Journal articles: 'Americans American literature Paris (France)' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

This study aims to explain the plot of the miniseries Bolívar (1983) by Venezuelan-American director, Betty Kaplan, from its beginning when Simón Bolívar is depicted in Paris, France in 1804, until the creation of Colombia in the Venezuelan city of Angostura in 1819. Fragmenting the scenes and the events related to the life and achievements of Simón Bolívar between 1804 and 1819, this article narrates all the matters proposed through the image of the Liberator and its context contrasting the plot with Bolivarian iconography, biography and literature in order to describe the events in which Bolívar is portrayed by Betty Kaplan. Furthermore, this article shares a series of original photographs from Betty Kaplan’s personal archive in order to illustrate the reader in a visual way.

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Drawing on recent innovations in detective criticism in France, this article broadens the quest to exonerate Poe’s famous orang-utan and argues that the Urtext of modern Anglo-American crime fiction is simultaneously a rejection of linguistic dominance (of English in this case) and an apologia for modern languages. This promotion of linguistic diversity goes hand in hand with the wilful non-self-coincidence of Poe’s detection narrative, which recalls, and pre-empts, the who’s-strangling-whom? paradox of deconstructionist criticism. Although “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is prescient, founding modern crime fiction for future generations, it is entwined with a nineteenth-century tradition of sculpture that not only poses men fighting with animals but also inverts classical scenarios, thereby questioning the binary of savagery versus civilization and investing animals with the strength to kill humans while also positing them as the victims of human violence.

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SUMMARY The recent extensive literature on exploration and the resulting scientific advances has failed to highlight the contribution of Austrian enterprise to the study of natural history. The leading role of Joseph II among the neutral powers which assumed the carrying trade of the belligerents during the American War of Independence, furthered the development of collections for the Schönbrunn Park and Gardens which had been set up on scientific principles by his parents. On the conclusion of peace, Joseph entrusted to Professor Maerter a world-encompassing mission in the course of which the Chief Gardener Franz Boos and his assistant Georg Scholl travelled to South Africa to collect plants and animals. Boos pursued the mission to Isle de France and Bourbon (Mauritius and Reunion), conveyed by the then unknown Nicolas Baudin. He worked at the Jardin du Roi, Pamplemousses, with Nicolas Cere, or at Palma with Joseph Francois Charpentier de Cossigny. The linkage of Austrian and French horticultural expertise created a situation fraught with opportunities which were to lead Baudin to the forefront of exploration and scientific research as the century closed in the upheaval of the Revolutionary Wars.

Abstract:

La Gracia Triunfante en la vida de catharina tegakovita (“Grace triumphant in the life of catherine tekakwitha”), an account of the miraculous life of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Iroquois Indian from New France, traversed language and space to be published in Mexico City, New Spain, in 1724. Juan de Urtassum, a Basque Navarran Jesuit who had spent many years in Mexico, translated his fellow Jesuit Pierre Cholonec's hagiographic text from its original French (first published in Paris in 1717). Two appendixes accompanied the translation. In the first, a learned theological apology, the Mexican cleric Juan Castorena y Urúsa extolled the piety of indigenous women whom he deemed fit to be nuns; the second consisted of short narratives detailing the exemplary lives of New Spanish indigenous women. Urtassum and Castorena compiled the volume in order to advocate for the foundation of convents for indigenous women, presenting Tekakwitha's piety as evidence of indigenous women's capacity for Christian virtue (Díaz, Indigenous Writings 56; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin” 237). While Tekakwitha's sanctity helped Urtassum's case, his knowledge of and indeed interest in her provenance were scant. He locates the Iroquois Nation (the “Provincia de los Iraqueses”) on the northern frontier of New Spain (today's New Mexico), where indigenous groups had resisted Spanish attempts at colonization and evangelization for centuries. He “domesticates” the distant Iroquois for the New Spanish reader, comparing them with the Araucanian Indians of Chile, whose bravery Alonso de Ercilla immortalized in his epic poem La Araucana and who, though geographically distant from Mexico, seemed familiar through the Spanish colonial condition they shared with Urtassum's readers. In a telling moment, in the dedication to his patron that precedes the translation, Urtassum refers to “todo este emispherio” (“this entire hemisphere”). It is clear, however, that this reference encompasses only Spanish imperial possessions, including the recently founded California missions. The distant Iroquois Nation, located in geographically indistinct New France, does not figure in this geopolitical economy, nor do other American territories in the possession of rival imperial powers.

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I Am Not Particularly Sensitive to Space and Location, Except When it Comes to Real Estate. Still, I Cannot Help But Notice their increased importance in the human sciences: philosophers evoke heterotopies and dream of geophilosophy, historians explore lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”), and distant reading or surface reading competes with close reading. It is as if to the end of history there corresponded a beginning of geography, and some scholars, like Michel Collot, have even spoken of a spatial turn (15).In teaching and studying French literature, which I have been doing for a long time, geographic forces have always had a significant role, because of the distance between France and the United States and because of the global situation of the two countries. That the distance has become less daunting in the past fifty or sixty years has led to more scholarly exchanges, smoother collaborations, easier access to subjects or objects, and the study of the literary extrême contemporain (“extremely contemporary”), say, or that of modern popular literature is now less problematic. As for the global situation, there has been a French loss and an American gain of cultural power, with less United States attention paid to French cultural products. This relative disaffection permeates many texts. I remember quite well how Donald Morrison buried French culture (Morrison and Compagnon), and I will not forget that Mark Bittman even argued in the New York Times that one ate better in London than in Paris. Across the ocean too, there was concern. As early as the 1990s, Jean-Marie Domenach deplored the twilight of French civilization. A few years later, Nicolas Baverez described a falling France.

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J. Walter Thompson (JWT), the leading American advertising agency until the 1970s, established a branch office in Paris in 1927. While many of JWT's worldwide branches became the leading agencies in their respective countries, notably Great Britain and Germany, JWT-Paris foundered from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. This article focuses on the reasons why: cultural clashes between the French and Americans, a regulated and protected French market, anti-Americanism among French businesses, and American condescension and insensitivity. It concludes with an analysis of and the reasons for JWT-Paris's achievement of limited success by the late 1960s.

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Since 9/11 an enormous amount of literature and media coverage has been devoted to anti-Americanism in France. Yet the American model seems to be overwhelmingly present in French life and culture. There is a fascination for it among all classes, from disadvantaged suburban youths who try to imitate African Americans, follow American clothing fashions, and have Power Rangers as heroes, to political elites who never tire of recommending to us the American model (pension funds, the two-party system, education, etc.) and propose adapting it to the French setting. Nothing illustrates this paradox better than the controversial and popular institution of McDonald's in France, which is loved and hated to the point of occasionally provoking a national crisis as well as a number of social conflicts in recent years. After retracing briefly the expansion of McDonald's in France, I will examine the opposition it has aroused, making a distinction between political opposition and opposition in the workplace, which takes the form of a struggle against working conditions, the conception of Mcwork and McManagement. I will look at the people who carry on this struggle and what it all means in terms of resistance to “Americanization.”

Abstract:

Addressing the fact that there are few studies exploring the relationship between board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in non-Western contexts, this study examines the relationship in South Korean corporate contexts. We concentrate on foreign directors as a board attribute, which is reported as a remarkable change in Korean corporate boards, and propose that foreign directors have different impacts on CSR investment depending on their nationality (Anglo-Americans vs. non-Anglo-Americans) and director types (insiders vs. outsiders). In detail, the presence of directors from Anglo-American countries (e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom) decreases firms’ CSR involvement, whereas the presence of directors from non-Anglo-American countries (e.g., France, Germany) increases firms’ CSR involvement. Moreover, the effects of Anglo-Americans on CSR are strengthened when they are inside (rather than outside) directors. Empirical analyses using a sample of 1828 Korean firms from 2002 to 2015 provide evidence to support the predictions. This study theoretically contributes to CSR and corporate governance literature in that it sheds light on the CSR in non-Western companies and reveals varied effects of foreign directors contingent upon their individual attributes. It also has practical implications for policymakers and corporate managers by providing insights of the changes generated by foreign members in a boardroom.

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-Dennis Walder, Robert D. Hamner, Derek Walcott. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. xvi + 199 pp.''Critical perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington DC: Three continents, 1993. xvii + 482 pp.-Yannick Tarrieu, Lilyan Kesteloot, Black writers in French: A literary history of Negritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1991. xxxiii + 411 pp.-Renée Larrier, Carole Boyce Davies ,Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean women and literature. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. xxiii + 399 pp., Elaine Savory Fido (eds)-Renée Larrier, Evelyn O'Callaghan, Woman version: Theoretical approaches to West Indian fiction by women. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. viii + 126 pp.-Lisa Douglass, Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the blood: Orality, gender and the 'vulgar' body of Jamaican popular culture. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. ix + 214 pp.-Christine G.T. 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Immensee: Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 1991. xxxiii + 313 pp.-Edward L. Cox, Carl C. Campbell, Cedulants and capitulants; The politics of the coloured opposition in the slave society of Trinidad, 1783-1838. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Paria Publishing, 1992. xv + 429 pp.-Thomas J. Spinner, Jr., Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and abolition: Sacrifice and survival on the Guyanese sugar plantations. Toronto: TSAR, 1993. xiii + 146 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Lila Gobardhan-Rambocus ,Immigratie en ontwikkeling: Emancipatie van contractanten. Paramaribo: Anton de Kom Universiteit, 1993. 262 pp., Maurits S. Hassankhan (eds)-Juan A. Giusti-Cordero, Teresita Martínez-Vergne, Capitalism in colonial Puerto Rico: Central San Vicente in the late nineteenth century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. 189 pp.-Jean Pierre Sainton, Henriette Levillain, La Guadeloupe 1875 -1914: Les soubresauts d'une société pluriethnique ou les ambiguïtés de l'assimilation. Paris: Autrement, 1994. 241 pp.-Michèle Baj Strobel, Solange Contour, Fort de France au début du siècle. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994. 224 pp.-Betty Wood, Robert J. Stewart, Religion and society in post-emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. xx + 254 pp.-O. Nigel Bolland, Michael Havinden ,Colonialism and development: Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850-1960. New York: Routledge, 1993. xv + 420 pp., David Meredith (eds)-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Luis Navarro García, La independencia de Cuba. Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992. 413 pp.-Pedro A. Pequeño, Guillermo J. Grenier ,Miami now! : Immigration, ethnicity, and social change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. 219 pp., Alex Stepick III (eds)-George Irving, Alistair Hennessy ,The fractured blockade: West European-Cuban relations during the revolution. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993. xv + 358 pp., George Lambie (eds)-George Irving, Donna Rich Kaplowitz, Cuba's ties to a changing world. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993, xii + 263 pp.-G.B. Hagelberg, Scott B. MacDonald ,The politics of the Caribbean basin sugar trade. New York: Praeger, 1991. vii + 164 pp., Georges A. Fauriol (eds)-Bonham C. Richardson, Trevor W. Purcell, Banana Fallout: Class, color, and culture among West Indians in Costa Rica. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American studies, 1993. xxi + 198 pp.-Gertrude Fraser, George Gmelch, Double Passage: The lives of Caribbean migrants abroad and back home. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. viii + 335 pp.-Gertrude Fraser, John Western, A passage to England: Barbadian Londoners speak of home. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xxii + 309 pp.-Trevor W. Purcell, Harry G. Lefever, Turtle Bogue: Afro-Caribbean life and culture in a Costa Rican Village. Cranbury NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1992. 249 pp.-Elizabeth Fortenberry, Virginia Heyer Young, Becoming West Indian: Culture, self, and nation in St. Vincent. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. x + 229 pp.-Horace Campbell, Dudley J. Thompson ,From Kingston to Kenya: The making of a Pan-Africanist lawyer. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1993. xii + 144 pp., Margaret Cezair Thompson (eds)-Kumar Mahabir, Samaroo Siewah, The lotus and the dagger: The Capildeo speeches (1957-1994). Port of Spain: Chakra Publishing House, 1994. 811 pp.-Donald R. Hill, Forty years of steel: An annotated discography of steel band and Pan recordings, 1951-1991. Jeffrey Thomas (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood, 1992. xxxii + 307 pp.-Jill A. Leonard, André Lucrèce, Société et modernité: Essai d'interprétation de la société martiniquaise. Case Pilote, Martinique: Editions de l'Autre Mer, 1994. 188 pp.-Dirk H. van der Elst, Ben Scholtens ,Gaama Duumi, Buta Gaama: Overlijden en opvolging van Aboikoni, grootopperhoofd van de Saramaka bosnegers. Stanley Dieko. Paramaribo: Afdeling Cultuurstudies/Minov; Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1992. 204 pp., Gloria Wekker, Lady van Putten (eds)-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Chandra van Binnendijk ,Sranan: Cultuur in Suriname. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen/Rotterdam: Museum voor Volkenkunde, 1992. 159 pp., Paul Faber (eds)-Harold Munneke, A.J.A. Quintus Bosz, Grepen uit de Surinaamse rechtshistorie. Paramaribo: Vaco, 1993. 176 pp.-Harold Munneke, Irvin Kanhai ,Strijd om grond in Suriname: Verkenning van het probleem van de grondenrechten van Indianen en Bosnegers. Paramaribo, 1993, 200 pp., Joyce Nelson (eds)-Ronald Donk, J. Hartog, De geschiedenis van twee landen: De Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba. Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 1993. 183 pp.-Aart G. Broek, J.J. Oversteegen, In het schuim van grauwe wolken: Het leven van Cola Debrot tot 1948. Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1994. 556 pp.''Gemunt op wederkeer: Het leven van Cola Debrot vanaf 1948. Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1994. 397 pp.

