Journal articles on the topic 'George Black angels'

Visions of the Apocalypse in 20th-century Music (Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Bernadetta Matuszczak, Aleksander Lasoń) This article aims to various interpretations of The Apocalypse of St. John in 20th-century music. Because of its comprehensive use of symbols and mystery, The Apocalypse was often an inspiration for painters, poets, and composers. Particularly, worth analysing are symbols and visions used in selected compositions, such as The Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen, Black Angels by George Crumb, Apokalipsis and Septem Tubae by Bernadetta Matuszczak, Symphony ‘1999’ by Aleksander Lasoń. Seven trumpets, seven horns, God’s anger, angels, destruction, God’s omnipotence, the victory of good over evil, and hope—those are the most common symbols used in these compositions. Transcendental and mysterious meaning is reflected by composers in various ways (from timbre and instrumentation, rhythmic diminution and tempo that shows eternity, to quotations and characters from The Apocalypse). Music written by different authors gives us a broad perspective on how the topic of Apocalypse was adapted in music.

Between 1900 and 1930, Los Angeles attracted thousands of white and black migrants from the Midwest and the South. Many had attachments to Protestant churches. But they also arrived with commitments to Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and social reform causes. This paper argues that these religionists in Los Angeles covered a broad spectrum of faiths, including Free Thought, innovative versions of Protestantism, and Freemasonry, and that traditional accounts of religion in the city have ignored these aspects of religious life and civic engagement. As World War I ushered in conservatism in every aspect of public life, the Los Angeles Times, the City Council, and the Protestant churches combined in an effort to squash these challenges to orthodoxy. In profiling two prominent Spiritualists, African American George W. Shields and white midwesterner Cynthia Lisetta Vose, this article illustrates the wide ranging civil and religious engagement of two committed Spiritualists. By the end of the 1920s, the fragmentation of Los Angeles neighborhoods and the growing racism of the city had nearly destroyed what had been a vigorous religion and a thriving commitment to progressive reform. Segregated white women's clubs and Freemasonry organizations turned the worship of California into a replacement for older forms of religious practice and civic engagement.

This paper examines Angela Davis’s 1969 Lectures on Liberation and her critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s views regarding freedom and enslaved agency. Across four sections, the paper etches out Davis’s response to what she calls Sartre’s ‘notorious statement’ through her own existential reading of Frederick Douglass’s resistance to chattel slavery. Instead of interpreting Davis’s existential insights through the work of Sartre or other Western continental philosophers, the paper engages Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, Frank Kirkland, and LaRose Parris to develop an alternative frame for assessing Davis’s existential thinking. Embracing a diverse lineage of existential philosophy, the paper argues for Black-centered approaches to existential philosophy that resonate with, but are not reducible or indebted to, European existentialism.

Abstract Who and what makes history? This essay describes how physician-activist Tolbert Small (b. 1942) has been collecting, preserving, and recording his own history, as well as of those around him. Small has been practicing medicine in California’s San Francisco Bay Area since 1968, serving a diversity of patients: from thousands of community members to revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and George Jackson. A physician for the Black Panther Party from 1970 to 1974, Small joined the party’s 1972 delegation to China, where he witnessed acupuncture. He then integrated the practice into his medical toolkit upon returning home. Small’s personal archives document an important chapter of American social and medical history. His stories, along with those of the revolutionaries who introduced acupuncture into New York City’s Lincoln Detox Center during the 1970s, ask us to revisit conventional historical narratives as well as the way in which acupuncture history is made.

Abstract Background: Black patients with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) have worse survival outcomes, even after adjusting for stage at diagnosis, income, insurance status and other socioeconomic factors. Little is known regarding anti-tumor immune responses in Black patients and how these differences affect responses to treatment in TNBC. Limited data exists regarding the stromal tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs, which are strongly prognostic in TNBC) distribution based on race and ethnicity. Here we evaluate the prevalence, distribution, and prognostic impact of sTILs in TNBC by race/ethnicity from 2 prospective clinical trials of adjuvant anthracycline/taxane-based chemotherapy (E2197 and E1199). Methods: Full-face hematoxylin and eosin-stained sections of 481 tumors from ECOG-ACRIN trials E2197 and E1199 were previously evaluated for density of sTILs and shown to be associated with disease-free survival (DFS), distant recurrence-free interval (DRFI), and overall survival (OS) (Adams, et al JCO 2014). Further analyses were undertaken to evaluate the impact of race/ethnicity. Results: The majority of the 481 TNBC were from White patients (82.3%, n=403); with 12.3% (n=59) Black patients, 1.6% (n=14) other (9 Hispanic, 3 Asian, 2 Other), and 0.5% (n=5) unknown race. Age distribution (mean 49.2 for White and 49.2 for Black) and node negative disease (White 68/403 (42%), Black 24/59 (41%)) were similar. However, tumor size ≤2cm was seen more commonly in White patients (34%, 137/403) compared with Black patients (20%, 12/59). Black patients had a higher proportion of high sTILs (≥30%) with 23.7% (14/59) compared to White patients (11.4%, 46/403). The association of continuous stromal TILs with DFS (hazard ratio for a 10-point difference) was 0.84 (95% CI 0.72, 0.98) for White patients and 0.94 (95% CI 0.73, 1.20) for Black patients [159 DFS events for Whites, 26 DFS events for Blacks]. Conclusions: This is the first dataset from prospective clinical trials evaluating sTILs in TNBC in Black patients. Prevalence of high sTILs was greater in Black patients compared to White patients. The association between increasing sTILs and improved invasive disease-free survival across racial/ethnic groups must be investigated in larger datasets. Table 1.Race/EthnicityTotal (n=481)White (n=403)Black (n=59)Other (n=19)Mean age49.049.249.245.6T1 (tumor <=2cm)157(32.6%)137 (34.0%)12 (20.3%)8 (42.1%)T2 (tumor >2 and <=5cm)283(58.8%)232 (57.6%)41 (69.5%)10 (52.6%)T3 and T441 (8.5%)34 (8.4%)6 (10.2%)1 (5.3%)Node negative197 (41.0%)168 (41.7%)24 (40.7%)5 (26.3%)Median sTILs (Quartiles)10 (10, 20)10 (10, 20)10 (10,20)20 (10, 30)sTILs = 095 (19.8%)83 (20.6%)10 (16.9%)2 (10.5%)sTILs 10-29%319 (66.3%)274 (68.0%)35 (59.3%)10 (52.6%)sTILs ≥30%67 (13.9%)46 (11.4%)14 (23.7%)7 (36.8%)—sTIL 30-49%,46 (9.6%)32 (7.9%)11 (18.6%)3 (15.8%)—sTIL 50-74%,17 (3.5%)11 (2.7%)3 (5.1%)3 (15.8%)—sTIL 75-100%4 (0.8%)3 (0.7%)01 (5.2%)iDFS (HR for 10% sTIL increase)0.86 (95% CI 0.76, 0.98)0.84 (95% CI 0.72, 0.98)0.94 (95% CI 0.73, 1.20)0.97 (95% CI 0.68, 1.40)DRFI (HR for 10% sTIL increase)0.82 (95% CI 0.68, 0.99)0.79 (95% CI 0.63, 1.00)1.08 (95% CI 0.82, 1.44)0.54 (95% CI 0.32, 0.90)OS (HR for 10% sTIL increase)0.81 (95% CI 0.69, 0.95)0.76 (95% CI 0.62, 0.94)1.01 (95% CI 0.76, 1.35)0.83 (95% CI 0.54, 1.29) Citation Format: Natalie Klar, Robert J Gray, Sylvia Adams, Joseph A Sparano, Lori J Goldstein, Angela M DeMichele, Antonio C Wolff, Nancy E Davidson, George W Sledge, Sunil S Badve. Stromal tumor infiltrating lymphocytes analysis by race and ethnicity in triple negative breast cancers from 2 phase III randomized adjuvant breast cancer trials: ECOG-ACRIN E2197 and E1199 [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P1-08-35.

-Chuck Meide, Kathleen Deagan ,Columbus's outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002. x + 294 pp., José María Cruxent (eds)-Lee D. Baker, George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A short history. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. x + 207 pp.-Evelyn Powell Jennings, Sherry Johnson, The social transformation of eighteenth-century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. x + 267 pp.-Michael Zeuske, J.S. Thrasher, The island of Cuba: A political essay by Alexander von Humboldt. Translated from Spanish with notes and a preliminary essay by J.S. Thrasher. Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener; Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001. vii + 280 pp.-Matt D. Childs, Virginia M. Bouvier, Whose America? The war of 1898 and the battles to define the nation. Westport CT: Praeger, 2001. xi + 241 pp.-Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Antonio Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país: La industria azucarera y la economía cubana (1919-1939). Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad de Sevilla y Diputación de Sevilla, 2001. 624 pp.-Charles Rutheiser, Joseph L. Scarpaci ,Havana: Two faces of the Antillean Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. x + 437 pp., Roberto Segre, Mario Coyula (eds)-Thomas Neuner, Ottmar Ette ,Kuba Heute: Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 863 pp., Martin Franzbach (eds)-Mark B. Padilla, Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xxiv + 257 pp.-Mark B. Padilla, Kamala Kempadoo, Sun, sex, and gold: Tourism and sex work in the Caribbean. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. viii + 356 pp.-Jane Desmond, Susanna Sloat, Caribbean dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How movement shapes identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xx + 408 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Nina Glick Schiller ,Georges woke up laughing: Long-distance nationalism and the search for home. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 324 pp., Georges Eugene Fouron (eds)-Karen Fog Olwig, Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's two great waves of immigration. Chelsea MI: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. xvi + 334 pp.-Aviva Chomsky, Lara Putnam, The company they kept: Migrants and the politics of gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 303 pp.-Rebecca B. Bateman, Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xvii + 150 pp.-Virginia Kerns, Carel Roessingh, The Belizean Garífuna: Organization of identity in an ethnic community in Central America. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. 2001. 264 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Susanna Regazzoni, Cuba: una literatura sin fronteras / Cuba: A literature beyond boundaries. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 148 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Lisa Sánchez González, Boricua literature: A literary history of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. viii + 216 pp.-Kathleen Gyssels, Ange-Séverin Malanda, Passages II: Histoire et pouvoir dans la littérature antillo-guyanaise. Paris: Editions du Ciref, 2002. 245 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Simone A. James Alexander, Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women. Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. x + 215 pp.-Gert Oostindie, Aarón Gamaliel Ramos ,Islands at the crossroads: Politics in the non-independent Caribbean., Angel Israel Rivera (eds)-Katherine E. Browne, David A.B. Murray, Opacity: Gender, sexuality, race, and the 'problem' of identity in Martinique. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. xi + 188 pp.-James Houk, Kean Gibson, Comfa religion and Creole language in a Caribbean community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xvii + 243 pp.-Kelvin Singh, Frank J. Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. viii + 305 pages.-Lise Winer, Kim Johnson, Renegades: The history of the renegades steel orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago. With photos by Jeffrey Chock. Oxford UK: Macmillan Caribbean Publishers, 2002. 170 pp.-Jerome Teelucksingh, Glenford Deroy Howe, Race, war and nationalism: A social history of West Indians in the first world war. Kingston: Ian Randle/Oxford UK: James Currey, 2002. vi + 270 pp.-Geneviève Escure, Glenn Gilbert, Pidgin and Creole linguistics in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002. 379 pp.-George L. Huttar, Eithne B. Carlin ,Atlas of the languages of Suriname. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press/Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002. vii + 345 pp., Jacques Arends (eds)

Abstract A primary difference between black women (BW) and white women (WW) diagnosed with breast cancer is not incidence, but aggressiveness of the tumor. Black women have higher mortalities with similar incidence of breast cancer compared to other race/ethnicities, and are diagnosed at a younger age with more advanced tumors with double the rate of lethal, triple negative breast cancers. There is ongoing debate regarding whether the underlying cause of higher mortality is related to healthcare inequalities or due to ancestry dependent molecular features found in normal breast tissue that facilitate the aggressive phenotype found in black women. One hypothesis is that chronic social and economic stressors result in molecular responses that create a tumor permissive tissue microenvironment in normal breast tissue, and these chronic stresses differ by race/ethnicity. In this study, we investigate molecular pattern changes in tissue N-glycosylation in a cohort of ancestry defined normal breast tissue from BW and WW with significant 5-year risk of breast cancer by Gail score. N-glycosylation, a glucose metabolism-linked post-translational modification attached to an asparagine (N) residue, was tested against social stressors. Social stresses included marital status, single, education, economic status (income), personal reproductive history, the risk factors BMI and age. Normal breast tissue microarrays from the Susan G. Komen tissue bank (WB=43; WW= 43) were used to evaluate glycosylation against socioeconomic stress and risk factors. There was no significant difference in age (Median age BW 42.5, 95% CI [40.0, 45.0]; WW 42.0, 95% CI [39.7, 44.3]). A subgroup of women had similar BMI (BW, n=24 Median BMI 29.5, 95% CI [27.6, 32.3]; WW, n=24 28.3, 95% CI [23.5, 31.6]. BW women had an overall lower median risk by 5-year Gail score, which, (BW 9.4, 95% CI [8.9, 9.9]; WW 10.4, 95% CI [8.1, 12.6]). Area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) ≥0.70, Brown/Wilson p-value <0.001 was used to assess for individual glycosylation differences in normal breast tissue at risk for breast cancer. Out of 55 N-glycans profiled in normal breast by glycomics mass spectrometry, one N-glycan appeared dependent on ancestry with high sensitivity and specificity (AUC 0.788, Brown/Wilson p-value<0.0001). For women of the same BMI, a total of 12 N-glycans could report potential ancestry-dependent differences. Interestingly, when we fit a linear regression model with ancestry as group variable and socioeconomic covariates as predictors, different N-glycans associated with different socioeconomic stresses. Five N-glycans in particular linked to different socioeconomic stresses for both BW and WW. For white women, household income was strongly associated to certain N-glycans, while for black women, marriage status (married and single) was strongly associated with the same N-glycan signature. Current work focuses on understanding if combined N-glycan biosignatures can further help understand normal breast tissue at risk. The data suggests that metabolic patterns linked to socioeconomic stresses may contribute to breast cancer risk dependent on ancestry. This study lays the foundation for understanding the complexities linking socioeconomic stresses and molecular factors to their role in ancestry dependent breast cancer risk and aggressiveness in black women. Citation Format: Peggi M Angel, Yeonhee Park, Danielle A Scott, Denys Rujchanarong, Sean Brown, Richard R Drake, George E Sandusky, Harikrishna Nakshatri. Metabolic links to socioeconomic stresses uniquely affecting race in normal breast tissue at risk for breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P3-14-13.

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?

-Dennis Walder, Robert D. Hamner, Derek Walcott. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. xvi + 199 pp.''Critical perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington DC: Three continents, 1993. xvii + 482 pp.-Yannick Tarrieu, Lilyan Kesteloot, Black writers in French: A literary history of Negritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1991. xxxiii + 411 pp.-Renée Larrier, Carole Boyce Davies ,Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean women and literature. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. xxiii + 399 pp., Elaine Savory Fido (eds)-Renée Larrier, Evelyn O'Callaghan, Woman version: Theoretical approaches to West Indian fiction by women. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. viii + 126 pp.-Lisa Douglass, Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the blood: Orality, gender and the 'vulgar' body of Jamaican popular culture. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. ix + 214 pp.-Christine G.T. Ho, Kumar Mahabir, East Indian women of Trinidad & Tobago: An annotated bibliography with photographs and ephemera. San Juan, Trinidad: Chakra, 1992. vii + 346 pp.-Eva Abraham, Richenel Ansano ,Mundu Yama Sinta Mira: Womanhood in Curacao. Eithel Martis (eds.). Curacao: Fundashon Publikashon, 1992. xii + 240 pp., Joceline Clemencia, Jeanette Cook (eds)-Louis Allaire, Corrine L. Hofman, In search of the native population of pre-Colombian Saba (400-1450 A.D.): Pottery styles and their interpretations. Part one. Amsterdam: Natuurwetenschappelijke Studiekring voor het Caraïbisch Gebied, 1993. xiv + 269 pp.-Frank L. Mills, Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the wider world, 1492-1992: A regional geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xvi + 235 pp.-Frank L. Mills, Thomas D. Boswell ,The Caribbean Islands: Endless geographical diversity. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. viii + 240 pp., Dennis Conway (eds)-Alex van Stipriaan, H.W. van den Doel ,Nederland en de Nieuwe Wereld. Utrecht: Aula, 1992. 348 pp., P.C. Emmer, H.PH. Vogel (eds)-Idsa E. Alegría Ortega, Francine Jácome, Diversidad cultural y tensión regional: América Latina y el Caribe. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad, 1993. 143 pp.-Barbara L. Solow, Ira Berlin ,Cultivation and culture: Labor and the shaping of slave life in the Americas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. viii + 388 pp., Philip D. Morgan (eds)-Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The other puritan colony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xiii + 393 pp.-Armando Lampe, Johannes Meier, Die Anfänge der Kirche auf den Karibischen Inseln: Die Geschichte der Bistümer Santo Domingo, Concepción de la Vega, San Juan de Puerto Rico und Santiago de Cuba von ihrer Entstehung (1511/22) bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Immensee: Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 1991. xxxiii + 313 pp.-Edward L. Cox, Carl C. Campbell, Cedulants and capitulants; The politics of the coloured opposition in the slave society of Trinidad, 1783-1838. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Paria Publishing, 1992. xv + 429 pp.-Thomas J. Spinner, Jr., Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and abolition: Sacrifice and survival on the Guyanese sugar plantations. Toronto: TSAR, 1993. xiii + 146 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Lila Gobardhan-Rambocus ,Immigratie en ontwikkeling: Emancipatie van contractanten. Paramaribo: Anton de Kom Universiteit, 1993. 262 pp., Maurits S. Hassankhan (eds)-Juan A. Giusti-Cordero, Teresita Martínez-Vergne, Capitalism in colonial Puerto Rico: Central San Vicente in the late nineteenth century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. 189 pp.-Jean Pierre Sainton, Henriette Levillain, La Guadeloupe 1875 -1914: Les soubresauts d'une société pluriethnique ou les ambiguïtés de l'assimilation. Paris: Autrement, 1994. 241 pp.-Michèle Baj Strobel, Solange Contour, Fort de France au début du siècle. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994. 224 pp.-Betty Wood, Robert J. Stewart, Religion and society in post-emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. xx + 254 pp.-O. Nigel Bolland, Michael Havinden ,Colonialism and development: Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850-1960. New York: Routledge, 1993. xv + 420 pp., David Meredith (eds)-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Luis Navarro García, La independencia de Cuba. Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992. 413 pp.-Pedro A. Pequeño, Guillermo J. Grenier ,Miami now! : Immigration, ethnicity, and social change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. 219 pp., Alex Stepick III (eds)-George Irving, Alistair Hennessy ,The fractured blockade: West European-Cuban relations during the revolution. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. xv + 358 pp., George Lambie (eds)-George Irving, Donna Rich Kaplowitz, Cuba's ties to a changing world. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993, xii + 263 pp.-G.B. Hagelberg, Scott B. MacDonald ,The politics of the Caribbean basin sugar trade. New York: Praeger, 1991. vii + 164 pp., Georges A. Fauriol (eds)-Bonham C. Richardson, Trevor W. Purcell, Banana Fallout: Class, color, and culture among West Indians in Costa Rica. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American studies, 1993. xxi + 198 pp.-Gertrude Fraser, George Gmelch, Double Passage: The lives of Caribbean migrants abroad and back home. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. viii + 335 pp.-Gertrude Fraser, John Western, A passage to England: Barbadian Londoners speak of home. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xxii + 309 pp.-Trevor W. Purcell, Harry G. Lefever, Turtle Bogue: Afro-Caribbean life and culture in a Costa Rican Village. Cranbury NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1992. 249 pp.-Elizabeth Fortenberry, Virginia Heyer Young, Becoming West Indian: Culture, self, and nation in St. Vincent. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. x + 229 pp.-Horace Campbell, Dudley J. Thompson ,From Kingston to Kenya: The making of a Pan-Africanist lawyer. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1993. xii + 144 pp., Margaret Cezair Thompson (eds)-Kumar Mahabir, Samaroo Siewah, The lotus and the dagger: The Capildeo speeches (1957-1994). Port of Spain: Chakra Publishing House, 1994. 811 pp.-Donald R. Hill, Forty years of steel: An annotated discography of steel band and Pan recordings, 1951-1991. Jeffrey Thomas (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood, 1992. xxxii + 307 pp.-Jill A. Leonard, André Lucrèce, Société et modernité: Essai d'interprétation de la société martiniquaise. Case Pilote, Martinique: Editions de l'Autre Mer, 1994. 188 pp.-Dirk H. van der Elst, Ben Scholtens ,Gaama Duumi, Buta Gaama: Overlijden en opvolging van Aboikoni, grootopperhoofd van de Saramaka bosnegers. Stanley Dieko. Paramaribo: Afdeling Cultuurstudies/Minov; Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1992. 204 pp., Gloria Wekker, Lady van Putten (eds)-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Chandra van Binnendijk ,Sranan: Cultuur in Suriname. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen/Rotterdam: Museum voor Volkenkunde, 1992. 159 pp., Paul Faber (eds)-Harold Munneke, A.J.A. Quintus Bosz, Grepen uit de Surinaamse rechtshistorie. Paramaribo: Vaco, 1993. 176 pp.-Harold Munneke, Irvin Kanhai ,Strijd om grond in Suriname: Verkenning van het probleem van de grondenrechten van Indianen en Bosnegers. Paramaribo, 1993, 200 pp., Joyce Nelson (eds)-Ronald Donk, J. Hartog, De geschiedenis van twee landen: De Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba. Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 1993. 183 pp.-Aart G. Broek, J.J. Oversteegen, In het schuim van grauwe wolken: Het leven van Cola Debrot tot 1948. Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1994. 556 pp.''Gemunt op wederkeer: Het leven van Cola Debrot vanaf 1948. Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1994. 397 pp.

