The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative

The article is a close reading of Isabella’s soliloquy in act IV of The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Pointing at the difference between the role of women in Early Modern re­ality and their function in contemporary plays, it demonstrates the perversity of a society where women were regularly marginalized and where, even in theatre, their transgressions of the boundaries imposed on them by the patriarchal social apparatus led to extremely unfavourable repercussions. Isabella, emotionally crushed by the foul murder of her son, decides in her helplessness to take her own life. In a world dominated by men, she does not quietly accept her passive role, but works within its limitations to become a character that takes action, albeit action that ends her life. Before making the symbolic gesture of stabbing herself, she exclaims against the circumstances which drove her to it. Her speech can be seen as one of the climactic points of the play.

Problems in studying of Akkadian expression ubānum ištēt ‘one finger’

The Akkadian expression ubānum ištēt ‘one finger’ is found in the Old Babylonian letters of the 18th century BCE, where it is used as an allegoric description of a close alliance between rulers. In the Assyriological literature, there are two possible explanations of the origin of this expression. According to the first one, the allegory of ‘one finger’ was based on a symbolic gesture performed by the kings while concluding a treaty. This gesture consisted of joining or locking thumbs or index fingers. The second explanation suggested that the expression ‘one finger’ referred to a phenomenon of syndactyly, i.e. an inborn defect of fusing of two or more fingers. The imagination of ancient Mesopotamians could turn such fused fingers into the symbol of alliance. W. L. Moran, whom these explanations belong to, considered the first one to be the clearest. Other scholars also accepted this explanation. Thus, in 2019 D. Charpin compared the Akkadian expression with a scene of concluding alliance between two Asian rulers of the 1st century AD, as described in the “Annals” of Tacitus. According to the Roman historian, the ceremony included binding the right thumbs of the two rulers. However, no direct proofs from written or iconographic sources from the 2nd millennium BCE were found, which support any of these explanations. The present article suggests considering as an iconographic proof of the first explanation the Ugarit stele, RS 7.116. This stele dates back to the 14th century BCE and likely preserves an iconographic source for concluding an alliance. The two rulers are standing in front of each other with a high table placed between them. On this table are sitting two tablets representing a treaty between the two parties. The rulers lean the elbows of one of their hands against the tablets and join (or are about to join) the fingers of those hands at the height of their heads. If this is so, and the Old Babylonian and Ugarit sources refer to the same gesture, the stele from Ugarit provides a sufficient ground for speculations about continuity of symbolic and legal practices in Syria and Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BCE.

Symbolic Actions and Anti-royal Propaganda during a Political Crisis

On Christmas Eve 1402, Hungarian noblemen gathered in the Cathedral of Nagyvárad, where St. Ladislas’ tomb was located, and swore an oath on the holy king’s relics. They proclaimed thus their allegiance to King Ladislas of Naples and conspired against the ruling King Sigis mund of Luxemburg. By swearing an oath on St. Ladislas’ relics, the conspirators united their minds and forces around the ideal figure of the holy king and knight who became the symbol of a political cause and the embodiment of the kingdom which King Sigismund was no longer suited to represent. The symbolic gesture of oath-swearing on St. Ladislas’ relics took place in the midst of a three-year political crisis (1401–1403) that seized the Kingdom of Hungary as a consequence of the barons’ dissatisfaction with King Sigismund’s measures, which jeopardized their wealth and political influence. By relying on both written accounts and visual sources, the present paper examines the utilizing by Hungarian noblemen during this political crisis of important political and spiritual symbols associated with the Kingdom of Hungary. These included: the cults, relics, and visual representations of St. Ladislas, the Hungarian Holy Crown, or the kingdom’s heraldry. The propagandistic usage of these spiritual and political symbols was reinforced by their insertion into elaborated rituals and symbolic actions, such as coronations or oath-swearing on relics. By activating the link between secular and religious spheres through these rituals and symbolic actions, their performers hoped to attract the divine approval. By discussing such instances, the present paper seeks to illustrate how the ideal figure of St. Ladislas became the catalyzing force behind a political cause.