Abstract:

Background. А history of the development of the human community is at the same time a history of the relationship between men and women, their role in society, in formation of mindset, development of science, technology and art. A woman’s path to the recognition of her merits is a struggle for equality and inclusion in all sectors of public life. Originated with particular urgency in the twentieth century, this set of problems gave impetus to the study of the female phenomenon in the sociocultural space. In this context, the disclosure of the direct contribution of talented women to art and their influence on its development has become of special relevance. The purpose of the article is to summarize segmental of information that highlights the contribution of women to the treasury of world art, their creative and inspiring power. Analytical, historical-biographical and comparative studying methods were applied to reveal the gender relationships in art and the role of woman in them as well as in the sociocultural space in general. The results from this study present a panorama of gifted women from the world of art and music who paved the way for future generations. Among them are: A. Gentileschi (1593–1653), who was the first woman admitted to The Florence Academy of Art; M. Vigee Le Brun (1755–1842), who painted portraits of the French aristocracy and later became a confidant of Marie-Antoinette; B. Morisot (1841–1895), who was accepted by the impressionists in their circle and repeatedly exhibited her works in the Paris Salon; F. Caccini (1587–1640), who went down in history as an Italian composer, teacher, harpsichordist, author of ballets and music for court theater performances; J. Kinkel (1810–1858) – the first female choral director in Germany, who published books about musical education, composed songs on poems of famous poets, as well as on her own texts; F. Mendelssohn (1805–1847) – German singer, pianist and composer, author of cantatas, vocal miniatures of organ preludes, piano pieces; R. Clark (1886–1979) – British viola player and composer who created trio, quartets, compositions for solo instruments, songs on poems of English poets; L. Boulanger (1893–1918) became the first woman to receive Grand Prix de Rome; R. Tsekhlin (1926–2007) – German harpsichordist, composer and teacher who successfully combined the composition of symphonies, concerts, choral and vocal opuses, operas, ballets, music for theatrical productions and cinema with active performing and teaching activities, and many others. The article emphasise the contribution of women-composers, writers, poetesses to the treasury of world literature and art. Among the composers in this row is S. Gubaidulina (1931), who has about 30 prizes and awards. She wrote music for 17 films and her works are being performed by famous musicians around the world. The glory of Ukrainian music is L. Dychko (1939) – the author of operas, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies, choral concertos, ballets, piano works, romances, film music. The broad famous are the French writers: S.-G. Colette (1873–1954), to which the films were devoted, the performances based on her novels are going all over the world, her lyrics are being studied in the literature departments. She was the President of the Goncourt Academy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, a square in the center of Paris is named after her. Also, creativity by her compatriot, L. de Vilmorin (1902–1969), on whose poems С. Arrieu, G. Auric, F. Poulenc wrote vocal miniatures, is beloved and recognized as in France as and widely abroad. The article denotes a circle of women who combined the position of a selfsufficient creator and a muse for their companion. M. Verevkina (1860–1938) – a Russian artist, a representative of expressionism in painting, not only helped shape the aesthetic views of her husband A. Yavlensky, contributing to his art education, but for a long time “left the stage” for to not compete with him and help him develop his talent fully. Furthermore, she managed to anticipate many of the discoveries as for the use of light that are associated with the names of H. Matisse, A. Derain and other French fauvist. F. Kahlo (1907–1954), a Mexican artist, was a strict critic and supporter for her husband D. Rivera, led his business, was frequently depicted in his frescoes. C. Schumann (1819–1896) was a committed promoter of R. Schumann’s creativity. She performed his music even when he was not yet recognized by public. She included his compositions in the repertoire of her students after the composer lost his ability to play due to the illness of the hands. She herself performed his works, making R. Schumann famous across Europe. In addition, Clara took care of the welfare of the family – the main source of finance was income from her concerts. The article indicates the growing interest of the twentieth century composers to the poems of female poets. Among them M. Debord-Valmore (1786–1859) – a French poetess, about whom S. Zweig, P. Verlaine and L. Aragon wrote their essays, and her poems were set to music by C. Franck, G. Bizet and R. Ahn; R. Auslender (1901–1988) is a German poetess, a native of Ukraine (Chernovtsy city), author of more than 20 collections, her lyrics were used by an American woman-composer E. Alexander to write “Three Songs” and by German composer G. Grosse-Schware who wrote four pieces for the choir; I. Bachmann (1926–1973) – the winner of three major Austrian awards, author of the libretto for the ballet “Idiot” and opera “The Prince of Hombur”. The composer H. W. Henze, in turn, created music for the play “Cicadas” by I. Bachmann. On this basis, we conclude that women not only successfully engaged in painting, wrote poems and novels, composed music, opened «locked doors», destroyed established stereotypes but were a powerful source of inspiration. Combining the roles of the creator and muse, they helped men reach the greatest heights. Toward the twentieth century, the role of the fair sex representatives in the world of art increased and strengthened significantly, which led Western European culture to a new round of its evolution.

Abstract:

Resumen: La literatura centroamericana hizo su aparición en la península española cuando Rubén Darío viajo hacia Madrid en 1892. París y Madrid se convirtieron en las metrópolis culturales de Centroamérica a partir de esa fecha. Sin embargo, su pertenencia a la región no fue reconocida como tal. En España esta producción fue leída desde una perspectiva hispano-céntrica que le fue útil a la península para resolver sus propias contradicciones de legitimación en el seno de Europa. En consecuencia, los escritores centroamericanos que publican con éxito en la península no pueden ser centroamericanos y cosmopolitas a la vez. En España se transforman en “hispanoamericanos.” Lo anterior elide su centro-americanidad, impidiendo la validación de sus pertenencias afectivas regionales o nacionales a un espacio específico.Palabras clave: Literatura, Modernismo, Darío, Hispanoamérica, istmo, cosmopolitismo, Centro-americanidad, marginalidad.Abstract: Central American literature first appeared in the Spanish peninsula when Rubén Darío traveled to Madrid in 1892. Paris and Madrid became since then the Central American cultural metropoles. However, their belongingness to the region was not recognized as such. In Spain, this production was read from a Hispano-centric perspective that was useful for the peninsula to solve its own issues of legitimization within Europe. As a result, Central American writers that publish successfully in Spain cannot be Central American and Cosmopolitan at the same time. In Spain, they become “Hispanic Americans”. This elides their Central Americanness, preventing the validation of their regional or national affective belonging to a specific space.Keywords: Literature, Modernism, Darío, Hispanic America, isthmus, Cosmopolitism, Central Americanity, marginality.

Abstract:

