Journal articles on the topic 'Hamid Naficy'

A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2011. 456pp., Pb. $28.95 ISBN-13: 9780822347750. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978, by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2011. 560pp., Pb. $29.95. ISBN- 13: 9780822347743. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2012. 288pp., Pb. $25.95. ISBN-13: 9780822348771. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2012. 664 pp., Pb. $32.95. ISBN-13: 9780822348788.

In this article I will review the film Dogville by Lars Von Trier through the perspective given by Hamid Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. The main purpose is to understand how identity is described and performed through the allegory of Grace and the image of the refugee, and the role homelessness and displacement play both for the filmmakers and the content of diasporic films. I will demonstrate how the relationship between minority (Grace-the refugee) and the majority (the population of Dogville) is a topic of transnational cinema, and which conclusions can we make by taking into account the role of identity and sense of belonging for transnational productions.

This article explores the world of the evacuee represented as a fantasy experience in Steven Poliakoff's television drama Perfect Strangers. Through the story, told in flashback, of two young girls evacuated from Birmingham to North Wales during the Second World War, Poliakoff does not present a realistic and factual account of this childhood trauma, but adopts visual strategies wrought from the imagination to articulate the emotions of displacement. The article argues, drawing on the work of Hamid Naficy, that the drama exhibits an ‘accented’ style – one which connotes a nostalgic yearning for the homeland and land of birth and which is particularly associated with diasporic, exilic and ethnic directors. Poliakoff is a second-generation immigrant and, arguably, implicit in his work is a visual approach associated with the transitional and the dislocating. The visual style of this drama is not rooted in mere escapism but is that of the displaced settler, the subject searching for security and protection.

Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf left Iran in 2005 shortly after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The artist underwent a multiphase evolution away from the supporter of Islamic regime in the early 1980s to cosmopolitan internationally acclaimed auteur. Finally, he became not only a dissident filmmaker but also a political dissident in the aftermath of 2009 presidential election. As exile wears on, Makhmalbaf became postnational filmmaker, making a variety of “accented films”. Not all the consequences of internationalization are positive – to be successful in transnational environment he has to face much larger competition and the capitalist market. Having in mind the categories of displaced Iranian directors distinguished by Hamid Naficy – exilic, diasporic, émigré, ethnic, cosmopolitan – I would like to find out which one of them applies to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s life and work. I also will focus on the following questions: To what extent the censorship of Makhmalbaf’s artistic activity was a reason for his migration? how are migratory experiences expressed in his movies? What features of “the accented cinema” his movies are manifesting? I would argue that the experience of migration and the transnationality was the characteristic feature of Makhmalbaf’s his work long before leaving the home country. It can be said that regardless this stylistic diversity, all of Makhmalbaf’s movies made abroad can be described as the example of “accented cinema” which comprises different types of cinema made by exilic and diasporic filmmakers who live and work in countries other than their country of origin.

Sabah telemovie production has started in the year 2002. However recent challenges in term offinance. This situation has led Sabahan filmmaker to apply an alternative method of producingtelemovie. Therefore, by referring to Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory. This paperexamines the similarity between the Sabah telemovie production mode and the interstitial modeof production. Therefore, this paper also suggests several methods to improve the current Sabahtelemovie production.

By drawing on postcolonial feminist discourse and Hamid Naficy’s (2001) notion of ‘accented’ cinema, in particular his approach of combining the interstitial position of exilic and diasporic filmmakers with concepts of authorship and genre, this paper explores the intersection between biographical film, gendered rewriting of history, and self-narrative as a site of resistance to nationalist and patriarchal ideologies in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017). I argue that Neshat’s authorial style and her position as an exilic artist inflect the biographical film in its traditional form, showcasing an innovative perspective on the genre, restructuring it to reveal the constructedness of not only a cinematic process, but also of history and historical figures. Blending the stories of a present-day Iranian woman filmmaker and the professional life of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum, Neshat displaces the biopic from its Western-centric roots by explicitly opening it up to a discourse of contemporary gender politics in the Middle East. In doing so, she exposes the social forces that shape the production of the biopic in relation to the notion of female authorship in the context of the transcultural circuits and feminist reclaiming of Oum Kulthum’s international stardom.

