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’s – that the young would create a new world order based on love and gentleness after those fearful Cold War years. And how similar it seemed musically, with rock music being played in churches and the Jesus people singing on the streets. That was what I wanted to bring together: something that would unite the love-songs of Provence with the music of
Tapestry in El Cid helps explain its far more complicated narrative structure and Cold War politics. Whereas Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves makes the Bayeux Tapestry analogous to film by transforming it into a film montage, equating mimetic representation with the extension of vision and the nonmimetic with blindness, El Cid ’s Bayeux Tapestry sequence enables us to see obliquely how
for individuals to test themselves – and succeed – physically and spiritually. 9 It is a place and direction that function, Davidson suggests, as almost a cross-cultural metonymy for self-discovery. Indeed, the fundamental cultural dynamic in Europe, from the antique to the centuries I consider, was not the east–west split of the Cold War but a north–south one. It is this dynamic, Peter Fjågesund has argued, that organised not only geography and natural history but also ‘ideas, perceptions and views of Self and Other’. 10 Particularly since the late
Epitomizing the academic side of the phenomenon is Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History (1997), the book jacket of which asks: ‘What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if the Russians had won the Cold War?’ and so on. Citing as its legitimating basis ‘our predisposition to think counterfactually’, Ferguson’s collection looks to ‘compare … actual outcomes’ with ‘conceivable outcomes’. 16 Yet counterfactual history ‘[tends] to discredit itself’, Ferguson laments, via ‘implausible’ questions or ‘whimsical’ answers, based
. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 17 See C. Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 18 See F. Barker, The Culture of Violence