Journal articles on the topic 'Sieges – Fiction'

<p>O objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre as narrativas do escritor albanês Ismail Kadaré que dialogam com o universo dos poemas homéricos, em especial a epopeia <em>Ilíada</em>, e com os modos de composição desses poemas, com vistas a examinar o jogo intertextual estabelecido. Partimos de um trabalho com um corpus inicial composto por alguns romances selecionados da trajetória ficcional do autor. Em seguida, interessa-nos a questão da representação da guerra como elemento de conexão entre Ismail Kadaré e Homero, e, para tanto, aborda-se de modo mais detido o romance <em>Os tambores da chuva (O castelo)</em> (1970), que traz o tema da guerra e da própria questão da escrita da (sobre a) guerra.</p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong><em> This article reflects upon the narratives of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare that engage with the universe of the Homeric poems, especially the </em>Iliad<em>, and with the modes of composition of these ancient poems in order to examine the intertextual play that goes on between Kadare and Homer. First, some selected novels are discussed that illustrate the fictional trajetory of Kadare. Secondly, the representation of war as a common element between Kadare and Homer is considered, with a particular focus on </em>The Drums of Rain (The Siege)<em> (1970), which develops the theme of war and the question of writing about it</em>.</p>

Abstract In retrospect, the turning point in the Kildare rebellion came with the rebels’ failure to capture Dublin, and the ordnance, shot and powder in the king's castle there, during the long siege in summer and autumn 1534, in part because, as this article argues, the city's capture had not initially been seen as an immediate priority. Kildare kept back most of his ordnance and gunners to defend Maynooth castle, and historians have focused instead on the brief siege and capture of Maynooth by the king's army in March. Richard Stanyhurst's description of the rebellion, written forty years later, includes much fiction and special pleading; but Dublin was Stanyhurst's native city, and his Chronicle provides the fullest account of the siege. It is here checked against available contemporary sources, suggesting that it is reliable.

Darstellung und Bewertung von sieben ausgewählten „science fiction stories“, in deren Zentrum Mathematiker oder unterhaltsame mathematische Probleme stehen, erlauben instruktive Blicke auf die Beziehung von Mathematik und Geisteswissenschaften, auf C. P. Snows „zwei Kulturen“ und die demgegenüber treffendere Diagnose von „half-cultured individuals“. Vorgeschlagen wird die Fortführung und Erweiterung der wegweisenden Analysen Knut Radbruchs zum Verhältnis von Mathematik, Dichtung und Literaturwissenschaft.

This paper analyzes the narrative structure and the literary elements that give Saramago’s novel its postmodern features, focusing in the plot and its uchronic perspective in order to appreciate the sci-fi dimension that the historical events take through the narrative. Our discussion examines the action of the principal character, Raymundo Silva, who proofreads a historical work titled The History of the Siege of Lisbon and decides to deny an important fact: "the crusaders did (not) help the Portuguese forces against the Moorish army". Added to the historical work, this não ("not", in portuguese) produces a disruption over the ‘real’ temporary line. In consequence, the city of Lisbon, at the centre of a meteorological phenomenon, slides in between the medieval siege and contemporary life. Thus, the historical subject resorts to a science fiction procedure: uchrony. Two intradiegetic symbols -the circle and the deleatur- represent the two overlapped universes; the circle refers to the historical world and the deleatur symbolizes the uchronic universe. Therefore, História do cerco de Lisboa is not a sci-fi work, but a postmodern historiographical metafiction.

Abstract An (un)conventional encounter between humans and alien beings has long been one of the main thematic preoccupations of the genre of science fiction. Such stories would thus include typical invasion narratives, as in the case of the three science fiction films I will discuss in the present paper: the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978; Abel Ferrara, 1993), The Host (Andrew Niccol, 2013), and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). I will examine the films in relation to postcolonial theories, while attempting to look at the ways of revisiting one’s history and culture (both alien and human) in the films’ worlds that takes place in order to uncover and heal the violent effects of colonization. In my reading of the films I will shed light on the specific processes of identity formation (of an individual or a group), and the possibilities of individual and communal recuperation through memories, rites of passages, as well as hybridization. I will argue that the colonized human or alien body can serve either as a mediator between the two cultures, or as an agent which fundamentally distances two separate civilizations, thus irrevocably bringing about the loss of identity, as well as the lack of comprehension of cultural differences.

Laurell Hamilton in her “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series” portrays a large community of monstrous creatures that populate a violent near-future American landscape. A number of critics have already explored the forms in which Anita, the leading heroine, emerges in the 1990s literary scene as a strong figure who challenges traditional narratives of female subordination and alters predictable romantic entanglements with the male protagonists (Crawford 2014; Veldman-Genz 2011; Siegel 2007; Holland-Toll 2004). Moving beyond this approach that centres on Anita, this paper explores the forms in which the author designs her male companions and lovers. Her choice of lovers suggests that there are multiple desires at play inHamilton’s popular fiction in relation to masculinity in the context of a heterosexual erotica. Following a methodological approach of cultural studies (Saukko 2003), this study seeks to illustrate how conflicting desires, emblemized by her plurality of lovers, represent a literary effect of paradoxical yearnings at play in contemporary white, middle-class American women’s lives.

The article states that the heroic-patriotic traditions of Russian classics (M. Lermontov, L. Tolstoy, A. Blok) live on in the works by participants in the Battle of Stalingrad: the founder of the ‘lieutenant prose’ Viktor Nekrasov and poets Mikhail Kulchitsky and Aleksandr Korenev. M. Lermontov’s ‘Borodino’ sounds with a new vigour in the lyric poetry by the fighters at Stalingrad. Works dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad follow and modernize the traditions of Russian realism exemplified by the first-hand accounts of L. Tolstoy, an officer during the Siege of Sevastopol. Military and engineering learnings of the Russian army garnered during the Crimean War were adopted by the characters of Front-Line Stalingrad [V okopakh Stalingrada] by V. Nekrasov, who received an architect’s degree in pre-war Kyiv and was in command of a sapper battalion on the Stalingrad front. This officer writer also follows the narrative approach of the 19th-c. classic, so that the ferocity of the battle does not obscure the ‘dialectics of the soul’ of his fellow soldiers, whom he portrays as part and parcel of the centuries-long national culture.

Basing on detailed study of open information and documentary sources, the author of the paper assumed the ground-lessness of official narrative setting out in the A. A. Crohn’s book «Deep-sea master. A tale of friend” (Moscow, New World Journal. Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union Publishing House, 1984. 272 p.) with regard to causes of conviction of the Hero of the Soviet Union, Diver No. 1 — A. I. Marinesco, as a result of malice from former director of Leningrad Institute of Transfusion (LIT) — associate professor, candidate of medicine V. V. Kuharchik. An exceptional importance of collaborative work of collective and chiefs of LIT on organization of donor movement under the severe conditions of the siege Leningrad and in a time of despiteous political repressions during the Great Patriotic War was shown. On the basis of analysis of confusion of biographies of two special persons: A. I. Marinesco and V. V. Kuharchik, it was made a conclusion of necessity of continuation historical and documentory studies aimed to discover the historical truth representing heroism of Soviet people at struggle with fascism.

This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siècle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).

Short stories as part of the literature play a significant role in portraying the human lifestyle, including the image of disabilities. Studying the portrayal of disabled people in literature becomes significant to consider the need to change the illustration of disabilities in fiction. There are four short stories selected in this study, namely “Cathedral” By Raymond Carver, “The Blind Man” by Guy de Maupassant, “The Blind Man” by Kate Chopin and “A Man Who Had No Eyes” by Benjamin MacKinlay Kantor. Applying disability theory proposed by Tobin Siebers, this textual analysis study found that the characters in the four stories are portrayed as weak, dependent, unproductive, and other negative prejudice. They receive this treatment due to the social misconception about disabilities.

La ville postcoloniale africaine a suscité des attentions critiques alors que les chercheurs s’interrogent sur ses possibilités et potentialités discursives. Under Siege: Four African Cities d’Okwui Enwezor et al, African Cities de Garth Myers, The African City de Bill Freund et d’autres sont des études notables sur les villes postcoloniales africaines. Aussi engageantes et perspicaces que soient ces études, leurs perspectives choisies sont particulièrement historiques, sociologiques et architecturales. Cependant, ces études factuelles des villes donneront un aperçu des représentations littéraires par les écrivains de fiction et de l’utopisme postcolonial qu’elles dépeignent. J’utiliserai la théorie de l’utopisme postcolonial de Bill Ashcroft pour examiner Un nègre a violé une bonde à Dallas de Ramonu Sanusi, Commissaire Kouamé de Marguerite Abouet & Donatien Mary, et Partir de Tahar Ben Jelloun en vue de démontrer comment Lagos, Abidjan et Tanger en tant que villes africaines postcoloniales sont représentées comme des épicentres de subjectivités, de subversions et de survivances dans la fiction africaine francophone. Ces villes africaines textualisées ne sont pas seulement des représentations culturelles, mais aussi réalistes de la postcolonialité africaine. Dans ces textes, les personnages sont dépeints comme des sujets abandonnés qui deviennent des « prisonniers du désir » afin de changer leurs récits de vie. Alors que les fantasmes urbains et les complexités dystopiques de ces villes jettent les bases et expliquent la pensée utopique et son audace d’espoir dans ces corps socialement démunis, les crimes et les vices (violence, meurtre, viol, vol, prostitution) font partie de leurs pratiques subversives et de survie dans les paysages urbains socialement construits et économiquement fragmentés de Lagos, Abidjan et Tanger.

This essay analyses Eugene McCabe’s short stories, ‘Cancer’, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Siege’ – known commonly as the ‘Fermanagh trilogy’ – focusing on them as border fictions. Written in the 1970s, the author argues that the stories share a material, cultural ‘borderliness’, a condition which is structured into McCabe’s writing about this part of Monahan-Fermanagh and the region along the border more widely. ‘Borderliness’ manifests itself as four thematic tropes that interconnect and complement each other. These tropes recur within and across the stories, expressing character and emotional states, defining dramatic conflicts, and shaping narrative structure. The origins of these literary tropes are indicated, selected examples are worked through and McCabe’s prose style is analysed. The essay situates the ‘Fermanagh trilogy’ within a lineage of cultural production from and about the border, and the interpretative frameworks that have arisen to understand the border’s socio-political significance.

The article discusses the poetic evolution of the contemporary author Polina Barskova. Nuzhdina follows the logic of Barskova’s poetic experimentation: from her early works written in the 1990s–2000s and inspired by the then-fashionable postmodernist intertextuality to the present-day verse marked by Barskova’s engagement with other, non-poetic new genres. Particularly important are her historical essays, such as The Seventh Alkali [Sedmaya shchyoloch], a book concerned with the distinguishing features of the poetry written in the besieged Leningrad in the 1940s, or her article in the collection of fiction and literary criticism entitled After the Siege [Blokadnye posle], which she also prepared for publication. The matter of genre becomes prominent in Nuzhdina’s analysis: the scholar argues that, following her beginnings in the tradition of intertextuality, typical of the period, Barskova, as early as in the 2010s, went on to master a specific genre of a ‘poetic archive,’ evidenced both in her poetry and historical research. Her poetic texts and essays share a number of characteristics: a diversity of ‘disguises’ and voices, a focus on documentary accuracy, and an ‘uninterrupted alternation’ of narrative and lyrical scenes.

Contemporary Deaf literature and film of the science fiction (SF) genre such as Ted Evans’s The End and Donna Williams’s “When the Dead are Cured” imagine worlds where Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) are threatened with eradication. Employing schema criticism, the article shows how these social SF stories have the potential to transform harmful cognitive schemas that perpetuate eugenic drives, explaining how certain cognitive schemas uphold beliefs inherent to the ideology of ability (Bracher 2013; Siebers 2008). These SF texts question the ethics of genetic engineering and the desire to “cure” deafness; the intersection of disability and SF results in a subgenre of protest literature. Each protest story depicts eugenic ideologies that instantiate real-world SLPs’ activist claims to human and group rights. Further, these depictions of eugenic drives enable the activation of cognitive schemas that work against social injustices. SF as a mode of thought thus supports real-life protest against the state.

The novel was removed from the most important literary arts in the modern era, which was able to direct writers and critics and turned their attention and writings in the literary arena; Which is the siege of life in various aspects of trendy, social, social or political, and the means of expressing human concerns and the same verses, and what he says and looks for him, and he is looking for, and it is aware of a lot of values ​​that represent the aspiration in many societies as a group and individuals, and here came The idea of ​​research is based on the presentation and searches at the first: the spiritual values ​​in the three dreams, and in the second sect: congenital values, and then stirring them with the most important research findings.

. . . There had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty's subjects were causing trouble . . .J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London: Cape, 1990) p. 215.J. G. Farrell has, in common with Paul Scott, an admiration for Joseph Conrad (obvious in their use of symbolism, topographical and otherwise), a fascination with the decline of Empire as a subject for fiction; a reputation that rests on a series of historical novels on this subject. Farrell died at the age of 44 whereas Paul Scott did so at 58; therefore it is not fair to compare their overall achievement. Yet it is necessary to observe that, whereas Scott portrayed one country during a single short period in his major work, Farrell's view was global and spanned virtually a century, lighting upon three important crises in three different countries during three different periods: Troubles (1970), set in the context of the Irish disturbances of 1919-21; The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), located during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in India; The Singapore Grip (1978), focusing on the period leading up to the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese during the Second World War, the first signal defeat of the might of the British Empire by an Asian power.

Abstract In spite of their informal and substandard nature, Chinese urban villages are actually part of the infrastructure that institutionalizes and normalizes China's uneven development by providing cheap dormitory-style accommodations to the country's vast army of unskilled rural migrants who flock to cities as precarious laborers. This extended photo essay uses an urban village renewal project in the southern city Guangzhou to analyze the politics of eviction, demolition, resistance, and gentrification in light of the region's shift from low-value to high-tech industries. When urban villagers appropriated ideas of tradition, lineage, and socialist collectivism to fight against the government and the developer, their purpose was to acquire greater compensation and even symbolic capital in order to secure an urban middle-class future for themselves. In the process, however, they have further foreclosed the futures of many rural migrants whose survival in the city rely on cheap accommodation in these slum-like enclaves, even though survival in this context often implies dull and dead-end jobs with little prospect of social mobility. Drawing on the author's visual project called Where There Is No Room for Fiction, the selected photographs here provide a visual ethnographic account of the contested landscape of an urban village under siege. As well, these images explore the possibility of a critical aesthetics in order to engage the official vision of urban modernity that is saturated with spectacle and speculation.

Flowers of Galilee breaks new ground in modern political discourse. Thisbook recommends a democratic one-state solution in all of historicalPalestine and the return of the Palestinians to rebuild their villages. Thebeautiful front cover painting by Suleiman Mansour of Jerusalem lovinglydepicts a Palestinian family, children seated on a donkey, walking past a hillcovered with olive trees. Similarly, Israel Shamir’s essays portray the peaceful,pastoral landscape of the Holy Land and the humanity of its inhabitants,juxtaposed against the ugliness and inhumanity of Jewish racism.These thought-provoking essays, written in Jaffa during the al-AqsaIntifada in 2001-02, call for Jews to leave their sense of exclusivity andplead for human equality. The author, a Russian immigrant to Israel in 1969,followed his meditations to their inevitable conclusion, renounced Judaism,and was baptized in the Palestinian Orthodox Christian Church ofJerusalem. A brilliant storyteller with a vast knowledge of history, he discussescurrent events and their global implications with brutal honesty andtenderness. His clear insights and lyrical use of language to illustrate social,religious, and political complexities make him the Khalil Gibran of our time.An important chapter, “The Last Action Heroes,” memorializes theSpring 2002 siege of Bethlehem. The Israeli army surrounded 40 monksand priests and 200 Palestinians seeking refuge in the Church of Nativity.For a month, “people starved ... Stench of corpses and of infected woundsfilled the old church” (p. 63). The UN did nothing, but a few InternationalSolidarity Movement activists from America and Europe, including theauthor’s son, broke the siege. One group distracted the soldiers while theothers rushed into the church’s gates, brought food and water, and helpednegotiate a surrender.Shamir deconstructs the legal fictions of the state of Israel and the elusivePalestinian state: “Israelis who would like to live in peace with theirPalestinian neighbors ... cannot counteract the raw muscle of the AmericanJewish leadership” (p.179). He further dissects the Jewish Holocaust cultand other Zionist public relations tactics. He exposes the two-state solutionas a political bluff, calls on the world to cut off aid to Israel, and admonishesthe Muslim world for indulging in usury ...

The fostering of rationality has long been endorsed as an educational ideal by some philosophers; in recent years, whereas some have argued for this ideal, others have challenged it, particularly within debates relevant to the study of critical thinking. Harvey Siegel, who has spelled out the philosophical theory of educating for rationality, not only has defended his view from such challenges but also has been deepening his thoughts regarding how rationality can be fostered. This paper centers on the cultivating of sensitivity to reasons in the fostering of rationality by critically examining and extending Siegel’s arguments concerning the notion of what he calls “felt reasons.” By clarifying the notion of felt reasons, I will argue for two ideas: first, teachers, parents, and fictional characters in media such as novels and films can be seen as exemplars that manifest rationality; second, the emotion of admiring exemplars may act as a motivating force for children—including small children who are still not sensitive to reasons and thus are not moved by reasons—to be critical thinkers.

Ziya Şakir is a well-known author for his works published in newspapers and magazines. The author, known as Ziya Şakir during the Ottoman period, took the surname “Soko” with the Surname Law enacted during the Republican period. He also used nicknames such as Z. Melek, Hüseyin Servet, Bahtiyar, M. Ziya, Emekligil, Hamid Nuri, Abdülmüheymin. In his works, in which he included historical realities, he met with people who witnessed events other than memoirs or documents, and assumed the duty of “oral historiography” by recording the memories described verbally. Avar Oğlu that is published in Yarım Ay magazine in 1935 is one of author’s works where he brought a historical truth together with fiction. The work, which deals with the Avars that were the first Turks sieging Istanbul, has a narrative style that prioritizes Turkish tradition and morality over other nations. The work, which includes taboos, Shamanist beliefs, rowing bone fortune telling, which is one of the types of fortune telling, and beliefs that numbers are sacred, brings together the values transferred from the past to the present with the reader. In this study, it was investigated how the author, who started from a historical reality and emphasized the importance of the Avars on the stage of history, conveyed Turkish customs and beliefs in Avar Oğlu. As a result of the examination, it was determined that Ziya Şakir used the spiritual values that built bridges between generations to highlight the character traits of the Turks. Keywords: Ziya Şakir, Avars, siege of İstanbul, Turkish beliefs, history.