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Abstract The murder of George Floyd triggered a broad social response and noticeable shift in public opinion of policing. Since policing is dependent upon public cooperation, a question is whether the shift in opinion had an effect on police calls-for-service. Data from Los Angeles and New York City are evaluated using a regression discontinuity design. Violent crime, property crime and quality-of-life disorder calls are analyzed to address differences in reporting norms. The role of racial-ethnic composition of local areas is assessed by examining census tracts where the majority of the residential population is Asian, Black, Hispanic, or White. Following the murder of George Floyd, in New York City violent crime, property crime, and quality-of-life calls all increased significantly. In Los Angeles, quality-of-life calls for service decreased significantly. The increase in violent crime calls observed in New York was greatest in areas where the majority of residents are Black, whereas the increase in property crime calls was the greatest in areas where a majority of residents are White. The decrease in quality-of-life calls observed in Los Angeles was in areas where the majority of residents are White. In both cases, the effect was relatively short-lived.

During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.

Among the artists and music critics within the black sci-fi community interviewed for the film The Last Angel of History, Director John Akomfrah interweaves the narrative of the Data Thief who is on a quest to find the mythical crossroads. As a juncture marked by transience and inhabited by time travelers, the crossroads is where secret black technology is forged. The famous legend says that Robert Johnson learned the blues by selling his soul to the devil. The blues was a secret due to its transformative power to replicate and recode itself into several musical genres thereafter. The Data Thief, a cyborg-like fictional character, searches 200 years after Paul Johnson’s discovery to find the mythical crossroads to obtain the keys to his future. His journey commences with one spoken clue: “Mothership Connection.” Drawing from the narrative of the Data Thief and the allusion to Parliament’s 1975 album that situates blackness in outer space through funk music, this essay examines the ways in which inhabitants of the crossroads, the Data Thief and George Clinton in particular, produce a new expressive order against the grain of a nebulous history imposed upon them by dominant white cultural representations. Through a reorganizing of black aesthetics, critical theory and liberation politics, this article highlights how black artists manipulate and imaginatively transcend linear time and make history beyond the Middle Passage epistemology. The movements of these artists collide with theories of spacetime borrowed from science fiction in service of theorizing black performance.

Abstract Recently, scholars in American studies have begun to trace the literary and cultural history of charisma, an especially slippery term which most often connotes spectacular, individual male leadership. In this article, I suggest that Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim theatre provides an alternative notion of this term. Specifically, Smith’s plays enact a Black feminist mode of collectivist charisma, one which has been and can be transported from stage to streets and vice versa. I focus here on Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), a one-woman show that Smith created by interviewing and impersonating dozens of people involved in or affected by the Rodney King “riots.” While the public primarily remembers this moment through King himself, or through spokespeople such as Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush, Smith refuses either to create protagonists or to channel individualist charisma by staging a multitude. Further, Smith’s decentered theater proffers a collective approach to remembering the broader post-civil rights ethnic and racial tensions that led to the 1992 LA Crisis. Indeed, I suggest that we experience Twilight as part of a performance history of contemporary Left protest by drawing out the similarities between Smith’s multivocal plays and today’s “leaderful,” Black-feminist-led movements for racial justice.

Angela Davis I heard Angela was coming to Honolulu Black History Month people still struggling globally El Niño season Afghanistan, Pakistan Iraq, Iran, red alert people hurt in prison unconscious injustice still around. I heard Angela was coming to Honolulu a real event like Miles & his red trumpet Sweet Honey in the Rock even Maya Angelou representing conflict & transformations. People fear real events like indigenous struggles while all around the stock market bucking like an angry bull affirmative action slipping away ebonics a clever diversion while real events are shadowed. I heard we were connected Alabama Massachusetts California Hawaii mutual friends I dreamed she came again to Hawaii before her dreads we walked together on the beach at Kualoa. After the Marin County, George Jackson fiasco She came before when she still wore an Afro fitted jeans high black pumps talking revolutionising thought. I heard she would be visiting So folk over here be working real hard to raise the fees and share some soulful aloha. And so I hope the vine is pumping and Angela is coming to share a space in time. Mumia Abu Jamal Knight for Justice Knight of Justice, Political prisoner. We watch your tragic drama like waiting for a tsunami generated by the quake of your daring to challenge like a race of people pounding at the black cliffs on a group of volcanic islands in the Pacific. The spirit of the wind hoodoos the trees— Transcendent revenge. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Waddell Takara, Kathryn. "Freedom Poems." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/7-waddelltakara.php>. APA Style Waddell Takara, K. (Sep. 2006) "Freedom Poems," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/7-waddelltakara.php>.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.

Abstract Purpose On November 19, 2020, a man was brutally murdered by security guards of a supermarket chain located in a city in the very south of Brazil, home to the world’s largest Afro-Black community outside Africa. This killing triggered protests across the country, as a Black man was killed one day before Black Awareness Day. This large popular mobilization happened at the end of 2020 and resembled the George Floyd protests. Despite the anger resonating across communities in Brazil and abroad, the news media coverage on social media resulted in an inequitable distribution of editorial space to both the affective and critical dimensions. As users often adopt view-based practices by not clicking on social media content shared through URLs, it is essential to understand how news media portrays content in short text posted online. Study design Under the lens of news frame and social media theories, our study was built on a multi-method approach combining computational, quantitative, qualitative methods to understand how news media portrays content in a tweet. To do so, we collected 267,576 tweets. They were filtered through the case’s perspective and analyzed using frame theory. Findings Results show that Brazilian news media value different angles concerning Mr. Freitas’s death and subsequent events. While traditional media tends to be more neutral in portraying protests and the killing, digital media raised the debate on the issue and about racism in the country, highlighting protests and using supporting hashtags. Furthermore, cultural hybridity can be seen in Brazil with Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Practical and social implications In a media system that shares some aspects with those found in the United States, such as highly commercial media, our study demonstrates the importance of digital media for articulating racial issues and segregation in Brazil. Originality/value A long tradition of scholarship in sociology and communication studies has investigated how news media frames social movements and the impact this coverage might have on protesters and their ability to gather public support in Western-rich democracies. Less well documented is the use of news frames in Brazil. Furthermore, it shows how BLM is hybridized with local topics and has gained traction with digital media outlets. This study aims to fill this gap by becoming the first study investigating how news media frames social movements against racism in Brazil.

The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on key Black historical figures who have been memorialized in wax. W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Duke Ellington stand out. The final wax figure, a Black man, sits with an empty card box in his right hand and a lit cigarette in his left. The film’s narrator appears: a slim, afroed Black man. He sits to the right of the figure. The only living person in a room full of bodies, he reaches over to grab the cigarette. To his inanimate companion he nonchalantly says “Oh. Thank you very much. Needed that” and ashes the cigarette.The afroed, cigarette-ashing narrator is poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron. The film is Black Wax (1982), directed by Robert Mugge. Black Wax is equal parts concert film, social documentary, and political statement by the poet. Set in Washington, D.C. and released in the midst of singer Stevie Wonder’s long campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, Scott-Heron’s film feels, in part, like an extension of Wonder’s wider effort. The year prior, Wonder held a massive rally in the city to demonstrate national support for the creation of the holiday. Reportedly, over 100,000 people attended. Wonder, building on mounting support of the proposed holiday made his song in honor of MLK Jr.—“Happy Birthday”—an integral part of his upcoming tour with Bob Marley. When Marley fell ill, Scott-Heron stepped in to lend his talents to Wonder’s cause. He would then participate in the Washington, D.C. rally that featured speeches from Diana Ross and Jesse Jackson (Cuepoint).Between live performances of various songs from his catalogue, Scott-Heron stages walking interludes wherein his wiry frame ambles through the city. Most are sonically accompanied by verses from his song “Washington, D.C.” He also folds in excerpts from his poems, personal reflections, and critiques of President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Scott-Heron ambulates a historically sedimented reality; namely that Washington, D.C. is a segregated city and that America, more broadly, is a divided nation. Against the backdrop of national monuments, his stroll stages critiques of the country’s racist past. In Black Wax, song becomes walk becomes interlude becomes critique.Throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron used his politically conscious poetry and music to mount strident critiques of social relations. Songs like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, “Winter in America”, and “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” reflect the artist’s larger concern with the stories Americans tell ourselves about who we are. This carried over into the 1980s. In his 1981 song “B-Movie”, Scott-Heron examines the ascent of Ronald Reagan, from actor to president. For the poet, the distinction is false, since Reagan “acted” his way into office. As an “actor in chief” Reagan represent a politically conservative regime that began before his entry into the White House. Reagan’s conservative politics were present when he was Governor of California and clashing with the Black Panther Party. Scott-Heron seized upon this history in Black Wax, tracing it all the way to the nation’s capital.A tour is “a journey for business, pleasure, or education often involving a series of stops and ending at the starting point” (“Tour”). Tours can offer closed-loop narratives that creates for participants a “safe” distance from the historical conditions which makes the location they are visiting possible. Scott-Heron undermines the certainly of that formulation with this wandering. In song and stride, he fashions himself a tour guide. This is not in the sense of taking the viewer into the “hood” to evidence urban decay. Rather, the poet’s critical amble undermines a national memory project that removes race from histories of the nation’s capital.Scott-Heron, self-styled Bluesologist, traveler, wanders through the world with a marrow-deep knowledge about the historical dynamics animating Black life. Walking richly informs how he relates to space. For Michel de Certeau, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered [...] it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […] a spatial acting-out of the place […] and it implies relations among differentiated positions” (97-98). For Scott-Heron, the “relations among differentiated positions” is informed by his identity as a Black American. His relationship to race imbues him with what Black geographer Katherine McKittrick calls a “black sense of place.” According to McKittrick,a black sense of place can be understood as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter […][it] is not a steady, focused, and homogenous way of seeing and being in place, but rather a set of changing and differentiated perspectives that are illustrative of, and therefore remark upon, legacies of normalized racial violence that calcify, but do not guarantee, the denigration of black geographies and their inhabitants. (949-950)Scott-Heron elaborates on McKittrick’s concept through a series of walking interludes wherein he refuses a national narrative of harmonious racial progress. He dismisses an American fantasy of race, and it is not new. In “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” writer Ralph Ellison dissects the ways that Americans have historically tried to “get shut” of Black people, all while actively thriving on Black America’s cultural contributions. Scott-Heron’s black sense of place is articulated through a series of ambulant interventions that (subtly) acknowledge national violences while highlighting the often unspoken presence of Black people thriving in the nation’s capital.Visually, the poet sequesters national monuments to the background. Reducing their scale and stripping them of their dwarfing capacity while also actively not naming them. He miniaturizes them. This allows him to centre his critique of national history and politics. For Scott-Heron, the Capital Building and the White House are not sites to be revered. They are symbols of an ongoing betrayal perpetrated by the Reagan administration.The scenes I examine here are not representative. That isn’t my project. I am much more interested in the film as a wandering text, one that pushes at tensions in order to untether the viewer from a constricting narrative about who they might be. According to Sarah Jane Cervenak, “wandering aligns with the free at precisely those moments when it bends away from forces that attempt to translate or read” (15). In this regard, I offer this reading as a suggestion. It does not work towards a particular end other than opening the process(es) through which we make meaning of Scott-Heron’s filmic performance. In effect, don’t worry about where you are doing. Just be in the scene. Invite yourself to view the film and elaborate on descriptions offered here. Wander with him. Wander with me.———In his first walking interlude, the poet strolls along the Potomac River with a boombox hoisted upon his left shoulder. He plays a tape of his song “Washington, D.C.”, and as the opening instrumental creeps into audibility he offers his own introductory monologue:yeah, I forget what Washington did on the Potomac. This is the Potomac. Black folks would sometimes refer to that as the Po-to-mac [...] This here is the Potomac. Saw a duck floating out there a little while ago. Yeah, somebody said now that Reagan is in charge we’re all ducks. Dead ducks. You dig it?Walking along the Potomac, his slow gait is the focus. He stares directly at the camera and speaks to the viewer, to us. His (willful) forgetting of what George Washington “did on the Potomac” suggests that major figures in American history do not hold equal significance for all Americans. In fact, for Scott-Heron, the viewer/we might also do well to forget. His monologue smoothly transitions into the first verse of “Washington, D.C.”:Symbols of democracy, are pinned against the coastOuthouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moatCitizens of poverty are barely out of sightOverlords escape near evening, the brother’s on at nightMorning comes and brings the tourists, straining rubber necksPerhaps a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreckIt’s a mass of irony for all the world to seeIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C. It’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.(mmmm-hmmm)He feigns no allegiance to Washington, D.C. or the city’s touristic artifice. As the lyrics indicate, poverty stricken Americans’ proximity to physical symbols of national wealth belie the idea that democracy is successful. For him, poverty is as symbolic as monuments. Yet Scott-Heron does not visually exploit Americans living in poverty. This isn’t that kind of tour. Instead, he casts his gaze on the “symbol[s] of democracy” that celebrate the “outhouse of bureaucracy” that is Washington, D.C.As the poet continues his stroll along the Potomac, the Jefferson Memorial appears in the background. He has no interest in it. He does not name it, nor does he gesture to it in any way. Instead, he focuses his attention on the camera, the viewer, us. While the camera lags slightly behind him, rather than turn his attention to the river that he walks along, he looks over his right shoulder to re-establish eye contact with the camera. His indifference is reinforced by the nonchalant stride that never breaks. The Jefferson Memorial nor the Potomac River are objects to marvel at. They hold no amount of significance that would require the poet or viewer/us to stop and ponder them or their alleged importance. With eyes and feet, he keeps them where he wants them ... in the background.———In another interlude Scott-Heron, still holding the boombox atop his shoulder, appears in the courtyard area of an apartment complex. The repetition of his outfit, boombox location, and music give continuity to the scene by the Potomac and the unidentified neighborhood. His outfit is the same one he wears when walking by the Potomac and the boombox remains on his shoulder. Reciting the next verse of “Washington, D.C.”, it seems like he’s walking through a tableau.May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A.It may not have the history or intrigue of PompeiiBut when it comes to making music, and sure enough making newsOr people who just don’t make sense, and people making doSeems a massive contradiction, pulling different waysBetween the folks who come and go, and one’s who’ve got to stayIt’s a mass of irony for all the world to seeIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington, D.C. He strolls along the sidewalk, the camera zooming in on his face. Over his right shoulder two Black kids pose on their bikes as men stand around them. The camera rotates clockwise, giving a slight panoramic view of the apartment building in the background. Residents crowd the doorway, a combination of what appears to be overlapping greetings and farewells. The ambiguous actions of the people in the background smoothly contrasts with the poet’s lean frame while his focus on the camera/viewer enlarges his presence.The scene also includes various people sitting on park benches. We do not know if they are residents or visitors. In many ways, the distinction does not matter. What we see is comfort in the faces and bodies of the Black people immediately behind Scott-Heron. On one bench we see two people. The first is a Black man who hoists his right leg up, resting his foot on the bench. As the boombox plays and the poet raps, the man taps his knee and snaps his fingers. Similarly, a Black woman in a red dress sitting on the same bench responds to Scott-Heron’s presence and his music with a committed head bob and toe tap. On another bench, three young Black men nod coolly as they watch the poet recite the remainder of his verse.It’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.He walks us through the partially-animated tableau wherein the folks sitting behind him subtly reinforce the message he directly communicates to the viewer/us.———In another interlude, three scenes are cut into one. In the first, the Capital Building looms in the distance as Scott-Heron enters the frame. He gestures toward the building and notes the ways that tours distract visitors from the real Washington:Let me tell you, those tours are all the same. They bring you around to places like this [gestures toward the Capital Building]. They might even tell you who the jackass is on the horse or the guy on top of the building, but they never show you the real Washington.Should’ve been around the 15th of January. That’s when Stevie Wonder was holding this rally. It was about 50,000 gathered there. They were trying to demonstrate and make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. But it’s always the same. The Capital. The Hoover Building. Maybe sometimes they’d even show you the Washington Monument [gestures towards the monument in the distance]. But that’s not a look at the real Washington. The one I’d like to show you is something special. You wanna see what’s happening in the nation’s capital? Come with me… (Black Wax)Since the standard D.C. tour leaves out the real Washington, the poet primes the viewer for the real thing. His mention of Stevie Wonder allows the poet to connect the viewer to that real Washington, Black Washington. This is the Washington that boasts Ben’s Chili Bowl, Howard University, and Scurlock Studios as cultural institutions. This is the Washington that would welcome the creation of a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The scene quickly transitions to Scott-Heron walking down the streets of a presumably Black neighborhood. This neighborhood is outside the purview of tour mobile routes. There is nothing remarkable about the neighborhood. Nothing monumental. The street is lined with row houses. In the background, Black pedestrians passively observe or go about their day. One young Black man smokes a cigarette as Scott-Heron casually walks past him. For Scott-Heron, these folks are the “life-blood of the city” yet he does not speak with them, perhaps because his point is not to put these people on display but to formally acknowledge who gets left out of official narratives. The segment concludes with a return to Heron’s stroll along the Potomac, where he picks up another verse to “Washington, D.C.”:Seems to me, it’s still in light time people knifed up on 14th streetMakes me feel it’s always the right time for them people showing up and coming cleanDid make the one seem kind of numbIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C. ConclusionI’ll end with this. In a final scene, the poet walks in along the front gates of the White House. He holds a little Black girl’s hand and smokes a cigarette. Together they stroll along the gates of the White House. Their movement, from right to left, suggest a return. A going back to. However, this return is not nostalgic. It is accusatory. It is a reckoning with the unrealised promises that America doles out to its citizens. He notes:the protests that are launched in this country are not launched necessarily against the government. They are launched in terms of the fact that this country has rarely lived up to its advanced publicity. This is supposed to be the land of justice, liberty, and equality and that’s what everybody over here is looking for. (Black Wax)Perhaps, then, Gil Scott-Heron leaves his viewer/us not with a push to March. No. Walking against the miasma of national nostalgia perpetuated through tourism is one way to maintain a black sense of place.ReferencesBaram, Marcus. “How Stevie Wonder Helped Create Martin Luther King Day.” Cuepoint, 18 Jan. 2015. 15 Jul. 2018 <https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-stevie-wonder-helped-create-martin-luther-king-day-807451a78664>.Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984.Gil Scott-Heron: Black Wax. Dir. Robert Mugge, performances by Gil Scott-Heron and the Midnight Band. WinStar Home Entertainment, 1982.McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography 12.8 (2011): 947-963. Scott-Heron, Gil. The Last Holiday: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2012.“Tour.” Merriam-Webster. 15 Jul. 2018.<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tour>.

“I’m saying let’s make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!” …“Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!” Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan’s essay, “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001) On September 17, 2003, Citizenship Day, the United States was to adopt a new version of its Oath of Allegiance. The updated version would modernize the oath by removing cumbersome words like “abjure” and dropping anachronistic references like “potentate.” Thus the oral recitation marking the entrance into citizenship would become more meaningful—and more manageable—for the millions of immigrants eligible for naturalization. The revised version, however, was quickly canned after conservative organizations, senators, and other loud political leaders decried what they saw as an attack on a timeless document and a weakening of the military obligation foundational to entrance into the American citizenry. The Heritage Foundation, one such organization opposing the perceived attack on citizenship, issued an executive statement decrying “the Department of Homeland Security's misguided attempts to make U.S. citizenship more ‘user-friendly’ for those who want the benefits of our country, but don't care to accept the responsibility” (n.pag.). Indeed, the thwarted attempt to make citizenship procedures more welcoming arose at a curious time. Though the proposed changes arose from a long, rather mundane administrative initiative to reconsider various procedural issues, the debate over the Oath of Allegiance politicized the issue within the context of the war on terror and the constriction of entrances into the national turf. The Bush administration responded to events referred to as 9/11 with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security. The infamous Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became the consumerist, welcome-sounding Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services when it was placed it under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The consolidation of citizenship services and disparate border policing programs further bolsters the longstanding scrutiny of immigrants—especially those considered not-white—for their ideological commitment and adherence to current national ideals. Naturalization requires a uniform recitation of unhesitant adherence to official doctrines—and a stated commitment to fight and die for those ideals. War, it seems, and its necessary division of friends and foes (“evildoers”), occupies the dead center of official ceremonies of citizenship. Naturalization procedures demonstrate how the figure of the immigrant undergoes rigorous scrutiny and thus defines the bounds of American citizenship. However, as immigration scholars like Bonnie Honig, Mai Ngai, Linda Bosniak, and Judith Shklar have shown, the specter of the immigrant also serves as an exculpatory device for preexisting inequities by obscuring internal division. While immigrants perform allegiance publicly to obtain citizenship status, birth-right citizens are presumed to have been born with a natural allegiance that precludes multiple allegiances to ideologies, projects, or potentates outside national borders. Ideas about the necessity of pairing exclusive ideological commitment with citizenship are as old as the American nation, notwithstanding the tremendous volume of announcements of a new world order in the wake of 9/11. In all incarnations of the citizenship oath, full membership in the nation-state via naturalization requires a simultaneous oath of allegiance and renunciation. Entrance into the nation-state requires exit—from ideological turf more than geographic turf—from the newly naturalized citizen’s former home country. Though scholars of diasporic and cosmopolitan identities like Aihwa Ong, Phengh Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Brent Edwards have questioned the viability of the nation-state in postmodernity, official American articulations of citizenship adhere to a longstanding phenomenon whereby inclusion within the polity requires a simultaneous exclusion or renunciation. Or, in the realm of rhetoric, any articulation of a “we” requires a simultaneous citation of a “not-we.” At the heart of citizenship is a cleavage: a coming together made possible by a splitting apart. It is not mere historical curiosity that the notorious utterance of “We” in the Action of the Second Continental Congress popularly known as the Declaration of Independence is forged in direct opposition to a “He” (King George III)—repeated no less than nineteen times in the short document. In contrast, “we” appears only eleven times. What the Declaration shows, and what the Oath of Allegiance insists, is that the constitution of a bounded polity in America emphasizes external difference in order to create the semblance of an internally homogeneous “we.” Thus arises the potency of national documents that announce equality amidst a decidedly unequal social order. These documents provide the ring of broad inclusion for what Rogers M. Smith has described as “civic myths”: ideals of full equality that politicians cite enthusiastically without worrying about their veracity in the everyday lives of the citizenry. Yet American archives and literary histories teem with protest writing that makes visible the internal divisions of American publics. In these literatures arises a figure that threatens the fragile story of a finished “we” based on uniform allegiance: the partial citizen speaking. The partial citizen speaking—from experience, on behalf of others—and addressing the real divisions within a national audience is situated at a strategic site at which to simultaneously claim and critique the inclusive pronouncements of the American Republic in order to make them real. The best example is Frederick Douglass who, having been invited to celebrate the nation in 1848, capitalized on his tenuous claim to citizenship status and delivered the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass excoriates his audience in Rochester, New York on behalf of the slaves absent from Corinthian Hall because they are toiling on Southern plantations. To his “fellow-citizens” Douglass cries, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (116). In contradistinction to leaders’ duplicitous uses of civic myths eschewed by Smith, protesters like Douglass use their partial citizenship to gain a toehold on the viable, but unfinished project of full democracy for all. By claiming the essential American-ness of their projects, protesters like Douglass position their present projects as the fulfillment of previous national promises. In her study of foreigners’ critiques of America, Bonnie Honig shows how “[Foreigners] make room for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being” (101). In the wake of 9/11, we must be interested in the rhetorical means of similar stagings by those already inside presumed national borders who have been denied full access to, or enjoyment of civic, economic, and/or social rights. These partial citizens speaking and writing stage heretofore nonexistent rights by claiming preexisting civic myths by, for, and on behalf of voices that were never meant to speak such civic myths as truths. Sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush took the virtually unprecedented step of labeling U.S. citizens like Yasir Hamdi and José Padilla “enemy combatants” in order to circumvent the guaranteed legal rights to counsel and trial afforded to all U.S. citizens. The arbitrary nullification of Hamdi’s and Padilla’s citizenship rights was not entirely new given that protest has often been seen as forfeiture of citizenship. In addition to the obvious example of the allegiance-renunciation pairing in the citizenship oath, we can turn to Emma Goldman’s deportation to Russia in 1919, or to the odd favor with which the exit plans of Garveyites and their predecessors have been received. Or, squarely within American borders, Henry David Thoreau’s blueprint of civil disobedience pairs protest with the withdrawal from collectivity (his refusal to pay poll taxes in protest of the Mexican War), a move which bolsters the notion that dissent necessitates a retraction from participation in the public sphere. However, there is another option: collectivity in the face of division. Protesters like Douglass occupy the outposts of real publics that can deliver the ineffable social equality of the modern democratic state. Here, those whose very citizenship is in question are the ones to sift through the promises of the nation-state and to hold them against the evidence of experience—their own and that of others for whom they speak. Participation in the state is more than adherence and renunciation. If Toni Morrison would just as soon have us enter a polling station to pray as to vote; so, too, protesters like Douglass demand hope amidst despairing situations of inequality—often state-sponsored. Their projects are never to simply unveil inconsistency between state promises and the experiences of subsets of its citizenry. Squarely within the circuitous myths that enshroud the state’s turf, these protesters stake claims to the very national myths that threaten their existence. Works Cited Bosniak, Linda. “Citizenship.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies. Eds. Peter Can & MarkTushnet. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 183-201. Cheah, Phengh, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1848. Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 108-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Govindarajan, Shweta. “Criticism Puts Citizenship Oath Revision on Hold; Conservatives Pan Immigration Officials’ Modernization of the Long-Used Pledge.” Los Angeles Times 19 Sep. 2003, sect. 1:13. The Heritage Foundation. First They Attacked the Pledge, Now the Oath. 10 Sep. 2003. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/meeseletter.cfm>. Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jordan, June. “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage.” Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 16-19. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship and the Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Websites Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Norman, Brian J. "Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>. APA Style Norman, B. (2004, Mar17). Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>

Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsement of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsement by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic homophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. 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Abstract The Society gratefully acknowledges the time and effort of the following individuals who served as reviewers of abstracts for this meeting: ASH ABSTRACTS COORDINATING REVIEWERS Blanche P. Alter Stephen M. Ansell Ralph B. Arlinghaus Scott Armstrong Asad Bashey Philip Bierman Neil Blumberg Chiara Bonini Dominique Bonnet Jacqueline Boultwood Rena Buckstein John C. Byrd Marc Carrier Lucio H. Castilla Selina Chen-Kiang Nicholas Chiorazzi Jorge Cortes-Franco Claire E. Dearden Mary C. Dinauer Harry Paul Erba Carolyn A. Felix Pierre Fenaux Debra L. Friedman Irene M. Ghobrial Jason R. Gotlib Brandon Hayes-Lattin Cheryl A. Hillery Achille Iolascon Jean-Pierre J. Issa Sundar Jagannath Diane F. Jelinek H. Phillip Koeffler John Koreth Robert J. Kreitman Robert B. Levy David Lillicrap Richard Lottenberg John D. McMannis Mark D. Minden Charles G. Mullighan Arnon Nagler Peter J. Newman Robert Z. Orlowski Antonio Palumbo Julie A. Panepinto Warren S. Pear Sibrand Poppema Barbara Pro Ching-Hon Pui A. Koneti Rao Aaron P. Rapoport Pieter H. Reitsma Douglas D. Ross J. Eric Russell Barbara Savoldo Kirk R. Schultz Radek C. Skoda Marilyn L. Slovak Susan Smyth Hugo ten Cate Herve Tilly John M. Timmerman Ivo Touw Amy J. Wagers Russell E. Ware Catherine J. Wu Virginia M. Zaleskas ASH ABSTRACTS REVIEWERS Camille Abboud Omar Abdel-Wahab Jeremy Abramson Suneet Agarwal Sikander Ailawadhi Onder Alpdogan Andrew Aprikyan Mary Armanios Aneel Ashrani Norio Asou Aglaia Athanassiadou Eyal Attar Mohammad Azam Maria Baer Jorg Baesecke Sarah Ball Karen Ballen Frederic Baron Shannon Bates Minoo Battiwalla Marie Bene Charles Bennett James Berenson Steven Bernstein Francesco Bertoni Monica Bessler Wolfgang Bethge Kapil Bhalla Deepa Bhojwani James Bieker Bruce R. Blazar Annemarie Block David Bodine Catherine Bollard Antonio Bonati Eric Bouhassira Benjamin Braun Christopher Bredeson Patrick Brown Ross Brown Jan Burger Dario Campana Jose Cancelas Paul Carpenter Andrew Carroll James Casella Rebecca Chan Roy Chemaly Benny Chen Jerry Cheng Linzhao Cheng Bruce Cheson Mark Chiang Athar Chishti Hearn Cho Magdalena Chrzanowska-Wodnicka Richard E. Clark Joseph Connors Kenneth Cooke Miguel Cruz Adam Cuker Sandeep Dave Janice Davis Sproul Lucia De Franceschi Philip De Groot Rodney DeKoter Richard Delarue Stephen Devereux Steven Devine Paola Jorge Di Don Diamond Meletios Dimopoulos John DiPersio Angela Dispenzieri Benjamin Djulbegovic Jing-fei Dong James Downing William Drobyski Rafael Duarte Charles Dumontet Kieron Dunleavy Brian Durie Dimitar Efremov Elizabeth Eklund Jonas Emsley Patricia Ernst Andrew Evens Chris Fegan Andrew Feldman Giuliana Ferrari Willem Fibbe Adele Fielding Thoas Fioretos Robert Flaumenhaft Rafael Fonseca James Foran Joseph Frank Janet Franklin Paul Frenette Alan Friedman Terry Fry Saghi Gaffari Naomi Galili Patrick Gallagher Anne Galy David Garcia Randy Gascoyne Cristina Gasparetto Norbert Gattermann Tobias Gedde-Dahl Alan Gewirtz Francis Giles Robert Godal Lucy Godley Ivana Gojo Norbert Gorin Andre Goy Eric Grabowski Steven Grant Timothy Graubert Elizabeth Griffiths H. Leighton Grimes Claudia Haferlach Corinne Haioun Parameswaran Hari Christine Harrison Robert Hasserjian Nyla Heerema Shelly Heimfeld Roland Herzog Elizabeth Hexner Teru Hideshima William H. Hildebrand Gerhard Hildebrandt Devendra Hiwase Karin Hoffmeister Donna Hogge Scott Howard Brian Huntly Hiroto Inaba Baba Inusa Shai Izraeli Suresh Jhanwar Amy Johnson Craig Jordan Joseph Jurcic Nina Kadan-Lottick Lawrence Kaplan Jonathan Kaufman Neil Kay Michelle Kelliher Craig Kessler H. Jean Khoury Allison King Joseph Kiss Issay Kitabayashi Robert Klaassen Christoph Klein Yoshihisa Kodera Alexander Kohlmann Barbara Konkle Michael Kovacs Robert Kralovics Amrita Krishnan Nicolaus Kroger Ashish Kumar Ralf Küppers Jeffery Kutok Ann LaCasce Raymond Lai David Lane Peter Lane Richard Larson Michelle Le Beau Gregoire Le Gal Ollivier Legrand Suzanne Lentzsch John Leonard John Levine Ross Levine Linheng Li Renhao Li Zhenyu Li Wendy Lim Charles Linker Jeffrey Lipton Per Ljungman John Lollar Philip Low David Lucas Selina Luger Leo Luznik Gary Lyman Jaroslaw Maciejewski Elizabeth MacIntyre Nigel Mackman Luca Malcovati Guido Marcucci Tomer Mark Susan Maroney Giovanni Martinelli Peter Maslak Alan Mast Grant McArthur Philip McCarthy Michael McDevitt Peter McLaughlin Bruno Medeiros Jules P.P. Meijerink Junia Melo Thomas Mercher Bradley Messmer Marco Mielcarek Ken Mills Shin Mineishi Arturo Molina Silvia Montoto Marie Joelle Mozziconacci Auayporn Nademanee Vesna Najfeld Eneida Nemecek Ellis Neufeld Peter Newburger Heyu Ni Charlotte Marie Niemeyer Yago Nieto Anne Novak Paul O\'Donnell Vivian Oehler Fritz Offner Johannes Oldenburg Rebecca Olin Richard J. O'Reilly Thomas Ortel Keiya Ozawa Rose Ann Padua Sung-Yun Pai James Palis Derwood Pamphilon Animesh Pardanani Farzana Pashankar Andrea Pellagatti Catherine Pellat-Deceunynck Louis Pelus Chris Pepper Melanie Percy Andrew Perkins Luke Peterson Andrew Pettitt Javier Pinilla-Ibarz Kimmo Porkka David Porter Amy Powers Claude Preudhomme Frederick Racke Margaret Ragni Thomas Raife Alessandro Rambaldi Mariusz Ratajczak Pavan Reddy Mary Relling Tannishtha Reya Lisa Rimsza Stefano Rivella Isabelle Riviere Pamela Robey Gail Roboz Aldo Roccaro Maria Alma Rodriguez Frank Rosenbauer Laura Rosinol Alan Rosmarin Giuseppe Saglio Jonathan Said Valeria Santini Ravindra Sarode Yogenthiran Saunthararajah Bipin Savani Alan Schechter Charles Schiffer Robert Schlossman Laurie Sehn Rita Selby Orhan Sezer Sadhna Shankar John Shaughnessy Jordan Shavit Kevin Sheehan Shalini Shenoy Colin Sieff Paul Simmons Seema Singhal Sonali Smith Gerard Socie Pieter Sonneveld Simona Soverini David Spaner Steven Spitalnik Kostas Stamatopoulos David Steensma Richard Stone Toshio Suda Perumal Thiagarajan Courtney Thornburg Rodger Tiedemann David Traver Guido Tricot Darrell Triulzi Suzanne Trudel Christel Van Geet Karin Vanderkerken David Varon Amit Verma Srdan Verstovsek Ravi Vij Dan Vogl Loren Walensky Edmund Waller George Weiner Daniel Weisdorf Karl Welte Peter Westervelt Adrian Wiestner P.W. Wijermans John Wingard Anne Woolfrey Mingjiang Xu Qing Yi Anas Younes Ryan Zarychanski Arthur Zelent Clive Zent Dong-Er Zhang Xianzheng Zhou James Zimring

Alex Abou-Chebl, MD Michael Abraham, MD Joseph E. Acker, III, EMT-P, MPH Robert Adams, MD, MS, FAHA Eric Adelman, MD Opeolu Adeoye, MD DeAnna L. Adkins, PhD Maria Aguilar, MD Absar Ahmed, MD Naveed Akhtar, MD Rufus Akinyemi, MBBS, MSc, MWACP, FMCP(Nig) Karen C. Albright, DO, MPH Felipe Albuquerque, MD Andrei V. Alexandrov, MD Abdulnasser Alhajeri, MD Latisha Ali, MD Nabil J. Alkayed, MD, PhD, FAHA Amer Alshekhlee, MD, MSc Irfan Altafullah, MD Arun Paul Amar, MD Pierre Amarenco, MD, FAHA, FAAN Sepideh Amin-Hanjani, MD, FAANS, FACS, FAHA Catherine Amlie-Lefond, MD Aaron M. Anderson, MD David C. Anderson, MD, FAHA Sameer A. Ansari, MD, PhD Ken Arai, PhD Agnieszka Ardelt, MD, PhD Juan Arenillas, MD PhD William Armstead, PhD, FAHA Jennifer L. Armstrong-Wells, MD, MPH Negar Asdaghi, MD, MSc, FRCPC Nancy D. Ashley, APRN,BC, CEN,CCRN,CNRN Stephen Ashwal, MD Andrew Asimos, MD Rand Askalan, MD, PhD Kjell Asplund, MD Richard P. Atkinson, MD, FAHA Issam A. Awad, MD, MSc, FACS, MA (hon) Hakan Ay, MD, FAHA Michael Ayad, MD, PhD Cenk Ayata, MD Aamir Badruddin, MD Hee Joon Bae, MD, PhD Mark Bain, MD Tamilyn Bakas, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN Frank Barone, BA, DPhil Andrew Barreto, MD William G. Barsan, MD, FACEP, FAHA Nicolas G. Bazan, MD, PhD Kyra Becker, MD, FAHA Ludmila Belayev, MD Rodney Bell, MD Andrei B. Belousov, PhD Susan L. Benedict, MD Larry Benowitz, PhD Rohit Bhatia, MBBS, MD, DM, DNB Pratik Bhattacharya, MD MPh James A. Bibb, PhD Jose Biller, MD, FACP, FAAN, FAHA Randie Black Schaffer, MD, MA Kristine Blackham, MD Bernadette Boden-Albala, DrPH Cesar Borlongan, MA, PhD Susana M. Bowling, MD Monique M. B. Breteler, MD, PhD Jonathan Brisman, MD Allan L. Brook, MD, FSIR Robert D. Brown, MD, MPH Devin L. Brown, MD, MS Ketan R. Bulsara, MD James Burke, MD Cheryl Bushnell, MD, MHSc, FAHA Ken Butcher, MD, PhD, FRCPC Livia Candelise, MD S Thomas Carmichael, MD, PhD Bob S. Carter, MD, PhD Angel Chamorro, MD, PhD Pak H. 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I have recently resigned from my casual job at a convenience store where I worked for over five years. During the farewells that took place as I finished my last shift, one of my co-workers asked me if I had any regrets about leaving, and whether there were any fond memories I could recall from the period of my employment. For those of you who have had the somewhat dubious pleasure of working at the lower end of the retail food chain, you'll know that my co-worker could not possibly have been expecting a serious answer to her enquiry. Working in a convenience store is mind-numbing at the best of times, and even if you think you have an iota of intelligence, there are plenty of customers and employers willing to disabuse you of this self-deluding pretension on your part. Despite the facetious quality of my co-worker's question, this article does offer her an answer, but my approach has less to do with memories about the work as such, as it does about the play that went on alongside the work, in order to endure the work. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau speaks of the art of making do as practiced by individuals as they go about their everyday life. He introduces a clear distinction between his understanding of the concepts of 'strategies' and 'tactics'. De Certeau argues that while systems may implement 'strategies' to designate particular activities to specific places, 'tactics' offer innumerable ways to evade or traverse this imposed "law of the place" (29). Tactics are "a clever utilization of time" (39) that take advantage of the opportunities that momentarily present themselves as cracks in the strategies that are enacted by the "surveillance of the proprietary powers" (37). De Certeau illustrates how the mobilisation of tactics is in effect the mobilisation of "ways of using the constraining order of the place" (30) where an individual has little choice but to live and work. In this regard, de Certeau advocates the notion of a creative approach to everyday life, where the individual resorts to artisan-like inventiveness, trickery and "guileful ruse" (37), and thus introduces play into the foundations of power (39), so that she or he may survive the strategies enacted by power. Since for financial reasons I had to work in a convenience store, I always hoped, I admit rather naively, that it would be of the kind that I saw in the movies. I liked the film Grosse Point Blank for a number of reasons. First, for the point in the script where the central character, played by John Cusack, returns to his hometown and attempts to revisit the house he grew up in; in place of his family home he finds a convenience store. Aside from the poetic resonance of this scene with my own life (after five years I began to feel as though I lived at the shop, and even had the front door keys), I envied the guy who worked there -- at least initially, before the shop was turned into a fireball. The convenience store's employee had taken advantage of the absence of an owner or manager to introduce into the workplace an activity usually associated with not-working, with being a customer. He had literally introduced play into the workplace, taking the opportunity to use the shop's video game as his own personal arcade. He was ensconced in a world of his own making, complete with headphones, defiantly oblivious to the customers and the low flying bullets around him. The explicit introduction of play into the workplace is also apparent in Clerks, the film that first highlighted the dissatisfaction of the convenience store employee. In this film, work as a place is transcended in a flagrant example of 'tactics' winning bet on time over place (39), as the employee closes the shop during working hours, and takes to the roof to play a pre-organised game of hockey. Central to the antics of the characters in both films is the absence of power in the form of the owner, or a manager. In my own case, the first four years of working were invariably in the presence of the owner of the store. Given this potentially punitive restraint it was difficult to inject much in the way of overt play into the workplace; however, as soon as the owner was away from the shop, the opportunity to play was seized with both hands. I remember walking into the shop one day, and finding one of my co-workers sitting on one of the benches, formulating questions for another co-worker in anticipation of a quiz game they were going to play, based upon knowledge about the idiosyncrasies of the shop and its customers. A sample question went something like this: What are the names of [insert the name of the bread delivery man here]'s children? For extra points tell me their ages. No doubt the prize was going to be a generous, though unwitting donation from the store's owner. Until the reorganisation of my boss's schedule I had merely wished that I could stand behind the counter and indulge in the leisurely activity of reading the magazines like the employee in Clerks. The opportunities to make use of my employer's time were very fine cracks indeed, so it was true, in accordance with de Certeau, that a particular kind of inventiveness was called for. An example of a creative use of the work place in the face of considerable restraint was the existence of the 'staff lollies' jar. The jar, a re-used plastic confectionery container, appeared one day; someone had gathered all the half-opened packets of lifesavers and chewing gum scattered about under the counter, and labelled them. The effect of the appearance of this container was to sanction the consumption of confectionery that was not paid for, under the ruse that somehow if you didn't either take home, or personally finish the packet of sweets that you had opened, then you weren't stealing them. It was even more okay to finish a packet that someone else had opened, because you couldn't be held remotely responsible. The establishment of a 'staff lollies' jar is not entirely explained by de Certeau's understanding of la perruque, where an employee essentially uses the time and equipment of an employer for her or his own means, without actually stealing goods; that's what reading the New Weekly, then returning it to the magazine rack is about. Having a 'staff lollies' jar is an extension of using "tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the weak on the adversary on his [sic] own turf, hunter's tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic and warlike discoveries" (40), which arise in response to a particular rational system. Although when one first begins to work in the type of shop I have been discussing, one is the proverbial kid in a candy store, the conditions of employment are such that it is not acceptable, or even legal, to freely consume the goods. There were however, a variety of refinements of the practice of not-stealing in my former workplace that made it possible to play further, but within the expectations of compliance to legal constraints. Such trickery extended to the trial of new products; how could we respond effectively to customer enquiries about newly arrived products if we hadn't sampled them? In the most subtle manifestation of this ruse, the first aid kit, although ostensibly provided by my employer, was in fact stocked from the shelves by the employees. All in the name of workplace health and safety we provided ourselves with a never-ending supply of nail polish remover, cotton balls, under-arm deodorant and body sprays, tampons, vitamin C and garlic tablets, glucodin energy supplements (like we needed more sugar!), and at any given time, at least three boxes each of the more usual fare of Band-Aids and headache relief capsules. A less subtle and more obviously jubilant manifestation of our ways of using the store's goods resulted in a meandering trail of Australian salamander species -- toys procured from the Kinder surprise-like Yowies -- which were blu-tacked to the inside of a window frame behind the shop's counter in a semi-permanent ligne d'erre: a squiggle of our consumption, our way of using the constraining order of the work place. There are many more examples of play, insofar as that means taking delight in inventiveness, trickery, guile, and ruse, than I can explore within the limits of this article, that the convenience store employee utilises to make do within the framework of subservience in which she or he operates. While I have only dealt with aspects of the employer and employee relationship here, there are certainly many tactics that are employed by the employee to deal with her or his similarly subservient position to the store's customers. For an insight into the dynamics of this relationship Clerks provides an all too brief expose of weird and unreasonable customer behaviour, in response to which the convenience store employee must, at least on the surface, appear to adopt the maxim 'the customer is always right'. Of course, as maxims go, this one is patently not true, but I'll leave it to you to reflect on your own experiences in the convenience store, so that you might ascertain how the person serving you is using tactics. References De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Artificial Eye: 1994. Grosse Point Blank. Dir. George Armitage. Buena Vista: 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Kirsty Leishman. "At Our Convenience: Working and Playing in the Convenience Store." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php>. Chicago style: Kirsty Leishman, "At Our Convenience: Working and Playing in the Convenience Store," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Kirsty Leishman. (1998) At our convenience: working and playing in the convenience store. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php> ([your date of access]).

