of the monarch (Clancy 65). For the alternative narrative is easy to be found. As one commentator for the Irish Times put it, “having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok as head of state” (Freyne). In this depiction, a monarch is a work of fiction having no real basis. The anointing of the British monarch by necessity taps into the same narrative devices that can be found throughout fiction. The only difference is that this is real life and there is no guarantee of a happily ever after. The act of magic evident in the anointing of the monarch is played out in ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, episode 5 of the first season of the television series The Crown. The episode opens with King George VI asking a young Princess Elizabeth to help him practice his anointing ceremony. Complete with a much improved, though still evident stutter, he says to the young Princess pretending to be the Archbishop: You have to anoint me, otherwise, I can’t ... be King. Do you understand? When the holy oil touches me, I am tr... I am transformed. Brought into direct contact with the divine. For ... forever changed. Bound to God. It is the most important part of the entire ceremony. The episode closes with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Watching the ceremony on television is the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who was not invited to the coronation. To an audience of his friends and his wife Wallis Simpson, he orates: Oils and oaths. Orbs and sceptres. Symbol upon symbol. An unfathomable web of arcane mystery and liturgy. Blurring so many lines no clergyman or historian or lawyer could ever untangle any of it – It's crazy – On the contrary. It's perfectly sane. Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry? Pull away the veil and what are you left with? An ordinary young woman of modest ability and little imagination. But wrap her up like this, anoint her with oil, and hey, presto, what do you have? A goddess. By the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, television would demand to show the coronation, and after Elizabeth’s initial reluctance was allowed to televise most of the event. Again, the issue of visibility and invisibility emerges. If the future Queen was blessed by God, why did the public need to see the event? Prime Minister Winston Churchill argued that television should be banned from the coronation because the “religious and spiritual aspects should not be presented as if they were theatrical performance” (Clancy 67). Clancy goes on to argue that the need for television was misunderstood by Churchill: royal spectacle equated with royal power, and the “monarchy is performance and representation” (Clancy 67). But Churchill countered that the “risks” of television was to weaken the “magic of the monarch” (Clancy 67). King Charles III’s Coronation: ‘An ageing debutante about to become a god’ Walter Bagehot also wrote, “when there is a select committee on the Queen … the charm of royalty will be gone”. When asking readers to think about who should pay for King Charles III’s coronation, The Guardian reminded readers that the monarchy rests not on mantras and vapours, but on a solid financial foundation that has been deliberately shielded from parliamentary accountability … . No doubt King Charles III hopes that his coronation will have an enormous impact on the prestige of the monarchy – and secure his legitimacy. But it is the state that will foot the bill for its antique flummery. (The Guardian) Legitimacy it has been said is “essentially magic” (Cusack). The flummery that delivers royal legitimacy – coronations – has been referred to as “a magic hat ceremony” as well as “medieval”, “anachronistic”, and “outdated” (Young). If King Charles III lacks the legitimacy of his subjects, then where is the magic? The highly coordinated, extravagant succession of King Charles III has been planned for over half a century. The reliance on a singular monarch has ensured that this has been a necessity. This also begs the question: why is it so necessary? A monarch whose place was assured surely is in no need of such trappings. Andrew Cusack’s royalist view of the proclamation of the new King reveals much about the reliance on ritual to create magic. His description of the Accession Council at St James’s Palace on 10 September 2022 reveals the rituals that accompany such rarefied events: reading the Accession Proclamation, the monarch swearing their oath and signing various decrees, and the declaration to the public from the balcony of the palace. For the first time, the general public was allowed behind the veil through the lens of television cameras and the more modern online streaming; essential, perhaps, as the proclamation from the balcony was read to an empty street, which had been closed off as a security measure. Yet, for those privileged members of the Privy Council who were able to attend, standing there in a solemn crowd of many hundreds, responding to Garter’s reading of the proclamation with a hearty and united shout of “God save the King!” echoing down the streets of London, it was difficult not to feel the supernatural and preternatural magic of the monarchy. (Cusack) Regardless, the footage of the event reveals a highly rehearsed affair, all against a backdrop of carefully curated colour, music, and costume. Costumes need to be “magnificent” because they “help to will the spell into being” (Gold). This was not the only proclamation ceremony. Variations were executed across the Commonwealth and other realms. In Australia, the