In 1992, Farzaneh Milani’s groundbreaking Veils and Words brought into dialoguethe fields of Iranian studies and feminist critical theory – two areas ofhumanist inquiry that, in some sense, need each other. Moreover, with workslike Hamid Naficy’s The Making of Exile Cultures (1993), interdisciplinarycritical theory has informed many humanist and social science approaches toIranian literature and culture. These links between integrated critical theoryand Iranian studies can produce compelling and insightful analyses. However,the cadence of such work might be more in tune with one subfield than another.While the content and subject of these studies might include Iranian society,culture, or art, it is often the case that the critical method being deployedis more important than the historical, literary, or social content to which it isapplied. Methodology eclipses the subject of analysis.This is the case with Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Entrapment andEmancipation (Mirrors). Bahmany’s work tells us more about the feministcritical genealogy brought to bear on the work of Sylvia Plath (d. 1963) andForrough Farrokhzad (d. 1967) than it does about the works and lives of thesepoets themselves. But if, as I note above, these fields do “need” each other,then this book is worth exploring for both feminist scholars and Iranian studiesspecialists. Beyond specialists, however, the work does little to draw in areader not already at least slightly familiar with debates in psychoanalyticfeminist theory of the twentieth century.Bahmany begins her book with the highly suggestive images of Narcissusand Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, she quickly movesfrom this basis in classical western mythology to the relevance of these imagesfor psychoanalysis and feminism. Thus, she rapidly establishes a ...

Talak merupakan hukum yang disyariatkan bagi satu pasangan yang tidak mungkin lagi membina hubungan keluarga dengan baik. Peluang talak ini dapat dipilih oleh suami dengan memperhatikan tata cara dan prosedur yang sesuai dengan hukum Islam. Terdapat beberapa hukum yang ulama tidak padu dan berbeda pendapat, khususnya mengenai konsep talak dilihat dari sisi waktu dan jumlah penjatuhannya. Penelitian ini henda mengkaji pendapat Ibn Qayyim. Masalah yang didalami adalah bagaimana pandangan Ibnu Qayyim al-Jauziyyah terhadap konsep dan pengaruh hukum talak syar’i dilihat dari segi waktu dan jumlah penjatuhan talak, dan bagaimana metode istinbaṭ yang ia gunakan. Penelitian ini termasuk penelitian pustaka, data yang terkumpul dianalisis dengan cara analisis-deskriptif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa menurut Ibn Qayyim al-Jauziyyah, konsep talak secara umum ada dua bentuk, yaitu talak dari segi waktu dan dari segi jumlah. Dari segi waktu, talak dilakukan saat isteri suci dan tidak digauli saat suci tersebut. Pengaruh suami yang menceraikan isteri saat haid dan telah digauli, itu diharamkan dan talak tidak jatuh. Dari segi jumlah, hak talak suami hanya ada tiga. Tiga jumlah hak talak tersebut digunakan secara bertahap, tidak bisa digunakan sekaligus. Pengaruh suami yang menceraikan isteri dengan talak dua atau tiga sekaligus, talak yang jatuh hanya dipandang satu kali. Adapun dalil yang digunakan Ibn Qayyim yaitu QS. al-Ṭalāq ayat 1, QS. al-Baqarah ayat 229, QS. al-Baqarah ayat 230, dan QS. al-Nūr ayat 6. Adapun riwayat hadis di antaranya hadis dari Nafi’ riwayat Abī Dāwud, dari Sa’di bin Ibrahim riwayat Muslim, dari Abdullah bin Ali bin Sa’ib riwayat Abī Dāwud, dan dari Ibn Wahab riwayat HR. Nasā’i. Metode yang digunakan Ibn Qayyim yaitu bayanī dan metode istiṣlāḥī. Talak is a law prescribed to one spouse that is no longer likely to foster family relationships well. The chance of this Talak can be chosen by the husband taking into account the ordinances and procedures according to Islamic law. There are some laws that scholars do not mix and differ, especially regarding the concept of Talak seen from the time and number of the allotment. This study has studied Ibn Qayyim's opinion. The issue in the matter is how Ibn Qayyim al-Jauziyyah's view of the concept and influence of the law is seen in terms of time and the number of a bailout, and how the Istinbaṭ method he used. This research includes the research of libraries, the collected data is analyzed in a descriptive-analysis way. The results showed that according to Ibn Qayyim al-Jauziyyah, the concept of Talak, in general, there are two forms, namely Talak in terms of time and in terms of number. In terms of time, the Talak was performed during the Holy Wife and not in the holy moment. The influence of the husband who divorced the wife during menstruation and has been held, it is haraam and the Talak does not fall. In terms of numbers, the right to the husband is only three. The three total rights of the Board are used gradually, not to be used at once. The influence of the husband who divorced the wife with a two or three talak at once, a talak that fell only considered one time. The evidence that Ibn Qayyim used is QS. al-Ṭalāq verse 1, Qs. Al-Baqarah verses 229, Qs. Al-Baqarah verses 230, and Qs. Al-Nūr verse 6. The history of Hadith includes hadith from Nafi ' History of Abī Dāwud, from Sa'di bin Ibrahim Muslim history, from Abdullah bin Ali bin Sa'ib abī dāwud history, and Ibn Wahab narrated by the history of the Christian. The method used Ibn Qayyim was bayanī and the method Istiṣlāḥī.

