Journal articles on the topic '1844-1900 Political and social views'

The discovery of an official report, so far unpublished, about coolie scandals on the plantations on Sumatra's East Coast around the year 1900, motivated me to produce a full-length book on this theme. My original intention had been merely to write a short introduction to the publication of a shocking historical document. However, I changed my mind when it became obvious that proper understanding of the source required more background information on the social and policy framework within which the plantation system operated. This applied both to conditions on the estates themselves and to the evaluation of those affairs by official and non-official outsiders. The main aim of my study is to contribute to the historiography of industrial labour in Southeast Asia. However, it also analyses die linkage that came about between capitalist industry and colonial policy in a region that formed part of the so-called Outer Provinces of die Netherlands Indies.

This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca.1600 and ca.1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the East has been oscillating between universalism and particularism, and between naive idealization and racist bias. This oscillation is a function as much of the changing political economy of the capitalist world-system as of the endogenous politics of the intellectual field. Despite their contrasting views, both admirers and despisers of the East viewed non-Western civilizations as uniform wholes that had never changed. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions about the ontological differences between East and West and the former's inferiority, as previous critics of Orientalism have supposed, but in its reductionism. Understanding non-Western civilizations in their full dynamism and heterogeneity is a critical step toward the renewal of the twentieth-century social theories that were built upon and impaired by the Orientalist knowledge accumulated in the previous centuries.

The article examines the processes of organizational development of the British Labour Party in the early XXth century, the evolution of the party structure and political programme in the twentieths of the XXth century. Special attention is paid to researching the formation of the Social Democratic Federation, Fabian Society and Independent Labour Party till the time of its joining to the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and adopting the “Labour Party” name in 1906. The author’s aim was to comprehensively investigate the political manifests and activities of those organizations on the way of transformation from separate trade-unions and socialist groups to apparent union of labour, and then to the mass and wide represented parliamentary party. However, the variety of social base of those societies is distinguished, and difference of socialist views and tactics of achieving the final purpose are emphasized. Considerable attention is paid to the system of the individual membership and results thereof in the process of the evolution of the Labour Party’s organization. The reorganization of the Labour party in 1918, Representation of the People Act, 1918 and the crisis in the Liberal party were favourable for the further evolution of the Labour Party. It is summarized that the social base, the history of party’s birth, the conditions of formation and the party system had influenced the process of the evolution of the ideological and political concepts of Labourizm.

AbstractFrom the first years after 1900, the Russian anarchists debated the “question of the organization,” and examined how they should organize the movement so that they may carry on its political activities and secure freedom of expression and of spontaneous action both for its members and for the masses. Opposed as they were to all kind of hierarchic, centralized, and pyramidal types of organization, most of the Russian anarchists preferred the creation of independent and autonomous groups whose members would be linked by a community of ideas and feelings. (The first groups appeared in Russia in 1903.) Under the influence of classical anarchist thinkers like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta, some of them saw in anarchism not only an ideology, but a way of life, and tried to create cells in the image of the future society. Everyday realities compelled many of them to adopt more efficient and practical solutions. The most frequent terms used in their vocabulary (and examined here) reveal their state of mind and ways of action, terms such as self-rule, initiative, autonomous action, independence, creativity, and free activity. Their groups were usually homogenous in terms of their social, educational, and national or ethnic composition. They rejected the practice of collecting members' fees or donations. As a result they faced the problem of how to finance their activities. A major debate ensued whether or not to use “expropriations” (eksy), armed attacks on state institutions or private enterprises, for gathering funds, and how such actions were viewed by the masses. The Revolution of 1905, in which the anarchists participated actively, had important repercussions on their views and ways of organizing.

The creative work of Dr. Myron Korduba (1876 - 1947) in the geography of the population of Bukovina in the early twentieth century is analyzed. Scientists are given a thorough comprehensive geographical assessment of the population of the region, studied the levels of education of the inhabitants of Bukovina, the structure of employment and its distribution by major social strata. The boundaries of the Ukrainian and Romanian "ethnographic territories" of Bukovina are clearly delineated as a basis for establishing appropriate state borders. With the arrival of Chernivtsi at the turn of the century and employment in the Second Academic Gymnasium, a young, full of energy Dr. Myron Korduba plunged into the whirlpool of active socio-political life. He had clearly expressed Ukrainian-centric state views, which he vigorously defended and scientifically substantiated. Therefore, it seems quite natural that his increased attention to politico-geographical and geopolitical research, important areas of which we have considered earlier. A significant place in the creative work of the scientist, of course, is also occupied by geographical and pedagogical developments. Studying the work of a scientist in the geography of the population of Bukovina, we should pay attention to the extremely valuable for the study of problems of regional development - analysis-review of Myron Korduba on official census materials published by the regional statistical bureau. It is important, as M. Korduba claims, that the publisher is not limited to information only for 1900, but also provides data for both 1880 and 1890 for comparison. It was necessary to dwell on the most important indicators of the last census of the population of Bukovyna also because neither the Bukovynian nor the Galician communities were acquainted in detail with these materials. First of all, Myron Korduba pays attention to population density and its geographical distribution in the counties of the region. According to the average - 70 people per 1 km² in 1900 Bukovina ranked 9th among the Austrian provinces (in 1890 - 10th place after Istria). Kitsman and Sadagur counties of Bukovina were "most densely populated" - 125 and 123 people per 1 km, respectively. The counties of DornaVatra and Seletyn had the lowest population density in the region (22 and 13 people per 1 km). For comparison, M. Korduba provides data on the average population density in the Czech Republic - 121 people per 1 km². In his analysis of the geography of the region's population, the reviewer focuses significantly on the language issue. He notes that in 1900, Ukrainian was spoken by 41.2% of all residents of Bukovina, Wallachian - 31.7%, German - 22.0%, Polish - 3.7%. Dr. Myron Korduba's brief but extremely informative study "Bukowina / Bukowina v nástinuhistorickémaetnografickém", published in Czech in the series "PoznejmeUkrainu", is of great interest for a comprehensive understanding of the problems of the geography of the region's population. This article by the scholar is all the more significant because it was published during the Paris Peace Conference and, in particular, the preparation of the Saint-Germain and future Sevres peace treaties, which legitimized the transfer of Bukovina to the Kingdom of Romania. Based on the above, Dr. Myron Korduba gives the following generalizations: neither historically nor ethnographically, Bukovyna can be considered as a "purely Romanian land", as Ukrainians make up a relative majority of the region's population; the communities of Zastavna, Kitsman, Vashkivtsi, Vyzhnytsia, and the environs of Selyatyn are purely Ukrainian; the political districts of Chernivtsi and Seret, as well as the Ukrainian parts of the communities of Storozhynets and Kimpolungu, have a Ukrainian majority. It is the relative majority of nationalities in a given area that should be decisive in the "division of Bukovina into regions with different nationalities"; although the region's capital, Chernivtsi, is dominated by Jews, Ukrainians are second only to Jews. The city is surrounded by Ukrainian communities and borders a small "Romanian island of several villages." Therefore, it is natural to "deliver" Chernivtsi to the Ukrainian part of Bukovyna.

A strong tradition in democratic theory claims that only constitutions made with direct popular involvement can establish or deepen democracy. Against this view, we argue that new constitutions are likely to enhance liberal democracy when they emerge through a plural agreement among political elites with distinct bases of social support. Power dispersion during constitution writing induces the adoption of institutions that protect opposition forces from the arbitrary use of executive power without unduly impairing majority rule. However, since incumbents may renege on the bargain, the democratizing effect of politically plural constitutional agreements is likely to be larger in the short term, when the identity of negotiating political forces and the balance of power between them tend to remain stable. We find support for these arguments using an original global dataset on the origins of constitutions between 1900 and 2015 and a difference-in-differences design.

Often overlooked, Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was an experimental novelist who produced a sustained and critical engagement with the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of unregulated capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. Focusing onThe Web of Life(1900) andTogether(1908), this essay argues that Herrick's novels forcefully document a radical middle-class political position and demonstrate how the middle class was capable of apprehending and resisting the functionings of capitalism—especially its fragmentation of lived experience and its foreclosure of any practical exterior to the social totality. Given how recent economic trends toward deregulation and privatization have resulted in a precarious situation for the middle class worldwide, Herrick's depiction of the emergence of the modern middle class in 1890s Chicago also presents a dynamic foil from which to view our present moment. Though his genre-bending and politically ambiguous literary and political experiments have long contributed to critical confusion and even dismissal of his work, today Herrick's novels are a powerful tool for rethinking the long-accepted understanding of the relationship between literary realism, the struggles surrounding the emergence of corporate capitalism, and the political standpoint of the professional middle class.