Governor-General made a declaration flanked by troops. “A coronation creates a god out of a man: it is magic” (Gold). But for King Charles III, his lack of confidence in the magic spell was obvious at breakfast time. As the congregation spooled into Westminster Abbey, with actors at the front – kings tend to like actors, as they have the same job – the head of the anti-monarchist pressure group Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested near Trafalgar Square with five other republican leaders (Gold). The BBC cut away from the remaining Trafalgar Square protestors as the royal cavalcade passed them by, meaning “screen[s] were erected in front of the protest, as if our eyes — and the king’s — were too delicate to be allowed to see it” (Gold). The Duke of York was booed as he left Buckingham Palace, but that too was not reported on (Ward). This was followed by “the pomp: the fantastical costumes, the militarism, the uneasy horses” (Gold). Yet, the king looked both scared and thrilled: an ageing debutante about to become a god [as he was] poked and prodded, dressed and undressed, and sacred objects were placed on and near him by a succession of holy men who looked like they would fight to the death for the opportunity. (Gold) King Charles III’s first remarks at the beginning of coronation were “I come not to be served, but to serve” (New York Times), a narrative largely employed to dispel the next two hours of well-dressed courtiers and clergy attending to all manner of trinkets and singing all matter of hymns. After being anointed with holy oil and presented with some of the crown jewels, King Charles was officially crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury placing the St Edward’s Crown upon his head. The 360-year-old crown is the centrepiece of the Crown Jewels. It stands just over 30 centimetres tall and weighs over two kilograms (Howard). In the literal crowning moment, Charles was seated on the 700-year-old Coronation Chair, believed to be the oldest piece of furniture in Europe still being used for its original purpose and holding two golden scepters as the glittering St. Edward’s Crown, made for King Charles II in 1661, was placed on his head. It is the only time he will ever wear it. (New York Times) The Indigenous Australian journalist Stan Grant perhaps best sums up the coronation and its need to sanctify via magic the legitimacy of the monarchy. He argues that taking the coronation seriously only risks becoming complicit in this antediluvian ritual. A 74-year-old man will finally inherit the crown of a faded empire. His own family is not united, let alone his country. Charles will still reign over 15 nations, among them St Lucia, Tuvalu, Grenada, Canada and, of course, steadfast Australia. The “republican” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be among those pledging his allegiance. To seal it all, the new King will be anointed with holy oil. This man is apparently a gift from God. Conclusion Magic is central to the construction of the coronation ceremony of British monarchs, a tradition that stretches back over a millennium. Magic relies upon an implicit understanding between the actors and the audience; the audience knows what they are seeing is a trick, but nonetheless want to be convinced otherwise. It is for the actors to present the trick seamlessly for the audience to enjoy. The coronation relies upon the elevation of a singular person above all other citizens and the established ritual is designed to make the seemingly impossible occur. For centuries, British coronations occurred behind closed doors, with the magic performed in front of a select crowd of peers and notables. The introduction of broadcasting technology, first film, then radio and television, transformed the coronation ceremony and threatened to expose the magic ritual for the trick it is. The stage management of the latest coronation reveals that these concerns were held by the producers, with camera footage carefully shot so as to exclude any counter-narrative from being broadcast. However, technology has evolved since the previous coronation in 1953, and these undesired images still made their way into various media, letting the daylight in and disrupting the magic. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, this will have on the long-term reign of Charles III. References Altman, Dennis. God Save the Queen: The Strange Persistence of Monarchies. Melbourne: Scribe, 2021. Benussi, Matteo. "Magic." The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ed. Felix Stein. Cambridge 2019. Brain, Jessica. "The History of the Coronation." Historic UK, 2023. Cannadine, David. "The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition', c. 1820–1977." The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger. Canto ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 101-64. ———. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. U of Chicago P, 2011. Clancy, Laura. Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021. Cusack, Andrew. "Magic at St James's Palace." Quadrant 66.10 (2022): 14-16. Edinburgh Castle. "The Stone of Destiny." Edinburgh Castle, 2023. Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. U of Chicago P, 2004. Gold, Tanya. "The Coronation Was an Act of Magic for a Country Scared the Spell Might Break." Politico 6 May 2023. Grant, Stan. "When the Queen Died, I Felt Betrayed by a Nation. For King Charles's Coronation, I Feel Something Quite Different." ABC News 6 May 2023. The Guardian. "The Guardian View on Royal Finances: Time to Let the Daylight In: Editorial." The Guardian 6 Apr. 2023. Hackett, Lisa J., and Jo Coghlan. "A Life in Uniform: How the Queen’s Clothing Signifies Her Role and Status." See and Be Seen. 2022. Hardman, Robert. Queen of Our Times: The Life of Queen Elizabeth II. Simon and Schuster, 2022. Holden, Michael, and Hanna Rantala. "Britain's Bruised Royals Stay Silent as Prince Harry Lets 'Light in on Magic'." Reuters 10 Jan. 2023. Howard, Jacqueline. "King Charles Has Been Crowned at His 'Slimmed-Down' Coronation Ceremony. These Were the Key Moments." ABC News 7 May 2023. Humphrys, John. "First the Coronation… But What Then?" YouGov 14 Apr. 2023. Knight, Sam. "'London Bridge Is Down': The Secret Plan for the Days after the Queen’s Death." The Guardian 2017. Leddington, Jason. "The Experience of Magic." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74.3 (2016): 253-64. "Smoke and Mirrors." The Crown. Dir. Philip Martin. Netflix, 2016. "Bubbikins." The Crown. Dir. Benjamin Caron. Netflix, 2019. Morton, Andrew. The Queen. Michael O'Mara, 2022. New York Times. "Missed the Coronation? Here’s What Happened, from the Crown to the Crowds." New York Times 2023. Pimlott, Ben. "Jubilee and the Idea of Royalty." Historian 76 (2002): 6-15. Ratcliffe, Susan, ed. Oxford Essential Quotations. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Reed, Charles, Andrew Thompson, and John Mackenzie. Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911. Oxford: Manchester UP, 2016. Stockman, Farah. "We Are Obsessed with Royalty." Editorial. The New York Times 10 Mar. 2021: A22(L). Ward, Victoria. "Prince Andrew Booed by Parts of Coronation Crowd." The Telegraph 6 May 2023. YouGov. "Do You Think the Coronation of King Charles Should or Should Not Be Funded by the Government?" 18 Apr. 2023. ———. "How Likely Are You to Watch King Charles’ Coronation and/or Take Part in Celebrations Surrounding It?" 13 Apr. 2023. Young, Francis. "The Ancient Royal Magic of the Coronation." First Things: Journal of Religion and Public Life 5 May 2023.

IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Fisher, Stephanie. "The Best Possible Story? Learning about WWII from FPS Video Games." Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 299-318.Harris, Sam, and Paul Bloom. "Waking Up with Sam Harris #56 – Abusing Dolores." Sam Harris 12 Dec. 2016. Howley, Daniel. "Review: Beautiful Battlefield 1 Gives the War to End All Wars Its Due Respect." Yahoo! 2016. Kain, Erik. "'Battlefield 1' Is Stunningly Beautiful on PC." Forbes 2016.Keogh, Brendan. Spec Ops: The Line's Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter. Paper presented at DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies.Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Osborne, Scott. "Battlefield 1942 Review." Gamesport 2002. Payne, Matthew Thomas. "War Bytes: The Critique of Militainment in Spec Ops: The Line." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.4 (2014): 265-82. Plante, Chris. "Battlefield 1 Is Excellent Because the Series Has Stopped Trying to Be Call of Duty." The Verge 2016. Rashid, Justin. Terrorism in Video Games and the Storytelling War against Extremism. Paper presented at Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 9-12 Jan. 2011.Schklovski, Viktor. "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary." Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 25-60.Simpson, Campbell. "Battlefield 1 Isn't a Game: It's a History Lesson." Kotaku 2016. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Welsh, Timothy. "Face to Face: Humanizing the Digital Display in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Guns, Grenade, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh. Call, and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 389-414. Wilson, Jason Anthony. "Gameplay and the Aesthetics of Intimacy." PhD diss. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.

Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for papers related to persona was our first sign that something special was being initiated. The sheer number and interdisciplinary breadth of the abstracts and ultimate submissions was evidence that the term ‘persona’ was the catalyst to an explosion of ideas. As the responses flowed into the journal and to us, we became aware of the meme-like qualities of the many interpretations and history of the term, each with its own idiosyncratic coding of patterned similarity. The reality of this development is that it was not entirely unexpected. The editors have been developing the concept of persona and persona studies over the past four years, and persona studies has emerged from a congruence in our collective research interests as an interdisciplinary investigation of the presentation of the self in the contemporary moment. Together, we have been involved in the development of the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP) at Deakin University. Within that group, we have concentrated ourselves in the Persona Research cluster, made up of a group of 15 or so academics along with another smaller group from other institutions. Emerging from our work is the forthcoming book entitled Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity, and the Transformation of Public Culture (forthcoming Wiley 2015). Both the book and the research group are intent on exploring what has been altering in our worlds, our cultures, and our communities that make us think the new intensified play of the personal in public needs closer scrutiny. The impetus for us as a team of scholars is quite clearly linked to the uses of online culture and how greater aspects