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. In fact this is what defines AR as a different perceptual paradigm: the creation of a convergent space—which will remain inevitably imperfect—between material reality and virtual information.References Azuma, Ronald T. “A Survey on Augmented Reality.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6.4 (Aug. 1997): 355-385. < http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base/ARfinal.pdf >. Benayoun, Maurice. World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War. 1997. Immersive installation: CAVE, Computer, video projectors, 1 to 5 real photo cameras, 2 to 6 magnetic or infrared trackers, shutter glasses, audio-system, Internet connection, color printer. Maurice Benayoun, Works. < http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16 >. Bimber, Oliver, and Ramesh Raskar. Spatial Augmented Reality. Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, Massachusetts: AK Peters, 2005. 71-92. Burnett, Ron. How Images Think. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Campbell, Jim. Hallucination. 1988-1990. Black and white video camera, 50 inch rear projection video monitor, laser disc players, custom electronics. Collection of Don Fisher, San Francisco. Campus, Peter. Interface. 1972. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, video projector, light projector, glass sheet, empty, dark room. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Courchesne, Luc. Where Are You? 2005. Immersive installation: Panoscope 360°. a single channel immersive display, a large inverted dome, a hemispheric lens and projector, a computer and a surround sound system. Collection of the artist. < http://courchel.net/# >. Davies, Char. Osmose. 1995. Computer, sound synthesizers and processors, stereoscopic head-mounted display with 3D localized sound, breathing/balance interface vest, motion capture devices, video projectors, and silhouette screen. Char Davies, Immersence, Osmose. < http://www.immersence.com >. Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012. Graham, Dan. Present Continuous Past(s). 1974. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, one black and white monitor, two mirrors, microprocessor. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2003. Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2012. < http://www.etymonline.com >. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” Visual Communication 5.2 (2006): 219-240. Milgram, Paul, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, Fumio Kishino. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” SPIE [The International Society for Optical Engineering] Proceedings 2351: Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies (1994): 282-292. Naimark, Michael, Be Now Here. 1995-97. Stereoscopic interactive panorama: 3-D glasses, two 35mm motion-picture cameras, rotating tripod, input pedestal, stereoscopic projection screen, four-channel audio, 16-foot (4.87 m) rotating floor. Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation with additional support from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Paris, France. < http://www.naimark.net/projects/benowhere.html >. Nauman, Bruce. Live-Taped Video Corridor. 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, videotape player, and videotape, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Novak, Marcos. Interview with Leo Gullbring, Calimero journalistic och fotografi, 2001. < http://www.calimero.se/novak2.htm >. Sermon, Paul. Telematic Dreaming. 1992. ISDN telematic installation, two video projectors, two video cameras, two beds set. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford England. Shaw, Jeffrey, and Theo Botschuijver. Viewpoint. 1975. Photo installation. Shown at 9th Biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France.

Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Fowler, Pete. "Skins Rule." The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader. Ed. Charlie Gillett. London: Pluto Press, 1972. 10-26.Frith, Simon, and Tony Cummings. “Playing Records.” Rock File 3. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. St Albans: Panther, 1975. 21–48.Godin, Dave. “The Dave Godin Column”. Blues and Soul 67 (1971).Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6-23.Hollows, Joanne, and Katie Milestone. "Welcome to Dreamsville: A History and Geography of Northern Soul." The Place of Music. Eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 83-103.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McRobbie, Angela. "Dance and Social Fantasy." Gender and Generation. Eds. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club. London: Bee Cool, 2001.Soja, Edward W. "Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places." Capital & Class 22.1 (1998): 137-139.This England. TV documentary. Manchester: Granada Television, 1977.Wall, Tim. "Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene." Popular Music 25.3 (2006): 431-445.Wilson, Andrew. Northern Soul: Music, Drugs and Subcultural Identity. Cullompton: Willan, 2007.Winstanley, Russ, and David Nowell. Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story. London: Robson, 1996.Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. "Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music." Journal of Urban Design 18.3 (2013): 383-408.

To coalesce politically is to join together whilst retaining singularity. This is the aim of much contemporary social movement activism, marked most consistently under the sign of the global justice movement – the movement ‘for humanity and against neoliberalism’, as a common slogan goes. This movement regularly writes itself as one composed of diversity and a commitment to horizontal power relations. Within this, the discourse of the movement demonstrates a particular consciousness around privilege and oppression (Starr 95-97). The demands, in this regard, on a coalescence that brings together such groups as middle-class university students, landless peasant farmers, indigenous militants and child labourers are strong (Maeckelbergh). What kinds of solidarities are required for such a precipitation across difference and power? What ethical imperatives are produced for those activists who occupy the normatively first world, white, middle-class activist subject position within this?For activism in the Australian context, this question has had particular implications for practices of alliance and resistance around, for example, the Northern Territory Intervention as well as the treatment of refugees, particularly their mandatory detention and deportation. Many activist individuals and groups involved in these social movements can also be found occupying various positions within global justice movement discourse. There were shouts of “no borders, no nations, no deportations” at the 2002 World Trade Organisation protests in Sydney; there are declarations of Indigenous sovereignty at the gates of the Villawood detention centre in 2010. Under these circumstances, the question for coalition between singularities is negotiated at the difference between being an incarcerated refugee or a citizen of the incarcerating state; or between a person whose livelihood is administered through their race and class and one who has relative control over their own means of existence.Whilst these differentials are neither static nor binarised opposites, they do manifest in this way, among other ways, at the moment of claiming coalition. Again, then: what are the ethics of coalition that might be produced here for the relatively or differently privileged subject? By way of a response, this article is an address to the ethical scene of activist coalition, drawing on anti-colonial feminism, discourses of precarity, and Derrida’s “fiduciary register” (Acts of Religion). I pose three interpenetrating ethics of coalition for the privileged subject in (the) global justice movement: risk, prayer and gift. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you are interpellated as this subject, in view of its instability. By the same token, this meditation is not specifically applied to the cases of alliance sketched above; which is not to say it cannot be.RiskAs global justice movement discourse recognises, the contemporary global polis is heavily marked by practices of securitisation and containment. Under such conditions, anticolonial theorist Leela Gandhi suggests that a collective oppositional consciousness may be defined by risk. For Gandhi it is the risk (of pain, sacrifice, humiliation, or exile) taken by the “philoxenic”, or stranger-oriented, subject in transnational activism that defines their politics as one of friendship, after Jacques Derrida (Politics; Gandhi 29–30). Risk takes the subject beyond recognition; it means facing something you might not recognise, something you cannot know. Easily commodified, risk cannot be pre-planned; “philoxenia”, says Gandhi, “is not reducible to a form of masochistic moral adventurism or absolutism, to a sort of ethics-as-bungie-jumping-at-any-cost school of thought” (30). Risk, rather, is partial, open-ended; always to come. (Risk here is distinguished, thus, from its actuarial register. The regimes of risk underpinning global securitisation are defined by imminence rather than immanence.)Risk, in this ethical imaginary, is a threat to subjectivity; the catalyst for any coalitional process of deactivating the habits of privilege and hierarchy. This is viscerally articulated by Bernice Johnson Reagon in her speech "Turning the Century: Coalition Politics":I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing. (Reagon)Reagon (a musician, scholar and activist speaking at a women’s music festival in 1981) highlighted that, as displacement is necessary to coalition, so do we risk displacement every time we seek coalition. Reagon’s speech remains a landmark challenge for allies to stake their subjectivity on social justice. A response is perhaps prefigured by feminist philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir, in her reflection on her pro-abortion activism in early 1970s France:I believed that it was up to women like me to take the risk on behalf of those who could not, because we could afford to do it. We had the money and the position and we were not likely to be punished for our actions. I was already a sacred cow to the authorities and no-one would dare arrest me, so don’t give me too much credit for bravery because I was untouchable. Save your sympathy for the ordinary women who really suffered by their admission. (Bair 547)Contemporarily, queer theorist and activist Judith Butler expresses similar coalescent displacement in Precarious Life, her manifesto for a politics of mourning:For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you”, by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49)Indeed: Butler and de Beauvoir, two different feminists equally concerned with coalition, provide two orientations to the risky solidarity forecast by Reagon. Butler’s is a commitment to displacing privilege, in order to bring about political relationship to another. De Beauvoir’s is to use her privilege to protect and advance the rights of those who are oppressed by that privilege. Both recognise a re-distributive, even liberatory, power that is created by giving up privilege, or by recognising it in order to work against it. Both statements might be located in particular timespace: de Beauvoir’s from a feminism beginning to consider the homogeneity in the white middle class heterosexual feminist construct of “woman”, and Butler’s reflecting a thoroughly raced, classed, queered, feminist subject. An anticolonial feminist reworking of this scene might thus see de Beauvoir and Butler as both deploying forms of Chela Sandoval's “tactical subjectivity”, that “capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved” (58-9). In doing this, both may run the risk of fetishising the others they de/refer to: Butler’s as the source of her humanity, de Beauvoir’s in speaking on their behalf (Ahmed 4-5). So in risking their personal empowerment activists still, simultaneously, risk replicating the very dominations to which they are opposed. The risk still, must not ‘stop’ alliance work, as Sandoval’s theory appreciates (62). These themes - of endurance and disorienting imagination - are rife in activist discourse: from the unionist “dare to struggle, dare to win” to the World Social Forum’s “another world is possible”. The ethical precept of risk is unpredictability, uncertainty; the interception of otherness. PrayerIn a world overdetermined by risk it is no surprise that much global justice movement activism is founded on notions of precarity. “Precarious work” is a term in labour politics that refers to widespread workforce casualisation and the decline of certain industrial standards, particularly in the geopolitical west. An example of its political deployment may be found in the performative Italian meme of San Precario, created by Milanese activists in 2000. For a decade now, San Precario has appeared at rallies, in grottoes and on devotional cards as the patron saint of precarious workers in Italy (Johal); enacting an iconic-ironic twist on prayer. Precarity as activist trope has its roots in wage instability but has been extended (particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York) to refer to the condition of life during neoliberal globalisation.Within this there are those such as Ida Dominijanni who invoke Butler’s “precarious life” for an alliance politics formed from a shared vulnerability and instability. Butler’s notion of precarity here entails an acknowledgement that September 11 generated a “dislocation from First World privilege” (xii) in the Anglosphere.The ethical content of such a risky politics can be gleaned from these examples. On the one hand Butler and Dominijanni demonstrate that to be open to risk is to refuse the obsessive securitisations of neoliberal globalisation. On the other, San Precario highlights the value of security to those who are denied it under those same conditions. In evaluating the many-edged significance of precarity in global justice movement activism, Australian scholar Angela Mitropoulos puts it this way:“Precarious” is as much a description of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience, hopes and fears of a faltering movement … This raises the risk of movements that become trapped in communitarian dreams of a final end to risk in the supposedly secure embrace of global juridical recognition. Yet, it also makes clear that a different future, by definition, can only be constructed precariously, without firm grounds for doing so, without the measure of a general rule, and with questions that should, often, shake us – particularly what “us” might mean. (Mitropoulos, Precari-Us?)Our precarious lives in partiality require, then, a contemplative sensibility - in order to discern and deploy, to tell the difference between containment and critique, and so on. We need to “take a moment” to balance on precarity’s shaky edge: to mourn the loss of certainty, seek guidance, affirm hope and belief, express the desires of futurity. It is arguably in this way that the Latin precarium became the English word prayer; as its simplest root/route it means “entreaty, petition, request” (Oxford English Dictionary).Prayer implies an address, though not necessarily as supplication to a sovereign. Prayer may instead be a gesture to a time of justice that may arrive despite all odds. Activism is social creativity: it requires the imagination of other worlds. It thus negotiates the transcendant: as other-to-this, other-to-now – simultaneously multiplying conceptions of time. This is a fiduciary mode of being; an openness to otherness that may be distinguished from institutional religion (Derrida, Acts of Religion 51), and that generates a “social divine” (Lacey).Crucially, prayer also tends to belong to the time and space of solitude (the “time out”, the “space outside”). In her thinking on solitude, Angela Mitropoulos suggests of contemporary activists – who are in social movement under hyperconnected capitalism – that “connection is not necessarily relation” (Mitropoulos, What Is to Be Undone?), particularly when said hypernetwork underscores an “injunction to stay connected in order to be a political subject.” Mitropoulos reinforces how “the solitude that can derive from disconnection” need not be “a retreat to the personal … neither individualism or quietism.” Instead, “a politics that disconnects as well as connects remains a form of relation”.To be sure, as Sara Ahmed notes, (more) ethical relations may be formed by a disinvestment that allows one to detect difference and disconnection; “getting closer to others in order to occupy or inhabit the distance between us” (179). In turning away, activists can nuance their responses to the domination they resist: choosing, sometimes, not to reproduce hegemonic sociality. The implication may be that those in social movement who adhere only to the communitarian community critiqued by Mitropoulos will lack the critical expansiveness required of coalition. The ethical precept of prayer may thus question, reaffirm and sustain activism through disconnection from coalition and disinvestment from activism by the privileged subject. Indeed, this may be a particularly just movement when the participation of privileged allies threatens to dominate the resistance of those they ally with.GiftTo think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change. (X 160)These remarks from Andrew X, heavily circulated in some activist milieux, suggest that to Give Up Activism is something of an impossible gift for the activist. Indeed, one response to this text is entitled “The Impossibility and Necessity of Anti-Activism” (Kellstadt). For the geopolitically privileged agent to whom X’s text is addressed, Giving Up Activism would mean giving up privilege – which is itself the necessary and impossible catalyst for ethical coalition in the global justice movement (Spivak). On this logic, those who resist the exclusions of identity, community and geopolity may do well to give up activism when that identification is at risk of reproducing the force of these categories. It is one thing to give up activism as a literal casting off of the label and a refusal of activity addressed to patriarch, polis or nation; an interlinked giving up may be in understanding activism as an impossible gift, along lines traced by Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous. In these specific readings, the gift is reconceptualised as operating outside of the capitalist system of exchange (Cowell). But, under the modern system of ubiquitous global capital, there is something impossible about this gesture. For the privileged subject who “gives up privilege” for the other, she enacts a “giving which is also always a taking”, as Fiona Probyn puts it (42). So, the impossible gift of “giving up activism” – as strategic action or tactical consciousness – is one made with the awareness that the privileged activist in social movement cannot not risk reinscribing domination. Such an understanding in activist discourse would continue to nuánce the question of “What Is to Be Done?” (or indeed, What is to Be Undone, in Mitropoulos’ formulation). The ethical precept of gift is the capacity to give up the privileged investments of activism, and understanding that you cannot.Meta-MovementTo give up activism when it is called for, within an understanding of activism as the impossible gift of the privileged subject, is reflective of the Derridean friendship that shapes Gandhi’s explorations of anticolonial transnational solidarity. This is the friendship that requires turning one’s back, or “‘facing’ back to front” (Wills 9). If horizontal coalitions are to work with and against privilege, and if this means working beyond that limited horizon where activist recognises activist, then “giving up”, “turning one’s back on” activism may be a tactical exercise of power. This “turning one’s back” will also, therefore, be “the turn outwards” implied by prayer: a metaphysical movement that engages the other worlds that are imagined and sought. It is a movement which allows one to risk “giving up activism”, when that is required, in order to give (in)to or over to (the) other(ness). The metaphysical move goes outwards, from “physical” to “meta”: not towards a totalising meta, but as a sense of the other which overwrites present certainties: meta-. I recall Chela Sandoval’s words here: “Without making this metamove any ‘liberation’ or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself” (59, my emphasis). It is in the space of such a movement that the ethics of coalition are disclosed.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality. London: Routledge, 2000.Bair, Dierdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.Cowell, Andrew. “The Pleasures and Pains of the Gift." The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. Ed. Mart Osteen. London: Routledge, 2002.Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002.———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. David Wills. London: Verso, 1997.Dominijanni, Ida. "Rethinking Change: Italian Feminism between Crisis and Critique of Politics." Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 25-35.Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Gandhi, M.K. “Non-Violent Non-Cooperation.” The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 82. Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1995 (1942).Johal, Am. “Precarious Labour: Interview with San Precario Connection Organizer Alessandro Delfanti.” Rabble.ca 11 Sep. 2010. 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/amjohal/2010/09/precarious-labour-interview-san-precario-connection-organizer-alessan>. Kellstadt, J. “The Necessity and Impossibility of Anti-Activism.” A Critical Discussion on the Role of Activism. n.d. 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.archive.org/details/ACriticalDiscussionOnTheRoleOfActivism>. Lacey, Anita. “Spaces of Justice: The Social Divine of Global Anti-Capital Activists’s Sites of Resistance.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 42.4 (2005): 403-420.Maeckelbergh, Marian. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2009.Mitropoulos, Angela. “Precari-Us?” Mute 29 (Jan. 2005). 23 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.metamute.org/en/Precari-us>. Mitropoulos, Angela. “What Is to Be Undone?" archive:s0metim3s, 27 Jan. 2007. 28 Jan. 2005 ‹http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/01/25/activism>. Probyn, Fiona. "Playing Chicken at the Intersection: The White Critic in/of Whiteness." borderlands 3.2 (2004). 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au>. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Turning the Century: Coalition Politics.” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983 [1981].Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Note on the New International.” Parallax 3.1 (2001): 12-16.Starr, Amory. Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements against Globalization. New York: Zed Books, 2005.Wills, David. “Full Dorsal: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.” Postmodern Culture 15.3 (2005).X, Andrew. “Give up Activism”. Do or Die 9 (2001): 160-166.

