Narration of Violence or Violence of Narration: Bahram Beyzaie's The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad and The One Thousand and First Night

Bahram Beyzaie is one of the most distinguished Iranian playwrights. Beginning his career in the early 1960s and still working, he is considered as a playwright who has always been looking for discovering and inventing non-classic and non-western narrative templates. To fulfill this purpose, he has made considerable use of classic Iranian literary sources, among which the One Thousand and One Nights and Ta'ziyeh texts are special cases. By analyzing Beyzaie's two plays, Hashtomin Safar-e Sandbad (The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad, 1964) and Shab-e Hezar-o Yekom (The One Thousand and First Night, 2003), which were produced within a forty-year period, this article attempts to highlight some of Beyzaie's methods of narration, particularly in relation to violence.     

The Mongol Invasion in Iranian Drama: The Case of Bahram Beyzaie

New Historicists view history as a text through whose discontinuities and breaks the repressed and suppressed voices find ways of articulation. Likewise, a literary text, in its underlying layers, alludes to the historical conditions at the time of its production. In some cases, as in Bahram Beyzaie's works, however, the author intentionally uses the past to reread the present. He recreates history as a text in which the voices repressed in the classified history are heard. As the Mongols played an important role in the history of Iran, some of Beyzaie's works pay particular attention to them. This paper analyzes some of Beyzaie's plays and screenplays to investigate the presentation of the Mongols in his fictional worlds.     

Collective Identity and Despotism: Lessons in Two Plays by Bahram Beyzaie

With an overview of identity as a dominant theme in Bahram Beyzaie's artistic creations, this article examines two of his, arguably, most political plays: Chahar Sanduq (Four Boxes, 1967) and Khaterat-e Honarpisheh-ye Naqsh-e Dovvom (Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role, 1981) to examine his reflections on the nature, function, and vulnerability of collective social, political, and cultural identity in authoritarian societies. Both plays illustrate that the tyrannical rulers of such societies perpetuate their dominance over their subjects through exploiting the individual's self-interests, thereby isolating him and stripping him of collective and, inevitably, individual identity. Beyzaie's allegorical and rather abstract approach in these plays contributes to conveying a less topical, culture-specific, and more universal message.     

Reformulation of Shahnameh Legends in Bahram Beyzaie's Plays

This essay explores Bahram Beyzaie's inter-paradigmatic reformulations of Iranian dramatic forms and Shahnameh legends in plays which highlight the voice of the periphery against the center and imbue these narratives with motifs that relate them to the present. The essay first reviews Beyzaie's work with the Shahnameh and then examines the Shahnameh cycle of Jamshid and Zahhak to provide the context for in-depth analyses of Azhdahak (1959), Karnameh-ye Bondar-e Bidakhsh (The Account of Bondar the Premier, 1996), and the first episode of Shab-e Hezar-o-Yekom (The One Thousand and First Night, 2003) in which Beyzaie reconstructs the cycle of Jamshid and Zahhak.     

Exploring the City in the Cinema of Bahram Beyzaie

This article explores five of Bahram Beyzaie's urban films over the last four decades to study their critique of the process of modernization and social changes that have taken place in Iran. These include The Journey (Safar, 1972), The Crow (Kalagh, 1977), Maybe Some Other Time (Shayad Vaqti Digar, 1987), Killing Mad Dogs (Sag Koshi, 2001) and When We Are All Asleep (Vaqti Hame Khabim, 2009). It examines the impact of modernization on the architecture and landscape of the city and consequently on the local community. It then studies the increasing complexity of ascertaining the real and unreal within the city. Finally, it looks at the changing values, the fears and threats within the city and the impact these have on its inhabitants, particularly women and their movement within the city.     

A Report on the British Premiere of Death of Yazdgerd: A Cross-cultural Adaptation?