Theological discourse in Nusantara is always associated with two varieties of Ash‘arīsm and Māturīdīsm. Nevertheless, Ash‘arīsm became the dominant theological discourse for Muslim people of Nusantara at least since the seventeenth century—or more—which brought by ‘Ulamā’s. There are some obscurity concerning the history of Māturīdīsm about the carriers and teachings developed. Thus it is oſten assumed that the theological discourse that developed in Nusantara since Islam entered and developed just an Ash‘arīsm and ignored other theology [Māturīdīsm]. This study would prove that Māturīdīsm developed along with the development of Ash‘arīsm through the global networks of the Nusantara ‘Ulamā around theological discourse in the Muslim world. This study attempts to provide the justification of Māturīdīsm that developed in Nusantara as well as provide a new perspective about method of theology for Muslim people of Nusantara. The focus of this study is to explore the intellectual treasures of ulama’s works in Nusantara who lived in the period of the seventeentah until nineteenth centuries. This study concludes that theological discourse in Nusantara is a continuous form of global theological discourse that developed in the Islamic world, where the emerging theological discourse always associated on two varieties of Ash‘arīsm and Māturīdīsm which later became known as Sunnīsm. In this context, the discourse of Māturīdīsm developed in Nusantara is seen as a method of thinking that is in tune with the tradition of Sunnīsm which emphasizes the elements of moderation and balance in theology. Keywords: Theology, Sunnī, Ash‘arīsm, Māturīdīsm, ‘Ulama, Nusantara Reference: Abdullah, Muhd Saghir, Sheikh Muhammad Arsyad al-Banjari: Pengarang Sabilal Muhtadin. Kuala Lumpur: Khazanah Fathimiyah, n.d. Abū ‘Udhba, al-Rawḍat al-Bahīyah fī-mā Bayn al-Ashā’irah wa al-Māturīdīyah. Hyderabad: n.p, 1322 H. 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Bandung: al-Ma‘ārif, n.d. _______, Nihāyat al-Zayn fī Irshād al-Mubtadi‘īn. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmīyah, 2002. Bazdawī, Abū al-Yusr Muhammad al-, Kitāb Uṣūl al-Dīn. Cairo: al-Maktabah al-Azharīyah, 2003. Ceric, Mustafa, Roots of Synthetic Theology in Islam: A Study of the Theology of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi. Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1995. Drewes, G.W.J., “Further Data Concerning ‘Abd al-Samad al-Palimbani”, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 132, No. 2/3 (1976). _______, The Admonitions of Seh Bari: A 16th Century Javanese Muslim Text. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. Effendi, Djohan, Pembaruan Tanpa Membongkar Tradisi. Jakarta:Kompas, 2012. Eissa, Mohamed Ahmed Abdelrahman, The Jurist and the Theologian: Speculative Theology in Shāfi‘ī Legal Theory. New York: Gorgias Press, 2017. Fādānī, Yāsīn al-, al-'Iqd al-Farīd min Jawāhir al-Asānīd. Surabaya: Dār al-Saqāf, 1981. Fathurahman, Oman, Katalog Naskah Tanoh Abee Aceh Besar. Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu & PPIM, 2010. Ghurābah, Ḥamūdah, Abū Ḥasan al-Ash‘arī. Cairo: Majma‘ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah, 1993. Griffel, Frank, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hasan, Noorhaidi, “Muhammad Arshad al-Banjari (1710-1812) and the Discourse of Islamization in the Banjar Sultanate”, thesis M.A. Leiden: Leiden University, 1999. _______, “The Tuḥfah al-Rāghibīn: the Work of Abdul Samad al-Palimbani or of Muhammad Arsyad al-Banjari?”, in Bijdragen tot de Tall-, Land-en Volkenkunde (BKI) 161-3, 2007. Hasjmy, Ali, Syi’ah dan Ahlussunnah; Saling Rebut Pengaruh dan Kekuasaan Sejak Awal Sejarah Islam di Kepulauan Nusantara. Surabaya: PT.Bina Ilmu, 1983. Hasyim, Arrazy, Teologi Ulama Tasawuf di Nusantara Abad XVII-XIX. Ciputat: Maktabah Darus Sunnah, 2011. Heer, Nicholas, A Concise Handlist of Jawi Authors and Their Works. Washington: n.p, 2009. Ibn Ḥazm, al-Faṣl fī al-Milal wa al-Niḥal. Beirut: Dār al-Ma‘rifah, 1983. 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Muttalib, Abdul, “The Mystical Thought of Muhammad Nafīs al-Banjārī: An Indonesia Sufi of the Eighteenth Century”, thesis M.A. Montreal: McGill University, 1995. Nafīs, M. al-Banjārī, Durr al-Nafīs fī Bayān Waḥdat al-Af‘āl wa al-Asmā‘ wa al-Ṣifāt wa al-Dhāt al-Taqdīs. Singapura: al-Haramayn, n.d. Nasution, Harun, Teologi Islam. Jakarta: UI Press, 2011. Palimbānī, ‘Abd al-Ṣamad al-, Sayr al-Sāllikīn ilā ‘Ibādat Rabb al-‘Ālamīn. Singapura: al-Haramayn, n.d. Quzwain, M. Chatib, Mengenal Allah: Suatu Studi Mengenai Ajaran Tasawuf Syekh Abd al-Shamad al-Palimbani. Jakarta: Bulan Bintang, 1985. Rānīrī, Nūr al-Dīn al-, Durrat al-Farā'id bi Sharḥ al-‘Aqā’id, MS collection of PNRI Jakarta. Research Team IAIN Antasari, Risalah Tasawuf Syekh Abdul Hamid Abulung. Banjarmasin: IAIN Antarasari, 2003. Shahrastānī, Muḥammad bin ‘Abd al-Karīm al-, al-Milal wa al-Niḥal. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmīyah, 2011. Ṣiddīq, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Banjārī, Fatḥ ‘Ālim fī Tartīb al-Ta‘līm. 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<p>Polyglot films highlight the coexistence of multiple languages at the level of dialogue and narration. Even the notoriously monolingual Hollywood film industry has recently seen an increase in polyglot productions. Much of Europe’s polyglot cinema reflects on post-war migration. Hamid Naficy has coined the phrase “accented cinema” to define diasporic filmmaking, a closely related category. The present essay considers polyglot Emirati films as part of an increasingly popular global genre. It argues that the lack of a monolingual mandate is conducive to experiments with language choices, and that the polyglot genre serves best to emphasize efforts made to accommodate the diversity of cultures interacting in urban centers in the United Arab Emirates. Case studies of Ali F. Mostafa’s <em>From A to B</em> (2014) and Humaid Alsuwaidi’s <em>Abdullah</em> (2015) demonstrate the considerable contributions Emirati filmmakers have already made to a genre, which offers a powerful potential for cinema in the UAE. A comparative analysis identifies the extent to which each of the two films reveals elements inherent in three of the five sub-categories outlined by Chris Wahl.</p><p><em>Keywords</em>: Ali Mostafa; Emirati cinema; film analysis; Humaid Alsuwaidi; multilingualism; polyglot cinema </p>

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. 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