Journal articles on the topic 'Religious Arts Guild'

ABSTRACT:The economic and political dimensions of guilds in medieval Flanders, especially medieval Ghent, have been well studied for generations. It is often noted that guilds were more than work organizations, and that their religious and social activities made them very like confraternities, but exploring the cultural and ideological side of guilds can be hampered by less surviving evidence. The present article attempts to address this lacuna by using poems written by/for the masons’ guild in fifteenth-century Ghent, taking an interdisciplinary perspective to examine ideals of community, hierarchy and the sacralization of labour from an urban perspective.

Quanzhen Taoism and its relationship with local performing arts is an important yet inadequately studied subject, to date, due to the shortage of and limited access to new sources. However, on the basis of historical documents, oral statements and field research, we determined at least eight genres of local performing arts closely related to Quanzhen Taoism, especially its sublineage, the Longmen School, in Republic Shandong and Henan. They traced back their own history to Quanzhen Taoist patriarch WANG Chongyang, adopted the Quanzhen Taoist lineage poem to name their disciples, and created the Ever Spring Guild (Changchun hui 長春會), in the name of Quanzhen Taoist QIU Changchun 丘長春, to assist each other. In other words, the Quanzhen Taoist institution was imitated by the local performing arts and, at the same time, the local artists performed some reasonable adaptations and accommodations to meet their own needs. By reviewing the local performing arts in Shangdong and Henan provinces, we can further understand Quanzhen Taoism in popular cultural traditions and local societies.

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the importance of religion as a factor influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners from – and inside – the guilds in eighteenth-century Strasbourg. We consider the different notions of theétrangeras socially constructed and circumstantial. Together with factors such as social status, family ties, gender, systems of patronage, wealth, language and the citizenship rights of a town, religious and denominational boundaries constituted a major factor for influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the early modern society. The construction and preservation of such boundaries are explored here through the examples of the carpenters' and the shipmen's guild found in the eighteenth-century multiconfessional city of Strasbourg.

The Highlands and Islands Film Guild is briefly surveyed in this article that introduces the Special Issue on Media and Modernity. The foundations, principles and manner of operation are outlined, as well as the interdisciplinary research project. The article starts with a review of literature on the nature of society in the Highlands and Islands, and the way that researchers regard it as ‘the other’ in historical and ethnographic research within the United Kingdom. We note the work undertaken in cultural history that has tended to treat the Highland zone as disjoined in governance and everyday life. The researchers’ different approaches and methods are then discussed, moving through specialists in film and television, creative arts, religious and cultural history, and social geography. Finally, the article introduces the articles that follow in the Special Issue.

Researchers within New Testament Studies have attempted in recent years to articulate the multifaceted identity of a broad discipline. The place of New Testament Theology (NTT) remains disputed within the guild. Some would like to remove NTT from fields of research undertaken within Arts and Humanities departments, while others argue that the New Testament cannot be properly understood without an eye to its theological claims. This article employs the ongoing tension as a starting point from which to argue that metaphors provide a fruitful field of study within NTT. The study of metaphors allows readers of the New Testament to draw upon broader research within the Humanities, while wrestling with the theological claims of New Testament texts. The article outlines recent studies of metaphors in a range of fields before exploring metaphorical uses of temple imagery within the Gospel of John, the Pauline letters, and Revelation. Temple metaphors employ the same image with multiple referents so that the study of metaphors may also illustrate unity and diversity within the New Testament. The study of metaphors deserves further consideration within NTT, since multiple avenues for exploration open when undertaking such research.

We do not know who trained Esaias Boursse (1631-1672) to be a painter, but we do know that he became a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke around 1651. He certainly did not have a successful career because he joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1661. He travelled to Colombo, the capital of the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1972), captured six years earlier by the Portuguese, by way of Batavia (now Jakarta). In 1663 he was back in Amsterdam – remarkable, as the standard contract with the VOC was for five years. In financial straits again, he re-joined the VOC in 1671 and left for Asia. Shortly after leaving he died at sea. In 1996 an album containing 116 drawings came to light, most of them made by Boursse during his time in Ceylon; he made only a small number during his outward or return journeys to the Cape of Good Hope. The drawings are completely different from his earlier known oeuvre of genre paintings and prints with religious themes. The pages in his ‘Tijkenboeck’ provide a unique picture of what Boursse saw in and around Colombo. They are important evidence of the early days of the VOC in its conquered colony of Ceylon.

AbstractIn the latter half of the 16th century a conspicuously large number of Netherlandisch artists emigrated to Cologne. The majority came from the south Netherlands after 1567, forced to leave for political and religious reasons during Alva's reign of terror. Worsening economical conditions were another reason. Cologne offered good prospects for immigrants. Most of the Dutch artists who settled there were engravers, designers and publishers of prints, professions which were much in demand. Skilled native artists were rare in Cologne, and the wealthy, art-loving patricians and prosperous burghers were eager customers. From a different point of view, though, Cologne was not the ideal place for refugees. The city was a bastion of Catholicism, and the Netherlandish emigrants were only tolerated on condition that they showed no signs of their Protestant faith. Protestants were regularly arrested and expelled. Only Lutherans were treated with a modicum of lenience; although they, too, were forbidden to practise their religion, they were eligible for citizenship. After the fall of Antwerp in 1585, when a fresh stream of emigrants descended on Cologne, things became even more difficult for non-Catholics, many of whom were forced to leave the city around 1600. Adriaan de Weert (d. ca. 1590) went to Cologne in about 1567. Despite being a Lutheran (in 1579 he was arrested during a sermon), he joined the Cologne guild of painters and was granted citizenship in 1577. De Weert's work is best known from prints after his designs engraved by his close friend Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert (fig. 2). Coornhert, who had fled from Haarlem to the Rhineland in 1568, also invented subjects for the two friends' prints, and moreover inspired a few moral-philosophical prints after De Weert which were probably engraved by Hendrick Goltzius (figs. 3 and 4). Their prints reflect a personal, unorthodox and anti-clerical view of religion (fig. 2), and are unlikely to have been published in Catholic Cologne. Isaac Duchemin, who like De Weert came from Brussels, made prints of De Weert's more conventional designs (figs. 1 and 6). A later Duchemin print after his own design (1612; fig. 15) shows a horde of ignorant donkeys practising the arts, lampooning the situation of the arts and sciences in Cologne in a period when the last dissident artists and scientists had died or been expelled and the heyday of culture was over. Frans Hogenberg, who was banished by Alva in 1568 and sought admission to Cologne in 1570, was another active Lutheran. During the aforementioned gathering in 1579 he, too, was arrested, but let off with a fine. Hogenberg may originally have had Calvinist sympathies; a print made while he was still in Antwerp (fig. 7) depicts Predestination. He joined the Cologne painters' guild, and was a highly productive engraver and publisher until his death in 1590. Notably his town views and history prints of contemporary war activities and other political events (figs. 8 and 9) were held in high esteem. Crispijn dc Passe the Elder opted for his baptist faith after the fall of Antwerp (1585) and was compelled to leave the city. After a brief sojourn in Aachen in 1589 he moved that same year to Cologne, where he published and engraved a large number of prints. Some were his own designs (fig. i 3), but more often those of Maartcn de Vos, his wife's uncle (figs. 11-12). Despite his friendship with such well-known Protestants as Carel Utenhoven and Matthias Quad, De Passe seems to have been careful to keep out of trouble. His prints catered to the taste of a conservative, Catholic elite, and he endeavoured to gain the favour of prominent citizens of Cologne by dedicating prints to them (fig. 14). However, the city grew increasingly intolerant of the Protestant immigrants. During a campaign to flush them out, especially the baptists, De Passe was registered in 1610 and along with all the other baptists had to leave the city in 1611. He settled in Utrecht, where his prints were published from 1612 on. Catholic Dutch artists also emigrated to Cologne. The public's hostile attitude towards Willem van Tetrode's work (his recently completed high altar in Delft was destroyed in the iconoclasm of 1573) induced the sculptor to seek commissions from Cologne patricians a successful venture, as it turned out. The Catholic painter Geldorp Gortzius of Louvain became Cologne's favourite portraitist (fig. 10). He lived there from 1579 until his death in 1619), holding an administrative post and living in financial circumstances which he would never have enjoyed in the south Netherlands, where there was fierce competition among the many painters.

Contrary to the widespread assumption in the study of Japanese religions that Kagura is historically the main genre of performing arts at Shintō festivals, something dating back to the beginning of Japanese history, in this article I focus instead on Gagaku (and its Bugaku dance repertory) as a central component of rituals, ceremonies, and festivals not only at the imperial court but also and especially at many temples and shrines across the country. While Gagaku and Bugaku were deeply rooted in the Kansai area, with guilds of hereditary professional musicians affiliated with, respectively, the imperial court in Kyoto, Kasuga-Kōfukuji in Nara, and Shitennōji in Osaka, and with the most lavish performances being held at temples and shrines in the region, those art forms had already spread to the provinces by the end of the Heian period. This article investigates some of the connections between religious ideas, rituals, and musical performances in relation to Kuroda Toshio’s concept of the exo-esoteric system (kenmitsu taisei) and the creative use of Buddhist canonical sources that such connections originated.

