Academic literature on the topic 'Captivity narratives United States History and criticism'

Juxtaposing the French and Indian War stories of Elizabeth George Speare, a mid-twentieth- century Anglo-American children's author, against those of Joseph Bruchac, a twenty-first- century Abenaki children's author, reveals how flexible and powerful captivity narratives have been in shaping arguments about gender, nationhood, citizenship, and land in the postwar United States.

This article presents two twenty-first-century novels that deal with particularly charged and contemporary expressions of violence in the United States: Matthew Quick’s Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock and the threat of armed students in school, and John Updike’s Terrorist and the threat of Islamic extremism. High profile acts of violence of this kind in the United States leading up to and into the years following the turn of the millennium prompted significant concern surrounding the identification of would-be perpetrators, including those in the premeditating stage of their intended attacks. This article argues that stepping away from the violent act and focusing instead on the violent mind situates premeditation as an integral part of violence and its conceptualization. Further, interest in the internalized aspects of violence can be seen as a response to very real socio-cultural concerns in the United States. In order to achieve this analytical focus, the article adopts the legal concepts of mens rea (the guilty mind) and actus reus (the guilty act), interweaving them with literary criticism in order to suggest that novels can serve as Momusian windows into the premeditating stage of violence through immersion into the violent mind. In so doing, they contribute more robustly to broader understandings of violence in the United States as it evolves from concept to action.

After the liberation in 1945, two conflicting narratives of the war experience were formulated. A consensus narrative presented the Danish nation as being united in resistance while a competing narrative, which also stressed the resistance of most Danes, depicted the collaborating Danish establishment as an enemy alongside the Germans. This latter narrative, formulated by members of the resistance movement, was marginalised after the war and the consensus narrative became dominant. The resistance narrative survived, however, and, from the 1960s, it was successfully retold by the left, both to criticise the Danish alliance with the ‘imperialist’ United States, and as an argument against Danish membership of the EC. From the 1980s, the right also used the framework of the resistance narrative in its criticism of Danish asylum legislation. Finally, liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started using it as his basic narrative of the war years (partly in order to legitimise his government's decision to join the war against Iraq in 2003). The war years have thus played a central role in Danish political culture since 1945, and in this process the role of historians has been utterly marginal.

Throughout its history, the United States has been a major site for the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment. This accommodation has been driven by two closely related but distinct processes: the demystification of religion's cognitive claims by scientific advances, exemplified by the Higher Criticism in Biblical scholarship and the Darwinian revolution in natural history; and the demographic diversification of society, placing Protestants in the increasingly intimate company of Americans who did not share a Protestant past and thus inspiring doubts about the validity of inherited ideas and practices for the entire human species. The accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment will continue to hold a place among American narratives as long as “diversity” and “science” remain respected values, and as long as the population includes a substantial number of Protestants. If you think that time has passed, look around you.

AbstractNotions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

The past twenty years witnessed a dramatic transformation in Arabic literature studies in the United States. In the early 1990s, the field was still almost exclusively a satellite of area studies and largely bound by Orientalist historical and epistemological paradigms. Graduate students—even those wishing to focus entirely on modern literature—were trained to competence in the entire span of the Arabic literary tradition starting with pre-Islamic times, and secondary research languages were still rooted in the philological tradition of classical scholarship. The standard requirement was German, with Spanish as a distant second for those interested in Andalusia, but rarely French, say, or Italian or Russian. Other Middle Eastern languages were mainly conceived as primary-text languages rather than research languages. Philology, traditional literary history, and New Criticism formed the methodological boundaries of research. “Theory”—even when it purported to speak of the world outside Europe—was something that was generated by departments of English and comparative literature on the other side of campus, and crossings were rare and complicated in both the disciplinary and the institutional sense. Of course, one branch of “theory”—postcolonial studies—made its way into area studies much faster than the more eclectic offshoots of continental philosophy, for obvious reasons. From nationalism studies to subaltern studies, from Benedict Anderson to Gayatri Spivak, the wave of postcolonial critical theory that swept through U.S. academia in the 1980s and 1990s sparked an uprising in area studies at large and particularly in the literature disciplines. One of the first casualties of this uprising was the old historical paradigm itself: narratives of rise and fall, golden ages, and ages of decadence. Slowly but surely, scholars began to question the entire epistemological edifice through which Arabic literary history had been constructed by Orientalism. It was through the postcolonial theory of the 1980s that Arabic literature came to a broader rapprochement with poststructuralism: Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, Jameson, and White, to name a few of the major thinkers who began to transform the field in the late 1990s.