A 2014 sociology of religion conference invitation asserted that it is ‘A long-standing assumption in the sociology of religion … that there is a correlation between religious resurgence and intense moments of political, economic and socio-cultural crisis.’ We test this proposition against various post-1900 British or uk church adherence data and find no evidence to support the claim. On the contrary, the trajectories of decline are remarkably smooth. We suggest that such smoothness better supports the sociological view of secularization as a long-run process with amorphous and deep causes than it supports the claim that religious change is a response to specific events.

SummaryThe West Virginia Miners engaged in remarkable inter-ethnic rebellions in the early twentieth century, against the “feudal” conditions in the Mountain State's coalfields. This paper challenges the view that these actions were backed by an equally radical and class-conscious language based on Americanism. It shows how due to various barriers, ranging from ethnic differences to electoral interference, political involvement on the part of the miners was sporadic and unsuccessful, and they were unable to form a common, coherent political identity. Instead they articulated a broad and ultimately ambiguous appeal to “American” rights and values, which focused on the exceptionalism of West Virginia, and took the interpretation of Americanism to be self-evident.

The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.

Michele Stephen; Desire, divine and demonic; Balinese mysticism in the paintings of I Ketut Budiana and I Gusti Nyoman Mirdiana (Andrea Acri) John Lynch (ed.); Issues in Austronesian historical phonology (Alexander Adelaar) Alfred W. McCoy; The politics of heroin; CIA complicity in the global drug trade (Greg Bankoff) Anthony Reid; An Indonesian frontier; Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (Timothy P. Barnard) John G. Butcher; The closing of the frontier; A history of the maritime fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 1850-2000 (Peter Boomgaard) Francis Loh Kok Wah, Joakim Öjendal (eds); Southeast Asian responses to globalization; Restructuring governance and deepening democracy (Alexander Claver) I Wayan Arka; Balinese morpho-syntax: a lexical-functional approach (Adrian Clynes) Zaharani Ahmad; The phonology-morphology interface in Malay; An optimality theoretic account (Abigail C. Cohn) Michael C. Ewing; Grammar and inference in conversation; Identifying clause structure in spoken Javanese (Aone van Engelenhoven) Helen Creese; Women of the kakawin world; Marriage and sexuality in the Indic courts of Java and Bali (Amrit Gomperts) Ming Govaars; Dutch colonial education; The Chinese experience in Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Kees Groeneboer) Ernst van Veen, Leonard Blussé (eds); Rivalry and conflict; European traders and Asian trading networks in the 16th and 17th centuries (Hans Hägerdal) Holger Jebens; Pathways to heaven; Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea (Menno Hekker) Ota Atsushi; Changes of regime and social dynamics in West Java; Society, state and the outer world of Banten, 1750-1830 (Mason C. Hoadley) Richard McMillan; The British occupation of Indonesia 1945-1946; Britain, the Netherlands and the Indonesian Revolution (Russell Jones) H.Th. Bussemaker; Bersiap! Opstand in het paradijs; De Bersiapperiode op Java en Sumatra 1945-1946 (Russell Jones) Michael Heppell; Limbang anak Melaka and Enyan anak Usen, Iban art; Sexual selection and severed heads: weaving, sculpture, tattooing and other arts of the Iban of Borneo (Viktor T. King) John Roosa; Pretext for mass murder; The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s coup d’état in Indonesia (Gerry van Klinken) Vladimir Braginsky; The heritage of traditional Malay literature; A historical survey of genres, writings and literary views (Dick van der Meij) Joel Robbins, Holly Wardlow (eds); The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia; Humiliation, transformation and the nature of cultural change (Toon van Meijl) Kwee Hui Kian; The political economy of Java’s northeast coast c. 1740-1800; Elite synergy (Luc Nagtegaal) Charles A. Coppel (ed.); Violent conflicts in Indonesia; Analysis, representation, resolution (Gerben Nooteboom) Tom Therik; Wehali: the female land; Traditions of a Timorese ritual centre (Dianne van Oosterhout) Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso; State and society in the Philippines (Portia L. Reyes) Han ten Brummelhuis; King of the waters; Homan van der Heide and the origin of modern irrigation in Siam (Jeroen Rikkerink) Hotze Lont; Juggling money; Financial self-help organizations and social security in Yogyakarta (Dirk Steinwand) Henk Maier; We are playing relatives; A survey of Malay writing (Maya Sutedja-Liem) Hjorleifur Jonsson; Mien relations; Mountain people and state control in Thailand (Nicholas Tapp) Lee Hock Guan (ed.); Civil society in Southeast Asia (Bryan S. Turner) Jan Mrázek; Phenomenology of a puppet theatre; Contemplations on the art of Javanese wayang kulit (Sarah Weiss) Janet Steele; Wars within; The story of Tempo, an independent magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia (Robert Wessing) REVIEW ESSAY Sean Turnell; Burma today Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Robert Taylor, Tin Maung Maung Than (eds); Myanmar; Beyond politics to societal imperatives Monique Skidmore (ed.); Burma at the turn of the 21st century Mya Than; Myanmar in ASEAN In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde no. 163 (2007) no: 1, Leiden

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

AbstractRecent scholarship on the history of German anthropology has tended to describe its trajectory between 1900 and the Nazi period as characterized by a paradigmatic shift from the liberal to the anti-humanistic. This article reconstructs key moments in the history of anthropometric photography between 1900 and 1925, paying particular attention to the role of the influential liberal anthropologist Rudolf Martin (1864–1925) in the standardization of anthropological method and technique. It is shown that Rudolf Martin's primary significance was social and institutional. The article reconstructs key stages in Martin's writing on and uses of photography and analyses the peculiar form of scientific debate surrounding the development of anthropometric photography, which centred on local and practical questions. Against the political backdrop of German colonialism in Africa and studies of prisoners of war during the First World War, two key tensions in this history surface: between anthropological method and its politicization, and between the international scientific ethos and nationalist impulses. By adopting a practical–epistemic perspective, the article also destabilizes the conventional differentiation between the German liberal and anti-humanist anthropological traditions. Finally, the article suggests that there is a certain historical irony in the fact that the liberal Martin was central in the process that endowed physical anthropology with prestige precisely in the period when major parts of German society increasingly came to view ‘race’ as offering powerful, scientific answers to social and political questions.

<p class="06IsiAbstrak"><span lang="EN-GB">Sufism and political expressions are often considered contradictory. Politics tends to be secular, hedonic and materialist as the reason for the Sufis to stay away from it. Politicians also view that Sufi life only curbs political creativity. Secularization in Turkey failed because it met with resistance from the Sufis spearheaded by Said Nursi. This research is limited to the four pillars of thought Sufism Said Nursi. This study aims to determine the four pillars of Said Nursi's Sufism thought and its influence on the political struggle of the Muslim community in Turkey in 1900-1960. This research is library research. Data sources consist of primary data sources, secondary data sources and tertiary data. The method used in analyzing the data is the content analysis method. The research results obtained the following findings; Through the neo-Sufism social movement, Nursi got a broad audience. His guidance for Turkish society and readers of Risalah al-Nur in particular influenced political change.</span></p>

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals (both Northern and Southern) who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today.

During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism infin-de-siècleAustria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.

This paper takes forward the view put forward by Diana Gittins that the visual representation of childhood appeared simple but could have deceived Victorian audiences. It does this by analyzing those images - few in number - which linked childhood with death and describes them in relation to the majority of childhood imagery between 1870 and 1900. The paper also suggests that there are pitfalls in regarding the visual part of the historical record solely as an illustrative resource. The author argues that death did not belong in the Victorian cultural delineation of the child's world. Rather, mortality is best understood as one part of the adult domain in which the child was a relative stranger. When childhood was brought into close visual alignment with death, notions of remorse, reproof, sin and safety could emerge alongside grief as preoccupations which concealed as much as they revealed. The known reality of death's impact on children's lives was kept visually hidden from Victorian audiences, even if it was acknowledged in many associated commentaries. The vast majority of images addressing childhood themes from the period set out a benign, if instructional, view of relationships between adults and children. Those few images which did link childhood with death were part of a social and cultural context which preferred to blot out their implications. Children were far more likely to be depicted as the embodiment of life. A preference existed for visual material which endorsed, rather than undermined, adult care and control of the child's world. Pictures linking mortality to childhood were few in number because they were unbearable to audiences for unacknowledged reasons. As well as grief, such scenes of mortality made graphic reference to occasions when adults were powerless to protect every child.