Due to historical ill-fate, Georgia found itself cut off from European civilization and culture for a long time. The catastrophe caused by the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century placed Georgia under an aggressive Islamic siege, posing a mortal threat to the existence of its nation-state and at the same time cutting the spiritual and cultural arteries that historically connected Georgia with Europe. The process of “re-Europeanization” (Siradze, 2008, p. 213) was first systematically revealed in the Georgian writing of the so-called “transitional century” (the turn of the 18th-19th centuries) and spread in all spheres of life throughout the 19th century. It should be emphasized that for our leaders, Europeanism was essentially not a matter of social-cultural orientation or vector, but the return of Georgian culture to its native bosom, native living and mental space, the restoration of the natural path of development. The 19th century saw great interest in Europe and its literature. The term "Europeanism" has been established since the 1850s. As for the content of the term itself, when defining the essence of Europeanism, we rely mainly on the point of view of Friedrich Nietzsche that Europe, as a term denoting culture, refers to those peoples who have a common past with the Greek and Roman civilizations, in the form of the Bible and Christianity. If we take into account Nietzsche’s definition and compare it with the history of Georgia, it is easy to see that we really have reason to call ourselves Europeans. First of all. The present work is aimed at studying and fully presenting the history of European-Georgian relations; the role and significance of translation, journalism and fiction in bringing Georgia closer to Europe; the turning of the viewpoint of Georgian society towards European ideals and the struggle for the establishment of the cultural traditions of Europeanism.

Abstract: The article focuses on past epidemics and previous confinements, looking for the art of journeying through immobility. It rekindles the plague that ravaged the city of Turin in the 1630s, as well as Xavier de Maistre who, confined in the military citadel in 1790, wrote the Voyage autour de ma chambre, perhaps the first example of modern ‘anodeporics’, a neologism to designate immobility travelogues. The essay then explores other pandemics and subsequent attempts at imitating De Maistre. First, it concentrates on Wilkie Collins, the author of the 1852 short story “A Terribly Strange Bed”, who remained stranded with his father William, the painter, at the frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the cholera that broke out there in 1836. Second, it bears on Almeida Garrett, who resisted the siege of typhus-struck Oporto in 1832-3 and, ten years later, penned another classic of ‘anodeporics’, Viagens na minha terra, also inspired by De Maistre. After consideration, from the perspective of semiotics, of what is needed to “journeying throughout immobility”, the essay ends with a study of the most famous anodeporic tale in world literature, also containing ironic quotes by De Maistre: Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph, named after a fictional device for mystical travel confined in a basement of 1940s Buenos Aires. The conclusion of this semiotic exploration through pandemics, lockdowns, and immobility travelogues is simple: in case of forced immobility, the practice of exploring space through time can be replaced by the alternative practice of exploring time through space.

Les premiers resultats positifs obtenus dans la prevision des amplitudes de la maree dans les ports datent de plusieurs siecles ; depuis fort longtemps les courants de maree dans les mers coheres sont famihers aux navigateurs. Rappelons simplement qu'encore de nos jours, la prevision des marnages (difference de niveau entre pleine et basse raer) et des phases (decalages de la plelne mer par rapport au passage de la lune au mendien) s'appuie sur 1'analyse harmomque des enregistrements de maregraphes. Cette analyse differe de celle de FDURIER: les penodes des differentes composantes ne sont pas des sous-multiples entiers d'une meme penode elementaire, mais ont des valeurs connues avec toute la precision desiree. La composante principale, dans nos regions europeennes du moms, represente la maree qui serait due a une lune fictive tournant a distance constante de la terre et a Vitesse constante dans le plan de l'equateur (maree dite M2). Depuis la fin du siecle dernier des recherches tres nombreuses ont ete faites parmi lesquelles ll faut citer celles de POINCARE (methode theonque de determination des amplitudes et courants), HARRIS (trace des hgnes cotidales - c'est-d-dire equiphases - de la maree M2), HANSEN (determination des denivellations et courants en Mer du Nord), DOODSON (determination des hgnes cotidales et equiamphtudes dans les mers bordant la GRANDE RRET/1GNE).

David Scott; Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Shalina Puri)Rebecca J. Scott; Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha)Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (ed.); Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (Dianne M. Stewart)Londa Schiebinger; Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (J.D. La Fleur)F. Abiola Irele, Simon Gikandi (eds.);The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (A. James Arnold)Sean X. Goudie; Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (J. Bradford Anderson)Doris Garraway; The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Charles Forsdick)Adélékè Adéèkó; The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (Owen Robinson)J. Brooks Bouson; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert)Gary Wilder; The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Nick Nesbitt)Fernando Picó; History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of its People (Francisco A. Scarano)Peter E. Siegel (ed.); Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico (William F. Keegan) Magali Roy-Féquière; Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico (Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel)Katherine E. Browne; Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag (David Beriss)Louis A. Pérez, Jr; To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Matt D. Childs)John Lawrence Tone; War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (Gillian McGillivray)Frank Argote-Freyre; Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (Javier Figueroa-De Cárdenas)Juanita de Barros, Audra Diptee, David V. Trotman (eds.); Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History (Bernard Moitt)Matthew Mulcahy; Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Bonham C. Richardson)Michaeline A. Crichlow; Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (Christine Chivallon)Peta Gay Jensen; The Last Colonials: The Story of Two European Families in Jamaica (Karl Watson)Marc Tardieu; Les Antillais à Paris: D’hier à aujourd’hui (David Beriss)Rhonda D. Frederick; “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Michael L. Conniff)James Robertson; Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534-2000 (Philip D. Morgan)Philippe R. Girard; Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hotspot (Carolle Charles)Michael Deibert; Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Carolle Charles)Ellen de Vries; Suriname na de binnenlandse oorlog (Aspha E. Bijnaar)In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids no. 82 (2008), no: 1-2, Leiden

The Vow to Testify: On the Gulag and Intertextual Economy of Literature (Karlo Štajner, Varlam Shalamov, Danilo Kiš)Departing from the “aesthetics of unrepresentability” of testimonial literature and implied “belatedness and collapse of witnessing” (G. Agamben, Sh. Felman, D. Laub), the paper engages in the economic foundations of literature through analysis of symbolic meanings of economic metaphors in Štajner’s memoirs Seven Thousand Days in Siberia and Shalamov’s story Lend-Lease, and through illuminating different aspects of intertextual and intercultural exchange between Štajner’s memoirs and Kiš’s “pseudo-factual” fiction A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. What is testimony and can it be – considering the nature of the one who testifies and the language in which he testifies – “valid,” “valuable,” “useful,” to use the language of economy? Can we think about Kiš’s literary appropriation of Štajner’s memoirs as an outlet for reclaiming the voice not only of Štajner, but also of Kiš’s father, who perished in Auschwitz? What are the uses of economic hypothesis in literary studies? Zavjet svjedočenja: o Gulagu i intertekstualnoj ekonomiji književnosti (Karlo Štajner, Varlam Šalamov, Danilo Kiš)Polazeći od “estetike neizrecivosti” književnosti svjedočenja te implicirane “zakašnjelosti i kolapsa svjedočenja” (G. Agamben, Sh. Felman, D. Laub), rad prilazi složenoj problematici ekonomskih temelja književnosti kroz analizu simboličkog značenja ekonomskih metafora u Štajnerovim memoarima 7000 dana u Sibiru i Šalamovljevoj znamenitoj priči Po Lend-Leasu te kroz intertekstualni i interkulturni upis Štajnerovih memoara u Kiševu “pseudočinjeničnu” fikciju u djelu Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča. Što je svjedočenje i može li ono biti – s obzirom na status svjedoka kao subjekta izricanja i jezik na kojem svjedoči – “valjano” i “korisno” (iskoristimo li jezik ekonomije)? Može li se o Kiševoj aproprijaciji Štajnerovih memoara razmišljati kao o jednom od načina vraćanja prava glasa ne samo Štajneru, nego i Kiševom preminulom ocu, stradalom u Auschwitzu? U čemu je epistemološka korist ekonomskih analiza u proučavanju književnosti? Przysięga świadectwa: O gułagu i intertekstualnej ekonomii literatury (Karlo Štajner, Warlam Szałamow, Danilo Kiš)Wychodząc naprzeciw koncepcjom mówiącym o „poetyce niewyrażalności” literackich świadectw oraz założeniu o „spóźnieniu i upadku świadectwa” (G. Agamben, Sh. Felman, D. Laub), artykuł podejmuje problematykę ekonomicznych podstaw literatury poprzez analizę znaczeń (symboli) metafor ekonomicznych w pamiętniku Siedem tysięcy dni na Syberii Karlo Štajnera oraz opowiadaniu Z lend lease’u Warłama Szałamowa, a także poprzez wskazanie na różne aspekty intertekstualnej i międzykulturowej wymiany pomiędzy wspomnieniami Štajnera a fikcyjną literaturą „pseudo-faktu” Danilo Kiša w książce Grobowiec dla Borysa Dawidowicza. Czym jest świadectwo i czy może być – biorąc pod uwagę to, kim jest świadek i język, w którym daje świadectwo – „ważne”, „wartościowe”, „użyteczne”, używając języka ekonomii? Czy możemy zinterpretować literackie przywłaszczenie wspomnień Štajnera dokonane przez Kiša jako jeden ze sposobów przywracania prawa głosu nie tylko Štajnerowi, ale także ojcu Kiša, który zginął w Auschwitz? Jakie są zastosowania hipotezy ekonomicznej w literaturoznawstwie?

Throughout the pandemic, we have witnessed the channelling of affective intensities into demonstrations, sieges, and violent outbursts underpinned by far right-wing populism, including the siege of Capitol Hill, counter-BLM protests and so-called “anti-hygienic protests” against lockdowns and public health measures. These outbursts, as sensational manifestations of the more general turn to populism, attest to the urgency of understanding the structures of feelings underlying populist logic and the affective tactics used to spread them. The intensification of these affects by the pandemic and consequent lockdowns requires urgent attention as the associated socio-economic crisis and moral-panic are contributing to far-right populist resentments, the long-term effects of which remain to be seen. I look here how digital media contributes to what has been termed “pandemic populism” in an assemblage consisting of right-wing populist logic, digital and particularly social media, the COVID19 virus and associated public health measures. Far-right populist media and activists have taken advantage of the confusion around public health measures during the pandemic to blur boundaries between fact and fiction to fit the effects of the pandemic into their own narratives. Accordingly, I include in my analysis consideration of hyper-partisan media and the power of conspiracy theories, mis- and dis-information and how these forms of mediation engage populations in ways that challenge rational models of communication. I adopt a version of affect theory developed by Lisa Blackman in conjunction with Rebecca Coleman’s concept of (infra)structures of feeling to make sense of the affective dimensions underpinning right-wing populism, which exert pressure on and mediate actions and experiences and which have been exacerbated by the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is a piece of experimental multi-perspectival writing in which four different personae adopt different methods and intellectual relationships to writing as a means of research, by using the topics of fiction, counterfactual history and not-being. The narrative line is provided by a novelist who retells Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In Saramago’s novel a wayward proof-reader mischievously adds the word “not” to the historical account, creating a fictional, counterfactual history. This “bringing into being” of a fiction – of what didn’t actually happen – sets in train a series of perspectives or thought experiments by the four personae of the present text on the nature of “not-being”. They deploy methods from fictional writing and phenomenological practice informed by Saramago and Sartre, and phenomenological theory informed by Husserl and Meinong, thereby investigating the topic from four different perspectives. As a result, it is proposed that the legitimacy gap suffered by fiction-as-research may be bridged by so-called Meinongian objects, and the problem of whether such inexistent objects are facts, is less important than deciding whether they are useful. The conclusion is that artistic research methods offer techniques and a space to discuss the agency of not-being, of what-if, and of omission, through the legitimate deployment of fiction and falsehoods; and the benefits of so doing outweigh the existential discomfort that such ideas usually induce in researchers.

Githa Hariharan uses a variety of techniques in her novels to depict the themes of alienation, betrayal, and disloyalty. Narrative tools like the stream of consciousness technique, flashback technique, and storytelling elements, which have clear morals for society. The crisis of identity plays a pivotal role in In Times of Siege. Her stories are complete with recounting of various kinds of inequalities and power struggles. The paradox of desire for change and the status in the mind of secular intellectual is shown in this novel. In Times of Siege, the title's military metaphor outlines the film's vehemently polemical and ultimately uncompromising stance on religious extremism. Fiction depicts the glory of our culture; learners will be able to understand the structure of a sentence, word order and vocabulary. Cultural information is disseminated by Githa Hariharan through her fiction. Her work is a clear representation of Indian culture, literature, and oral traditions. This article examines the author’s use of various Narrative Techniques and Tools to investigate the theme of the novel, as well as the characters’ state of mind, attitude, and responses.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Was wäre wenn? Mittels medialer Darstellungen können bestimmte technische und gesellschaftliche Probleme dargestellt und damit reflexiv eingeholt werden. Insofern soll mit Blick auf das Zitat von Hannah Arendt untersucht werden, welche bildungstheoretischen Potenziale durch die Darstellung von künstlichen Lebensformen in Computerspielen eröffnet werden. Aufbauend auf der entwickelten komparativen Methodik, soll durch die Studie deren Funktionsweise dargestellt und überprüft werden. Die Bearbeitung der Fragestellung nach der Darstellung von künstlichen Lebensformen im Computerspiel, wird in der Studie in sieben Teilen vorgenommen. Im ersten Teil soll der Begriff des künstlichen Lebens und seine Relevanz in naturwissenschaftlich-ethischer Hinsicht, wie auch im Kontext medialer Darstellungen und insbesondere im Modus der Science Fiction untersucht werden. Im zweiten Teil wird die Mass-Effect-Trilogie, die den empirischen Ausgangspunkt für die Studie darstellt, hinsichtlich der dargestellten Spielwelt und der dargestellten Geschichte, anhand von Gamemaps rekonstruiert. Im dritten Teil der Studie wird die Medialität der Mass-Effect-Trilogie in den Blick genommen. Hierbei werden allgemeine strukturale Merkmale herausgearbeitet, welche relevant sind für die Kodierprozesse und das Verständnis der strukturalen Differenzen zwischen den drei Spielen der Trilogie. Im vierten Teil werde ich das aus dem offenen Kodieren entstandene Kategoriensystem darstellen und erläutern. Daran anschliessend, werden diese Kategorien und Eigenschaften in ein Darstellungsprofil der dargestellten künstlichen Lebensformen eingebracht. Damit soll die Gegenstandsbezogenheit der Kategorien und Eigenschaften sichtbar gemacht und jene wesentlichen künstlichen Lebensformen, die zur Ergebnisbildung dieser Studie beigetragen haben, konturiert werden. Hierbei werden auch wesentliche Strukturale Aspekte der Darstellung dieser künstlichen Lebensformen mit einbezogen. Im fünften Teil der Studie werden die wesentlichen Strukturalen Phänomene, im Kontext der dargestellten künstlichen Lebensformen herausgearbeitet. Diese sollen mit Blick auf die Darstellungsformen künstlicher Lebewesen, die Voraussetzungen, Mechanismen und Prozesse auf der Mikroebene des Spiels in den Blick nehmen. Daran anschliessend sollen im sechsten Teil der Studie das zentrale strukturale Phänomen und damit verbunden, die Bildungspotenziale herausgearbeitet werden. Im siebten Teil der Studie werden die Ergebnisse zusammengefasst und diskutiert. Daran anschliessend soll auch ein Ausblick über die möglichen Erweiterungen und Weiterentwicklungen der Studie gegeben werden.

Cass, Kiera. The One. New York: Harper Teen/Harper Collins Publisher, 2014. Print.Book Three in The Selection seriesThe One is the third instalment of Kiera Cass’ Selection series. The first book, The Selection, begins with thirty-five girls who are chosen across the country to vie for the prince’s heart to become the next queen of Illéa. For most girls, this would be a dream come true. For America Singer, one of the selected, she could not care less. She does not want to leave her family or her childhood sweetheart behind. Soon swept into a world so different from her own, she begins to see not everything is perfect at the castle or as simple as it seems.The Elite, book two, picks up right after one of the eliminations and begins with the final six girls (the elite). There is more turmoil as America battles with her feelings for her childhood sweetheart, Aspen, who is a guard at the palace, and Maxon, the prince, who has more aspects to him than she originally thought. Tension rises when the rebels attack the castle and the girls are under siege. While America struggles with her feelings, she decides that she does, in fact, want to be there and will now try for Maxon’s heart, if she still has a chance.The One, book three, begins with the castle under attack. We have learned secrets about the king at the end of book two and are beginning to understand the rebels’ motives. Competition is also fierce as it is now down to the top four girls and each girl is desperately trying to win Maxon’s heart. America feels strongly for the prince, but how can she know if she loves him when he still has three other girls that he is dating? Does he love her or one of the other girls more? Can she really turn away from Aspen, her first true love? Full of action, suspense and heartache, you will want to know how this book ends. The story is a mix between The Hunger Games, The Bachelor and Cinderella. This series is sure to thrill teenage audiences looking for adventure and romance.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewed by: Shawna ManchakowskyShawna Manchakowsky recently completed her MLIS at the University of Alberta. When she is not working at Rutherford Library as a Public Service Assistant, she can be found with her husband parenting her two young girls; avoiding any kind of cooking; and reading for her two book clubs. In between book club titles, she tries to read as much teen fiction as she can get away with.