This article is dedicated to the development and presentation of the results of the first phase of implementation of the project "Knowledge, research and curricular innovations in teacher training for ethnic-racial diversity in higher education: questioning and contributions of ethnic-racial matrices and (NEAB / UFSCar), Brazil, linked to the Abdias Nascimento Academic Development Program, promoted by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). The project aims to establish a transnational network of joint research between researchers in partnership with three international institutions: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas (Colombia), Georgia State University (USA) and Université Paris Nanterre (France). The project aims to analyze if and how the curriculum of teacher training courses are changing for the dialogue of ethnic-racial and cultural knowledge, African and Afro-descendant knowledge. In this article we present a review of the literature on this subject in the contexts of Colombia and the United States.ResumoEste artigo apresenta alguns resultados da primeira fase de implementação do projeto “Conhecimento, pesquisa e inovações curriculares na formação de professores para a diversidade étnico-racial no ensino superior: questionamentos e contribuições das matrizes étnico-raciais e culturais, de saberes africanos e afrodescendentes” do Núcleo de Estudos Afro-Brasileiros da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (NEAB/UFSCar), vinculado ao Programa de Desenvolvimento Acadêmico Abdias Nascimento fomentado pela Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). O projeto visa estabelecer uma rede transnacional de investigação conjunta entre pesquisadores e pesquisadoras em parceria com três instituições internacionais: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas (Colômbia), Georgia State University (EUA) e Université Paris Nanterre (França). O projeto objetiva analisar se e de que forma os currículos dos cursos de formação de professores estão se modificando para o diálogo de conhecimentos étnico-raciais e culturais, de saberes africanos e afrodescendentes. Neste artigo apresentamos um recorte do levantamento bibliográfico sobre este tema nos contextos da Colômbia e dos Estados Unidos.Keywords: Curriculum, Higher education, Ethnic-racial diversity, Affirmative action policies.Palavras-chave: Currículo, Ensino superior, Diversidade étnico-racial, Políticas de ação afirmativa.ReferencesALRIDGE, Derrick. Teachers in the movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. Disponível em: http://www.aera.net/Publications/Online-Paper-Repository/AERA-Online-Paper-Repository/Owner/912849 Acessado em outubro de 2018.AU, Wayne; BROWN, Anthony L.; CALDERON, Dolores. How does it feel to be a problem? Communities of Color, Self-Determination, and Historical Educational Struggle, 2018.BRAH, Avtar. 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Disponível em: <http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=85532558010> acesso em: 05 de novembro de 2017.COLÔMBIA. Lei 70 de 1993. Por la cual se desarrolla el artículo transitório 55 de la Constitucion política. El Congresso de Colômbia. 1993.DÍAZ SÁNCHEZ, Edisson. Reflexiones pedagógicas sobre la formación de docentes en los estudios escolares afrocolombianos. Revista Colombiana de Educación, [S.l.], n. 69, p. 183.202, 2015. ISSN 2323-0134.DU BOIS, William E. Burghardt. As almas da gente negra. Tradução de Heloisa Toller Gomes. Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda, 1999.DUSSEL, Enrique. 1492: El encubrimiento del otro: hacia el origen del mito de la modernidad. UMSA. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Plural Editores: La Paz, 1994.ESTEBAN-GUITART, Moisés et al. Empatia y tolerancia a la diversidad en un contexto educativo intercultural. Univ. Psychol., Bogotá, v. 11, n. 2, p. 415-426, June 2012.GOMES, Nilma Lino. O movimento negro educador: saberes construídos nas lutas por emancipação. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2017. 154 p.GRANADOS-BELTRAN, Carlo. Interculturalidad crítica. Un camino para profesores de inglés en formación. Íkala, Medellín, v. 21, n. 2, p. 171-187, Aug. 2016. GRANT, CARL A.; BROWN, KEFFRELYN D.; BROWN, ANTHONY L. Black intellectual thought in education: The missing traditions of Anna Julia Copper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Le Roy Locke. Routledge: New York, 2016. HOOKS, Bell. Ensinando a transgredir: a educação como prática da liberdade. Trad. Marcelo Brandão Cipolla. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2013.JIMENEZ, Nidia N.; GULLO, Maria, A. C.; MONTES, Jorge, E. O. Perception to the literacy process of adults and young natives from Guainía Department Colombia: Look of the protagonists. Investigación & desarrollo, vol. 24, n.° 1, 2016.KING, Joyce Elaine. Minds Stayed on Freedom. 2018. Disponível em http://www.aera.net/Publications/Online-Paper-Repository/AERA-Online-Paper-Repository/Owner/23358.KING, Joyce Elaine. Black education post-Katrina. And all us we are not saved. Epilogue: In: TILLMAN, L. C., (Ed.). The SAGE Handbook of African American Education (pp. 499-510). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009.LAGO DE ZOTA, Alejandrina; LAGO DE FERNANDEZ, Carmen; LAGO DE VERGARA, Diana. Educación para ciudadanos del mundo con identidad afrodescendiente: caso institución educativa Antonia Santos, Cartagena de Índias, Colombia. Rev. hist.edu.latinoam - Vol. 14 No. 18, - pp. 53 – 74 enero – junio 2012.MBEMBE, Achille. Afropolitanismo. Áskesis. Revista dxs Discentes do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia da UFSCar. Trad. Cleber Daniel Lambert da Silva. v. 4, n. 2, 2015, Julho/Dezembro, pp. 68-71.MBEMBE, Achille. Afriques indociles: christianisme, pouvoir et etat en société postcoloniale. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1988.MEN - Ministerio de Educación Nacional. Serie lineamientos curriculares: Cátedra Estudios Afrocolombianos. 1997.MENESES-COPETE, Yeison. A. Representaciones sociales sobre afrodescendencia: curriculum, practica y discurso pedagógico del profesorado. Entramado. Vol. 10 No.2, 2014.MORA MONROY, Gloria E. Dos experiencias educativas y editoriales con estudiantes indígenas, afrodescendientes y de municipios pobres en la universidad, desde una perspectiva intercultural. Forma funcion, Santaf, de Bogot, D.C., Bogotá, v. 29, n. 1, p. 61-80, Jan. 2016.RODRIGUES, Cristiano. Movimentos negros, políticas públicas e desigualdades raciais no Brasil e Colômbia. CLEA. Debates Latinoamericanos. Año 12, volumen 1/2014.ROJAS, Alex. Cátedra de Estudios Afrocolombianos: Aportes para maestros. Universidad del Cauca. 2008.SANTOS, Doris. Mimesis y bilingüismo ideológico: un análisis crítico del discurso sobre la diversidad en un documento de política educativa universitaria en América Latina. Forma funcion, Santaf, de Bogot, D.C. [online]. vol.26, n.1. pp.183-216, 2013.SCHOMBURG, Arturo. The negro digs up his past. In: The Survey, The Negro Expresses Himself. March (1), 1925. pp. 670-672.

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Americans living in England are sometimes inspired by a sense of belated recognition, a desire to claim the place as their own through an imagined return to an ancestral or a spiritual homeland. Nathaniel Hawthorne was hardly enamored of English life when he took up residence in Liverpool in 1853; nonetheless, after two years' stay he writes of a “latent” recognition: “I suppose there is still latent in us Americans (even of two centuries date, and more, like myself) an adaptation to the English climate, which makes it like native soil and air to us” (121-22). But even as Hawthorne became more at home in England, his contentment was disturbed by the political realities of living in the United Kingdom-an imperial entity created by an act of Parliament in 1801. Appearing at the edges of the detailed travel descriptions in the notebooks are lingering resentments over previous British-American conflicts and a dislike of the colonizer mentality. Writing in October 1854, during the CrimeanWar, Hawthorne adopts the tone of an expatriate's disdain: “Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion to this war, the Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help” (91). Hawthorne's reference is to two Times articles that are worth citing here, in that they seem to prefigure our era of “precision warfare” and triumphalist national self-regard: “The incidents of this [Crimean] war have already immeasurably increased the mutual confidence and respect of two nations [France and Britain] which have just shown they are the most powerful states in the world,” declared the Times on 4 October. The following day it stated:The lessons learned at Bomarsund and Sebastopol will not be forgotten, for they have introduced a new era in warfare by throwing doubt on places before deemed impregnable, and showing that the promptitude of an attack supported by the engines of modern warfare may supercede the more protracted operations of former sieges. The rapid triumphs which are wonderful now would have been impossible before.(qtd. in Hawthorne 632)

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate project management dimensions while constructing the Panama Canal from the end of ninetieth century to the start of twentieth century and then benchmarking against the Palm Diera Island at the lapse of a century. Second, to highlight issues of project management, specially the risk management with its economic, social and political domains at the construction site and in France and America. Design/methodology/approach The case study research method of qualitative research has been adopted when comparing two mega projects executed in different time and space. For the Panama Canal project documentation investigation was performed. However, a semi-structured interview data collection method was adopted for the Palm Diera Island project. A comparative study of two projects helps in deeper understanding of cross-project management dimensions. Findings The research reveals that the French team failed to complete the Panama Canal construction project due to inadequate planning, inappropriate design, lack of risk management, health and safety of the staff and non-availability of finances. However, the Americans successfully completed construction of the canal within budget and time and this was due to the support of change in the purpose of the canal construction adding to achieve its commercial objectives and at the same time strengthen its naval presence. American took its construction as a national objective than the individual enterprise as executed by the French team. Research limitations/implications Data collection for the Panama Canal was limited to only historical data available from the literature as documentary investigation. The researchers visited the canal to get in-depth understanding of the construction practices and the scale of construction. However, for the Palm Diera project, data collection was limited to three key personnel interviews. Practical implications The Americans were successful in completing the canal due to the US Government control on management and finances of the canal construction and lessons learned during the French construction period. The paper serves as a benchmark for project management dimension in two different regions in different times. The paper bears economic implications for the construction of the mega projects both in South America and the Middle East. Cost overrun construction of the Panama Canal during the French period influenced political spectrum in France resulting into the defeat of the government. During the American period of construction first time out of country visit by the sitting president of the USA reflects its economic and social importance. The valley of death was converted into the valley comfort during the American period resulting into social welfare of the workers. Completion of the canal by the Americans helped them secure operations of the Panama Canal for the next 100 years, contributing to its economic and naval strength. Social implications The paper reveals that safety and social implications for the work place in two different regions and at two different times. The impact of safe and improved working conditions at Palm Diera Island resulted into no injury or loss of life, however, during the Panama Canal construction more than 30,000 workers died affecting not only families of the respective workers but their nations as well. The impacts of both the projects on the society were also significant. The public opinion against the construction of the canal during the French period of construction was so significant that they had to abandon their construction equipment at the site. On the contrary, completion of construction of the Panama Canal during the French period helped secured political mileage for President Roosevelt and his party. Originality/value The paper benchmarks two different mega projects with different scope executed in two different regions at the lapse of a century. No such research work was found to have compared project management dimensions of two mega projects at the lapse of a century and in two different regions.

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[First paragraph]Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures. DEBRA L. ANDERSON. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 118 pp. (Cloth US$46.95)L'Eau: Source d'une ecriture dans les litteratures feminines francophones. YOLANDE HELM (ed.). New York: Peter Lang, 1995. x + 295 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.95)Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. MARY JEAN GREEN, KAREN GOULD, MICHELINE RICE-MAXIMIN, KEITH L. WALKER & JACK A. YEAGER (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. xxii + 359 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Statue cou coupe. ANNIE LE BRUN. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1996. 177 pp. (Paper FF 85.00) Although best remembered as a founding father of the Negritude movement along with Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor was from the very outset of his career equally committed - as both a poet and a politician - to what he felt were the inseparable concepts of la francophonie and metissage. Senghor's has been an unabashedly paradoxical vision, consistently addressing the unanswerable question of how one can be essentially a "black African" and at the same time (in Homi Bhabha's words) "something else besides" (1994:28). In his "Eloge du metissage," written in 1950, Senghor ably described the contradictions involved in assuming the hybrid identity of a metis (an identity that offers none of the comforting biological and/or cultural certainties - about "rhythm," "intuition," and such like - upon which the project of Negritude was founded): "too assimilated and yet not assimilated enough? Such is exactly our destiny as cultural metis. It's an unattractive role, difficult to take hold of; it's a necessary role if the conjuncture of the 'Union francaise' is to have any meaning. In the face of nationalisms, racisms, academicisms, it's the struggle for the freedom of the Soul - the freedom of Man" (1964:103). At first glance, this definition of the metis appears as dated as the crude essentialism with which Senghor's Negritude is now commonly identified: in linking the fate of the metis to that of the "Union francaise," that imperial federation of states created in the years following upon the end of the Second World War with the intention of putting a "new" face on the old French Empire, Senghor would seem to have doomed the metis and his "role ingrat" to obsolescence. By the end of the decade, the decolonization of French Africa had deprived the "Union franchise" of whatever "meaning" it might once have had. The uncompromisingly manichean rhetoric of opposition that flourished in the decolonization years (and that was most famously manipulated by Fanon in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth) had rendered especially unpalatable the complicities to which Senghor's (un)assimilated metis was subject and to which he also subjected himself in the name of a "humanism" that was around this same time itself becoming the object of an all-out assault in France at the hands of intellectuals like Foucault.