of our lives are now involved in public displays, mediated displays, and a peculiar new blend of interpersonal and presentational constructions of identities and selves. Persona as a specific area of inquiry has emerged from the close study of the public self. Its immediate intellectual past has its strongest links with research on celebrity. In the Celebrity Studies Reader collection, Marshall began forming the idea that a new public self was emerging through new media (New Media). In subsequent work, Marshall identifies celebrity culture as one of the pedagogic sources for how the wider population presented itself in online culture and social media (Marshall, Promotion). Barbour and Marshall expanded their thinking about the presentation of the self through a closer study of online academic persona and the different strategic ways individuals were managing and building reputations and prestige through these techniques. Terms such as the ‘comprehensive,’ ’networked’, and ‘uncontained’ self, mapped the various kinds of public personalities that were emerging through the most prominent academics (Barbour and Marshall). In a similar vein, Barbour’s research has looked closely at the online and public personas that fringe artists—specifically tattoo artists, craftivists, performance poets and street artists—produce and maintain in the contemporary moment (Hiding; Finding). Her work has advanced the concepts of “registers of performance” (Registers), where a closer analysis of how the personal, the professional, and sometimes the intimate registers are constructed and deployed to produce a public persona that demonstrates ‘artistness’. By analysing persona through registers of performance, Barbour is able to differentiate between the types of identity building activity that occurs online. This provides insight into the ways that impression management occurs in spaces that suffer from context collapse due to the intersection of friends, family, fans, and followers. Moore’s work (Hats; Magic; Invigorating) on the player’s assembly of a networked online ‘gamer’ persona considers the intersection of social media and video game culture and contributes analysis of the affective dimensions of player-oriented game objects and their public curation and display. His recent research visualising Twitter and Flickr data (Screenshots, forthcoming) advances an understanding of the accumulation and online presentation of the self through digital game artefacts, specifically video game screenshots. He is currently researching the interaction of social media activity, reputation management, and everyday identity ‘play’ within public game cultures and the larger dynamics of production and consumption of games and play in the video game industry. Most recently, Marshall called for what he titled a “persona studies manifesto”: the public presentation of the self demands a more extensive analysis of the play and deployment of persona in contemporary culture. Beyond popular culture, the development of reputation and persona and its intersection with online culture especially needs to be explored in those professions, disciplines and activities where this form of investigation has never been attempted (Marshall, Persona Studies). The initiative of persona studies then is in some ways turning the cultural studies’ approach to the study of the audience on its head: it is a study of agency and the processes by which agency has been individualized and assembled across contemporary culture, but highly privileged in online culture (Marshall, Personifying). Persona studies involves a close investigation of the personalized and negotiated presentation of the self. So, what is persona? The articles here assume different, but connected, understandings of the term, each with levels of deference to writers such as Jung, Goffman, Butler, and Foucault, along with some expected allusions to the ancient Greeks and Romans who coined the term. The Greek origins identify that persona is a mask and derived from performance and acting. From Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Greeks this mask of public identity was not seen in a derogatory way; rather it was natural to assume a public/political persona that was quite removed from the private and home sphere. A political persona defined by citizenry was a clearly conscious separation from the household of activity. Jung’s take on persona is that it was designed for collective experience and for the outside world and therapy would lead to an understanding of the individual that delved beneath the persona. The resurgence in interest in Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy allows us to consider persona as an everyday performance, where the purpose of the presentation of self is to convince the audience (and at times, the performer) that the performance is genuine and authentic. All of us know what it is like to act in a role, to wear a uniform or costume, to create a profile. More than a few of us know what it is to suffer through the ‘individualising’ categories of a social networking sign-up survey that do not adequately account for distinctions. Persona is all these things, or rather, through the various everyday activities of our work, social, and online selves we contribute to the accretion of the identity at the base of its structure. Persona functions like the construct or automated script that we assemble to interact with the world with on our behalf. This involves the technologies of computation and mediation and their interfaces that function to automate, produce and filter communication