The article analyzes the foundations of the formation of the foreign policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, which, first of all, are influenced by the traditions of the historical development of this country, its geopolitical location in the center of the Eurasian continent, transport and communication potential and the presence of large reserves of natural resources. It is emphasized that in modern Kazakhstan there is still no holistic perception of many historical events and processes, in particular those that were hushed up during the imperial and Soviet periods. At the same time, in the scientific discourse of the country, there is a rethinking of national history through criticism of the previous historical experience. It is noted that after the formation in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the Kazakh Khanate, the progressive development of statehood was replaced by a period of struggle against foreign invaders – first the Dzungars, and then the Russian Empire. It ended with the loss of statehood, the struggle for the restoration of which is presented in the form of a teleologically constructed narrative of the heroic struggle for independence, which includes a number of historical events and periods. The process of modern nation-state building in Kazakhstan is based on the consolidating role of the titular nation, which contributes to the growth of interest in historical issues and is accompanied by a gradual loss of the influence of Soviet-Russian narratives in political and historical discourse. A feature of the foreign policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan is a multi-vector approach, which has developed historically and is designed to ensure a balance between various geopolitical centers of power. The priorities of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy are determined: the development of allied relations with the Russian Federation, a comprehensive strategic partnership with the PRC, an expanded strategic partnership with the United States, strategic relations with the Central Asian states, an expanded partnership and cooperation with the European Union.