AbstractPhilips Wouwerman(s) was undoubtedly the most accomplished and successful Dutch painter of equestrian scenes in the 17th century. Even so, neither a critical study of his work nor a documented biography has been published. The present essay not only presents the results of archive research but also outlines his artistic development. Besides the seven dated pictures by the artist known by Hofstede de Groot, several others have been discovered. Wouwerman was born in Haarlem, the eldest son of the painter Pouwels Joosten and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogert. Two other sons, Pieter and Johannes Wouwerman, were also to become painters. Wouwerman's grandfather originally came from Brussels. Philips probably received his first painting lessons from his father, none of whose work has been identified however, making it impossible to determine the extent of his influence on the son's work. According to Cornelis de Bie, Wouwerman was next apprenticed to Frans Hals. He is subsequently reputed to have spent several weeks in 1638 or 1639 working in Hamburg in the studio of the German history painter Evert Decker. In Hamburg he married Annetje Pietersz van Broeckhof. On 4 September 1640 Wouwerman became a member of the Haarlem painters' guild, in which he held the office of vinder in 1646. In the following years his presence in Haarlem is mentioned repeatedly. In view of the many southern elements in his landscapes it has frequently been suggested that Wouwerman travelled to France or Italy. However, there is no documentary evidence of his having left Haarlem for any length of time. Wouwerman died on 19 May 1668 and was buried on 23 May 1668 in the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem. He evidently attained a certain degree of prosperity, going by the relatively large sums of money each of his seven children inherited on his widow's death in 1670 and by the various houses he owned. No confirmation can be found of Arnold Houbraken's often quoted remark that Wouwerman's daughter Ludovica brought a dowry of 20,000 guilders with her in 1672 when she married the painter Hendrik de Fromantiou (1633/34 - after 1694). Wouwerman's oeuvre consists mainly of small cabinet pieces with horses, such as battle and hunting scenes, army camps, smithies and interiors of stables. He also painted sensitively executed silvery-grey landscapes, genre pieces and a few original representations of religious and mythological scenes. Wouwerman was also exceptionally prolific. Although he only lived to the age of 48, more than a thousand paintings bear his name. Even when one bears in mind that a number of these paintings should actually be attributed to his brothers Pieter and Jan, Philips left an extraordinarily large oeuvre. Only a small number of drawings by his hand are known. His pupils include Nicolaes Ficke, Jacob Warnars, Emanuel Murant and his brothers Pieter (1623-1682) and Jan Wouwerman (1629-1666). He had many followers and his paintings were much sought after in the i8th and early 19th centuries, especially in France. Important collections created during that period, including those which form the nuclei of the museums in St Petersburg, Dresden and The Hague, all contain a large number of his works. Establishing a chronology with respect to Philips Wouwerman's work is extremely problematic. His extensive oeuvre notwithstanding, only a comparatively small number of paintings are dated. The style of the signature enables us to date pictures only within wide margins: the monogram composed of P, H, and W was only used before 1646; thenceforth he used a monogram composed of PHILS and W. Wouwerman's earliest dated work, of 1639 (sale London, Christie's, October 10, 1972), is of minor quality. However, during the 1640s his talents improved rapidly. During that period he was strongly influenced by the Haarlem painter Pieter van Laer (1599 - after 1642) with respect to both style and subject matter. This tallies with Houbraken's remark that Wouwerman laid his hands on sketches and studies by Van Laer after that artist's death. Van Laer's influence is evident in Attack on a Coach, dated 1644, in the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz. Several figures and details are quotations from works by Van Laer. Most of Wouwerman's compositions of the mid-1640os are dominated by a diagonally placed hill or dune covering most of the horizon, a tree - often dead - as a repoussoir and a few rather large figures, usually with horses. Landscape with Peasants Merrymaking in front of a Cottage in the City Art Gallery, Manchester, Battle Scene in the National Gallery, London and Landscape with a Resting Horseman in the Museum der Bildcnden Künste, Leipzig, all dated 1646, are proof that Wouwerman gradually developed his own style; nonetheless, Van Laer continued to be an important source of inspiration. As demonstrated by the four known dated paintings of 1649, the artist had replaced his sombre palette for a more colourful one by that time, and had also adopted a predominantly more horizontal scheme for his compositions. During that same period Wouwerman' pictures came to reflect a growing interest in landscape, and in the first half of the 1650s he produced a number of paintings which bear witness to his mastery of the landscape idiom. In a Landscape with Horsemen, of 1652, in a private British collection, painted in silvery tones, the figures and horses are reduced to a fairly insignificant staffage. Genre elements continued to play an important role in most of his paintings, though. One of his most successful works of that period is the Festive Peasants before a Panorama, dated 1653, in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Perhaps nowhere else in his oeuvre did the artist succeed in producing such a happy synthesis of genre and landscape elements. In the second half of the 1650s Wouwerman painted many of the fanciful hunting scenes - often with a vaguely Italian setting and brighter local colours - which were particularly sought after in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Only a few dated works from the last decade of his life have been preserved, but they do show a tendency towards more sombre colours and suggest a slight decline in his artistic skills. Van Laer's stylistic influence on Wouwerman had almost disappeared by then, although it continued to play a major role in terms of subject matter. After the middle of the 19th century Wouwerman's popularity waned, but more recently his work has met with increasing acclaim.

Abstract Due to the religious restrictions on imagery introduced by the Reformation, depictions of the Black African incarnation of Saint Maurice were sharply reduced and transformed in the German-speaking lands after 1530. This essay looks in detail at developments in several Saxon cities and also in the Baltic cities of Tallinn (Reval) and Riga. In Magdeburg and Halle, the focus is on secularized images of Maurice, while in Halle a little-known but vast painting replaced the Black Maurice with other Black characters more closely tied to the Bible. In the Baltic cities, the Black Maurice was in a complicated relationship with the heraldry of the Black Heads merchant guilds; only in the last few centuries has a secular version of the Black Maurice fully reappeared.

Due to the local cult of the miraculous statue of Virgin Mary that emerged in the 14th century religious fraternities began to play a leading role in the daily life of citizens, attracting to the town famous architects, artisans, composers and artists (among them was Hieronymus Bosch). But besides religious communities, professional corporations were also important actors in the urban commune, uniting artisans of various specialties around one patron. The most significant guilds in Hertogenbosch were the communities of clothiers and blacksmiths, which formed the main articles of the town’s exports. Areas, in which those craftsmen settled, formed a specific topography of the inner-city space. The core of it was the market square with the houses of the richest members of commercial and administrative elite. Apart from the two main sites — the market and St. John’s cathedral, erected much later — in the urban landscape were present important monasteries and cloisters; belonging to fraternities of beguines and Brotherhood of Common Life. The economic, socio-political, religious and cultural activities of these numerous urban communities formed the environment in which the everyday activities of the inhabitants of Hertogenbosch took place during the 14—15th centuries.

During the centuries of Ottoman Rule the local communities of the GreekPeninsula had to fulfill basic duties towards the Ottoman State. This madethem create a local political life more or less rich and complicated, dependingon their geographical position and local circumstances. Some of the biggercommunities of the zone northern than the Volos - Farsala - Arta line,presented -mostly due to their proximity with the dense net of the CentralBalkan roads and ports of commerce- a vivid political life, in whichparticipated the local merchants and artisans with their guilds as well as thelocal religious and administrative clerks and leaders. On the contrary, to thesouth of the above mentioned zone (in Central Greece, in Peloponnesus andin most of the small islands of the Aegean) the local communal political lifewas less complicated, and in the hands of persons or institutions whose localpower was more connected to the land than to handicraft and commerce.

Abstract Oscar Wilde and Paul Cadmus both utilize their art to renegotiate how we imagine our relationship to sin within Catholicism. This article draws attention to resonances between their approaches by presenting a Wildean queer theological aesthetic as a framework to interpret Cadmus’s art. A Wildean framework utilizes the excesses of both Catholicism and queerness as a foil for each other to create pauses for the imagination in a culture and religious tradition that risks falling into mechanization. In the space of that excess, we are allowed to escape the trap of existence to live as Individuals, claiming sin as an excess that offers an imaginative pause out of mere existence. Applied to Cadmus, a Wildean framework focuses on how Cadmus’s works also engages queer and Catholic excess to renegotiate Catholic guilt around the body and instead see the body and its sin as a site to know the Self.

In the decade between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, many of the Russian radical intelligentsia believed that Dostoevskii had anticipated their moral dilemmas. Critics, such as D. S. Merezhkovskii, argued that the experience of that turbulent period confirmed Dostoevskii's discovery about the nature of moral choice: Namely, there existed no single system of beliefs, no coherent ethical code, that could resolve all problems of ends and means and that this was so because, on some of the most fundamental issues of moral choice, the promptings of reason and feeling could not be reconciled. To be internally consistent, any ethical systems (and the religious and political creeds that embodied them) must therefore ignore or deny some of the moral imperatives rooted in man's nature. No system of belief, however compelling, could thus confer immunity from guilt, doubt, or self-contempt.

Abstract In this paper, we argue that antecedents of modern corporate social responsibility (CSR) prior to the Industrial Revolution can be referred to as “proto-CSR” to describe a practice that influenced modern CSR, but which is different from its modern counterparts in form and structure. We develop our argument with the history of miners’ guilds in medieval Germany—religious fraternities and secular mutual aid societies. Based on historical data collected by historians and archeologists, we reconstruct a long-term process of pragmatic experimentation with institutions of mutual aid that address social problems in the early mining industry, and thus before the rise of the modern state and the capitalist firm. Co-shaped by economic and political actors, these institutions of mutual aid have influenced the social responsibility programs of early industrialists, modern social welfare legislation, and contemporary CSR. We conjecture that other elements of proto-CSR might have evolved according to similar trajectories.

The Corpus Christi celebrations of medieval York provide a good opportunity for studying how symbolic power structures social relations, and how institutions reproduce their legitimacy at a time when the procession as well as the presentation of the pageant wagons were rigorously supervised by the city council. The elaborate procession of torches honoring the sacrament, a little discussed aspect of these celebrations, is particularly useful for such a study, because the records of the guilds provide surprising indications of the extent to which the supposedly solemn procession honoring the sacrament was characterized by disruption. These documents contradict those historians who normally treat both the procession and the pageants as representations staged in civic space that mirrored a united civic body. The negotiations surrounding the Skinner's participation in the Corpus Christi ceremonies of 1419 and the conflict of civic, religious, and royal authority in determining the position of the Cordwainers in the celebrations of 1490 provide traces of a different history—a history of a representation of social distinctions rather than a representation of undifferentiated community. This is a history of struggle between groups with different interests, engaging in symbolic struggle to maintain or alter the social distinctions embodied in the form of the procession.

Drawing upon theoretical frameworks, such as Sara Ahmed’s “strange encounters” (2000), “willful subjects” (2014), and Judith Butler’s vulnerability (2004), the present article aims to explore female agency and action in The Wonder as fundamental steps to achieve transformation and change. For this purpose, I first offer a brief introduction to the vulnerability of the female body in Irish history, as it counts on a significant tradition firmly rooted in religious and class politics. Significantly, the novel foregrounds a reformulation of religious superstitions into new patterns of existence. Lib’s watchfulness and vigil astutely enact a self-displaying activity that offers the promise of a more communicative and empathic interaction with Anna. In addition, attention will be also paid to the narrative techniques that depict Lib’s failure to read Anna’s body fully as a wounded individual, thus revealing an encounter with alterity that can only work when there is will, love and affection. The story, then, challenges an aesthetics of grief and guilt and enacts, in turn, a new pattern of existence for both Anna and Lib. Such a pattern demands an ethics of attention and communication aimed to restore the self and display a more affective stance, which is necessary in order to encounter the limits of intelligibility and find out the perverse truth behind Anna’s “wonderful anomaly” (Donoghue 2016: 97).

Since the times of Augustine, there has been a philosophical and theological debate on the inheritance of guilt on the interpretation of Original Sin. This debate turns on the early Church Fathers of the first centuries, signalled by the Neo-Patristic movement within the Orthodox Church in its accusations of heresy against the Catholic Church and proposing the very different notion of "Ancestral Sin". This paper will evaluate this debate and discuss the history of the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, and propose a new interpretation of the notion of "Original Sin" that offers an understanding of the nature of human beings and their relationship to evil without assuming the notion of the inheritance of guilt for the sin of Adam and Eve.