Copying Europe? Integration as a Citizenship Requirement in Australia

Recent decades have seen a significant expansion of so-called “integration requirements” for citizenship applicants in many countries. Though led by European states, the trend now seems to be reaching traditional settler states such as Australia. This article examines the integration requirement proposed for citizenship applicants in Australia in 2017. According to the proposal, applicants for citizenship by conferral would have been required to show that they had “integrated into the Australian community,” for instance, through employment, involvement in community organizations, and the absence of conduct inconsistent with Australian values. Although the proposal failed, it is noteworthy because of its far-reaching nature and novelty in a traditional country of immigration. This article analyzes the implications of the proposed legislation with reference to the diverse groups of permanent immigrants entering Australia, demonstrating its discriminatory potential in terms of gender, nationality, and visa category. It argues that the proposal failed because despite its significant implications, the government did not put forward a convincing case for its introduction and may even have initiated it as a symbolic gesture. The article contributes to understanding why integration requirements that are popular in some states and regions may fail to gain favor in others. It suggests that, given the rapid spread of restrictive immigration policies, scholars should pay more attention to the specific local conditions under which immigration and citizenship policy transfers succeed or fail.

A Passage of Nostalgia: The Life and Work of Jacobus Kloppers

Jacobus Kloppers, an eminent composer, organist, pedagogue, and scholar, significantly contributed to musicological and organ teaching in South Africa and Canada and, in the latter context, art music, and liturgical composition. A Passage of Nostalgia – The Life and Work of Jacobus Kloppers, as a symbolic gesture, constitute recognition of his work both in South Africa and Canada. This publication is unique in that, apart from relevant disciplinary perspectives, biographical and autobiographical narrative, and anecdote, all constitute a necessary means through which the authors illuminate Kloppers’ compositional process and its creative outcomes. In this regard, Kloppers generously dedicated his time to the project to make information on his life and work available, often in complex ways. This retrospective input supports the work offered as an authentic, self-reflective recounting of a life of dedicated service in music. The construct of nostalgia as an overarching theme to this volume on some level denotes Kloppers’ position of cultural and religious ‘insidedness’ and ‘outsidedness’. However, apart from representing a return to a lost and challenging past, the composer’s creative work affirms his individuality, sense of artistic self, and propensity for spiritual acceptance and tolerance. Moreover, nostalgia in his oeuvre takes on importance as a rhetorical artistic practice by which continuity is as central as discontinuity.

ON SOUND, MUSIC, HARMONY AS PHENOMENA OF THE CULTURAL CODE OF CHINA

The article deals with sound, music, and harmony as universals of the Chinese cultural code. The cultural code is the result of merging ideas concerning the ontological unity of the world, including the harmony of society, the state and the individual. These ideas permeate historical monuments, philosophical studies, artistic creativity, and the life of every person. At the time of ‘roots’ and ‘sources’, the Chinese worldview reveals in signs of the divine — Shen (神) and subtle, elegant — Miao (妙) evidence of the manifestation of the previously hidden Tao and the birth of meanings and categories of Chinese aesthetics. Their interaction is inseparable from sound and music, which at the initial stage manifest themselves as a rhythm of ontological action. Interconnected yin and yang (female and male; dark and light) are connected to it, complementing each other, enveloping the world with web of allusions. Thus, the “Chun-qiu” classic confirms that as a result, everything that exists, “finding its final form”, occupies a “certain space”, which has a “certain tone”. “The ancient kings were based on this in the establishment of music” (Luishi Chunqiu). So was born an idea of beauty as a harmony of He, equally significant for life and artistic creativity, including theater. The complex architectonics of Chinese theater is based on the laws of music and musical rhythm, according to which vocal lines, speech passages, conditioned by the tonal pronunciation norm, stage movement, rhythm of stage action, symbolic gesture, dance pattern combine, meaning that the theater is embodied not only in plot collisions, but also conveys the deepest meanings of Chinese ontology.