This book is a collection of essays written by a variety of experts on Turkey and social movements and provides a critical analysis of the role of the Gülen Movement (GM)—or Hizmet (“service”), as it is referred to by its adherents—in the coup attempt which was undertaken by one or more factions of the Turkish armed forces in July 2016. Edited and contributed to by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, this work began at a conference in October of 2016, where these experts gathered to discuss the coup itself as well as its implications and ramifications. The chapters in the book all build off of each other to some degree, with earlier chapters covering the history of the GM and the ways in which it has acquired influence both in Turkey and abroad; the coup and structural factors both within Turkish society; and the GM alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey. Later chapters expand in scope, covering the foreign policy implications of the coup both for Turkey and the United States, where Fethullah Gülen, the eponymous leader of the movement, resides today. Several chapters engage the state of the scholarship on the GM itself, effectively unpacking the ways in which the organization has actively co-opted academia by offering paid trips to Turkey, publishing non-peer-reviewed material, and funding conferences which avoid critical analysis of the GM. In the introduction Balci and Yavuz discuss the history of the Turkish state, giving particular focus to the place of religion under Kemal Atatürk; the pair discusses how the Turkish concept of secularism hews much more closely to the Jacobin tradition than the Anglo-American understanding. This is quite important as the alliance between the AKP and the GM (following Turkish elections in 2002 wherein the AKP swept to power) rested on a shared desire to overthrow the Kemalist conception of secularism, which seeks to dominate religion and prevent its expression in the public sphere. The book’s first chapter, written by Yavuz, charts the GM’s development over time, enumerating three key stages in its history. The first was that of a loosely bound religious network, encouraged by their leader to do good works; the second marked the expansion of the GM both within and outside of Turkey as an education-providing and media powerhouse; the third saw the GM create a parallel state structure in Turkey, which was mobilized to further increase the movement’s power throughout the 2000s and this current decade, most famously during the coup itself, though a variety of other incidents are discussed here and throughout the book. The next chapter details the coup itself, giving background which is necessary to understand the rest of the work and underlining four key junctures which put Turkey on the path to the July 15th event. The chapter’s author, Mujeeb R. Khan, notes that the structure of Turkish institutions (particularly its version of secularism), the continued domination of the Turkish deep state following the introduction of multi-party elections several decades ago, the neo-liberal opening Turkey experienced in the 1980s, and the rise of the AKP in the early 2000s all played integral roles in the rise of the GM and, eventually, the coup. Yavuz collaborated with Rasim Koç to write the third chapter, which examines the relationship between the GM and Erdoğan’s AKP (beginning with the unspoken alliance between the two which started after AKP’s 2002 electoral victory and whose disintegration led to the coup) as well as foreign policy consequences it had for Turkey. Chapters 4 and 5, written by Michael A. Reynolds and Kiliç Kanat, examine the coup, including the factors and events which led to both its occurrence and its failure. Kanat’s examination of why the coup failed is particularly interesting; he compares and contrasts the failure with previous successful coups which occurred in Turkey during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The next chapter, written by Caroline Tee, returns specifically to the topic of the AKP-GM relationship, digging deeply into the events which caused what on the surface seemed like a natural alliance to fracture and, during 2016, turn upon itself. Sabine Dreher’s chapter follows Tee’s, and is one of the most theoretical in the book, as it places the GM in the contexts of neoliberal and globalist theory, and notes internal contradictions within the movement itself. She considers how the global goals of the organization—the eradication of ignorance through educational work, the alleviation of poverty through private enterprise run by movement members, and the hosting of intercultural and interfaith dialogue— stand at odds with the nationalist project of the GM in Turkey, where movement members attempted to seize control of the state they had been infiltrating for some time as opposed to working outside of it. Balci wrote the eighth chapter, which deals with the GM movement’s presence in former Soviet satellites, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Following the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government pressured all of these states to shut down any GM movement activities within their countries, which was difficult as the GM provided excellent education to the children of elites in these nations. He then charts the differing reactions of the states mentioned above. The ninth chapter, by David Tittensor, turns to the structure of the GM and how secrecy and hierarchy play crucial roles in it, a reality which is often denied by the majority of scholarship—though he and other contributors to the work might dispute the use of the term “scholarship”, or at least qualify it. He does end his chapter with a criticism of the theory that GM members were key leaders of the coup, a conclusion which is at odds with that of most other contributors to the volume. The tenth chapter, by Yavuz Çobanoĝlu, provides insight into the role of women in the GM, criticizing some of Gülen’s writings and detailing the experiences of female students living in GM dormitories in Turkey, an experience that many of the women surveyed found to be repressive. Kristina Dohrn’s contribution outlines the activities and role of the GM movement in Tanzania, which, similar to Balci’s chapter, deals with repercussions of the coup and examines potential paths forward for the GM outside of Turkey. The work’s final chapter, written by Joshua Hendrick, is about how the GM presented itself as a “good” Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, during a period in which the West writ large was searching for a “modern” version of the religion which it could champion in opposition to extremism. He effectively critiques the idea that religion itself can be good or bad, and rightly puts the onus on the actors themselves. The book ends with a postscript which examines the four major theories about how the coup may have come to pass, and comes to the conclusion that GM members were central and sole actors in the coup, which was in all likelihood approved by Gülen himself. This work does an excellent job of unpacking the GM and its various religious and political facets, even for the relatively uninitiated reader, and pushes back strongly against what it identifies as the prevailing anti-Erdoĝan Western narratives about the coup, which try to shift blame away from the GM and onto the shoulders of other actors, including the AKP leader. Particularly interesting is the book’s criticism of GM-sponsored scholarship, which is cited as one of the primary ways in which the GM has ingratiated itself worldwide, as it frames the group as “good” Islam. The work refrains from being speculative but does examine possible futures for the GM, mostly outside of Turkey, as the country’s government has gone to extreme lengths to uproot the movement in its homeland—lengths that the authors do rightly criticize as going too far, if somewhat tepidly at times. The US-Turkey relationship as it relates to the GM issue, specifically hisresidence in the US, is also examined in some depth and leads a student of either Islam in the US or the country’s politics to wonder if the GM has successfully insinuated itself into any institutions here, as it has done in Turkey. The author of this review once believed that Erdoĝan may have permitted or even been behind the coup attempt as a vehicle to consolidate power, but the evidence and arguments presented by the authors of this work have swayed his point of view; the GM was almost certainly responsible for the coup attempt, and it seems likely that Gülen himself gave his blessing to the members of his movement who carried it out. Grant MarthinsenMA, Center for Contemporary Arab StudiesGeorgetown University

IntroductionFilmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives.This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.The Northern Safari before AdamsNorthern Australia gained a reputation for rugged, masculine adventure long before the arrival there of Adams and his cameras. That reputation was closely associated with the animals of the north, and it is generally the dangerous species that have inspired popular accounts of the region. Linda Thompson has recognised that before the release of the film Crocodile Dundee in 1986 crocodiles “received significant and sensational (although sporadic) media attention across Australia—attention that created associations of danger, mystery, and abnormality” (118). While Thompson went on to argue that in the wake of Crocodile Dundee the saltwater crocodile became a widely recognised symbol of Australia (for both Australians and non-Australians) it is perhaps more pertinent to consider the place of animals in creating a notion of the Australian north.Adams’s extended and international success (he showed his film profitably in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand as well as throughout Australia) suggests that the landscape and wildlife of northern Australia holds a fascination for a wide audience (Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 169-261). Certainly northern Australia, and its wild beasts, had established a reputation for adventure earlier, particularly in the periods following the world wars. Perhaps crocodiles were not the most significant of the north’s charismatic megafauna in the first half of the twentieth century, but their presence was a source of excitement well before the 1980s, and they were not the only animals in the north to attract attention: the Northern Territory’s buffalo had long acted as a drawcard for adventure seekers.Carl Warburton’s popular book Buffaloes was typical in linking Australians’ experiences of war with the Australian north and the pursuit of adventure, generally in the form of dangerous big game. War and hunting have long been linked as both are expressions of masculine valour in physically dangerous circumstances (Brennan “Imperial” 44-46). That link is made very clear in Warbuton’s account when he begins it on the beach at Gallipoli as he and his comrades discuss their plans for the future. After Warburton announces his determination not to return from war to work in a bank, he and a friend determine that they will go to either Brazil or the Northern Territory to seek adventure (2). Back in Sydney, a coin flip determines their “compass was set for the unknown north” (5).As the title of his book suggests, the game pursued by Warburton and his mate were buffaloes, as buffalo hides were fetching high prices when he set out for the north. In his writing Warburton was keen to establish his reputation as an adventurer and his descriptions of the dangers of buffalo hunting used the animals to establish the adventurous credentials of northern Australia. Warburton noted of the buffalo that: “Alone of all wild animals he will attack unprovoked, and in single combat is more than a match for a tiger. It is the pleasant pastime of some Indian princes to stage such combats for the entertainment of their guests” (62-63). Thereby, he linked Arnhem Land to India, a place that had long held a reputation as a site of adventurous hunting for the rulers of the British Empire (Brennan “Africa” 399). Later Warburton reinforced those credentials by noting: “there is no more dangerous animal in the world than a wounded buffalo bull” (126). While buffalo might have provided the headline act, crocodiles also featured in the interwar northern imaginary. Warburton recorded: “I had always determined to have a crack at the crocodiles for the sport of it.” He duly set about sating this desire (222-3).Buffalo had been hunted commercially in the Northern Territory since 1886 and Warburton was not the first to publicise the adventurous hunting available in northern Australia (Clinch 21-23). He had been drawn north after reading “of the exploits of two crack buffalo shooters, Fred Smith and Paddy Cahill” (Warburton 6). Such accounts of buffalo, and also of crocodiles, were common newspaper fodder in the first half of the twentieth century. Even earlier, explorers’ accounts had drawn attention to the animal excitement of northern Australia. For example, John Lort Stokes had noted ‘alligators’ as one of the many interesting animals inhabiting the region (418). Thus, from the nineteenth century Australia’s north had popularly linked together remoteness, adventure, and large animals; it was unsurprising that Warburton in turn acted as inspiration to later adventure-hunters in northern Australia. In 1954 he was mentioned in a newspaper story about two English migrants who had come to Australia to shoot crocodiles on Cape York with “their ambitions fed by the books of men such as Ion Idriess, Carl Warburton, Frank Clune and others” (Gay 15).The Development of Northern ‘Adventure’ TourismNot all who sought adventure in northern Australia were as independent as Adams. Cynthia Nolan’s account of travel through outback Australia in the late 1940s noted the increasing tourist infrastructure available, particularly in her account of Alice Springs (27-28, 45). She also recorded the significance of big game in the lure of the north. At the start of her journey she met a man seeking his fortune crocodile shooting (16), later encountered buffalo shooters (82), and recorded the locals’ hilarity while recounting a visit by a city-based big game hunter who arrived with an elephant gun. According to her informants: “No, he didn’t shoot any buffaloes, but he had his picture taken posing behind every animal that dropped. He’d arrange himself in a crouch, gun at the ready, and take self-exposure