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Abstract. 1. The conference The third conference on "Nonlinear VAriability in Geophysics: scaling and multifractal processes" (NVAG 3) was held in Cargese, Corsica, Sept. 10-17, 1993. NVAG3 was joint American Geophysical Union Chapman and European Geophysical Society Richardson Memorial conference, the first specialist conference jointly sponsored by the two organizations. It followed NVAG1 (Montreal, Aug. 1986), NVAG2 (Paris, June 1988; Schertzer and Lovejoy, 1991), five consecutive annual sessions at EGS general assemblies and two consecutive spring AGU meeting sessions. As with the other conferences and workshops mentioned above, the aim was to develop confrontation between theories and experiments on scaling/multifractal behaviour of geophysical fields. Subjects covered included climate, clouds, earthquakes, atmospheric and ocean dynamics, tectonics, precipitation, hydrology, the solar cycle and volcanoes. Areas of focus included new methods of data analysis (especially those used for the reliable estimation of multifractal and scaling exponents), as well as their application to rapidly growing data bases from in situ networks and remote sensing. The corresponding modelling, prediction and estimation techniques were also emphasized as were the current debates about stochastic and deterministic dynamics, fractal geometry and multifractals, self-organized criticality and multifractal fields, each of which was the subject of a specific general discussion. The conference started with a one day short course of multifractals featuring four lectures on a) Fundamentals of multifractals: dimension, codimensions, codimension formalism, b) Multifractal estimation techniques: (PDMS, DTM), c) Numerical simulations, Generalized Scale Invariance analysis, d) Advanced multifractals, singular statistics, phase transitions, self-organized criticality and Lie cascades (given by D. Schertzer and S. Lovejoy, detailed course notes were sent to participants shortly after the conference). This was followed by five days with 8 oral sessions and one poster session. Overall, there were 65 papers involving 74 authors. In general, the main topics covered are reflected in this special issue: geophysical turbulence, clouds and climate, hydrology and solid earth geophysics. In addition to AGU and EGS, the conference was supported by the International Science Foundation, the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Meteo-France, the Department of Energy (US), the Commission of European Communities (DG XII), the Comite National Francais pour le Programme Hydrologique International, the Ministere de l'Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche (France). We thank P. Hubert, Y. Kagan, Ph. Ladoy, A. Lazarev, S.S. Moiseev, R. Pierrehumbert, F. Schmitt and Y. Tessier, for help with the organization of the conference. However special thanks goes to A. Richter and the EGS office, B. Weaver and the AGU without whom this would have been impossible. We also thank the Institut d' Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese whose beautiful site was much appreciated, as well as the Bar des Amis whose ambiance stimulated so many discussions. 2. Tribute to L.F. Richardson With NVAG3, the European geophysical community paid tribute to Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) on the 40th anniversary of his death. Richardson was one of the founding fathers of the idea of scaling and fractality, and his life reflects the European geophysical community and its history in many ways. Although many of Richardson's numerous, outstanding scientific contributions to geophysics have been recognized, perhaps his main contribution concerning the importance of scaling and cascades has still not received the attention it deserves. Richardson was the first not only to suggest numerical integration of the equations of motion of the atmosphere, but also to attempt to do so by hand, during the First World War. This work, as well as a presentation of a broad vision of future developments in the field, appeared in his famous, pioneering book "Weather prediction by numerical processes" (1922). As a consequence of his atmospheric studies, the nondimensional number associated with fluid convective stability has been called the "Richardson number". In addition, his book presents a study of the limitations of numerical integration of these equations, it was in this book that - through a celebrated poem - that the suggestion that turbulent cascades were the fundamental driving mechanism of the atmosphere was first made. In these cascades, large eddies break up into smaller eddies in a manner which involves no characteristic scales, all the way from the planetary scale down to the viscous scale. This led to the Richardson law of turbulent diffusion (1926) and tot he suggestion that particles trajectories might not be describable by smooth curves, but that such trajectories might instead require highly convoluted curves such as the Peano or Weierstrass (fractal) curves for their description. As a founder of the cascade and scaling theories of atmospheric dynamics, he more or less anticipated the Kolmogorov law (1941). He also used scaling ideas to invent the "Richardson dividers method" of successively increasing the resolution of fractal curves and tested out the method on geographical boundaries (as part of his wartime studies). In the latter work he anticipated recent efforts to study scale invariance in rivers and topography. His complex life typifies some of the hardships that the European scientific community has had to face. His educational career is unusual: he received a B.A. degree in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and zoology at Cambridge University, and he finally obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical psychology at the age of 47 from the University of London. As a conscientious objector he was compelled to quit the United Kingdom Meteorological Office in 1920 when the latter was militarized by integration into the Air Ministry. He subsequently became the head of a physics department and the principal of a college. In 1940, he retired to do research on war, which was published posthumously in book form (Richardson, 1963). This latter work is testimony to the trauma caused by the two World Wars and which led some scientists including Richardson to use their skills in rational attempts to eradicate the source of conflict. Unfortunately, this remains an open field of research. 3. The contributions in this special issue Perhaps the area of geophysics where scaling ideas have the longest history, and where they have made the largest impact in the last few years, is turbulence. The paper by Tsinober is an example where geometric fractal ideas are used to deduce corrections to standard dimensional analysis results for turbulence. Based on local spontaneous breaking of isotropy of turbulent flows, the fractal notion is used in order to deduce diffusion laws (anomalous with respect to the Richardson law). It is argued that his law is ubiquitous from the atmospheric boundary layer to the stratosphere. The asymptotic intermittency exponent i hypothesized to be not only finite but to be determined by the angular momentum flux. Schmitt et al., Chigirinskaya et al. and Lazarev et al. apply statistical multifractal notions to atmospheric turbulence. In the former, the formal analogy between multifractals and thermodynamics is exploited, in particular to confirm theoretical predictions that sample-size dependent multifractal phase transitions occur. While this quantitatively explains the behavior of the most extreme turbulent events, it suggests that - contrary to the type of multifractals most commonly discussed in the literature which are bounded - more violent (unbounded) multifractals are indeed present in the atmospheric wind field. Chigirinskaya et al. use a tropical rather than mid-latitude set to study the extreme fluctuations form yet another angle: That of coherent structures, which, in the multifractal framework, are identified with singularities of various orders. The existence of a critical order of singularity which distinguishes violent "self-organized critical structures" was theoretically predicted ten years ago; here it is directly estimated. The second of this two part series (Lazarev et al.) investigates yet another aspect of tropical atmospheric dynamics: the strong multiscaling anisotropy. Beyond the determination of universal multifractal indices and critical singularities in the vertical, this enables a comparison to be made with Chigirinskaya et al.'s horizontal results, requiring an extension of the unified scaling model of atmospheric dynamics. Other approaches to the problem of geophysical turbulence are followed in the papers by Pavlos et al., Vassiliadis et al., Voros et al. All of them share a common assumption that a very small number of degrees of freedom (deterministic chaos) might be sufficient for characterizing/modelling the systems under consideration. Pavlos et al. consider the magnetospheric response to solar wind, showing that scaling occurs both in real space (using spectra), and also in phase space; the latter being characterized by a correlation dimension. The paper by Vassiliadis et al. follows on directly by investigating the phase space properties of power-law filtered and rectified gaussian noise; the results further quantify how low phase space correlation dimensions can occur even with very large number of degrees of freedom (stochastic) processes. Voros et al. analyze time series of geomagnetic storms and magnetosphere pulsations, also estimating their correlation dimensions and Lyapounov exponents taking special care of the stability of the estimates. They discriminate low dimensional events from others, which are for instance attributed to incoherent waves. While clouds and climate were the subject of several talks at the conference (including several contributions on multifractal clouds), Cahalan's contribution is the only one in this special issue. Addressing the fundamental problem of the relationship of horizontal cloud heterogeneity and the related radiation fields, he first summarizes some recent numerical results showing that even for comparatively thin clouds that fractal heterogeneity will significantly reduce the albedo. The model used for the distribution of cloud liquid water is the monofractal "bounded cascade" model, whose properties are also outlined. The paper by Falkovich addresses another problem concerning the general circulation: the nonlinear interaction of waves. By assuming the existence of a peak (i.e. scale break) at the inertial oscillation frequency, it is argued that due to remarkable cancellations, the interactions between long inertio-gravity waves and Rossby waves are anomalously weak, producing a "wave condensate" of large amplitude so that wave breaking with front creation can occur. Kagan et al., Eneva and Hooge et al. consider fractal and multifractal behaviour in seismic events. Eneva estimates multifractal exponents of the density of micro-earthquakes induced by mining activity. The effects of sample limitations are discussed, especially in order to distinguish between genuine from spurious multifractal behaviour. With the help of an analysis of the CALNET catalogue, Hooge et al. points out, that the origin of the celebrated Gutenberg-Richter law could be related to a non-classical Self-Organized Criticality generated by a first order phase transition in a multifractal earthquake process. They also analyze multifractal seismic fields which are obtained by raising earthquake amplitudes to various powers and summing them on a grid. In contrast, Kagan, analyzing several earthquake catalogues discussed the various laws associated with earthquakes. Giving theoretical and empirical arguments, he proposes an additive (monofractal) model of earthquake stress, emphasizing the relevance of (asymmetric) stable Cauchy probability distributions to describe earthquake stress distributions. This would yield a linear model for self-organized critical earthquakes. References: Kolmogorov, A.N.: Local structure of turbulence in an incompressible liquid for very large Reynolds number, Proc. Acad. Sci. URSS Geochem. Sect., 30, 299-303, 1941. Perrin, J.: Les Atomes, NRF-Gallimard, Paris, 1913. Richardson, L.F.: Weather prediction by numerical process. Cambridge Univ. Press 1922 (republished by Dover, 1965). Richardson, L.F.: Atmospheric diffusion on a distance neighbour graph. Proc. Roy. of London A110, 709-737, 1923. Richardson, L.F.: The problem of contiguity: an appendix of deadly quarrels. General Systems Yearbook, 6, 139-187, 1963. Schertzer, D., Lovejoy, S.: Nonlinear Variability in Geophysics, Kluwer, 252 pp, 1991.