Franziska Hammer: Räume erzählen – erzählende Räume. Raumdarstellung als Poetik. Mit einer exemplarischen Analyse des Nibelungenliedes, Heidelberg: Winter, 2018 (Gabriel Viehhauser) Nina Nowakowski: Sprechen und Erzählen beim Stricker. Kommunikative Formate in mittelhochdeutschen Kurzerzählungen [Trends in Medieval Philology 35], Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018 (Patrick del Duca) Jörn Bockmann, Julia Gold (Hgg.): Turpiloquium. Kommunikation mit Teufeln und Dämonen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit [Würzburger Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie 41], Würzburg: Königshausen &amp; Neumann, 2017 (Daniela Fuhrmann) Olivia Kobiela, Lena Zschunke (Hgg.): Himmlisch, irdisch, höllisch. Religiöse und anthropologische Annäherungen an eine historische Ästhetik, Würzburg: Königshausen &amp; Neumann, 2019 (Maximilian Wick) Christian Schmidt: Drama und Betrachtung. Meditative Theaterästhetiken im 16. Jahrhundert [Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 93], Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018 (Carla Dauven-van Knippenberg) Bastian Kuhl: Verhandlungen von Kindlichkeit. Die englischen Kinderschauspieltruppen der Shakespeare-Zeit, Heidelberg: Winter, 2018 (Anja Höing) Elisabeth Weiss, Oliver Jahraus, Hanni Geiger (Hgg.): Faust und die Wissenschaften. Aktuelle Zugänge und Perspektiven in wissenschaftlicher Vielfalt, Würzburg: Königshausen &amp; Neumann, 2019 (Dominik Wabersich) Wolfgang Drost: Der Dichter und die Kunst. Kunstkritik in Frankreich. Baudelaire, Gautier und ihre Vorläufer Diderot, Stendhal und Heine [Reihe Siegen – Beiträge zur Literatur-, Sprach- und Medienwissenschaft 180], Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019 (Christoph Groß) Norbert Franz: »So, Sie meinen also, es gibt ihn nicht?« Der Teufel in der russischen Literatur, Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2019 (Clemens Günther) Heather McAlpine: Emblematic Strategies in Pre-Raphaelite Literature [Costerus New Series 227], Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2019 (Cezara Bobeica) Jesko Reiling: Volkspoesie versus Kunstpoesie. Wirkungsgeschichte einer Denkfigur im literarischen 19. Jahrhundert [Beihefte zum Euphorion 107], Heidelberg: Winter, 2019 (Max Graff) Hebbel-Jahrbuch 73/2018, hg. im Auftrag der Hebbel-Gesellschaft von Martin Langner, Hargen Thomsen, Heide: Boyens, 2018 (Florian Eckes) Hebbel-Jahrbuch 74/2019, hg. im Auftrag der Hebbel-Gesellschaft von Martin Langner und Hargen Thomsen, Heide: Boyens, 2019 (Florian Eckes) Philipp Theison, Christian Demandt und Regina Fasold (Hgg.): Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Band 69/2019, Heide: Boysen, 2019 (Karin Tebben) Frank Trende (Hg.): »Die Geschichten sind ja schnell gelesen …«. Ein Müllenhoff-Lesebuch, Heide: Boyens, 2018 (Florian Eckes) Klaus Groth: Quickborn, hg. von Ulf Bichel, 4. Auflage, Heide: Boyens, 2019. 416 S. – Klaus-Groth-Lesebuch, hg. und eingeleitet von Robert Langhanke, Heide: Boyens, 2019. 183 S. – Jahrbuch der Klaus-Groth-Gesellschaft. Klaus Groth zum 200. Geburtstag. Bd. 61/2019, hg. im Auftrag der Klaus-Groth-Gesellschaft von Robert Langhanke, Heide: Boyens, 2019 (Friederike Mayer-Lindenberg) Robert Vogt: Theorie und Typologie narrativer Unzuverlässigkeit am Beispiel englischsprachiger Erzählliteratur, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018 (Franziska Quabeck) Dominique Bauer and Michael J. Kelly: The Imagery of Interior Spaces, Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2019 (Olivia Jürjendal) Christoph Deupmann: Die verlorene Generation. Heimkehrer aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, Heidelberg: Winter, 2019 (Max Graff) Julius Goldmann: Gaddas Mailand. Ein Beitrag zur Großstadtliteratur [Studia Romanica 210], Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018 (Aina Sandrini) Annette Grötler: Pikturales Erzählen. Thomas Mann und die bildende Kunst, Heidelberg: Winter, 2019 (Aglaia Kister) Sarah Bonciarelli, Anne Reverseau, Carmen Van den Bergh (Hgg.): Literature as Document. Generic Boundaries in 1930s Western Literature, Leiden: Brill, 2019 (Isabelle Geising) Annika Bartsch: Romantik um 2000. Zur Reaktualisierung eines Modells in deutschsprachigen Romanen der Gegenwart, Heidelberg: Winter, 2019 (Friederike Mayer-Lindenberg) Aleida Assmann: Introduction to Cultural Studies. Topics, Concepts, Issues [Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 36], 2nd, revised edition, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2019 (Dorothea Flothow) Christina Rossi: Sinn und Struktur. Zugänge zu den Collagen Herta Müllers, Würzburg: Königshausen &amp; Neumann 2019 (Norbert Otto Eke) Anna Weigel-Heller: ›Fictions of the Internet‹. From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in 21st-Century Novels [RABE: Reihe alternativer Beiträge zur Erzählforschung 5], Trier: WVT, 2018 (Heiko Zimmermann)

In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. Amazonian: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. London: Penguin, 1998. Callahan, Maureen. “Eat, Pray, Loathe: Latest Self-Help Bestseller Proves Faith is Blind.” New York Post 23 Dec. 2007. Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1995. 212-20. Dahl, Roald. Revolting Rhymes. London: Puffin Books, 1982. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Fortunati, Vita, Rita Monticelli, and Maurizio Ascari, eds. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1936. 237-48. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New Jersey: Penguin, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood.” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 144-9. Hahn, Nicolas. “Too Dumb to Know Better: Cacogenic Family Studies and the Criminology of Women.” Criminology 18.1 (1980): 3-25. Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. Lionsgate. 2005. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Howells, Elizabeth. “Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More.” Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, eds. F.J. Antczak, C. Coggins, and G.D. Klinger. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 131-7. Hyland, Paul. The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. USA: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Morris, Mary. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Complete Fairytales. Trans. A.E. Johnson and others. London: Constable & Company, 1961. Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Warner Bros. 2011. Sanders, Joshunda, and Diana Barnes-Brown. “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream” Bitch Magazine 47 (2010). 10 May, 2011 < http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eat-pray-spend >. Siegel, Kristi. Ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi. “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between.” Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 194-207. Swan, Sheila, and Peter Laufer. Safety and Security for Women who Travel. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

Introduction Many people interpret the word ‘cult’ through specific connotations, including, but not limited to, a community of like-minded people on the edge of civilization, often led by a charismatic leader, with beliefs that are ‘other’ to societal ‘norms’. Cults are often perceived as deviant, regularly incorporating elements of crime, especially physical and sexual violence. The adoption by some cults of a special uniform or dress code has been readily picked up by popular culture and has become a key ‘defining’ characteristic of the nature of a cult. In this article, we use the semiotic framework of myth, as discussed by Barthes, to demonstrate how cult uniforms become semiotic myths of popular culture. Narratively, the myth of the cult communicates violence, deviance, manipulation, and brainwashing. The myth of on-screen cults has derived itself from a reflexive pop culture foundation. From popular culture inspiring cults to cults inspiring popular culture and back again, society generates its cult myth through three key mechanisms: medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. This means we are at risk of misrepresenting the true nature of cults, creating a definition incongruent with reality. This article traces the history of cults, the expectations of cult behaviour, and the semiotics of uniforms to start the discussion on why society is primed to accept a confusion between nature and the semiotic messaging of “what-goes-without-saying” (Barthes Mythologies 11). Semiotics and Myth Following the basic groundwork of de Saussure in the early 1900s, semiotics is the study of signs and how we use signs to derive meaning from the external world (de Saussure). Barthes expanded on this with his series of essays in Mythologies, adding a layer of connotation that leads to myth (Barthes Mythologies). Connotation, as described by Barthes, is the interaction between signs, feelings, and values. The connotations assigned to objects and concepts become a system of communication that is a message, the message becomes myth. The myth is not defined by the object or concept, but by the way society collectively understands it and all its connotations (Barthes Elements of Semiology 89-91). For scholars like Barthes, languages and cultural artifacts lend themselves to myth because many of our concepts are vague and abstract. Because the concept is vague, it is easy to impose our own values and ideologies upon it. This also means different people can interpret the same concept in different ways (Barthes Mythologies 132). The concept of a cult is no exception. Cults mean different things to different people and the boundaries between cults and religious or commercial organisations are often contested. As a pop culture artifact, the meaning of cults has been generated through repeated exposure in different media and genres. Similarly, pop culture (tv, films, news, etc.) often has the benefit of fiction, which separates itself from the true nature of cults (sensu Barthes Mythologies). Yet, through repeated exposure, we begin to share a universal meaning for the term and all the behaviours understood within the myth. Our repeated exposure to the signs of cults in pop culture is the combined effect of news media and fiction slowly building upon itself in a reflexive manner. We hear news reports of cults behaving in obscure ways, followed by a drama, parody, critique, or satire in a fictitious story. The audience then begins to see the repeated narrative as evidence to the true nature of cults. Over time the myth of the cult naturalises into the zeitgeist as concretely as any other sign, word, or symbol. Once the myth is naturalised, it is better used as a narrative device when affixed to a universally recognised symbol, such as the uniform. The uniform becomes an efficient device for communicating meaning in a short space of time. We argue that the concept of cult as myth has entered a collective understanding, and so, it is necessary to reflect on the mechanisms that drove the correlations which ultimately created the myth. Barthes’s purpose for analysing myth was “to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there” (Barthes Mythologies 11). For this reason, we must briefly look at the history of cults and their relationship with crime. A Brief History of Cults ‘Cult’ derives from the Latin root, cultus, or cultivation, and initially referred to forms of religious worship involving special rituals and ceremonies directed towards specific figures, objects, and/or divine beings. Early to mid-twentieth century sociologists adopted and adapted the term to classify a kind of religious organisation and later to signal new forms of religious expression not previously of primary or singular interest to the scholar of religion (Campbell; Jackson and Jobling; Nelson). The consequences were such that ‘cult’ came to carry new weight in terms of its meaning and reception, and much like other analytical concepts developed an intellectual significance regarding religious innovation it had not previously possessed. Unfortunately, this was not to last. By the early 1990s, ‘cult’ had become a term eschewed by scholars as pejorative, value-laden, and disparaging of its supposed subject matter; a term denuded of technical and descriptive meaning and replaced by more value-neutral alternatives (Dillon and Richardson; Richardson; Chryssides and Zeller). Results from well-published surveys (Pfeifer; Olson) and our own experience in teaching related subject matter revealed predominantly negative attitudes towards the term ‘cult’, with the inverse true for the alternative descriptors. Perhaps more importantly, the surveys revealed that for the public majority, knowledge of ‘cults’ came via media reportage of particularly the sensational few, rather than from direct experience of new religions or their members more generally (Pfeifer). For example, the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidian, and Heaven’s Gate groups featured heavily in news and mass media. Importantly, reporting of each of the tragic events marking their demise (in 1978, 1993, and 1997 respectively) reinforced a burgeoning stereotype and escalated fears about cults in our midst. The events in Jonestown, Guyana (Peoples Temple), especially, bolstered an anticult movement of purported cult experts and deprogrammers offering to save errant family members from the same fate as those who died [there]. The anticult movement portrayed all alleged cults as inherently dangerous and subject only to internal influences. They figured the charismatic leader as so powerful that he could take captive the minds of his followers and make them do whatever he wanted. (Crockford 95) While the term ‘new religious movement’ (NRM) has been used in place of cults within the academic sphere, ‘cult’ is still used within popular culture contexts precisely because of the connotations it inspires, with features including charismatic leaders, deprogrammers, coercion and mind-control, deception, perversion, exploitation, deviance, religious zealotry, abuse, violence, and death. For this reason, we still use the word cult to mean the myth of the cult as represented by popular culture. Representations of Cults and Expectations of Crime Violence and crime can be common features of some cults. Most NRMs “stay within the boundaries of the law” and practice their religion peacefully (Szubin, Jensen III, and Gregg 17). Unfortunately, it is usually those cults that are engaged in violence and crime that become newsworthy, and thus shape public ‘knowledge’ about the nature of cults and drive public expectations. Two of America’s most publicised cults, Charles Manson and the Manson Family and the Peoples Temple, are synonymous with violence and crime. Prior to committing mass suicide by poison in Jonestown, the Peoples Temple accumulated many guns as well as killing Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his party. Similarly, Charles Manson and the Manson Family stockpiled weapons, participated in illegal drug use, and murdered seven people, including Hollywood actor Sharon Tate. The high-profile victims of both groups ensured ongoing widespread media attention and continuous popular culture interest in both groups. Other cults are more specifically criminal in nature: for example, the Constanzo group in Matamoros, while presenting as a cult, are also a drug gang, leading to many calling these groups narco-cults (Kail 56). Sexual assault and abuse are commonly associated with cults. There have been numerous media reports worldwide on the sexual abuse of (usually) women and/or children. For example, a fourteen-year-old in the Children of God group alleged that she was raped when she disobeyed a leader (Rudin 28). In 2021, the regional city of Armidale, Australia, became national news when a former soldier was arrested on charges of “manipulating a woman for a ‘cult’ like purpose” (McKinnell). The man, James Davis, styles himself as the patriarch of a group known as the ‘House of Cadifor’. Police evidence includes six signed “slavery contracts”, as well as 70 witnesses to support the allegation that Mr Davis subjected a woman to “ongoing physical, sexual and psychological abuse and degradation” as well as unpaid prostitution and enslavement (McKinnell). Cults and Popular Culture The depiction of cults in popular culture is attracting growing attention. Scholars Lynn Neal (2011) and Joseph Laycock (2013) have initiated this research and identified consistent stereotypes of 'cults’ being portrayed throughout popular media. Neal found that cults began to be featured in television shows as early as the 1950s and 1960s, continually escalating until the 1990s before dropping slightly between 2000 and 2008 (the time the research was concluded). Specifically, there were 10 episodes between 1958-1969; 19 in the 1970s, which Neal attributes to the “rise of the cult scare and intense media scrutiny of NRMs” (97); 25 in the 1980s; 72 in the 1990s; and 59 between 2000 and 2008. Such academic research has identified that popular culture is important in the formation of the public perception, and social definition, of acceptable and deviant religions (Laycock 81). Laycock argues that representations of cults in popular culture reinforces public narratives about cults in three important ways: medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. Medicalisation refers to the depiction of individuals becoming brainwashed and deprogrammed. The medicalisation of cults can be exacerbated by the cult uniform and clinical, ritualistic behaviours. Deviance amplification, a term coined by Leslie Wilkins in the 1960s, is the phenomenon of ‘media hype’, where the media selects specific examples of deviant behaviour, distorting them (Wilkins), such that a handful of peripheral cases appears representative of a larger social problem (Laycock 84). Following the deviance amplification, there is then often a 'moral panic' (a term coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972) where the problem is distorted and heightened within the media. Cults are often subject to deviance amplification within the media, leading to moral panics about the ‘depraved’, sexual, criminal, and violent activities of cults preying on and brainwashing innocents. Convergence “is a rhetorical device associated with deviance amplification in which two or more activities are linked so as to implicitly draw a parallel between them” (Laycock 85). An example of convergence occurred when the Branch Davidians were compared to the Peoples Temple, ultimately leading the FBI “to end the siege through an aggressive ‘dynamic entry’ in part because they feared such a mass suicide” (Laycock 85). The FBI transferred responsibility for the deaths to ‘mass suicide’, which has become the common narrative of events at Waco. Each of the three mechanisms have an important role to play in the popular culture presentation of cults to audiences. Popular media sources, fictional or not, are incentivised to present the most diabolical cult to the audience – and this often includes the medicalised elements of brainwashing and