Portrait of an Unknown Woman: Fictional Representations of Levina Teerlinc, Tudor Paintrix

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Catherine Padmore
Keyword(s):  
Fictional Representations

Afghanistan Meets the Amazon: Reading The Kite Runner in America

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Aubry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
United States Military ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Global War On Terrorism ◽  
Customer Reviews ◽  
Global War ◽  
Fictional Representations

This essay considers the American reception of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner in the context of the Bush administration's global war on terrorism by examining the customer reviews of the novel posted on Amazon. As many of the responses indicate, identification serves as a paradoxical means of negotiating with fictional representations of foreignness. The intense and painful empathy inspired by The Kite Runner serves a valorizing function for American readers, strengthening their sense of their own humanity—an effect that resists strict political categorization. Hosseini's ambivalent conception of what it means to be human, I argue, supports a diversity of competing attitudes toward the United States' military intervention in the Middle East and central Asia, while simultaneously catering to fantasies of escape from ideological and cultural divisions altogether.

Representing Transnational Law: Drone Warfare and Transnational Legal Text

2021 ◽  
pp. 1068-1090
Author(s):  
Jothie Rajah
Keyword(s):  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
British State ◽  
Fictional Representations

What can entertainment media tell us about a contemporary concept of law that is being transnationalized, and why should scholars pay attention to ostensibly fictional representations of law in transnational contexts? In this chapter, I consider representations of transnational law through an analysis of Gavin Hood’s 2016 film on drone warfare, Eye in the Sky (Eye). Eye is driven by a compelling narrative tension: a child is likely to be harmed if a missile is launched at a room occupied by terrorists loading suicide vests with explosives. But if this child is not risked (sacrificed?) and the terrorists conduct their suicide mission, a minimum of eighty civilian deaths is the probable result. With lives at stake, we watch a transnational alliance of American and British state actors debate law, the rules governing drone strikes, and accountability to publics, as the decision is made to conduct the targeted killing. Dramatizing questions of law in relation to the secretive workings of drone warfare, Eye offers a valuable representation of how a very specific account of law as security is being transnationalized.

scholarly journals Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kühberger
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Fictional Representations

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or – to put it more precisely – by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of Austrian children’s rooms, this paper explores traceable manifestations of history and historical fiction, particularly toy dragons and dinosaurs, in their properties as objects and as focuses of their owners’ interpretations as ascertained in interviews. The research finds little clear demarcation in the minds of the children interviewed (all between 8 and 12 years old) between imaginings and cognitive attempts to reconstruct the past. The article examines the influence of these factual–fictional representations on historical thinking from a history education perspective.

Ghost Meat

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Catherine Belling
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linear Topology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
The Devil

Abstract The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.

Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Aaron Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
News Media ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Sunset Boulevard

This chapter focuses on Latin American singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who helped create an all-purpose, homogeneous image of Latin Americans, their culture, and especially their music. Hollywood used Miranda as a do-all prop in dramatic settings as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Mexico. The resulting conflation of costumes, instruments, musical genres, and languages is highly entertaining on one level but pernicious and (at the time) politically counterproductive on another. The partial coverage by US news media of events in South America left a gap that is “often filled by fictional representations in motion pictures and television shows. Film, in particular, has played a major role in shaping modern America's consciousness of Latin America.”

“What Comes From Men and Women Dancing”

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fictional Representations

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
East West

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

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