Kumar, Krishan, Visions of Empire. How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World, Princeton / Oxford 2017, Princeton University Press, XVIII u. 576 S. / Abb., £ 32,95. (Wolfgang Reinhard) Drews, Wolfram / Christian Scholl (Hrsg.), Transkulturelle Verflechtungsprozesse in der Vormoderne (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte, 3), Berlin/Boston 2016,de Gruyter, XXIII u.287 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Jenny Rahel Oesterle) Jochum, Georg, ”Plus Ultra“ oder die Erfindung der Moderne. Zur neuzeitlichen Entgrenzung der okzidentalen Welt (Global Studies), Bielefeld 2017, transcript, 602 S. / Abb., € 44,99. (Wolfgang Reinhard) Raeymaekers, Dries / Sebastiaan Derks (Hrsg.), The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750 (Rulers and Elites, 8), Leiden/Boston 2016, Brill, XIII u. 352 S. / Abb., € 135,00. (Andreas Pecar) Knobler, Adam, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (European Expansion and Indigenous Response, 23), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XI u. 151 S., € 99,00; als Brill MyBook € 25,00. (Tobias Winnerling) Muhlack, Ulrich, Renaissance und Humanismus (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 93), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, IX u. 276 S., € 24,95 (Volker Reinhardt) Hamm, Berndt / Thomas Kaufmann (Hrsg.), Wie fromm waren die Humanisten? (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 33), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 359 S. / Abb., € 84,00. (Nikolaus Staubach) Auge, Oliver (Hrsg.), König, Reich und Fürsten im Mittelalter. Abschlusstagung des Greifswalder ”Principes-Projekts“. Festschrift für Karl-Heinz Spieß (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Greifswald, 12), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 593 S. / Abb., € 94,00. (Andreas Büttner) Huang, Angela, Die Textilien des Hanseraums. Produktion und Distribution einer spätmittelalterlichen Fernhandelsware (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 71), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2015, Böhlau, 311 S. / graph. Darst., € 40,00. (Kirsten O. Frieling) Hirbodian, Sigrid / Peter Rückert (Hrsg.), Württembergische Städte im späten Mittelalter. Herrschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur im Vergleich (Tübinger Bausteine zur Landesgeschichte, 26), Ostfildern 2016, Thorbecke, 332 S. / Abb., € 35,00.(Stefan G. Holz) Esch, Claudia, Zwischen Institution und Individuum. Bürgerliche Handlungsspielräume im mittelalterlichen Bamberg (Stadt und Region in der Vormoderne, 4), Würzburg 2016, Ergon, 576 S. / graph. Darst., € 72,00. (Ulrich Knefelkamp) Mayer, Hans E., Von der Cour des Bourgeois zum öffentlichen Notariat. Die freiwillige Gerichtsbarkeit in den Kreuzfahrerstaaten (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Schriften, 70), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz, XXXIV u. 526 S., € 70,00. (Wolf Zöller) Hesse, Christian, Synthese und Aufbruch. 1346–1410 (Gebhardt. Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 7b), Stuttgart 2017, Klett-Cotta, XLVIII u. 300 S., € 45,00. (Gabriela Signori) Frey, Stefan, Fromme feste Junker. Neuer Stadtadel im spätmittelalterlichen Zürich (Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, 84), Zürich 2017, Chronos, 216 S. / Abb., € 43,00. (Christof Rolker) Matter-Bacon, Nicole, Städtische Ehepaare im Spätmittelalter. Verhaltensmuster und Handlungsspielräume imZürich des 15. Jahrhunderts (Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum Verlag. Reihe: Geschichtswissenschaft, 30), Marburg 2016, Tectum, 412 S., € 39,95. (Elisabeth Vavra) Halter-Pernet, Colee / Felix Hammerli, Zürichs streitbarer Gelehrter im Spätmittelalter. Mit Übersetzungen aus dem Lateinischenv.Helena Müller u. Erika Egner Eid, Zürich 2017, Chronos, 446 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Martina Wehrli-Johns) Kyle, Sarah R., Medicine and Humanism inLate Medieval Italy. The Carrara Herbal in Padua (Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean), London / New York 2017, Routledge, XIII u. 243 S. / Abb., £ 95,00. (Klaus Bergdolt) Nodl, Martin, Das Kuttenberger Dekret von 1409. Von der Eintracht zum Konflikt der Prager Universitätsnationen. Aus dem Tschechischen übers. v. Roswitha u. Pavel Cervicek (Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Mitteleuropa, 51), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 404 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Blanka Zilynská) Ellermann, Julia / Dennis Hormuth / Volker Seresse (Hrsg.), Politische Kultur im frühneuzeitlichen Europa. Festschrift für Olaf Mörke zum 65. Geburtstag (Geist und Wissen, 26), Kiel 2017, Ludwig, 421 S. / Abb., € 56,80. (Wolfgang Reinhard) Horowski, Leonhard, Das Europa der Könige. Macht und Spiel an den Höfen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Reinbek 2017, Rowohlt, 1119 S. / Abb., € 39,95. (Ronald G. Asch) Rössner, Philipp R. (Hrsg.),Economic Growth and the Origins of Modern Political Economy.Economic Reasons of State, 1500–2000, London/NewYork 2016, Routledge, XII u. 317 S. / Abb., £ 95,00. (Justus Nipperdey) Burgdorf, Wolfgang (Bearb.), Die Wahlkapitulationen der römisch-deutschen Könige und Kaiser 1519–1792 (Quellen zur Geschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches, 1), Göttingen 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 884 S., € 90,00. Burgdorf, Wolfgang, Protokonstitutionalismus. Die Reichsverfassung in den Wahlkapitulationen der römisch-deutschen Könige und Kaiser 1519–1792 (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 94), Göttingen / Bristol 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 226 S., € 60,00. Durchhardt, Heinz (Hrsg.), Wahlkapitulationen in Europa (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 95), Göttingen / Bristol 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 172 S. / Abb, € 55,00. (Alexander Denzler) Durst, Benjamin, Archive des Völkerrechts. Gedruckte Sammlungen europäischer Mächteverträge in der Frühen Neuzeit (Colloquia Augustana, 34), Berlin/Boston 2016, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 494 S. / Abb., € 79,95. (Anuschka Tischer) Krischer, André, Die Macht des Verfahrens. Englische Hochverratsprozesse 1554–1848 (Verhandeln, Verfahren, Entscheiden, 3), Münster 2017, Aschendorff, VII u. 720 S. / Abb., € 79,00. (Ronald G. Asch) Elmer, Peter, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England, Oxford / New York 2016, Oxford University Press, X u. 369 S., £ 65,00. (Gerd Schwerhoff) Mentzer, Raymond A. / Betrand Van Ruymbeke (Hrsg.), A Companion to the Huguenots (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 68), Leiden/Boston 2016, Brill, XV u. 481 S. / Abb., € 229,00; als Brill MyBook € 25,00. (Ulrich Niggemann) Cevolini, Alberto (Hrsg.), Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe (Library of the Written Word, 53; The Handpress World, 40), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XI u. 389 S., € 154,00. (Martin Gierl) Freist, Dagmar / Susanne Lachenicht (Hrsg.), Connecting Worlds and People. Early Modern Diasporas, Abingdon / New York 2017, Routledge, XIII u. 149 S./ graph. Darst., £ 95,00. (Thomas Dorfner) Boer, Wietsede / Karl A. E. Enenkel / Walter S. Melion(Hrsg.), Jesuit Image Theory (Intersections, 45), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XIX u. 497 S. / Abb., € 172,00. (Dominik Sieber) Abreu, Laurinda, The Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health Care in Early-Modern Portugal (The History of Medicine in Context), London / New York 2016, Routledge, VI u. 302 S. / graph. Darst., £ 110,00. (Robert Jütte) Häberlein, Mark (Hrsg.), Sprachmeister. Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte eines prekären Berufsstands (Schriften der Matthias-Kramer-Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Fremdsprachenerwerbs und der Mehrsprachigkeit, 1), Bamberg 2015, University of Bamberg Press, 218 S. / Abb., € 18,00. (Michael Schaich) Handley, Sasha, Sleep in Early Modern England, New Haven / London 2016, Yale University Press, XII u. 280 S. / Abb., $ 65,00. (Marion Kintzinger) Nieden, Marcel (Hrsg.), Ketzer, Held und Prediger. Martin Luther im Gedächtnis der Deutschen, Darmstadt 2017, Lambert Schneider, 248 S. / Abb., € 49,95. Rößler, Hole (Hrsg.), Luthermania. Ansichten einer Kultfigur (Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek, 99), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 407 S. / Abb., € 39,80. (Eike Wolgast) Eser, Thomas / Stephanie Armer (Hrsg.), Luther, Kolumbus und die Folgen. Welt im Wandel 1500–1600. Ausstellung im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg vom 13. Juli bis 12. November 2017, Nürnberg 2017, Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 312 S. / Abb., € 36,00.(Heinz Schilling) Biagioni, Mario, The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe. A Lasting Heritage (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 207), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XI u. 180 S., € 108,00. (Hans-Jürgen Goertz) Peters, Christian, Vom Humanismus zum Täuferreich. Der Weg des Bernhard Rothmann (Refo500 Academic Studies, 38), Göttingen / Bristol 2017, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 201 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (James M. Stayer) Bräuer, Siegfried / Günther Vogler / Thomas Müntzer, Neu Ordnung machen in der Welt. Eine Biographie, Gütersloh 2016, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 496 S./ Abb., € 58,00. (Ulrich Bubenheimer) Müntzer, Thomas, Manuskripte und Notizen, hrsg. v. Armin Kohnle/Eike Wolgast unter Mitarbeit v. Vasily Arslanov / Alexander Bartmuß / Christine Haustein (Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1), Leipzig 2017, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaftenzu Leipzig/Evangelische Verlagsanstalt inKommission, XXIII u. 546 S., € 58,00. (Cornel Zwierlein) Selderhuis, Herman J. / Arnold Huijgen (Hrsg.), Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae. Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research (Reformed Historical Theology, 39), Göttingen / Bristol 2016, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 467 S., € 120,00. (Iris Fleßenkämper) McCallum, John, Scotland’s LongReformation.NewPerspectives on Scottish Religion, c. 1500–c. 1600 (St AndrewsStudies in Reformation History), Leiden/Boston 2016, Brill, XI u. 230 S. / Abb., € 110,00. (Martin Foerster) Toenjes, Christopher, Islam, the Turks and the Making of the Reformation. The History of the Ottoman Empire in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.] 2016, Lang, XVI u. 447 S. / Abb., € 74,70. (Stefan Hanß) GarcÍa-Arenal (Hrsg.), After Conversion. Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XII u. 463 S. / Abb., € 181,00; als eBook open access. Norton, Claire, ConversionandIslam in the EarlyModernMediterranean.The Lure of the Other (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), London / New York 2017, Routledge, X u. 222 S. / Abb., £ 110,00; als eBook £ 35,99. (Christian Windler) Graf, Tobias P., The Sultan’s Renegades. Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite,1575–1610, Oxford 2017, Oxford University Press, XX u. 261 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Arkadiusz Blaszczyk) Hans Dernschwam’s Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (1553/55), hrsg. v. Franz Babinger, ins Neuhochdeutsche übers. v. Jörg Riecke, Berlin 2014, Duncker &amp; Humblot, XXXVII u. 300 S. / Abb., € 69,90. (Mathis Leibetseder) Comerford, Kathleen M., Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 (Jesuit Studies, 7), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XVI u. 316 S. / graph. Darst., € 142,00. (Fabian Fechner) Nicolaus von Amsdorff, Ausgewählte Schriften der Jahre 1550 bis 1562 aus der ehemaligen Eisenacher Ministerialbibliothek, hrsg. v. Hagen Jäger (Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie, 32), Leipzig 2017, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 284 S., € 48,00. (Volker Leppin) Piltz, Eric / Gerd Schwerhoff (Hrsg.), Gottlosigkeit und Eigensinn. Religiöse Devianz im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beiheft, 51), Berlin 2015, Duncker &amp; Humblot, 530 S. / Abb., € 69,90. (Martin Scheutz) Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm / Friedrich Vollhardt (Hrsg.), Ideengeschichte um 1600. Konstellationen zwischen Schulmetaphysik, Konfessionalisierung und hermetischer Spekulation (Problemata, 158), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2017, Frommann-Holzboog, 338 S. / Abb., € 68,00. (Tobias Winnerling) Friedrich, Markus / Sascha Salatowsky / Luise Schorn-Schütte (Hrsg.), Konfession, Politik und Gelehrsamkeit. Der Jenaer Theologe Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) im Kontext seiner Zeit (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 11), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 280 S., € 52,00. (Martin Gierl) Schleinert, Dirk / Monika Schneikart (Hrsg.), Zwischen Thronsaal und Frawenzimmer. Handlungsfelder pommerscher Fürstinnen um 1600 (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Pommern. Reihe V: Forschungen zur pommerschen Geschichte, 50), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 402 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Katrin Keller) Wareing, John, Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618–1718. „There is Great Want of Servants“, Oxford / New York 2017, Oxford University Press, VIII u. 298 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Mark Häberlein) May, Niels F., Zwischen fürstlicher Repräsentation und adliger Statuspolitik. Das Kongresszeremoniell bei den westfälischen Friedensverhandlungen (Beihefte der Francia, 82), Ostfildern 2016, Thorbecke, 284 S., € 42,00. (Anuschka Tischer) Haupt, Herbert, Ein Herr von Stand und Würde. Fürst Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein (1657–1712). Mosaiksteine eines Lebens, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2016, Böhlau, 389 S. / Abb., € 47,00. (Thomas Winkelbauer) Homa, Bernhard, Die Tübinger Philosophische Fakultät 1652–1752. Institution – Disziplinen – Lehrkräfte (Contubernium, 85), Stuttgart 2016, Steiner, 428 S. / 1 CDROM, € 69,00. (Martin Gierl) Windler, Christian (Hrsg.), Kongressorte der Frühen Neuzeit im europäischen Vergleich. Der Friede von Baden (1714), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2016, Böhlau, 303 S. / Abb., € 19,90. (Regina Dauser) Pecar, Andreas / Holger Zaunstöck / Thomas Müller-Bahlke (Hrsg.), Wie pietistisch kann Adel sein? Hallescher Pietismus und Reichsadel im 18. Jahrhundert (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sachsen-Anhalts, 10), Halle a. d. S. 2016, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 176 S. / Abb., € 25,00. (Martin Gierl) Eißner, Daniel, Erweckte Handwerker im Umfeld des Pietismus. Zur religiösen Selbstermächtigung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Hallesche Forschungen, 43), Halle a. d. S. / Wiesbaden 2016, Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen / Harrassowitz in Kommission, IX u. 384 S., € 52,00. (Martin Gierl) Black, Jeremy, British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1744–57. Mid-Century Crisis, Farnham / Burlington 2015, Ashgate, XIV u. 267 S., £ 70,00. (Michael Schaich) Stobart, Jon / Mark Rothery (Hrsg.), Consumption and the Country House, Oxford / New York 2016, Oxford University Press, X u. 304 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Michael Maurer) Diest, Johann von, Wirtschaftspolitik und Lobbyismus im 18. Jahrhundert. Eine quellenbasierte Neubewertung der wechselseitigen Einflussnahme von Obrigkeit und Wirtschaft in Brandenburg-Preußen und Kurhannover (Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit, 23), Göttingen 2016, V&amp;R unipress, 392 S., € 55,00. 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The western world has an enthusiasm for blondes that amounts to a cultural fetish. As a signifier the blonde is loaded: blondes have more fun, blondes are dumb, blondes are more sexually available, blondes are less capable, less serious, less complicated. The blonde is, in modern day patriarchy, often portrayed as the ideal woman. The Oxford Dictionary defines a Goddess as a female deity or a woman who is adored for her beauty. The Blonde Goddess then is the ultimate contemporary female, worshipped for her appearance, erotically idolised. She may be a Playboy bunny, the hot girl on the beach or the larger than life billboard, but everywhere her image haunts mere mortals: the men who can’t have her and the women who can’t be her. During the second wave of feminism the Blonde Goddess was vilified as an unrealistic illusion and exploitive fantasy and our enthusiasm for her was roundly challenged. She was a stereotype, feminists cried, a site of oppression, a phoney construct. Men were judged harshly for desiring her and women were discouraged from being her. Well beyond hair colour and its power as signifier the very notion of Goddessness, of being adored for one’s beauty, was considered repressive. Women were called upon to refuse participation in blondeness (in its signifying sense) and Goddessness (in the sense of being revered for attractiveness) and men were chastised for being superficial and chauvinistic.Nevertheless, decades later, many men continue to lust after her, women (and increasingly younger girls) work ever harder at being her — bleaching, shaving, breast augmenting and botoxing — and the media promotes endless representations of her. If the second wave thought the Blonde Goddess would give up the ghost easily it was mistaken but what their enthusiastic critique did enable is the birth of a new type of Blonde Goddess, one generally considered to be stronger, more empowered and a better role model for the 21st century Miss. Though the likes of Mae West hinted at this type of Blonde Goddess well before Madonna it was not until Madonna’s generation that she went mainstream. There have been many Blonde Goddess “It girls” — Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield and Debbie Harry (singer of the band Blondie) to name a few, but two in particular stand out as the embodiment of these types; their bodies and identities going beyond the image-making machinery to become a kind of Blonde Goddess performance art. They are Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The enthusiasm for blondeness and Goddessness routinely gives rise to faddish cultural enthusasisms. In Monroe’s day her curvaceous figure was upheld as the model female form. After Madonna appeared with her bangles and layered tops girls all across America and around the world dressed like her. Drawing on Angela Carter’s feminist readings of De Sade in The Sadeian Woman and envisioning Monroe and Madonna, two of the most fêted examples of Blonde Goddessness in history, as De Sade’s Justine and Juliette reveals their erotic currency as both couched in patriarchal gender relations and binding us to it. Considering Monroe and Madonna with the Marquis De Sade characters Justine and Juliette in mind illustrates that Goddessness as I’m defining it here — the enthusiasm which with women rely on beauty for affirmation and men’s enthusiastic feeding of that dependence — amounts to a feminine masquerade that disempowers women from a real experience of femaleness, emancipation and eroticism. When feminists in the 60s and 70s critiqued the Blonde Goddess as the poster-child for good old-fashioned sexism it was women like Monroe they had in mind. What feminists argued for they largely got — access to life beyond the domestic domain, financial autonomy, self-determination — but, as a De Sadian viewing of Madonna will show, we’re still compromised. While many feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin, rejected the Marquis De Sade, notorious libertine and writer, as a dishonourable pornographer, others, such as Luce Irigaray and Angela Carter, felt he accurately reflected the social structures and relations of western civilisation and was therefore fertile ground for the exploration of what it is to be a woman in our culture. Justine and Juliette are erotic novels that recount the very different fortunes of two dissimilar sisters. They are beautiful (of course) and as such they are Goddesses, even while being defiled and defiling. Monroe and Madonna are metaphorical sisters in a man's world (and it was an infamous touch of video genius when Madonna acknowledged as much by doing Monroe in the video for “Material Girl” early on in her career). Yet one is a survivor and one isn't. One is living and one is long dead. Monroe is the Blonde Goddess as victim; Madonna is the Blonde Goddess as Villain. Monroe cast a shadow; Madonna has danced with the shadow. Both Marilyn and Madonna assumed a feminine masquerade so successful, so omnipotent, that they became not just Goddesses, desired by men, admired by women, and emulated by girls, but the most iconic and celebrated Blonde Goddesses of their age. It was, and in Madonna’s case still is, a highly sexualised masquerade that utilises and promotes itself as a commodity. Both women milked this masquerade to achieve notoriety and wealth in a world where women are disadvantaged in the public sphere. Some read this kind of exploitation of erotic desire as a mark of subjugation while others see it as a feminist act: a knowing usage of means toward a self-possessed end, but as Carter will help demonstrate, masquerade is, either way, an artificial construct and our enthusiasm for trading in it comes at a high price. Monroe, the sexy, fragile child-woman, was the firstborn of the sisters. Her star rose in the moralistic fifties, and by all accounts she spent most of her time in the limelight frustrated by her career and by the studio’s control of it. She was “owned”, and she rebelled against it, fleeing to New York City to study acting at the renowned Actors Studio. She became a devoted student of method acting, a technique that encourages actors to plumb their emotional depths and experiences, though her own psychological instability threatened her career. She was scandalously difficult to work with: chronically late, forgetful, and self-indulgent; and she died alone, intoxicated and naked. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems likely that a cocktail of mental disturbance, man trouble, and substance addiction led to her premature death by overdose in 1962. Monroe’s traditional take on blondeness and Goddessness embodied the purely feminine masquerade and translated to the classic Justine trajectory.Madonna can be thought of as Monroe’s post-modern younger sister, the next generation of Blonde Goddessness. Known for her self-determination, business savvy and self-control Madonna’s self-parody and decades long survival and triumph in a male dominated industry is remarkable. Perhaps this is where the sisters differ most: Madonna challenges the dominant semiotic code of traditional gender roles in that she combines her feminine masquerade with masculinity, witness the pointy cone bra worn with pinstripe trousers and monocle on the “Blonde Ambition” tour. Madonna is the new blonde — shrewder, more forceful, more man-like. She plays girly in her feminine masquerade, but she does so self-consciously, with a wink, as the second sister who has observed and learned the lesson of the first. In Carter’s exploration of the characters of Justine and Juliette she notes that when the orphaned girls are turned out of the convent to fend for themselves, Justine, the sister whose goodness and innocence is constantly met with the brutality and betrayal of men, "embarks on a dolorous pilgrimage in which each preferred sanctuary turns out to be a new prison and all the human relations offered her are a form of servitude" (39). During Monroe’s pilgrimage from foster care, to young wife, to teen model, to star she found herself trapped in an abusive studio system that could not nurture her and instead raped her over and over again in the sense that it thwarted her personal aspirations as an actor and her desire for creative autonomy by overpowering her with its demands. Monroe did not own her own life and sexuality so much as function as a site of objectification, a possession of the Tinsel Town suits. In her personal life she was endowed with the “feminine” trait of feeling; she was, like Justine, "the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulcher, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape” (Carter 49).In real life and in most of her characters Monroe was kind hearted, generous, caring and compassionate. It is this heart that Justine values most; whatever happens to the body, no matter how impure it becomes, the heart remains sacred. The victim with heart is morally superior to her masters. In a suffering that becomes second nature, "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity” (57).Conspiracy theories and rumors of Monroe's suffering and possible murder at the hands of the Kennedys (cast as evil Sadian masters) abound. Suicide attempts, drug dependency, and nervous breakdowns were the order of the day in her final years. The continuing fascination with Monroe lies in the fact that she was the archetypal sullied virgin. Feminine virtue and goodness require sexual innocence and purity. If Monroe’s innocence (a feature of films like Some Like it Hot) was too often confused with stupidity she made the most of it by cornering the market on bimbo roles (Gentleman Prefer Blondes is her ultimate dumb blonde performance). But even those who thought she couldn’t act realised that her appeal was potent because her innocence was infused with the potentiality of an uncontainable libidinous energy. Like Justine, Juliette was a woman born into a man's world, but in her corruption Juliette decided beat men at their own game, to transcend her destiny as woman at any cost. Carter says of Juliette: She is rationality personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed to produce two results for herself — financial profit and libidinal gratification. (79)Indeed, it could be said that it is financial profit and libidinal gratification that most defines Madonna in the public’s eye. She is obscenely rich and often cited for her calculated re-inventions and assertive sexuality (which peaked in the early nineties with the album Erotica and the graphic Sex book). Madonna, like Juliette, is a story-teller. Even if she isn’t always the author of her songs she creates narrative interplay using song, fashion, and video. Like Juliette Madonna takes control of her destiny. She heads her own production company and is intimately involved with the details of her multi-faceted career. Like Monroe Madonna is said to have slept around strategically in her pre-stardom years, but unlike Monroe she was not passed around. The men in Madonna’s life early in her career were critical to advancing it. From Dan Gilroy, who helped form her first rock band, the Breakfast Club to DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who remixed tracks on her debut album Madonna took every step up the ladder of success guided by a precision instinct for self-preservation and promotion. She was not used up as she used others. Her trail leaves no sign of weakness, just one envelope-pushing accomplishment after another, with a few failures along the way, most notably in film. Though very different central to both Monroe and Madonna’s lives and careers is a mega-watt erotic appeal, an appeal that has everything to do with their respective differential repetitions of being blonde.In Eroticism Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the fusion of separate objects involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In Bataille’s work these words have a specific and unconventional meaning. Discontinuity describes our individuality, our separateness from each other, a separateness that reigns in our social and work-a-day lives. Continuity refers to dissolution of separateness that is most associated with death but which is also experienced by way of exalted living through a taste of transcendence. Bataille posits three types of eroticism: physical, emotional and religious and he claims that they all “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (15).Here Bataille meets De Sade. In the Introduction to Eroticism Bataille speaks of De Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the “licentious image.” Further, Bataille declares that eroticism is not just an enthusiasm; it is the enthusiasm of humankind. “It seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions,” he says. “I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions” (12). He goes on to state that our enthusiasm/eroticism is not just an aspect of our being, but its driving force: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15).Human beauty is, Bataille suggests, measured by its distance from the animal — the more ethereal (light and unearthly) the female shape and texture, and the less clear its relation to animal reality, the more beautiful — the erotic moment lies in profaning that beauty, reducing it to its animal essence. Perhaps this is another reason why blondeness matters and signifies sex, conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal “light” which evokes the sacredness of continuity while denying the animal (the hairy and base reality of the body). This is the invitation The Blonde Goddess makes to defilement, her begging to be reduced to her private parts. Juliette/Madonna subverts her blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in the profanation. Madonna has openly embraced gay culture, S & M, exhibitionism, fetishism, role-play and religious symbolism placing herself centre stage at all times. Justine/Monroe attracted erotic victimisation while Juliette/Madonna refused it by sleight of hand, and here again De Sade can help make sense of this. The works that illustrate this difference between Justine/Monroe and Juliette/Madonna most clearly are The Misfits and Truth or Dare. The Misfits is a beautiful and delicate film, written by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller. The role of Roslyn is rumored to be based on Monroe's own character and her relationship with its three metaphorically dying cowboys reveals an enchanting and pale Justine broken by the dysfunctional and dominating masculinity around her. In contrast, Truth or Dare is a self styled documentary of Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour. It portrays Madonna striking a pose as the tough-talking Queen of the castle, calling the shots, with a bevy of play-thing pawns scuttling beneath her. But, opposite as these characterisations are, some sameness emanates from the two women in these works. Something haunts the screen and it is this: the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe. And here Carter helps solve the mystery: "She [Juliette] is just as her sister is, a description of a type of female behavior rather than a model of female behavior and her triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine's disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis” (79).In other words, in Carters’ view Justine/Monroe as heart personified maintains the traditional role of woman as body, as one belonging to the private sphere who pays dearly for entering public life, while Juliette/Madonna as reason personified infiltrates the male dominated territory of culture. Unlike Monroe, Madonna gets away with being a public figure, flourishes even, but as Carter’s Juliette, this victory has required her to betray herself in some way. It is “ambivalent” and Madonna doesn’t quite get off scot free. Madonna has been progressive in that she moved away from the traditional feminine role of body in a forbidding industry, but even though her lucrative maneuvering is more sophisticated than Monroe’s careening, she walks a fine line. In De Sade the sexuality of a libertine is a male identified desire in which women are objectified and exploited. Madonna’s trick is to manifest in feminine masquerade then take an ironic turn in objectifying and exploiting herself in what amounts to a split persona, half woman, half man. In other words she seduces herself under our gaze, and she dares to enjoy it. Ultimately, neither sister can escape the social structure into which she was born. Monroe, who was unable to live as a real woman, lives on as a legend, a Blonde Goddess in the eternal feminine masquerade. Madonna is reborn every time she re-invents herself but it’s hard to tell, with all the costume changing, who the real Madonna is. It was the unactualised real woman that the second wave tried to free by daring to suggest that she existed and was valuable beyond signification and Goddessness and that she had a right to her own experience of enthusiasm/eroticism rather than being relegated to the role of being the “licentious image” for the male gaze. The attack on the Blonde Goddess underestimated the deeply rooted psychic/emotional conditioning at play on both sides of the Blonde Goddess game. Here we are in a new millennium in which the ‘pornified’ Blonde Goddess is everywhere but even if she’s more unfettered and sexually active that deeply rooted conditioning remains. For Carter neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither are Monroe nor Madonna. However, Carter does speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” (79). Blondeness as a signifier and Goddessness as a function inhibit an experience of shared enthusiasm and eroticism between men and women. When Bataille speaks of nakedness he means eroticism as the destruction of the self-contained character that gives rise to an experience of continuity. This kind of absolute nakedness is impossible for those trapped in the cycle of signification and functional relations. I suggest that the liberation project of the second wave of feminism stalled when in our desire to not be Justines we simply became more akin to Juliette. Blondeness as a signifier is still problematic, and Goddessness of the kind I have spoken of here — women’s attachment to using beauty to garner adoration in place of an innate sense of self and worth and men’s willingness to patronise it — is still rampant and both the Justine and Juliette feminine masquerades produce a false economy of enthusiasm and eroticism that denies the experience of authenticity and the true potential of relationship. The challenge now is one that most needs to be met not in the spotlight but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our lives as the struggle for synthesis continues in those of us, female and male, blonde, brunette, redhead, black or grey-haired, who long for an experience of ourselves and each other that transcends masquerade. ReferencesCarter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago Press, 1979.Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1987.Madonna. Erotica. Warner Bros, 1992.———. “Material Girl.” Like a Virgin. WEA/Warner Bros, 1984.——— and Steven Meisel. Sex. Warner Bros, 1992. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston.. MGM, 1961. Some Like It Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder, Billy. MGM, 1959. Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. Live/Artisan, 1991.

Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 2000. Bell, David. “Bodies, Technologies, Spaces: On ‘Dogging’.” Sexualities 9.4 (2006): 387-408. Bennett, Colin. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 2001. Bolt, Nate. “The Binary Proletariat.” First Monday 5.5 (2000). 25 Feb 2010 ‹http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/issue5_5/bolt/index.html›. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Routledge, 2008 Burns, Kelli. Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Castells, Manuel. “The Urban Ideology.” The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Ed. Ida Susser. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 34-70. Cossins, Anne, Jane Goodman-Delahunty, and Kate O’Brien. “Uncertainty and Misconceptions about Child Sexual Abuse: Implications for the Criminal Justice System.” Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law 16.4 (2009): 435-452. Dalton, David. “Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘Homocriminality’ in Beat Spaces in Australia.” Law & Critique 18.3 (2007): 375-405. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California P, 1984. Dennis, Kingsley. “Keeping a Close Watch: The Rise of Self-Surveillance and the Threat of Digital Exposure.” The Sociological Review 56.3 (2008): 347-357. Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. “Outlines of a World Coming into Existence: Pervasive Computing and the Ethics of Forgetting.” Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design 34.3 (2007): 431-445. Doel, Marcus, and David Clarke. “Transpolitical Urbanism: Suburban Anomaly and Ambient Fear.” Space & Culture 1.2 (1998): 13-36. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1999. Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Gumpert, Gary, and Susan Drucker. “Privacy, Predictability or Serendipity and Digital Cities.” Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches. Berlin: Springer, 2002. 26-40. Hassan, Robert. The Information Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Hillier, Bill. “Cities as Movement Economies.” Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution. Ed. Peter Drioege. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997. 295-342. Holmes, David. “Cybercommuting on an Information Superhighway: The Case of Melbourne’s CityLink.” The Cybercities Reader. Ed. Stephen Graham. London: Routledge, 2004. 173-178. Huey, Laura, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle. “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of CounterSurveillance as a Tool of Resistance.” Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. Ed. Torin Monahan. London: Routledge, 2006. 149-166. Ingebretsen, Edward. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. iSee. “Now More Than Ever”. 20 Feb 2010 ‹http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee/info.html›. Jackson, Margaret, and Julian Ligertwood. "Identity Management: Is an Identity Card the Solution for Australia?” Prometheus 24.4 (2006): 379-387. Jermyn, Deborah. Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV. London: IB Tauris, 2007. Kullenberg, Christopher. “The Social Impact of IT: Surveillance and Resistance in Present-Day Conflicts.” FlfF-Kommunikation 1 (2009): 37-40. Lyon, David. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. London: Routledge, 2003. Marr, David. The Henson Case. Melbourne: Text, 2008. Maynard, Margaret. Dress and Globalisation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Merchant, Carolyn. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Monmonier, Mark. “Geolocation and Locational Privacy: The ‘Inside’ Story on Geospatial Tracking’.” Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-disciplinary Conversation. Ed. Katherine Strandburg and Daniela Raicu. Berlin: Springer, 2006. 75-92. Ndalianis, Angela. “Architecture of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles.” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Tradition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 355-374. Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Sayre, Shay. “T-shirt Messages: Fortune or Folly for Advertisers.” Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility. Ed. Sammy Danna. New York: Popular Press, 1992. 73-82. Savitch, Henry. Cities in a Time of Terror: Space, Territory and Local Resilience. Armonk: Sharpe, 2008. Scheingold, Stuart. The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession. Philadephia: Temple UP, 1992. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1995. Shafron-Perez, Sharon. “Average Teenager or Sex Offender: Solutions to the Legal Dilemma Caused by Sexting.” John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law 26.3 (2009): 431-487. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1971. Staples, William. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Steiner, George. George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Wark, Mackenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women. Berkeley: University of California P, 1991. Wood, David. “Towards Spatial Protocol: The Topologies of the Pervasive Surveillance Society.” Augmenting Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Eds. Allesandro Aurigi and Fiorella de Cindio. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 93-106.

Film adaptation is an ambiguous term, both semantically and conceptually. Among its multiple connotations, the word “adaptation” may signify an artistic composition that has been recast in a new form, an alteration in the structure or function of an organism to make it better fitted for survival, or a modification in individual or social activity in adjustment to social surroundings. What all these definitions have in common is a tacitly implied hierarchy and valorisation: they presume the existence of an origin to which the recast work of art is indebted, or of biological or societal constraints to which the individual should conform in order to survive. The bias implied in the very connotations of the word has affected the theory and study of film adaptation. This bias is most noticeably reflected in the criterion of fidelity, which has been the major standard for evaluating film adaptations ever since George Bluestone’s 1957 pivotal Novels into Films. “Fidelity criticism,” observes McFarlane, “depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (7). But such an approach, Leitch argues, is rooted in several unacknowledged but entrenched misconceptions. It privileges literature over film, casts a false aura of originality on the precursor text, and ignores the fact that all texts, whether literary or cinematic, are essentially intertexts. As Kristeva, along with other poststructuralist theorists, has taught us, any text is an amalgam of others, a part of a larger fabric of cultural discourse (64-91). “A text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, writes Barthes in 1977 (146), and 15 years later film theoretician Robert Stam elaborates: “The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (57). The poststructuralists’ view of texts draws on the structuralists’ view of language, which is conceived as a system that pre-exists the individual speaker and determines subjectivity. These assumptions counter the Romantic ideology of individualism, with its associated concepts of authorial originality and a text’s single, unified meaning, based on the author’s intention. “It is language which speaks, not the author,” declares Barthes, “to write is to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not me” (143). In consequence, the fidelity criterion of film adaptation may be regarded as an outdated vestige of the Romantic world-view. If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid. Film adaptation should rather be perceived as an intertextual practice, contributing to a dynamic interpretive exchange between the literary and cinematic texts, an exchange in which each text can be enriched, modified or subverted. The relationship between Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001) is a case in point. Here there was no source text, as the writing of the story did not precede the making of the film. The two processes were concurrent, and were triggered by the same basic idea, which Jonathan discussed with his brother during a road trip from Chicago to LA. Christopher developed the idea into a film and Jonathan turned it into a short story; he also collaborated in the film script. Moreover, Jonathan designed otnemem> (memento in reverse), the official Website, which contextualises the film’s fictional world, while increasing its ambiguity. What was adapted here was an idea, and each text explores in different ways the narrative, ontological and epistemological implications of that idea. The story, the film and the Website produce a multi-layered intertextual fabric, in which each thread potentially unravels the narrative possibilities suggested by the other threads. Intertextuality functions to increase ambiguity, and is therefore thematically relevant, for “Memento Mori”, Memento and otnemem> are three fragmented texts in search of a coherent narrative. The concept of narrative may arguably be one of the most overused and under-defined terms in academic discourse. In the context of the present paper, the most productive approach is that of Wilkens, Hughes, Wildemuth and Marchionini, who define narrative as a chain of events related by cause and effect, occurring in time and space, and involving agency and intention. In fiction or in film, intention is usually associated with human agents, who can be either the characters or the narrator. It is these agents who move along the chain of causes and effects, so that cause-effect and agency work together to make the narrative. This narrative paradigm underpins mainstream Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell writes: The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. … The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement, or non achievement, of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character … . In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. (157) The large body of films flourishing in America between the years 1941 and 1958 collectively dubbed film noir subvert this narrative formula, but only partially. As accurately observed by Telotte, the devices of flashback and voice-over associated with the genre implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth and foregrounds the rift between reality and perception (3, 20). Yet in spite of the narrative experimentation that characterises the genre, the viewer of a classical film noir film can still figure out what happened in the fictional world and why, and can still reconstruct the story line according to sequential and causal schemata. This does not hold true for the intertextual composite consisting of Memento, “Memento Mori” and otnemem>. The basic idea that generated the project was that of a self-appointed detective who obsessively investigates and seeks to revenge his wife’s rape and murder, while suffering from a total loss of short term memory. The loss of memory precludes learning and the acquisition of knowledge, so the protagonist uses scribbled notes, Polaroid photos and information tattooed onto his skin, in an effort to reconstruct his fragmented reality into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Narrativity is visually foregrounded: the protagonist reads his body to make sense of his predicament. To recap, the narrative paradigm relies on a triad of terms: connectedness (a chain of events), causality, and intentionality. The basic situation in Memento and “Memento Mori”, which involves a rupture in the protagonist’s/narrator’s psychological time, entails a breakdown of all three pre-requisites of narrativity. Since the protagonists of both story and film are condemned, by their memory deficiency, to living in an eternal present, they are unable to experience the continuity of time and the connectedness of events. The disruption of temporality inevitably entails the breakdown of causality: the central character’s inability to determine the proper sequence of events prevents him from being able to distinguish between cause and effect. Finally, the notion of agency is also problematised, because agency implies the existence of a stable, identifiable subject, and identity is contingent on the subject’s uninterrupted continuity across time and change. The subversive potential of the basic narrative situation is heightened by the fact that both Memento and “Memento Mori” are focalised through the consciousness and perception of the main character. This means that the story, as well as the film, is conveyed from the point of view of a narrator who is constitutionally unable to experience his life as a narrative. This conundrum is addressed differently in the story and in the film, both thematically and formally. “Memento Mori” presents, in a way, the backdrop to Memento. It focuses on the figure of Earl, a brain damaged protagonist suffering from anterograde amnesia, who is staying in a blank, anonymous room, that we assume to be a part of a mental institution. We also assume that Earl’s brain damage results from a blow to the head that he received while witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. Earl is bent on avenging his wife’s death. To remind himself to do so, he writes messages to himself, which he affixes on the walls of his room. Leonard Shelby is Memento’s cinematic version of Earl. By Leonard’s own account, he has an inability to form memories. This, he claims, is the result of neurological damage sustained during an attack on him and his wife, an attack in which his wife was raped and killed. To be able to pursue his wife’s killers, he has recourse to various complex and bizarre devices—Polaroid photos, a quasi-police file, a wall chart, and inscriptions tattooed onto his skin—in order to replace his memory. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes to be named “John G.” Leonard’s faulty memory is deviously manipulated by various people he encounters, of whom the most crucial are a bartender called Natalie and an undercover cop named Teddy, both involved in a lucrative drug deal. So far for a straightforward account of the short story and the film. But there is nothing straightforward about either Memento or “Memento Mori”. The basic narrative premise, consisting of a protagonist/narrator suffering from a severe memory deficit, is a condition entailing far-reaching psychological and philosophical implications. In the following discussion, I would like to focus on these two implications and to tie them in to the notions of narrativity, intertextuality, and eventually, adaptation. The first implication of memory loss is the dissolution of identity. Our sense of identity is contingent on our ability to construct an uninterrupted personal narrative, a narrative in which the present self is continuous with the past self. In Oneself as Another, his philosophical treatise on the concept of selfhood, Paul Ricoeur queries: “do we not consider human lives to be more readable when they have been interpreted in terms of the stories that people tell about them?” He concludes by observing that “interpretation of the self … finds in narrative, among others signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation” (ft. 114). Ricoeur further suggests that the sense of selfhood is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness. The loss of memory subverts the last two attributes of personal identity, the sense of continuity and permanence over time, and thereby also ruptures the first two. In “Memento Mori” and Memento, the disintegration of identity is formally rendered through the fragmentation of the literary and cinematic narratives, respectively. In Jonathan Nolan’s short story, traditional linear narrative is disrupted by shifts in point of view and by graphic differences in the shape of the print on the page. “Memento Mori” is alternately narrated in the first and in the third person. The first person segments, which constitute the present of the story, are written by Earl to himself. As his memory span is ten-minute long, his existence consists of “just the same ten minutes, over and over again” (Nolan, 187). Fully aware of the impending fading away of memory, Earl’s present-version self leaves notes to his future-version self, in an effort to situate him in time and space and to motivate him to the final action of revenge. The literary device of alternating points of view formally subverts the notion of identity as a stable unity. Paradoxically, rather than setting him apart from the rest of us, Earl’s brain damage foregrounds his similarity. “Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions,” observes Earl, comforting his future self by affirming his basic humanity, “Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing” (Nolan, 189). His observation echoes Beckett’s description of the individual as “the seat of a constant process of decantation … to the vessel containing the fluid of past time” (Beckett, 4-5). Identity, suggests Jonathan Nolan, following Beckett, among other things, is a theoretical construct. Human beings are works in progress, existing in a state of constant flux. We are all fragmented beings—the ten-minute man is only more so. A second strategy employed by Jonathan to convey the discontinuity of the self is the creation of visual graphic disunity. As noted by Yellowlees Douglas, among others, the static, fixed nature of the printed page and its austere linearity make it ideal for the representation of our mental construct of narrative. The text of “Memento Mori” appears on the page in three different font types: the first person segments, Earl’s admonitions to himself, appear in italics; the third person segments are written in regular type; and the notes and signs are capitalised. Christopher Nolan obviously has recourse to different strategies to reach the same ends. His principal technique, and the film’s most striking aspect, is its reversed time sequence. The film begins with a crude Polaroid flash photograph of a man’s body lying on a decaying wooden floor. The image in the photo gradually fades, until the camera sucks the picture up. The photograph presents the last chronological event; the film then skips backwards in ten-minute increments, mirroring the protagonist’s memory span. But the film’s time sequence is not simply a reversed linear structure. It is a triple-decker narrative, mirroring the three-part organisation of the story. In the opening scene, one comes to realise that the film-spool is running backwards. After several minutes the film suddenly reverses and runs forward for a few seconds. Then there is a sudden cut to a different scene, in black and white, where the protagonist (who we have just learned is called Leonard) begins to talk, out of the blue, about his confusion. Soon the film switches to a color scene, again unconnected, in which the “action” of the film begins. In the black and white scenes, which from then on are interspersed with the main action, Leonard attempts to understand what is happening to him and to explain (to an unseen listener) the nature of his condition. The “main action” of the film follows a double temporal structure: while each scene, as a unit of action, runs normally forward, each scene is triggered by the following, rather than by the preceding scene, so that we are witnessing a story whose main action goes back in time as the film progresses (Hutchinson and Read, 79). A third narrative thread, interspersed with the other two, is a story that functions as a foil to the film’s main action. It is the story of Sammy Jankis: one of the cases that Leonard worked on in his past career as an insurance investigator. Sammy was apparently suffering from anterograde amnesia, the same condition that Leonard is suffering from now. Sammy’s wife filed an insurance claim on his behalf, a claim that Leonard rejected on the grounds that Sammy’s condition was merely psychosomatic. Hoping to confirm Leonard’s diagnosis, Sammy’s diabetic wife puts her husband to the test. He fails the test as he tenderly administers multiple insulin injections to her, thereby causing her death. As Leonard’s beloved wife also suffered from diabetes, and as Teddy (the undercover cop) eventually tells Leonard that Sammy never had a wife, the Sammy Jankis parable functions as a mise en abyme, which can either corroborate or subvert the narrative that Leonard is attempting to construct of his own life. Sammy may be seen as Leonard’s symbolic double in that his form of amnesia foreshadows the condition with which Leonard will eventually be afflicted. This interpretation corroborates Leonard’s personal narrative of his memory loss, while tainting him with the blame for the death of Sammy’s wife. But the camera also suggests a more unsettling possibility—Leonard may ultimately be responsible for the death of his own wife. The scene in which Sammy, condemned by his amnesia, administers to his wife a repeated and fatal shot of insulin, is briefly followed by a scene of Leonard pinching his own wife’s thigh before her insulin shot, a scene recurring in the film like a leitmotif. The juxtaposition of the two scenes suggests that it is Leonard who, mistakenly or deliberately, has killed his wife, and that ever since he has been projecting his guilt onto others: the innocent victims of his trail of revenge. In this ironic interpretive twist, it is Leonard, rather than Sammy, who has been faking his amnesia. The parable of Sammy Jankis highlights another central concern of Memento and “Memento Mori”: the precarious nature of truth. This is the second psychological and philosophical implication of what Leonard persistently calls his “condition”, namely his loss of memory. The question explicitly raised in the film is whether memory records or creates, if it retains the lived life or reshapes it into a narrative that will confer on it unity and meaning. The answer is metaphorically suggested by the recurring shots of a mirror, which Leonard must use to read his body inscriptions. The mirror, as Lacan describes it, offers the infant his first recognition as a coherent, unique self. But this recognition is a mis-recognition, for the reflection has a coherence and unity that the subject both lacks and desires. The body inscriptions that Leonard can read only in the mirror do not necessarily testify to the truth. But they do enable him to create a narrative that makes his life worth living. A Lacanian reading of the mirror image has two profoundly unsettling implications. It establishes Leonard as a morally deficient, rather than neurologically deficient, human being, and it suggests that we are not fundamentally different from him. Leonard’s intricate system of notes and body inscriptions builds up an inventory of set representations to which he can refer in all his future experiences. Thus when he wakes up naked in bed with a woman lying beside him, he looks among his Polaroid photographs for a picture which he can match with her, which will tell him what the woman’s name is and what he can expect from her on the basis of past experience. But this, suggest Hutchinson and Read, is an external representation of operations that all of us perform mentally (89). We all respond to sensory input by constructing internal representations that form the foundations of our psyche. This view underpins current theories of language and of the mind. Semioticians tell us that the word, the signifier, refers to a mental representation of an object rather than to the object itself. Cognitivists assume that cognition consists in the operation of mental items which are symbols for real entities. Leonard’s apparently bizarre method of apprehending reality is thus essentially an externalisation of memory. But if, cognitively and epistemologically speaking, Lennie is less different from us than we would like to think, this implication may also extend to our moral nature. Our complicity with Leonard is mainly established through the film’s complex temporal structure, which makes us viscerally share the protagonist’s/narrator’s confusion and disorientation. We become as unable as he is to construct a single, coherent and meaningful narrative: the film’s obscurity is built in. Memento’s ambiguity is enhanced by the film’s Website, which presents a newspaper clipping about the attack on Leonard and his wife, torn pages from police and psychiatric reports, and a number of notes from Leonard to himself. While blurring the boundaries between story and film by suggesting that Leonard, like Earl, may have escaped from a mental institution, otnemem> also provides evidence that can either confirm or confound our interpretive efforts, such as a doctor’s report suggesting that “John G.” may be a figment of Leonard’s imagination. The precarious nature of truth is foregrounded by the fact that the narrative Leonard is trying to construct, as well as the narrative in which Christopher Nolan has embedded him, is a detective story. The traditional detective story proceeds from a two-fold assumption: truth exists, and it can be known. But Memento and “Memento Mori” undermine this epistemological confidence. They suggest that truth, like identity, is a fictional construct, derived from the tales we tell ourselves and recount to others. These tales do not coincide with objective reality; they are the prisms we create in order to understand reality, to make our lives bearable and worth living. Narratives are cognitive patterns that we construct to make sense of the world. They convey our yearning for coherence, closure, and a single unified meaning. The overlapping and conflicting threads interweaving Memento, “Memento Mori” and the Website otnemem> simultaneously expose and resist our nostalgia for unity, by evoking a multiplicity of meanings and creating an intertextual web that is the essence of all adaptation. References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1957. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Hutchinson, Phil, and Rupert Read. “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.” Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. 72-93. Kristeva, Julia. “World, Dialogue and Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Rudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ēcrits: A Selection. New York: Norton 1977. 1-7. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Nolan, Jonathan. “Memento Mori.” The Making of Memento. Ed. James Mottram. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 183-95. Nolan, Jonathan. otnemem. 24 April 2007 http://otnemem.com>. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-76. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. Wilkens, T., A. Hughes, B.M. Wildemuth, and G. Marchionini. “The Role of Narrative in Understanding Digital Video.” 24 April 2007 http://www.open-video.org/papers/Wilkens_Asist_2003.pdf>. Yellowlees Douglass, J. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do.” 24 April 2007 http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (May 2007) "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>.

