Ordinary Affects and Spectrality in Three Works: Carole Giangrande’s Midsummer, Brenda Missen’s Tell Anna She’s Safe, and Andrea Thompson’s Over Our Heads

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Silvia Caporale-Bizzini
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Unexpected Event ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Crisis ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Lauren Berlant

Abstract Scholars such as Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant have pointed out that neoliberalism stresses the social benefits of individual precariousness for the sake of profit and fosters a sense of personal crisis. In the three contemporary novels I examine, such feelings of crisis permeate the characters’ lives. I build on the concepts of the unexpected and spectrality to analyze Carole Giangrande’s Midsummer (2014), Brenda Missen’s Tell Anna She’s Safe (2011), and Andrea Thompson’s Over Our Heads (2014). These three novels share similar themes: in each, as the result of an unexpected event, specters from the past interact with the present – thereby forcing the central characters to question their beliefs, rethink their ideas about what constitutes a good life, and start a journey of personal discovery.

scholarly journals Moving Emotions: Affect, the Archive and the Moving Image

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Caterina Albano
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
The Past ◽  
Home Movies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Lauren Berlant

This article considers the significance of the moving image as an archival record and its implications for the ways in which memory interacts with history. As a defining technology of recording and documenting, film is entangled with history in its making: however, what kinds of narrative ensues from images whose contextual references are opaque to us? What can we garner from footage whose indexical connections have been lost? By focusing on the artistic practice of filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, I suggest a reading of early-twentieth-century archival film footage, including found footage and home movies, in terms of affect. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's approach focuses on the procedural features of the frame and an excavation of the features that can be drawn from its defining connotations. Through an excavation of the most minute details within the frame, they point out the kind of ‘presence’ that film projects back to us as gesture, expression, and movement and abstract from them forgotten memories of everyday encounters and the affective forms that mundane actions took. In particular, I shall focus on works by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's that deal with encounters with ‘the other’ and the visual practices of representation that inform them. The legibility that Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's approach brings to a reading of archival film footage is indicative for broader methodological considerations of the ways in which the moving image encodes affect and emotion. This is relevant for an understanding of what Lauren Berlant refers to as the ‘realm of the social’ by uncovering the structures of perception and representation of the past and the significance that they might take in the present.

The Cruel Optimism of Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-497
Author(s):  
Jamie Coates
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Construction ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The World ◽  
Transnational Migrants ◽  
Government Level ◽  
Lauren Berlant

Over the past thirty years, moving overseas has been a positively valued aspiration in China. On both a government level, and within popular discourse, migration has been propagated as a means to be better citizens, and a better nation, resonating with families’ desire for a better life. However, there are consequences for those who move, in terms of belonging and how they imagine their life projects. This article extends the established scholarship on mobility out of China by comparing the rhetorical construction of mobility with the experiences of Chinese migrants in Japan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among educationally channeled Chinese migrants in Tokyo, I show how the imaginaries that shape migrant projects are constituted by conflicting aspirations and desires. The mismatch between daily experiences and discursively informed perceptions of what constitutes a “good life” and “success,” in many senses resemble what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Educationally channeled migration out of China is posited as a desirable object-idea that is “cruel” because the “cluster of promises” that constitute its “optimism” cannot be reconciled with the mobile lifeworlds of many Chinese transnational migrants. Due to the impossibility of simultaneously achieving the promises of success, pleasing one’s family, and attaining a sense of cosmopolitanism, many migrants resign themselves to the instabilities of mobile life. Their experiences are suggestive of the consequences of a world that increasingly celebrates mobility, with implications for how “being at home in the world” is imagined today.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Disciplining Polenta: A Parody on the Politics of Saving Food

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione
Keyword(s):  
Food Products ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
Traditional Foods ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

Pakistan’s Development: Successes, Failures, and Future Tasks (Presidential Remarks)

1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Golden Jubilee ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Past Half ◽  
Do So

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.

Современный образ войны и проблема ее трасформации

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
D. A. Abgadzhava ◽  
A. S. Vlaskina
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Advanced Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Modern War

War is an essential part of the social reality inherent in all stages of human development: from the primitive communal system to the present, where advanced technologies and social progress prevail. However, these characteristics do not make our society more peaceful, on the contrary, according to recent research and reality, now the number of wars and armed conflicts have increased, and most of the conflicts have a pronounced local intra-state character. Thus, wars in the classical sense of them go back to the past, giving way to military and armed conflicts. Now the number of soldiers and the big army doesn’t show the opponents strength. What is more important is the fact that people can use technology, the ideological and informational base to win the war. According to the history, «weak» opponent can be more successful in conflict if he has greater cohesion and ideological unity. Modern wars have already transcended the political boundaries of states, under the pressure of certain trends, they are transformed into transnational wars, that based on privatization, commercialization and obtaining revenue. Thus, the present paper will show a difference in understanding of terms such as «war», «military conflict» and «armed conflict». And also the auteurs will tell about the image of modern war and forecasts for its future transformation.

The Impact of War on Population Health

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Turkan Ahmet
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Status ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Past ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Physical Environments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Impact

The past few decades of ongoing war in Iraq has had a dramatic impact on the health of Iraq’s population. Wars are known to have negative effects on the social and physical environments of individuals, as well as limit their access to the available health care services. This paper explores the personal experiences of my family members, who were exposed to war, as well as includes information that has been reviewed form many academic sources. The data aided in providing recommendations and developing strategies, on both local and international levels, to improve the health status of the populations exposed to war.

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