manipulation. This presentation reinforces existing deviance amplification and moral panics around the depraved activities of cults, and in particular sexual and criminal activities. And finally, convergence acts as a 'cultural script’ where the portrayal of these types of characteristics (brainwashing, criminal or violent behaviour, etc.) is automatically associated with cults. As Laycock argues, “in this way, popular culture has a unique ability to promote convergence and, by extension, deviance amplification” (85). The mechanisms of medicalisation, deviance amplification and convergence are important to the semiotic linking of concepts, signs, and signifiers in the process of myth generation. In efficiently understanding the message of the myth, the viewer must have a sign they can affix to it. In the case of visual mediums this must be immediate and certain. As many of the convergent properties of cults are behavioural (acts of violence and depravity, charismatic leaders, etc.), we need a symbol that audiences can understand immediately. Uniforms achieve this with remarkable efficiency. Upon seeing a still, two-dimensional image of people wearing matching garb it can be made easily apparent that they are part of a cult. Religious uniforms are one of the first visual images one conjures upon hearing the word cult: “for most people the word ‘cult’ conjures up ‘60s images of college students wearing flowing robes, chanting rhythmically and spouting Eastern philosophy” (Salvatore cited in Petherick 577; italics in original). The impact is especially pronounced if the clothes are atypical, anachronistic, or otherwise different to the expected clothes of the context. This interpretation then becomes cemented through the actions of the characters. In Rick and Morty, season 1, episode 10, Morty is imprisoned with interdimensional versions of himself. Despite some morphological differences, each Morty is wearing his recognisable yellow top and blue pants. While our Morty’s back is turned, five hooded, robed figures in atypical garb with matching facial markings approach Morty. The audience is immediately aware that this is a cult. The comparison between the uniform of Morty and the Morty cult exemplifies the use of cult uniform in the myth of Cults. The cult is then cemented through chanting and a belief in the “One true Morty” (Harmon et al.). Semiotics, Clothes, and Uniforms The semiotics of clothes includes implicit, explicit, and subliminal signs. The reasons we choose to wear what we wear is governed by multiple factors both within our control and outside of it: for instance, our body shape, social networks and economic status, access to fashion and choice (Barthes The Fashion System; Hackett). We often choose to communicate aspects of our identity through what we wear or what we choose not to wear. Our choice of clothing communicates aspects of who we are, but also who we want to be (Hackett; Simmel; Veblen) Uniforms are an effective and efficient communicative device. Calefato’s classification of uniforms is not only as those used by military and working groups, but also including the strictly coded dress of subcultures. Unlike other clothes which can be weakly coded, uniforms differentiate themselves through their purposeful coded signalling system (Calefato). To scholars such as Jennifer Craik, uniforms intrigue us because they combine evident statements as well as implied and subliminal communications (Craik). Theories about identity predict that processes similar to the defining of an individual are also important to group life, whereby an individual group member's conceptualisation of their group is derived from the collective identity (Horowitz; Lauger). Collective identities are regularly emphasised as a key component in understanding how groups gain meaning and purpose (Polletta and Jasper). The identity is generally constructed and reinforced through routine socialisation and collective action. Uniforms are a well-known means of creating collective identities. They restrict one’s clothing choices and use boundary-setting rituals to ensure commitment to the group. In general, the more obvious the restriction, the easier it is to enforce. Demanding obvious behaviours from members, unique to the community, simultaneously generates a differentiation between the members and non-members, while enabling self-enforcement and peer-to-peer judgments of commitment. Leaders of religious movements like cults and NRMs will sometimes step back from the punitive aspects of nonconformity. Instead, it falls to the members to maintain the discipline of the collective (Kelley 109). This further leads to a sense of ownership and therefore belonging to the community. Uniforms are an easy outward-facing signal that allows for ready discrimination of error. Because they are often obvious and distinctive dress, they constrain and often stigmatise members. In other collective situations such as with American gangs, even dedicated members will deny their gang affiliation if it is advantageous to do so (Lauger Real Gangstas). While in uniform, individuals cannot hide their membership, making the sacrifice more costly. Members are forced to take one hundred percent of the ownership and participate wholly, or not at all. Through this mechanism, cults demonstrate the medicalisation of the members. Leaders may want their members to be unable to escape or deny affiliation. Similarly, their external appearances might invite persecution and therefore breed resilience, courage, and solidarity. It is, in essence, a form of manipulation (see for instance Iannaccone). Alternatively, as Melton argues, members may want to be open and proud of their organisation, as displayed through them adopting their uniforms (15). The uniform of cults in popular media is a principal component of medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. The uniform, often robes, offers credence to the medicalisation aspect: members of cults are receiving ‘treatment’ — initially, negative treatment while being brainwashed, and then later helpful/saving treatment when being deprogrammed, providing they survive a mass suicide attempt and/or, criminal, sexual, or violent escapades. Through portraying cult members in a distinctive uniform, there is no doubt for the audience who is receiving or in need of treatment. Many of the cults portrayed on screen can easily communicate the joining of a cult by changing the characters' dress. Similarly, by simply re-dressing the character, it is communicated that the character has returned to normal, they have been saved, they are a survivor. In Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, while three of the four ‘Mole women’ integrate back into society, Gretchen Chalker continues to believe in their cult; as such she never takes of her cult uniform. In addition, the employment of uniforms for cult members in popular culture enables an instant visual recognition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and reinforces stereotypical notions of social order and marginalised, deviant (religious) groups (Neal 83). The clothing differences are obvious in The Simpsons season 9, episode 13, “Joy of Sect”: ‘Movementarian’ members, including the Simpsons, don long flowing robes. The use of cult uniform visualises their fanatical commitment to the group. It sets them apart from the rest of Springfield and society (Neal 88-89). The connection between uniforms and cults derives two seemingly paradoxical meanings. Firstly, it reduces the chances of the audience believing that the cult employed ‘deceptive recruiting’ techniques. As Melton argues, because of the association our society has with uniforms and cults, “it is very hard for someone to join most new religions, given their peculiar dress and worship practices, without knowing immediately its religious nature” (14). As such, within popular media, the presence of the uniform increases the culpability of those who join the cult. Contrarily, the character in uniform is a sign that the person has been manipulated and/or brainwashed. This reduces the culpability of the cult member. However, the two understandings are not necessarily exclusive. It is possible to view the cult member as a naïve victim, someone who approached the cult as an escape from their life but was subsequently manipulated into behaving criminally. This interpretation is particularly powerful because it indicates cults can prey on anyone, and that anyone could become a victim of a cult. This, in turn, heightens the moral panic surrounding cults and NRMs. The on-screen myth of the cult as represented by its uniform has a basis in the real-life history of NRMs. Heaven’s Gate members famously died after they imbibed fatal doses of alcohol and barbiturates to achieve their ‘final exit’. Most members were found laid out on beds covered in purple shrouds, all wearing matching black shirts, black pants, and black and white Nike shoes. The famous photos of Warren Jeffs’s polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the subject of Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, depict multiple women in matching conservative dresses with matching hairstyles gathered around a photo of Jeffs. The image and uniform are a clear influence on the design of Unbreakable’s ‘Mole women’. A prime example of the stereotype of cult uniforms is provided by the Canadian comedy program The Red Green Show when the character Red tells Harold “cults are full of followers, they have no independent thought, they go to these pointless meetings ... they all dress the same” (episode 165). The statement is made while the two main characters Red and Harold are standing in matching outfits. Blurring Nature and Myth Importantly, the success of these shows very much relies on audiences having a shared conception of NRMs and the myth of the cult. This is a curious combination of real and fictional knowledge of the well-publicised controversial events in history. Fictional cults frequently take widely held perspectives of actual religious movements and render them either more absurd or more frightening (Laycock 81). Moreover, the blurring of fictional and non-fictional groups serves to reinforce the sense that all popular culture cults and their real-world counterparts are the same; that they all follow a common script. In this, there is convergence between the fictional and the real. The myth of the cult bleeds from the screen into real life. The Simpsons’ “The Joy of Sect” was televised in the year following the suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate group, and the storyline in part was influenced by it. Importantly, as a piercing, satirical critique of middle-class America, the “Joy of Sect” not only parodied traditional and non-traditional religion generally (as well as the ‘cult-like’ following of mass media such as Fox); scholars have shown that it also parodied the ‘cult’ stereotype itself (Feltmate). While Heaven’s Gate influenced to a greater or lesser extent each of the TV shows highlighted thus far, it was also the case that the group incorporated into its eschatology aspects of popular culture linked primarily to science fiction. For example, group members were known to have regularly watched and discussed episodes of Star Trek (Hoffmann and Burke; Sconce), adopting aspects of the show’s vernacular in “attempts to relate to the public” (Gate 163). Words such as ‘away-team’, ‘prime-directive’, ‘hologram’, ‘Captain’, ‘Admiral’, and importantly ‘Red-Alert’ were adopted; the latter, often signalling code-red situations in Star Trek episodes, appeared on the Heaven’s Gate Website in the days just prior to their demise. Importantly, allusions to science fiction and Star Trek were incorporated into the group’s self-styled ‘uniform’ worn during their tragic ritual-suicide. Stitched into the shoulders of each of their uniforms were triangular, Star Trek-inspired patches featuring various celestial bodies along with a tagline signalling the common bond uniting each member: “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” (Sconce). Ironically, with replica patches readily for sale online, and T-shirts and hoodies featuring modified though similar Heaven’s Gate symbolism, this ‘common bond’ has been commodified in such a way as to subvert its original meaning – at least as it concerned ‘cult’ membership in the religious context. The re-integration of cult symbols into popular culture typifies the way we as a society detachedly view the behaviours of cults. The behaviour of cults is anecdotally viewed through a voyeuristic lens, potentially exacerbated by the regular portrayals of cults through parody. Scholars have demonstrated how popular culture has internationally impacted on criminological aspects of society. For instance, there was a noted, international increase in unrealistic expectations of jurors wanting forensic evidence during court cases after the popularity of forensic science in crime dramas (Franzen; Wise). After the arrest of James Davis in Armidale, NSW, Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Davis was the patriarch of the “House of Cadifor” and he was part of a “cult” (both reported in inverted commas). The article also includes an assumption from Davis's lawyer that, in discussing the women of the group, “the Crown might say ‘they’ve been brainwashed’”. Similarly, the article references the use of matching collars by the women (Mitchell). Nine News reported that the “ex-soldier allegedly forced tattooed, collared sex slave into prostitution”, bringing attention to the clothing as part of the coercive techniques of Davis. While the article does not designate the House of Cadifor as a cult, they include a quote from the Assistant Commissioner Justine Gough, “Mr Davis' group has cult-like qualities”, and included the keyword ‘cults’ for the article. Regrettably, the myth of cults and real-world behaviours of NRMs do not always align, and a false convergence is drawn between the two. Furthermore, the consistent parodying and voyeuristic nature of on-screen cults means we might be at fault of euphemising the crimes and behaviours of those deemed to be part of a ‘cult’. Anecdotally, the way Armidale locals discussed Davis was through a lens of excitement and titillation, as if watching a fictional story unfold in their own backyard. The conversations and news reporting focussed on the cult-like aspects of Davis and not the abhorrence of the alleged crimes. We must remain mindful that the cinematic semiology of cults and the myth as represented by their uniform dress and behaviours is incongruent with the nature of NRMs. However, more work needs to be done to better understand the impact of on-screen cults on real-world attitudes and beliefs. Conclusion The myth of the cult has entered a shared understanding within today’s zeitgeist, and the uniform of the cult stands at its heart as a key sign of the myth. Popular culture plays a key role in shaping this shared understanding by following the cultural script, slowly layering fact with fiction, just as fact begins to incorporate the fiction. The language of the cult as communicated through their uniforms is, we would argue, universally understood and purposeful. The ubiquitous representation of cults portrays a deviant group, often medicalised, and subject to deviance amplification and convergence. When a group of characters is presented to the audience in the same cult dress, we know what is being communicated to us. Fictional cults in popular culture continue to mirror the common list of negative features attributed to many new religious movements. Such fictional framing has come to inform media-consumer attitudes in much the same way as news media, reflecting as they do the cultural stock of knowledge from which our understandings are drawn, and which has little grounding in the direct or immediate experience of the phenomena in question. In short, the nature of NRMs has become confused with the myth of the cult. More research is needed to understand the impact of the myth of the cult. However, it is important to ensure “what-goes-without-saying” is not obfuscating, euphemising, or otherwise misrepresenting nature. References Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. London: Jonathon Cape, 1967. ———. The Fashion System. U of California P, 1990. ———. Mythologies. Trans. 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Real Gangstas: Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers UP, 2012. McKinnell, Jamie. "Alleged Sex 'Cult' Leader James Davis's Trial Will Hear from 70 Witnesses, Court Hears." ABC News 2021. Melton, J. Gordon. Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America. Routledge, 2014. Mitchell, Georgina. "James Davis Refused Bail over ‘Holding Woman as Slave, Coercing Her into Sex Work’." The Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2021. <https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/james-davis-refused-bail-over-holding-woman-as-slave-coercing-her-into-sex-work-20210317-p57bn7.html>. Nelson, Geoffrey K. "The Spiritualist Movement and the Need for a Redefinition of Cult." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8.1 (1969): 152-60. Nine News. "Ex-Soldier Allegedly Forced Tattooed, Collared Sex Slave into Prostitution." Nine News Mar. 2021. <https://www.9news.com.au/national/james-davis-house-of-cadifor-alleged-slave-forced-into-sex/48738435-74cd-403d-acc9-e998f7cad08c>. Olson, Paul J. "The Public Perception of 'Cults' and 'New Religious Movements'." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45.1 (2006): 97-106. Petherick, Wayne. "Chapter 20 – Cults." The Psychology of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior. Eds. Wayne Petherick and Grant Sinnamon. Academic Press, 2017. 565-88. Pfeifer, Jeffrey E. "The Psychological Framing of Cults: Schematic Representations and Cult Evaluations." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 22.7 (1992): 531-44. Polletta, Francesca, and James M. Jasper. "Collective Identity and Social Movements." Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 283-305. Richardson, James T. "Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative." Review of Religious Research 34.4 (1993): 348-56.. Rudin, Marcia R. "The Cult Phenomenon: Fad or Fact." NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change 9 (1979): 17. Salvatore, D. "Soul Searching: Cults Targeting an Older Pool of Recruits." Ladies Home Journal, Chicago Sun Times 1987. Sconce, Jeffrey. "Star Trek, Heaven’s Gate, and Textual Transcendence." Cult Television (2004): 199-222. Simmel, Georg. "Fashion." International Quarterly 10.1 (1904): 136. Szubin, Adam, Carl J. Jensen III, and Rod Gregg. "Interacting with Cults: A Policing Model." FBI L. Enforcement Bull. 69 (2000): 16. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Netflix, 2020. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Allen & Unwin, 1924. Wilkins, Leslie T. Social Deviance: Social Policy, Action and Research. Routledge, 2013. Wise, Jenny. "Providing the CSI Treatment: Criminal Justice Practitioners and the CSI Effect." Current Issues in Criminal Justice 21.3 (2010): 383-99.