Given that the new advances in technology in the 1980s had a major impact on the carefully constructed myth of authenticity in horror and pornography, ranging from flawless special effects at one extreme to the idea of the handheld voyeur movie at the other, it is rather ironic that the key progenitor to the erotic-grotesque form is a long-established and in some ways basic form: the pen and paper art of manga. This medium can be traced back to pillow books and the illustrated tradition in Japanese culture – a culture where even written language has evolved from drawings rather than alphabetical ciphers. Technological innovation notwithstanding, the 1980s is an extraordinary period for manga and it is perhaps here that we find the most startling hybridisation of porn and horror where, to borrow a phrase from Liz Kotz, “pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire” (Kotz 188). Many of the most extreme examples of 1980s manga repeatedly confront the reader with tales that intersperse and interlink imagery and narrative sequences of sex, violence and the abject. Suehiro Maruo is in many ways a commercially marginalised but highly renowned manga artist of the erotic-grotesque. His full-length manga novel Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a sweeping tale of carnival freaks redolent with sex and sadism, but in this article I will address his short comic strips from around the same period. The stories collected in Suehiro Maruo’s Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001) present a mortifying vision of sex and horror with stories that draw on the erotically tinged world of classical Japanese theatre and the short fiction of Edogawa Rampo but push them into the domain of extreme pornography. In “Putrid Night” (1981), an abusive man, Todoroki, subjects his teenage wife, Sayoko, to vicious cunnilingus and anal sex. In one sequence, Sayoko gives oral sex while Todoroki runs a samurai sword across her cheek. In her misery, Sayoko finds true love in the teenage boy Michio. Their illicit sexual love is tender and fulfilling and yet the imagery that intersperses it is ominous: when they have sex in a field, their conjoined bodies are juxtaposed with rotting fruit infested with ants and Michio’s erect penis is juxtaposed with a serpent in the grass. Sayoko and Michio plot to murder Todoroki. The result is disastrous, with Todoroki cutting off the arms of his wife and her lover through the elbows, and lancing their eyeballs. In the carnage, Todoroki has sex with Sayoko. The young lovers do not die, and Todoroki keeps them alive in a cell as “pets” (19). In a grotesque triumph of true love, Todoroki, to his horror, spies on his two victims and sees them, their eye sockets and arm stumps pouring blood, tenderly making love. In “Shit Soup” (1982), Maruo produces a comic strip with no story as such and is therefore a highly simplistic pornographic narrative. We witness a menage a trois with a young woman and her two male lovers and the comic presents their various exploits. In their opening bout, the woman squeezes a cow’s eyeball into her vagina and one man sucks it out of her while the other licks her beneath the eyelid. Later, the three excrete onto dinner plates and dine upon their mixed shit. The story ends with the three laughing deliriously as they fall from a cliff, an emblem of their joyful abandon and the intersection of love and death. As epilogue, Maruo describes the taste of excrement and invites us to taste our own. This ending is an ingenious narrative decision, as it turns on the reader and strives to deny us – the viewer/voyeur – any comfortable distance: we are invited, as it were, to eat shit literally and if we refuse, we can eat shit metaphorically. Suehiro Maruo’s work can also be subtle: in what looks like a realistic image at the opening of “A Season in Hell” (1981), a dead teenage girl lies, covered in “gore and faeces” (45), on a grassy path which resembles the hairy opening to female sexual organs. The surrounding field is like a pudenda and the double arch of the nearby bridge resembles breasts. Maruo can thus outwit the censorship tradition in which pubic hair is generally forbidden (it does appear in some of Maruo’s comic strips), although erections, ejaculations and hairless openings and organs would seem to be always graphically permissible. Probably the most excessive vision in Ultra-Gash Inferno is “The Great Masturbator” (1982). In this, Suehiro Maruo presents a family in which the father repeatedly dresses his daughter up as a schoolgirl in order to rape her, even cutting a vagina-sized hole into her abdomen. Eventually, he slices her with numerous openings so that he can penetrate her with his fists as well as his penis. Meanwhile, her brother embarks on an incestuous relationship with his ancient aunt. After her death, he acquires her false teeth and uses them to masturbate. He ejaculates onto her grave, splitting his head open on the tombstone. The excess and debauchery make it a shocking tale, a kind of violent manga reworking of Robert Crumb’s cartoon “The family that lays together, stays together” (91) from Snatch 2 (January 1969). Like Crumb, we could argue that Maruo employs explicit sexual imagery and an ethos of sexual taboo with the same purpose of transgressing and provoking the jargon of particular social norms. The political dimension to Maruo’s work finds its most blatant treatment in “Planet of the Jap” (1985), anthologised in Comics Underground Japan (1996). This manga strip is a devastating historical-political work presented as a history lesson in which Japan won the Second World War, having dropped atomic bombs on Los Angeles and San Francisco. The comic is full of startling iconic imagery such as the Japanese flag being hoisted over the shell-pocked Statue of Liberty and the public execution of General MacArthur. Of course, this being Maruo, there is a pornographic sequence. In a lengthy and graphic episode, an American mother is raped by Japanese soldiers while her son is murdered. As these horrors are committed, the lyrics of a patriotic song about present-day Japan, written by the Ministry of Education, form the textual narrative. Although the story could be seen as a comment on the subjection of Japan at the end of the Second World War – a sustained ironic inversion of history – it seems more likely to be a condemnation of the phase of Japanese history when, tragically, a minority of “atavistic, chauvinistic, racist warmongers” secured for themselves a position of “ideological legitimacy and power” (Lehmann 213). However, Maruo is being deliberately provocative to his contemporary reader: he writes this story in the mid-1980s, the peak of Japan’s post-war prosperity. As Joy Hendry says, Japan’s “tremendous economic success” in this period is not just important for Japan but marks an “important element of world history” (Hendry 18). Maruo ends “Planet of the Jap” with a haunting international message: “Don’t be fooled. Japan is by no means a defeated nation. Japan is still the strongest country in the world” (124). The porn-horror creator Suehiro Maruo follows in the tradition of figures like Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille and Robert Crumb who have used explicit pornography and sexual taboo as a forum for political provocation. The sexual horror of Maruo’s erotic-grotesque manga may terrify some readers and titillate others. It may even terrify and titillate at the same time in a disturbing fusion which has social and political implications: all the Maruo works in this essay were produced in the early to mid-1980s, the peak of Japanese economic success. They also coincide with the boom years of the Japanese sex industry, which Akira Suei argues was terminated by the repressive legislation of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act of 1985 (Suei, 10). Suei’s account of the period paints one of frivolity and inventiveness embodied in the phenomenon of “no-panties coffee shops” (10) and the numerous sex clubs which offered extraordinary “role-playing opportunities” (13). The mood is one of triumph for the sexual expression of the customers but also for the extremely well-paid sex workers. Maruo’s stories contemporaneous with this have their own freedom of sexual expression, creating a vision where sexually explicit images comment upon a wide variety of subjects, from the family, scatological taboos, through to national history and Japan’s economic success. At the same time as presenting explicit sex as a feature in his films, Maruo always closely weaves it in with the taboo of death. Martin Heidegger interprets human existence as Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) (Kearney 35): in Maruo’s vision, existence is evidently one of sexual-being-towards-death. Like Suehiro Maruo’s hideously maimed and blind lovers, humanity always returns to the impulse of its sexuality and the desire/will to orgasm: what Maruo calls “the cosmic gash” of physical love, a gash which also reveals, in a Heideggerian sense, the non-being that is the only certainty of existence. And we should remember that even when love is blind, someone will always be watching. References Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb, Volume 5: Happy Hippy Comix. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1990. Hendry, Joy. Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge, 1987. Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Kotz, Liz. “Complicity: Women Artists Investigating Masculinity” in Paula Church Gibson (ed.) More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (Second Edition). London, BFI, 2004, 188-203. Lehmann, Jean-Pierre. The Roots of Modern Japan. London: Macmillan, 1982. Maruo, Suehiro. “Planet of the Jap” in Quigley, Kevin (ed.). Comics Underground Japan. New York: Blast Books, 1992. —-. Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show. New York: Blast, 1992. —-. Ultra-Gash Inferno. London: Creation, 2001 Mizuki, Shigeru. Youkai Gadan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York: Tuttle, 1956. Suei, Akira “The Lucky Hole as the Black Hole” in Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln: Taschen, 1997, 10-15. MLA Style Hand, Richard J. "Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/05_horror.php>. APA Style Hand, R. (2004 Oct 11). Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/05_horror.php>

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/>.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/>.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 <https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124>.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html>.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

0. IntroductionIf we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals — from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.In this photo essay I'd like to pull a different thread and ask whether it's possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility? The following is a provisional "visual ethnography" constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a "taxonomy of differentiality", each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects. The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the "emptiness" of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.1. We Move the WorldTo many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.Here at the departure gate the traveller's body comes to a moment's rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name's of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline's phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger's own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of "openings of every sort — in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines — are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way. 2. Attentive AttentionAlongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, "air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them" (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas's lingo, these are complex "junkspaces" unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, "Store" 63). It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger's every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment —more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.3. We Know ChicagoSelf-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of "exclusive rollover minutes", "nationwide long distance", "no roaming charges" and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It's a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites. Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer's arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco's logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper's ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like "a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11). 4. Machine in the CaféIs there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes "have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next" (Fuller, "Welcome" 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar — no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions — machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, "Welcome").Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth — from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore's Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. "Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable ... Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of "the flight from the city" can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it's deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, "incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction — a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today" (Marx 4). 5. Windows at 35,000 FeetIf waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation. As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows "implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations" (Kepes 77).The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation. With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space — hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity "ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous" (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and "hard to read". They are informatic.From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. "By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge" (Fuller, "Welcome" 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.6. Can You Feel It?Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we're not sure we want what's on offer.Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don't see much at all. Whatever we do see, it's probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is "held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble" (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler's body itself is "engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms" during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).7. Elevator MusicsThe imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She's just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal's vascular system.Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body — conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175). The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there's no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more "open". This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing "an illusion of distended time", sonically separated from the continuous hum of "generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting" (Lanza 43).There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around ... and that turn them into functions of information flows — the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).An elevator is a grave says an old inspector's maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).8. States of SuspensionThe suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today's weary air traveller. But it's the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in — witness the amount of activity in his suspension — is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio's vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: "the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it's as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.ReferencesAppleyard, Donald. "Motion, Sequence and the City." The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Adey, Peter. "If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities." Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75–95. Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002. Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Fuller, Gillian. "Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport." Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008. –––. "Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense". Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196. Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985. Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944). Koolhass, Rem. "Junkspace." Content. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html›.Lanza, Joseph. "The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!)." Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53. McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964. Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000. Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006. Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001. Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004. Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262. Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54. Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