with us; email, blogs, Twitter accounts, and so on. These golems interconnect and can interact on their own in unpredictable ways on our behalf; connecting our Facebook account to a product, brand or petition; using Google as a portal to login into other web enabled services; or authorising an app to record our location. Then there are the traces that we leave scattered across digital networks, intranets, hard drives, and lost USB memory sticks, from scattered collections of digital photos to the contact lists of our mobile devices and the ‘achievements’ in our online gaming profiles. Persona can also be something that happens to us, as friends tag unflattering images via Facebook, or another Twitter user publicly addresses us with a unwanted, or unwarranted commentary, using the ‘@’ and the ‘#’ functions. We have an extensive degree of control over the ways we assemble ourselves online and yet the contemporary experience is one of constant negotiation with forces that seeks to disavow their responsibilities to us, and maximise the limitations under which we can act. Our personas serve as a buffer to these forces. We can strategically assemble our persona to participate in, influence and use to our advantage to transmit messages across the network and communicate a mediated form of ourselves. The many ways to account persona stands as a primary and apparently Sisyphean task for persona studies: no sooner than when we might assemble a complete topology of the many accounts, traditions, domains, methodologies and theories for account of for the self, we will have arrived at possibly entirely new way of conceptualising the presentation of online persona through some post-Facebook, Oculus Rift, or Google Glass augmented reality experience. One of the challenges of persona studies will be to provide a series of methodological and theoretical tools, as well as a common touchstone from which multiple perspectives may converge around the meme-like qualities of this dramatic term. It will be necessary to consider the future of the presentation of the self, as much as the past accounts for the understanding of the self and its compositions. In the contemporary moment we consider a series of common currents and features of the iterations of persona with which we might begin this endeavour. The collective objective of the ‘persona’ theme edition is to coalesce around the emerging significance of the public self, and to map that activity within disciplinary traditions, historical precedents and the cultural and technological predispositions that have made this kind of reading of the contemporary world valuable, important, and ultimately, sensible. This collection of articles on persona is innovative in terms of the diversity of issues it tackles through the term. Given the massive change in public identity that we have identified as an elemental part of online culture, it is not surprising that social media and online constructions of persona figure prominently throughout the issue. However, we are also pleased to include papers that consider fictional performances from both television and film and even character studies of public figures. Marshall’s feature article for the edition continues his theorisation of persona. Seriality is identified as one of the ways that a consistency of persona is developed and the article charts the usefulness in analogizing how the construction of a serial character or ‘personnage’ for an actor/performer provides insights into the relationship between the person and persona in other settings that are emerging in the contemporary moment. In ‘Darkly Dreaming (in) Authenticity: The Self/Persona Opposition in Dexter,’ Glenn D'Cruz uses Dexter Morgan, the novelised serial killer and Showtime TV anti-hero to examine the connections between self and persona and the discourse of authenticity. D’Cruz foresees a series of challenges for persona studies and considers key concerns ahead, in terms of the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda and addresses the need for critical genealogy of the term ‘persona’. Talia Morag, in ‘Persons and Their Personas: Living with Yourself’, considers the tensions identified in the persona of the private domain, and examines the patterns of social interaction that work to affect an ‘endorsed’ private persona, compared to those patterns classified as ‘hidden’. She frames the negotiation of these tensions as a move to better understand the sphere of the private self, as well as the those strains which arise on the private persona and the grounds from which they come to occupy our time. Together these two approaches predict the convergence of the private, the performed and the public persona which occupies Neil Henderson’s ‘The Contingency of Online Persona and Its Tension with Relationship Development’. Henderson’s engagement with the dimensions of online persona in the short film, Noah, takes a position at the crossroads between Marshall’s celebrity-inscribed approach to persona studies and the application of actor-network theory in order to map the potential pitfalls of identity management through ubiquitous technologies and broader critical questions about the play of our online selves in the everyday. Moving to the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life, Lesley Procter draws on the symbolic interactionist theories of social identity and the role of the avatar in ‘A Mirror without a Tain: Personae, Avatars, and Selves in a Multi-User Virtual Environment’. Procter’s contribution to persona studies highlights the actual and conceptual mirroring