It’s a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn.—— Tom Junod, “The Man Who Invented 9/11”The nearly decade-long attempt by families of 9/11 victims to reclaim the remains of their relatives involves rhetorics of bodilessness, waste, and virtuality that offer startling illustrations of what might be termed “the poetics of grief.” After combining as the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. in 2002, the families sued the city of New York in 2005. They lost and the case has been under appeal since 2008. WTC Families is asking for nearly one million tons of material to be moved from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in order to sift it for human remains. These remains will then be reclaimed and interred: Proper Burial. But the matter is far less definitive. When a judge hearing the appeal asked how one would prove someone’s identity, the city’s lawyer replied, “You have to be able to particularise and say it’s your body. All that’s left here is a bunch of undifferentiated dust.” The reply “elicited gasps and muttered ‘no’s’ from a crowd whose members wore laminated photos of deceased victims” (Hughes). These laminated displays are an attempt by WTC Families to counteract the notion of the victims as “undifferentiated dust”; the protected, hermetic images are testimony to painful uncertainty, an (always) outmoded relic of the evidentiary self.In the face of such uncertainty, it was not only court audiences who waited for a particular response to the terrorist attacks. Adam Hirsch, reviewer for the New York Sun, claimed that “the writer whose September 11 novel seemed most necessary was Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo, more than any other novelist, has always worked at the intersection of public terror and private fear.” DeLillo’s prescience regarding the centrality of terrorism in American culture was noted by many critics in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre. The novelist even penned an essay for Harper’s in which he reflected on the role of the novelist in the new cultural landscape of the post-9/11 world. In an online book club exchange for Slate, Meghan O’Rourke says, “DeLillo seemed eerily primed to write a novel about the events of September 11. … Rereading some of his earlier books, including the terrorism-riddled Mao II, I wondered, half-seriously, if Mohamed Atta and crew had been studying DeLillo.” If there was any writer who might have been said to have seen it coming it was DeLillo. The World Trade Center had figured in his novels before the 9/11 attacks. The twin towers are a primary landmark in Underworld, gracing the cover of the novel in ghostly black and white. In Players (1977), a Wall Street worker becomes involved in a terrorist plot to bomb the New York Stock exchange and his wife works in the WTC for the “Grief Management Council”—“Where else would you stack all this grief?” (18).ClassificationsAs the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. trial demonstrates, the reality of the terrorist attacks of September 11 offered an altogether more macabre and less poetic reality than DeLillo’s fiction had depicted. The Fresh Kills landfill serves in Underworld as a metaphor for the accumulated history of Cold War America in the last half-century. Taking in the “man-made mountain,” waste management executive Brian Glassic thinks, “It was science fiction and prehistory”; seeing the World Trade Center in the distance, “he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one” (Underworld 184). But the poetic balance DeLillo explores in the 1997 novel has been sundered by the obliteration of the twin towers. Fresh Kills and the WTC are now united by a disquieting grief. The landfill, which closed in 2001, was forced to reopen when the towers collapsed to receive their waste. Fresh Kills bears molecular witness to this too-big collective trauma. “‘They commingled it, and then they dumped it,’ Mr. Siegel [lawyer for WTC Families] said of the remains being mixed with household trash, adding that a Fresh Kills worker had witnessed city employees use that mixture to fill potholes” (Hughes). The revelation is obscene: Are we walking and driving over our dead? The commingling of rubble and human remains becomes a collective (of) contamination too toxic, too overwhelming for conventional comprehension. “You can’t even consider the issue of closure until this issue has been resolved,” says the lawyer representing WTC Families (Hartocollis).Nick Shay, Underworld’s main character, is another waste executive who travels the world to observe ways of dealing with garbage. Of shopping with his wife, Nick says, “Marion and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?” (121). This attests to the virtuality of waste, a potentiality of the products – commercial, temporal, biological – that comprise the stuff of contemporary American culture. Synecdoche and metonymy both, waste becomes the ground of hysteron proteron, the rhetorical figure that disorders time and makes the future always present. Like (its) Fresh Kills, waste is science fiction and prehistory.Repeating the apparent causal and temporal inversion of hysteron proteron, Nick’s son Jeff uses his home computer to access a simultaneous future and past that is the internal horizon of Underworld’s historical fiction. Jeff has previously been using his computer to search for something in the video footage of the “Texas Highway Killer,” a serial murderer who randomly shoots people on Texan highways. Jeff tries to resolve the image so that the pixels will yield more, exposing their past and future. “He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter” (118). Searching for something more, something buried, Jeff, like WTC Families, is attempting to redeem the artifactual and the overlooked by reconfiguring them as identity. DeLillo recognises this molecular episteme through the “dot theory of reality”: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true” (177). Like the gleaming supermarket products Nick and Marion see as garbage, the unredeemed opens onto complex temporal and rhetorical orders. Getting inside garbage is like getting “inside a dot.” This approach is not possible for the unplanned waste of 9/11. Having already lost its case, WTC Families will almost certainly lose its appeal because its categories and its means are unworkable and inapplicable: they cannot particularise.PremonitionsIn his 9/11 essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in Harper’s a few months after the attacks, DeLillo says “We are all breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan where traces of the dead are everywhere, in the soft breeze off the river, on rooftops and windows, in our hair and on our clothes” (39). DeLillo‘s portrait of molecular waste adumbrates the need to create “counternarratives.” Until the events of 11 September 2001 the American narrative was that of the Cold War, and thus also the narrative of Underworld; one for which DeLillo claims the Bush administration was feeling nostalgic. “This is over now,” he says. “The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative” (34).DeLillo was already at work on a narrative of his own at the time of the terrorist attacks. As Joseph Conte notes, when the World Trade Center was attacked, “DeLillo, had nearly finished drafting his thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis [… and] shared in the collective seizure of the American mind” (179). And while it was released in 2003, DeLillo sets the novel in 2000 on “a day in April.” If the millennium, the year 2000, has been as Boxall claims the horizon of DeLillo’s writing, the tagging of this “day in April” at the beginning of the novel signals Cosmopolis as a limit-work (4). 9/11 functions as a felt absence in the novel, a binding thing floating in the air, like the shirt that DeLillo will use to begin and end Falling Man; a story that will ‘go beyond’ the millennial limit, a story that is, effectively, the counternarrative of which DeLillo speaks in his 9/11 essay. Given the timing of the terrorist attacks in New York, and DeLillo’s development of his novel, it is extraordinary to consider just how Cosmopolis reflects on its author’s position as a man who should have “seen it coming.” The billionaire protagonist Eric Packer traverses Manhattan by car, his journey a bifurcation between sophistication and banality. Along the way he has an onanistic sexual encounter whilst having his prostate examined, hacks into and deletes his wife’s old money European fortune, loses his own self-made wealth by irrationally betting against the rise of the yen, kills a man, and shoots himself in the hand in front of his assassin. Eric actively moves toward his own death. Throughout Eric’s journey the socially binding integrity of the present and the future is teased apart. He continually sees images of future events before they occur – putting his hand on his chin, a bomb explosion, and finally, his own murder – via video screens in his car and wristwatch. These are, as Conte rightly notes, repeated instances of hysteron proteron (186). His corpse does not herald obsolescence but begins the true life of waste: virtual information. Or, as Eric’s “Chief of Theory” asks, “Why die when you can live on a disk?” (106). There are shades here of Jeff’s pixelated excursion into the video footage of the Texas Highway Killer: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information.” Life at this level is not only virtual, it is particularised, a point (or a collection of points) Eric comes to grasp during the protracted scene in which he watches himself die: “The stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him” (207). In Falling Man, the work in which DeLillo engages directly with the 9/11 attack, the particularised body recurs in various forms. First there is the (now iconic) falling man: the otherwise unknown victim of the terrorist attack who leapt from the WTC and whose descent was captured in a photograph by Richard Drew. This figure was named (particularised) by Tom Junod (who provides the epigram for this essay) as “The Falling Man.” In DeLillo’s novel another Falling Man, a performance artist, re-enacts the moment by jumping off buildings, reiterating the photograph (back) into a bodily performance. In these various incarnations the falling man is serially particularised: photographed, named, then emulated. The falling man is a single individual, and multiple copies. He lives on long after death and so does his trauma. He represents the poetic expression of collective grief. Particularised bodies also infect the terror narrative of Falling Man at a molecular level. Falling Man’s terrorist, Hammad, achieves a similar life-after-death by becoming “organic shrapnel.” The surviving victims of the suicide bomb attack, months later, begin to display signs of the suicide bombers in lumps and sores emerging from their bodies, too-small bits of the attacker forever incorporated. Hammad is thus paired with the victims of the crash in a kind of disseminative and absorptive (rhetorical) structure. “The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation” (80). RevisionsThe traces of American culture that were already contained in the landfill in Underworld have now become the resting place of the dust and the bodies of the trauma of 9/11. Rereading DeLillo’s magnum opus one cannot help but be struck by the new resonance of Fresh Kills.The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not…. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?The wind carried the stink across the kill…. The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us. (184-5)The landfill looms large on the landscape, a huge pile of evidence for the mass trauma of what remains, those that remain, and what may come—waste in all its virtuality. The “omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows” is a picture of dust-blanketed Downtown NYC that everybody, everywhere, continually saw. The mediatory second sight of sifting the landfill, of combing the second site of the victims for its “sodden second thoughts,” is at once something “you wanted ardently and then did not.” The particles are wanted as a distillate, produced by the frameline of an intentional, processual practice that ‘edits’ 9/11 and its aftermath into a less unacceptable sequence that might allow the familiar mourning ritual of burying a corpse. WTC Families Inc. is seeking to throw the frame of human identity around the unincorporated particles of waste in the Fresh Kills landfill, an unbearably man-made, million-ton mountain. This operation is an attempt to immure the victims and their families from the attacks and its afterlife as waste or recycled material, refusing the ever-present virtual life of waste that always accompanied them. Of course, even if WTC Families is granted its wish to sift Fresh Kills, how can it differentiate its remains from those of the 9/11 attackers? The latter have a molecular, virtual afterlife in the present and the living, lumpy reminders that surface as foreign bodies.Resisting the city’s drive to rebuild and move on, WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. is absorbed with the classification of waste rather than its deployment. In spite of the group’s failed court action, the Fresh Kills site will still be dug over: a civil works project by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation will reclaim the landfill and rename it “Freshkills Park,” a re-creational area to be twice the size of Central Park—As DeLillo foresaw, “The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us.”ReferencesBoxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006.Conte, Joseph M. “Writing amid the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis”. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 179-192.Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.DeLillo, Don. Players. London: Vintage, 1991.———. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1992.———. Underworld. London: Picador, 1997.———. “In the Ruins of the Future”. Harper’s. Dec. 2001: 33-40.———. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2003.———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.Hartocollis, Anemona. “Landfill Has 9/11 Remains, Medical Examiner Wrote”. 24 Mar. 2007. The New York Times. 7 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24%20/nyregion/24remains.html›. Hirsch, Adam. “DeLillo Confronts September 11”. 2 May 2007. The New York Sun. 10 May 2007 ‹http://www.nysun.com/arts/delillo-confronts-september-11/53594/›.Hughes, C. J. “9/11 Families Press Judges on Sifting at Landfill”. 16 Dec. 2009. The New York Times. 17 Dec. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/nyregion/17sift.html›.Junod, Tom. “The Man Who Invented 9/11”. 7 May 2007. Rev. of Falling Man by Don DeLillo. Esquire. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/delillo›.O’Rourke, Meghan. “DeLillo Seemed Almost Eerily Primed to Write a Novel about 9/11”. 23 May 2007. Slate.com. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2166831/%20entry/2166848/›.

