“Passengeriality”: Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran and the May Coup in Poland

Travellers’ discourses thrive on anecdotes. According to Stephen Greenblatt, they interpose between a series of similar, narrow experiences and a wider pattern they may indicate. This analysis deciphers how an anecdote from Passenger to Teheran (1926), the travelogue written by Vita Sackville-West, is not just an isolated flash but can indicate larger representational strategies. In her epic journey Vita Sackville-West travelled from London to Egypt, India, Persia, and then back to England, through Russia, Poland and Prussia; by boat, train and car. In the episode which is subject to a detailed analysis, the travellers were stopped at the Polish–East Prussian border and forced to leave the train. The consequences of what could be just an anecdote about an “unwelcome incident”, reverberate – as it turns out – far beyond the incidental because what is at stake at almost every border incident is a socio–political, geo–political, military and ideological reality. No matter whether such events are presented as adventures or in all seriousness, each border trouble has consequences beyond any “local moment”. To disclose some of the less obvious implications of the Polish–Prussian passage in Vita Sackville-West’s book is the aim of this essay.

Body-Space-Relation in Parkour : Street Practices and Visual Representations

Parkour today is a global subcultural scene that combines street with media practices. Parkour consists of a local moment, fundamentally concerned with the materiality of the street, and simultaneously of a global digital discourse, which involves millions of parkour actors. While the spatial knowledge requires a very close knowledge and tactile contact of the surface’s nature of space, the media representations seem to reflect an opposite image, namely the detachedness of space. In this chapter, I will address the question of space-making and spatial practices in Morocco and the relation to parkour’s visual representations.

Unexpected differences between surface and bulk spectroscopic and implied Kondo properties of heavy fermion CeRh2Si2

Ultra-violet angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (UV-ARPES) was used to explore the temperature dependence of the Ce-4f spectral responses for surface and bulk in the antiferromagnetic Kondo lattice CeRh2Si2. Spectra were taken from Ce- and Si-terminated surfaces in a wide temperature range, and reveal characteristic 4f patterns for weakly (surface) and strongly (bulk) hybridized Ce, respectively. The temperature dependence of the Fermi level peak differs strongly for both cases implying that the effective Kondo temperature at the surface and bulk can be rather distinct. The greatly reduced crystal–electric-field (CEF) splitting at the surface gives reason to believe that the surface may exhibit a larger effective Kondo temperature because of a higher local-moment effective degeneracy. Further, the hybridization processes could strongly affect the 4f peak intensity at the Fermi level. We derived the k-resolved dispersion of the Kondo peak which is also found to be distinct due to different sets of itinerant bands to which the 4f states of surface and bulk Ce are coupled. Overall our study brings into reach the ultimate goal of quantitatively testing many-body theories that link spectroscopy and transport properties, for both the bulk and the surface, separately. It also allows for a direct insight into the broader problem of Kondo lattices with two different local-moment sublattices, providing some understanding of why the cross-talking between the two Kondo effects is weak.