‘La femme du soldat inconnu’

On 26 August 1970, in a carefully orchestrated and highly provocative symbolic gesture, a small group of MLF feminists attempted to lay wreaths to the ‘even more unknown’ wife of the Unknown Soldier at the annual commemorative ceremonyheld at the Arc de Triomphe. The wreath-laying came to epitomize radical French feminism in the 1970s; its tongue-in-cheek iconoclasm, shocking for many, served as a recruitment tool for nascent feminists. This new generation of feminists cast the tomb as the ultimate symbol of the hegemony of masculinist culture, as a synecdoche for the oppression, belittling and silencing of women under patriarchy. This chapter explores the extent to which feminism has debated and shaped the inclusion/exclusion of women in French lieux de mémoire(sites of memory) since the 1970s. It considers in particular debates around the recasting of the statue of nineteenth-century feminist Marie Deraismes in 1983; the transferral of Marie Curie’s remains to the Pantheon in 1995; and the construction of the ‘Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir’ in Paris, which opened in 2006, asking if the aims of the original 1970 demonstration have been met, nuanced, compromised or even betrayed in more recent years.

Leninfall: The spectacle of forgetting

This article explores the phenomenon of Leninfall – destroying, replacing and transferring objects symbolizing the Russian Revolution in the Ukrainian material landscape in the context of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. The symbolic gesture of physically removing the idols of 1917 from Ukrainian statue-pedestals, and clearing Ukrainian streets and maps of names related to Communism, is triggered by strategic acts to ensure one’s ideological, historical and political frame is victorious. I demonstrate how these framing acts operate through analysis of the visual and verbal representations of Leninfall in nine Ukrainian TV and film documentaries, analysed in terms of perspectives, figure and ground, metaphor and reframing. This intersemiotic approach affords an explanation of how and why groups and individuals hold particular positions about Leninfall that connect to a certain view of history and national identity. I argue first that different groups have rendered Leninfall a spectacle of forgetting; second, that the perspectives identified through the analysis of documentaries help explain why the post-2014 conflicts and transformations in Ukraine have occurred; and, third, that contrary to common assumptions in this conflicted context, political identities are not only represented as irreconcilable binaries, and that more nuanced positions are detected. The research contributes to our understanding of how positions are arrived at and negotiated both around prominent anniversaries and commemorations like 1917 and Lenin, and in conditions of societies in conflict.

THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY AND POLITENESS OF THE MALAY WOMAN FROM IBU ZAIN’S PERSPECTIVE

Women are considered the nucleus of a family, country, and civilization. This is due to the fact that they act as a cornerstone in producing good, beneficial and useful generations of the future. The value, personality, and self-respect of women are increasingly becoming more marginalized due to the current borderline digitalized globalized, modernized transformed the modern world. This study aims at evaluating Ibu Zain’s concept of personality and politeness of the Malay woman. The concept of personality and politeness are the essence of the study since the two elements denote the ontological existence of a woman in examining the value of personality as a symbolic gesture of Malay woman, and in analyzing the value of politeness possessed by the Malay lady. This is a qualitative study and it uses the interpretation method approach. Data collection was entirely done through library research by referencing to relevant documents written by this scholar and other related articles of other scholars. Data analysis was in the form of descriptive textual analysis of the concept of personality and politeness. The findings show that the Malay woman symbolizes the strength of the nation with its own uniqueness based on polite behavior, high morale, and sincere struggle in developing the race of the nation, besides freeing themselves from the injustices of colonization and men of cowardice. The impact of this study is fundamentally on the development and empowerment of Malay women holistically. This is due to the significance of Ibu Zain’s idea during that time, crystallized during this period and for the future, inspired to continue defending the identity of a dignified Malay woman.