Guest Editors Kathryn Ricketts and Patrick Lewis, University of Regina, Education Johan Huizinga (1944) reminds us that, “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing” (1950, p. 1). In his work Homo Ludens [Man the player or Playing man] he argued that play is a fundamental human function that permeates all cultures from the beginning. Indeed, he argues that “human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play” (p. 1). Play is not a by-product or consequence of culture—rather play exists before culture. More recently, Brian Boyd (2009) in his work, On the Origins of Stories argues that those things we so easily associate with culture and its development, like the arts and stories actually emerge from/through play. Play is often said to be universal--children everywhere are said to engage in some form of play. Nackmanovitch (1990) states, “Play is the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for it’s own pure joy” (p. 43). He goes on to call this state of play as the child-mind: “the most potent muse of all is our own inner child” (p. 44). However, even though play is said to be universal and widely recognizable, play is also very difficult to explicate. That is because play is not an object, an action or a place. Play is abstract, a dynamic and fluid process. Further complicating the idea of play are the plethora of meanings, so together the fluidity of play and the multiplicity of meanings make it impossible to adequately define play: almost any pursuit or act could be play simply by how we frame it (Johnson, Christie & Wardle, 2005, p. 11). The late Brian Sutton-Smith began his life long study of play with Huizinga’s work and at the end of the 20th century pondered “maybe the function of play is quite different from the kinds of things we have been looking at, or perhaps we have been looking at the wrong kinds of function” (Sutton-Smith, 1995, p. 282). Later he would ask, in The ambiguity of play (2001), if a theory of play was even possible. Carl Jung (1990) states that, “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” (as cited in Nachmanovitch, p. 42). He furthers this by stating “The inner mind plays with the objects it loves.” Part of this exploration of play is to investigate the interplay between the object, the story and the body. Sherry Turkle states, “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with”(Turkle, 2007, p. 6). As we welcome perspectives from Performative Inquiry (Fels 1998), Performance Studies (Schechner,1977), and Thing Theorists (Turkle, 2007), we gain a broader perspective to the diverse approaches of play as a means for emancipatory processes in performance, therapy, education and philosophy. We are interested in methods that depart from text centricity and embrace transmediated (Siegel, 1995) understandings of self in relation to the world. This departure from the text, invites a playful imagining of stories to be constructed collectively, and calls attention to remembered histories while embracing current realities.Submissions This special issue of Childhood Studies imagines contributors taking up the provocation of the title (or a variation) to explore the ludic form across not only the early childhood landscape but through the myriad human activities that intersect and weave through that landscape and beyond. The Editors will consider works in and through: performing arts, performance studies, the visual arts, the child’s eyes, psychology, teacher education, educational research, teacher practice, play theory, and early learning and care. This list is by no means exhaustive, leaving open a playful approach to imagining play as otherwise. Please submit title and abstract by December 1st 2016. Reviews of abstracts will be completed by January1st, 2017 with authors notified of decisions shortly after that date. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit completed manuscripts by March 1st, 2017. Manuscripts should be a maximum of 6000 words. Please see the submission guidelines for specific details of preparing your manuscript. However, should your manuscript travel outside the usual format and content conventions we will endeavour to accommodate as best we can, given the parameters of JCS. If you have any questions about the special issue please contact Kathryn Ricketts (kathryn.ricketts@uregina.ca) and Patrick Lewis (patrick.lewis@uregina.ca) ReferencesBoyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Fels, L. (1998). In the wind clothes dance on a line performative inquiry: A (re)search methodology (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.Huizinga, J. (1950). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London: Roy Publishers.Jacobi, J. (Ed.). (1973). C. G. Jung: Psychological reflections: A new anthology of his writings, 1905-1961 (J. Jacobi & R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Schechner, R. (1977). Essays on performance theory 1970-1976. New York, NY: Drama Book Specialists.Siegel, M. (1995). More than words: The power of transmediation for learning. Canadian Journal of Education, Toronto, 20(4) 455 -475.Sutton-Smith, B. (2001). The ambiguity of play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Nachmanovitch, S. (1990). Free play, improvisation in life and art. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam Inc.Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

IntroductionThe horror film Hush (2016) has attracted attention since its release due to the uniqueness of its central character—a deaf–mute author who lives in a world of silence. Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) moves into a remote cabin in the woods to recover from a breakup and finish her new novel. Aside from a cat, she is alone in the house, only engaging with loved ones via online messaging or video chats during which she uses American Sign Language (ASL). Maddie cannot hear nor speak, so writing is her primary mode of creative expression, and a key source of information for the audience. This article explores both the presence and absence of text in Hush, examining how textual “captions” of various kinds are both provided and withheld at key moments. As an author, Maddie battles the limits of written language as she struggles with writer’s block. As a person, she fights the limits of silence and isolation as a brutal killer invades her retreat. Accordingly, this article examines how the interplay between silence, text, and sound invites viewers to identify with the heroine’s experience and ultimate triumph.Hush is best described as a slasher—a horror film in which a single (usually male) killer stalks and kills a series of victims with relentless determination (Clover, Men, Women). Slashers are about close, visceral killing—blood and the hard stab of the knife. With her big brown eyes and gentle presence, quiet, deaf Maddie is clearly framed as a lamb to slaughter in the opening scenes. Indeed, throughout Hush, Maddie’s lack of hearing is leveraged to increase suspense and horror. The classic pantomime cry of “He’s behind you!” is taken to dark extremes as the audience watches a nameless man (John Gallagher Jr.) stalk the writer in her isolated house. She is unable to hear him enter the building, unable to sense him looming behind her. Neither does she hear him killing her friend outside on the porch, banging her body loudly against the French doors.And yet, despite her vulnerability, she rises to the challenge. Fighting back against her attacker using a variety of multisensory strategies, Maddie assumes the role of the “Final Girl” in this narrative. As Carol Clover has explained, the Final Girl is a key trope of slasher films, forming part of their essential structure. While others in the film are killed, “she alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (Clover, Her Body, Himself). However, reviews and discussions of Hush typically frame Maddie as a Final Girl with a difference. Adding disability into the equation is seen as “revolutionising” the trope (Sheppard) and “updating the Final Girl theory” for a new age (Laird). Indeed, the film presents its Final Girl as simultaneously deaf and powerful—a twist that potentially challenges the dynamics of the slasher and representations of disability more generally.My Weakness, My StrengthThe opening sequence of Hush introduces Maddie’s deafness through the use of sound, silence, and text. Following an establishing shot sweeping over the dark forest and down to her solitary cottage, the film opens to warm domesticity. Close-ups of onion, eggs, and garlic being prepared are accompanied by clear, crisp sounds of crackling, bubbling, slicing, and frying. The camera zooms out to focus on Maddie, busy at her culinary tasks. All noises begin to fade. The camera focuses on Maddie’s ear as audio is eliminated, replaced by silence. As she continues to cook, the audience experiences her world—a world devoid of sound. These initial moments also highlight the importance of digital communication technologies. Maddie moves smoothly between devices, switching from laptop computer to iPhone while sharing instant messages with a friend. Close-ups of these on-screen conversations provide viewers with additional narrative information, operating as an alternate form of captioning from within the diegesis. Snippets of text from other sources are likewise shown in passing, such as the author’s blurb on the jacket of her previous novel. The camera lingers on this book, allowing viewers to read that Maddie suffered hearing loss and vocal paralysis after contracting bacterial meningitis at 13 years old. Traditional closed captioning or subtitles are thus avoided in favour of less intrusive forms of expositional text that are integrated within the plot.While hearing characters, such as her neighbour and sister, use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) to communicate with her, Maddie signs in silence. Because the filmmakers have elected not to provide captions for her signs in these moments, a—typically non-ASL speaking—hearing audience will inevitably experience disruptions in comprehension and Maddie’s conversations can therefore only be partially understood. This allows for an interesting role reversal for viewers. As Katherine A. Jankowski (32) points out, deaf and hard of hearing audiences have long expressed dissatisfaction with accessing the spoken word on television and film due to a lack of closed captioning. Despite the increasing technological ease of captioning digital media in the 21st century, this barrier to accessibility continues to be an ongoing issue (Ellis and Kent). The hearing community do not share this frustrating background—television programs that include ASL are captioned to ensure hearing viewers can follow the story (see for example Beth Haller’s article on Switched at Birth in this special issue). Hush therefore inverts this dynamic by presenting ASL without captions. Whereas silence is used to draw hearing viewers into Maddie’s experience, her periodic use of ASL pushes them out again. This creates a push–pull dynamic, whereby the hearing audience identify with Maddie and empathise with the losses associated with being deaf and mute, but also realise that, as a result, she has developed additional skills that are beyond their ken.It is worth noting at this point that Maddie is not the first Final Girl with a disability. In the 1967 thriller Wait until Dark, for instance, Audrey Hepburn plays Susy Hendrix, a blind woman trapped in her home by three crooks. Martin F. Norden suggests that this film represented a “step forward” in cinematic representations of disability because its heroine is not simply an innocent victim, but “tough, resilient, and resourceful in her fight against the criminals who have misrepresented themselves to her and have broken into her apartment” (228). Susy’s blindness, at first presented as a source of vulnerability and frustration, becomes her strength in the film’s climax. Bashing out all the lights in the apartment, she forces the men to fight on her terms, in darkness, where she holds the upper hand. In a classic example of Final Girl tenacity, Susy stabs the last of them to death before help arrives. Maddie likewise uses her disability as a tactical advantage. An enhanced sense of touch allows her to detect the killer when he sneaks up behind her as she feels the lightest flutter upon the hairs of her neck. She also wields a blaring fire alarm as a weapon, deafening and disorienting her attacker, causing him to drop his knife.The similarities between these films are not coincidental. During an interview, director Mike Flanagan (who co-wrote Hush with wife Siegel) stated that they were directly informed by Wait until Dark. When asked about the choice to make Maddie’s character deaf, he explained that “it kind of happened because Kate and I were out to dinner and we were talking about movies we liked. One of the ones that we stumbled on that we both really liked was Wait Until Dark” (cited in Thurman). In the earlier film, director Terence Young used darkness to blind the audience—at times the screen is completely black and viewers must listen carefully to work out what is happening. Likewise, Flanagan and Siegel use silence to effectively deafen the audience at crucial moments. The viewers are therefore forced to experience the action as the heroines do.You’re Gonna Die Screaming But You Won’t Be HeardHorror films often depend upon sound design for impact—the most mundane visuals can be made frightening by the addition of a particular noise, effect, or tune. Therefore, in the context of the slasher genre, one of the most unique aspects of Hush is the absence of the Final Girl’s vocalisation. A mute heroine is deprived of the most basic expressive tool in the horror handbook—a good scream. “What really won me over,” comments one reviewer, “was the fact that this particular ‘final girl’ isn’t physically able to whinge or scream when in pain–something that really isn’t the norm in slasher/home invasion movies” (Gorman). Yet silence also plays an important part in this genre, “when the wind stops or the footfalls cease, death is near” (Whittington 183). Indeed, Hush’s tagline is “silence can be killer.”The arrival of the killer triggers a deep kind of silence in this particular film, because alternative captions, text, and other communicative techniques (including ASL) cease to be used or useful when the man begins terrorising Maddie. This is not entirely surprising, as the abject failure of technology is a familiar trope in slasher films. As Clover explains, “the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological” (Her Body, Himself, 198). In Hush, however, the focus on text in this context is notable. There is a sense that written modes of communication are unreliable when it counts. The killer steals her phone, and cuts electricity and Internet access to the house. She attempts to use the neighbours’ Wi-Fi via her laptop, but does not know the password. Quick thinking Maddie even scrawls backwards messages on her windows, “WON’T TELL. DIDN’T SEE FACE,” she writes in lipstick, “BOYFRIEND COMING HOME.” In response, the killer simply removes his mask, “You’ve seen it now” he says. They both know there is no boyfriend. The written word has shifted from being central to Maddie’s life, to largely irrelevant. Text cannot save her. It is only by using other strategies (and senses) that Maddie empowers herself to survive.Maddie’s struggles to communicate and take control are integral to the film’s unfolding narrative, and co-writer Siegel notes this was a conscious theme: “A lot of this movie is … a metaphor for feeling unheard. It’s a movie about asserting yourself and of course as a female writer I brought a lot to that.” In their reflection on the limits of both verbal and written communication, the writers of Hush owe a debt to another source of inspiration—Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. Season four, episode ten, also called Hush, was first aired on 14 December 1999 and features a critically acclaimed storyline in which the characters all lose their ability to speak. Voices from all over Sunnydale are stolen by monstrous fairytale figures called The Gentlemen, who use the silence to cut fresh hearts from living victims. Their appearance is heralded by a morbid rhyme:Can’t even shout, can’t even cry The Gentlemen are coming by. Looking in windows, knocking on doors, They need to take seven and they might take yours. Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word, You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.The theme of being “unheard” is clearly felt in this episode. Buffy and co attempt a variety of methods to compensate for their lost voices, such as hanging message boards around their necks, using basic text-to-voice computer software, and drawing on overhead projector slides. These tools essentially provide the captions for a story unfolding in silence, as no subtitles are provided. As it turns out, in many ways the friends’ non-verbal communication is more effective than their spoken words. Patrick Shade argues that the episode:celebrates the limits and virtues of both the nonverbal and the verbal. … We tend to be most readily aware of verbal means … but “Hush” stresses that we are embodied creatures whose communication consists in more than the spoken word. It reminds us that we have multiple resources we regularly employ in communicating.In a similar way, the film Hush emphasises alternative modes of expression through the device of the mute Final Girl, who must use all of her sensory and intellectual resources to survive. The evening begins with Maddie at leisure, unable to decide how to end her fictional novel. By the finale she is clarity incarnate. She assesses each real-life scene proactively and “writes” the end of the film on her own terms, showing that there is only one way to survive the night—she must fight.Deaf GainIn his discussion of disability and cinema, Norden explains that the majority of films position disabled people as outsiders and “others” because “filmmakers photograph and edit their work to reflect an able-bodied point of view” (1). The very apparatus of mainstream film, he argues, is designed to embody able-bodied experiences and encourage audience identification with able-bodied characters. He argues this bias results in disabled characters positioned as “objects of spectacle” to be pitied, feared or scorned by viewers. In Hush, however, the audience is consistently encouraged to identify with Maddie. As she fights for her life in the final scenes, sound fades away and the camera assumes a first-person perspective. The man is above, choking her on the floor, and we look up at him through her eyes. As Maddie’s groping hand finds a corkscrew and jabs the spike into his neck, we watch his death through her eyes too. The film thus assists viewers to apprehend Maddie’s strength intimately, rather than framing her as a spectacle or distanced “other” to be pitied.Importantly, it is this very core of perceived vulnerability, yet ultimate strength, that gives Maddie the edge over her attacker in the end. In this way, Maddie’s disabilities are not solely represented as a space of limitation or difference, but a potential wellspring of power. Hence the film supports, to some degree, the move to seeing deafness as gain, rather than loss:Deafness has long been viewed as a hearing loss—an absence, a void, a lack. It is virtually impossible to think of deafness without thinking of loss. And yet Deaf people do not often consider their lives to be defined by loss. Rather, there is something present in the lives of Deaf people, something full and complete. (Bauman and Murray, 3)As Bauman and Murray explain, the shift from “hearing loss” to “deaf gain” involves focusing on what is advantageous and unique about the deaf experience. They use the example of the Swiss national snowboarding team, who hired a deaf coach to boost their performance. The coach noticed they were depending too much on sound and used earplugs to teach a multi-sensory approach, “the earplugs forced them to learn to depend on the feel of the snow beneath their boards [and] the snowboarder’s performance improved markedly” (6). This idea that removing sound strengthens other senses is a thread that runs throughout Hush. For example, it is the loss of hearing and speech that are credited with inspiring Maddie’s successful writing career and innovative literary “voice”.Lennard J. Davis warns that framing people as heroic or empowered as a result of their disabilities can feed counterproductive stereotypes and perpetuate oppressive systems. “Privileging the inherent powers of the deaf or the blind is a form of patronizing,” he argues, because it traps such individuals within the concept of innate difference (106). Disparities between able and disabled people are easier to justify when disabled characters are presented as intrinsically “special” or “noble,” as this suggests inevitable divergence, rather than structural inequality. While this is something to keep in mind, Hush skirts the issue by presenting Maddie as a flawed, realistic character. She does not possess superpowers; she makes mistakes and gets injured. In short, she is a fallible human using what resources she has to the best of her abilities. As such, she represents a holistic vision of a disabled heroine rather than an overly glorified stereotype.ConclusionHush is a film about the limits of text, the gaps where language is impossible or insufficient, and the struggle to be heard as a woman with disabilities. It is a film about the difficulties surrounding both verbal and written communication, and our dependence upon them. The absence of closed captions or subtitles, combined with the use of alternative “captioning”—in the form of instant messaging, for instance—grounds the narrative in lived space, rather than providing easy extra-textual solutions. It also poses a challenge to a hearing audience, to cross the border of “otherness” and identify with a deaf heroine.Returning to the discussion of the Final Girl characterisation, Clover argues that this is a gendered device combining both traditionally feminine and masculine characteristics. The fluidity of the Final Girl is constant, “even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong, now flees the killer and now charges him, now stabs and is stabbed, now cries out in fear and now shouts in anger” (Her Body, Himself, 221). Men viewing slasher films identify with the Final Girl’s “masculine” traits, and in the process find themselves looking through the eyes of a woman. In using a deaf character, Hush suggests that an evolution of this dynamic might also occur along the dis/abled boundary line. Maddie is a powerful survivor who shifts between weak and strong, frightened and fierce, but also between disabled and able. This portrayal encourages the audience to identify with her empowered traits and in the process look through the eyes of a disabled woman. Therefore, while slashers—and horror films in general—are not traditionally associated with progressive representations of disabilities, this evolution of the Final Girl may provide a fruitful topic of both research and filmmaking in the future.ReferencesBauman, Dirksen, and Joseph J. Murray. “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain.” Trans. Fallon Brizendine and Emily Schenker. Deaf Studies Digital Journal 1 (2009): 1–10. <http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/assets/section/section2/entry19/DSDJ_entry19.pdf>.Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992.———. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187–228.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Gorman, H. “Hush: Film Review.” Scream Horror Magazine (2016) <http://www.screamhorrormag.com/hush-film-review/>.Jankowski, Katherine A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.Laird, E.E. “Updating the Final Girl Theory.” Medium (2016) <https://medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4>.Norden, M.F. Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994.Shade, Patrick. “Screaming to Be Heard: Community and Communication in ‘Hush’.” Slayage 6.1 (2006). <http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/shade_slayage_6.1.pdf>.Sheppard, D. “Hush: Revolutionising the Final Girl.” Eyes on Screen (2016). <https://eyesonscreen.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/hush-revolutionising-the-final-girl/>.Thurman, T. “‘Hush’ Director Mike Flanagan and Actress Kate Siegel on Their New Thriller!” Interview. Bloody Disgusting (2016). <http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3384092/interview-hush-mike-flanagan-kate-siegel/>.Whittington, W. “Horror Sound Design.” A Companion to the Horror Film. Ed. Harry M. Benshoff. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014: 168–185.