shots of himself and trophy” (85-86). Earlier, organised tours of the Northern Territory included buffalo shooter camps in their itineraries (when access was available), making clear the continuing significance of dangerous game to the northern imaginary (Cole, Hell 207). Even as Adams was pursuing his independent path north, tourist infrastructure was bringing the northern Australian safari experience within reach for those with little experience but sufficient funds to secure the provision of equipment, vehicles and expert advice. The Australian Crocodile Shooters’ Club, founded in 1950, predated Northern Safari, but it tapped into the same interest in the potential of northern Australia to offer adventure. It clearly associated that adventure with big game hunting and the club’s success depended on its marketing of the adventurous north to Australia’s urban population (Brennan “Africa” 403-06). Similarly, the safari camps which developed in the Northern Territory, starting with Nourlangie in 1959, promoted the adventure available in Australia’s north to those who sought to visit without necessarily roughing it. The degree of luxury that was on offer initially is questionable, but the notion of Australia’s north as a big game hunting destination supported the development of an Australian safari industry (Berzins 177-80, Brennan “Africa” 407-09). Safari entrepreneur Allan Stewart has eagerly testified to the broad appeal of the safari experience in 1960s Australia, claiming his clientele included accountants, barristers, barmaids, brokers, bankers, salesmen, journalists, actors, students, nursing sisters, doctors, clergymen, soldiers, pilots, yachtsmen, racing drivers, company directors, housewives, precocious children, air hostesses, policemen and jockeys (18).Later Additions to the Imaginary of the Northern SafariAdams’s film was made in 1955, and its subject of adventurous travel and hunting in northern Australia was taken up by a number of books during the 1960s as publishers kept the link between large game and the adventurous north alive. New Zealand author Barry Crump contributed a fictionalised account of his time hunting crocodiles in northern Australia in Gulf, first published in 1964. Crump displayed his trademark humour throughout his book, and made a running joke of the ‘best professional crocodile-shooters’ that he encountered in pubs throughout northern Australia (28-29). Certainly, the possibility of adventure and the chance to make a living as a professional hunter lured men to the north. Among those who came was Australian journalist Keith Willey who in 1966 published an account of his time crocodile hunting. Willey promoted the north as a site of adventure and rugged masculinity. On the very first page of his book he established his credentials by advising that “Hunting crocodiles is a hard trade; hard, dirty and dangerous; but mostly hard” (1). Although Willey’s book reveals that he did not make his fortune crocodile hunting he evidently revelled in its adventurous mystique and his book was sufficiently successful to be republished by Rigby in 1977. The association between the Australian north, the hunting of large animals, and adventure continued to thrive.These 1960s crocodile publications represent a period when crocodile hunting replaced buffalo hunting as a commercial enterprise in northern Australia. In the immediate post-war period crocodile skins increased in value as traditional sources became unreliable, and interest in professional hunting increased. As had been the case with Warburton, the north promised adventure to men unwilling to return to domesticity after their experiences of war (Brennan, “Crocodile” 1). This part of the northern imaginary was directly discussed by another crocodile hunting author. Gunther Bahnemann spent some time crocodile hunting in Australia before moving his operation north to poach crocodiles in Dutch New Guinea. Bahnemann had participated in the Second World War and in his book he was clear about his unwillingness to settle for a humdrum life, instead choosing crocodile hunting for his profession. As he described it: “We risked our lives to make quick money, but not easy money; yet I believe that the allure of adventure was the main motive of our expedition. It seems so now, when I think back to it” (8).In the tradition of Adams, Malcolm Douglas released his documentary film Across the Top in 1968, which was subsequently serialised for television. From around this time, television was becoming an increasingly popular medium and means of reinforcing the connection between the Australian outback and adventure. The animals of northern Australia played a role in setting the region apart from the rest of the continent. The 1970s and 1980s saw a boom in programs that presented the outback, including the north, as a source of interest and national pride. In this period Harry Butler presented In the Wild, while the Leyland brothers (Mike and Mal) created their iconic and highly popular Ask the Leyland Brothers (and similar productions) which ran to over 150 episodes between 1976 and 1980. In the cinema, Alby Mangels’s series of World Safari movies included Australia in his wide-ranging adventures. While these documentaries of outback Australia traded on the same sense of adventure and fascination with Australia’s wildlife that had promoted Northern Safari, the element of big game hunting was muted.That link was reforged in the 1980s and 1990s. Crocodile Dundee was an extremely successful movie and it again placed interactions with charismatic megafauna at the heart of the northern Australian experience (Thompson 124). The success of the film reinvigorated depictions of northern Australia as a place to encounter dangerous beasts. Capitalising on the film’s success Crump’s book was republished as