Month: November 2012

Hot Off the Presses: New Journal Releases from Berghahn

New journal releases from Berghahn:

Nature and Culture
Volume 7, Number 3, Winter 2012
Including articles on the Second Darwinian Revolution, environmentalism in Iran, what is necessary for sustainability in the water sector, and the environmental impacts of militarization.

Transfers
Volume 2, Number 3, Winter 2012
Featuring a Special Section on Cultural Appropriation containing articles that comment on the “cultural appropriation” of, respectively, literary genres, stories, and sausages.

Theoria
Volume 59, Number 133, Winter 2012
With articles on the national debt to Africa, democracy and democide in the Weimar Republic, moral relativism, the politics of theatre, and the revival of political philosophy.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 12, Number 3, Winter 2012
With a special focus on Antonia Gramsci, exploring various intersections between culture and politics, fostering the cross-fertilization of new Gramscian specialisms and traditional disciplines.

Focaal
Volume 2012, Number 64, Winter 2012
Featuring a theme section on the anthropology and radical philosophy of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, as well as articles on issues in China, West Bengal, and South Korea.

Comics and Contradictions with Laurence Grove, co-editor of European Comic Art

Note: Berghahn recently released the paperback edition of Laurence Grove’s Comics in French and also publishes the journal European Comic Art, which he co-edits. Here he discusses his current work on an exhibit of comics for the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.

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One of the inspiring things about co-editing European Comic Art, apart from the buzz of working with Ann Miller and Mark McKinney, is the connections it creates.  In recent times we have had the pleasure of receiving scholarship on comic art from England, France, Greece, Canada, Italy, Spain, Argentina and Germany, and from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. It is not long before you are reminded that whatever your speciality, there are unexpected link-ins elsewhere and contradictions to the knowledge we might have taken for granted.

It may seem strange, therefore, that one of my current projects is to prepare an exhibition whose provisional title, Scotland and the Birth of Comics, could appear to bask in positivist certainties. The display, which will open in Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery before touring, will bring to light a little-known work of primary importance, The Glasgow Looking Glass of 1825. The Looking Glass appears to be the world’s oldest comic, predating the earliest published ‘comics’ by Rodolphe Töpffer by eight years, Le Charivari by seven, and Punch by sixteen.  Building on the historic angle and taking the notion of graphic narrative in its widest sense, the exhibition will allow us to showcase Hunterian treasures from the Roman period to Hogarth and on to contemporary selections, as well as key manuscripts and printed works from Glasgow University Library’s Special Collections and certain related items from Glasgow’s museums.

“Consumption of Smoke: Present” and “Consumption of Smoke: Future” From Vol. 1, no. 8: Northern Looking Glass, 17th September 1825
With the permission of Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library. (Sp Coll Bh14-x.8)

At the initial research stage (I have the Glasgow Looking Glass in front of me as I write) I have been struck by the intertwining connections. The Looking Glass inspired Punch, but its characters—the street musicians, the clergymen, the medics, and so on—also offer firm reminders of the styles of Töpffer, Rowlandson, and Hogarth. It is thus inevitable that the exhibition will lure the visitor in with the promise of newly-found canonical certainties (comics started in a specific time and place, and that is Glasgow in 1825), only then to make it clear that the complexities are so that such certainties must be flawed.

“Domestic Intelligence: Home, Sweet Home”, From Vol. 1, No. 2: Glasgow Looking Glass, June 25th, 1825
With the permission of Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library (Sp Coll Bh14-x.8)

This week I am going to Geneva to meet with the Director of the Bibliothèque de Genève, Alexandre Vanautgaerden, and his team, with a view to a possible loan of a Töpffer manuscript. Ironically, having made the notion that Töpffer did not invent the comic strip (nor did anyone else) a central theme of my Comics in French (Berghahn Books), I am strangely excited about getting to see the Swiss schoolteacher’s creations in the flesh. It is the fact that life is a hybrid art full of contradictions that makes it such fun. A bit like comics.

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Laurence Grove is is Reader in French and Director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow.

 

To view more images from the collection, visit the Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department.


Interview with the editors of Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective

What inspired the project?

Ursula Tidd: As far as I was concerned, I was keen to show the immense relevance of Beauvoir’s thought to film studies and hence, to take her work more deeply into the area of film studies. I have noticed that Beauvoir’s work is often implied in discussions in film studies about ‘the male gaze’ and on the topic of gender relations more broadly, but not always made explicit in what it contributes to the debates.

Jean-Pierre Boulé: A desire to use The Second Sex to show that Beauvoir still has a lot to say about human relationships.

 

How did you hope it might influence the field?

J-PB: For people to go back to or discover Beauvoir and realise that she has a place in film studies.

UT: I hope that this volume will inspire more people to look at film through Beauvoirean eyes, so to speak! And to engage more closely with her phenomenologically-based philosophy on gender and ageing.

 

Which aspect of co-editing did you find most difficult?

J-PB: Not difficult as such, but bearing in mind a student readership, making the volume accessible to them. And choosing the front cover photograph.

UT: Yes, it’s important to keep in mind the future readership of a volume like this – although one can’t please everyone…

 

Would the films discussed be the kind of films Simone de Beauvoir would be interested in?

UT: For sure! Beauvoir was highly eclectic in her cultural interests and an avid film-goer, at least for most of her life. She enjoyed art house as well as Hollywood cinema so I think that all the films discussed would have engaged her.

