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When we meet someone new, and ask a friend 'Who's that?', the first answer is normally a name, rather than an occupation, a relationship, a place of residence, or a physical attribute. The only predetermined part of the name, of course, is the surname or family name, inherited in England and Scotland since the Middle Ages. This book is largely concerned with surnames in England; it deliberates on names originating in other countries without pretending in any way to be knowledgeable about their earlier history. The surname detective is interested in three main aspects of a name's history - its meaning, the pattern of its spread over the centuries since it became inherited, and its present distribution. It is the second and third of these with which the book is primarily concerned. There is an important distinction to be made between byenames, non-inherited second names commonly added in England in the early Middle Ages; surnames which are inherited; and the genetic descent of particular individuals. The book is largely concerned with the second of these three subjects of study. Twentieth-century writing about British surnames has produced some interesting developments; there has been a regular stream of dictionaries which purport to show their original meaning.
The body of work that Toni Morrison has produced is powerfully engaged with questions of history, memory and trauma. This book explores the way in which Morrison's novels function as a form of cultural memory and how, in their engagement with the African American past, they testify to historical trauma. Writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison continued the tradition that Du Bois's vision of haunted historical memory has bequeathed. Through her fictive narratives, Morrison offers ways of imagining the subject in history. By shaping cultural memory of the past, her novels offer readers different ways of relating to the past and the future and therefore of 'being in history'. In Morrison's view, history is never over, never simply in the past. Its repercussions and traumatic consequences generate the effects of the present and continue to shape it. Without knowledge of that history, the present can be only poorly understood. Morrison's focus on literature as a way of making the past available to memory recalls Freud's focus on the puzzling nature of dream work among the traumatised. As much as Morrison's novels constitute a form of cultural memory, then, they also disclaim the possibility of entirely transforming painful, unassimilated history into satisfactorily integrated narrative.
This book examines different theories purporting to explain the Atlantic Alliance's current difficulties and states that the recent divisions among the allies are a result of the decline in 'Atlanticism' understood as transatlantic solidarity based on a community of values. It offers a brief historical survey of the main issues that have characterised transatlantic security relations from Kosovo to Iraq, focuses on the development of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESPD) and the Kosovo and Iraqi crises. It then examines the evolution of foreign policies of key members of the Alliance as well as those of the so-called 'neutrals' since the end of the Cold War. The book examines the attitude of their respective countries vis-à-vis the issues of humanitarian intervention, the question of how to provide order and stability in a unipolar system, the emergence of a defence vocation within the EU and the relationship between ESDP and NATO. It also explains the reasons that led the George W. Bush administration to adopt a new strategy on the international scene and reviews the different way in which France and the UK conceptualise European security notwithstanding their common effort to develop ESPD. The book also explains the dynamism German foreign policy manifested since reunification, shows that Italy has not made a Euro-sceptic turn under the Berlusconi government and that there is a remarkable continuity in Italian foreign policy.
To the despair of Sicilians, the very name Sicily is, universally and inevitably, associated not with the island's rich literary tradition, unique historical legacy or beauty of landscape but with crime and the mafia. The injustice from the Sicilian perspective lies not in the basic assertion of mafia power in the island, but in the more pernicious belief that mafia and Sicily are synonymous. In any recognisable form, the mafia began to emerge towards the middle of the last century, but if the mafia as a structure is a comparatively recent phenomenon, its origins lie deep in Sicilian history and culture. Mafia violence is far removed both from expressions of an aggressive instinct and from random outbreaks of unaccountable vandalism. The mafia evolved in tandem with the society on to which it battened. It has become conventional among mafiologists to identify three phases: the rural mafia, the urban mafia and the contemporary mafia which is variously characterised as international, financial or entrepreneurial. Tommaso Buscetta has so deeply revolutionised the state of knowledge about the mafia that mafia studies can be divided into pre- and post-Buscetta. The increased violence in Sicily and the awareness of the risks posed by the intermingling of legal and illegal economies finally provoked a reaction from the Italian State, long seemingly immobilised in the face of mafia outrages.