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This volume of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad offers a wide variety of approaches and topics in international education research. First, readers will note the geographic diversity that the articles represent; they examine study abroad topics in Africa, Argentina, Costa Rica, France, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. Second, the articles cover a wide-range of issues, including language acquisition, risk management, recruitment of minority students for study abroad, evaluation of cultural integration, and financial inequities in study abroad. Third, this volume contains articles by a variety of authors, including U.S.-based study abroad administrators, faculty members, and on-site resident directors. Finally, the modes of inquiry are as varied as the topics and authors. Research approaches in this volume include survey instruments, interviews, participant observation, case studies, literature review, as well as analytical essays. This diversity of geography, issues, authors, and modes of inquiry has from the beginning characterized the content of Frontiers and been one of its chief strengths. When the first volume of Frontiers appeared in 1995, one was hard pressed to find many research-based and analytical studies in the field, let alone the diversity of such work that this volume represents. In this regard, Frontiers has matured along with the field of international education, and today, almost ten years later, this volume reflects the growing importance being placed on research on the critical aspects of our work. The opening article by Lilli Engle and John Engle, “Study Abroad Levels: Toward a Classification of Program Types,” offers a revolutionary perspective by which international educators may categorize and judge study abroad programs. Their proposed typology makes qualitative distinctions between study abroad program models based on their view of a spectrum of cultural immersion. Frontiers readers will find their analysis provocative, stimulating study abroad professionals to examine programming in useful ways. In “Women and Cultural Learning in Costa Rica: Reading the Contexts,” Adele Anderson reviews research on Costa Rica’s cultural context, student adjustment and tourism theory, relating them to American student experiences, and she includes data from ethnographic observations and interviews collected during three years as a resident director of short-term programs. Anderson introduces a tool that may be used by resident directors to guide student cultural adjustment more systematically. Mark Ritchie, an on-site resident director in Thailand, provides a very useful analysis of study abroad risk management in his article, “Risk Management in Study Abroad: Lessons from the Wilderness.” Ritchie draws upon the principles of wilderness education, especially as it is conducted in developing countries, in offering recommendations for study abroad risk management. Readers will appreciate his suggestions for reducing risk by applying the experiential techniques of wilderness education. J. Scott Van Der Meid’s study, “Asian Americans: Factors Influencing the Decision to Study Abroad,” examines the factors that influence Asian American students’ decision to study abroad, and provides useful suggestions for considering ways to increase study abroad participation among this population. As the field of study abroad continues to seek ways to increase minority participation in study abroad, Van Der Meid’s study offers a model for examining this question among all ethnic groups. In their analysis of an innovative Vietnam study abroad program, “History Lived and Learned: Students and Vietnam Veterans in an Integrative Study Abroad Course,” Raymond Scurfield, Leslie Root, and Andrew Wiest et al, analyze the collaborative learning experience of students and Vietnam veterans in a program that combined the teaching of Vietnam culture and military history with an exploration of the mental health aspects of combat and post-war recovery of the veterans. This article discusses the lessons learned from the experience of designing and implementing a study abroad program that integrates history education with therapeutic objectives. Jennifer Coffman and Kevin Brennan analyze the economic imbalance of African educational exchange with the United States in their article, “African Studies Abroad: Meaning and Impact of America’s Burgeoning Export Industry.” Coffman and Brennan recommend developing more equitable models of reciprocity by examining the economics of U.S. – African exchanges, and by reconsidering the ways in which African study abroad programs are conceived and implemented in light of their social and intellectual impact. “Development of Oral Communication Skills Abroad” by Christina Isabelli-Garcia examines the impact of a semester study abroad program in Argentina on the second language acquisition of three American university Spanish learners. Isabelli-Garcia’s study measures the development of two aspects of communications skills: first, fluency and performance in the oral functions of narration, and, second, description and supporting an opinion. Her study provides insight into the conditions of a study abroad program that best promote the acquisition of improved oral communication skills in a target language. In “Studying Abroad in Nepal: Assessing Impact,” Patricia Farrell and Murari Suvedi present the perceived impact of studying in Nepal on students’ academic program, personal development, and intellectual development. Using a survey instrument as well as interviews and case studies, the authors link the reported outcomes to the objectives of the study abroad program. We are pleased to include in this volume of Frontiers an essay by Patti McGill Peterson, “New Directions for the Global Century.” McGill Peterson’s analysis of the changing and challenging context for global education inspires us to meet the demands of the 21st century with determination, creativity, and enhanced global collaboration. This volume of Frontiers concludes with reviews of books of interest to international educators, each relating to diverse intellectual foundations of the field: Jean-Philippe Mathy’s Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, and First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power by Warren Zimmermann. We encourage our readers to continue to suggest books of interest, and to submit reviews for consideration. The update on the Forum on Education Abroad that appears at the back of this volume reflects the continuing fruitful collaboration between Frontiers and the Forum. Together with the Forum, Frontiers will continue to encourage and support research studies on study abroad topics, and to disseminate this research as widely as possible. The next volume of Frontiers, due to be published in November, 2004, will be our tenth anniversary volume. It is appropriate that this anniversary volume will be a Special Issue that focuses on the assessment of the learning outcomes of study abroad, a topic that reflects the maturation of a field that is now beginning to document the results of its activity. Other Special Issues that are in the planning stages include: curriculum integration and study abroad, the arts and study abroad, and student development and study abroad. Finally, I want to thank the new sponsors of Frontiers who, together with our existing sponsors, make the publication of this journal possible. The sponsors of Frontiers are institutions with a strong commitment to international education, and we are proud to be supported by them. The editorial board takes seriously its responsibility to provide the very best writing about and research on study abroad to our readers, and the support of our sponsors makes this mission possible. Brian J. Whalen Editor

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In the wake of the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, (a satirical newspaper in Paris), there was much commentary on free speech, security, intelligence and the marginalization and dispossession of some young Muslim immigrants (and children of immigrants). Analysis has seemed, reasonably, to focus on economic opportunities, as well as addressing some identity and cultural issues, such as whether or not female Muslims should be allowed to wear a headscarf. The media reported that the two young men who seem to have led the attack on Charlie Hebdo had dropped out from school, going on to work low-wage jobs such as pizza delivery. Little of the news coverage details their education beyond that they were remembered as average Parisian boys, as media coverage focused of course on live breaking events, with less in-depth analysis of the social, economic and political factors driving the broader conflict between European and North American states and their Muslim immigrant residents and citizens. The Charlie Hebdo attacks, like 9/11, were only one expression of this broader escalating and expanding conflict. The academic literature does discuss in depth the history of France’s colonization of countries such as Algeria and Morocco, as well as the racist oppression and economic marginalization Maghrebi immigrant families face—even two generations later. (Bienkowski, 2010; Bowen 2007; Cesari 2002; Franz 2007; Limage 2010; Keaton 2005; Jugé and Perez 2006; Landof and Pagan 2005; Levine 2004; Mahmood 2006; Zimmerman 2015). This paper will thus explore the question of whether there is a “school to terror” pipeline—that is, is there anything about the pedagogy, curriculum, school culture or educational policies of France which might well be contributing to the radicalization of young people? I will conclude with consideration of what peace pedagogy might be able to contribute in terms of conflict transformation.

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Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissem*nt de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

Abstract:

Background: Copper-associated hepatitis (CAH) is a well-documented chronic hepatic disease in dogs. In some breeds, the disease results from an inherited defect in copper metabolism. In others, it is unclear whether its acummulation is a primary or secondary condition. Reports of copper accumulation in dog breeds that are not genetically predisposed are increasing.Aim: To describe the epidemiology, clinical and laboratory findings, liver biopsy techniques, and treatment response in dogs with CAH.Methods: A retrospective study was performed, drawing upon medical records from CAH dogs at a Veterinary Referral Hospital in Paris, France. The diagnosis of CAH had been confirmed in these patients by positive rhodanine staining of hepatic tissue obtained through biopsy. Medical records were mined for the following data: age at presentation, sex, breed, chief presenting complaints, abdominal ultrasound (US) findings, and rhodanine staining pattern.Results: A total of 17 dogs were included in the study. Median age at presentation was 8-year old (4–11). No sex predisposition was found. Terriers (4/17) and German Shepherd Dogs (GSD, 3/17) were overrepresented. American Staffordshire Terriers and Beauceron had not previously appeared in case reports on CAH; two of each breed were identified in this study. Clinical signs of affected dogs were non-specific. An incidental identification of increased liverenzymes was observed in 5/17 dogs. A heterogeneous, mottled liver was frequently described (5/17) on abdominal US. Liver biopsies were performed by US-guided percutaneous approach in 10/17 dogs, laparoscopy and laparotomy in 6/17 and 1/17, respectively. The rhodanine staining pattern was centrilobular (zone 3) in 8/17 dogs and periportal (zone 1) in 3/17 dogs. The pattern was considered multifocal in 6/17 dogs.Conclusion: Increased liver enzymes may be the only clinical finding in dogs with copper-associated hepatitis, reflecting the silent progression of this disease. Centrilobular pattern of rhodanine staining was observed in the majority of cases suggesting the primary condition of the disease. Results of this study are consistent with the current literature, which reports that terriers and GSD are predisposed to CAH. This is the first description of CAH in Beauceron and American Staffordshire Terrier dogs. Keywords: American Staffordshire Terrier, Beauceron, Copper-associated hepatitis, Liver biopsy, Rhodanine.

Abstract:

The genre of travel literature in the nineteenth century, particularly in the francophone context, allowed European writers to compare the Old World with the New World and cast judgments about democracy, religion, and race in comparison to Europe, themes which are particularly relevant to our discussion about modernity. One such example of this literature is Outre-Mer by Paul Bourget which was written over an eight month period beginning in July 1893 and was published in Paris in 1895. Bourget is best known for his 1883 collection Essais de psychologie contemporaine and for his 1889 novel Le disciple. Although his work is viewed largely as minor literature today, in the 1880s and 1890s, he was essentially a literary celebrity. Thus, in 1893 when he visited Canada at the very beginning of his trip he was received with great fan fare and the events of his three-week vacation were chronicled in nearly every Francophone Quebec Journal. However, when the book was published in 1895, the Canadians were surprised to find that Bourget did not mention them once, as if he had never even gone to Canada. The outcry from the Canadian public, in my opinion, was not just about being snubbed by a literary celebrity, but showed that French-speaking Canadians genuinely wanted to hear Paul Bourget’s opinion about their culture and society. To meet this need, a Canadian journalist and editor named Sylva Clapin wrote Sensations de Nouvelle-France with the subtitle “Pour faire suite à Outre-Mer” and signed the book Paul Bourget. My communication seeks to study Sylva Clapin’s appropriation of Bourget’s political and social ideology which he used to create his forgery and launch a polemic in the francophone journals of Québec in 1895. At the core of Bourget’s vision is the concept that while Democracy, Science (Positivism), and the problems of Race were essentially destroying the Old World, they were at the heart of what made the Americas great. These are the tools that Clapin applied to his study of French-speaking Canada which I propose to explore in my communication.