Michael Lucas Leopold Willmann (1630–1706) was born in Königsberg (now Kalinin grad in Russia), where his first teacher was Christian Peter, a well -off guild painter. After years of journeys of apprenticeship and learning in the Netherlands, the young artist returned to his homeland, after Matthias Czwiczek’s death in 1654 probably hoping for the position of the painter at the court of Great Elector Frederick William (1620–1688).What served to draw the ruler’s attention to himself was probably the lost painting, described by Johann Joachim von Sandrart as follows: ‘the Vulcan with his cyclops makes armour for Mars and a shield and a spear for Minerva’. The failure of these efforts led the future ‘Apelles’ to emigrate to Silesia, where he created a family painting workshop in Lubiąż (Leubus), and following the conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism, he became a Cistercian painter, creating famous works of art in religious or secular centres of Crown Bohemia. What connects him to Prussia is another painting of great importance in his career, the little -known ‘Apotheosis of the Great Elector as a Guardian of Arts’ from 1682. The successor to Great Elector Frederick III (1657–1713) was crowned in 1701 as the ‘king of Prussia’. The ceremony required an appropriate artistic setting, which prompted many artists to flock to Königsberg, including a Dutchman from Leiden, the painter Justus Bentum, a pupil of Gottfred Schalken, who reached the capital of the new kingdom together with his son Philip Christian. After studying from his father, Philip Christian Bentum (ok. 1690 – po 1757) followed in the footsteps of the famous Willmann, and went on a journey, from which he never returned to Prussia. He went first to imperial Prague, where he collaborated with Peter Brandl and converted to Catholicism, following which he travelled to Silesia. After 1731, he took part in the artistic projects of Bishop Franz Ludwig von Pfalz–Neuburg of Wrocław (Breslau) and Abbot Constantin Beyer, who completed the project begun by Freiberger and Willmann: the extension and decoration of the Cistercian Abbey in Lubiąż. It was there that he made the largest in Europe canvas -painted oil plafond of the Prince’s Hall and completed his opus magnum: covering all the library walls and vaults with painting. Those pro -Habsburg works were finished two years before the death of Emperor Charles VI (1685–1740) and the military invasion of Silesia by Frederick II Hohenzollern (1712–1786), great - -grandson of the Great Elector. The fate of the artists mentioned in the title was intertwined with Königsberg and Lubiąż. Both converts set off for the professional maturity from the Prussian capital via Prague to Silesia. They can be compared by the Dutch sources of their art and a compilation method of creating images using print ‘prototypes’. Their inner discrepancy can be seen in the choice of these patterns, as they followed both the Catholic Rubens and the Protestant Rembrandt Van Rijn. They were connected with the provinces playing a key role in Central -European politics: here the Hohenzollerns competed for power in Central Europe with the Habsburgs. They were witnessesto the game for winning Silesia, and even took part in it by creating propagandistic art. Both of them worked for Bishop Franz Ludwig von Pfalz–Neuburg (1664–1732), associated with the Emperor, a kind of the capo di tutti capi of the Counter -Reformation in Silesia. Bentum eagerly imitated selected compositions of his predecessor and master from Lubiąż, and I think he even tried to surpass him in scale and precision. The artistic competition with Willman is visible in the paintings of the library in Lubiąż. There, he presented an Allegory of Painting, which shows the image of Willmann carried by an angel, while the inscription praising the qualities of his character calls him ‘Apelles’. The work of both painters, who took their first steps in the profession as Protestants in Königsberg, but became famous through their work for Catholics, provides an interesting material for the analysis of the general topic of artistic careers on the periphery of Europe, the relationship between the centres and the periphery, as well as for two stages of re -Catholisation in Silesia treated as an instrument of power. It was usually pointed out how much separates the two painters, but no one has ever tried to show what unites them. The comparison of the sources, motifs, and outstanding achievements of both of them, especially in Lubiąż, gives a more complete picture of their activity deeply immersed in the politics of their times. This picture is not as unambiguous as it has been so far, highlighting the political and propaganda aspects of their career spreading out between the coastal Protestant north and the Catholic south. The drama of their lives took place in Silesia, where the multiple dividing lines of Europe intersected. The idea of narrating the parallel fates of two artists with great Politics in the background (as in he case of Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’) came to my mind years ago when I curated the Exhibition ‘Willmann – Drawings. A Baroque Artist’s Workshop’ (2001, National Museum in Wrocław, in cooperation with Salzburg and Stuttgart). The present paper was to be included in the volume accompanying that project initiated by Andrzej Kozieł (Willmann and Others. Painting, Drawing and Graphic Arts in Silesia and Neighbouring Countries in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. A. Kozieł, B. Lejman, Wrocław 2002), but I withdrew from its publication. I am hereby publishing it, thanking Małgorzata Omilanowska for her presence at the opening of this first great exhibition of mine in 2001, as well for the excellent cooperation with my Austrian, Czech, German, and Polish colleagues. This text, referring to the topic of our discussions at the time – as on the event of the above -mentioned exhibition I spoke at a press conference in Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie, where the curator of the German exhibition was Hans Martin Kaulbach, exactly two days after the attack on WTC.

In December 1624, the London draper and merchant adventurer, John Kendrick (Fig. 1), died leaving a large proportion of his considerable fortune to charitable causes. Like other early seventeenth-century metropolitan benefactors, he sought to attack the causes of poverty as well as to relieve its impact, and his legacies included the sums of £7,500 and £4,000, bequeathed respectively to the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury, to establish workhouses for the employment of the poor. Workhouses were a relatively new public institution at this date. In the wake of the dissolution of both monasteries and religious guilds in the 1530s and 1540s, and consequent decline in charitable support to the poor, urban authorities experimented with a range of measures to relieve poverty. A small number of towns and cities, including York (1567) and Chester (1577), used charitable funds and locally raised poor rates to establish workhouses to provide work and training to the poor. The workhouses were not residential and in some cases merely acted as distribution points for raw materials to be processed at home. In a parallel development, other towns and cities, including London (1555) and Ipswich (1569) established houses of correction to punish vagrants and to force them to work. Some also provided training schools for the young. The state moved quickly to endorse such measures. Legislation was introduced in 1576 requiring justices of the peace to supply stocks of wool, hemp, flax, iron or other materials to provide work for the poor and to establish houses of correction in each county for incorrigible rogues and those who refused to work. Penalties for non-compliance with the legislation were introduced in 1610.

Objectives: Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849) is credited with the creation of the detective story. However, his tales have not been extensively researched, especially in areas such as religiosity and spirituality. This paper aims to delve into these deeply-embedded areas and explore the neglected themes within Poe's works. The objective is to uncover the religious experiences that some of Poe's protagonists undergo. Methods: Employing an intrinsic approach, this study demonstrates that the protagonists in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" experience spiritual growth and awakening after losing their proper orientation and going astray. These characters do not appear to be true believers, as they do not believe in the existence of God. However, after facing a crisis resulting from committing a crime, God suddenly becomes apparent to them. Results: Therefore, the present study focuses on analyzing the gothic setting, inner conflict, symbols, and narrative techniques in Poe’s two stories. It aims to highlight the significance of the psychological turmoil experienced by the two protagonists, which ultimately leads to their spiritual awakening. Conclusions: Under the weight of guilt and remorse, the two protagonists begin to perceive existence in a new light, as revealed through their monologues. They express a need for spiritual revival.

The reconstruction of Dostoevsky’s first literary experience — the lost drama “Mary Stuart” — involves the identification and analysis of the sources of the idea. As a result of the conducted research, a hypothetical chain of events was built. In 1838 (1835, according to other sources), Dostoevsky was impressed by “Mary Stuart” at the Alexandrinsky Theater with A. M. Karatygina in the title role: the image of the suffering queen created by the actress was superimposed on the reading of both Schiller’s tragedy “Mary Stuart” and Walter Scott’s novel “The Abbot.” Russian collection of her biographical documents, published in 1809 and the 1839 French-Russian edition of letters of Mary Stuart, her will and the report on the execution discovered by A. Ya. Lobanov-Rostovsky in the archives, came into the view of the novice writer when he was studying the “historical data” about the “life and execution” of Mary Stuart. In 1839–1840, a fictionalized biography of the “criminal” queen, compiled by Alexandre Dumas, was published. In his version, the image of Mary Stuart is twofold: along with the heroic beginning of the character, the theme of sinful passion emerged. The bifurcation of the image was reinforced in the 1841 essay by Filaret Shal, who also emphasized the religious motives of the unfolding historical drama. Comprehending all these turns of European and Russian historiography in 1839–1842, Dostoevsky could use as the basis of his play the dialogue of the nurse and Mary in the fourth scene of the first act of his tragedy about the correlation between guilt and responsibility, which Schiller did not continue. For Schiller, Mary Stuart is the title character, but not the only main one, moreover, the theme of Elizabeth in many ways attracted dramatic interest. Dostoevsky most likely focused on the internal collisions of the “gigantic character,” whom he placed in a line of Racine’s heroines (first of all, the “Shakespearean essay” by Phaedra): Maria integrated the firmness of spirit in the face of suffering and death itself with the omnipotence of passion, accompanied by torments of conscience. The “historical data” that Riesenkampf hinted at, mastered by the Russian author, allowed to continue Schiller’s creative work. The article identifies and analyzes a range of these data thatrevealed the deep collisions of European history embodied in one of its iconic characters to Dostoevsky.

Having been an ʿAbbāsid Caliph in such a period when the Caliphate office lost its political authority and symbolically serviced as a religious power, al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh desired to reset the authority of Caliphate in Islamic world. For doing so he did notable military, political, intellectual and social reforms. One of the reforms he did that dates back to the earlier times was to improve the concept and position of the idea of futuwwa under his authority. Term “futuwwa,” referring youth, bravery and gallantry derives from the Arabic term fetā that means youth in Arabic. Two different types of concept of futuwwa have been developed in historical process. One is resulted in due to the fact that social and demographic changes in the Middle East. Especially, after the Islamic conquests around the Middle East, rapid urbanization has been appeared there. This urbanization phenomen caused to weaken the ties within tribe members. Unitary function of the tribe was replaced with futuwwa unities that were formed by young people who were having same profession and had same ideology. The purpose of this development was to increase the social cooperation and the association activities. Moreover, ṣūfism also created a kind of futuwwa that requires men to be virtuous men and to do favours for others without any personal interest. It is meaningful that this kind of futuwwa also emphasizes public service. As a result of the fact that some of the scattered and disobedient futuwwa unites, Caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh ordered al-Suhrawardī who is the leading ṣūfī of his era to compose a new doctrine related to the concept of futuwwa. Al-Suhrawardī tried to integrate the futuwwa unites with the ṣūfistic approach of the concept of futuwwa and he also aimed to form such virtuous futuwwa unites that they devote themselves to the public interest. Furthermore, al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh who declared himself as a leader of all futuwwa groups did not hesitate to disband some futuwwa groups not obeying his authority. In this way, he not only overcome the disobedient futuwwa unites but also increase his authority over all futuwwa unites, and finally, the entire futuwwa unites unavoidably confirm his power. It is seen that al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh focused on rearranging the concept and mission of the futuwwa to unite all Muslims under the power of futuwwa by ignoring the denominational differences within all Muslims. Thus, the concept of futuwwa that was legitimized during the reign of the Caliph al-Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh turned to the shape of the craft guilds in following periods as it organize the artisan and craft groups in Muslim societies. Therefore, futuwwa which spread and serviced under the title of Akhīsm in Anatolia contributes to the shape of the socio-economic life in Anatolia. In this study, not only the position and role of al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh as a leader of futuwwa unites were discussed in the sense of his perception of futuwwa and but also his reforms, and possible aims regarding this phenomenon were covered. Keywords: Futuwwa, Akhīsm, al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh, ʿAbbāsid.