This article touches the notion of alienation from Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and young Marx’s perspective, Althusser’s critique being its offset, which, according to, this concept stems from an abstract, metaphysical view of history and human agents’ activities. According to Althusser, alienation is indeed the humanistic expression of a back-to-origins philosophy and of lost human essence retrieval. Hence, the philosophy of contractual alienation (as a foundation of political community as per Rousseau), the interrogation of historical positivity from young Hegel’s writings and, last but not least, the alienated work critique elaborated by young Marx in Manuscripts of 1844 can be interpreted as variations around the same essential concepts of human history. In the attempt of overcoming such an undifferentiated approach, the study tries to highlight the original and particular reflection that each of these authors develop on the subject and highlights, at the same time, what they have in common, despite their differences on this theme. When we talk about alienation we always relate to a mutilated loss in the relationship with the self, with others and with the social world. Moreover, we also talk about the possibility of overcoming some of the conditions that are considered degrading for humans. In other words, this study aims to prove that not only it is not possible to reduce the alienation to an abstract and naïve humanistic notion, but that it also represents an essential landmark for understanding the impossibility of some social groups of classes to develop on the merits of long-lasting deprivation of the benefits the relationship with the self, the others and the social world can bring.

Abstract Theorists have long disagreed about the impact of socio-economic modernization on social trust. The pessimistic school asserts that modernization undermines the structural conditions for high levels of trust. The optimistic account argues that it delivers economic security and human empowerment and thereby enhances trust. Adapting these contrasting theories to the specific case of China, this article puts them to the test with survey data from the World Values Survey. Exploiting the condition of highly uneven levels of regional development, combined with common political institutions and a shared cultural heritage, the study conducts a multi-level analysis of survey data from over 1900 individuals and a wide range of regional statistics from 61 county-level units. While trust in family members and particular trust beyond the family are unaffected by levels of regional modernization, we find robust evidence to suggest that regional modernization is associated with substantially higher levels of general trust. The results further suggests that higher general trust in more developed regions does not lead to an enhanced conversion of particular into general trust. This indicates that general trust is nurtured through the contextual effect of residing in more modern social environments. Overall, these findings provide substantial support for modernization optimists and lend themselves to a reinterpretation of a widely discussed “trust crisis” in China, which to date is often interpreted according to the pessimistic view of modernization.

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

Nowhere, in recent times, has the question of the Islamic Law of Shari’ah produced such a crescendo of concern, posed such a challenge to the prevailing justice system, as in Nigeria. In "modern" societies, the criminal justice system not only produces social solidarity by reaffirming the society's bond and its adherence to certain norms, but also serves to legitimize the political authority of the state. In the postcolonial pluralistic society of Nigeria, the criminal justice system has been fundamentally influenced by the ascendancy of Western penology. During the era of European colonization of Africa, existing systems of justice were suppressed; in Nigeria's case, by the British imperial power. Predictably, the British system of justice clashed with the indigenous systems. Nowhere is this historical conflict more manifest than in the ongoing challenge Shari’a has posed to the Nigerian state. Shari’ah was an incendiary issue during the colonial period (1900-60) in Nigeria, and has continued to challenge the classical view of the modern state ever since. This challenge has reshaped Nigeria's postcolonial criminal justice system. Here religion, politics, and society intersect, shedding light on the arrival, reactions, and crises of modernity, themes that run through the Shari’ah controversy like interwoven threads.

The English version of this article was first published in 1957. The journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique republished it 60 years later in 2017. In this essay, Franz L. Neumann discusses the role of anxiety in politics. The article asks: How does it happen that the masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the men have who accept leaders? For answering these questions, the author suggests a combination of political economy, Freudian political psychology, and ideology critique. He sees anxiety in the context of alienation. Alienation is analysed as a multidimensional phenomenon consisting of economic, political, social and psychological alienation. Neumann introduces the notions of Caesaristic identification, institutionalised anxiety and persecutory anxiety. The essay shows that fascism remains an actual threat in capitalist societies.Acknowledgement: The editors of tripleC express their gratitude to the Neumann and Marcuse families for their support in republishing this essay, to Simon & Schuster for granting us the rights, and to Denise Rose Hansen for her invaluable editorial assistance. Original source: From the book “The Democratic and the Authoritarian State” by Franz Neumann. Copyright © 1957 by the Free Press. Copyright renewed © 1985 by the Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Originally delivered as a lecture before the Free University of Berlin and published in the series “Recht und Staat,” Tübingen,1954. Translated by Professor Peter Gay. This article is published in tripleC without a CC licence.About the AuthorFranz Leopold Neumann (1900-1954) was a political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School. He obtained a doctoral degree in legal studies at the University of Frankfurt with the dissertation „Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung zu einer Abhandlung über das Verhältnis von Staat und Strafe“ (A Legal-Philosophical Introduction to A Treatise on the Relationship between the State and Punishment). Neumann became the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) main legal advisor at a time when the Nazis and Hitler gained strength in Germany. At the time when Hitler came to power in 1933, the legal office had to be closed and Neumann had to flee from Germany. In London, he in 1936 obtained his second doctoral degree from the London School of Economics with the work “The Governance of the Rule of Law” under the supervision of Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim. Neumann moved to New York in 1936, where he became a member of the Institute of Social Research (also known as the “Frankfurt School”) that was then in exile in the USA. In 1942, he started working for the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), where he together with Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer analysed Nazi Germany. In 1942, Neumann published his main book is Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (2nd, updated edition published in 1944), one of the most profound analyses of Nazi Germany’s political economy and ideology. Franz L. Neumann died in 1954 in a car accident.

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

Abstract Posterity has not been kind to the Australian-born polymath Jack Lindsay (1900–1990), a self-confessed ‘odd man out’ who published over one hundred and seventy books across a range of genres. This article asks what Lindsay wrote, why it has been forgotten and why we should care. It restores to view Lindsay's politico-cultural trajectory from his conversion to Marxism in 1936. It argues that Lindsay's searching and sceptical Marxism was a source of his prolific creativity and that he evolved a distinct and sometimes eccentric Marxist theoretical framework – a system with the concept of alienation at its core – within which his individual works are most legible. It argues that Lindsay's theoretical Marxism is not reducible to that of ‘British Communism’ or the ‘Old Left’, but exceeded and was mostly in tension with the Marxism of his party and its Soviet models, despite his political affiliation. It explains that Lindsay's oeuvre sank gradually from mainstream cultural visibility through the Cold War and that his conflicted but ongoing CP and Soviet-facing alignment alienated him from an emerging New Left with which he actually shared much theoretical ground. Estranged from his own party and largely dismissed by the New Left, his project disappeared through the cracks that opened during the traumatic realignments of the British Left in the post-1956 decade and remains largely absent from accounts of Marxist thought in Britain today. But though in many ways flawed, Lindsay's central project – tracing the processes of alienation through social formations, sifting human history for moments of resistance to that alienation, and attempting to prefigure a society in which values of creative production and communication are generalized across society as a whole – speaks loudly to ever-sharpening problems and deserves revisiting now.

Libya at the beginning of this century had little to offer the would-be imperialist and coloniser. The true value of Turkey's last remaining African possessions was not — despite the insistence of the Italian nationalist lobby — as a settler-colony or as a gateway to the largely illusory wealth of central Africa, but as a strategic base on the central Mediterranean. The general poverty of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was reflected indeed in the poverty of the literature in any language on contemporary Libya.But growing Italian interest in these territories, by 1900 almost the last parts of Africa unclaimed by any European power, generated a series of books and articles by an imperialist-nationalist lobby eager to prove the case that Italy's political, strategic, economic and social wellbeing depended on the immediate possession of Turkish North Africa. Such writings naturally generated a rather less voluminous counter-flow of material, mainly from socialist sources, putting the opposite and (as events were to prove) essentially more realistic case.The outbreak of the Italo-Turkish war in September 1911 and the subsequent Italian occupation of bridgeheads at Tripoli, Horns, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk first brought Libya to the notice of the international press. The British correspondents who reported one or other side of the conflict subsequently produced a number of surprisingly partisan books about the war and their own adventures in it, but had very much less to say about the little-understood country and its people. With the sudden end of the war in 1912 and the outbreak of more serious fighting in the Balkans, interest in Libya quickly waned. For the next 30 years nearly all the relevant literature was to be provided by Italians, in Italian and written from a purely Italian point of view — some of it later to be destroyed in the antifascist and anti-imperialist reaction from 1943 onwards.