In the spring semester of 2010, the students of the module “Non Western Performances” at Loughborough University were directed by Sudipto Chatterjee to stage the UK premiere of Bahram Beyzaie's canonical play, Death of Yazdgerd (1979). The play, which was initially supposed to be a student-led workshop as part of the module's practice, took a life of its own and turned into a full-blown production. The production consisted of all the registered students of the module who formed the cast and the crew, the main tutor and director Sudipto Chatterjee, the co-tutor and dramaturge Proshot Kalam) and the two technical tutors (Dave Hill and Mark Simpson). The present essay is an attempt to analyze the cross-cultural aspects and the practical approaches undertaken by the crew for the production of the play.     

When Druid went to jail: returned migrants,Irish prisoners,and Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming

Irish playwright Tom Murphy became Writer-in-Association with Druid Theatre of Galway, Ireland, in September 1983. The partnership began with Druid's production of Murphy's Famine (1968) in February 1984, and was followed by a lunchtime production of On the Outside (written in 1959 with Murphy's friend Noel O'Donoghue). Druid premiered Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985) in December 1985 and Conversations on a Homecoming in April 1985. Druid toured Conversations locally, nationally, and internationally for two and a half years. In February 1987, Druid presented the play at three Irish prisons. This article attempts to reveal how the prison audiences related to a play about a returned migrant; and to discover what prompted the professional company to perform in Irish prisons.     

“Tell Thou the Tale”: Shakespeare's Taming of Folktales in The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew adapts two European folktales, “The Taming of the Shrew” (ATU 901) and “Lord for a Day” (ATU 1531). The playwright adapts these tales in order to negotiate his role as storyteller with the audience, alternately insisting on his right to innovate and deferring to the audience by allowing them to choose among multiple possible endings.     

Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction

The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conclusion that the camp has replaced the city as the biopolitical paradigm of the West is as difficult to digest as it is easy to see how it responds to contemporary political tendencies in the world today. In this introduction to this theme issue on Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp, a detailed exposition, emulating the structure of Agamben's seminal book Homo Sacer, is conducted, tracing the genealogies of Agamben's ideas and commenting on his swiftly enhanced importance in the social sciences and humanities. The introduction concludes by outlining some possible research fields in human geogrphy where much insight could be gained if Agamben's work is given more detailed consideration.     

An American Prototype in Thomas Mann's Königliche Hoheit

This study is inspired by Henri Lefebvre's theories on the production of space to consider the issues of geographic scale, urbanism, and historical memory in Spanish playwright Jerónimo López Mozo's 1999 play El arquitecto y el relojero. In this drama, the discourses of scale and the spectacle of urban space permeate the dialogue and staging of the work while the characters confront contemporary anxieties about the spatial component of historical memory. Relying on Henri Lefebvre's tripartite theory of the production of space to explore this spatial component not only illustrates the important relationship between culture and space, but it also demonstrates how the production of space at one scale—the urban—simultaneously “articulates” (Delaney and Leitner) with the broader geography of the nation.     

Henry Mayhew at 200 – the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew – journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhew's work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhew's corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.     

An interview with Anne Buttimer: an autobiographical window on geographical thought and practice 1965–2005

Anne Buttimer's 40 years of geographical publications have been influential and international in scope. She has also played an important institutional role within the International Geographical Union, culminating in her presidency 2000–2004. The relative invisibility of women's geographical work in histories of the discipline needs to be redressed and it is hoped that this interview might contribute to that wider project. After a brief biographical sketch, the bulk of the article is devoted to an (auto)biographical interview, which addresses Buttimer's work on social geography, values in geography, the humanist and phenomenological schools, the Dialogue Project, and environmental issues, as well as her own gendered career experience and perspectives on gender issues. While Buttimer does not deem herself a theoretical feminist per se, her work has shown sensitivity to gender issues through her concern for the human perspective on geographical issues and knowledge.     