J-PB: Absolutely! I like to think she would have liked the various genres under study, as she herself wrote in a variety of genres. I think she would have loved Revolutionary Road, set in 1955, with its story of oppression and liberation.

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Jean-Pierre Boulé is Professor of Contemporary French Studies at Nottingham Trent University.

 

Ursula Tidd is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester.

 

Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective was published by Berghahn Books in September 2012.  A companion volume, Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective, edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Enda McCaffrey, is also available from Berghahn Books.

An Excerpt from Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples

Tuff City is an ethnographic history of urban renewal in the historic centre of Naples during the 1990s under the stewardship of the city’s first directly elected mayor, former communist Antonio Bassolino. Through the study of two major piazzas and a squatted centro sociale (social centre), the book explores the pivotal role of public space in the administration’s efforts to reorder and redefine a city that had hitherto been commonly regarded as an urban outcast. It thus sets out to investigate how changes to the built environment were, on the one hand, produced and publicly endorsed and, on the other, experienced and contested by different groups of people.  Understanding public space means grappling with the messy and perhaps ugly pluralism that constitutes urban life, rather than unwittingly confirming normative and institutional ideals about a ‘good’ (and, especially in the case of Naples, ‘well-behaved’) city.

 

The following extract is taken from the case study of DAMM located in the popular quarter of Montesanto.  As a local resident, I grew to appreciate the complex dynamics of the surrounding social milieu that some outside observers have hastily (mis)labelled ‘inner city’ or ‘working class’ and which local orthodox leftists had in the past dismissed as ‘lumpen’ and ‘pre-political’. Following the occupation of a three-storey building in 1995, the occupants of DAMM – a mix of local residents, students and cultural workers – sought to develop an alternative idea of public space through the self-management of an adjacent park and public escalator system that were built following the 1980 earthquake, but which had been left in a state of abandonment. This extract highlights a theme that lies at the heart of Tuff City, namely, how the politics of regeneration was continually stymied and reformulated through everyday uses of, and struggles over urban space. Continue reading “An Excerpt from Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples ” →

Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Change Debate

This was the scene just down the street from the Berghahn offices in DUMBO the night of Hurricane Sandy – our office is just outside the frame of this particular photo:


(Photo: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Over 3 million gallons of water have been pumped from the basement of our office building since then, and we are glad to report that everyone on staff made it through safe and sound (albeit without heat this week but we’re bundled up and hanging in there).

Though recovery has been fairly swift in our area, the images of the “Frankenstorm” and its aftermath have brought the issues of climate change and sustainability to the forefront of political discourse in the United States. Bloomberg Businessweek took the blunt approach:


(Photo: Bloomberg Businessweek)

At Berghahn Journals, we’re proud to publish a selection of journals that take a more scholarly approach to environmental issues.

In the next few weeks, we will be posting the online version of Environment and Society Volume 3, which focuses on Capitalism and the Environment. Preview the Table of Contents on the journal’s main page, here.

Next Spring, we are excited to be publishing Nature + Culture’s Special Symposium on “Nature, Science, and Politics, or: Policy Assessment to Promote Sustainable Development?”, the Table of Contents for which is posted on the journal’s main page, here.

 

In our most recent issue of Nature + Culture, several articles focus on approaches to sustainability:

Sustainability in the Water Sector: Enabling Lasting Change through Leadership and Cultural Transformation by Wendy Lynne Lee

The Environmental Impacts of Militarization in Comparative Perspective: An Overlooked Relationship by Andrew K. Jorgenson, Brett Clark, Jennifer E. Givens

Review Essay: Just Plain Disappointment: Why Contemporary Thinking About Environmental Sustainability Needs To Be More Courageous by Wendy Lynne Lee

 

Moving forward, we hope that the work of scholars such as those published in our journals will continue to contribute to the discourse on climate change.

 

Hot Off the Presses: New Journal Releases from Berghahn

New journal releases from Berghahn:

Asia Pacific World
Volume 3, Number 2, Autumn 2012
Including a special feature article on Creating a Poverty-Free World, as well as articles on issues in Japan, Myanmar, Guam, and Indonesia.

Critical Survey
Volume 24, Number 2, Summer 2012
Focusing on Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, the essays in this special issue consider the various manifestations of the physical and metaphorical town on the Avon, across time, genre and place, from America to New Zealand, from children’s literature to wartime commemorations.

Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
Volume 38, Number 3, Winter 2012
Featuring a special section entitled “(Re)presenting Women, the Female, and the Feminine,” with articles that investigate the ways in which women are embodied by, or embody in themselves, the social, cultural, or political ethos of a particular era or region.

International Journal of Social Quality
Volume 2, Number 1, Summer 2012
In this issue, the authors apply the social quality theory to topics including sustainability, social innovation, and urban development.

Israel Studies Review
Volume 27, Number 2, Winter 2012
Guest edited by Gad Barzilai, this special issue of ISR focuses on “Law, Politics, Justice, and Society: Israel in a Comparative Context,” with articles that reveal, explain, and conceptualize these processes that have characterized Israeli politics, law, and society

Projections
Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2012
Focusing on the psychological, social, and physiological constituents of meaning and emotion in cinema, the essays and book reviews illuminate the multiple dimensions that connect movies and mind.