150 Years of the Folk High School- Books around a JubileeBy Hans HenningsenWith the book »Rødding Folk High School 1844 - 1994«, Käthe Z. S. Pedersen and John Pedersen have provided an interesting contribution to the history of the folk high school. Thanks to Chr. Flor, the man behind the initiative to establish the school, Rødding Folk High School became an attempt to realize Grundtvig’s folk high school ideas from the 1830s more than any other school in the first hundred years of the folk high school movement. Among successive principals at Rødding it was above all Sofus Høgsbro who tried to continue Flor’s socially oriented line, but came up against difficulties from several sides. After the war in 1864, the principal and teachers decided to carry on the school at Askov, north of the new border.Another publication from the jubilee year is »Knowledge and Spirit - Ask Folk High School 1869 - 1994« by Thorkild C. Lyby, Doctor of Divinity. After the national disaster in 1864 folk high schools sprang up everywhere, some of them sustained, first and foremost, by the need of the peasants for education and social and political equality, others also by the revivals and the educational ideas of Grundtvig and Kold. The schools that were named after Lars Bjømbak, Viby near Aarhus, belonged to the first category. The »Bjømbak« schools did not have the spirit of the time on their side, as the Grundtvigians had. But politically, the »Bjømbak«s were more class-conscious than the Grundtvigians.The goal was the uprising of the peasantry. As this goal was gradually being approached, the justification for this type of folk high school disappeared. The Association of Folk High Schools in Denmark celebrated the jubilee with a publication by Professor Gunhild Nissen, Doctor of Pedagogics: »Challenges to the Folk High School«. The main view is that the folk high school, which should concern itself with universal matters, was hampered by the alliance with the peasantry and allowed itself to be restricted culturally by the Christian world picture as determined by the revivals. The folk high school proved incapable of opening up towards the young people of modem urban culture, and it failed when the democratic wave of the 60s included the question of student influence, which for example showed itself in the Askov controversy around 1970, which is dealt with in detail in the book.An important post-war innovation within the folk high school was Krogerup Folk High School, established in 1946. This is the subject of the book »Hal Koch and Krogerup Folk High School«, written by the former Minister of Economic Affairs, Poul Nyboe Andersen. Krogerup was a modem attempt to create a folk high school on the immediate inspiration of Grundtvig’s folk high school model. But Krogerup turned out to be a disappointment to its founder and first principal, Professor of Theology Hal Koch.In the political associations and youth organizations that Hal Koch had appealed to, tbe belief in the importance of a national community spirit and the enthusiastic faith in dialogue as the mainstay of democracy did not for long survive the War and the Occupation.However, nothing has contributed more than Hal Koch’s Krogerup work to the transplantation of Grundtvig’s idea of the dialogue and the national community feeling to the modem democratic society.

In de historiografie werd het aandeel van het Vlaamse socialisme in de Vlaamse beweging lang miskend. Rond 1970 toonde onderzoek aan hoe het Vlaamse socialisme, ondanks een beperkt aantal volksvertegenwoordigers (drie in 1900 ten opzichte van 23 Waalse en 5 Brusselse) de taalwetten verdedigden. Na een frontale botsing met Waalse partijgenoten werd de taalkwestie in de unitaire Belgische Werkliedenpartij (°1885) in 1909 een vrije kwestie. Intussen vorderde het onderzoek. Dat maakte een nieuwe synthese mogelijk. Het opzet werd breder. In een eerste deel werd de partij doorgelicht als vertrekpunt naar communautaire tegenstellingen: een socialistisch reformisme en attentisme, het besluitvormingsproces, de interactie tussen centraal bestuur/federaties/ parlementsfractie, de ongelijkmatige economische ontwikkeling en de politieke vertaling ervan, het interne taalgebruik. Zoals elders vereenzelvigde de BWP zich steeds meer met het nationale vaderland. Brusselse, Vlaamse en Waalse socialisten vulden dit echter anders in.In een tweede deel staan de communautaire spanningen zelf centraal. Aanvankelijk leek het er op dat Vlamingen en Walen als Belgen taalkundig naar elkaar konden groeien. Dat veronderstelde gelijkheid en wederkerigheid. Het streefdoel werd dan ofwel een veralgemeende tweetaligheid ofwel een officiële eentaligheid van beide taalgebieden. Dat gebeurde niet. Na 1900 ging het Vlaamse socialisme tot de voorhoede van de Vlaamse beweging behoren, terwijl het Waalse socialisme de leiding van de Waalse beweging overnam. Dat was een complex proces. Voor de analyse ervan werd vertrokken van de argumenten die de Gentse leider Anseele in 1911 gebruikte om zijn afwachtend standpunt te verduidelijken: de Vlaamse kwestie als hoofd- of bijzaak, de toegenomen sterkte van de Vlaamse beweging, het beginselprogramma van de partij, het gevaar voor de eenheid van het Vlaamse socialisme én voor de eenheid van het Belgische socialisme.Wat alle partijgenoten bond, was een emotionele en rationele identificatie, gericht op de strijd voor politieke gelijkheid via het afdwingen van algemeen enkelvoudig stemrecht. Maar secundair botsten toenemende regionalismen. Het Vlaamse socialisme verscherpte de taalstrijd als aspect van de klassenstrijd tegen de francofone dominantie, die de emancipatie van de arbeiders bemoeilijkte. De eis tot ‘culturele autonomie’ (Otto Bauer!) vond ingang: zelfbeschikking over een Nederlandstalig onderwijs van laag tot hoog. Het Waalse socialisme duldde steeds minder de negatie van het programma door voortdurend aan de macht blijvende katholieke regeringen sinds 1884. Die steunden op Vlaanderen, terwijl in Wallonië een antiklerikale meerderheid van liberalen en socialisten bestond. De superioriteit van het Frans in België in vraag stellen of de kennis van het Nederlands aan Walen opleggen, werd geïnterpreteerd als een bijkomende discriminatie. Desnoods werd met bestuurlijke scheiding gedreigd. Toch werden in de partij mogelijkheden tot een vergelijk gezocht. België bestond uit twee volken met eigen culturele rechten. Breekpunt bleef hoe men wilde omgaan met ‘taalminderheden’ in beide landsgedeelten en hoe men die wilde definiëren.________‘Frenemies’? Communitarian tensions in the Socialist Party until 1914The contribution of Flemish socialism to the Flemish Movement has long been misunderstood in the historiography. Around 1970, research demonstrated how Flemish socialism, despite a limited number of representatives in parliament (three in 1900, in contrast to 23 from Wallonia and 5 from Brussels) defended the language laws. After a major clash with Walloon fellow party members, the language question became a free question within the Belgian Workers’ Party (*1885). In the meantime, the research kept advancing. This made a new synthesis possible. The framework became broader. In the first wave, the party was studied as a point of departure toward communitarian oppositions: a socialist reformism and ‘wait-andsee’ attitude, the decision-making process, the interaction between the central committee, federations, and the parliamentary group, uneven economic development and the political consequences thereof, internal language use. As elsewhere, the BWP identified more and more with the national fath-erland. Brussels, Flemish and Walloon socialists each understood this very differently.In the second wave, the communitarian tensions themselves take center stage. Originally, it seemed that Flemings and Walloons could grow toward one another linguistically as Belgians. This presupposed equality and reciprocity. The goal of struggle became either a general bilingualism or an official monolingualism for both language regions. That did not happen. After 1900, Flemish socialism belonged to the vanguard of the Flemish Movement, while Walloon socialism took over the leadership of the Walloon Movement. This was a complex process. The analysis of it took as a starting point the arguments that the Ghent leader Anseele used in 1911 in order to clarify his ‘wait-and-see’ point of view: the Flemish question as main or side question, the increasing strength of the Flemish Movement, the party manifesto, the concern for the unity of Flemish social-ism and for the unity of Belgian socialism.What bound all party members together was an emotional and rational identification with each other, built on the struggle for political equality through the demand for single universal suffrage. But growing regionalisms clashed under the surface. Flemish socialism increasingly emphasized the language struggle as an aspect of the class struggle against French-speaking domination, which hindered the emancipation of the workers. The demand for ‘cultural autonomy’ (Otto Bauer!) found purchase: self-determination of a Dutch-language education, from top to bottom. Walloon socialism grew more and more impatient of not being able to realise its program, due to the unbroken chain of Catholic governments in power since 1884. These governments found their support in Flanders, while an anticlerical majority of liberals and social-ists existed in Wallonia. Questioning the superiority of French in Belgium, or imposing the knowledge of Dutch on Walloons, was interpreted as another form of discrimination. If necessary there was the threat of administrative separation. Nevertheless, the party still looked for possibilities for compromise. Belgium consisted of two peoples, each with their own cultural rights. The sensitive point remained how one wanted to handle ‘linguistic minorities’ in both parts of the country, and how one wanted to define them.