This article examined the notion of colonial anxiety through the concept of space in the colonial setting, particularly through the usage of signifiers found in colonial literature. The four case studies used are Burmese Days by George Orwell, Max Havelaar by Multatuli, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. These have been investigated in terms of the supposed sanctuary and feeling of unease that the private colonial spaces they present offer to their characters. In this way, it has been argued that private colonial spaces can be discussed in terms of both positive and negative signifiers for those using them. Highlighting the effect of colonial anxiety, this piece is primarily interested in the negative connotations and how the characters deal with these challenges. The emphasis on space focuses on individual locations and structures and how they impacted those inhabiting them, aiming to flag active signifiers of anxiety in terms of space, which connect to the wider debate into colonial anxiety at the literary level. References Author, (2021). Bijl, Paul, Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Blunt, Alison. “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24(4), (1999). 421-440. Bosma, Ulbe, “The Cultivation System (1830-1870) and its Private Entrepreneurs on Colonial Java’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies”, 38(2), (Jun., 2007). 275-291. Claiborne Park, Clara. “Artist of Empire: Kipling and Kim”, The Hudson Review, 55(4), (Winter, 2003). 537-561. Dawson, Jennifer. “Reading the Rocks, Flora and Fauna: Representations of India in Kim, A Passage to India and Burmese Days.” Journal of South Asian Literature, 28(1/2), Miscellany, (Spring / Fall, 1993). 1-12. Dayal, Samir. “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, College English, 54(4), (Apr., 1992). 431-445. Didicher, Nicole E. “Adolescence, Imperialism, and Identity in “Kim” and “Pegasus in Flight”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 34(2), A Special Issue: Children’s Literature, (June, 2001). 149-164. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox (ed). London: Penguin Books, 2021. Feenberg, Anne-Marie. “Max Havelaar: An Anti-Imperialist Novel”, MLN, 112(5), Comparative Literature Issue, (Dec., 1997). 817-835. Fraser, John. “The Role of La Martiniere College in the Siege of Lucknow”, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 65(261), (Spring, 1987). 5-19. Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Strachey, Alix (trans), Martino Publishing, (Eastford, CT, 2013). Glover, William J. “Constructing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab”, Journal of Punjab Studies, 14(2), (Fall 2007). 211-224. Gopinath, Praseeda, ‘An Orphaned Manliness: The Pukka Sahib and the End of Empire in “A Passage to India” and “Burmese Days.” Studies in the Novel, 41(2), (Summer, 2009). 201-223. Guha, Ranajit. “Not at Home in Empire.” Critical Inquiry, 23(3), Front Lines / Border Posts, (Spring, 1997). 482-493. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity.” Twentieth Century Literature, 47(4), Salman Rushdie, (Winter, 2001). 510-544. Johnson, Jamie W. “The Changing Representation of the Art Public in “Punch”, 1841-1896.” Victorian Periodicals Review, 35(3), (2002). 272-294. Johnson, Robert. “What was the Significance of Gender to British Imperialism.” in Robert Johnson, British Imperialism, Palgrave MacMillan (Basingstoke, 2003). 122-131. Kahane, Reuven. “Multicode Organizations: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Boarding Schools.” Sociology of Education¸61(4), (Oct., 1988). 211-226. Kane, Jean M. and Salman Rushdie. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Contemporary Literature, 37(1), (Spring, 1996). 94-118. Karamcheti, Indira. “Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and an Alternate Genesis.” Pacific Coast Philology, 21(1/2), (Nov., 1986). 81-84. Kets-Vree, Annemarie. “Dutch Scholarly Editing: The Historical-Critical Edition in Practice.” Text, 13, (2000). 131-149. Kipling, Rudyard, Kim. London: The Folio Society, 2016. Lee, Robert A. “Symbol and Structure in Burmese Days: A Revaluation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 11(1), (Spring, 1969). 819-835. Liddle, Joanna and Rama Joshi. “Gender and Imperialism in British India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 20(43), (Oct. 26, 1985). 72-78. Lubina, Michal. “Overshadowed by Kala.” Politeja, 40, Modern South Asia: A Space of Intercultural Dialogue, (2016). 435-454. Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, Nahuÿs, Alphonse (trans). Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1868. O’Reilly, Michael F. “Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter.” Postcolonial Text, 3(4), (2007). 1-15. Orwell, George, Burmese Days. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Parry, Ann. “Recovering the Connection Between Kim and Contemporary History,” in Kim: A Norton Critical Edition, Rudyard Kipling (Author), Zohreh T. Sullivan (ed), Norton, (New York, 2002). Patel, Vikram, Mutambirwa, Jane and Nhiwatiwa, Sekai. “Stressed, Depressed, or Bewitched? A Perspective on Mental Health, Culture, and Religion.” Development in Practice, 5(3), (Aug., 1995), 216-224. Rege, Josna E. “Victim into Protagonist? “Midnight’s Children” and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties.” Studies in the Novel, 29(3), Postcolonialism, History, and the Novel, (Fall, 1997). 342-375. Riedi, Eliza. “Women, Gender, and the Promotion of Empire: The Victoria League, 1901- 1914.” The Historical Journal, 45(3), (Sept., 2002). 569-599. Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Scott, Nick. “The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”’, AAA: Arebeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 39(2), (2014). 175-184. Sharma, Jyoti Pandey. “Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Colonial India: The Nabob, the Nabobian Kothi, and the Pursuit of Leisure.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 31(1), (Fall 2019). 7-24. Targosz, Tobiasz (Author) and Zuzanna Slawik (Trans). “Burmese Culture Suring the Colonial Period in the Years 1885-1931: The World of Burmese Values in Reaction to the Inclusion of Colonialism.” Politeja, 44, Jagiellonian Cultural Studies Human Values in Intercultural Space (2016). 277-300. Upstone, Sara. “Domesticity in Magical-Realist Postcolonial Fiction: Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 28(1/2), Domestic Frontiers: The Home and Colonization (2007). 260-284. Vann, Don J., Van Arsdel and Rosemary T. “Outposts of Empire.” in Periodicals of Queen Victoria’s Empire: An Exploration, J. Don Vann & Rosemary T. Van Arsdel (eds), University of Toronto Press, (Toronto, 1996). 301-332. Ward, Megan. “A Charm in Those Fingers: Patterns, Taste, and the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review, 41(3), (Fall, 2008). 248-269. Wilson, Jon E. The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Easter India, 1780-1835, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Zook, Darren C. “Searching for Max Havelaar: Multatuli, Colonial History, and the Confusion of Empire.” MLN, 121(5), Comparative Literature Issue, (Dec., 2006). 1169-1189.

Introduction: Conceptualizing DisabilityThe two most prominent models for understanding disability are the medical model and the social model (“Disability”). The medical model locates disability in the person and emphasises the possibility of a cure, reinforcing the idea that disability is the fault of the disabled person, their body, their genes, and/or their upbringing. The social model, formulated as a response to the medical model, presents disability as a failure of the surrounding environment to accommodate differently abled bodies and minds. Closely linked to identity politics, the social model argues that disability is not a defect to be fixed but a source of human experience and identity, and that to disregard the needs of people with disability is to discriminate against them by being “ableist.”Both models have limitations. On the one hand, simply being a person with disability or having any other minority identity/-ies does not by itself lead to exclusion and discrimination (Nocella 18); an element of social valuation must be present that goes beyond a mere numbers game. On the other hand, merely focusing on the social aspect neglects “the realities of sickness, suffering, and pain” that many people with disability experience (Mollow 196) and that cannot be substantially alleviated by any degree of social change. The body is irreducible to discourse and representation (Siebers 749). Disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs. How a body “fits” (my word) its environment is the focus of the “ecosomatic paradigm” (Cella 574-75); one example is how the drastically different environment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) reorients the coordinates of ability and impairment (Cella 582–84). I want to examine a novel that, conversely, features a change not in environment but in body.Alien LegsTim Farnsworth, the protagonist of Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed (2010), is a high-powered New York lawyer who develops a condition that causes him to walk spontaneously without control over direction or duration. Tim suffers four periods of “walking,” during which his body could without warning stand up and walk at any time up to the point of exhaustion; each period grows increasingly longer with more frequent walks, until the fourth one ends in Tim’s death. As his wife, Jane, understands it, these forced excursions are “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter” (24). The direction is not random, for his legs follow roads and traffic lights. When Tim is exhausted, his legs abruptly stop, ceding control back to his conscious will, whence Tim usually calls Jane and then sleeps like a baby wherever he stops. She picks him up at all hours of the day and night.Contemporary critics note shades of Beckett in both the premise and title of the novel (“Young”; Adams), connections confirmed by Ferris (“Involuntary”); Ron Charles mentions the Poe story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), but it seems only the compulsion to walk is similar. Ferris says he “was interested in writing about disease” (“Involuntary”), and disability is at the core of the novel; Tim more than once thinks bitterly to himself that the smug person without disability in front of him will one day fall ill and die, alluding to the universality of disability. His condition is detrimental to his work and life, and Stuart Murray explores how this reveals the ableist assumptions behind the idea of “productivity” in a post-industrial economy. In one humorous episode, Tim arrives unexpectedly (but volitionally) at a courtroom and has just finished requesting permission to join the proceedings when his legs take him out of the courtroom again; he barely has time to shout over his shoulder, “on second thought, Your Honor” (Ferris Unnamed 103). However, Murray does not discuss what is unique about Tim’s disability: it revolves around walking, the paradigmatic act of ability in popular culture, as connoted in the phrase “to stand up and walk.” This makes it difficult to understand Tim’s predicament solely in terms of either the medical or social model. He is able-bodied—in fact, we might say he is “over-able”—leading one doctor to label his condition “benign idiopathic perambulation” (41; my emphasis); yet the lack of agency in his walking precludes it from becoming a “pedestrian speech act” (de Certeau 98), walking that imbues space with semiotic value. It is difficult to imagine what changes society could make to neutralize Tim’s disability.The novel explores both avenues. At first, Tim adheres to the medical model protocol of seeking a diagnosis to facilitate treatment. He goes to every and any (pseudo)expert in search of “the One Guy” who can diagnose and, possibly, cure him (53), but none can; a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documents psychiatrists and neurologists, finding nothing, kicking the can between them, “from the mind to body back to the mind” (101). Tim is driven to seek a diagnosis because, under the medical model, a diagnosis facilitates understanding, by others and by oneself. As the Farnsworths experience many times, it is surpassingly difficult to explain to others that one has a disease with no diagnosis or even name. Without a name, the disease may as well not exist, and even their daughter, Becka, doubts Tim at first. Only Jane is able to empathize with him based on her own experience of menopause, incomprehensible to men, gesturing towards the influence of sex on medical hermeneutics (Mollow 188–92). As the last hope of a diagnosis comes up empty, Tim shifts his mentality, attempting to understand his condition through an idiosyncratic idiom: experiencing “brain fog”, feeling “mentally unsticky”, and having “jangly” nerves, “hyperslogged” muscles, a “floaty” left side, and “bunched up” breathing—these, to him, are “the most precise descriptions” of his physical and mental state (126). “Name” something, “revealing nature’s mystery”, and one can “triumph over it”, he thinks at one point (212). But he is never able to eschew the drive toward understanding via naming, and his “deep metaphysical ache” (Burn 45) takes the form of a lament at misfortune, a genre traceable to the Book of Job.Short of crafting a life for Tim in which his family, friends, and work are meaningfully present yet detached enough in scheduling and physical space to accommodate his needs, the social model is insufficient to make sense of, let alone neutralize, his disability. Nonetheless, there are certain aspects of his experience that can be improved with social adjustments. Tim often ends his walks by sleeping wherever he stops, and he would benefit from sensitivity training for police officers and other authority figures; out of all the authority figures who he encounters, only one shows consideration for his safety, comfort, and mental well-being prior to addressing the illegality of his behaviour. And making the general public more aware of “modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know”, in the words of Jack Halberstam (qtd. in McRuer and Johnson 152), would alleviate the plight not just of Tim but of all sufferers of undiagnosed diseases and people with (rare forms of) disability.After Tim leaves home and starts walking cross-country, he has to learn to deal with his disability without any support system. The solution he hits upon illustrates the ecosomatic paradigm: he buys camping gear and treats his walking as an endless hike. Neither “curing” his body nor asking accommodation of society, Tim’s tools mediate a fit between body and environs, and it more or less works. For Tim the involuntary nomad, “everywhere was a wilderness” (Ferris Unnamed 247).The Otherness of the BodyProblems arise when Tim tries to fight his legs. After despairing of a diagnosis, he internalises the struggle against the “somatic noncompliance” of his body (Mollow 197) and refers to it as “the other” (207). One through-line of the novel is a (failed) attempt to overcome cartesian duality (Reiffenrath). Tim divides his experiences along cartesian lines and actively tries to enhance while short-circuiting the body. He recites case law and tries to take up birdwatching to maintain his mind, but his body constantly stymies him, drawing his attention to its own needs. He keeps himself ill-clothed and -fed and spurns needed medical attention, only to find—on the brink of death—that his body has brought him to a hospital, and that he stops walking until he is cured and discharged. Tim’s early impression that his body has “a mind of its own” (44), a situation comparable to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Ludwigs 123–24), is borne out when it starts to silently speak to him, monosyllabically at first (“Food!” (207)), then progressing to simple sentences (“Leg is hurting” (213)) and sarcasm (“Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know” (216)) before arriving at full-blown taunting:The other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject […].Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?A: Certain what?Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.A: Which?Q: And do you know that if I do this—[inaudible]A: Oof!Q: —you will flatline? And if I do this—[inaudible]A: Aaa, aaa…Q: —you will cease flatlining? (223–24; emphases and interpolations in original except for bracketed ellipsis)His Jobean lament turns literal, with his mind on God’s side and his body, “the other”, on the Devil’s in a battle for his eternal soul (Burn 46). Ironically, this “God talk” (Ferris Unnamed 248) finally gets Tim diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he receives medication that silences his body, if not stilling his legs. But when he is not medicated, his body can dominate his mind with multiple-page monologues.Not long after Tim’s mind and body reach a truce thanks to the camping gear and medication, Tim receives word on the west coast that Jane, in New York, has terminal cancer; he resolves to fight his end-of-walk “narcoleptic episodes” (12) to return to her—on foot. His body is not pleased, and it slowly falls apart as Tim fights it eastward cross-country. By the time he is hospitalized “ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination”, his ailments include “conjunctivitis”, “leg cramps”, “myositis”, “kidney failure”, “chafing and blisters”, “shingles”, “back pain”, “bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice”, “sun blisters”, “heatstroke and dehydration”, “rhabdomyolysis”, “excess [blood] potassium”, “splintering [leg] bones”, “burning tongue”, “[ballooning] heels”, “osteal complications”, “acute respiratory distress syndrome”, “excess fluid [in] his peritoneal cavity”, “brain swelling”, and a coma (278–80)—not including the fingers and toes lost to frostbite during an earlier period of walking. Nevertheless, he recovers and reunites with Jane, maintaining a holding pattern by returning to Jane’s hospital bedside after each walk.Jane recovers; the urgency having dissipated, Tim goes back on the road, confident that “he had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it” (303). A victory for mind over body? Not quite. The ending, Tim’s death scene, planned by Ferris from the beginning (Ferris “Tracking”), manages to grant victory to both mind and body without uniting them: his mind keeps working after physical death, but its last thought is of a “delicious […] cup of water” (310). Mind and body are two, but indivisible.Cartesian duality has relevance for other significant characters. The chain-smoking Detective Roy, assigned the case Tim is defending, later appears with oxygen tank in tow due to emphysema, yet he cannot quit smoking. What might have been a mere shortcut for characterization here carries physical consequences: the oxygen tank limits Roy’s movement and, one supposes, his investigative ability. After Jane recovers, Tim visits Frank Novovian, the security guard at his old law firm, and finds he has “gone fat [...] His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back”; recognising Tim, Frank “lifted an inch off [his] chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place” (297; my emphases). Frank’s physical state reflects the state of his career: settled. The mind-body antagonism is even more stark among Tim’s lawyer colleagues. Lev Wittig cannot become sexually aroused unless there is a “rare and extremely venomous snak[e]” in the room with no lights (145)—in direct contrast to his being a corporate tax specialist and the “dullest person you will ever meet” (141). And Mike Kronish famously once billed a twenty-seven-hour workday by crossing multiple time zones, but his apparent victory of mind over matter is undercut by his other notable achievement, being such a workaholic that his grown kids call him “Uncle Daddy” (148).Jane offers a more vexed case. While serving as Tim’s primary caretaker, she dreads the prospect of sacrificing the rest of her life for him. The pressures of the consciously maintaining her wedding vows directly affects her body. Besides succumbing to and recovering from alcoholism, she is twice tempted by the sexuality of other men; the second time, Tim calls her at the moment of truth to tell her the walking has returned, but instead of offering to pick him up, she says to him, “Come home” (195). As she later admits, asking him to do the impossible is a form of abandonment, and though causality is merely implied, Tim decides a day later not to return. Cartesian duality is similarly blurred in Jane’s fight against cancer. Prior to developing cancer, it is the pretence for Tim’s frequent office absences; she develops cancer; she fights it into remission not by relying on the clinical trial she undergoes, but because Tim’s impossible return inspires her; its remission removes the sense of urgency keeping Tim around, and he leaves; and he later learns that she dies from its recurrence. In multiple senses, Jane’s physical challenges are inextricable from her marriage commitment. Tim’s peripatetic condition affects both of them in homologous ways, gesturing towards the importance of disability studies for understanding the experience both of people with disability and of their caretakers.Becka copes with cartesian duality in the form of her obesity, and the way she does so sets an example for Tim. She gains weight during adolescence, around the time Tim starts walking uncontrollably, and despite her efforts she never loses weight. At first moody and depressed, she later channels her emotions into music, eventually going on tour. After one of her concerts, she tells Tim she has accepted her body, calling it “my one go-around,” freeing her from having to “hate yourself till the bitter end” (262) to instead enjoy her life and music. The idea of acceptance stays with Tim; whereas in previous episodes of walking he ignored the outside world—another example of reconceptualizing walking in the mode of disability—he pays attention to his surroundings on his journey back to New York, which is filled with descriptions of various geographical, meteorological, biological, and sociological phenomena, all while his body slowly breaks down. By the time he leaves home forever, he has acquired the habit of constant observation and the ability to enjoy things moment by moment. “Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere” (279), he thinks. Invoking the figure of the flâneur, which Ferris had in mind when writing the novel (Ferris “Involuntary”), Peter Ferry argues that “becoming a 21st century incarnation of the flâneur gives Tim a greater sense of selfhood, a belief in the significance of his own existence within the increasingly chaotic and disorientating urban environment” (59). I concur, with two caveats: the chaotic and disorienting environment is not merely urban; and, contrary to Ferry’s claim that this regained selfhood is in contrast to “disintegrating” “conventional understandings of masculinity” (57), it instead incorporates Tim’s new identity as a person with disability.Conclusion: The Experience of DisabilityMore than specific insights into living with disability, the most important contribution of The Unnamed to disability studies is its exploration of the pure experience of disability. Ferris says, “I wanted to strip down this character to the very barest essentials and see what happens when sickness can’t go away and it can’t be answered by all [sic] of the medical technology that the country has at its disposal” (“Tracking”); by making Tim a wealthy lawyer with a caring family—removing common complicating socioeconomic factors of disability—and giving him an unprecedented impairment—removing all medical support and social services—Ferris depicts disability per se, illuminating the importance of disability studies for all people with(out) disability. After undergoing variegated experiences of pure disability, Tim “maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, […] and he persevered in this manner of living until his death” (Ferris Unnamed 306). This is an ideal relation to maintain between mind, body, and environment, irrespective of (dis)ability.ReferencesAdams, Tim. “The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.” Fiction. Observer, 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/the-unnamed-joshua-ferris>.Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.Cella, Matthew J.C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 574–96.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Charles, Ron. “Book World Review of Joshua Ferris’s ‘The Unnamed.’” Books. Washington Post 20 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011903945.html>.“Disability.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 17 Sep. 2018. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability>.Ferris, Joshua. “Involuntary Walking; the Joshua Ferris Interview.” ReadRollShow. Created by David Weich. Sheepscot Creative, 2010. Vimeo, 9 Mar. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.vimeo.com/10026925>. [My transcript.]———. “Tracking a Man’s Life, in Endless Footsteps.” Interview by Melissa Block. All Things Considered, NPR, 15 Feb. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123650332>.———. The Unnamed: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49–61.Ludwigs, Marina. “Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity.” Studia Neophilologica 87.1 (Suppl. 1) (2015): 116–28.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.McRuer, Robert, and Merri Lisa Johnson. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 149–69.Mollow, Anna. “Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 185–201.Murray, Stuart. “Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2017). 20 May 2018 <http://dsq–sds.org/article/view/6104/4823/>.Nocella, Anthony J., II. “Defining Eco–Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco–Ability Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K.C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 3–21.Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” 1845. PoeStories.com. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd>.Reiffenrath, Tanja. “Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative.” [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation 5.1 (2014). 20 May 2018 <https://www.sic–journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=305/>.Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54.“The Young and the Restless.” Review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Books and Arts. Economist, 28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/01/28/the-young-and-the-restless>.