Crocodile Country in 1990, and Tom Cole’s memoirs of his time in northern Australia, including his work buffalo shooting and crocodile hunting, were first published in 1986, 1988, and 1992 (and reprinted multiple times). However, Steve Irwin is probably the best known of northern Australia’s ‘crocodile hunters’, despite his Australia Zoo lying outside the crocodile’s natural range, and despite being a conservationist opposed to killing crocodiles. Irwin’s chosen moniker is ironic, given his often-stated love for the species and his commitment to preserving crocodile lives through relocating (when necessary, to captivity) rather than killing problem animals. He first appeared on Australian television in 1996, and continued to appear regularly until his death in 2006.Tourism Australia used both Hogan and Irwin for promotional purposes. While Thompson argues that at this time the significance of the crocodile was broadened to encompass Australia more generally, the examples of crocodile marketing that she lists relate to the Northern Territory, with a brief mention of Far North Queensland and the crocodile remained a signifier of northern adventure (Thompson 125-27). The depiction of Irwin as a ‘crocodile hunter’ despite his commitment to saving crocodile lives marked a larger shift that had already begun within the safari. While the title ‘safari’ retained its popularity in the late twentieth century it had come to be applied generally to organised adventurous travel with a view to seeing and capturing images of animals, rather than exclusively identifying hunting expeditions.ConclusionThe extraordinary success of Adams’s film was based on a widespread understanding of northern Australia as a type of adventure playground, populated by fascinating dangerous beasts. That imaginary was exploited but not created by Adams. It had been in existence since the nineteenth century, was particularly evident during the buffalo and crocodile hunting bubbles after the world wars, and boomed again with the popularity of the fictional Mick Dundee and the real Steve Irwin, for both of whom interacting with the charismatic megafauna of the north was central to their characters. The excitement surrounding large game still influences visions of northern Australia. At present there is no particularly striking northern bushman media personage, but the large animals of the north still regularly provoke discussion. The north’s safari camps continue to do business, trading on the availability of large game (particularly buffalo, banteng, pigs, and samba) and northern Australia’s crocodiles have established themselves as a significant source of interest among international big game hunters. Australia’s politicians regularly debate the possibility of legalising a limited crocodile safari in Australia, based on the culling of problem animals, and that debate highlights a continuing sense of Australia’s north as a place apart from the more settled, civilised south of the continent.ReferencesAdams, Keith. ’Aussie Bites.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip2/>.———. ‘Crocodile Hunting.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip3/>.———. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000.Bahnemann, Gunther. New Guinea Crocodile Poacher. 2nd ed. London: The Adventurers Club, 1965.Berzins, Baiba. Australia’s Northern Secret: Tourism in the Northern Territory, 1920s to 1980s. Sydney: Baiba Berzins, 2007.Brennan, Claire. "’An Africa on Your Own Front Door Step’: The Development of an Australian Safari.” Journal of Australian Studies 39.3 (2015): 396-410.———. “Crocodile Hunting.” Queensland Historical Atlas (2013): 1-3.———. "Imperial Game: A History of Hunting, Society, Exotic Species and the Environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901." Dissertation. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2005.Clinch, M.A. “Home on the Range: The Role of the Buffalo in the Northern Territory, 1824–1920.” Northern Perspective 11.2 (1988): 16-27.Cole, Tom. Crocodiles and Other Characters. Chippendale, NSW: Sun Australia, 1992.———. Hell West and Crooked. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1990.———. Riding the Wildman Plains: The Letters and Diaries of Tom Cole 1923-1943. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992.———. Spears & Smoke Signals: Exciting True Tales by a Buffalo & Croc Shooter. Casuarina, NT: Adventure Pub., 1986.Cowan, Adam. Letter. “A Feeling of Disgust.” Canberra Times 12 Mar. 1971: 2.Crocodile Dundee. Dir. Peter Faiman. Paramount Pictures, 1986.Crump, Barry. Gulf. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1964.Gay, Edward. “Adventure. Tally-ho after Cape York Crocodiles.” The World’s News (Sydney), 27 Feb. 1954: 15.Nolan, Cynthia. Outback. London: Methuen & Co, 1962.Northeast, Brian. Preface. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. By Keith Adams. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000. vi-viii.Northern Safari. Dir. Keith Adams. Keith Adams, 1956.Northern Safari. n.d. <http://northernsafari.com/>.Stewart, Allan. The Green Eyes Are Buffaloes. Melbourne: Lansdown, 1969.Stokes, John Lort. Discoveries in Australia: With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle in the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits to the Islands in the Arafura Sea. London: T. and W. Boone, 1846.Thompson, Linda. “’You Call That a Knife?’ The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia”. New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies. Eds. Catriona Elder and Keith Moore. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012: 118-134.Warburton, Carl. Buffaloes: Adventure and Discovery in Arnhem Land. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1934.Willey, Keith. Crocodile Hunt. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966.