Resumo: O presente texto objetiva uma abordagem, no interior do pensamento de Ernst Bloch (1885/1977), acerca da relação entre marxismo e utopia: um vínculo incomum no interior do marxismo, comumente tido numa oposição inconciliável. Daí a apropriação do termo “herético” em referência ao marxismo do autor alemão: a expressão é usada não em sentido pejorativo, mas apenas para situar seu distanciamento do marxismo vulgar, bem como sua intenção de crítica radical dessa tradição. Aqui entendemos que é, em particular, por meio da relação entre marxismo e utopia que o pensamento de Ernst Bloch aparece como um projeto inelutavelmente político com vistas a uma filosofia da práxis concreta na principal obra do autor: O Princípio esperança (Das Prinzip Hoffnung) [1954/1959]. Neste livro encontramos, com efeito, a tentativa de pensar a atualidade do marxismo para o contexto do século XX, a era das catástrofes, conforme definição do historiador Eric Hobsbawm. Palavras-chave: Marxismo. Utopia. Dialética. Crítica social. Cultura. Abstract: This paper presents an approach within the thinking of Ernst Bloch (1885/1977) about the relation between Marxism and Utopia: an unusual link within Marxism, commonly held in an irreconcilable opposition. Hence the appropriation of the term "heretical" in reference to the German author's Marxism: the expression is used not in a pejorative sense, but only to situate its distancing from vulgar Marxism, as well as its intention of a radical critique of this tradition. Here we understand that it is particularly through the relationship between Marxism and Utopia that Ernst Bloch's thought appears as an ineluctably political project with a view to a philosophy of concrete praxis in the principal work of the author: The Principle Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung) [1954/1959]. In this book we find, in effect, the attempt to think the actuality of Marxism in the context of the age of catastrophe - as defined by Eric Hobsbawm - that is, the long twentieth century that experienced the extreme barbarism of the concentration camp, of which the thinker in question, Jewish and Communist, managed to escape. Keywords: Marxism. Utopia. Dialectics. Social criticismo. Culture. REFERÊNCIAS ALBORNOZ, Suzana. O enigma da Esperança: Ernst Bloch e as margens da história do espírito. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1995. ALBORNOZ, Suzana. Ética e utopia: ensaio sobre Ernst Bloch. 2ª edição. Porto Alegre: Movimento; Santa Cruz do Sul: EdUSC, 2006. BICCA, Luiz. Marxismo e liberdade. São Paulo: Loyola, 1987. BLOCH, Ernst. Filosofia del Rinascimento. Trad. it. de Gabriella Bonacchi e Katia Tannenbaum. Bologna: il Mulino, 1981. BLOCH, Ernst. Héritage de ce temps. Trad. Jean Lacoste. Paris: Payot, 1978. BLOCH, Ernst. O Princípio Esperança [1954-1959]. Vol. I. Trad. br. Nélio Schneider. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ; Contraponto, 2005. BLOCH, Ernst. O Princípio Esperança [1954-1959]. Vol. II. Trad. br. Werner Fuchs. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ; Contraponto, 2006. BLOCH, Ernst. O Princípio Esperança [1954-1959]. Vol. III. Trad. br. Nélio Schneider. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ; Contraponto, 2006. BLOCH, Ernst. Du rêve à l’utopie: Entretiens philosophiques. Textos escolhidos e prefaciados por Arno Münster. Paris: Hermann, 2016. BLOCH, Ernst. Thomas Münzer, Teólogo da Revolução [1963]. Trad. br. Vamireh Chacon e Celeste Aída Galeão. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1973. BLOCH, Ernst. L’esprit de l’utopie, [1918-1023]. Trad. fr. de Anne Marie Lang e Catherine Tiron-Audard. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. BLOCH, Ernst. El pensamiento de Hegel. Trad. esp. de Wenceslao Roces. Mexico; Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1963. BOURETZ, Pierre. Testemunhas do futuro: filosofia e messianismo. Trad. J. Guinsburg. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011, p. 690. FREUD, Sigmund. Los sueños [1900-1901]. Trad. Luis Lopez-Ballesteros et al., Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1981. FREUD, Sigmund. A Interpretação dos sonhos. Vol. I. Trad. Jayme Salomão. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 2006. HORKHEIMER, Max. Filosofia e teoria crítica. In: Textos escolhidos. Trad. de José Lino Grünnewald. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1980, p. 155 (Coleção Os Pensadores.). MÜNSTER, Arno. Ernst Bloch: filosofia da práxis e utopia concreta. São Paulo: UNESP, 1993. MÜNSTER, Arno. Utopia, Messianismo e Apocalipse nas primeiras de Ernst Bloch. Trad. br. de Flávio Beno Siebeneichler. São Paulo: UNESP, 1997. PIRON-AUDARD, Catherine. Anthropologie marxiste et psychanalyse selon Ernst Bloch. In: RAULET, Gérard (org.). Utopie-marxisme selon Ernst Bloch: un système de l'inconstructible. Payot: Paris, 1976. VIEIRA, Antonio Rufino. Princípio esperança e a “herança intacta do marxismo” em Ernst Bloch. In: Anais do 5° Coloquio Internacional Marx-Engels. Campinas: CEMARX/Unicamp. Disponível em: <www.unicamp.br / cemarx_v_coloquio_arquivos_arquivos /comunicacoes/gt1/sessao6/Antonio_Rufi no.pdf>. VIEIRA, Antonio Rufino. Marxismo e libertação: estudos sobre Ernst Bloch e Enrique Dussel. São Leopoldo: Nova Harmonia, 2010. RAULET, Gérard (Organizador). Utopie - marxisme selon Ernst Bloch: un sistème de l’inconstructible. Paris: Payot, 1976. ZECCHI, Stefano. Ernest Bloch: Utopia y Esperanza en el Comunismo [1974]. Trad. esp. de Enric Pérez Nadal, Barcellona: Península, 1978.

-Sandra L. Richards, Judy S.J. Stone, Theatre. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994. xii + 268 pp.-Lowell Fiet, Errol Hill, The Jamaican stage, 1655-1900: profile of a colonial theatre. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. xiv + 346 pp.-Supriya Nair, Bruce King, V.S. Naipaul. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. viii + 170 pp.-Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Donald E. Rice, The rhetorical uses of the authorizing figure: Fidel Castro and José Martí. Westport CT: Praeger, 1992. xviii + 163 pp.-Graciella Cruz-Taura, Juan A. Martínez, Cuban art and national identity: The Vanguardia painters, 1927-1950. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xiv + 189 pp.-Graciella Cruz-Taura, Luis Camnitzer, New art of Cuba. Austin; University of Texas Press, 1994. xxx + 400 pp.-Gary Brana-Shute, Richard Price ,On the mall: Presenting Maroon tradition-bearers at the 1992 festival of American folklife. Bloomington: Folklore Institute, Indiana University, 1994. xi + 123 pp., Sally Price (eds)-Erika Bourguignon, Stephan Palmié, Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991. vii + 520 pp.-Carla Freeman, Daniel Miller, Modernity, an ethnographic approach: Dualism and mass consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994. 340 pp.-Daniel A. Segal, Kelvin Singh, Race and class: Struggles in a colonial state: Trinidad 1917-1945. Kingston; The Press - University of the West Indies, 1994. xxii + 284 pp.-Evelyne Huber, Patsy Lewis, Jamaica: Preparing for the twenty-first century. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1994. xvi + 272 pp.-Diane Vernon, Elisa Janine Sobo, One blood: The Jamaican body. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1993. vii + 329 pp.-Robert Myers, Patrick L. Baker, Centring the periphery: Chaos. order and the ethnohistory of Dominica. Kingston: The Press - University of the West Indies, 1994. xxviii + 251 pp.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Debra Evenson, Revolution in the balance: Law and society in contemporary Cuba. Boulder CO: Westview, 1994. xiii + 235 pp.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Mindie Lazarus-Black, Legitimate acts and illegal encounters: Law and society in Antigua and Barbuda. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. xxv + 357 pp.-Michiel Baud, Luis Martínez-Fernández, Torn between empires: Economy, society, and patterns of political thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840-1878. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. ix + 333 pp.-Stanley L. Engerman, Jorge F. Pérez-López, The economics of Cuban sugar. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991, xviii + 313 pp.-Rosario Espinal, Michiel Baud, Historia de un sueño: Los ferrocarriles públicos en la República Dominicana, 1880-1930. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1993. 145 pp.-Birgit Sonesson, Carlos Esteban Dieve, Las emigraciones canarias a Santo Domingo: Siglos XVII y XVIII. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1991. iii + 185 pp.-Erna Kerkhof, Juan Flores, Divided borders: Essays on Puerto Rican identity. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993. 252 pp.-Cruz M. Nazario, Joan Koss-Chioino, Women as healers, women as patients: Mental health care and traditional healing in Puerto Rico. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xx + 237 pp.-Forrest D. Colburn, Andrés Serbin ,El Caribe y Cuba en la posguerra fría. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1994. 272 pp., Joseph Tulchin (eds)-Winthrop R. Wright, Nina S. de Friedemann, La saga del negro: Presencia africana en Colombia. Santa Fe de Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano, 1993. 117 pp.-Rita Giacalone, Francois Taglioni, Géopolitique des Petites Antilles: Influences européenne et nordaméricaine. Paris: Karthala, 1994. vii + 321 pp.-Daniel J. Crowley, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties. With the assistance of Nancy Condon. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. vii + 512 pp.-Peter Bakker, Joan D. Hall ,Old English and new: Studies in language and linguistics in honor of Frederic G. Cassidy. New York: Garland, 1992. xxxiii + 460 pp., Nick Doane, Dick Ringler (eds)-Peter Bakker, Francis Byrne ,Atlantic meets Pacific: A global view of Pidginization and Creolization. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. ix + 465 pp., John Holm (eds)-Jacques Arends, George L. Huttar ,Ndyuka. London: Routledge, 1994. 631 pp., Mary L. Huttar (eds)-P.C. Emmer, Henk den Heyer, De geschiedenis van de WIC. Zutphen, Netherlands: De Walburg Pers, 1994. 208 pp.-Wim Hoogbergen, A.F. Paula, 'Vrije' slaven: Een sociaal-historische studie over de dualistische slavenemancipatie op Nederlands Sint Maarten, 1816-1863. Zutphen, Netherlands: De Walburg Pers, 1993. 191 pp.-Wim Hoogbergen, Bea Brommer, Ik ben eigendom van ...: Slavenhandel en plantageleven. Wijk en Aalburg, Netherlands: Pictures Publishers, 1993. 144 pp.-Gert Oostindie, Ben Scholtens, Bosnegers en overheid in Suriname: De ontwikkeling van de politieke verhouding 1651-1992. Paramaribo: Afdeling Cultuurstudies/Minov, 1994. 237 pp.-Edward M. Dew, Marten Schalkwijk, Suriname: Het steentje in de Nederlandse schoen: Van onafhankelijkheid tot raamverdrag. Paramaribo: Firgos Suriname, 1994. 356 pp.