Things move fast in the world of the videogame and videogame scholarship. Given that videogames constitute a new arena for academic study, many of the recent publications have tended to address games in a rather generalist manner, often as a means of mapping the field. Any intersection between the world of the scholar and the world of the videogame, therefore, has to be carefully negotiated. This collection represents a series of frozen analytic moments, and an opportunity for reflection among a range of critics approaching games from different places and with varied disciplinary backgrounds. It takes a 'bottom-up' approach, seeking not to survey the entire field, but instead to move closer to the experience of playing particular games. The experience of being-in-the-world of a game is contingent on the particular design, across a range of dimensions, of a given game and that design provides the formal and structural features of a game. Within the terms of the narratology/ludology debate that so characterized early public discussions about the action of scholarship in relation to videogames, it might be assumed that any focus on games as texts refers only to their non-interactive elements. The essays address a game or group of games in detail and in so doing go some way towards addressing the very complex and diversely rendered relationship between videogame text, play and performance. The experience of playing games, in all its various affective colouring, occurs through the interchange between technology, aesthetics and the player's own particular investments.
For a majority of the French population during the period known as the Renaissance, most medical care would come at the hands of women. Women's medical work, like that of other providers, needs to be situated in specific historical and social contexts. This book adopts a number of methodological approaches which will help to highlight and understand women's medical practices, and may provide new ways to perceive their contribution to the history of medicine more generally. It focuses on women because, as practitioners, they cut across most sectors of medical practice. The book is structured in such a way as to demonstrate how different contexts and communities responded to women's medical work in varied and sometimes contrasting ways. It explores religious understandings of female healing work as lay and religious women. The book presents the study of women's domestic and charitable medical labour, by exploring the impact of print in the context of women as readers and patrons of medical literature, with a focus on the publication of manuals contributing to the domestic care discourse. It examines the role of women in the municipally organised systems of poor relief and child care for foundlings and orphans. The book also follows women's gynaecological and reproductive knowledge, particularly in the contexts of elite and royal court life.
This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own Church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains while also catering for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child-rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism – now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.
Exhibiting Irishness traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and the 1960s as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally connected state. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents, and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exhibitions captured the imagination of organisers and visitors. The global displays were heralded as a unique, profitable, and unsurpassed forum for celebrating a country’s wares, vying for increased trade, and consolidating national mores. Exhibitions were grand spectacles that showcased the manufactures, industries, arts, technologies, histories, and communities of various nations on an international platform for the consumption of millions of visitors over several months. Each chapter demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs, and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland’s political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland, a separation that continues today. In sum, this book tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness – an Irish identity always on sale.
Lifework explores the autobiographical impulse in art since 1970. Following the scepticism fostered over the notion of the ‘self’ as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists looked to test the problem posed by autobiography both as a genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent rise of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic production, as first outlined in the writings of Roland Barthes, examining a diverse set of practices in the visual arts and literature that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book’s chapters cut across medium, geography, and time, together uncovering how both the marginalisation and promotion of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural, and political implications. The volume is loosely arranged into five sections, the first of which variously considers artistic practices that mine how mediated the self has become under the technocracy of late capitalism. The remaining sections focus heavily on the work of women artists and writers, exploring ways in which the idea of ‘lifework’ both lends itself to analyses of their work and is augmented by these practices. It also features several examples of autotheoretical writing, as well as reflections on autotheory’s relevance and its potential for understanding the work of contemporary art and, indeed, of various ways of living life.
Showing resistance explores how exhibitions were used as propaganda during the two decades from 1933. Mounted in public places – from stations to workers’ canteens, empty shops and bombsites – exhibitions were identified as a key medium for mass public communication by activists and government bodies alike. Over eight chapters, it charts the work of a fascinating range of exhibition makers, from the interwar period to the early Cold War. A leading exponent was designer Misha Black, who described such exhibitions as ‘the materialisation of persuasion’. The form was also shaped by refugees living in Britain from the 1930s including artist László Moholy-Nagy, graphic designer F. H. K. Henrion, Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, photomontage artist John Heartfield, painter Oskar Kokoschka, photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and architects Ernö Goldfinger and Peter Moro. They drew on a range of architectural forms and materials from graphic design, photomontages, pictograms and models to give urgent warnings against the rise of fascism and to demonstrate international political alignments and solidarities, beliefs and affiliations. During the Second World War, the British Ministry of Information used exhibitions as a key tool of propaganda and, in the war’s aftermath, as a way of showing the benefits of the embryonic welfare state. Richly illustrated, this is the first book-length analysis of the meaning and significance of such exhibitions in Britain. It draws on material from numerous archive collections, addressing themes of acute contemporary relevance, such as the role of propaganda in a democracy and the cultural contribution of refugees.