Abstract This article investigates a devout society centring on the household of Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509) at Collyweston in Northamptonshire and St Katherine's guild in the neighbouring market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. The discussion unveils Margaret Beaufort's place at the heart of a vibrant devotional community, whose members, among them a core group of lay and religious townswomen, were united by their geography and shared devotional interests. Ultimately, this article sheds new light on the overlapping spiritual networks of an important market town and the household of a highly influential noblewoman, whilst also demonstrating how Margaret's sponsorship of the society informed her self-fashioning as a pious matriarch of the house of Tudor.

AbstractThe implementation of multidisciplinary research approaches is an essential prerequisite to obtain comprehensive insights into the life and works of the old masters and their timeline in the production of the arts. In this study, traditional art history, cultural heritage, and natural science methods were combined to shed light on an Adoration of the Shepherds painting by Jacques Jordaens (1593–1678), which until now had been considered as a copy. From dendrochronological analysis of the wooden support, it was concluded that the planks in the panel painting were made from Baltic oak trees felled after 1608. An independent dating based on the panel maker’s mark, and the guild’s quality control marks suggests a production period of the panel between 1617 and 1627. Furthermore, the size of the panel corresponds to the dimension known as salvator, which was commonly used for religious paintings during the period 1615 to 1621. Finally, the interpretation of the stylistic elements of the painting suggests that it was made by Jordaens between 1616 and 1618. To conclude, from the synthesis of: (i) dendrochronological analysis, (ii) panel makers’ punch mark and Antwerp Guild brand marks, (iii) re-examination of secondary sources, and (iv) stylistic comparisons to other Jordaens paintings, we suggest that the examined Adoration of the Shepherds should be considered as an original by Jordaens and likely painted in the period 1617–1618. The study is a striking example of the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary approach to investigate panel paintings.

AbstractPieter Veen's name is virtually unmentioned in art-historical sources. Moreover, many of his paintings, some of them bearing false signatures, were sold under other names, which may partly account for his obscurity. Veen lived and worked in Rotterdam, where he was a dean of Saint Luke's guild in 1716, 1720, 1731 and 1736. Eighteenth-century auction catalogues list him as a pupil of Adriaen van der Werff, whose influence can certainly be seen in his work. Not, however, in his earliest extant painting, and the only one to be dated: a portrait of Geertruy van der Hey, a burgomaster's wife, done in 1686. In type, the portrait is closer to the work of Jan Verkolje, who was active in Delft. From a written source we know that Veen painted a portrait of Adriaen Boon in 1684. This justifies the cautious conclusion that he began his career as a portraitist. By far the greater part of his output consisted however of history paintings, most of them religious works. He also painted a few mythological pictures and especially allegories. An occasional link can be established with work by Adriaen van der Werff; Veen's Fall, for instance, is partly based on the latter's Adam and Eve after the Fall. Veen's style is less rigidly classicistic, though. His paintings have a narrative character. In that respect his work has more in common with the notions of classicism as expressed in Gerard Hoet's bible illustrations and Arnold Houbraken's paintings. Veen tends towards the decorative: graceful attitudes, elongated bodies and little parallel folds in garments are characteristic of his style. An eclectic painter, he was influenced by the art of both his own period and the past. Abraham Receiving the Three Angels, Susanna and the Elders and Apollo and Daphne, for instance, appear to derive from sixteenth-century exemplars. The Holy Family with Anna and Angels is actually a direct copy of a composition by Hans van Aken. The landscape in Shepherd Playing a Flute displays the influence of French classicists such as Poussin and Millet, many of whose works Veen could have seen in Rotterdam. Pieter Veen possessed only a modest talent, and there arc hardly any signs of a development in his work. Nonetheless, this forgotten Rotterdam painter deserves a place among the minor masters of the period.

AbstractHerman Jansz Breckerveld was born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1595/1596. He left his birth country for religious and economic reasons, deciding to settle in the Netherlands. There is evidence he was living in The Hague in the year 1622, though there is a strong possibility that he had been in the country for some time before then. It is probable that he learned the trade of glass making from a Master in Arnhem. Whilst living in The Hague Breckerveld befriended David Beck, Master of the French School there. Beck kept a diary of the year 1624 from which much information on the daily lives of himself and his friend Breckerveld can be drawn. Breckerveld was registered as an official glass maker of The Hague St. Luke Guild in 1623. The levels of his success varied, resulting in financial ups and downs. In March of 1624 he took on the role of teaching, taking on a student, most probably his first. In August of the same year he acquired new accommodation, where the first evidence of a workshop can be found. This workshop contained a glass furnace, the first he could claim to be his own. Prior to this he would take his glasses to Delft for them to be baked there. Little is known of commissions which Breckerveld may have received in his period in The Hague. Beck does mention a number of commissions for producing glasses, but these were for family members of Beck, who were among Breckerveld's circle of friends and acquaintances. At the end of 1625 Breckerveld, by this time married, left The Hague for Arnhem with his wife Jenneke Arents. He registered himself in the same year as glass maker and painter at the guild. From this time until his death in 1673 he ran a successful glass workshop with a total of 20 students, including his own son, Josua, who would later take over the running of the workshop just before his father's death. Breckerveld received many commissions from the city of Arnhem, a few from local organisations, and even some from the city of Nijmegen. A total amount of 3,000 guilders in commissions can be traced back from city account records. The majority of these earnings were made from the installation or renovation of clear or painted glass. Many commissions were for so-called 'tribute glasse', which were presented by the city of Arnhem to certain citizens or organisations. Alongside his work as a glass painter, Breckerveld was also active as a calligrapher and painter. Furthermore, he was periodically involved in many other work activities. This kind of versatility was hard to come by in the mid seventeenth century in the province of Zeeland in Holland, and in Utrecht. The artists in these regions, which at the time formed the economic heart of the Republic, had already specialised in their form of choice. The generalist Breckerveld would most probably have found it very difficult to compete with the large number of specialists in the more economically developed regions, who all had developed a very high standard of craftsmanship. Perhaps he was conscious of this and made the decision to move to Arnhem to avoid this competition. No painted glasses by Herman Breckerveld are known. It may be suggested that a glass with a depiction of Christ and the Samaritan Woman can be attributed to him. The only collection of his artistry known to date consists of 20 signed and attributed drawings, six prints, one painting and some calligraphic work. All but four of the drawings were produced in the period 1624-1626. Eight landscapes form, together with a set of signed landscapes dated from 1625, a stylistically unambiguous group. During this period he worked with thick, precisely placed lines, despite using almost no washing. His compositions from this time seem to be rather old fashioned for the period. He seems to have drawn inspiration mainly from artists such as Paulus Bril, Hendrick Goltzius and Jacob de Gheyn II. Furthermore, a group of four figure drawings can be attributed to him. Three drawings from the National Museum of Stockholm and one from the Detroit Institute of Arts were previously attributed to Hendrick Bloemaert and Herman Blockhauwcr, respectively. The drawings were made in the same style as Breckerveld's landscapes and seem to have been inspired by the series of prints 'Handling Weapons' by Jacob de Gheyn. Breckerveld often used prints by other artists as an example from which he worked. He was also inspired in this way by the work of Claes Jansz. Visscher, Hendrick Goltzius and Abraham Blocmart. There are only three signed drawings and one attributed drawing known by Breckerveld from the period post-1626. The style and technique of these differ greatly from the drawings from the period 1624-1626, the most obvious being the change in medium from pcn to brush. It is possible that there are more unsigned drawings from the period post-1626 that have remained intact, however, without material to compare these to one cannot without a doubt attribute these to Breckerveld. A number of attributed drawings made to him in the past arc for this reason not entirely convincing. Little research has been carried out into the work of Herman Breckerveld, as is the case for many seventeenth century artists. This lack of interest is partly due to the limited artistic value of their work. Any research does, however, contain cultural historical value. It provides us with new information on the social background of the non-specialised masters of a smaller level than their great counterparts. Even more so, research into these masters can assist in identifying the artists of the many as yet anonymous drawings from this period.

AbstractThe present study aims to understand the experiences, challenges, psychological well-being and needs of clinical and non-clinical government healthcare workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Hyderabad-Karnataka (H-K) region. This qualitative study used purposive sampling method to recruit 221 HCWs working in the H-K region government hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with those HCWs who agreed to participate. The data analyzed using conventional content analysis revealed three main themes: (1) experiences and challenges faced by HCWs; (2) psychological well-being and coping strategies used by HCWs; and (3) experience of and need for social support. The main findings of the current study are as follows: The HCWs experienced fear and apprehension during the early stages of the pandemic, but gradually, their fears reduced, and they perceived the situation to be the “new normal”. They experienced work-related (scarcity of resources, problems with PPE, communication issues, violence, and stigma) and family-related (fear of infecting family members, choosing work over family, inability to undertake family roles) challenges while serving during the pandemic. They reported increased psychological issues (psychological distress, experience of loss, and feelings of guilt and helplessness). Conversely, they reported a need for emotional stability. The HCWs reported using adaptive (emotion-focused, problem-focused, and religious) and maladaptive (avoidance and substance abuse) coping strategies to cope with these challenges and psychological problems. They also sought social support (from family, friends, colleagues, and superiors) and raised the need for organizational, personal, and societal support to cope with the pandemic. The HCWs experienced physical and psychological burnout, especially from stretching beyond the assigned roles due to a shortage of resources and workforce. However, amidst juggling with work and family responsibilities, HCWs were found to be emotionally stable and reported to have a positive outlook in general. Besides, emphasizing the regulation of policies for meeting their primary needs, they stressed the need for professional psychological services with need-based intervention strategies.