This article discusses the socialist involvement of three of Canada’s earliest Bahá’ís, namely Paul Kingston Dealy, Honoré Jaxon, and Rose Henderson. Given that the Bahá’í Faith had an authentic interest in economic and social justice from its earliest days, a number of these early Bahá’ís were involved in socialism. This paper seeks to explain such an engagement despite the Bahá’í proscription of involvement in partisan politics. Because of the paucity of Bahá’í core writings until the early 1920s, a number of early Bahá’ís fit what they perceived to be Bahá’í teachings to their personal views, which led a number of them to engage in political activism. These views stand in sharp contrast to the Bahá’í teachings forbidding such involvement. Moreover, the porous membership boundaries in the early days of the Bahá’í community did not allow members to be consistent about criteria of Bahá’í membership. However, by the 1920s, membership in the Bahá’í community had become formalized and the prohibition against engaging in political affairs became a sine qua non for such membership. As a result, these early Bahá’ís either formally relinquished their membership or withdrew from active participation. At the current time, the Bahá’í Community of Canada numbers approximately 33,000 adherents. It is a religion that was founded in 1844.

Historians studying Vietnamese intellectual and political history have evaluated the negative perspectives that the Vietnamese educated class expressed in political journalism, especially newspapers, as an expression of nationalism and anti-foreign sentiments. This hostile attitude from the Vietnamese community was correlated with the fact that the Chinese during this time were relatively segregated from the larger community with their own social and political system of governance. However, a deeper study of Vietnamese newspapers would show how their narratives were ambivalently mixed among antagonism, admiration, and even sympathy. Other literary sources such as popular literature also presented more moderate voices that took into consideration the contributions of the ethnic Chinese as a long-established immigrant-settler community in the southern region. This plurality of perspectives, as represented in Vietnamese newspapers and popular literature published in the first four decades of the twentieth centuries, demonstrated how the relationship between the two ethnic groups were influenced not just by colonial policy and ethnic nationalism but also individual economic or political motives. This paper examines the portrayals of ethnic Chinese people in selected sources of Vietnamese newspapers and popular literature written in the colonial period. Most of the publications were written in the new romanized Vietnamese script (chữ Quốc ngữ) and were published from the 1900s to 1940s. First, I will explain the historical background of Chinese migration and settlement in southern Vietnam and the context of Vietnamese intellectual and political history in the early twentieth century. Second, I examine the ambivalent anti-Chinese stance demonstrated in certain early twentieth century newspapers, including Quốc dân diễn đàn, Lục tỉnh tân văn, Đông Pháp thờibáo, and Thần chung. I will focus on how the political goals and affiliations of these newspapers impacted their views toward the Chinese and prove that they did not necessarily reflect hostile relations between the two communities.

Examining how the female body and lifecycle were constructed within 19th-century Scottish psychiatry, and the wider significance of such portrayals, this article situates the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act within a much longer history that presents menstruation as a problem. We highlight the historical resonance of two prominent features of the Act and the debates leading to it: the enduring tension between views of menstruation as a normal versus a pathological process, and the perceived deleterious impact of menstruation upon female education and, by extension, women’s status. By 1900, Scottish psychiatry had achieved professional status. Asylums were recognised as the officially approved response to madness, and mass institutionalisation allowed the medical profession unparalleled opportunities to observe, classify and treat those deemed insane. Madness as a ‘female malady’, with doctors portraying the female sex as more vulnerable to insanity in publications and clinical documentation, largely due to their reproductive system, has become a popular theme in historical scholarship. This article examines how 19th-century psychiatry depicted the biological ‘crises’ of the female lifecycle and the extent to which menstruation was conceptualised as a pathological process. The widely cited and prolific medical writer, Thomas Clouston—physician-superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum (1873–1908), Scotland’s largest and most prestigious asylum—offers a particularly illuminating case study. An advocate of managing mental health holistically, Clouston advised society on healthy living through adherence to respectable Victorian standards. In his policing of social norms, he became a prominent spokesperson for limiting female education to protect women during the ‘dangerous’ transition from childhood to womanhood.