Abstract:

A publicação desta breve entrevista, realizada há exatamente 10 anos, neste número temático da REVELLI, visa não apenas relembrar as reflexões de um dos mais importantes historiadores europeus da atualidade, Roger Chartier[1], acerca do impacto das novas formas de produção e circulação virtuais dos textos para as práticas de escrita e de leitura. Sua publicação visa também, diante das mudanças velozes e significativas ocorridas desde então, reiterar a importância de se refletir sobre as “contradições que atravessam a cultura escrita atualmente”, relativas à dimensão técnica mas também ética que se impõe ao mundo da escrita hoje. Apesar das dúvidas e desafios evocados nesta entrevista já serem outros em relação aos da atualidade imediata, eles guardam em comum com as de nosso presente atual a importância de uma melhor compreensão do passado, das relações entre as mudanças técnicas e as práticas, das apropriações diversas, da questão ética de uma produção constante, em larga escala, ubíqua e segmentada, baseada e alimentada nos dados que fornecemos dia-a-dia com nossa produção e recepção virtuais de textos. [1] Roger Chartier (Lyon, 1945) é professor emérito no Collège de France, junto à cátedra Écrit et cultures dans l’Europe moderne, na EHESS - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales e, na condição de professor visitante, na University of Pennsylvania, nos EUA, e orienta estudos na Escola de Altos Estudos em Ciências Sociais (EHESS) em Paris. Presidiu o Conselho Científico da Biblioteca Nacional da França. Entre os prêmios recebidos, destaca-se o Annual Award de la American Printing History Association, em 1990, o grande prêmio de História da Academia Francesa (Prêmio Gobert), em 1992. Foi-lhe outorgado o título de Doutor honoris causa na Universidad Carlos III, em Madrid, e o título de Fellow da British Academy, entre outros prêmios e reconhecimentos. É um dos historiadores mais reconhecidos na atualidade. Seu trabalho se concentra na História Cultural da escrita e da leitura. Foi responsável, junto com Henri-Jean Martin, pela organização da obra magna História da Edição Francesa, assim como do terceiro volume de História da Vida Privada, projeto dirigido por Georges Duby e Phillipe Ariès. É autor de uma obra cujo impacto se faz reconhecer pelas numerosas traduções em diversas línguas. Em português já conta com 15 livros traduzidos e vários artigos publicados em livros e revistas, cuja repercussão o traz ao Brasil várias vezes ao ano a convite de pesquisadores de diferentes áreas das Ciências Humanas. Entre os livros publicados no Brasil, destacamos: Práticas da Leitura (1996); A ordem dos livros: leitores, autores e bibliotecas na Europa entre os séculos XIV e XVIII (1994); A Aventura do livro: do leitor ao navegador (1998); À Beira da Falésia: a história entre certezas e inquietude (2002); Leitura e Leitores na França do Antigo Regime (2003); Inscrever e Apagar: cultura escrita e literatura (2007); Origens culturais da Revolução Francesa (2008). “O que é um autor”: Revisão de uma genealogia (2012); A mão do autor e a mente do editor (2014); Do palco à página (2017).

Abstract:

Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand duch*ess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand duch*ess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand duch*ess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circ*mstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand duch*ess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/duch*ess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand duch*ess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/duch*ess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.

Abstract:

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.

Abstract:

I called your producer on the way here in the car because I was very excited. I found out … I did one of those genetic testing things and I found out that I'm 63 percent Irish … I had no idea. I had no idea! I thought I was Scottish and Welsh. It turns out my parents are just full of sh*t, I guess. But now I’m Irish and it just makes so much sense! I'm a really good drinker. I love St. Patrick's Day. Potatoes are delicious. I'm looking forward to meeting all my cousins … [to Conan O’Brien] You and I are probably related! … Now I get to say things like, “It’s in me genes! I love that Conan O’Brien; he’s such a nice fella.” You’re kinda like a giant leprechaun. (Reese Witherspoon, Tuesday 21 March 2017)IntroductionAs an Irishman and a football fan, I watched the unfolding 2016 UEFA European Championship in France (hereafter ‘Euro 2016’) with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Although the Republic of Ireland team was eventually knocked out of the competition in defeat to the host nation, the players performed extremely well – most notably in defeating Italy 1:0. It is not the on-field performance of the Irish team that interests me in this short article, however, but rather how Irish fans travelling to the competition were depicted in the surrounding international news coverage. In particular, I focus on the centrality of fan footage – shot on smart phones and uploaded to YouTube (in most cases by fans themselves) – in this news coverage. In doing so, I reflect on how sports fans contribute to wider understandings of nationness in the global imagination and how their behaviour is often interpreted (as in the case here) through long-established tropes about people and places. The Media ManifoldTo “depict” something is to represent it in words and pictures. As the contemporary world is largely shaped by and dependent on mass media – and different forms of media have merged (or “converged”) through digital media platforms – mediated forms of depiction have become increasingly important in our lives. On one hand, the constant connectivity made possible in the digital age has made the representation of people and places less controllable, insofar as the information and knowledge about our world circulating through media devices are partly created by ordinary people. On the other hand, traditional broadcast media arguably remain the dominant narrators of people and places worldwide, and their stories, Gerbner reminds us, are largely formula-driven and dramatically charged, and work to “retribalize” modern society. However, a more important point, I suggest, is that so-called new and old media can no longer be thought of as separate and discrete; rather, our attention should focus on the complex interrelations made possible by deep mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp).As an example, consider that the Youtube video of Reese Witherspoon’s recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien chat show – from which the passage at the start of this article is taken – had already been viewed 54,669 times when I first viewed it, a mere 16 hours after it was originally posted. At that point, the televised interview had already been reported on in a variety of international digital news outlets, including rte.ie, independent.ie., nydailynews.com, msn.com, huffingtonpost.com, cote-ivoire.com – and myriad entertainment news sites. In other words, this short interview was consumed synchronously and asynchronously, over a number of different media platforms; it was viewed and reviewed, and critiqued and commented upon, and in turn found itself the subject of news commentary, which fed the ongoing cycle. And yet, it is important to also note that a multiplicity of media interactions does not automatically give rise to oppositional discourse and ideological contestation, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, how ostensibly ‘different’ kinds of media can work to produce a broadly shared construction of a people and place is particularly relevant here. Just as Reese Witherspoon’s interview on the Conan O’Brien show perpetuates a highly stereotypical version of Irishness across a number of platforms, news coverage of Irish fans at Euro 2016 largely conformed to established tropes about Irish people, but this was also fed – to some extent – by Irish fans themselves.Irish Identity, Sport, and the Global ImaginationThere is insufficient space here to describe in any detail the evolving representation of Irish identity, about which a vast literature has developed (nationally and internationally) over the past several decades. As with other varieties of nationness, Irishness has been constructed across a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, art, film, novels, travel brochures, plays and documentaries. Importantly, Irishness has also to a great extent been constructed outside of Ireland (Arrowsmith; Negra).As is well known, the Irish were historically constructed by their colonial masters as a small uncivilised race – as primitive wayward children, prone to “sentimentality, ineffectuality, nervous excitability and unworldliness” (Fanning 33). When pondering the “Celtic nature,” the renowned English poet and cultural critic Mathew Arnold concluded that “sentimental” was the best single term to use (100). This perception pervaded internationally, with early depictions of Irish-Americans in US cinema centring on varieties of negative excess, such as lawlessness, drunkenness and violence (Rains). Against this prevailing image of negative excess, the intellectuals and artists associated with what became known as the Celtic Revival began a conscious effort to “rebrand” Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, reversing the negatives of the colonial project and celebrating Irish tradition, language and culture (Fanning).At first, only distinctly Irish sports associated with the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) were co-opted in this very particular nation-building project. Since then, however, sport more generally has acted as a site for the negotiation of a variety of overlapping Irish identities. Cronin, for example, describes how the GAA successfully repackaged itself in the 1990s to reflect the confidence of Celtic Tiger Irishness while also remaining rooted in the counties and parishes across Ireland. Studies of Irish football and rugby have similarly examined how these sports have functioned as representatives of changed or evolving Irish identities (Arrowsmith; Free). And yet, throughout Ireland’s changing economic fortunes – from boom to bust, to the gradual renewal of late – a touristic image of Irishness has remained hegemonic in the global imagination. In popular culture, and especially American popular culture, Ireland is often depicted as a kind of pre-industrial theme park – a place where the effects of modernity are felt less, or are erased altogether (Negra). The Irish are known for their charm and sociability; in Clancy’s words, they are seen internationally as “simple, clever and friendly folk” (98). We can identify a number of representational tropes within this dominant image, but two in particular are apposite here: ‘smallness’ and ‘happy-go-luckiness’.Sporting NewsBefore we consider Euro 2016, it is worth briefly considering how the news industry approaches such events. “News”, Dahlgren reminds us, is not so much “information” as it is a specific kind of cultural discourse. News, in other words, is a particular kind of discursive composition that constructs and narrates stories in particular ways. Approaching sports coverage from this vantage point, Poulton and Roderick (xviii) suggest that “sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama.” Similarly, Jason Tuck observes that the media have long had a tendency to employ the “vocabulary of war” to “hype up sporting events,” a discursive tactic which, he argues, links “the two areas of life where the nation is a primary signifier” (190-191).In short, sport is abundant in news values, and media professionals strive to produce coverage that is attractive, interesting and exciting for audiences. Stead (340) suggests that there are three key characteristics governing the production of “media sports packages”: spectacularisation, dramatisation, and personalisation. These production characteristics ensure that sports coverage is exciting and interesting for viewers, but that it also in some respects conforms to their expectations. “This ‘emergent’ quality of sport in the media helps meet the perpetual audience need for something new and different alongside what is familiar and known” (Rowe 32). The disproportionate attention to Irish fans at Euro 2016 was perhaps new, but the overall depiction of the Irish was rather old, I would argue. The news discourse surrounding Euro 2016 worked to suggest, in the Irish case at least, that the nation was embodied not only in its on-field athletic representatives but more so, perhaps, in its travelling fans.Euro 2016In June 2016 the Euros kicked off in France, with the home team beating Romania 2-1. Despite widespread fears of potential terrorist attacks and disruption, the event passed successfully, with Portugal eventually lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy. As the competition progressed, the behaviour of Irish fans quickly became a central news story, fuelled in large part by smart phone footage uploaded to the internet by Irish fans themselves. Amongst the many videos uploaded to the internet, several became the focus of news reports, especially those in which the goodwill and childlike playfulness of the Irish were on show. In one such video, Irish fans are seen singing lullabies to a baby on a Bordeaux train. In another video, Irish fans appear to help a French couple change a flat tire. In yet another video, Irish fans sing cheerfully as they clean up beer cans and bottles. (It is noteworthy that as of July 2017, some of these videos have been viewed several million times.)News providers quickly turned their attention to Irish fans, sometimes using these to draw stark contrasts with the behaviour of other fans, notably English and Russian fans. Buzzfeed, followed by ESPN, followed by Sky News, Le Monde, Fox News, the Washington Post and numerous other providers celebrated the exploits of Irish fans, with some such as Sky News and Aljazeera going so far as to produce video montages of the most “memorable moments” involving “the boys in green.” In an article titled ‘Irish fans win admirers at Euro 2016,’ Fox News reported that “social media is full of examples of Irish kindness” and that “that Irish wit has been a fixture at the tournament.” Aljazeera’s AJ+ news channel produced a video montage titled ‘Are Irish fans the champions of Euro 2016?’ which included spliced footage from some of the aforementioned videos. The Daily Mirror (UK edition) praised their “fun loving approach to watching football.” Similarly, a headline for NPR declared, “And as if they could not be adorable enough, in a quiet moment, Irish fans sang on a French train to help lull a baby to sleep.” It is important to note that viewer comments under many of these articles and videos were also generally effusive in their praise. For example, under the video ‘Irish Fans help French couple change flat tire,’ one viewer (Amsterdam 410) commented, ‘Irish people nicest people in world by far. they always happy just amazing people.’ Another (Juan Ardilla) commented, ‘Irish fans restored my faith in humanity.’As the final stages of the tournament approached, the Mayor of Paris announced that she was awarding the Medal of the City of Paris to Irish fans for their sporting goodwill. Back home in Ireland, the behaviour of Irish fans in France was also celebrated, with President Michael D. Higgins commenting that “Ireland could not wish for better ambassadors abroad.” In all of this news coverage, the humble kindness, helpfulness and friendliness of the Irish are depicted as native qualities and crystallise as a kind of ideal national character. Though laudatory, the tropes of smallness and happy-go-luckiness are again evident here, as is the recurrent depiction of Irishness as an ‘innocent identity’ (Negra). The “boys” in green are spirited in a non-threatening way, as children generally are. Notably, Stephan Reich, journalist with German sports magazine 11Freunde wrote: “the qualification of the Irish is a godsend. The Boys in Green can celebrate like no other nation, always peaceful, always sympathetic and emphatic, with an infectious, childlike joy.” Irishness as Antidote? The centrality of the Irish fan footage in the international news coverage of Euro 2016 is significant, I suggest, but interpreting its meaning is not a simple or straightforward task. Fans (like everyone) make choices about how to present themselves, and these choices are partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly spontaneous and partly conditioned. Pope (2008), for example, draws on Emile Durkheim to explain the behaviour of sports fans sociologically. “Sporting events,” Pope tells us, “exemplify the conditions of religious ritual: high rates of group interaction, focus on sacred symbols, and collective ritual behaviour symbolising group membership and strengthening shared beliefs, values, aspirations and emotions” (Pope 85). Pope reminds us, in other words, that what fans do and say, and wear and sing – in short, how they perform – is partly spontaneous and situated, and partly governed by a long-established fandom pedagogy that implies familiarity with a whole range of international football fan styles and embodied performances (Rowe). To this, we must add that fans of a national sports team generally uphold shared understandings of what constitutes desirable and appropriate patriotic behaviour. Finally, in the case reported here, we must also consider that the behaviour of Irish fans was also partly shaped by their awareness of participating in the developing media sport spectacle and, indeed, of their own position as ‘suppliers’ of news content. In effect, Irish fans at Euro 2016 occupied an interesting hybrid position between passive consumption and active production – ‘produser’ fans, as it were.On one hand, therefore, we can consider fan footage as evidence of spontaneous displays of affective unity, captured by fellow participants. The realism or ‘authenticity’ of these supposedly natural and unscripted performances is conveyed by the grainy images, and amateur, shaky camerawork, which ironically work to create an impression of unmediated reality (see Goldman and Papson). On the other hand, Mike Cronin considers them contrived, staged, and knowingly performative, and suggestive of “hyper-aware” Irish fans playing up to the camera.However, regardless of how we might explain or interpret these fan performances, it is the fact that they play a role in making Irishness public that most interests me here. For my purposes, the most important consideration is how the patriotic performances of Irish fans both fed and harmonized with the developing news coverage; the resulting depiction of the Irish was partly an outcome of journalistic conventions and partly a consequence of the self-essentialising performances of Irish fans. In a sense, these fan-centred videos were ready-made or ‘packaged’ for an international news audience: they are short, dramatic and entertaining, and their ideological content is in keeping with established tropes about Irishness. As a consequence, the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 – itself a mixture of international news values and home-grown essentialism – valorised a largely touristic understanding of Irishness, albeit one that many Irish people wilfully celebrate.Why such a construction of Irishness is internationally appealing is unclear, but it is certainly not new. John Fanning (26) cites a number of writers in highlighting that Ireland has long nurtured a romantic self-image that presents the country as a kind of balm for the complexities of the modern world. For example, he cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who observed in 2001 that “people all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality hoping to siphon off what they can feed to their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumption and computers.” Similarly, Diane Negra writes that “virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalisation to post-modern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction” (3). Earlier, I described the Arnoldian image of the Irish as a race governed by ‘negative excess’. Arguably, in a time of profound ideological division and resurgent cultural nationalism – a time of polarisation and populism, of Trumpism and Euroscepticism – this ‘excess’ has once again been positively recoded, and now it is the ‘sentimental excess’ of the Irish that is imagined as a salve for the cultural schisms of our time.ConclusionMuch has been made of new media powers to contest official discourses. Sports fans, too, are now considered much less ‘controllable’ on account of their ability to disrupt official messages online (as well as offline). The case of Irish fans at Euro 2016, however, offers a reminder that we must avoid routine assumptions that the “uses” made of “new” and “old” media are necessarily divergent (Rowe, Ruddock and Hutchins). My interest here was less in what any single news item or fan-produced video tells us, but rather in the aggregate construction of Irishness that emerges in the media-sport discourse surrounding this event. Relatedly, in writing about the London Olympics, Wardle observed that most of what appeared on social media concerning the Games did not depart significantly from the celebratory tone of mainstream news media organisations. “In fact the absence of any story that threatened the hegemonic vision of the Games as nation-builder, shows that while social media provided an additional and new form of newsgathering, it had to fit within the traditional news structures, routines and agenda” (Wardle 12).Obviously, it is important to acknowledge the contestability of all media texts, including the news items and fan footage mentioned here, and to recognise that such texts are open to multiple interpretations based on diverse reading positions. And yet, here I have suggested that there is something of a ‘preferred’ reading in the depiction of Irish fans at Euro 2016. The news coverage, and the footage on which it draws, are important because of what they collectively suggest about Irish national identity: here we witness a shift from identity performance to identity writ large, and one means of analysing their international (and intertextual significance), I have suggested, is to view them through the prism of established tropes about Irishness.Travelling sports fans – for better or worse – are ‘carriers’ of places and cultures, and they remind us that “there is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall” (Rowe 24). There is no question, to borrow Rowe’s term, that Ireland’s ‘stocks’ rose considerably on account of Euro 2016. In news terms, Irish fans provided entertainment value; they were the ‘human interest’ story of the tournament; they were the ‘feel-good’ factor of the event – and importantly, they were the suppliers of much of this content (albeit unofficially). Ultimately, I suggest that we think of the overall depiction of the Irish at Euro 2016 as a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-presentational practices of Irish fans themselves. The result was not simply a depiction of idealised fandom, but more importantly, an idealisation of a people and a place, in which the plucky little people on tour became the global standard bearers of Irish identity.ReferencesArnold, Mathew. Celtic Literature. 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Abstract:

Introduction The scientific validity of climate change claims, how to intervene (if at all) in environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change, and the adaptation and mitigation needed with any given climate change scenario, are contested areas of public, policy and academic discourses. For marginalised populations, the climate discourses around adaptation, mitigation, vulnerability and resilience are of particular importance. This paper considers the silence around disabled people in these discourses. Marci Roth of the Spinal Cord Injury Association testified before Congress in regards to the Katrina disaster: [On August 29] Susan Daniels called me to enlist my help because her sister in-law, a quadriplegic woman in New Orleans, had been unsuccessfully trying to evacuate to the Superdome for two days. […] It was clear that this woman, Benilda Caixetta, was not being evacuated. I stayed on the phone with Benilda, for the most part of the day. […] She kept telling me she’d been calling for a ride to the Superdome since Saturday; but, despite promises, no one came. The very same paratransit system that people can’t rely on in good weather is what was being relied on in the evacuation. […] I was on the phone with Benilda when she told me, with panic in her voice “the water is rushing in.” And then her phone went dead. We learned five days later that she had been found in her apartment dead, floating next to her wheelchair. […] Benilda did not have to drown. (National Council on Disability, emphasis added) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is the “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC, Climate Change 2007). Adaptations can be anticipatory or reactive, and depending on their degree of spontaneity they can be autonomous or planned (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report). Adaptations can be private or public (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report), technological, behavioural, managerial and structural (National Research Council of Canada). Adaptation, in the context of human dimensions of global change, usually refers to a process, action or outcome in a system (household, community, group, sector, region, country) in order for that system to better cope with, manage or adjust to some changing condition, stress, hazard, risk or opportunity (Smit and Wandel). Adaptation can encompass national or regional strategies as well as practical steps taken at the community level or by individuals. According to Smit et al, a framework for systematically defining adaptations is based on three questions: (i) adaptation to what; (ii) who or what adapts; and (iii) how does adaptation occur? These are essential questions that have to be looked at from many angles including cultural and anthropological lenses as well as lenses of marginalised and highly vulnerable populations. Mitigation (to reduce or prevent changes in the climate system), vulnerability (the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, the adverse effects of climate change), and resilience (the amount of change a system can undergo without changing state), are other important concepts within the climate change discourse. Non-climate stresses can increase vulnerability to climate change by reducing resilience and can also reduce adaptive capacity because of resource deployment to competing needs. Extending this to the context of disabled people, ableism (sentiment to expect certain abilities within humans) (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”) and disablism (the unwillingness to accommodate different needs) (Miller, Parker and Gillinson) are two concepts that will thus play themselves out in climate discourses. The “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC 2007 report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, states: “Poor communities can be especially vulnerable, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas. They tend to have more limited adaptive capacities, and are more dependent on climate-sensitive resources such as local water and food supplies.” From this quote one can conclude that disabled people are particularly impacted, as the majority of disabled people live in poverty (Elwan). For instance, CARE International, a humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft, a company that specialises in the calculation, analysis and visualisation of global risks, conclude: “The degree of vulnerability is determined by underlying natural, human, social, physical and financial factors and is a major reason why poor people—especially those in marginalised social groups like women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities—are most affected by disasters” (CARE International). The purpose of this paper is to expose the reader to (a) how disabled people are situated in the culture of the climate, adaptation, mitigation and resilience discourse; (b) how one would answer the three questions, (i) adaptation to what, (ii) who or what adapts, and (iii) how does adaptation occur (Smit et al), using a disabled people lens; and (c) what that reality of the involvement of disabled people within the climate change discourse might herald for other groups in the future. The paper contends that there is a pressing need for the climate discourse to be more inclusive and to develop a new social contract to modify existing dynamics of ableism and disablism so as to avoid the uneven distribution of evident burdens already linked to climate change. A Culture of Neglect: The Situation of Disabled People As climates changes, environmental events that are classified as natural disasters are expected to be more frequent. In the face of recent disaster responses, how effective have these efforts been as they relate to the needs and challenges faced by disabled people? Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the National Council on Disability (NCD) in the United States estimated that 155,000 people with disabilities lived in the three cities hardest hit by the hurricane (about 25 per cent of the cities’ populations). The NCD urged emergency managers and government officials to recognise that the need for basic necessities by hurricane survivors with disabilities was “compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments … [which include] people who are blind, people who are deaf, people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers, crutches, people with service animals, and people with mental health needs.” The NCD estimated that a disproportionate number of fatalities were people with disabilities. They cited one statistic from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP): “73 per cent of Hurricane Katrina-related deaths in New Orleans area were among persons age 60 and over, although they comprised only 15 per cent of the population in New Orleans.” As the NCD stated, “most of those individuals had medical conditions and functional or sensory disabilities that made them more vulnerable. Many more people with disabilities under the age of 60 died or were otherwise impacted by the hurricanes.” As these numbers are very likely linked to the impaired status of the elderly, it seems reasonable to assume similar numbers for non-elderly disabled people. Hurricane Katrina is but one example of how disabled people are neglected in a disaster (Hemingway and Priestley; Fjord and Manderson). Disabled people were also disproportionately impacted in other disasters, such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan (Nakamura) or the 2003 heatwave in France, where 63 per cent of heat-related deaths occurred in institutions, with a quarter of these in nursing homes (Holstein et al.). A review of 18 US heatwave response plans revealed that although people with mental or chronic illnesses and the homeless constitute a significant proportion of the victims in recent heatwaves, only one plan emphasised outreach to disabled persons, and only two addressed the shelter and water needs of the homeless (Ebi and Meehl; Bernhard and McGeehin). Presence of Disabled People in Climate Discourse Although climate change will disproportionately impact disabled people, despite the less than stellar record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people, and despite the fact that other social groups (such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people) are mentioned in climate-related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008, the same reports do not mention disabled people. Even worse, the majority of the material generated by, and physically set up for, discourses on climate, is inaccessible for many disabled people (Australian Human Rights Commission). For instance, the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, contains Box 8.2: Gender and natural disasters, makes the following points: (a) “men and women are affected differently in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction”; (b) “natural disasters have been shown to result in increased domestic violence against, and post-traumatic stress disorders in, women”; and (c) “women make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery.” The content of Box 8.2 acknowledges the existence of different perspectives and contributions to the climate discourse, and that it is beneficial to explore these differences. It seems reasonable to assume that differences in perspectives, contributions and impact may well also exist between people with and without disabilities, and that it may be likewise beneficial to explore these differences. Disabled people are differently affected in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction. Disabled people could also make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery, important as distributors of relief efforts and in reconstruction design. The Bonn Declaration from the 2007 international conference, Disasters are always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations, highlighted many problems disabled people are facing and gives recommendations for inclusive disaster preparedness planning, for inclusive response in acute emergency situations and immediate rehabilitation measures, and for inclusive post-disaster reconstruction and development measures. Many workshops were initiated by disabled people groups, such as Rehabilitation International. However, the disabled people disaster adaptation and mitigation discourse is not mainstreamed. Advocacy by people with disability for accessible transport and universal or “life-cycle” housing (among other things) shows how they can contribute significantly to more effective social systems and public facilities. These benefit everyone and help to shift public expectations towards accessible and flexible amenities and services—for example, emergency response and evacuation procedures are much easier for all if such facilities are universally accessible. Most suggestions by disabled people for a more integrative, accessible physical environment and societal attitude benefit everyone, and gain special importance with the ever-increasing proportion of elderly people in society. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is intended to be a balanced assessment of current knowledge on climate change mitigation. However, none of the 2007 IPCC reports mention disabled people. Does that mean that disabled people are not impacted by, or impact, climate change? Does no knowledge of adaptation, mitigation and adaptation capacity from a disabled people lens exist, or does the knowledge not reach the IPCC, or does the IPCC judge this knowledge as irrelevant? This culture of neglect and unbalanced assessment of knowledge evident in the IPCC reports was recognised before for rise of a ‘global’ climate discourse. For instance, a 2001 Canadian government document asked that research agendas be developed with the involvement of, among others, disabled people (Health Canada). The 2009 Nairobi Declaration on Africa’s response to climate change (paragraph 36) also asks for the involvement of disabled people (African Ministerial Conference on the Environment). However, so far nothing has trickled up to the international bodies, like the IPCC, or leading conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009. Where Will It End? In his essay, “We do not need climate change apartheid in adaptation”, in the Human Development Report 2007/2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu suggests that we are drifting into a situation of global adaptation apartheid—that adaptation becomes a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale (United Nations Development Programme). He uses the term “adaptation apartheid” to highlight the inequality of support for adaptation capacity between high and low income countries: “Inequality in capacity to adapt to climate change is emerging as a potential driver of wider disparities in wealth, security and opportunities for human development”. I submit that “adaptation apartheid” also exists in regard to disabled people, with the invisibility of disabled people in the climate discourse being just one facet. The unwillingness to accommodate, to help the “other,” is nothing new for disabled people. The ableism that favours species-typical bodily functioning (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”; Wolbring, “Why NBIC?”) and disablism (Miller, Parker, and Gillinson)—the lack of accommodation enthusiasm for the needs of people with ‘below’ species-typical body abilities and the unwillingness to adapt to the needs of “others”—is a form of “adaptation apartheid,” of accommodation apartheid, of adaptation disablism that has been battled by disabled people for a long time. In a 2009 online survey of 2000 British people, 38 per cent believed that most people in British society see disabled people as a “drain on resources” (Scope). A majority of human geneticist concluded in a survey in 1999 that disabled people will never be given the support they need (Nippert and Wolff). Adaptation disablism is visible in the literature and studies around other disasters. The 1988 British Medical Association discussion document, Selection of casualties for treatment after nuclear attack, stated “casualties whose injuries were likely to lead to a permanent disability would receive lower priority than those expected to fully recover” (Sunday Morning Herald). Famine is seen to lead to increased infanticide, increased competitiveness and decreased collaboration (Participants of the Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival Session). Ableism and disablism notions experienced by disabled people can now be extended to include those challenges expected to arise from the need to adapt to climate change. It is reasonable to expect that ableism will prevail, expecting people to cope with certain forms of climate change, and that disablism will be extended, with the ones less affected being unwilling to accommodate the ones more affected beyond a certain point. This ableism/disablism will not only play itself out between high and low income countries, as Desmond Tutu described, but also within high income countries, as not every need will be accommodated. The disaster experience of disabled people is just one example. And there might be climate change consequences that one can only mitigate through high tech bodily adaptations that will not be available to many of the ones who are so far accommodated in high income countries. Desmond Tutu submits that adaptation apartheid might work for the fortunate ones in the short term, but will be destructive for them in the long term (United Nations Development Programme). Disability studies scholar Erik Leipoldt proposed that the disability perspective of interdependence is a practical guide from the margins for making new choices that may lead to a just and sustainable world—a concept that reduces the distance between each other and our environment (Leipoldt). This perspective rejects ableism and disablism as it plays itself out today, including adaptation apartheid. Planned adaptation involves four basic steps: information development and awareness-raising; planning and design; implementation; and monitoring and evaluation (Smit et al). Disabled people have important knowledge to contribute to these four basic steps that goes far beyond their community. Their understanding and acceptance of, for example, the concept of interdependence, is just one major contribution. Including the concept of interdependence within the set of tools that inform the four basic steps of adaptation and other facets of climate discourse has the potential to lead to a decrease of adaptation apartheid, and to increase the utility of the climate discourse for the global community as a whole. References African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. 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Holstein, J., et al. “Were Less Disabled Patients the Most Affected by the 2003 Heatwave in Nursing Homes in Paris, France?” Journal of Public Health Advance 27.4 (2005): 359-65. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_wg2_report_impacts_adaptation_and_vulnerability.htm ›. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Summary for Policymakers.” Eds. O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, C. E. Hanson, and M.L.Parry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 7-22. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-spm.pdf ›. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 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Abstract:

IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, hom*ogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. 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Abstract:

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circ*mstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circ*mstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisem*nts: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

Abstract:

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull hom*ogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. 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Abstract:

This essay aims to show some approaches in the understanding of the lifelong learning concepts, knowledge, competence, from a literature review with the contributions of Dewey, Bruner, Freire, Schon and Tardif among others. Coming from theoretical studies carried out by Italian researchers and a Brazilian researcher, through their Research Centers/Laboratories and international collaborative partnership between Brazilian and Italian Universities, this text addresses from the undertake scientific literature, key terms which support the held studies. From the considerations, it is highlighted the regular understanding around lifelong learning concept, which considers the human condition for the permanent learning and valuing experiences from different contexts, such as family and school (basic and higher education). In view of this, the approximation between the concepts of competence and knowledge was also highlighted, recognized and valued as fundamental elements for the learning process and for the development of critical and reflexive thinking, and consequently transforming daily problems and challenges. The task reinforces the research network, pursuing the improving theoretical knowledge to subsidize the scientific research production in the educational field, besides Brazilian or Italian academic walls.SommarioQuesto saggio ha l’obiettivo di presentare gli approcci sulla definizione dei concetti di apprendimento permanente, saperi e competenze, partendo da una revisione della letteratura, con i contributi,tra gli altri, di Dewey, Bruner, Freire, Schon e Tardif. A partire dall’analisi teorica condotta da ricercatori italiani e una ricercatrice brasiliana, mediante i loro centri di ricerca/laboratório, e l’accordo di collaborazione internazionale tra l’università brasiliana e italiana, questo testo affronta, in base alla letteratura scientifica, i termini chiave che supportano gli studi realizzati. Dalle argomentazioni espresse, emerge la posizione comune sul concetto di apprendimento permanente o per tutta la vita, che considera l’approccio umanistico e la valorizzazione delle esperienze provenienti da diversi contesti come la famiglia e la scuola (in particolare di base e superiore). In questa prospettiva, si mette in evidenzia anche l'approssimazione semantica tra i concetti di competenza e saperi, riconosciuti e valorizzati come elementi fondamentali per il processo di apprendimento e per lo sviluppo del pensiero critico e riflessivo, e di conseguenza trasformatore rispetto ai problemi e alle sfide quotidiane della vita. Il presente contributo rafforza la rete di ricerca congiunta, con l'obiettivo di migliorare le conoscenze teoriche per supportare lo sviluppo di ricerche in campo educativo, al di là delle mura accademiche brasiliane o italiane.Keywords: Lifelong learning, Knowledge, Strategic competence, Reflexive competence.Parole chiave: Apprendimento permanente, Saperi, Competenze strategiche, Competenze di riflessione.Palavras-chave: Aprendizagem permanente, Conhecimento, Competência estratégica, Competência reflexiva.ReferencesALBERICI, A. La possibilità di cambiare. Apprendere ad apprendere come risorsa strategica per la vita. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2008.ALBERICI, A.; DI RIENZO, P. Learning to learn for individual and society. In: R. Deakin CRICK, C. S.; K. REN (Eds), Learning to Learn. International perspectives from theory and practice. New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 87-104.BALDACCI M. Trattato di pedagogia generale, Roma: Carocci Editore, 2002.BANDURA A. 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Abstract:

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond hom*o sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting hom*o sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

Abstract:

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. 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