Susheel Kumar Sharma’s Unwinding Self: A Collection of Poems. Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraj Institute, 2020, ISBN: 978-81-943450-3-9, Paperback, pp. viii + 152. Like his earlier collection, The Door is Half Open, Susheel Kumar Sharma’s Unwinding Self: A Collection of Poems has three sections consisting of forty-two poems of varied length and style, a detailed Glossary mainly on the proper nouns from Indian culture and tradition and seven Afterwords from the pens of the trained readers from different countries of four continents. The structure of the book is circular. The first poem “Snapshots” indicates fifteen kaleidoscopic patterns of different moods of life in about fifteen words each. It seems to be a rumination on the variegated images of everyday experiences ranging from individual concerns to spiritual values. Art-wise, they can be called mini-micro-poems as is the last poem of the book. While the character limit in a micro poem is generally 140 (the character limit on Twitter) Susheel has used just around 65 in each of these poems. Naturally, imagery, symbolism and cinematic technique play a great role in this case. In “The End of the Road” the poet depicts his individual experiences particularly changing scenario of the world. He seems to be worried about his eyesight getting weak with the passage of time, simultaneously he contrasts the weakness of his eyesight with the hypocrisy permeating the human life. He compares his diminishing eyesight to Milton and shows his fear as if he will get blind. He changes his spectacles six times to clear his vision and see the plurality of a reality in human life. It is an irony on the changing aspects of human life causing miseries to the humanity. At the end of the poem, the poet admits the huge changes based on the sham principles: “The world has lost its original colour” (4). The concluding lines of the poem make a mockery of the people who are not able to recognise reality in the right perspective. The poem “Durga Puja in 2013” deals with the celebration of the festival “Durga Puja” popular in the Hindu religion. The poet’s urge to be with Ma Durga shows his dedication towards the Goddess Durga, whom he addresses with different names like ‘Mai’, ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’. He worships her power and expresses deep reverence for annihilating the evil-spirits. The festival Durga Puja also reminds people of victory of the goddess on the elusive demons in the battlefield. “Chasing a Dream on the Ganges” is another poem having spiritual overtones. Similarly, the poem “Akshya Tritya” has religious and spiritual connotations. It reflects curiosity of people for celebration of “Akshya Tritya” with enthusiasm. But the political and economic overtones cannot be ignored as the poem ends with the remarkable comments: The GDP may go up on this day; Even, Budia is able to Eat to his fill; Panditji can blow his Conch shell with full might. Outside, somebody is asking for votes; Somebody is urging others to vote. I shall vote for Akshya Tritya. (65-66) “On Reading Langston Hughes’ ‘Theme for English B’” is a long poem in the collection. In this poem, the poet reveals a learner’s craving for learning, perhaps who comes from an extremely poor background to pursue his dreams of higher education. The poet considers the learner’s plights of early childhood, school education and evolutionary spirit. He associates it with Dronacharya and Eklavya to describe the mythical system of education. He does not want to be burdened with the self-guilt by denying the student to be his ‘guru’ therefore, he accepts the challenge to change his life. Finally, he shows his sympathy towards the learner and decides to be the ‘guru’: “It is better to face/A challenge and change/Than to be burden with a life/Of self-guilt. /I put my signatures on his form willy-nilly” (11). The poem “The Destitute” is an ironical presentation of the modern ways of living seeking pleasure in the exotic locations all over the world. It portrays the life of a person who has to leave his motherland for earning his livelihood, and has to face an irreparable loss affecting moral virtues, lifestyle, health and sometimes resulting in deaths. The poem “The Black Experience” deals with the suppression of the Africans by the white people. The poem “Me, A Black Doxy”, perhaps points out the dilemma of a black woman whether she should prostitute herself or not, to earn her livelihood. Perhaps, her deep consciousness about her self-esteem does not allow her to indulge in it but she thinks that she is not alone in objectifying herself for money in the street. Her voice resonates repeatedly with the guilt of her indulgence on the filthy streets: At the dining time Me not alone? In the crowded street Me not alone? They ’ave white, grey, pink hair Me ’ave black hair – me not alone There’s a crowd with black hair. Me ’ave no black money Me not alone? (14) The poem “Thus Spake a Woman” is structured in five sections having expressions of the different aspects of a woman’s love designs. It depicts a woman’s dreams and her attraction towards her lover. The auditory images like “strings of a violin”, “music of the violin” and “clinch in my fist” multiply intensity of her feelings. With development of the poem, her dreams seem to be shattered and sadness know the doors of her dreamland. Finally, she is confronted with sadness and is taken back to the past memories reminding her of the difficult situations she had faced. Replete with poetic irony, “Bubli Poems” presents the journey of a female, who, from the formative years of her life to womanhood, experienced gender stereotypes, biased sociocultural practices, and ephemeral happiness on the faces of other girls around her. The poem showcases the transformation of a village girl into a New Woman, who dreams her existence in all types of luxurious belongings rather than identifying her independent existence and finding out her own ways of living. Her dreams lead her to social mobility through education, friendships, and the freedom that she gains from her parents, family, society and culture. She attempts her luck in the different walks of human life, particularly singing and dancing and imagines her social status and wide popularity similar to those of the famous Indian actresses viz. Katrina and Madhuri Dixit: “One day Bubli was standing before the mirror/Putting on a jeans and jacket and shaking her hips/She was trying to be a local Katrina” (41). She readily bears the freakish behaviour of the rustic/uncultured lads, derogatory comments, and physical assaults in order to fulfil her expectations and achieves her individual freedom. Having enjoyed all the worldly happiness and fashionable life, ultimately, she is confronted with the evils designs around her which make her worried, as if she is ignorant of the world replete with the evils and agonies: “Bubli was ignorant of her agony and the lost calm” (42). The examples of direct poetic irony and ironic expressions of the socio-cultural evils, and the different governing bodies globally, are explicit in this poem: “Bubli is a leader/What though if a cheerleader./The news makes her family happy.”(40), “Others were blaming the Vice-Chancellor/ Some others the system;/ Some the freedom given to girls;”(45), and “Some blame poverty; some the IMF;/ Some the UN; some the environment;/ Some the arms race; some the crony’s lust;/ Some the US’s craving for power;/Some the UK’s greed. (46-47). Finally, Bubli finds that her imaginative world is fragile. She gives up her corporeal dreams which have taken the peace of her mind away. She yearns for shelter in the temples and churches and surrenders herself before deities praying for her liberation: “Jai Kali,/ Jai Mahakali, Jai Ma, Jai Jagaddhatri,/ Save me, save the world.” (47). In the poem “The Unlucky”, the poet jibes at those who are lethargic in reading. He identifies four kinds of readers and places himself in the fourth category by rating himself a ‘poor’ reader. The first three categories remind the readers of William Shakespeare’s statement “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” At the end of the poem, the poet questions himself for being a poet and teacher. The question itself reflects on his ironic presentation of himself as a poor reader because a poet’s wisdom is compared with that of the philosopher and everybody worships and bows before a teacher, a “guru”, in the Indian tradition. The poet is considered the embodiment of both. The poet’s unfulfilled wish to have been born in Prayagraj is indexed with compunction when the poem ends with the question “Why was I not born in Prayagraj?” (52). Ending with a question mark, the last line of the poem expresses his desire for perfection. The next poem, “Saying Goodbye”, is elegiac in tone and has an allusion to Thomas Gray’s “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in the line “When the curfew tolls the knell of the parting day”; it ends with a question mark. The poem seems to be a depiction of the essence and immortality of ‘time’. Reflecting on the poet’s consideration of the power and beauty of ‘time’, Pradeep Kumar Patra rightly points out, “It is such a phenomena that nobody can turn away from it. The moment is both beautiful as well as ferocious. It beautifies and showcases everything and at the same time pulls everything down when necessary” (146). Apparently, the poem “The Kerala Flood 2018”is an expression of emotions at the disaster caused by the flood in 2018. By reminding of Gandhi’s tenets to be followed by people for the sake of morality and humankind, the poet makes an implicit criticism of the pretentions, and violation of pledges made by people to care of other beings, particularly, cow that is worshiped as “mother” and is considered to be a symbol of fertility, peace and holiness in Hinduism as well as the Buddhist culture. The poet also denigrates people who deliberately ignore the sanctity of the human life in Hinduism and slaughter the animal cow to satisfy their appetites. In the poem, the carnivorous are criticized explicitly, but those who pretend to be herbivorous are decried as shams: If a cow is sacrosanct And people eat beef One has to take a side. Some of the friends chose to Side with cow and others With the beef-eaters. Some were more human They chose both. (55) The poet infuses positivity into the minds of the Indian people. Perhaps, he