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Copyright of Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As the beginnings of the popular Japanese crime genre coincided with the end of American occupation, this genre offers a space of historically visible transnationality. Through formal analysis, this research identifies a cultural plurality embedded within crime cinema. Examining the adoption of film noir aesthetics in Japan alongside the development of the nationalistic ninkyō eiga (chivalry film), I argue the crime genre formed as a culturally hybrid genre in tension between these conflicting identities. The crime film demonstrates a dialectical tension between local and international cultural signifiers and cinematic styles, which result in a set of hybrid symbols that repeat on-end the dialectic tension embedded in their formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to critically examine Allan Moore's Watchmen in terms of its elements that could be utilised for critical power thinking and the critique of fanatic and/or apolitical self-proclaimed saviours of society. The first part of the paper attempts to read Rorschach through the prism of critical criminology, as he represents the novel's most distinct expression of revenge and retribution, which, eventually, is linked to fascist-like practices. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the reading of Veidt's macabre plan and his set of advice for self-care in terms of a twofold biopolitical strategy that entails both the thanatopolitical effect of killing millions for the sake of life itself and preaching the need for the latter's optimisation to achieve individual and collective happiness. In the end, Watchmen is a 'superhero neo-noir' critique to both worldviews, since its point of departure is the critique of superheroes overall, as 'nothing works' and therefore 'nothing ever ends' if the structural reasons behind unfairness and oppression remain untouched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that although Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is, like the 1982 Ridley Scott film to which it is a sequel, most obviously located within the genres of science fiction and neo-noir, it in fact engages extensively with the history of the Western genre. Villeneuve's film, I argue, is a crypto-Western, recuperating Western conventions within the aesthetic superstructure of other genres. Blade Runner 2049 thus exemplifies how even our most future-facing popular culture can exhibit ghostly traces of nostalgia for popular frontier mythologies. The film engages with the debt that the figure of the fictive detective owes to the dime novel cowboys of earlier literature, locating its central thematic discourses about the nature of (post)humanity in a long American tradition of narrative art that glorifies the 'rugged individualist'. Meanwhile, in the film's world, human over-exploitation of the environment has, ironically, made the wilderness conditions of the mythologised Western past possible once more. This does not, however, render Blade Runner 2049 a film incapable of imagining the future. Rather, I suggest, the film's future is plausible precisely because it reckons with the adhesiveness of the past, and little in the American past looms larger than the real-and-imagined old West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an interdisciplinary study of Gérard Delteil's Les Écœurés, a 2019 novel that was marketed as a "le premier polar en Gilet Jaune." In this essay, we explore the generic tensions that arise when murder mystery intersects with socioeconomic criticism in our age of advanced capitalism. We argue that Les Écœurés functions differently when read through a sociological prism than it does as a noir or polar. We demonstrate that analysis of social media data shows that Delteil captures quite well and to a large extent reproduces the concerns of the Gilets Jaunes movement, while at the same time showcasing the dispiriting durability of a corrupt establishment. Second, on the level of character, we maintain that in presenting a drably failed bildungsroman, the novel undercuts the importance of any individual agency or élan. And third, we argue that on the level of genre, the text—by sidelining its own murder mystery—raises questions about the force and relevance of crime fiction as a potential agent of social change. Ultimately, we maintain that the very failures in and of Les Écœurés point metatextually to the novel's position as an artifact of the period and as embodiment of the Gilets Jaunes movement's likely fate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influx of European émigré filmmakers into the US film industry during the mid-1930s led to an exilic critique in Hollywood films. This study analyzes Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) to explore the relationships between exile and trauma, engaging with issues of displacement, memory, the victim/perpetrator duality, and the loss of "home." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vexing clinical moment with an addictive patient provokes the author's "inner-Bogart" voice, a cynical wise-guy persona confirming the author's sometimes pessimistic perspective, clouding his usual relationally empathic sensibility. After attempting and failing to rebuff such pessimism, he turns to writing, where he recalls a childhood love of film noir and the poignant family memories associated with it, transforming him from a frustrated therapist into a detective seeking "clues" about the case. He discovers unseen parallels in his own upbringing with alcoholic caregivers, who seek the "bottom line" of their own protection at the expense of their children, reinforcing his smart-alecky pessimism. By integrating his "inner gumshoe" via analytic writing, he finds that his patient shares his black humor. This loosens their mutual tension and frees up the patient's authentic affectivity. The initial tension now leads to a cocreated alliance, the author hoping the patient will Say it again, Sam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term "cyber-noir" to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on a group of recent novels set against the background of Italy’s colonies in East Africa during the Fascist period, this essay aims at investigating a fundamental tension within the tradition of Italian crime fiction, and, more specifically, of historical crime fiction. On the one hand, by shedding light into the darker and less explored corners of Italy’s past, the genre aims at serving as a sort of ‘new social novel’, to paraphrase the title of a 2004 book by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò. On the other, the conventions and generic requirements of crime and