Liberation and literature: Naples 1944

The arrival of Anglo‐American forces in Naples on 1 October 1943 precipitated the structural crisis which had beset the capital of the south since its integration into the Italian nation‐state in 1860. This crisis had been masked by the reassuringly engaging ethos of napoletanità, encoded in the urban dialect and crystallized in its literary culture from Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo onwards. The myth of napoletanità had been frozen under Fascism, but was shattered by the experience of the war years and after, and only factitiously restored under the political hegemony of the monarchist ship owner Achille Lauro during the 1950s. Young literary Americans such as John Home Burns and William Weaver, who found themselves in Naples with the occupying Allied forces, fell under its spell, while the equally young British military intelligence officer Norman Lewis maintained a detached, but sympathetic, objectivity. The older Tuscan writer, Curzio Malaparte, so provocatively transformed the image of Naples as to earn furious rejection by the city's dominant postwar political circles and by Italy's literary circles. Yet, despite brilliant attempts at restoration by the departed Neapolitan, Giuseppe Marotta, and the much‐loved actor‐playwright Eduardo De Filippo, napoletanità was systematically undermined and demolished by younger Neapolitan writers from Domenico Rea and Anna Maria Ortese to Raffaele La Capria as the city's urban fabric was transformed by appallingly irresponsible property speculators. This article focuses on the literary anthropology of Naples in the 1940s. It explores literary texts and contexts, and the way they problematize Naples as a unified subject or object. It addresses the paradoxical issue of the city's need for liberation from itself, and the time scale of a liberation that perhaps has always been and always will be in fieri.     

Utopia Fading: Taxonomies,Freedom and Dissent in Open Access Publishing

This essay focuses on some of Mayhew's interviews in London Labour and the London Poor, and especially his interview with one coster-girl. Do these sources express the lived experience of a speaking subject; or do they merely rehearse contemporary cultural and linguistic codes? There is no subject without language; language precedes and determines the subject, but nor is there language without subjects. Language exists only insofar as individuals and groups utilize it, reproduce it and transform it – and always within specific social relations and networks of power and in a relentlessly material world. Mayhew's writings provide a wonderful resource to explore some of these complex struggles over meaning – in a precise time and place.     

The politics of Greek tragedy in Samson Agonistes

ABSTRACT

This essay charts Milton’s engagement in Samson Agonistes with Greek political thought as critiqued in Athenian tragic drama, particularly that of Euripides. In early modern Europe, Euripides’ plays were not only understood to denounce tyranny but also to remain rigorously sceptical about the workings of Athenian democracy (in itself a highly limited kind of representational politics). Milton knew well the commentary tradition that framed Euripidean tragedy in such terms, and found a corollary to his own political views within it, most notably in the writings of Gasparus Stiblinus whose prefaces are included in the 1602 Stephanus edition of the playwright’s works, which he used heavily. Stiblinus shows how Euripides relentlessly scrutinizes corruption, which his tragedies reveal to be not only characteristic of tyrants but also to pervade democratic systems. Milton’s allusions to Euripidean tragic form in Samson Agonistes evoke these commentaries to denounce political corruption.     

Texts,topoi and the self: a reading of Alfredian spirituality*

Challenging the allegation that Alfred's spirituality as Asser presents it is no more than a string of textual fictions, this article outlines a context for understanding Alfred's spirituality as a functional process of living texts, or of ‘textualizing’ the self. The discussion first draws support for this view from the history of early medieval spirituality and then demonstrates the theme's relevance both to Asser's representation of Alfred and to the king's own writings. Attention is given especially to the congruence between Alfred's depiction in the Life and Gregory the Great's teachings on the ideal rector as propounded in the Pastoral Care, a text carefully read and famously translated by Alfred himself. The comparison suggests that the main spiritual models for Alfred's kingly piety may be understood to reside in, and to involve assimilation of, this work of Gregory, making it possible to conceptualize the king's self‐presentation in terms of a conscious project to ‘live’ Gregory's text by bringing the ideals of the Gregorian rector to life in his own person. Such an argument helps to explain Alfred's interest in Gregory, to account for his concern to translate the Pastoral Care, and to legitimize the predominant images associated with the king's spirituality as indicative of a kind of functional piety grounded in the reading of texts, rather than simply reflected, perhaps falsely, in Asser’s Life.     