thinks that, for Indians, poverty, ignorance, dirt and mud are not taboos as if they are habitual to forbear evils by their instincts. They readily accept them and live their lives happily with pride considering their deity as the preserver of their lives. The poem “A Family by the Road” is an example of such beliefs, in which the poet lavishes most of his poetic depiction on the significance of the Lord Shiva, the preserver of people in Hinduism: Let me enjoy my freedom. I am proud of my poverty. I am proud of my ignorance. I am proud of my dirt. I have a home because of these. I am proud of my home. My future is writ on the walls Of your houses My family shall stay in the mud. After all, somebody is needed To clean the dirt as well. I am Shiva, Shivoham. (73) In the poem “Kabir’s Chadar”, the poet invokes several virtues to back up his faith in spirituality and simplicity. He draws a line of merit and virtue between Kabir’s Chadar which is ‘white’ and his own which is “thickly woven” and “Patterned with various beautiful designs/ In dark but shining colours” (50). The poet expresses his views on Kabir’s ‘white’ Chadar symbolically to inculcate the sense of purity, fortitude, spirituality, and righteousness among people. The purpose of his direct comparison between them is to refute artificiality, guilt and evil intents of humanity, and propagate spiritual purity, the stark simplicities of our old way of life, and follow the patience of a saint like Kabir. The poem “Distancing” is a statement of poetic irony on the city having two different names known as Bombay and Mumbai. The poet sneers at its existence in Atlas. Although the poet portraits the historical events jeering at the distancing between the two cities as if they are really different, yet the poet’s prophetic anticipation about the spread of the COVID-19 in India cannot be denied prima facie. The poet’s overwhelming opinions on the overcrowded city of Bombay warn humankind to rescue their lives. Even though the poem seems to have individual expressions of the poet, leaves a message of distancing to be understood by the people for their safety against the uneven things. The poem “Crowded Locals” seems to be a sequel to the poem “Distancing”. Although the poet’s purpose, and appeal to the commonplace for distancing cannot be affirmed by the readers yet his remarks on the overcrowded cities like in Mumbai (“Crowded Locals”), foresee some risk to the humankind. In the poem “Crowded Locals”, he details the mobility of people from one place to another, having dreams in their eyes and puzzles in their minds for their livelihood while feeling insecure especially, pickpockets, thieves and strangers. The poet also makes sneering comments on the body odour of people travelling in first class. However, these two poems have become a novel contribution for social distancing to fight against the COVID-19. In the poem “Buy Books, Not Diamonds” the poet makes an ironical interpretation of social anarchy, political upheaval, and threat of violence. In this poem, the poet vies attention of the readers towards the socio-cultural anarchy, especially, anarchy falls on the academic institutions in the western countries where capitalism, aristocracy, dictatorship have armed children not with books which inculcate human values but with rifles which create fear and cause violence resulting in deaths. The poet’s perplexed opinions find manifestation in such a way as if books have been replaced with diamonds and guns, therefore, human values are on the verge of collapse: “Nine radiant diamonds are no match/ To the redness of the queen of spades. . . . / … holding/ Rifles is a better option than/ Hawking groundnuts on the streets?” (67).The poet also decries the spread of austere religious practices and jihadist movement like Boko Haram, powerful personalities, regulatory bodies and religious persons: “Boko Haram has come/Obama has also come/The UN has come/Even John has come with/Various kinds of ointments” (67). The poem “Lost Childhood” seems to be a memoir in which the poet compares the early life of an orphan with the child who enjoys early years of their lives under the safety of their parents. Similarly, the theme of the poem “Hands” deals with the poet’s past experiences of the lifestyle and its comparison to the present generation. The poet’s deep reverence for his parents reveals his clear understanding of the ways of living and human values. He seems to be very grateful to his father as if he wants to make his life peaceful by reading the lines of his palms: “I need to read the lines in his palm” (70). In the poem “A Gush of Wind”, the poet deliberates on the role of Nature in our lives. The poem is divided into three sections, perhaps developing in three different forms of the wind viz. air, storm, and breeze respectively. It is structured around the significance of the Nature. In the first section, the poet lays emphasis on the air we breathe and keep ourselves fresh as if it is a panacea. The poet criticizes artificial and material things like AC. In the second section, he depicts the stormy nature of the wind scattering papers, making the bed sheets dusty affecting or breaking the different types of fragile and luxurious objects like Italian carpets and lamp shades with its strong blow entering the oriels and window panes of the houses. Apparently, the poem may be an individual expression, but it seems to be a caricature on the majesty of the rich people who ignore the use of eco-chic objects and disobey the Nature’s behest. In the third and the last section of the poem, the poet’s tone is critical towards Whitman, Pushkin and Ginsberg for their pseudoscientific philosophy of adherence to the Nature. Finally, he opens himself to enjoy the wind fearlessly. The poems like “A Voice” , “The New Year Dawn”, “The New Age”, “The World in Words in 2015”, “A Pond Nearby”, “Wearing the Scarlet Letter ‘A’”, “A Mock Drill”, “Strutting Around”, “Sahibs, Snobs, Sinners”, “Endless Wait”, “The Soul with a New Hat”, “Renewed Hope”, “Like Father, Unlike Son”, “Hands”, “Rechristening the City”, “Coffee”, “The Unborn Poem”, “The Fountain Square”, “Ram Setu”, and “Connaught Place” touch upon the different themes. These poems reveal poet’s creativity and unique features of his poetic arts and crafts. The last poem of the collection “Stories from the Mahabharata” is written in twenty-five stanzas consisting of three lines each. Each stanza either describes a scene or narrates a story from the Mahabharata, the source of the poem. Every stanza has an independent action verb to describe the actions of different characters drawn from the Mahabharata. Thus, each stanza is a complete miniscule poem in itself which seems to be a remarkable characteristic of the poem. It is an exquisite example of ‘Micro-poetry’ on paper, remarkable for its brevity, dexterity and intensity. The poet’s conscious and brilliant reframing of the stories in his poem sets an example of a new type of ‘Found Poetry’ for his readers. Although the poet’s use of various types images—natural, comic, tragic, childhood, horticultural, retains the attention of readers yet the abundant evidences of anaphora reflect redundancy and affect the readers’ concentration and diminishes their mental perception, for examples, pronouns ‘her’ and ‘we’ in a very small poem “Lost Childhood”, articles ‘the’ and ‘all’ in “Crowded Locals”, the phrase ‘I am proud of’ in “A Family by the Road” occur many times. Svitlana Buchatska’s concise but evaluative views in her Afterword to Unwinding Self help the readers to catch hold of the poet’s depiction of his emotions. She writes, “Being a keen observer of life he vividly depicts people’s life, traditions and emotions involving us into their rich spiritual world. His poems are the reflection on the Master’s world of values, love to his family, friends, students and what is more, to his beloved India. Thus, the author reveals all his beliefs, attitudes, myths and allusions which are the patterns used by the Indian poets” (150). W. H. Auden defines poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” It seems so true of Susheel Sharma’s Unwinding Self. It is a mixture of poems that touch upon the different aspects of human life. It can be averred that the collection consists of the poet’s seamless efforts to delve into the various domains of the human life and spot for the different places as well. It is a poetic revue in verse in which the poet instils energy, confidence, power and enthusiasm into minds of Indian people and touches upon all aspects of their lives. The poverty, ignorance, dirt, mud, daily struggle against liars, thieves, pickpockets, touts, politician and darkness have been depicted not as weaknesses of people in Indian culture but their strengths, because they have courage to overcome darkness and see the advent of a new era. The poems teach people morality, guide them to relive their pains and lead them to their salvation. Patricia Prime’s opinion is remarkable: “Sharma writes about his family, men and women, childhood, identity, roots and rootlessness, memory and loss, dreams and interactions with nature and place. His poised, articulate poems are remarkable for their wit, conversational tone and insight” (138). Through the poems in the collection, the poet dovetails the niceties of the Indian culture, and communicates its beauty and uniqueness meticulously. The language of the poem is lucid, elevated and eloquent. The poet’s use of diction seems to be very simple and colloquial like that of an inspiring teacher. On the whole the book is more than just a collection of poems as it teaches the readers a lot about the world around them through a detailed Glossary appended soon after the poems in the collection. It provides supplementary information about the terms used abundantly in Indian scriptures, myths, and other religious and academic writings. The Glossary, therefore, plays pivotal role in unfolding the layers of meaning and reaching the hearts of the global readers. The “Afterwords” appended at the end, enhances readability of poems and displays worldwide acceptability, intelligibility, and popularity of the poet. The Afterwords are a good example of authentic Formalistic criticism and New Criticism. They indirectly teach a formative reader and critic the importance of forming one’s opinion, direct reading and writing without any crutches of the critics.