Transmedia storytelling, as defined by Henry Jenkins in 2006 in his book Convergence Culture, highlights a production strategy that aims to augment the narration of a cultural work by scattering it across several media platforms—digital or non-digital. The term is certainly quite recent, but the practices are not new and allow us to understand the evolution of the cultural industries and the creation of a new media ecosystem. As Matthew Freeman states, transmedia storytelling always relies on industrial changes, the narration adapting itself to new media synergies and novelties to create engaging and coherent storyworlds.Producers of American TV shows, showrunners, and networks are more and more eager to develop narrative universes on other media platforms in order to target new audiences and to give food for thought to fans, as well as reward them for their intellectual and emotional investment. Ancillary content and tie-ins sometimes take the form of novelisations or comic books, highlighting the fact that strategies of transmedia storytelling can be deployed on non-digital platforms and still enhance the narrative aspects of the show. For example, Twin Peaks (1990) developed The Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), a journal written by the character Laura Palmer who gave insights on her life and details about her relationships with other characters before she was murdered at the beginning of the series. How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) published The BroCode (2008), first seen on episode “The Goat” (season 3 episode 17), and The Playbook (2012), first seen in an episode entitled “The Playbook” (season 5 episode 8). They are bibles written by character Barney Stinson that contain rules or advice for picking up women. For instance, The BroCode contains 150 articles, a glossary of terms, a definition of “a bro,” history of the code, amendments, violations, and approved punishments, all invented by Barney; some of these components were talked about on the show, while others were original additions for the book.Another way to create transmedia storytelling around TV shows is by developing comic books. This article will explore this specific media form in relation to transmedia strategies and will try to underline how comic books can make a narrative richer by focusing on parts of the plot, characters, times, or locations. First, I will focus on the importance of seriality from a historical perspective, because seriality appears to be one of the main principles of transmedia storytelling. Yet, is this narrative continuity always coherent and always canon when it comes to the publication of comic books? I will then propose a typology of the narratives comic books exploit to augment the storytelling of a show. I will give examples to illustrate how comic books can enrich the narrative universe of a given show and how characters can smoothly move from one platform to the other.A Transmedia World: Television and Comic Books Hand in HandSeriality is one of the main pillars of transmedia storytelling, and, according to Jenkins, “it is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms, but which motivate us to come back for more” (“Transmedia”). These characteristics are already present in the way TV series are written, produced, and broadcast, and in the way comic books are created. They rely on episodes for TV shows and on issues for comic books that usually end with suspense and a suspension in the narrative continuity, commonly known as a cliff-hanger. For comic books, this narrative continuity took root in the early comic strips of the 18th and 19th century (Maigret and Stefanelli), which played a huge part in what we now know as comic books. As Pagello explains:The extensive practice of narrative serialisation played a major role in this context: the creative process, the industrial production and distribution, the editorial practices and, finally, the experience of comics readers all underwent dramatic changes when comics started to develop an identity distinguished from satirical cartoons, illustrated books and the various forms of children’s picture stories.According to Derek Johnson, these evolutions, in terms of production and reception, are closely linked to the widespread use of the franchise model in media industries. Johnson explains thatcomic books, video games, and other markets once considered ancillary now play increasingly significant and recentered roles in the production and consumption of everyday film and television properties such as Heroes, Transformers, and the re-envisioned Star Trek in ways that only very few innovators (such as George Lucas and his carefully elaborated and expanded Star Wars empire) had previously conceived in the twentieth century.The creation of transmedia strategies that capitalize on narrative continuity and seriality call for some synergies between media and for a “gatekeeper” of the stories who will ensure that all is coherent in the storyworld. Thus, “in 2006, the management of Heroes, for example, became a job for a professional ‘Transmedia Team’ charged with implementing creative coordination across television, comics, and the Internet” (Johnson).Another principle of transmedia storytelling, closely linked to seriality and the essence of the definition, is the creation of a narrative universe, that is “world-building,” in which plots and characters develop, and which will lay the foundations for the story. These foundations will be written in what is called a Bible, a document containing all the narrative elements in order to ensure coherence. In the notion of world-building, a matrix of possibilities is deployed, since stories can potentially become threads to weave, and re-weave. This rhizomatic world can be extended to infinity in a canonical way (by the official production) and in a non-canonical one (by the creations of fans). For Mark Wolf, these narrative worlds work like dynamic entities, and are transformative, transmedial, and transauthorial, which are similar to the notions and possibilities of transmedia storytelling, and media and cultural convergence. Stories that cannot be contained within the “real” of a single medium will be expended and developed on another or several other ones, creating a rich storyworlds. Comic books can be one of these tie-in media.New Term, Old Creations: An Historical OverviewMatthew Freeman wrote in his latest book Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that these transmedia practices do have a past and existed long before the introduction of the term due to new technologies, production strategies, and reception tactics. Comic books were often an option to enrich storylines and further develop the characters. For example, L. Frank Baum created a storyworld around The Wizard of Oz made of mock newspapers, conferences, billboards, novels, musicals, and comic strips in order to “appeal to a migratory audience” (Jenkins, “I Have”) and to deepen the characters, introduce new ones, and discover the land of Oz as if it were a real location. The author used techniques of advertising to promote and above all to expand his storyworld. As newspaper comic strips were quite popular at the time, Baum created several tie-in extensions in the newspapers and in a novel format. As Jason Scott underlines, “serial narratology enhances the possibilities of advertising and exploitation through the established market for the second and subsequent instalment” (14). The series of comic strips entitled Queer Visitor from the Marvellous Land of Oz (1904-1905) picked up, in terms of narration, just after the end of the book, offering a new temporality and life for the characters. As Freeman notes, this choice follows an economic logic:The era’s newspaper comic strips and their institutional tendency to prioritize recurring characters as successful advertising mechanisms (as witnessed in the cross-media dispersion of Buster Brown) had in fact influenced Baum to return to the series’ more familiar faces of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman (2371).Here, the beloved characters are moving from one medium to the next, giving new insights on their life after the end of the book, and enhancing their stories beyond its pages.A Typology of Comic Books and Tie-in Extensions of TV SeriesBefore diving into a tentative typology, I want to look at the definition of canon in a transmedia storyworld. There is a strong debate in academic discussions around the issues of canonicity, and here I understand canonicity as the production of official texts around a given cultural content. That is because of precisely what is qualified as an official text or an official extension, and what is not. In the book I co-edited with Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa), we respond by coining the term “transtexts,” which includes officially produced texts and fantexts in the same narrative universe. The dichotomy between both kinds of texts is thus diminished. Nonetheless, in production and transmedia strategies, canonicity is hard to evaluate because “few television series have attempted to create transmedia extensions that offer such a (high level of) canonic integration, with interwoven story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehension” (Mittell 298). He follows by proposing a typology of two possible transmedia extensions based on a canon perspective versus a non-canon one: “what is extensions” extend the storyworld canonically and in a coherent way, whereas “what if extensions” “pose(s) hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alternate stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to be treated as potential canon” (Mittell 298). Mark Wolf refers to the term growth to qualify canonical materials which are going to expand a given storyworld and which nourish the stories. As argued by Gabriel et al., “Wolf’s definition of ‘growth’ makes it clear that, for him, a transmedial product can only be considered to contribute to a world’s growth if it adds new ‘canonical’ material, i.e. material that presents new pieces of information that are “true” for the fictional world” (Gabriel et al. 169). This notion of “truth” to the diegesis can be opposed in this context to the notion of alternate stories and alternate versions of the characters.My attempted typology lays its foundation upon this opposition between what is seen as an official extension and what is seen as an unofficial extension, but offers alternate perspectives to expand the storyworld using new characters, locations, or universes. The first category will look at canonical extensions and how they can deepen characters’ development and temporalities. The second category will deal with “canon divergent” (to use fans’ language) extensions and how they can offer new entries into the stories by creating new characters or presenting new locations.Canonical Extensions: CharactersTie-in extensions in the form of comic books help to deepen the characters, especially supporting characters, by delving into their motivations and psychology, or by giving them backstories and origin stories. According to Paolo Bertetti, “the transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told on several media platforms, each providing details about the character's life” (2344). Actually, motivated characters are the quintessential element of the narration of the classic Hollywood era, which was then reused in the narration of TV series, which were then penned into comic books. In her definition of transmedia superstructures, Marsha Kinder based her analysis on how characters moved from one medium to the next, making them the centre of the narrative universe and the element audiences would follow.For example, Fringe (2008), in a deal with DC comics, extended its stories and its characters in comic books, which were an integral part of the storyworld, and which included canon materials by offering Easter Eggs to fans and rewarding them for their investment in the narrative universe. Each issue of the second series dealt with a major or recurring character from the show, deepening them by giving them backgrounds. That way, audiences can discover the backstories of Agent Broyles, Nina Sharp, the CEO of Massive Dynamic, or even Gene, Walter’s cow, all of which are featured in the series but not well developed.Written by actor Tim Rozon (who plays Doc Holliday on the show) and author Beau Smith, Wynonna Earp Season Zero (2017) focuses on the past of main character Wynonna Earp when she was an outlaw and before she comes back to her hometown, Purgatory. The past comes to life on the pages, while it was only hinted at in the show. It is a good introduction to the main character before the show, since Wynonna comes back to Purgatory by bus at the beginning of the very first episode and there are no flashback episode relating her story earlier. Because the two authors of this comic book are part of the creative crew of the show, an actor and a writer, they ensure a sense of coherence in the extensions they write.In collaboration with Dynamite Entertainment, an American comic book company, NBC Universal launched a series of comic book issues entitled Origins (2008) as an ancillary text to Battlestar Galactica (2004). “Origin stories” are a specific genre related to superhero franchises. M.J. Clarke underlines that,the use of Origins Stories is influenced by the economic structure of the comic book industry, which continues to produce stories over years and decades. ... By remaining faithful to the Origins (which are frequently modified in their consistency), readers can discover a story without having to navigate in more than 400 numbers of commix. (54)The goal of these comic books is to create a "past" for the human characters that appeared in the series. The collection of comic books thus focuses on five main characters in 11 issues, spread out over a year: William Adama, Zarek, Gaius Baltar, Kara "Starbuck” Thrace, and Karl "Helo" Agathon. These issues are collected in an eponymous Omnibus. Likewise, Orphan Black (2011) also offered backstories for its “clone club” without disrupting the pace of the show. The stories, tied to the events of the series, focus on the opportunity to better understand the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that exemplify the characters of the show.It is interesting to note that the authors of these comic book extensions were in close contact with Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, showrunners of the Battlestar Galactica series, which guaranteed coherence and canonicity to the newly created material. In a personal interview, Robert Napton, writer of Origins, explained the creative process:so every week we would watch episodes and make sure our stories matched as closely as possible to what the television series was doing …we tried to make it feel like it was very much part of the series, so they were untold adventures and we tried to fit it into the continuity of the series as much as possible.Brandon Jerwa, writer for Battlestar Galactica comic book series Season Zero and Ghosts (2009), confirmed that, “It is my understanding that the comics were passed through Mr. Moore’s office, and they were certainly vetted by Syfy and Universal.” Jerwa also added an interesting input on perception of canonicity versus non-canonicity by fans who can be picky about the ancillary contents and added materials that extend a storyworld:Most comic tie-ins have a hard time being considered a legitimate part of the canon, and that is simply beyond the control of the creative team. I worked very hard to make sure that I was writing material that adhered to the continuity of the show as closely as humanly possible. I don’t believe in writing a licensed property in such a way as to put forward ‘my vision’ of the universe; I believe very firmly that it is my responsibility to serve the source material above all else.Canonical Extensions: TemporalitiesComic books as a licensed product can expand the temporalities of the show and tell stories before the beginning of the series and after it ended, as well as fill time voids and ellipses. For example, now in its 11th season in comic books, Joss Whedon managed to keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) alive and to attract new fans without alienating its original fanbase. Blogger and web entrepreneur Keith McDuffee felt that reading Buffy as a comic book after seeing it on television for seven years was strange, but the new format was a good sign because: “the medium lets creativity go completely wild without budget worries.” The comic books focus on the famous characters and created a life for them after the end of the show, making them jump from the screen onto the pages. Sometimes, the comic books told original stories that might seem out-of-character, like the issue in which Buffy sleeps with a woman. That kind of storyline wasn’t explored in the TV show, and comics offer one way to go deeper into the characters’ backgrounds and psychology. Sometimes, the tie-ins do not strictly follow the continuity and become non-canon regarding the stories of the TV shows. For example, DC/Wildstorm presented comic book issues around The X-Files (1993-) that were set in continuity of the show but failed to refer to main plot events (for example, Scully’s pregnancy). “Rather than offering ‘additive comprehension’ to a pre-existing television and film narrative, Spotnitz chose to write licensed comics on their own terms” (Pillai 112).DC is familiar with offering new adventures for its superhero characters in the form of comic books (which are first published online), going back to the basics. Of course, in this case, the relationship between the comic book medium and the television medium is more intricate, as the TV series are based on comic book characters whose stories are then extended again in comic books, which are created specifically to extend the TV shows’ storyworlds. The creation of the comic book series The Flash Season Zero (2015) set the stories between the episodes of the first season of The Flash and focus on the struggles of Barry Allen as he juggles between his job as a CSI, his love for Iris West, his childhood sweetheart, and his new identity as a vigilante with superpowers. This allows viewers to better understand a part of Barry Allen’s life that was not well developed in the show, adding temporal layers to the stories. The Adventures of Supergirl vol. 1 (2016) also depict the battles of the girl of steel between episodes, as well as her life with her sister, Alex (who is also a new addition in the comic book), and her co-workers at the DEO. For Arrow,the digital tie-ins offer producers [opportunities] to explore side stories they are unable to cover on screen. In the case of Season 2.5, the 22-chapter comic enabled the producers to fill in the blanks in between the seasons, thus offering more opportunities to explore the dynamics of fan-favorite characters such as Felicity and Diggle. (Bourdaa and Chin 183)These DC comic books are examples of giving life to a TV show beyond the TV screen, enhancing the timeframe of the stories and providing new content. The characters pass through the screen to live new adventures in comic books. In some cases, the involvement of the series' actor and writer in comic book scripting confirms the desire for consistency in the extensions of the series, whatever the medium used and whatever the objectives.Canon Divergent Extensions or the Real PossibilitiesFinally, comic books can deploy stories that will display a new point of view on the canon: a “multiplicity” (Jenkins, “La Licorne”) or a “what-if story” (Mittell), which will explore new possibilities and new characters.The second series of Orphan Black comic book tie-ins entitled Helsinki (2016) dealt with clones in the capital of Finland. The readers discover the lives of other clones, how they deal with the discovery of their “condition,” and that they have a caretaker. The comics are written by John Fawcett, who is also a showrunner for the series. The narrative universe is stretched into new possibilities, seen with new eyes, and shown from the perspective of new clones. The introduction of new characters gives opportunities to tell new stories and diverge from the canonical content, especially in terms of the characters’ development and depth.Battlestar Galactica, after the show ended, partnered once again with Dynamite Entertainment, to publish a new set of comic books entitled BSG: Ghosts (2009), which tells the story of new characters surviving the Cylon genocide. Writer Brandon Jerwa asks in BSG: Ghosts: "And if a squadron of secret agents had also survived Cylon Attack?" For him, comic books are a good opportunity to relaunch the narrative universe by introducing new characters in a well-known storyworld.The comic books will definitely have to evolve in order to survive because at some point we will end up exhausting the interest of the readers on the narrative continuity. Projects like Ghosts are definitely a good way to test public reaction to new ideas in a familiar environment. (Jerwa)Conclusion: From One Medium to the Next, From Narrative Extensions to MarketingThis article offers an overview of how comic books are used as tie-in products to extend TV series’ narrative universe. The ambition was not to give an exhaustive panorama but to propose a typology with some examples. I showed that characters’ development, temporalities, and new points of view are narrative angles exploited in comic books to give depth to a storyworld. Of course, this raises issues of labour, authorship, and canon content, which are already discussed elsewhere (see, for example: Clarke, Pillai, Scott). Yet, comic books are an integral part of transmedia storytelling and capitalise on notions of seriality, offering readers new stories, continuity, depth, and character motivations in order to enrich storylines and make them live beyond the screen. However, Robert Napton, in our interview, underlines an interesting opposition between licensing and marketing: “Frankly, comic books are considered licensing and marketing, not official canon. The only TV comic that is canon is Buffy Season 8 and 9 because Joss Whedon says they are, but that is not the normal situation.” He clearly draws a line between what he considers to be a licensed product, in this article what I describe as canonical content, and a marketing product, which could be understood in this article as a canon divergent tie-in. The debate here is clearly on, since understandings of transmedia vary between the perspectives of production companies, which are trying to gain profit by providing new content, the perspectives of fans, who know the storyworlds and the characters extensively and could be very possessive of them, and the perspectives of extension authors, who “have very strict story guidelines” (Jerwa) and have to make their stories fit within the narrative universe as it is told onscreen.ReferencesBertetti, Paolo. “Towards a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344-2361.Boni, Marta. World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Transmedia Storytelling: Entre Narration Augmentée et Logiques Immersives.” InaGlobal (2012). 16 December 2017 <http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/le-transmedia-entre-narration-augmentee-et-logiques-immersives>.Bourdaa, Mélanie, and Bertha Chin. “World and Fandom Building: Extending the Universe of Arrow in Arrow 2.5.” Arrow and Superhero Television: Essays on Themes and Characters of the Series. Eds. James F. Iaccino, Cory Barker, and Myc Wiatrowski. Jefferson: MacFarland, 2017.Clarke, M.J. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production. New York: Continuum Publishing, 2013.Derhy Kurtz, WL Benjamin, and Mélanie Bourdaa. The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities. London: Routledge, 2016.Freeman, Matthew. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London: Routledge, 2017.Gabriel, Nicole, Bogna Kazur, and Kai Matuszkiewicz. “Reconsidering Transmedia(l) Worlds.” Convergence Culture Reconsidered: Media—Participation—Environments. Eds. Claudia Georgi and Brigitte Johanna Glaser. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2015.Gillan, Jennifer. Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. New York: Routledge, 2010.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.Jenkins, Henry. “I Have Seen the Future of Entertainment… And It Works.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2008. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2008/10/i_have_seen_the_futures_of_ent.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Education: The 7 Principles Revisited.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2010. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “La Licorne Origami Contre-attaque: Réflexions Plus Poussées sur le transmedia storytelling.” Terminal 10-11 (2013): 11-28. <http://journals.openedition.org/terminal/455>.Jerwa, Brandon. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Web Exclusive Essays. <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.Wo6g24IiGgQ>.Maigret, Eric, and Matteo Stefanelli. La Bande Dessinée: Une Médiaculture. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.McDuffee, Keith. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, Part 1. Season premiere. 2007. <http://www.aoltv.com/2007/03/16/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-the-long-way-home-season-premiere/.>.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.Napton, Robert. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Pagello, Federico. “Before the Comics: On Seriality of Graphic Narratives during the Nineteenth Century.” Belphégor 14 (2016). <http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/810>.Pillai, Nicolas. “What Am I Looking at Mulder?: Licensed Comics and Freedoms of Transmedia Storytelling.” Science Fiction and Television 6.1 (2013): 101-117.Scott, Jason. “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (2009): 10–28.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. "Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact." The Fledgling Fund, Dec. 2008. 15 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.thefledglingfund.org/media/research.html›. Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1992. BRITDOC Foundation. The End of the Line: A Social Impact Evaluation. London: Channel 4, 2011. 12 Oct. 2011 ‹http://britdoc.org/news_details/the_social_impact_of_the_end_of_the_line/›. Cieply, Michael. "Uneven Growth for Film Studio with a Message." New York Times 5 Jun. 2011: B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Emerging Media and Documentary Practice." The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. Aug. 2008. 22 Sep. 2011. ‹http://www.gpia.info/node/911›. Grierson, John. "First Principles of Documentary (1932)." Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97-102. Hart, Philip Solomon and Anthony Leiserowitz. "Finding the Teachable Moment: An Analysis of Information-Seeking Behavior on Global Warming Related Websites during the Release of The Day After Tomorrow." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3.3 (2009): 355-66. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ———. "Transmedia Storytelling 101." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html›. Madaus, George, and Daniel Stufflebeam. "Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview." Evaluation in Education and Human Services 49.1 (2002): 3-18. Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Brad Brown, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. May 2011 ‹http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/›. Muraskin, Lana. 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The Alt Right Are Not Alright Academic explorations complicating both the Internet and whiteness have often focussed on the rise of the “alt-right” to examine the co-option of digital technologies to extend white supremacy (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Nagle). The term “alt-right” refers to media organisations, personalities, and sarcastic Internet users who promote the “alternative right”, understood as extremely conservative, political views online. The alt-right, in all of their online variations and inter-grouping, are infamous for supporting white supremacy online, “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value” (Southern Poverty Law Center). Theoretical studies of the alt-right have largely focussed on its growing presence across social media and websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and notoriously “chan” sites 4chan and 8chan, through the political discussions referred to as “threads” on the site (Nagle; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Hawley). As well, the ability of online users to surpass national boundaries and spread global white supremacy through the Internet has also been studied (Back et al.). The alt-right have found a home on the Internet, using its features to cunningly recruit members and to establish a growing community that mainstream politically extreme views (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise; Munn). This body of knowledge shows that academics have been able to produce critically relevant literature regarding the alt-right despite the online anonymity of the majority of its members. For example, Conway et al., in their analysis of the history and social media patterns of the alt-right, follow the unique nature of the Christchurch Massacre, encompassing the use and development of message boards, fringe websites, and social media sites to champion white supremacy online. Positioning my research in this literature, I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an act that is situated in a larger co-option of the Internet by the alt-right and white supremacists, but has been under theorised as a hate crime (Daniels; “Cyber Racism” 7). Shitposting I want to preface this chapter by acknowledging that while I understand the Internet, through my own external investigations of race, power and the Internet, as a series of entities that produce racial violence both online and offline, I am aware of the use of the Internet to frame, discuss, and share anti-racist activism. Here we can turn to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau who conceived the idea of a “tactic” as a way to construct a space of agency in opposition to institutional power. This becomes a way that marginalised groups, such as racialised peoples, can utilise the Internet as a tactical material to assert themselves and their non-compliance with the state. Particularly, shitposting, a tactic often associated with the alt-right, has also been co-opted by those who fight for social justice and rally against oppression both online and offline. As Roderick Graham explores, the Internet, and for this exploration, shitposting, can be used to proliferate deviant and racist material but also as a “deviant” byway of oppositional and anti-racist material. Despite this, a lot can be said about the invisible yet present claims and support of whiteness through Internet and digital technologies, as well as the activity of users channelled through these screens, such as the alt-right and their digital tactics. As Vikki Fraser remarks, “the internet assumes whiteness as the norm – whiteness is made visible through what is left unsaid, through the assumption that white need not be said” (120). It is through the lens of white privilege and claims to white supremacy that online irony, by way of shitposting, is co-opted and understood as an inherently alt-right tool, through the deviance it entails. Their sinister co-option of shitposting bolsters audacious claims as to who has the right to exist, in their support of white identity, but also hides behind a veil of mischief that can hide their more insidious intention and political ideologies. The alt-right have used “shitposting”, an online style of posting and interacting with other users, to create a form of online communication for a translocal identity of white nationalist members. Sean McEwan defines shitposting as “a form of Internet interaction predicated upon thwarting established norms of discourse in favour of seemingly anarchic, poor quality contributions” (19). Far from being random, however, I argue that shitposting functions as a discourse that is employed by online communities to discuss, proliferate, and introduce white supremacist ideals among their communities as well as into the mainstream. In the course of this article, I will introduce racist Zoom-bombing as a tactic situated in shitposting which can be used as a means of white supremacist discourse and an attempt to block anti-racist efforts. By this line, the function of discourse as one “to preserve or to reproduce discourse (within) a closed community” is calculatingly met through shitposting, Zoom-bombing, and more overt forms of white supremacy online (Foucault 225-226). Using memes, dehumanisation, and sarcasm, online white supremacists have created a means of both organising and mainstreaming white supremacy through humour that allows insidious themes to be mocked and then spread online. Foucault writes that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and danger, to cope with chance events, to evade ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). As Philippe-Joseph Salazar recontextualises to online white supremacists, “the first procedure of control is to define what is prohibited, in essence, to set aside that which cannot be spoken about, and thus to produce strategies to counter it” (137). By this line, the alt-right reorganises these procedures and allocates a checked speech that will allow their ideas to proliferate in like-minded and growing communities. As a result, online white supremacists becoming a “community of discourse” advantages them in two ways: first, ironic language permits the mainstreaming of hate that allows sinister content to enter the public as the severity of their intentions is doubted due to the sarcastic language employed. Second, shitposting is employed as an entry gate to more serious and dangerous participation with white supremacist action, engagement, and ideologies. It is important to note that white privilege is embodied in these discursive practices as despite this exploitation of emerging technologies to further white supremacy, there are approaches that theorise the alt-right as “crazed product(s) of an isolated, extremist milieu with no links to the mainstream” (Moses 201). In this way, it is useful to consider shitposting as an informal approach that mirrors legitimised white sovereignties and authorised white supremacy. The result is that white supremacist online users succeed in “not only in assembling a community of actors and a collective of authors, on the dual territory of digital communication and grass-roots activism”, but also shape an effective fellowship of discourse that audiences react well to online, encouraging its reception and mainstreaming (Salazar 142). Continuing, as McBain writes, “someone who would not dream of donning a white cap and attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting might find themselves laughing along to a video by the alt-right satirist RamZPaul”. This idea is echoed in a leaked stylistic guide by white supremacist website and message board the Daily Stormer that highlights irony as a cultivated mechanism used to draw new audiences to the far right, step by step (Wilson). As showcased in the screen capture below of the stylistic guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points” (Feinburg). The result of this style of writing is used “to immerse recruits in an online movement culture built on memes, racial panic and the worst of Internet culture” (Wilson). Figure 1: A screenshot of the Daily Stormer’s playbook, expanding on the stylistic decisions of alt-right writers. Racist Zoom-Bombing In the timely text “Racist Zoombombing”, Lisa Nakamura et al. write the following: Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacy … . Zoombombing should not be lumped into the larger category of trolling, both because the word “trolling” has become so broad it is nearly meaningless at times, and because zoombombing is designed to cause intimate harm and terrorize its target in distinct ways. (30) Notwithstanding the seriousness of Zoom-bombing, and to not minimise its insidiousness by understanding it as a form of shitposting, my article seeks to reiterate the seriousness of shitposting, which, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom-bombing has become an example of. I seek to purport the insidiousness of the tactical strategies of the alt-right online in a larger context of white violence online. Therefore, I am proposing a more critical look at the tactical use of the Internet by the alt-right, in theorising shitposting and Zoom-bombing as means of hate crimes wherein they impose upon anti-racist activism and organising. Newlands et al., receiving only limited exposure pre-pandemic, write that “Zoom has become a household name and an essential component for parties (Matyszczyk, 2020), weddings (Pajer, 2020), school and work” (1). However, through this came the strategic use of co-opting the application by the alt-right to digitise terror and ensure a “growing framework of memetic warfare” (Nakamura et al. 31). Kruglanski et al. label this co-opting of online tools to champion white supremacy operations via Zoom-bombing an example of shitposting: Not yet protesting the lockdown orders in front of statehouses, far-right extremists infiltrated Zoom calls and shared their screens, projecting violent and graphic imagery such as swastikas and pornography into the homes of unsuspecting attendees and making it impossible for schools to rely on Zoom for home-based lessons. Such actions, known as “Zoombombing,” were eventually curtailed by Zoom features requiring hosts to admit people into Zoom meetings as a default setting with an option to opt-out. (128) By this, we can draw on existing literature that has theorised white supremacists as innovation opportunists regarding their co-option of the Internet, as supported through Jessie Daniels’s work, “during the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital online users exploited emerging technologies to further their ideological goals” (“Algorithmic Rise” 63). Selfe and Selfe write in their description of the computer interface as a “political and ideological boundary land” that may serve larger cultural systems of domination in much the same way that geopolitical borders do (418). Considering these theorisations of white supremacists utilising tools that appear neutral for racialised aims and the political possibilities of whiteness online, we can consider racist Zoom-bombing as an assertion of a battle that seeks to disrupt racial justice online but also assert white supremacy as its own legitimate cause. My first encounter of local Zoom-bombing was during the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) Seminar titled “Intersecting Crises” by Western Sydney University. The event sought to explore the concatenation of deeply inextricable ecological, political, economic, racial, and social crises. An academic involved in the facilitation of the event, Alana Lentin, live tweeted during the Zoom-bombing of the event: Figure 2: Academic Alana Lentin on Twitter live tweeting the Zoom-bombing of the Intersecting Crises event. Upon reflecting on this instance, I wondered, could efforts have been organised to prevent white supremacy? In considering who may or may not be responsible for halting racist shit-posting, we can problematise the work of R David Lankes, who writes that “Zoom-bombing is when inadequate security on the part of the person organizing a video conference allows uninvited users to join and disrupt a meeting. It can be anything from a prankster logging on, yelling, and logging off to uninvited users” (217). However, this beckons two areas to consider in theorising racist Zoom-bombing as a means of isolated trolling. First, this approach to Zoom-bombing minimises the sinister intentions of Zoom-bombing when referring to people as pranksters. Albeit withholding the “mimic trickery and mischief that were already present in spaces such as real-life classrooms and town halls” it may be more useful to consider theorising Zoom-bombing as often racialised harassment and a counter aggression to anti-racist initiatives (Nakamura et al. 30). Due to the live nature of most Zoom meetings, it is increasingly difficult to halt the threat of the alt-right from Zoom-bombing meetings. In “A First Look at Zoom-bombings” a range of preventative strategies are encouraged for Zoom organisers including “unique meeting links for each participant, although we acknowledge that this has usability implications and might not always be feasible” (Ling et al. 1). The alt-right exploit gaps, akin to co-opting the mainstreaming of trolling and shitposting, to put forward their agenda on white supremacy and assert their presence when not welcome. Therefore, utilising the pandemic to instil new forms of terror, it can be said that Zoom-bombing becomes a new means to shitpost, where the alt-right “exploits Zoom’s uniquely liminal space, a space of intimacy generated by users via the relationship between the digital screen and what it can depict, the device’s audio tools and how they can transmit and receive sound, the software that we can see, and the software that we can’t” (Nakamura et al. 29). Second, this definition of Zoom-bombing begs the question, is this a fair assessment to write that reiterates the blame of organisers? Rather, we can consider other gaps that have resulted in the misuse of Zoom co-opted by the alt-right: “two conditions have paved the way for Zoom-bombing: a resurgent fascist movement that has found its legs and best megaphone on the Internet and an often-unwitting public who have been suddenly required to spend many hours a day on this platform” (Nakamura et al. 29). In this way, it is interesting to note that recommendations to halt Zoom-bombing revolve around the energy, resources, and attention of the organisers to practically address possible threats, rather than the onus being placed on those who maintain these systems and those who Zoom-bomb. As Jessie Daniels states, “we should hold the platform accountable for this type of damage that it's facilitated. It's the platform's fault and it shouldn't be left to individual users who are making Zoom millions, if not billions, of dollars right now” (Ruf 8). Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan explore the organised efforts by the alt-right to impose on Zoom events and disturb schedules: “coordinated raids of Zoom meetings have become a social activity traversing the networked terrain of multiple platforms and web spaces. Raiders coordinate by sharing links to Zoom meetings targets and other operational and logistical details regarding the execution of an attack” (14). By encouraging a mass coordination of racist Zoom-bombing, in turn, social justice organisers are made to feel overwhelmed and that their efforts will be counteracted inevitably by a large and organised group, albeit appearing prankster-like. Aligning with the idea that “Zoombombing conceals and contains the terror and psychological harm that targets of active harassment face because it doesn’t leave a trace unless an alert user records the meeting”, it is useful to consider to what extent racist Zoom-bombing becomes a new weapon of the alt-right to entertain and affirm current members, and engage and influence new members (Nakamura et al. 34). I propose that we consider Zoom-bombing through shitposting, which is within “the location of matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” to challenge the role of interface design and Internet infrastructure in enabling racial violence online (Costanza-Chock). Conclusion As Nakamura et al. have argued, Zoom-bombing is indeed “part of the lineage or ecosystem of trollish behavior”, yet these new forms of alt-right shitposting “[need] to be critiqued and understood as more than simply trolling because this term emerged during an earlier, less media-rich and interpersonally live Internet” (32). I recommend theorising the alt-right in a way that highlights the larger structures of white power, privilege, and supremacy that maintain their online and offline legacies beyond Zoom, “to view white supremacy not as a static ideology or condition, but to instead focus on its geographic and temporal contingency” that allows acts of hate crime by individuals on politicised bodies (Inwood and Bonds 722). This corresponds with Claire Renzetti’s argument that “criminologists theorise that committing a hate crime is a means of accomplishing a particular type of power, hegemonic masculinity, which is described as white, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual” – an approach that can be applied to theorisations of the alt-right and online violence (136). This violent white masculinity occupies a hegemonic hold in the formation, reproduction, and extension of white supremacy that is then shared, affirmed, and idolised through a racialised Internet (Donaldson et al.). Therefore, I recommend that we situate Zoom-bombing as a means of shitposting, by reiterating the severity of shitposting with the same intentions and sinister goals of hate crimes and racial violence. References Back, Les, et al. “Racism on the Internet: Mapping Neo-Fascist Subcultures in Cyber-Space.” Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Eds. Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo. 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