Saxton's Maps of England and Wales: The Accuracy of Anglia and Britannia and Their Relationship to Each Other and to the County Maps

ABSTRACT

From measurements of the graticules on Saxton's two general maps of England and Wales—the atlas map Anglia and the wall map Britannia—together with other evidence, it is argued that neither map was drawn according to any specific projection, but that both were effectively produced as ‘flat-earth’ maps with the graticules superimposed afterwards. Digital versions of Saxton's maps and of a modern map, the 1:1 million Ordnance Survey transport map, are used in a number of comparisons by means of the computer program MapAnalyst. These comparisons allow the scales of the two Saxton maps to be determined. They also show that the maps are of almost the same accuracy in terms of the positioning of settlements, typically within about 4.6 kilometres, in spite of a difference in scale of a factor of about 3.6. This fact and the direct comparison of the two Saxton maps in MapAnalyst show that they are basically the same map, and it is concluded that a version of the wall map was the first to be drawn and that Anglia is a reduced copy prepared for the atlas. The lengths of Saxton's miles as used on the two maps are calculated and compared with other determinations. The relationship between the two general maps and the county maps is briefly considered, and it is provisionally concluded that the relationship is a close one.     

Ova collection in Japan – making visible women's experience in male spaces

The role of women is essential in embryo creation and donation, as they undergo in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment for ova collection. Yet, it has often been pointed out that in the process of embryo donation women's role is largely neglected, as if embryos come from nowhere. The procedure of embryo donation in Japan is a case in point. During field research in Japan, we found that women were of the view that the procedures of embryo donation are inhuman, cold and harsh, while specialists said that no value is attached to embryos in Japan and that women have no scruples about donating them. This article explores the cause of the gap in the perception of experiences of ova collection between women and IVF specialists. Our primary source of data was interview narratives with women undergoing IVF, IVF specialists, nurses, counsellors and policy makers. Field research was conducted in 2006–2008. We analysed the process and the ways in which women's experiences of ova collection become invisible in Japanese socio-cultural contexts, including marriage, households and motherhood values in Japan. Our analysis critically draws on Marxist feminist theories, which enabled us to discuss the link among the production of embryos and ova, reproduction, ownership and gender. This theoretical framework also enabled us to view the case of Japan, paying particular attention to historical perspectives and specific cultural forms.     

‘La rue du 19 mars 1962 c'était la rue de la liberté’: Personal and Collective Memory Spaces in Rachid Akbal's Commemoration of Peace

Rachid Akbal is a French-born Algerian playwright, director and actor whose company, ‘Le temps de vivre’, took up residence at the Théâtre de Belleville in Paris in 2012 to perform his Trilogie Algérienne (three plays with a loosely autobiographical element: Baba la France, Ma mère l'Algérie and Alger, Terminal 2). On 19 March 2012, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first day of the ceasefire between Algeria and France, Akbal held an open evening at the theatre. The first half offered a run-through of the history between France and Algeria. The second half was a more personal, lyrical narrative of what the date represented for Akbal; unpublished elsewhere, Akbal has given permission for it to be reproduced here. In its hour-long performance, the narration was accompanied by sounds (natural elements, gunfire and sirens, and music), and at the end the lights went up and Akbal took a seat on stage, to begin a half-hour discussion with the audience. In so doing, Akbal created a discreet space of remembrance which allowed interested parties to come together in collective commemoration. Setting theorisations of cultural memory in dialogue with commentaries published during the commemorative period, this article sets up a framework to interrogate the possibilities of personal and collective remembrance offered by Akbal's event, opening these up via publication of the text and analysis of it as a ‘memory space’.     

An Empire of the Scholars: Transnational Lawyers and the Rule of Opinio Juris

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.