Stand-up is a global phenomenon. It is Australia’s most significant form of advocatorial theatre and a major platform for challenging stigma and prejudice. In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up is transforming into a more culturally diverse form and extending the spectrum of material addressing human rights. Since the 1980s Australian stand-up routines have moved beyond the old colonial targets of England and America, and Indigenous comics such as Kevin Kopinyeri, Andy Saunders, and Shiralee Hood have gained an established following. Additionally, the turn to Asia is evident not just in trade agreements and the higher education market but also in cultural exchange and in the billing of emerging Asian stand-ups at mainstream events. The major cultural driver for stand-up is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), Australia’s largest cultural event, now over 30 years old, and an important site for dissecting constructs of democracy and nationhood. As John McCallum has observed, popular humour in post-World War II Australia drew on widespread feelings of “displacement, migration and otherness—resonant topics in a country of transplanted people and a dispossessed indigenous population arguing over a distinct Australian identity” (205–06). This essay considers the traditional comic strategies of first and second generation immigrant stand-ups in Australia and compares them with the new wave of post 9/11 Asian-Australian and Middle-Eastern-Australian stand-ups whose personas and interrogations are shifting the paradigm. Self-identifying Muslim stand-ups challenge myths of dominant Australian identity in ways which many still find confronting. Furthermore, the theories of incongruity, superiority, and psychological release re-rehearsed in traditional humour studies, by figures such as Palmer (1994) and Morreall (2009), are predicated on models of humour which do not always serve live performance, especially stand-up with its relational dependence on audience interaction.Stand-ups who immigrated to Australia as children or whose parents immigrated and struggled against adversity are important symbols both of the Australian comedy industry and of a national self-understanding of migrant resilience and making good. Szubanski and Berger hail from earlier waves of European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Szubanski has written eloquently of her complex Irish-Polish heritage and documented how the “hand-me-down trinkets of family and trauma” and “the culture clash of competing responses to calamity” have been integral to the development of her comic success and the making of her Aussie characters (347). Rachel Berger, the child of Polish holocaust survivors, advertises and connects both identities on her LinkedIn page: “After 23 years as a stand-up comedian, growing up with Jewish guilt and refugee parents, Rachel Berger knows more about survival than any idiot attending tribal council on reality TV.”Anh Do, among Australia’s most famous immigrant stand-ups, identifies as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and arrived as a toddler in 1976. Do’s tale of his family’s survival against the odds and his creation of a persona which constructs the grateful, happy immigrant clown is the staple of his very successful routine and increasingly problematic. It is a testament to the power of Do’s stand-up that many did not perceive the toll of the loss of his birth country; the grinding poverty; and the pain of his father’s alcoholism, violence, and survivor guilt until the publication of Do’s ironically titled memoir The Happiest Refugee. In fact, the memoir draws on many of the trauma narratives that are still part of his set. One of Do’s most legendary routines is the story of his family’s sea journey to Australia, told here on ABC1’s Talking Heads:There were forty of us on a nine metre fishing boat. On day four of the journey we spot another boat. As the boat gets closer we realise it’s a boatload of Thai pirates. Seven men with knives, machetes and guns get on our boat and they take everything. One of the pirates picks up the smallest child, he lifts up the baby and rips open the baby’s nappy and dollars fall out. And the pirate decides to spare the kid’s life. And that’s a good thing cos that’s my little brother Khoa Do who in 2005 became Young Australian of the Year. And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia and we were there for around three months before Australia says, come to Australia. And we’re very glad that happened. So often we heard Mum and Dad say—what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing—kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate.Do’s strategy is apparently one of genuflection and gratitude, an adoption of what McCallum refers to as an Australian post-war tradition of the comedy of inadequacy and embarrassment (210–14). Journalists certainly like to bill Do as the happy clown, framing articles about him with headlines like Rosemary Neill’s “Laughing through Adversity.” In fact, Do is direct about his gallows humour and his propensity to darkness: his humour, he says, is a means of countering racism, of “being able to win people over who might have been averse to being friends with an Asian bloke,” but Neill does not linger on this, nor on the revelation that Do felt stigmatised by his refugee origins and terrified and shamed by the crippling poverty of his childhood in Australia. In The Happiest Refugee, Do reveals that, for him, the credibility of his routines with predominantly white Australian audiences lies in the crafting of himself as an “Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood” (182). This is not the official narrative that is retold even if it is how Do has endeared himself to Australians, and ridding himself of the happy refugee label may yet prove difficult. Suren Jayemanne is well known for his subtle mockery of multiculturalist rhetoric. In his 2016 MICF show, Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator, Jayemanne played on the supposed contradiction of his Sri Lankan-Malaysian heritage against his teenage years in the wealthy suburb of Malvern in Melbourne, his private schooling, and his obsession with hip hop and black American culture. Jayemanne’s strategy is to gently confound his audiences, leading them slowly up a blind alley. He builds up a picture of how to identify Sri Lankan parents, supposedly Sri Lankan qualities such as an exceptional ability at maths, and Sri Lankan employment ambitions which he argues he fulfilled in becoming an accountant. He then undercuts his story by saying he has recently realised that his suburban background, his numerical abilities, his love of black music, and his rejection of accountancy in favour of comedy, in fact prove conclusively that he has, all along, been white. He also confesses that this is a bruising disappointment. Jayemanne exposes the emptiness of the conceits of white, brown, and black and of invented identity markers and plays on his audiences’ preconceptions through an old storyteller’s device, the shaggy dog story. The different constituencies in his audiences enjoy his trick equally, from quite different perspectives.Diana Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese stand-up, was both traumatised and politicised by Pauline Hanson when she was a teenager. Hanson described Nguyen’s community in Dandenong as “yellow Asian people” (Filmer). Nguyen’s career as a community development worker combating racism relates directly to her activity as a stand-up: migrant stories are integral to Australian history and Nguyen hypothesises that the “Australian psyche of being invaded or taken over” has reignited over the question of Islamic fundamentalism and expresses her concern to Filmer about the Muslim youths under her care.Nguyen’s alarm about the elision of Islamic radicalism with Muslim culture drives an agenda that has led the new generation of self-identified Muslim stand-ups since 9/11. This post 9/11 world is described by Wajahat as gorged with “exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslim [. . . ] and perpetuated by negative discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life in western societies.” In Australia, Aamer Rahman, Muhamed Elleissi, Khaled Khalafalla, and Nazeem Hussain typify this newer, more assertive form of second generation immigrant stand-up—they identify as Muslim (whether religious or not), as brown, and as Australian. They might be said to symbolise a logical response to Ghassan Hage’s famous White Nation (1998), which argues that a white supremacism underlies the mindset of the white elite in Australia. Their positioning is more nuanced than previous generations of stand-up. Nazeem Hussain’s routines mark a transformation in Australian stand-up, as Waleed Aly has argued: “ethnic comedy” has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption, about “minstrel characters” [. . .] but Hussain interrogates his audiences in every direction—and aggravates Muslims too. Hussain’s is the world of post 9/11 Australian Muslims. It’s about more than ethnic stereotyping. It’s about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights, where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded.Understandably, a prevalent theme among the new wave of Muslim comics, and not just in Australia, is the focus on the reading of Muslims as manifestly linked with Islamic State (IS). Jokes about mistaken identity, plane crashes, suicide bombing, and the Koran feature prominently. English-Pakistani Muslim, Shazia Mirza, gained comedy notoriety in the UK in the wake of 9/11 by introducing her routine with the words: “My name’s Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” (Bedell). Stand-ups Negin Farsad, Ahmed Ahmed, and Dean Obeidalla are all also activists challenging prevailing myths about Islam, skin colour and terrorism in America. Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed acquired prominence for telling audiences in the infamous Axis of Evil Comedy Tour about how his life had changed much for the worse since 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed was the alias used by one of Osama Bin Laden’s devotees and his life became on ongoing struggle with anti-terrorism officials doing security checks (he was once incarcerated) and with the FBI who were certain that the comedian was among their most wanted terrorists. Similarly, Obeidalla, an Italian-Palestinian-Muslim, notes in his TEDx talk that “If you have a Muslim name, you are probably immune to identity theft.” His narration of a very sudden experience of becoming an object of persecution and of others’ paranoia is symptomatic of a shared understanding of a post 9/11 world among many Muslim comics: “On September 10th 2001 I went to bed as a white American and I woke up an Arab,” says Obeidalla, still dazed from the seismic shift in his life.Hussain and Khalafalla demonstrate a new sophistication and directness in their stand-up, and tackle their majority white audiences head-on. There is no hint of the apologetic or deferential stance performed by Anh Do. Many of the jokes in their routines target controversial or taboo issues, which up until recently were shunned in Australian political debate, or are absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. An Egyptian-Australian born in Saudi Arabia, Khaled Khalafalla arrived on the comedy scene in 2011, was runner-up in RAW, Australia’s most prestigious open mic competition, and in 2013 won the best of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Devious. Khalafalla’s shows focus on racist stereotypes and identity and he uses a range of Middle Eastern and Indian accents to broach IS recruitment, Muslim cousin marriages, and plane crashes. His 2016 MICF show, Jerk, was a confident and abrasive routine exploring relationships, drug use, the extreme racism of Reclaim Australia rallies, controversial visa checks by Border Force’s Operation Fortitude, and Islamophobia. Within the first minute of his routine, he criticises white people in the audience for their woeful refusal to master Middle Eastern names, calling out to the “brown woman” in the audience for support, before lining up a series of jokes about the (mis)pronunciation of his name. Khalafalla derives his power on stage by what Oliver Double calls “uncovering.” Double contends that “one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable,” subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media (292). For instance, in Jerk Khalafalla discusses the “whole hating halal movement” in Australia as a metaphor for exposing brutal prejudice: Let me break it down for you. Halal is not voodoo. It’s just a blessing that Muslims do for some things, food amongst other things. But, it’s also a magical spell that turns some people into fuckwits when they see it. Sometimes people think it’s a thing that can get stuck to your t-shirt . . . like ‘Oh fuck, I got halal on me’ [Australian accent]. I saw a guy the other day and he was like Fuck halal, it funds terrorism. And I was like, let me show you the true meaning of Islam. I took a lamb chop out of my pocket and threw it in his face. And, he was like Ah, what was that? A lamb chop. Oh, I fucking love lamb chops. And, I say you fool, it’s halal and he burst into flames.In effect, Khalafalla delivers a contemptuous attack on the white members of his audience, but at the same time his joke relies on those same audience members presuming that they are morally and intellectually superior to the individual who is the butt of the joke. Khalafalla’s considerable charm is a help in this tricky send-up. In 2015 the Australian Department of Defence recognised his symbolic power and invited him to join the Afghanistan Task Force to entertain the troops by providing what Doran describes as “home-grown Australian laughs” (7). On stage in Australia, Khalafalla constructs a persona which is an outsider to the dominant majority and challenges the persecution of Muslim communities. Ironically, on the NATO base, Khalafalla’s act was perceived as representing a diverse but united Australia. McCallum has pointed to such contradictions, moments where white Australia has shown itself to be a “culture which at first authenticates emigrant experience and later abrogates it in times of defiant nationalism” (207). Nazeem Hussain, born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, is even more confrontational. His stand-up is born of his belief that “comedy protects us from the world around us” and is “an evolutionary defence mechanism” (8–9). His ground-breaking comedy career is embedded in his work as an anti-racism activist and asylum seeker supporter and shaped by his second-generation migrant experiences, law studies, community youth work, and early mentorship by American Muslim comic trio Allah Made Me Funny. He is well-known for his pioneering television successes Legally Brown and Salam Café. In his stand-up, Hussain often dwells witheringly on the failings and peculiarities of white people’s attempts to interact with him. Like all his routines, his sell-out show Fear of the Brown Planet, performed with Aamer Rahman from 2004–2008, explored casual, pathologised racism. Hussain deliberately over-uses the term “white people” in his routines as a provocation and deploys a reverse racism against his majority white audiences, knowing that many will be squirming. “White people ask me how can Muslims have fun if they don’t drink? Muslims have fun! Of course we have fun! You’ve seen us on the news.” For Hussain stand-up is “fundamentally an art of protest,” to be used as “a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture” (Low 1–3). His larger project is to humanise Muslims to white Australians so that “they see us firstly as human beings” (1–3). Hussain’s 2016 MICF show, Hussain in the Membrane, both satirised media hype and hysterical racism and pushed for a better understanding of the complex problems Muslim communities face in Australia. His show also connected issues to older colonial traditions of racism. In a memorable and beautifully crafted tirade, Hussain inveighed against the 2015 Bendigo riots which occurred after local Muslims lodged an application to Bendigo council to build a mosque in the sleepy Victorian town. [YELLING in an exaggerated Australian accent] No we don’t want Muslims! NO we don’t want Muslims—to come invade Bendigo by application to the local council! That is the most bureaucratic invasion of all times. No place in history has been invaded by lodging an application to a local council. Can you see ISIS running around chasing town planners? Of course not, Muslims like to wait 6–8 months to invade! That’s a polite way to invade. What if white people invaded that way? What a better world we’d be living in. If white people invaded Australia that way, we’d be able to celebrate Australia Day on the same day without so much blood on our hands. What if Captain Cook came to Australia and said [in a British accent] Awe we would like to apply to invade this great land and here is our application. [In an Australian accent] Awe sorry, mate, rejected, but we’ll give you Bendigo.As Waleed Aly sees it, the Australian cultural majority is still “unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness.” Hussain exposes “a binary world where there’s whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not” (Aly). Hussain certainly speaks as an insider and goes so far as recognising his coloniser’s guilt in relation to indigenous Australians (Tan). Aly well remembers the hate mail he and Hussain received when they worked on Salam Café: “The message was clear. We were outsiders and should behave as such. We were not real Australians. We should know our place, as supplicants, celebrating the nation’s unblemished virtue.” Khalafalla, Rahman, Elleissi, and Hussain make clear that the new wave of comics identify as Muslim and Australian (which they would argue many in the audiences receive as a provocation). They have zero tolerance of racism, their comedy is intimately connected with their political activism, and they have an unapologetically Australian identity. No longer is it a question of whether the white cultural majority in Australia will anoint them as worthy and acceptable citizens, it is a question of whether the audiences can rise to the moral standards of the stand-ups. The power has been switched. For Hussain laughter is about connection: “that person laughs because they appreciate the point and whether or not they accept what was said was valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood” (Low 5). ReferencesAhmed, Ahmed. “When It Comes to Laughter, We Are All Alike.” TedXDoha (2010). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDoha-Ahmed-Ahmed-When-it-Co>.Aly, Waleed. “Comment.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Sep. 2013."Anh Do". Talking Heads with Peter Thompson. ABC1. 4 Oct. 2010. Radio.Bedell, Geraldine. “Veiled Humour.” The Guardian (2003). 8 Aug. 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/20/comedy.artsfeatures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.Berger, Rachel. LinkedIn [Profile page]. 14 June 2016 <http://www.linkedin.com/company/rachel-berger>.Do, Anh. The Happiest Refugee. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010. Doran, Mark. "Service with a Smile: Entertainers Give Troops a Taste of Home.” Air Force 57.21 (2015). 12 June 2016 <http://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/NewsPapers/Raaf/editions/5721/5721.pdf>.Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Filmer, Natalie. "For Dandenong Comedian and Actress Diana Nguyen The Colour Yellow has a Strong Meaning.” The Herald Sun 3 Sep. 2013.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Age. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998.Hussain, Nazeem. Hussain in the Membrane. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.———. "The Funny Side of 30.” Spectrum. The Age 12 Mar. 2016.Khalafalla, Khaled. Jerk. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.Low, Lian. "Fear of a Brown Planet: Fight the Power with Laughter.” Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture (2011). 12 June 2016 <http://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition10/fear-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter>. McCallum, John. "Cringe and Strut: Comedy and National Identity in Post-War Australia.” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference. Ed. Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morreall, John. Comic Relief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Neill, Rosemary. "Laughing through Adversity.” The Australian 28 Aug. 2010.Obeidalla, Dean. "Using Stand-Up to Counter Islamophobia.” TedXEast (2012). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxEast-Dean-Obeidalla-Using-S;TEDxEast>.Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Tan, Monica. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Allahu Akbar! Nazeem Hussain's Bogan-Muslim Army.” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2016. "Uncle Sam.” Salam Café (2008). 11 June 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQPAJt6caU>.Wajahat, Ali, et al. "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Center for American Progress (2011). 11 June 2016 <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc>.

