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Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN13: 9780374172145 -- a book review by Elena Furlanetto

Contains fulltext : 225665pub.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. 63This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. 02 oktober 2020 9 p.

This paper contributes to the theorization of how Orientalism has evolved after 9/11 and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I specifically address the multimediality of films and propose that post-9/11 Orientalism has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed throughout the interplay of different media which constitute the film experience. I recur to Foucault's concept of dispositif to illustrate how any of these media-such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.-may "[enter] into resonance or contradiction with the others" (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film's politics. When the film's different media pursue diverging politics, I speak of multimedia dissensus. In order to test this hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly champion diversity and aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices: Alejandro Amenábar's Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005). A more detailed analysis of the films' multimedial complexity, however, shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourses that have dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11. OA platinum

Nation and empire are intriguing conceptual frameworks for the study of the historical persistence of Atlantic entanglements—especially in the northern hemisphere. The Atlantic might generally be understood to have interlocked the Americas, Africa, and Europe from the beginning of European westward exploration until the official end of both slavery and European imperialism on Northern American soil. But Atlantic ideological battles extended well beyond the 19th century. Today, they are alive and kicking once more. As conceptual frameworks nation and empire organize ideas of belonging, community building, and social cohesion. In addition, they are short-hands for distinct, in fact competing, forms of political and economic hegemony. Since mechanisms of exclusion and seclusion have forged, delimited, and expanded nations as much as empires, this bibliographical essay will focus on studies that draw attention to the commonalities of nation and empire. Within the framework of the (Northern) Atlantic, nations and empires lose their cohesive and exclusivist aura, inviting persistent, if contrastive, comparisons of connective as well as divisive modes of transportation, exchange, and intellectual as well as cultural transformation. The idea of nation evokes several meanings: First used in Anglo-Norman and Middle French to denote birth, lineage, or family, the idea of the nation helped to lay the ground for modern-age ideas of race and biological descent. As a social and cultural concept, the nation organizes communities around questions of kinship, belonging, and culture until today. From the 19th century onward “nation” simultaneously described a political formation established by and for its diverse population. Empire likewise has many layers: etymologically speaking the word is used to speak about extensive territories controlled by a single ruler; politically speaking the term describes a system governed by ideas of supreme sovereignty and extensive subjection or domination; socially speaking it relates practices of command and control. Culturally speaking, empire denotes complex communication among communities with various degrees of authority and power. Scholarly analysis often delineates historical trajectories. From a Eurocentric perspective the New World attracted competing communities of settlers, planters, and traders, rewarding both an unbridled sense of possibility and the ambition to emulate and yet outdo European models. In this ambiguous setting the idea as well as institutional offsprings of empire proliferated long after empire officially ended with the First World War. With the return of empire (and nation) as imaginaries for new forms of coercion and collaboration, future scholarship will need to trace the Atlantic and its history of entanglements well into the 21st century.

While psychiatry and the neurosciences have dismissed the concept of neurosis as too vague for medical purposes, in recent years literary studies have adopted the term by virtue of its abstractness. This volume investigates the verbalization of neurosis in literary and cultural texts. As opposed to the medical diagnostics of neurosis in the individual, the contributions focus on the poetics of neurosis. They indicate how neuroses are still routinely romanticized or vilified, bent to suit aesthetic and narrative choices, and transfigured to illustrate unresolved cultural tensions.