David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin

The Nigerian film industry known as “Nollywood” was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknesses of the Nigerian state, but it inherited and carried forward one of the state’s major accomplishments: the creation of a national culture on and through television. This mission was reinterpreted in the context of a low-budget feature-film industry grounded in the informal sector of the economy. Twenty-five years on, governmental failures continue to structure the industry, even as new distribution technologies and the transnational corporations that have entered with them have created a whole new sector of production alongside the original one and have fractured the audience along class lines, adding to original linguistic and cultural divisions. Still, through its storytelling, Nollywood remains a powerful unifying cultural force on the national and Pan-African levels. In this context, Nigerian Pidgin is more important than ever as a linguistic medium of communication and as a symbol of national, regional, and Pan-African unity and communicability.

Living Dying in Gilead

The cultural force of Gilead stems from its powerful unveiling of how dying complicates the sensory and psychological dynamics of human perception, expelling Robinson’s aging and ailing narrator from the ordinary world his prose so beautifully illuminates. In his journal to his son, Ames uses language to compensate for his anticipated absence; however, the reader’s experience of this first-person narrative may achieve an aesthetic transcendence that belies the aching apprehension of loss that functions as its scaffolding. Gilead localizes Ames’s psychic struggle with his own imminent death in acts of perceptual processing that it both depicts and thematizes. Combining physiological, sociological, and psychological approaches to aging with phenomenology and cognitive theories of perception, this chapter explores how the novel pushes existential concerns into the realm of the everyday to explore the way that the lived experience of dying traps Robinson’s protagonist uncomfortably in the collapsing space between perception and representation.

Of God and Reason in XVIII C. British North America

The following article intends the description of the religious and intellectual environment in prerevo-lutionary America. It is divided into two main sec-tions: (1) a religious one where I will cover the most significant elements, and the ideological context of what was the most decisive cultural force in the formation of the new country ?Puritanism?; and (2) another that succinctly describes the particular shape that enlightened thought acquired in that part of the British Empire.A description of eighteenth-century Puritan North America requires a closer look at the ver-sion of Calvinism prevalent in the Northeastern seaboard, and therein to the cultural phenomenon of religious revivalism. Now connected to these variables lie a series of theological conceptions that shaped Puritan belief and practice in manifold ways, and that will be covered in the first section of this work: Arminianism, Antinomianism, Millen-nialism, and Religious Enthusiasm, among others.

Entertainment Media and Social Consciousness

Over the past decade and a half, scholarship in media psychology has significantly expanded to investigate the role entertainment media and experiences play in encouraging audiences to think more deeply, feel inspired, encourage prosocialness, and otherwise serve in the interest of social good. Many scholars suggest that media, including entertainment, are a significant cultural force in that they can articulate identities and values of a culture, but also serve as sites where these same values and identities are discussed and challenged. Much content presents narratives that discuss some of the toughest challenges faced by organizations, governments, and societies. This chapter introduces the term “socially conscious entertainment” (SCE), discussing its similarities with meaningful and hedonic entertainment experiences, entertainment-education, and various theoretical frameworks from which to examine its usefulness in prompting audiences to challenge existing social attitudes.

PUBLIC VIRTUES AND PRIVATE PLEASURES: HOW TV CULTURE EMERGED IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

Television represented the transformative technology in the 20th century, and it has also served as a major social and cultural force for modernization after World War II, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In socialist countries television was closely connected with future-oriented ideology, and aimed to provide the democratization of knowledge, promotion of socialist values and development of socialist citizenry. The beginning of TV broadcast in socialist Yugoslavia in 1958 gave way to the gradual development of TV culture during the sixties and seventies, the overall impact of which on the subjectivities and everyday lives of the viewers was undeniable. The aim of this paper is to briefly outline the context in which television culture in socialist Yugoslavia emerged and achieved momentum, pinpointing two periods: the penetration of TV into small places and villages during the sixties and the socio-cultural influence and ramifications of the broadcast of "Peyton Place" in the early seventies.

A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age

A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to today. Over this time, world-wide participation in sport has been shaped by economic developments, communication and transportation innovations, declining racism, diplomacy, political ideologies, feminization, democratization, as well as increasing professionalization and commercialization. Sport has now become both a global cultural force and one of the deepest ways in which individual nations express their myths, beliefs, values, traditions, and realities. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.

A Star Trek About Being Star Trek

At the height of the Cold War, the original Star Trek series provided viewers with a utopian, racially inclusive, and altogether progressive alternative to the present standoff among superpowers. Yet, at the same time, it was caught within the Cold War world system. Star Trek may have interrogated U.S. policy in the Cold War, frequently posing the question what its heroic protagonists were supposed to do when given morally tenuous options, but it never questioned that the crew the show portrayed in fact was heroic and good. After the original run, Star Trek remained a narrative corollary to popular imaginaries of history. Trends, fads, and new focus points in historiography frequently cropped up in its later iterations. This chapter argues that Discovery however operates on an added meta level that is not found in any of the other editions of the franchise. It is not just political in the sense that it takes stances in its narratives and challenges viewers’ preconceptions regarding current political issues. It also pointedly reasserts Star Trek’s own role as a cultural force that can, and wants to be, part of such a discourse.

Converting the Forces of Nature to a Cultural Force—An Invitation to Pursue the Study of “Satoyama” (A “Satoyama” May Only Be a Little Village Near the Mountains, Only at Best a “Satoyama”. Yet, Even So, It Is a “Satoyama”!)

“Satoyamas” are important geographical spaces related to the living zones inhabited by humans that can be made affluent through human agency, unlike the Okuyamas (mountain recesses) located far from villages. It was important for us to reconsider the force of nature that we could not have predicted so far by studying “Satoyama”. I hope that “Satoyama Studies” will develop to become a study pursued by global citizens and another field of human study, combining, blending, and mediating among the existing sciences.