Today, tomorrow, the dead, the unborn, the sick and dying. And me, can you see me? The thirty-five-year-old man, cross-legged in the large white tent where we speak of the dead? Another face in the hundred other faces. The walls are thick with thankas, pastel pinks and icy hells, skulls cups and lotus flowers. Mothers are rocking babies, fathers creak like old bones. We all inch forward to hear the large monk in yellow robes who says how forty-nine days after death we seek material form, see a range of lights, a chimera of colours. We drift to where our parents are making love and take form in the womb. To be reborn a human, he reminds us, is very, very rare. Breath in, breath out. Meaning of life through a contemplation on death. He says we need to remember to remember, but right now I wish I could forget. Me, on a midwinter night, in Christchurch. Twelve years old, naked and deep in the bath as a yellow cloud of piss bleeds out around my white and skinny knees. Downstairs, there are noises, milk bottles chinking, a coal shovel scraping, Pink Floyd and a maunder of women's voices. Back from a conference, they laugh and fret. Cars arrive, the door bell rings, and someone is met with cajoling welcome. Tonight it is busy, when for the last three days the house had been dead of life; just my brother in his room, my stepfather, Earl, fixing shelves in the bathroom, and me continually thinking about the conference, all those women, overseas speakers, delegates and workshops. Three thousand. To me it may as well have been the world. Everyone had gone. My mother, her friends, my sister. Even my gran had managed an afternoon on Sunday. "Yes darling," she said, mightily impressed, "all those girls rah-rah-rahing. Your mother up on stage. It was all quite a show." When they came in, I was sitting on the bench, picking a scab on my elbow. I remember, my mother, searching in her pockets for cigarettes and wrestling off her jacket. Her face had been tired and her eyes were sullen. Smoke eddied past her forehead as she reached up and unfastened her long tail of hair. Berwyn Sallychurch, six foot, pale and bony, was boasting about her workshop, 'Women and Guilt'. She was hunched over her hands, fixing herself a cracker and cheese when Earl came in from outside. He had his cotton work hat on, baggy corduroys and his hands looked cold and were splattered with paint. He stood in the middle of the room of women, cardboard roll, several brushes and a scrunched up sheet of paper in his hand. He bid them all a sheepish hello, to which my mother quickly smiled back, I examined my shoe, before he moved to the fire, tossed the rubbish into the red mouth of the fire and stabbed it with the poker. Berwyn was explaining how a woman broke down in the middle of her workshop. "The bit where I had them all writing down their childhoods, she starts up, wailing like an siren." "What did you do?" My mother rid her cigarette of ash with a quick flick of her finger. "Do!" Berwyn raised her hand. "What can you do? I said to her, 'Darling, you've got a lifetime of patriarchal conditioning to live down. It's gunna take a while.'" Berwyn went on saying how she asked the crying woman if she masturbated and how well the woman had responded to her question. Heads nodded, tea was poured, Earl skulked out the door. Another winter night, how I remember, all those noises, my mother's tired face, me in bath later on, trying to figure out this thing about asking someone if they masturbated, and really, who on earth would want to know? Footsteps up the stairs, then back down again, the door opening to myriad of sounds, cut through by my mother's indelible voice, just before the door slams. "Fuckin' silly bitch. When will she learn?" Who is the silly bitch? I lie back and consider. Patricia Hickey, the smut protector? She always gets a hiss and spit when she comes on the tellie. Or Lady Drayton, ex-mayoress, who has a thing for councillors and other women's husbands? One of the pro-life Spuckies, rabbit-breeding Catholic. It is hard to tell. There are so many silly bitches to choose from. The wall is tiled and chipped. It is peppered with splash marks and finger prints. On the shelf a tube of toothpaste is uncapped and oozing. Tooth brushes are scattered like pick-up sticks. There are two pictures tacked to the tiles. One is of a chart of all the kings and queens of England. The other picture, a real picture, is torn out of a magazine and its edges are frayed and have turned a shade of yellow. This is the one I look at. It isn't like the other pictures downstairs though, the ones in the hippy guides to mud huts and home births. There are no doctors with masks on, mothers grunting, hands being held, babies being squeezed out the lady's hole. I wouldn't show my friends. It's no fun. No fun at all. She is dead and flat on her face, arms out with her dress around her large, white buttocks. Blood is running out between her legs and at the bottom, beneath a twist of plastic tube, black letters say 'ABORTION -- A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE. KEEP IT OFF THE STREETS'. Everyday I see her, brushing my teeth, wiping my face, sitting on the loo. She is a reminder of how lucky I am, that she could be my mum or my sister, the lady who sent us a turkey at Christmas because she was religious and there was nothing else she could do; or maybe the one from last night when I answered the phone and she said 'Is your mum there darling?' distant and weepy. 'Please! Please! Can I speak to your mother?' From my wet, white toes to her grim, grainy print and world of lonely silence, my eyes and imagination move. How could they? The boyfriend, the husband, the doctors, Patricia Hickey, the stupid Catholics? How could they let her die? The tent flukes in the afternoon breeze. I can hear the sound of the waves and the occasional car. Figures pass by, feet on the sandy soil as I sit here aware that it has taken me three days; three days up the grassy slope, past the brazier wafting juniper and incense, past this shrine for the dead, three days looking down at my bare feet, their pale weave of bones, their callused heels upon the litter of green blades, the oak needles, ants and earth? Before me is a box containing many names, a masonite board and many different photos. The monk said he would give prayers for the unborn as well as the dead, and now the box is full and I must wedge my paper in. It contains a small offering, my mother's name, date of birth, date of death and a reason. As if we need a reason. My mother had her reasons. They were wrapped around her life like a shawl. At the National Archive that day, they were all that was left of a forty-seven-year-old life. In scribbles and scraps, cutouts and clippings, she was 'a notorious pioneer in New Zealand women's health, a fighter for justice, a heroine of reform', neatly assembled into two concertina folders. I sat at a neat desk in a large room with a head full of questions and a book full of scribbles. Proud? Of course I was proud. But when certain words fell off certain people's tongues, my skin crept and toes cramped. No. That woman they chorussed, the 'wonderful' 'strong' and 'gutsy' mother of mine, wasn't mine at all. She was theirs, sewn into their political imagination with the thread of nostalgia, traces of jealousy and fear. Hundred of pages attesting to her work: the back-breaking tedium of abortion politics, accounts, tax files, divvying up of funds, the 1977 Women's Conference, speakers to attend, registrations, flight details for women going to Australia, hotels booked, operating doctors. Q tried to get into Christchurch Women's Hospital. Refused. Found back street abortionist. Used catheter. Told to leave it in for a week -- bled badly. Emergency case Ch'ch Women's. Nearly died. Mrs M is a 44-year-old Maori woman, solo mother of 9. Husband left after service and never returned. She said herself that her children were a 'bit out of hand'. Just suffered a disc protrusion in her last pregnancy and spent six months in hospital severely depressed. In all the woman saw 7 doctors in order to obtain termination. The delays in appointments resulted in her being 16 weeks pregnant at the time of operation. Done for $250. I looked out the window at a seagull battling in the Wellington wind and could imagine my mother, labouring over a pad of paper and ashtray late at night. I wanted to hold her hand, share the load, tell her not to cry. I removed the file marked 'Personal' and was pulled out of my lament. It was brimming with letters, cringeful, naïve, mock militant letters that were bleedingly written and poorly spelt out. For me, they signalled a journey from boy to man along a fraught and fractured path. Letters from my mother's best friend to my mother, around the time they met, drunk in adoration, political vision and parochial feminist forecasts of 'Sisterhood' and 'Herstory'. From the halcyon high to inimical low, deceipt, and brokenheartedness, I could pin-point the letter written to my mother at the time of my seduction. "Dear Elizabeth," my new lover wrote. "You unmitigated bitch." Dozens of letters I stuffed in my sock, sick at the thought, feeling the camera in the corner, as if it were the eye of the world, laughing, goading and snickering at me, the feminist's son. 'Mine! Mine!' I want to shout. 'These letters are mine. No-one else's. Ya hear me. Got it!' And though I wanted it, no librarian's hand appeared on my shoulder, no one tried to stop me stealing. It was just me in that large room, and a small camera no one was even watching. From out of my shirt pocket I remove the photo and pin it to the masonite board. My mother, beside all the other photos of the dead, the polaroids and black and whites, has her hand on her chin and looks towards the early night sky. She wanted to see the Kauri trees before she died and her boyfriend drove them north. Her hand supports her chin and her face is alabaster in a red silhouette of sunset and trees. She wears a light-blue jumper and her black hair has not yet fallen out. That hair, once raven black and key to her bold symetry and audacious manner, dropped out in feathery lumps and left her like a small girl with frail shoulders and yellow skin. So many dead to ponder. My mother haunted by her past, was frightened to die. But for now at least, despite her driven face and questioning eyes, I see peace and a moment of closure. I breathe in, I breathe out. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Hamish Kaden. "The Interminable Son." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php>. Chicago style: Hamish Kaden, "The Interminable Son," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Hamish Kaden. (1999) The interminable son. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/son.php> ([your date of access]).