Scholarly analysis of the writings on architecture of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has largely focused on passages in Twilight of the Idols where he claims that ‘Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding.’1 Yet, considering Nietzsche’s theory of the will-to-power – that an innate drive towards power, might, and self-overcoming is the dominant force of existence – architecture gets interpreted in this passage as he would likely have interpreted sculpture. Any recognition of the social, political, physical, and psychological accommodations of architecture are absent. However, in a passage in Joyful Wisdom entitled ‘Architecture for the Perceptive’, Nietzsche wrote of architecture as a carefully crafted space to inhabit. This discussion of architecture as a lived space has received considerably less attention.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bellanta, Melissa. "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>. APA Style Bellanta, M. (Apr. 2008) "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. 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Epistemological frames and theoretical underpinnings are developed precisely to give coherence and cognitive rendering to a rather chaotic appearance of the world and reality to man’s consciousness. These frames offer associations of nuances and concepts that in turn provide cogent systems of understanding, which contribute to man’s unending search for meanings combining as it were his experience of the world and his ability to mentally grasp such experience hence, the Ancient Greek word episteme. In the social sciences, theoretical frameworks are formulated to provide grounding venues for construing the complexities and specificities of social phenomena toward a better understanding of the social world. Concomitantly, these frameworks are assessed and evaluated based on their capacity to utter notions and tell stories of the slice of reality they wish to depict. It is in this respect that this paper offers a critical examination of the most prevalent theoretical frames and epistemic perspectives, herein referred to as classics, deployed in understanding Philippine political local dynamics. In light of Philippine contemporary economic, social, cultural, and political developments, the article identifies some gaps and bumps in these ‘classics’ to offer a research trajectory that scholars in the field can rightly consider. Through a synthesis of existing political paradigms applied in local politics, the paper highlighted nuances that are ignored, realities that are not yet explored, and concepts rendered with over-simplistic meanings, suggesting imperatives for modifications, deconstructions, and even reconstructions. References Abueva, Jose. “Review on Southern Voting, 1946-1963.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6, special issue 2 (September 1975): 222-224. Alejo, Albert. Tao Po! Tuloy!: Isang Landas ng Pag-unawa sa Loob ng Tao. 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New Haven: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University, 1965. _________. “Parties and Politics in the Philippines.” Asian Survey 8, no. 9 (September 1968): 725-747. _________. “The Philippine Political Party System.” Journal, Southeast Asian History (1967): 19-39. McCoy, Alfred. Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1994. Pe-Pua, Rogelio and Marcelino, Elizabeth. “Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology): A Legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez.” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 3 (2000): 49-71. Roces, Mina. “Kinship Politics in Post-War Philippines: The Lopez Family, 1945-1989.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 181-221. Sidel, John. “Philippine Politics in Town, District, and Province: Bossism in Cavite and Cebu.” The Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 4 (November 1997): 947-966. 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IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and fucking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump shit goes into overdrive, meme shit floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme shit” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. 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New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Jokubauskaitė, Emilija, and Stijn Peeters. “Generally Curious: Thematically Distinct Datasets of General Threads on 4chan/Pol/”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14.1 (2020): 863-7. <https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7351>.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Dominique Boullier. “‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’. A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads.” British Journal of Sociology 63.4 (2012): 590-615.Marantz, Andrew. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the White House. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. 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Technique and creativity Having been called upon to provide a contribution to a publication dedicated to “Techne”, I feel it is fitting to start from the theme of technique, given that for too many years now, we have fruitlessly attempted to understand the inner workings of cinema whilst disregarding the element of technique. And this has posed a significant problem in our field of study, as it would be impossible to gain a true understanding of what cinema is without immersing ourselves in the technical and industrial culture of the 19th century. It was within this culture that a desire was born: to mould the imaginary through the new techniques of reproduction and transfiguration of reality through images. Studying the development of the so-called “pre-cinema” – i.e. the period up to the conventional birth of cinema on 28 December 1895 with the presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière – we discover that the technical history of cinema is not only almost more enthralling than its artistic and cultural history, but that it contains all the great theoretical, philosophical and scientific insights that we need to help us understand the social, economic and cultural impact that cinema had on the culture of the 20th century. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, when cinema had already existed in some form for a few years, when the first few short films of narrative fiction also already existed, the cinematograph was placed in the Pavilion of Technical Discoveries, to emphasise the fact that the first wonder, this element of unparalleled novelty and modernity, was still there, in technique, in this marvel of innovation and creativity. I would like to express my idea through the words of Franco Moretti, who claims in one of his most recent works that it is only possible to understand form through the forces that pulsate through it and press on it from beneath, finally allowing the form itself to come to the surface and make itself visible and comprehensible to our senses. As such, the cinematic form – that which appears on the screen, that which is now so familiar to us, that which each of us has now internalised, that has even somehow become capable of configuring our way of thinking, imagining, dreaming – that form is underpinned by forces that allow it to eventually make its way onto the screen and become artistic and narrative substance. And those forces are the forces of technique, the forces of industry, the economic, political and social forces without which we could never hope to understand cinema. One of the issues that I always make a point of addressing in the first few lessons with my students is that if they think that the history of cinema is made up of films, directors, narrative plots to be understood, perhaps even retold in some way, then they are entirely on the wrong track; if, on the other hand, they understand that it is the story of an institution with economic, political and social drivers within it that can, in some way, allow us to come to the great creators, the great titles, but that without a firm grasp of those drivers, there is no point in even attempting to explore it, then they are on the right track. As I see it, cinema in the twentieth century was a great democratic, interclassist laboratory such as no other art has ever been, and this occurred thanks to the fact that what underpinned it was an industrial reasoning: it had to respond to the capital invested in it, it had to make money, and as such, it had to reach the largest possible number of people, immersing it into a wholly unprecedented relational situation. The aim was to be as inclusive as possible, ultimately giving rise to the idea that cinema could not be autonomous, as other forms of art could be, but that it must instead be able to negotiate all the various forces acting upon it, pushing it in every direction. This concept of negotiation is one which has been explored in great detail by one of the greatest film theorists of our modern age, Francesco Casetti. In a 2005 book entitled “Eye of the Century”, which I consider to be a very important work, Casetti actually argues that cinema has proven itself to be the art form most capable of adhering to the complexity and fast pace of the short century, and that it is for this very reason that its golden age (in the broadest sense) can be contained within the span of just a hundred years. The fact that cinema was the true epistemological driving force of 20th-century modernity – a position now usurped by the Internet – is not, in my opinion, something that diminishes the strength of cinema, but rather an element of even greater interest. Casetti posits that cinema was the great negotiator of new cultural needs, of the need to look at art in a different way, of the willingness to adapt to technique and technology: indeed, the form of cinema has always changed according to the techniques and technologies that it has brought to the table or established a dialogue with on a number of occasions. Barry Salt, whose background is in physics, wrote an important book – publishing it at his own expense, as a mark of how difficult it is to work in certain fields – entitled “Film Style and Technology”, in which he calls upon us stop writing the history of cinema starting from the creators, from the spirit of the time, from the great cultural and historical questions, and instead to start afresh by following the techniques available over the course of its development. Throughout the history of cinema, the creation of certain films has been the result of a particular set of technical conditions: having a certain type of film, a certain type of camera, only being able to move in a certain way, needing a certain level of lighting, having an entire arsenal of equipment that was very difficult to move and handle; and as the equipment, medium and techniques changed and evolved over the years, so too did the type of cinema that we were able to make. This means framing the history of cinema and film theory in terms of the techniques that were available, and starting from there: of course, whilst Barry Salt’s somewhat provocative suggestion by no means cancels out the entire cultural, artistic and aesthetic discourse in cinema – which remains fundamental – it nonetheless raises an interesting point, as if we fail to consider the methods and techniques of production, we will probably never truly grasp what cinema is. These considerations also help us to understand just how vast the “construction site” of cinema is – the sort of “factory” that lies behind the production of any given film. Erwin Panofsky wrote a single essay on cinema in the 1930s entitled “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” – a very intelligent piece, as one would expect from Panofsky – in which at a certain point, he compares the construction site of the cinema to those of Gothic cathedrals, which were also under an immense amount of pressure from different forces, namely religious ones, but also socio-political and economic forces which ultimately shaped – in the case of the Gothic cathedral and its development – an idea of the relationship between the earth and the otherworldly. The same could be said for cinema, because it also involves starting with something very earthly, very grounded, which is then capable of unleashing an idea of imaginary metamorphosis. Some scholars, such as Edgar Morin, will say that cinema is increasingly becoming the new supernatural, the world of contemporary gods, as religion gradually gives way to other forms of deification. Panofsky’s image is a very focused one: by making film production into a construction site, which to all intents and purposes it is, he leads us to understand that there are different forces at work, represented by a producer, a scriptwriter, a director, but also a workforce, the simple labourers, as is always the case in large construction sites, calling into question the idea of who the “creator” truly is. So much so that cinema, now more than ever before, is reconsidering the question of authorship, moving towards a “history of cinema without names” in an attempt to combat the “policy of the author” which, in the 1950s, especially in France, identified the director as the de facto author of the film. Today, we are still in that position, with the director still considered the author of the film, but that was not always so: back in the 1910s, in the United States, the author of the film was the scriptwriter, the person who wrote it (as is now the case for TV series, where they have once again taken pride of place as the showrunner, the creator, the true author of the series, and nobody remembers the names of the directors of the individual episodes); or at times, it can be the producer, as was the case for a long time when the Oscar for Best Picture, for example, was accepted by the producer in their capacity as the commissioner, as the “owner” of the work. As such, the theme of authorship is a very controversial one indeed, but one which helps us to understand the great meeting of minds that goes into the production of a film, starting with the technicians, of course, but also including the actors. Occasionally, a film is even attributed to the name of a star, almost as if to declare that that film is theirs, in that it is their body and their talent as an actor lending it a signature