Chapter 3 deals with La mujer sin cabeza,which appears to allude to the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-82 and to the disappeared. The chapter proposes that this film can be understood as a form of counter-memory, that both avoids neat expositions of the past, whilst looking at its repetitions in the present. Drawing on Derrida, the chapter shows how the presence of spectres in La mujer sin cabeza recalls the victims of both the dictatorship and of contemporary neo-liberalism. It argues that spectres consistently puncture the comfortable bourgeois world of the film through silent gazes of resistance and knowledge, gazes which constitute a demand for justice. As the chapter goes on to argue, these gazes – repressed, emanating from the film’s visual periphery – are aligned in its meaning system with challenges to the bourgeois family associated with the adolescent girl and her transgressive, cross-class, same-sex desire. Through these images, the film gestures to a different kind of community to come, to the possibility of a world beyond the stifling and exclusionary world of the family, and hints at queer and non-normative forms of kinship and collectivity which transgress previously established social hierarchies of class and ethnicity.

The documents in this chapter describe the Normans' involvement in the Mediterranean, in Italy, and to a lesser extent in Byzantium, Spain and the Holy Land. The settlement of Normans in southern Italy was a very gradual process of military support for local princes and a slow emancipation of soldiers who grew from subordinates to become local lords themselves. The crusading movement offered a reason why people from north-western Europe went to the Mediterranean and spent some time in Italy.

This chapter comments on two books published at the end of the 1990s, Quarantine and Being Dead, which together represent perhaps Jim Crace's most lauded fiction. Each seems very different from the other, but both correlate human responses, emotional and physical, to hostile environments at the edge of civilisation, away from the rhythm of people's habitual lives. Both novels present a recurrent pattern into which other recognisably Cracean elements are interwoven; the landscape itself and its place in nature subsumes and dwarfs various individuals who are faced with the issues of human belief, human identity and the universal presence of death in life and its metaphysical meaning, or lack of it. Death is immanent in life. In both texts, a sense of the mundanity of the quotidian intersects with descriptions that evoke the symbolic power of nature.

The documents in this section examine the great variety of political regimes in late-medieval Italy: from consolidated communes such as Florence or Venice, to stable or unstable 'tyrannies' in Pisa, Ferrara or Verona. The Italian communes of the thirteenth century have been celebrated for their recreation of the institutions and methods of ancient democracy. From the middle decades of the thirteenth century, political life in northern Italy began to be dominated by a new breed of political and military leaders, generally known as tyrants or signori. If the major political developments of the thirteenth century were the appearance of city-lordships and the consolidation of communes, the major political development of the fourteenth was the construction of regional states, in which one dominant city came to control several formerly independent city-states.

As David Kilcullen would have it, contemporary terrorism is often a key element in what he defines as ‘hybrid’ warfare. The new social media, the old mass media, increasing urbanization throughout the world and the proximity of the major cities to vital waterways have helped to create situations in which new wars combine guerrilla warfare, urban guerrilla tactics, terrorism and the adroit use of the media to pose challenges that are difficult to defeat. Leftist conflicts in Central and South America, the Middle East, and India and Pakistan offer illustrations.

Public modesty became paradigmatic of a society that rendered sexuality into a threat, a shameful and dangerous activity from which one needed to be protected. The history of public modesty conceived as one of the spatialization of sexuality is a history of its "visibilization". It posits the examination of the ensemble of practices that transformed sexuality into a spectacle, that is to say, into an event whose specificity is to expose oneself. Sexual life was no longer organized by either marriage or space. We live in a sexual space that judges have incrementally constructed since the beginning of the nineteenth century without ever having raised, during the last reform of the French Penal Code, the issue of either its artificiality or its relationship with the society that we sought to leave behind. In this sense, the history of public modesty can be seen as an archeology of contemporary sexual scenography.

A brief historical overview of the discourses by which in Britain, until the late 1990s, popular genres were excluded from accounts of national cinemas, and of the gradual but very slow recognition, from the late 1990s, of these genres as worthy objects of film studies.

This chapter discusses Daniil Kharms – Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev in real life – a writer who was only able to gain limited local renown as an avant-garde eccentrist from Leningrad and a children's writer of the 1920s and the 1930s. However, he is also considered as the main example of a certain ‘Russian brand of absurdity’. The chapter shows the changes that occurred in Kharms's works, and shows that the boundaries between genres and the differences between fragment and whole are fluid in his works. It then looks at Kharms's use of the poetics of extremism, which he constantly adopted at various levels, and humour theory, which is considered as an essential approach to his work. The chapter also considers Kharms's writing, which can be closely connected to writers during and after his period.