Screening the Conflict, Reaping the Benefits: Yana’s Friends and the Politics of Representation of Russian-Speaking Jews in Israeli Cinema

W wyniku powszechnej fali imigracji, zapoczątkowanej w roku 1989, około miliona Żydów radzieckich trafiło do Izraela. Doświadczenie przesiedleń dla większości repatriantów naznaczone zostało napięciem pomiędzy potrzebą asymilacji w nowych warunkach kulturowych, a chęcią zachowania „rosyjskiej” tożsamości kulturowej. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje politykę (auto)reprezentacji radzieckich imigrantów w Izraelu na przykładzie filmu Arika Kapłuna Przyjaciele Jany (1999), który wyznaczył nową granicę w kinie rosyjsko-izraelskim. W przeciwieństwie do wcześniejszych filmów tworzonych w Izraelu przez filmowców z byłego ZSRR, w których doświadczenie przesiedlenia z reguły nacechowane było nostalgią, poczuciem utraty I podwójnej alienacji, Kapłun w przedstawianiu tożsamości rosyjsko-żydowskiej rezygnuje z nostalgii za radziecką przeszłością i kultywowania rosyjsko-żydowskiej niepowtarzalności. Chociaż bohaterowie filmu starannie i z pietyzmem zachowują niektóre aspekty kultury rosyjskiej (muzyka, sztuka, kulinaria), to łatwo rozstają się z innymi (akcent, alkoholizm, język rosyjski i radzieckie wzorce męskości). Analiza filmu ujawnia zmiany w strategiach autopozycjonowania tożsamości rosyjsko-żydowskiej w kontekście wielokulturowego Izraela.

11-, 12-, and 13½-Bar Blues: Time and African American Country Blues Recordings (1925–1938)

This chapter examines commercially-issued recordings of African American country blues from the early twentieth century, and considers the politics of representation involved with these recordings related to the metric and structural orthodoxies of blues performance. Often featuring solo male singers performing with guitar accompaniment, the recorded country blues of the 1920s–30s are markedly flexible in their approaches to timing. Drawing upon recordings of important country blues artists including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton, the chapter considers key issues such as the controversy over the speed at which Johnson’s records were recorded, the flexible approach musicians took to the standard 12-bar format, and the strictures that the three-and-a-half minute 78 rpm record side posed for artists’ songcraft. How these factors challenge musicological orthodoxies over conventional blues structures and historical insights into the practice of the blues is illuminated through the proposal that these recordings struggle with contentious narratives of primitivism, racial stereotyping, and authenticity, whereby canonical 78 rpm records are reified to fit a prevailing narrative of the country blues as atavistic and authentic.

Camera, Canvas, and Qibla: Late Ottoman Mobilities and the Fatih Mosque Painting

This article discusses the multiple mobilities of images, photographs, photographers, viewers, and places by focusing on Miʿmarzade Muhammed ʿAli’s (d. 1938) oil-on-canvas painting, now located in the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul. It explores the limits, lives, possibilities, and uses of photographic views and the exchanges between photography, painting, and print media by investigating the geopolitics and geopiety of the Hamidian era (i.e., Sultan ʿAbdülhamid II, r. 1876–1909), the production and circulation of early photographs of Mecca and Medina, and the spatial tradition of qibla decorum. It examines the photographic oeuvres of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (d. 1936), al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ghaffar, and the committee of the Erkān-ı Ḥarbiyye (General Military Staff), including Muhammad Sadiq Bey (d. 1902), as well as the reproductions and changing contexts of these photographs. Furthermore, this article highlights the role of print media in the dissemination and mobilization of the photographic image and the malleable politics of representation, especially as it pertains to the two sacred cities of Mecca and Medina.

From Religious Eulogy to War Anthem

This article looks to two songs, “Layla Said” and “Mammad, You Weren't There to See,” to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. “Layla Said,” a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.

History and the representation of Polynesian societies

This review article analyses representations of Polynesian pasts, discourses surrounding the concepts of history, culture and tradition, describing historiographical projects of Pacific islanders. The article highlights the complex relationship between oral traditions and written historical accounts, and the politics of representation of these projects.