The first thing you do when you begin your PhD is label your Endnote library “the woods.” Your supervisor has warned you: you must not get lost. I know you, your supervisor says, you’ll wander around forever, out there amongst the research. You’re too scared to tell them that you’ve already wandered off the beaten track, skirted around the signs that say "beware of the neurosis," and become entangled. According to the dictionary, neurosis is characterised by “obsessive thoughts and compulsive acts.” Perhaps you fell into this state way back at the beginning when things started getting rocky. The woods are dense now. You have a vague sense that there’s something out there, a many-headed creature with teeth—and possibly a red pen—waiting to pounce, to tear off your academic garb and reveal the fraud beneath. But the journey’s been worth it; up ahead you see a gap in the trees. You catch a glimpse of sky, and the possibilities beyond. There’s no point complaining about all of this. You’ve no one to blame but yourself; the minute you began, you were asking for trouble. This special issue of M/C Journal emerges from the Ignite10! Postgraduate Student Conference held at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in September 2010. The conference was titled Looking for Trouble. Postgraduate research students at QUT felt that conflict, or “trouble,” was an appropriate theme to encapsulate their endeavours in the critical and creative spheres of arts, media and social sciences at the bi-annual multidisciplinary conference. The conference was designed to spark postgraduate research culture within the Creative Industries (CI) Faculty. Ignite10! aimed to showcase the diversity of postgraduate research within the CI Faculty and provide postgraduate researchers with the opportunity to present research papers and creative works in a critical and supportive environment. As beginning research students, we are told that we need to find a research “problem” or “question.” Trouble is a synonym for “problem” and perhaps it is fitting that the research problem that we are encouraged and required to answer as students can also be substituted with the word “trouble,” as that is undoubtedly what it causes. A researcher’s contribution to knowledge relies on the ability to identify gaps in the knowledge and to be dissatisfied with what is the current status quo. A researcher seeks out trouble—not without trepidation—because they know trouble can be the site for new innovation, new approaches and new discoveries. The metaphor of a journey is an apt one, for research narratives, like fictional ones, move from a stable beginning, through complications and rising action to another point of equilibrium at the end (Brady 16). As Barbara Hardy states, narrative “should not be regarded as an aesthetic intervention used by artists, but as a primary act of mind transferred from art to life” (5). While the conference focused on the troubles encountered in the postgraduate research journey in particular, this special issue of M/C Journal has a wider focus, although these troublesome research narratives operate implicitly beneath the words. As a result, the papers in this special issue speak to the theme of trouble on two levels. Firstly, researchers identify trouble explicitly when establishing a gap in the knowledge or challenging an existing convention or practice. These papers also represent the finalisation of the implicit or personal journey through the research. They are the culmination of trouble. Each paper demonstrates one in a multiplicity of approaches to dealing with “trouble” in research across a variety of disciplines. The first paper in this edition, Ladies on the Loose: Contemporary Female Travel as a "Promiscuous" Excursion, examines the troubling nature of female travel writing and, in particular, the tendency of women travel writers to preface their work with an apology. Kate Cantrell explores the expectations and limitations placed on female travellers whose journeys outside the sphere of the home are traditionally viewed as hazardous. The problematic feeling of guilt associated with leaving the home raises questions of female travellers actively going out and looking for trouble. Cantrell analyses key travel texts including Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and several iterations of the fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood. This paper illuminates the troubling divide that still exists within the gendered practice of travel. While Kate Cantrell traversed the world of travel in her paper, Timothy Strom’s Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps traverses the digital world of Geographic Information Systems—in particular, Google Maps. Strom is certainly “asking for trouble” by challenging the routine behaviour of contemporary consumers. As a result of the enormous surge in smart phones, the Google Maps application is used by a staggering amount of people. According to current research in the United Kingdom, Google Maps is the leading application with 6.4 million users or 73.3% of all UK application users (ComScore). Strom’s paper raises some interesting similarities between the empires of colonial eras in the past and the current “Google Empire” of today. Advertising buys businesses substantial representation on Google Maps, yet the process lacks transparency; the scaling of business symbols, for instance, appears radically different for no apparent reason. It is indeed troubling to think of society’s tools, which most consumers use without thought, can be politically and commercially aligned. Yet Strom encounters what all of this issue’s researchers did; by challenging and exploring the cartographic elements of Google Maps and striving to make visible what is otherwise an invisible process, he has stumbled upon more questions rather than answers. Mashups are one possibility of “resistance,” Strom suggests, but ultimately it would require eliminating the product-driven ideology that underpins the corporation. This is potentially too idealistic for our increasingly globalised and consumerist society. Maree Kimberley also identifies the possibility of resistance in her paper, Neuroscience and Young Adult Fiction: A Recipe for Trouble? Kimberley identifies a troubling trend in young adult dystopian fiction that relies on neuroscientific concepts. Recent developments in neuroscience have revealed that the structure of the human brain has the ability to change in profound and long-lasting ways, a characteristic know as neuroplasticity. The adolescent brain displays this plastic quality; during adolescence skills such as impulse control and decision-making are still in a process of development. Kimberley cites examples from Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series; Brian Klass’s Dark Angel