Introduction to Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective

This article introduces some of the questions, activist and theoretical concepts featured in the special issue “Fucking solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a post-Soviet Perspective”. It reflects on the usage and applicability of the term queer and queer concepts within post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces, by playfully using the “fucking” as critical term, to emphasize queer’s original potential to offend and disrupt within English language. It reflects on the possibilities of queer and feminist solidarities across the East/West divide that do not fall into the trap of (Western) hegemony or anti-Western sentiments. Framing queer solidarity as “working together,” it looks for the possibilities of egalitarian mutual support across national and cultural borders. Finally, it gives an overview of the texts collected in the special issue.

Pragmatic Prediction in the Processing of Referring Expressions Containing Scalar Quantifiers

Previous research in cognitive science and psycholinguistics has shown that language users are able to predict upcoming linguistic input probabilistically, pre-activating material on the basis of cues emerging from different levels of linguistic abstraction, from phonology to semantics. Current evidence suggests that linguistic prediction also operates at the level of pragmatics, where processing is strongly constrained by context. To test a specific theory of contextually-constrained processing, termed pragmatic surprisal theory here, we used a self-paced reading task where participants were asked to view visual scenes and then read descriptions of those same scenes. Crucially, we manipulated whether the visual context biased readers into specific pragmatic expectations about how the description might unfold word by word. Contrary to the predictions of pragmatic surprisal theory, we found that participants took longer reading the main critical term in scenarios where they were biased by context and pragmatic constraints to expect a given word, as opposed to scenarios where there was no pragmatic expectation for any particular referent.

Asymptotically vanishing nodal solutions for critical double phase problems

We consider a Dirichlet double phase problem with unbalanced growth. In the reaction we have the combined effects of a critical term and of a locally defined Carathéodory perturbation. Using cut-off functions and truncation techniques we bypass the critical term and deal with a coercive problem. Using this auxillary problem, we show that the original Dirichlet equation has a whole sequence of nodal (sign-changing) solutions which converge to zero in the Musielak–Orlice–Sobolev space and in L ∞ .

The queer Global South: Transnational video activism between China and Africa

In this article, I examine grassroots cinematic connections between China and Africa by using Queer University, short for the Queer University Video Capacity Building Training Program, a 3-year (2017–2019) participatory video production program between Chinese and African queer filmmakers and activists, as a case study. Through interviews with Queer University organizers and participants, I discuss the transnational politics and decolonial potentials underpinning these grassroots initiatives. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s critical term “minor transnationalism,” I study transnational queer grassroots collaborations in the Global South, and, in doing so, unravel the hopes, promises, and precariousness of emerging people-to-people exchanges taking place in the Global South.

The ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: The Achievement of a Classical Arabic Allegorical Form

This paper aims to examine the renowned Early Islamic elegy, the ʿAyniyyah of the Mukhaḍram poet Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī in two respects. First, it examines the poem as an entirely unconventional example of a Classical Arabic elegiac poem (rithāʾ) in terms of its thematic structure of introductory lament to the poet’s dead sons followed by three panels: the onager, the oryx and knightly combat. It concludes that the tragic endings of all three panels constitute a dramatic inversion of the triumphal outcomes of such thematic panels in the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah in a manner that reflects al-Jāḥiẓ’s structural insights into the semantic functions of the animal panels in both elegy and qaṣīdah. Second, the paper explores the allegorical aspect of the thematic sections of the poem, the elegiac lament and the three tragic panels, in order to argue that they are a key to understanding the allegorical dimensions of such panels in the Early Arabic qaṣīdah tradition. The paper next explores Arabic critical terminology for the Western term “allegory,” such as tamthīl, umthūlah and majāz, only to conclude that none of them are adequate. Building especially on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s proper understanding of majāz, the paper finally proposes a new etymologically and semantically sound neologism as an Arabic critical term for allegory: umjūzah.

Bid'a in the Perspective of Islamic Theology and Law

Bid’a, literally translated as religious heresy and innovation, has become a topic of controversy amongst Muslims. There are Prophetic traditions that address bid’a in the most critical term, declaring its perpetrators of misguided persons threatened by hellfire. This paper critically examines the notion of bid’a and conceptually analyzes it from the perspectives of Islamic theology and law. Based on textual analysis of this term as this is found in some Prophetic traditions and their interpretation by Muslim scholars, this paper shows that the meaning of bid’a covers various aspects of Islam, including theology and law. Muslims scholars understand the hadith on bid’a literally and contend that all innovations are misleading. Other scholars, however, suggest that based on their critical examination of the term from linguistic, contextual and practical aspects, not all bid’a are misguided. These scholars tend to comprehend bid’a from the perspective of Islam law rather than theology. According to Islamic law, human actions fall into five legal categories: compulsory, recommended, neutral, reprehensible and forbidden. Bid’a must be put into this perspective. In other words, not all new things and innovation are forbidden because they can be categorised as neutral or recommended, depending on the relevant legal considerations.

intratextuality

Intratextuality is a critical term used to explore the relationship between the parts and the whole in texts, including issues of unity (and disunity), the relationship between digressions and their surroundings, interactions between disparate parts of texts (such as ring composition), juxtapositions that may reflect surprisingly on their neighbours, or any structural issue within a single work of literature. Intratextual approaches may also be interested in ways in which the activity of a reader affects response to the text, for example by dividing it into mental “paragraphs.” Crucial to intratextual reading is that all these relationships be interpretable.

Introduction

The introduction establishes some preliminary understandings that underpin the approach taken in this study of Lear. It asks whether nonsense is amenable to critical analysis, and how far “nonsense” will take us as a critical term for understanding Lear’s work, and considers the relationship between Lear’s work, morality and moralism. It presents the overarching argument of the book, that Lear’s nonsense is, without being moralistic, a moral art in that its representations of the absurdities of human experience are grounded in a cultivation of the capacity to see ourselves from various kinds of external perspective