IntroductionCirque du Soleil, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has eight standing shows in Las Vegas alone, KÀ, Love, Mystère, Zumanity, Believe, Michael Jackson ONE, Zarkana and O. Close to 150 million spectators have seen Cirque du Soleil shows since the company’s beginnings in 1984 and it is estimated that over 15 million spectators will see a Cirque du Soleil show in 2014 (Cirque du Soleil). The Cirque du Soleil concept of circus as a form of theatre, with simple, often archetypal, narrative arcs conveyed without words, virtuoso physicality with the circus artists presented as characters in a fictional world, cutting-edge lighting and visuals, extraordinary innovative staging, and the uptake of new technology for special effects can all be linked back to an early form of circus which is sometimes termed illegitimate circus. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, in the age of Romanticism, only two theatres in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, plus the summer theatre in the Haymarket, had royal patents allowing them to produce plays or text-based productions, and these were considered legitimate theatres. (These theatres retained this monopoly until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843; Saxon 301.) Other circuses and theatres such as Astley’s Amphitheatre, which were precluded from performing text-based works by the terms of their licenses, have been termed illegitimate (Moody 1). Perversely, the effect of licensing venues in this way, instead of having the desired effect of enshrining some particular forms of expression and “casting all others beyond the cultural pale,” served instead to help to cultivate a different kind of theatrical landscape, “a theatrical terrain with a new, rich and varied dramatic ecology” (Reed 255). A fundamental change to the theatrical culture of London took place, and pivotal to “that transformation was the emergence of an illegitimate theatrical culture” (Moody 1) with circus at its heart. An innovative and different form of performance, a theatre of the body, featuring spectacle and athleticism emerged, with “a sensuous, spectacular aesthetic largely wordless except for the lyrics of songs” (Bratton 117).This writing sets out to explore some of the strong parallels between the aesthetic that emerged in this early illegitimate circus and the aesthetic of the Montreal-based, multi-billion dollar entertainment empire of Cirque du Soleil. Although it is not fighting against legal restrictions and can in no way be considered illegitimate, the circus of Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the descendant of the early circus entrepreneurs and their illegitimate aesthetic which arose out of the desire to find ways to continue to attract audiences to their shows in spite of the restrictions of the licenses granted to them. BackgroundCircus has served as an inspiration for many innovatory theatre productions including Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) as well as the earlier experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky and other Soviet directors of the 1920’s (Saxon 299). A. H. Saxon points out, however, that the relationship between circus and theatre is a long-standing one that begins in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when circus itself was theatre (Saxon 299).Modern circus was founded in London in 1768 by an ex-cavalryman and his wife, Philip and Patty Astley, and consisted of spectacular stunt horse riding taking place in a ring, with acts from traditional fairs such as juggling, acrobatics, clowning and wire-walking inserted to cover the changeovers between riding acts. From the very first shows entry was by paid ticket only and the early history of circus was driven by innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Philip Astley, who indeed built so many new amphitheatres for his productions that he became known as Amphi-Philip (Jando). After years of legal tussles with the authorities concerning the legal status of this new entertainment, a limited license was finally granted in 1783 for Astley’s Amphitheatre. This license precluded the performing of plays, anything text-based, or anything which had a script that resembled a play. Instead the annual license granted allowed only for “public dancing and music” and “other public entertainments of like kind” (St. Leon 9).Corporeal Dramaturgy and TextIn the face of the ban on scripted text, illegitimate circus turned to the human body and privileged it as a means of dramatic expression. A resultant dramaturgy focusing on the expressive capabilities of the performers’ bodies emerged. “The primacy of rhetoric and the spoken word in legitimate drama gave way […] to a corporeal dramaturgy which privileged the galvanic, affective capacity of the human body as a vehicle of dramatic expression” (Moody 83). Moody proposes that the “iconography of illegitimacy participated in a broader cultural and scientific transformation in which the human body began to be understood as an eloquent compendium of visible signs” (83). Even though the company has the use of text and dramatic dialogue freely available to it, Cirque du Soleil, shares this investment in the bodies of the performers and their “galvanic, affective capacity” (83) to communicate with the audience directly without the use of a scripted text, and this remains a constant between the two forms of circus. Robert Lepage, the director of two Cirque du Soleil shows, KÀ (2004) and more recently Totem (2010), speaking about KÀ in 2004, said, “We wanted it to be an epic story told not with the use of words, but with the universal language of body movement” (Lepage cited in Fink).In accordance with David Graver’s system of classifying performers’ bodies, Cirque du Soleil’s productions most usually present performers’ ‘character bodies’ in which the performers are understood by spectators to be playing fictional roles or characters (Hurley n/p) and this was also the case with illegitimate circus which right from its very beginnings presented its performers within narratives in which the performers are understood to be playing characters. In Cirque du Soleil’s shows, as with illegitimate circus, this presentation of the performers’ character bodies is interspersed with acts “that emphasize the extraordinary training and physical skill of the performers, that is which draw attention to the ‘performer body’ but always within the context of an overall narrative” (Fricker n.p.).Insertion of Vital TextAfter audience feedback, text was eventually added into KÀ (2004) in the form of a pre-recorded prologue inserted to enable people to follow the narrative arc, and in the show Wintuk (2007) there are tales that are sung by Jim Comcoran (Leroux 126). Interestingly early illegitimate circus creators, in their efforts to circumvent the ban on using dramatic dialogue, often inserted text into their performances in similar ways to the methods Cirque du Soleil chose for KÀ and Wintuk. Illegitimate circus included dramatic recitatives accompanied by music to facilitate the following of the storyline (Moody 28) in the same way that Cirque du Soleil inserted a pre-recorded prologue to KÀ to enable audience members to understand the narrative. Performers in illegitimate circus often conveyed essential information to the audience as lyrics of songs (Bratton 117) in the same way that Jim Comcoran does in Wintuk. Dramaturgical StructuresAstley from his very first circus show in 1768 began to set his equestrian stunts within a narrative. Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford (1768), showed a tailor, a novice rider, mounting backwards, losing his belongings and being thrown off the horse when it bucks. The act ends with the tailor being chased around the ring by his horse (Schlicke 161). Early circus innovators, searching for dramaturgy for their shows drew on contemporary warfare, creating vivid physical enactments of contemporary battles. They also created a new dramatic form known as Hippodramas (literally ‘horse dramas’ from hippos the Attic Greek for Horse), a hybridization of melodrama and circus featuring the trick riding skills of the early circus pioneers. The narrative arcs chosen were often archetypal or sourced from well-known contemporary books or poems. As Moody writes, at the heart of many of these shows “lay an archetypal narrative of the villainous usurper finally defeated” (Moody 30).One of the first hippodramas, The Blood Red Knight, opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1810.Presented in dumbshow, and interspersed with grand chivalric processions, the show featured Alphonso’s rescue of his wife Isabella from her imprisonment and forced marriage to the evil knight Sir Rowland and concluded with the spectacular, fiery destruction of the castle and Sir Rowland’s death. (Moody 69)Another later hippodrama, The Spectre Monarch and his Phantom Steed, or the Genii Horseman of the Air (1830) was set in China where the rightful prince was ousted by a Tartar usurper who entered into a pact with the Spectre Monarch and received,a magic ring, by aid of which his unlawful desires were instantly gratified. Virtue, predictably won out in the end, and the discomforted villain, in a final settling of accounts with his dread master was borne off through the air in a car of fire pursued by Daemon Horsemen above THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. (Saxon 303)Karen Fricker writes of early Cirque du Soleil shows that “while plot is doubtless too strong a word, each of Cirque’s recent shows has a distinct concept or theme, that is urbanity for Saltimbanco; nomadism in Varekai (2002) and humanity’s clownish spirit for Corteo (2005), and tend to follow the same very basic storyline, which is not narrated in words but suggested by the staging that connects the individual acts” (Fricker n/p). Leroux describes the early Cirque du Soleil shows as following a “proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transformation trope’” (Leroux 122) whilst Peta Tait points out that the narrative arc of Cirque du Soleil “ might be summarized as an innocent protagonist, often female, helped by an older identity, seemingly male, to face a challenging journey or search for identity; more generally, old versus young” (Tait 128). However Leroux discerns an increasing interest in narrative devices such as action and plot in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions (Leroux 122). Fricker points out that “with KÀ, what Cirque sought – and indeed found in Lepage’s staging – was to push this storytelling tendency further into full-fledged plot and character” (Fricker n/p). Telling a story without words, apart from the inserted prologue, means that the narrative arc of Kà is, however, very simple. A young prince and princess, twins in a mythical Far Eastern kingdom, are separated when a ceremonial occasion is interrupted by an attack by a tribe of enemy warriors. A variety of adventures follow, most involving perilous escapes from bad guys with flaming arrows and fierce-looking body tattoos. After many trials, a happy reunion arrives. (Isherwood)This increasing emphasis on developing a plot and a narrative arc positions Cirque as moving closer in dramaturgical aesthetic to illegitimate circus.Visual TechnologiesTo increase the visual excitement of its shows and compensate for the absence of spoken dialogue, illegitimate circus in the late 18th and early 19th century drew on contemporaneous and emerging visual technologies. Some of the new visual technologies that Astley’s used have been termed pre-cinematic, including the panorama (or diorama as it is sometimes called) and “the phantasmagoria and other visual machines… [which] expanded the means through which an audience could be addressed” (O’Quinn, Governance 312). The panorama or diorama ran in the same way that a film runs in an analogue camera, rolling between vertical rollers on either side of the stage. In Astley’s production The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam (1800) he used another effect almost equivalent to a modern day camera zoom-in by showing scenic back drops which, as they moved through time, progressively moved geographically closer to the battle. This meant that “the increasing enlargement of scale-each successive scene has a smaller geographic space-has a telescopic event. Although the size of the performance space remains constant, the spatial parameters of the spectacle become increasingly magnified” (O’Quinn, Governance 345). In KÀ, Robert Lepage experiments with “cinematographic stage storytelling on a very grand scale” (Fricker n.p.). A KÀ press release (2005) from Cirque du Soleil describes the show “as a cinematic journey of aerial adventure” (Cirque du Soleil). Cirque du Soleil worked with ground-breaking visual technologies in KÀ, developing an interactive projected set. This involves the performers controlling what happens to the projected environment in real time, with the projected scenery responding to their movements. The performers’ movements are tracked by an infra-red sensitive camera above the stage, and by computer software written by Interactive Production Designer Olger Förterer. “In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” says Förterer. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer” (Cirque du Soleil).Contemporary Technology Cutting edge technologies, many of which came directly from contemporaneous warfare, were introduced into the illegitimate circus performance space by Astley and his competitors. These included explosions using redfire, a new military explosive that combined “strontia, shellac and chlorate of potash, [which] produced […] spectacular flame effects” (Moody 28). Redfire was used for ‘blow-ups,’ the spectacular explosions often occurring at the end of the performance when the villain’s castle or hideout was destroyed. Cirque du Soleil is also drawing on contemporary military technology for performance projects. Sparked: A Live interaction between Humans and Quadcopters (2014) is a recent short film released by Cirque du Soleil, which features the theatrical use of drones. The new collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios uses 10 quadcopters disguised as animated lampshades which take to the air, “carrying out the kinds of complex synchronized dance manoeuvres we usually see from the circus' famed acrobats” (Huffington Post). This shows, as with early illegitimate circus, the quick theatrical uptake of contemporary technology originally developed for use in warfare.Innovative StagingArrighi writes that the performance space that Astley developed was a “completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before… [and] included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pantomime and burletta)” (177) joined together by ramps that were large enough and strong enough to allow horses to be ridden over them during performances. The stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre was said to be the largest in Europe measuring over 130 feet across. A proscenium arch was installed in 1818 which could be adjusted in full view of the audience with the stage opening changing anywhere in size from forty to sixty feet (Saxon 300). The staging evolved so that it had the capacity to be multi-level, involving “immense [moveable] platforms or floors, rising above each other, and extending the whole width of the stage” (Meisel 214). The ability to transform the stage by the use of draped and masked platforms which could be moved mechanically, proved central to the creation of the “new hybrid genre of swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint, Leisure 46). Foot soldiers and mounted cavalry would fight their way across the elaborate sets and the production would culminate with a big finale that usually featured a burning castle (Kwint, Legitimization 95). Cirque du Soleil’s investment in high-tech staging can be clearly seen in KÀ. Mark Swed writes that KÀ is, “the most lavish production in the history of Western theatre. It is surely the most technologically advanced” (Swed). With a production budget of $165 million (Swed), theatre designer Michael Fisher has replaced the conventional stage floor with two huge moveable performance platforms and five smaller platforms that appear to float above a gigantic pit descending 51 feet below floor level. One of the larger platforms is a tatami floor that moves backwards and forwards, the other platform is described by the New York Times as being the most thrilling performer in the show.The most consistently thrilling performer, perhaps appropriately, isn't even human: It's the giant slab of machinery that serves as one of the two stages designed by Mark Fisher. Here Mr. Lepage's ability to use a single emblem or image for a variety of dramatic purposes is magnified to epic proportions. Rising and falling with amazing speed and ease, spinning and tilting to a full vertical position, this huge, hydraulically powered game board is a sandy beach in one segment, a sheer cliff wall in another and a battleground, viewed from above, for the evening's exuberantly cinematic climax. (Isherwood)In the climax a vertical battle is fought by aerialists fighting up and down the surface of the sand stone cliff with defeated fighters portrayed as tumbling down the surface of the cliff into the depths of the pit below. Cirque du Soleil’s production entitled O, which phonetically is the French word eau meaning water, is a collaboration with director Franco Dragone that has been running at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel since 1998. O has grossed over a billion dollars since it opened in 1998 (Sylt and Reid). It is an aquatic circus or an aquadrama. In 1804, Charles Dibdin, one of Astley’s rivals, taking advantage of the nearby New River, “added to the accoutrements of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre a tank three feet deep, ninety feet long and as wide as twenty-four feet which could be filled with water from the New River” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 171) Sadler’s Wells presented aquadramas depicting many reconstructions of famous naval battles. One of the first of these was The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) that used “117 ships designed by the Woolwich Dockyard shipwrights and capable of firing their guns” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 5). To represent the drowning Spanish sailors saved by the British, “Dibdin used children, ‘who were seen swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’”(5).O (1998) is the first Cirque production to be performed in a proscenium arch theatre, with the pool installed behind the proscenium arch. “To light the water in the pool, a majority of the front lighting comes from a subterranean light tunnel (at the same level as the pool) which has eleven 4" thick Plexiglas windows that open along the downstage perimeter of the pool” (Lampert-Greaux). Accompanied by a live orchestra, performers dive into the 53 x 90 foot pool from on high, they swim underwater lit by lights installed in the subterranean light tunnel and they also perform on perforated platforms that rise up out of the water and turn the pool into a solid stage floor. In many respects, Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the inheritors of the spectacular illegitimate circus of the 18th and 19th Century. The inheritance can be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s entrepreneurial daring, the corporeal dramaturgy privileging the affective power of the body over the use of words, in the performers presented primarily as character bodies, and in the delivering of essential text either as a prologue or as lyrics to songs. It can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s innovative staging design, the uptake of military based technology and the experimentation with cutting edge visual effects. Although re-invigorating the tradition and creating spectacular shows that in many respects are entirely of the moment, Cirque du Soleil’s aesthetic roots can be clearly seen to draw deeply on the inheritance of illegitimate circus.ReferencesBratton, Jacky. “Romantic Melodrama.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 115-27. Bratton, Jacky. “What Is a Play? 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Introduction The Owl House is an animated television series that aired on the Disney Channel from 2020 to 2023. The series follows Luz, a teenage Dominican-American human who finds a portal to the Demon Realm. She lands on the Boiling Isles, an island archipelago populated with magical creatures. There, Luz befriends a middle-aged witch named Edalyn “Eda” Clawthorne (also known as Eda the Owl Lady), and her housemate/adoptive son King, a cute dog-like demon with a skull for a head. Eda agrees to teach Luz magic. Magic is then used as a narrative prosthesis (McReynolds) to explore themes of inclusion and belonging. Our particular focus in this article is disability. Disability is represented in The Owl House in several ways, but most explicitly through Eda’s curse. Eda lives with a curse that turns her into an Owl Beast when not controlled by an elixir (a form of medication). Eda is the most powerful witch on the Boiling Isles and also its most wanted criminal. Yet, she also brings with her significant insight through her experience of living with her curse. Throughout this article, we draw on key concepts of critical disability studies in order to explore the way representations of familial relationships in The Owl House, both chosen and biological, are used as vehicles to subvert compulsory able-bodiedness, and therefore demonstrate affirmative notions of disability. As a field, critical disability studies respond to the limitations of both the medical model of disability, which sees impairments as the basis of disability, and the social model, which locates disability within society’s failure to accommodate bodily difference. Critical disability studies recognise disability as a complex web of physical, social, cultural, and political forces that work together to create disability. The affirmative model of disability is central to our discussion. This model takes a “non-tragic view of disability and impairment, which encompasses positive social identities, both individual and collective, for disabled people grounded in the benefits of lifestyle and life experience of being impaired” (Swain and French 569). The affirmative model recognises both positive and negative aspects of disability and, through its focus on identity and community, gives people with disability space to claim a positive individual and group identity. This disability identity is constructed outside the discourse of contemporary able-bodiedness and has its own benefits. Throughout The Owl House, Eda and Luz create a community of outsiders and then, like the affirmative model, celebrate and value the characteristics that prompted their exclusion. Familial Allyship Found families are tight-knit groups created by choice rather than through traditional bio-legal ties (Levin et al. 1). The provenance of this concept stems from the central role of friendship in the lives of queer people rejected by their biological family (Levin et al. 1): when many terminally ill queer patients with HIV/AIDS were abandoned by their biological families, they were often cared for by friends, elevating “the relationship from friendship to something more; an iteration of family” (Levin et al. 2). However, this queering of the traditional kinship structure is not solely an LGBTQIA+ experience: Alternative caregiving and kinship frameworks have “been shown to run parallel along multiple, intersecting lines of social disenfranchisement” (Levin et al. 2), including in disability communities. The Owl House subverts the traditional normative social unit of the biological family, instead privileging (at least initially) “chosen” or “found” family based on platonic care. Eda’s found family members, King and Luz, demonstrate an expanded “notion of kinship” (‘Caring Kinships’ 21), borne out of mutual experiences of rejection from their families and/or societies of origin. Eda, King, and Luz are self-identified “weirdos”, often proclaiming, “us weirdos have to stick together”. Though Eda is rebellious and outwardly confident, she is an outcast in the Boiling Isles. As a “wild witch,” Eda is breaking the law by refusing to conform to the mandatory oppressive coven system of the Boiling Isles. Because of her outlaw status and curse, Eda tends to isolate herself from the rest of society. She is often evasive and keeps people from getting close to her, avoiding her biological family, and keeping emotional distance from romantic interests. King also has a tenuous relationship with his place in society, struggling to understand his identity after being taken in by Eda at a young age. He has never seen another demon like him and has little recollection of his life before Eda. Finally, Luz was an outcast of her own in the human world. Before finding her way to the Boiling Isles, she often felt misunderstood, with her mother planning to send her to “Reality Check Summer Camp: Think Inside the Box”. The three characters find acceptance and allyship with one another, forming their own familial unit. This allyship is integral to Eda’s progression into self-acceptance. After sharing the secret of her curse with King and Luz, Eda gradually begins to open herself up to receiving help and support. As the series progresses, Eda finds herself taking on a caregiver role to both King and Luz, often referring to them as “the kids”. King even legally changed his name to King Clawthorne, so their family ties could be official. Though at this Eda’s life becomes more complex than it was when she isolated herself – due to her sense of responsibility for the kids – it also proves to be more fulfilling: Eda’s closeness to King and Luz leads her to make amends with her sister, rekindle an old relationship, and reconnect with her father. The queer, alternative kinship structure of The Owl House also creates a backdrop for themes of resistance to normative expectations. For example, in the society of the Boiling Isles, witches must join a coven and give up all other forms of magic; humans are not able to practice magic; and those cursed must long for a cure. However, within the home boundaries of the Owl House, these normative expectations are defied. Eda is a “wild witch” who refuses to conform to the oppressive coven system; Luz learns magic through non-traditional methods and eventually teaches these to Eda when her curse takes away her own magic; and Eda later accepts her curse as part of herself, while discovering the benefits it can bring. These alternative ways of living eventually extend to the outside of the house: as the family fight for a better future for everyone on the Boiling Isles, this action becomes central in dismantling the oppressive mandatory coven system. Eda eventually founded the University of Wild Magic to mentor students to express magic in their own way – a direct opposition to the former coven system –, with Luz attending as a student. Overall, Eda’s chosen family are integral not only to her personal journey to self-acceptance but to the subversion of norms outside the private realm for the betterment and freedom of the wider community. Lilith The character arc of Lilith, Eda’s older sister, depicts the pressure of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’, and the importance of community and allyship in dismantling this ideology. The logic of compulsory able-bodiedness upholds able-bodiedness as the norm that everyone must strive toward (Siebers). As a result, compulsory-able-bodiedness perpetuates the idea that people with disability must change themselves to meet (often unnecessary and unrealistic) able-bodied standards, such as being independent, thus positioning interdependence as inferior (Swain and French 573). Lilith’s character arc shows her progression from living without a curse, to acquiring a curse and dismantling her beliefs about able-bodiedness through the help of her allies. At the beginning of the series, Lilith is an antagonist working for the Emperor’s Coven and wants to capture Eda for being a coven-less witch. It is later revealed Lilith was the one who cursed Eda in the first place: as a child, feeling jealous and threatened by Eda’s skill, Lilith secretly placed a curse on her sister so she would lose the tryouts for a place in the prestigious Emperor’s Coven. However, on the day of the tryouts, Eda forfeits, preferring to remain coven-less and practise all kinds of magic. The curse then begins to take place, transforming Eda into the Owl Beast. To Lilith’s horror, the curse was not temporary, but lifelong. The audience then finds out that Lilith, motivated by guilt, worked her way up to a senior role in the Emperor’s Coven because the Emperor promised her a cure for Eda. Later in the series, this promise is revealed to be false, and Lilith rebels against the Emperor. After proving herself trustworthy, Lilith casts a pain-sharing spell on her sister, allowing her to take on half of Eda’s curse. This is the catalyst for their reconnection and the beginning of Lilith’s redemption arc. Upon acquiring the curse – which, for Lilith, takes the form of a raven – Lilith initially feels a loss of identity. She formerly placed her self-worth on her powerful magic and her high-profile job, neither of which she now has. In Season 2, Episode 1, Lilith is shown struggling with this change in self-perception, asking herself: “Who am I without magic? Without a coven?” When she first starts experiencing the symptoms of her curse, she rejects offers of help because she feels the need to prove her independence – perhaps the ultimate ideal of compulsory able-bodiedness. However, Lilith eventually admits she needs help and can’t do it alone. Together, Eda and Lilith create their own form of disability community. Thanks to Luz and King, Eda is now more receptive to letting people in and is happy to support her sister with her emerging curse symptoms. Eventually, Lilith finds that “failing” to live up to able-bodied expectations frees her of certain societal expectations (Swain and French 574–575). Instead of leading through fear in an oppressive coven, Lilith pursues her passion as a historian and becomes a curator at the Supernatural Museum of History. Her experiences also motivate her to dismantle the oppressive coven system along with Eda and their chosen family. Gwendolyn The character arc of Eda and Lilith’s mother, Gwendolyn, works to challenge the personal tragedy model of disability. This model of disability dominates cultural beliefs and media representations, perpetuating the idea that happiness and disability are mutually exclusive (Swain and French 572–573). Viewing disability as inherently tragic can also engender “paternalistic or condescending ableism” from non-disabled people, which elicits “behaviours that infantilize, overprotect, and take control” of people with disability, whom they presume to be unduly dependent (Nario-Redmond 337). This infantilisation has real-world consequences for people with a disability, including justification of “the sheltered regulation of disabled lives ‘for their own good’” (Nario-Redmond 337). In The Owl House, Gwendolyn initially holds these paternalistic views of her daughter’s curse. However, they are then subverted by the narrative development of the series, demonstrating the effect that Gwendolyn’s ableism (and eventual acceptance) has on her daughter. Gwendolyn is portrayed as the initial source of Eda’s shame about her curse. Episode 4 of Season 2, “Keeping Up A-Fear-Ances”, begins with a flashback of young Eda telling her mother and a healer about her recurring nightmare of the Owl Beast. Afterwards, young Eda overhears the healer suggesting that Gwendolyn consult the Potions Coven to keep the curse at bay. Gwendolyn is horrified at this suggestion, exclaiming, “Keep it at bay?! Oh no, my daughter is suffering, and I want that thing out! Cut it out if you have to”. Eda then runs away, afraid of what her mother will do to her. This highlights Gwendolyn’s deep-rooted belief that her daughter’s curse is inherently shameful. Although as the central plot develops Eda is now a grown witch in her 40s, Gwendolyn is still consumed with finding a cure for her daughter, despite Eda’s claims to the contrary. One day, Gwendolyn shows up at the Owl House, proclaiming, “Today I shall be curing your curse!”, to which Eda flatly replies, “No thanks”, explaining she is fine with her elixir system. Gwendolyn has been visiting Eda yearly with new hopes for a cure, and she blames the curse, rather than her own ableist beliefs, for the rift between her and her daughter. Gwendolyn explains to Luz that she has been studying under Master Wartlop, an expert healer specialising in curses. However, after procuring a book of cures from Wartlop – none of which work on Eda – Luz realises Gwendolyn has been scammed. At this point, Gwendolyn reveals she has stolen all of Eda’s elixirs and begins to spout anti-potion rhetoric. Luz and Gwendolyn begin to argue, and the stress triggers Eda’s Owl Beast, which she cannot control without her elixir. Lilith also transforms into her Raven Beast for the first time. Gwendolyn flies back to Wartlop for answers, only to realise that he is not a magic healer, but four gremlins in a costume. When Gwendolyn returns to her daughters, both of whom are now fighting each other in Beast form, she admits: My beautiful daughters, I failed you. Edalyn … I should’ve listened to you. I know now why you pushed me away. I made you think your curse was something to be ashamed of. Whether we want it or not, it’s a part of you. And I love every part of you. I’m so sorry. Hearing this apology from her mother enables Eda to momentarily take control of her curse, allowing her to help her sister. Luz and King then pour elixir onto the sisters, transforming them back into witches. Subverting the Miracle Cure The Owl House subverts the “miracle cure” trope of disability often found in media, wherein a cure – whether through divine intervention, medicine, or technology – is the most desirable ending for a (deserving) disabled character (Norden 73). By doing so, the series highlights values inherent to the affirmative model of disability, such as connectedness and interdependence. In Season 2, Episode 8, Eda finally confronts her curse after a lifetime of running. After accidentally eating a cookie laced with sleeping nettles, she experiences heightened dreams. Eda has a history of recurring dreams in which she is being haunted by her curse. In the dream, Eda angrily confronts her curse – which takes the form of an owl living in her subconscious – and they begin fighting. Eda blames the owl for her problems and screams at it to stop ruining her life. The stress of this confrontation causes Eda and the owl to merge, forming the Owl Beast. Later in the dream, the Beast is captured and falls into the ocean as it tries to escape, separating Eda and the owl into their own forms once again. They wash up on the shore and the owl, now much smaller, is trying to fly away. However, it is too exhausted, eventually falling onto the sand in a crumpled heap. As the owl struggles to breathe, Eda tentatively approaches it and pats it on the head, softly telling it, “It’s okay”. After this gesture of kindness towards the owl, a bottle of elixir washes up at their feet, and Eda says: I thought these [elixirs] were a way to fight you, but I think they're the reason we can stand here, face to face. Listen, neither of us want to be here, but, we are, and there's no changing that. If we can't accept each other, this nightmare will never end. So, what do you say? Truce? Eda pours some elixir into her hand and offers it to the owl, who drinks it, and then climbs into Eda’s lap, falling asleep peacefully. As Eda softly pets the owl, the dark black sky transforms into swirling lights of colour, and Eda says, “Wow … I’ve never had a dream this pretty”. As Eda embraces the owl, the two begin to levitate, and the dream fades out. Upon waking, Eda finds she has transformed into a harpy – part witch, part owl – as a physical manifestation of her embracing (literally and metaphorically) her curse. When she sees her reflection in the mirror, Eda wolf whistles at herself approvingly, exclaiming, “Oh girl, this is a hot look!” Eda later learns to transform into a harpy at will, and her new liminal form challenges her previously naturalised boundary between the self (the witch) and the other (the curse). Eda is no longer a witch cursed by an owl, but a witch and an owl. Though she still drinks the elixir, Eda begins to accept herself and the owl as connected parts of each other. Rather than perpetuating the idea of a cure as the most desirable ending, The Owl House provides Eda with an alternative solution to her curse: what McReynolds terms a “prosthetic relationship”. McReynolds argues that the traditional concept of prosthesis can be expanded to include anything that “allows a body to function in an environment for which it is overwise unequipped” (115). In this way, Eda and the owl form two halves of an entirely new whole: their relationship becomes defined by affirmative values of connectedness and interdependence rather than normative, able-bodied ideals of independence and bodily control. Conclusion This article explores the role of Eda’s chosen family (Luz and King), as well as her biological family (her sister Lilith and mother Gwendolyn), in representing affirmative ideas of disability. The affirmative model of disability gives people with disability space to claim their disability as a valid and valuable identity. Throughout the article, we argue that Eda’s curse is representative of disability. The progression from shame to acceptance to pride depicted in this series offers an important representation of disability: one which, in line with critical disability studies, responds to the limitations of both the medical and social models of disability. Indeed, The Owl House embraces an affirmative model of disability, recognising the importance of disability, identity, and community. While we have focused on Eda’s curse and familial relationships in this article, future studies could consider audience responses to The Owl House, and particularly those of audiences with disability and neurodiversity identifying with this animated series. The Owl House subverts traditional narratives of disability grounded in compulsory able-bodiedness and instead uses magic to depict a pragmatic view of disability grounded in acceptance and affirmation. References “Caring Kinships.” The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. La Vergne: Verso UK, 2020. 21–26. Levin, Nina Jackson, Shann K. Kattari, Emily K. 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