and Brian Faulkner’s Brain Jack to demonstrate that although this new discovery has the potential to empower adolescents in fictive works, affirming the notion that they have the ability to shape their own minds and behaviours, many writers of young adult dystopian fiction represent their teenager characters as having no control over the shaping of their own brains. In identifying this lack, Kimberley opens up the opportunity for a new kind of young adult writing that situates the power of neuroscience firmly in the hands of adolescents. But, she warns, teenagers challenging the authority of adults may be a recipe for trouble. Richard Carroll has already discovered trouble in his paper The Trouble with History and Fiction, which documents the on-going conflict between historians and writers of fictive history as they grapple with ways of representing the past. Carroll observes that historians and writers of historical fiction are both constructing the past through narrative forms. However, while the historian is bound by the need to verify their claims from a variety of valid sources, the writer of fiction is free to imagine and invent. In a post-modern era, historians face what Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (19) describe “as a crisis of representation.” Some historians’ self-exclusion from the imaginary have left them on shaky ground, and opened up a space for historical fiction writers like Kate Grenville to produce texts that are at once imaginative and based on historial reality. As Carroll notes, however, Grenville’s act of fictionalising history has not escaped criticism. In this paper, Carroll reminds us that an act that attempts to move between discourses, such as the fictive and the factual, is bound to cause trouble. Ariella Van Luyn’s creative work, Crocodile Hunt, occupies the borders of factual and fictive discourse that Carroll explores. Set in Brisbane, the work intertwines the personal trouble encountered by the main character, Murray, after the breakdown of his relationship, with the wider political turmoil that culminates with the bombing of the Communist Party headquarters in Brisbane in 1972. Unlike traditional historical accounts, this fictionalised history focuses on the personal and emotional response of characters. This story demonstrates the ways in which imagination can serve as a tool to negotiate the troubling gap in an historical narrative. The final inclusion in the edition is a creative work by Jarryd Luke. Although not as localised as Van Luyn’s narrative, Halfway House creatively explores troubles in its two young protagonists. Luke’s haunting short story speaks of two twins that escape an uncomfortable home life on the back of truck—in half a house being transported across the country. The narrative is troubling for many reasons. It illustrates the struggles the boys have with each other, with society, and the expectations placed upon them. The symbol of a broken house, literally cut through the middle, is a powerful one; Luke’s descriptive prose creates a troubled image of a house in crisis—hallways that lead to nowhere, rooms without doors. As Kimberley explores the more troubling side of dystopic youth fiction, Luke’s story is a disturbing image of male youth that blindly takes opportunities with no thought to where it might lead them. Ryan and Josh are certainly troubled characters, and like intrepid researchers, have no concept of what awaits them. Interestingly, they are never free of trouble, despite escaping the clutches of their violent father (for now), they encounter trouble at every turn. Trouble continues to find them, whether they are searching for it or not. What these papers share is the mapping of uncharted territories: whether it is the spaces between young adult fiction and neuroscience, or the spaces between history and fiction. Often, in attempting to chart new territories, researchers discover the extent of what remains unknown. Many of these papers, while reaching valid conclusions, also highlight the need for further research. The qualitative research journey is often characterised by “cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting” (Hearn et. al. 5). Troublesome research journeys are cyclic rather than linear. When researchers actively leave the path, and enter the woods, they realise that, while they are progressing forward, it is not always in a straight line. These papers have reached an end of one journey, yet signal multiple pathways for the next troubling encounter. Perhaps asking for trouble just leads to more questions. References Brady, Catherine. Logic and the Craft of Fiction. UK: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Comscore. GSMA Mobile Media Metrics Report Issued on UK Mobile Applications Usage. 2011. 22 Jun. 2011 ‹http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/GSMA_Mobile_Media_Metrics_Report_Issued_on_UK_Mobile_Applications_Usage›. Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna Lincoln. “The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. London: Sage, 2005. 1-32. Hardy, Barbara. “Towards a Poetics of Fiction.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 2.1 (1986). 25 Jun. 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344792›. Hearn, Greg, Jo Tacchi, Marcus Foth, and June Lennie. Action Research and New Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009. “Neuroses.” Dictionary.com. 2011. 25 Jun. 2011 ‹http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/neuroses›.

The following essay examines the image of "Barbary piracy" created by two prominent political figures, Thomas Jefferson and William Eaton, and by the American public from 1784 to 1805, and how those images shaped the policy of the American-Barbary War. Eaton‟s Orientalist approach to describing piracy and the North African population limited his views of this region, thus reducing the American conflict to the annihilation of animalistic "brutes." Jefferson‟s practical approach to describing piracy and the North African population focused on emancipating the region from the corrupting influence of greed, allowing him the necessary flexibility to solve the conflict by either by military force or with peace treaties, whichever was necessary. I will show the impact that categorizing piracy as either the result of a depraved society or as a corrupting force had on both American perceptions of the North Africa people and on the outcome of the American-Barbary War.

This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency.

Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.

My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature.

Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination.

In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.

Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.