that provides far more of a draw to audiences than the name of the director does. In light of this, the theme of authorship, which Panofsky raised in the 1930s through the example of the Gothic cathedral, which ultimately does not have a single creator, is one which uses the image of the construction site to also help us to better understand what kind of development a film production can go through and to what extent this affects its critical and historical reception; as such, grouping films together based on their director means doing something that, whilst certainly not incorrect in itself, precludes other avenues of interpretation and analysis which could have favoured or could still favour a different reading of the “cinematographic construction site”. Design and execution The great classic Hollywood film industry was a model that, although it no longer exists in the same form today, unquestionably made an indelible mark at a global level on the history not only of cinema, but more broadly, of the culture of the 20th century. The industry involved a very strong vertical system resembling an assembly line, revolving around producers, who had a high level of decision-making autonomy and a great deal of expertise, often inclined towards a certain genre of film and therefore capable of bringing together the exact kinds of skills and visions required to make that particular film. The history of classic American cinema is one that can also be reconstructed around the units that these producers would form. The “majors”, along with the so-called “minors”, were put together like football teams, with a chairman flanked by figures whom we would nowadays refer to as a sporting director and a managing director, who built the team based on specific ideas, “buying” directors, scriptwriters, scenographers, directors of photography, and even actors and actresses who generally worked almost exclusively for their major – although they could occasionally be “loaned out” to other studios. This system led to a very marked characterisation and allowed for the film to be designed in a highly consistent, recognisable way in an age when genres reigned supreme and there was the idea that in order to keep the audience coming back, it was important to provide certain reassurances about what they would see: anyone going to see a Western knew what sorts of characters and storylines to expect, with the same applying to a musical, a crime film, a comedy, a melodrama, and so on. The star system served to fuel this working method, with these major actors also representing both forces and materials in the hands of an approach to the filmmaking which had the ultimate objective of constructing the perfect film, in which everything had to function according to a rule rooted in both the aesthetic and the economic. Gore Vidal wrote that from 1939 onwards, Hollywood did not produce a single “wrong” film: indeed, whilst certainly hyperbolic, this claim confirms that that system produced films that were never wrong, never off-key, but instead always perfectly in tune with what the studios wished to achieve. Whilst this long-entrenched system of yesteryear ultimately imploded due to certain historical phenomena that determined it to be outdated, the way of thinking about production has not changed all that much, with film design remaining tied to a professional approach that is still rooted within it. The overwhelming majority of productions still start from a system which analyses the market and the possible economic impact of the film, before even starting to tackle the various steps that lead up to the creation of the film itself. Following production systems and the ways in which they have changed, in terms of both the technology and the cultural contexts, also involves taking stock of the still considerable differences that exist between approaches to filmmaking in different countries, or indeed the similarities linking highly disparate economic systems (consider, for example, India’s “Bollywood” or Nigeria’s “Nollywood”: two incredibly strong film industries that we are not generally familiar with as they lack global distribution, although they are built very solidly). In other words, any attempt to study Italian cinema and American cinema – to stay within this double field – with the same yardstick is unthinkable, precisely because the context of their production and design is completely different. Composition and innovation Studying the publications on cinema in the United States in the early 1900s – which, from about 1911 to 1923, offers us a revealing insight into the attempts made to garner an in-depth understanding of how this new storytelling machine worked and the development of the first real cultural industry of the modern age – casts light on the centrality of the issues of design and composition. I remain convinced that without reading and understanding that debate, it is very difficult to understand why cinema is as we have come to be familiar with it today. Many educational works investigated the inner workings of cinema, and some, having understood them, suggested that they were capable of teaching others to do so. These publications have almost never been translated into Italian and remain seldom studied even in the US, and yet they are absolutely crucial for understanding how cinema established itself on an industrial and aesthetic level. There are two key words that crop up time and time again in these books, the first being “action”, one of the first words uttered when a film starts rolling: “lights, camera, action”. This collection of terms is interesting in that “motore” highlights the presence of a machine that has to be started up, followed by “action”, which expresses that something must happen at that moment in front of that machine, otherwise the film will not exist. As such, “action” – a term to which I have devoted some of my studies – is a fundamental word here in that it represents a sort of moment of birth of the film that is very clear – tangible, even. The other word is “composition”, and this is an even more interesting word with a history that deserves a closer look: the first professor of cinema in history, Victor Oscar Freeburg (I edited the Italian translation of his textbook “The Art of Photoplay Making”, published in 1918), took up his position at Columbia University in 1915 and, in doing so, took on the task of teaching the first ever university course in cinema. Whilst Freeburg was, for his time, a very well-educated and highly-qualified person, having studied at Yale and then obtained his doctorate in theatre at Columbia, cinema was not entirely his field of expertise. He was asked to teach a course entitled “Photoplay Writing”. At the time, a film was known as a “photoplay”, in that it was a photographed play of sorts, and the fact that the central topic of the course was photoplay writing makes it clear that back then, the scriptwriter was considered the main author of the work. From this point of view, it made sense to entrust the teaching of cinema to an expert in theatre, based on the idea that it was useful to first and foremost teach a sort of photographable dramaturgy. However, upon arriving at Columbia, Freeburg soon realised whilst preparing his course that “photoplay writing” risked misleading the students, as it is not enough to simply write a story in order to make a film; as such, he decided to change the title of his course to “photoplay composition”. This apparently minor alteration, from “writing” to “composition”, in fact marked a decisive conceptual shift in that it highlighted that it was no longer enough to merely write: one had to “compose”. So it was that the author of a film became, according to Freeburg, not the scriptwriter or director, but the “cinema composer” (a term of his own coinage), thus directing and broadening the concept of composition towards music, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. We are often inclined to think that cinema has inherited expressive modules that come partly from literature, partly from theatre and partly from painting, but in actual fact, what Freeburg helps us to understand is that there are strong elements of music and architecture in a film, emphasising the lofty theme of the project. In his book, he explores at great length the relationship between static and dynamic forms in cinema, a topic that few have ever addressed in that way and that again, does not immediately spring to mind as applicable to a film. I believe that those initial intuitions were the result of a reflection unhindered by all the prejudices and preconceived notions that subsequently began to condition film studies as a discipline, and I feel that they are of great use to use today because they guide us, on the one hand, towards a symphonic idea of filmmaking, and on the other, towards an idea that preserves the fairly clear imprint of architecture. Space-Time In cinema as in architecture, the relationship between space and time is a crucial theme: in every textbook, space and time are amongst the first chapters to be studied precisely because in cinema, they undergo a process of metamorphosis – as Edgar Morin would say – which is vital to constructing the intermediate world of film. Indeed, from both a temporal and a spatial point of view, cinema provides a kind of ubiquitous opportunity to overlap different temporalities and spatialities, to move freely from one space to another, but above all, to construct new systems of time. The rules of film editing – especially so-called “invisible editing”, i.e. classical editing that conceals its own presence – are rules built upon specific and precise connections that hold together different spaces – even distant ones – whilst nonetheless giving the impression of unity, of contiguity, of everything that cinema never is in reality, because cinema is constantly fragmented and interrupted, even though we very often perceive it in continuity. As such, from both a spatial and a temporal perspective, there are technical studies that explain the rules of how to edit so as to give the idea of spatial continuity, as well as theoretical studies that explain how cinema has transformed our sense of space and time. To mark the beginning of Parma’s run as Italy’s Capital of Culture, an exhibition was organised entitled “Time Machine. Seeing and Experiencing Time”, curated by Antonio Somaini, with the challenge of demonstrating how cinema, from its earliest experiments to the digital age, has managed to manipulate and transform time, profoundly affecting our way of engaging with it. The themes of time and space are vital to understanding cinema, including from a philosophical point of view: in two of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal volumes, “The Movement Image” and “The Time Image”, the issues of space and time become the two great paradigms not only for explaining cinema, but also – as Deleuze himself says – for explaining a certain 20th-century philosophy. Deleuze succeeds in a truly impressive endeavour, namely linking cinema to philosophical reflection – indeed, making cinema into an instrument of philosophical thought; this heteronomy of filmmaking is then also transferred to its ability to become an instrument that goes beyond its own existence to become a reflection on the century that saw it as a protagonist of sorts. Don Ihde argues that every era has a technical discovery that somehow becomes what he calls an “epistemological engine”: a tool that opens up a system of thought that would never have been possible without that discovery. One of the many examples of this over the centuries is the camera obscura, but we could also name cinema as the defining discovery for 20th-century thought: indeed, cinema is indispensable for understanding the 20th century, just as the Internet is for understanding our way of thinking in the 21st century. Real-virtual Nowadays, the film industry is facing the crisis of cinema closures, ultimately caused by ever-spreading media platforms and the power of the economic competition that they are exerting by aggressively entering the field of production and distribution, albeit with a different angle on the age-old desire to garner audiences. Just a few days ago, Martin Scorsese was lamenting the fact that on these platforms, the artistic project is in danger of foundering, as excellent projects are placed in a catalogue alongside a series of products of varying quality, thus confusing the viewer. A few years ago, during the opening ceremony of the academic year at the University of Southern California, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas expressed the same concept about the future of cinema in a different way. Lucas argued that cinemas would soon have to become incredibly high-tech places where people can have an experience that is impossible to reproduce elsewhere, with a ticket price that takes into account the expanded and increased experiential value on offer thanks to the new technologies used. Spielberg, meanwhile, observed that cinemas will manage to survive if they manage to transform the cinemagoer from a simple viewer into a player, an actor of sorts. The history of cinema has always been marked by continuous adaptation to technological evolutions. I do not believe that cinema will ever end. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great masters of the Nouvelle Vague, once said in an interview: «I am very sorry not to have witnessed the birth of cinema, but I am sure that I will witness its death». Godard, who was born in 1930, is still alive. Since its origins, cinema has always transformed rather than dying. Raymond Bellour says that cinema is an art that never finishes finishing, a phrase that encapsulates the beauty and the secret of cinema: an art that never quite finishes finishing is an art that is always on the very edge of the precipice but never falls off, although it leans farther and farther over that edge. This is undoubtedly down to cinema’s ability to continually keep up with technique and technology, and in doing so to move – even to a different medium – to relocate, as contemporary theorists say, even finally moving out of cinemas themselves to shift onto platforms and tablets, yet all without ever ceasing to be cinema. That said, we should give everything we’ve got to ensure that cinemas survive.

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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