detective fiction - in particular, its frequent recourse to stereotyped situations and characters - can hamper the reconstruction of complex experiences such as that of Italian colonialism. A detailed discussion of Giorgio Ballario’s novels featuring the Major of the Carabinieri Aldo Morosini (2008-2012), Davide Longo’s Un mattino a Irgalem (2001), Luciano Marrocu’s Debrà Libanòs (2002), and Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallé (2003) will show how for contemporary Italian writers, as for many authors of late 19th- and 20th-century colonial novels, Africa often continues to be an empty space upon which to project European fantasies, regardless of whether the author’s intention is a critique or a celebration of empire. Only Camilleri manages to provide a more complex account of Italian imperialism by shifting his attention from the colonies themselves to the impact of colonialism upon the ‘motherland’, thus bringing into relief the constitutive function of colonialism in the formation of Fascist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a literary and filmic mode, noir has long been interested in revealing the breakdown of the symbolic order and the effect this breakdown has upon its protagonists. In his graphic novelBlack Hole(published serially between 1995 and 2005), Charles Burns combines noir’s current of symbolic unmasking with the visual elements found in the subgenre of body-horror to explore the insistence of the material real upon the daily lived experience of his text’s protagonists, suburban high-school students who function as the contemporary correlatives of noir’s losers and loners. In doing so, Burns critiques the masculine power structures implicit in the normative world of suburban America – as well as in the genres of noir and horror – by drawing the reader into his text as a subject who is asked to utilise and overcome the limited perspectives of Burns’s narrators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pixar films expand the limitations typically binding G-rated films by employing a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed multivalence. This deniability allows adult spectators to identify with the object, to distance themselves from “grown-up” cinema, and to contemplate adult fears through the guise of animation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kant's philosophy treated endings as necessary but necessarily elusive for the moral and political imagination, and he employed irony, among other things, to draw attention to the risks of perverting the figure of the end. Kantian endings, this essay suggests, give rise to two possible orientations which exist in tension with each other: melancholic confrontations with impossibility alongside a more forward-looking, optimistic gaze. I examine the two features of Kantian endings and the affective orientations they inspire under the headings of succession and secession. In addition to the mathematical-logical language of Kant's writing, however, one also has to be able to appreciate the noirish qualities of Kant's thought, which is to say, elements of culpability and aversion with respect to figures of transcendence that posit the space within which finite experience takes shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Margaret Atwood's proposition that ‘Perhaps all writing is motivated, deep down, by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead’. It considers this proposition for the writer of crime fiction and explores how powerful specific aspects of the narrative voice can be for writers in this genre. Drawing on the writer's own experience of writing crime fiction, as well as that of other practitioners, it discusses how insistent the voices of the dead can be in the solving of a fictional crime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

InThe Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie portrays the transformation of Bombay from a cosmopolitan city to one dominated by communalist forces, and explores the political violence this has engendered. He does not see violence per se as a threat to the vitality and political survival of India; rather, he is critical of the increased influence of right-wing Hindu supremacist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena, and the city's turn to a specifically fascist form of violence directed against Muslims and other perceived outsiders, seen, for example, in the riots in late 1992 and early 1993. While Rushdie largely attributes this violence to the masculinist and fundamentalist thinking of the Shiv Sena's cadres, he obliquely acknowledges the ways in which parties such as the Shiv Sena have inserted themselves into the terrain of what Partha Chatterjee calls political society in postcolonial India. At the end of the novel, Rushdie turns his reader's gaze beyond the nation to an imaginary town in Andalucian Spain. He projects onto this fictional space two contrasting visions of the global: a present-day paranoid, dystopic vision that critic Emily Apter calls ‘one-worldedness’, and a more optimistic vision of transnational consanguinity. The two different visions of Bombay, the cosmopolitan and the noir vision, anticipate these two different visions of the global. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines levels of interaction and intersection between culture and justice as they are represented in some recent works of fiction and non-fiction in Italy. It looks briefly at a specific strand of crime/noir fiction to see how it can function as a vehicle for the articulation of principles of justice and ethics, before directing attention to a more in depth consideration of an equally popular, though non-fictional, genre, which pursues the same aim through the deployment of different strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representation of Bologna in Carlo Lucarelli's crime fiction. It focuses mainly on his early novels: the comic trilogy which includes Nikita (1992), Falange armata (1993) and Il giorno del lupo (1994), and on his most successful noir novel Almost blue (1997). In these crime stories, Lucarelli makes Bologna a prominent character and embarks on discussing issues of identity, social change, and urban growth. However, by drawing on traditional noir narratives, he especially elaborates his notion of Bologna's dark side, and ponders on the tensions generated by the development of new youth cultures, new metropolitan communities, and new forms of criminality. Bologna is portrayed as a disquieting noir city, but it is ultimately presented as a symbol of the postmodern metropolis (or postmetropolis): a space in transition characterized by constant transformations and elusive identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]