involved in the sense of the self involved in the interaction with others online. Taina Bucher’s ‘About a Bot: Hoax, Fake, Performance Art’ is a revealing examination of the Twitter bot phenomenon. Bucher’s case study on ‘bot fakeness’ considers the automation and performance of persona and the interactions and relationships between people and bots. Brady Robards, in ‘Digital Traces of the Persona through Ten Years of Facebook’, offers a critical reading of the Facebook ‘look back’ video creation application made to celebrate the social network’s ten year. As with Bucher and Proctor, Robards is concerned with the ways persona is created through highly mediated social networking platforms, where the agency of the individual is countered by the intervention of the software itself. Robards considers in particular two functions of Facebook: first as a site for the performance of life narratives, and second as a location for reflection on public and private disclosure. Taking a specific element of this idea of disclosure—the sharing of one’s legal name—as a starting point, Ellen Moll’s ‘What’s in a Nym?: Gender, Race, Pseudonymity, and the Imagining of the Online Persona’ is a study of the reactions of feminist and anti-racist bloggers in the ongoing battles over pseudonymity online. Moll’s contribution centres around current concerns with the ‘real name policies’ of social media and web-based platforms and services. What is at stake here in the negotiation between the individuals, technologies and institutions over the rights of self-determination and agency in the digital and online environments. Narrowing the focus to a single case study, Emma Maguire’s study of author website as a site of self-presentation in ‘Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website’ examines the authorial persona produced for consumption within literary markets. Framing of the authorial website as ‘automedial text’, rather than as direct representations of a pre-existing self, Maguire employs authorship theory to understand the website as a genre of persona performance and textuality. Shifting away from the focus on social media, this issue concludes with a trio of character studies, each of which involves a detailed and critical account of the dimensions of a public assembly of a persona. Nathan Farrell’s ‘From Activist to Entrepreneur: Peace One Day and the Changing Persona of the Social Campaigner’ is the first, and considers the ways that an individual manages his persona for different audiences. Farrell’s focus is Jeremy Gilley, a documentary filmmaker and peace campaigner, and the paper speaks to the dimensions of overlapping audiences connected to an articulation of a socially aware entrepreneurial persona. Sally Totman and Mat Hardy have a very different figure in their contribution as they examine the many different public personas of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. In ‘The Many Personas of Colonel Qaddafi’, Totman and Hardy interrogate the multiple aspects of Qaddafi’s construction as a brotherly revolutionary, philosopher, liberator, leader, and clown. The authors chart the progression of his often conflicted and chaotic legacy, and of this political, ideological and even messianic presentation of the self to the Western and Arab worlds. Anastasia Denisova, completes the triptych of persona case studies for this collection, with ‘How Vladimir Putin's Divorce Story Was Constructed and Received, or When the President Divorced His Wife and Married the Country Instead’. Denisova contends Vladimir Putin’s divorce is representative of the degree to which political and private persona are mediated and merged across often competing channels of communication. The analysis contends with online discourse, images, and texts, which reveal the extensive personification of politics in Putin’s public persona in an environment of reception by an audience which also consider the values and attributes of their own country as a national persona. Conclusion We have structured the narrative flow of articles in this issue on persona from the fictional through to the online transformations of the self and then even further into the analyses of the public and political dimensions that are part of the constitution of public selves. No doubt, you as a reader will see different connections and intersections and will play with what makes the idea of persona so meaningful and valuable in understanding the strategic construction of a public identity and so central to comprehending the contemporary moment. We invite you to engage with this further with the issue editors’ planned 2015 launch of a journal called Persona Studies. Until then, this issue of M/C Journal certainly represents the most comprehensive and, we think, interesting, collection of writing on persona as we explore the implications behind the mask of public identity. We hope the issue stimulates discussion and with that hope, we hope to hear from you.AcknowledgmentsThe editors would like to thank Alison Bennett for creating an original gif for the cover image of this issue. More of Bennett's work, including her augmented reality images of tattoos from the internationally acclaimed exhibition Shifting Skin, can be found at her website, alisonbennett.com.au.Thanks also to Trent Griffiths for his copy-editing assistance. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barbour, Kim. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Street Artists Online.” Platform Journal of Media and Communication. 5.1 (2013). 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