[Persian Translator's Preface]

[SP1-211b] In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate, for those who need help, thanks and praise are due wholly to the Creator, who with omnipotence has created the land of the human body and has lodged in it the kinglike soul and the external and internal senses, which are like the subordinate administrators under his [the soul’s] command; and to each He has appointed its place. Boundless praise be to the Prophet, who is the cause of the glory of humankind and the reason for the creation of the world – God bless him and grant salvation to him and to his family. May it not be hidden from the minds of the masters of discernment that this poor, incapable wretch, ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim al-Ḥusaynī, in accordance with the request of some like-minded friends that a book be written on the merits of Balkh so that they be recorded in the annals of time, has spent a lifetime thinking about this idea. [P-1a] Then a happy event occurred, and a glorious morning dawned in the East, and a book was discovered on the merits of Balkh [P-1b] and the qualities of its people, composed by the Shaykh al-Islām, the descendant of the predecessors, the master of the successors Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar b. Muḥammad b. Dāwūd al-Wāʿiẓ Ṣafī al-Milla wa-l-Dīn al-Balkhī, may God grant him repose and make paradise his resting place, in his blessed handwriting and in the Arabic language, with elegant diction, pure composition, and boundless eloquence.

In 1868, Dundee's annual local council election generated intense public interest. In the weeks leading up to the poll, the Dundee Working Men's Association and Trades Council organised a campaign to persuade the town's leading manufacturers to stand for election. The Dundee Advertiser reported that: ‘Showing how good a feeling exists between employers and employed, the latter are now looking to the former to set aside business considerations and assist in giving new dignity, weight and influence to the Council.’ Dundee's emergence as a major centre for textile manufacture, however, had begun some fifty years earlier. Studies of the development of the town in the nineteenth century have invariably emphasised the dominance of manufacturing over the economy, the labour market and the townscape. The mill and factory owners at the forefront of this industrial growth attained unrivalled positions of wealth and status as the leading employers of labour in the town, but they did not take over the reins of power in local political institutions. The aim of this chapter is to account for this apparent reluctance, on the part of Dundee's manufacturing elite, to play a leading role in local government.

Although Dundee has not previously benefited from any detailed study of civic leadership of the kind that has been carried out for other industrial towns and cities, a few historians have offered interpretations of the contribution of manufacturers to town life in Dundee. In doing so, however, they have created a picture of a remote manufacturing elite, which abdicated responsibility for the needs of the working population.

Here the proprietor of the soil stocks the farm; at the close of autumn, the produce of the farm is valued, the proprietor appropriating one half and the tenant retaining the other. Does not this seem an admirable arrangement? Would it not exactly suit the state of things in the Highlands? Only, to prepare for such an arrangement, money should be supplied by the Government to meet the expense of trenching a sufficient amount of ground to furnish a thirty-acre croft to each family, with an outrun for cattle on hill pasture. This appears to me the most feasible scheme for meeting the wrongs under which our poor Highland crofters have so long been suffering. I have been thinking of ventilating this scheme, and I wish you to think it over, ere I say publicly anything about it.

The policy impact of the Napier Report was minimal but the effect of the public enquiry was to promulgate and intensify the expectation for land reform throughout the crofting areas. This heightening of the agitation from 1884 forced the crofters’ grievances into the forum of national politics, a process which eventually led to the passing of the 1886 Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act. At the same time both ministers and elders were forced to respond to the escalation of the land reform campaign, not least when troops were sent to bolster the authority of the law. The quote from John Kennedy's letter to Gustavus Aird above demonstrates the extent to which the agitation and the resolution of crofters’ grievances were coming to preoccupy spiritual leaders as well as legislators and landlords.

On 16 August 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to provide a $70 billion subsidy for those who enrol in Medicare, the federal health insurance programme for American seniors and some younger people with disabilities. Roughly 13 million Medicare beneficiaries will be spared from big increases in their out-of-pocket expenses during a year beset by record-high inflation. However, for those who have faith in Biden's commitment to build on Obamacare – a major achievement in the progressive dream for American universal healthcare long deferred – the IRA has largely failed their expectations. Neither has it removed the incentive of Medicare-approved private plans to limit the amount of medical care for more profits, nor significantly reduced the number of the uninsured or the ‘underinsured’, a well-captured and well-researched phenomenon in which the health insurance owned by individuals and families still falls short when illness strikes. From another perspective, an even more concerning narrative emerges when we consider the distinct feature about American healthcare: the unreasonably high cost and low coverage, a narrative that says less about the triumph of entitlement programmes and more about the dismantling of New Deal liberalism. In fact, the IRA has left intact a Medicare system predicated on what Gary Gerstle called ‘the neoliberal order’: the primacy of health consumerism, the emphasis on individual risk management, and the unbridled faith in the private sector as the first and the best means of tackling problems of all kinds.

INTRODUCTION

In November 1896 Vanessa Stephen, then aged seventeen, wrote to her sister Virginia describing a trip to Amiens which Vanessa made together with Thoby Stephen, their brother: ‘We took a lot of photographs, but we haven't had time to develop any yet. We had chocolate and rolls in our rooms at about 8.30, luncheon at 12 of about 6 courses and dinner at 7. On Saturday we went to a very improper French play’ (Marler 1993, p. 6). Bell's desire to describe her photographs first, before mentioning the potentially more fascinating ‘French play’, suggests how important photography was to both herself and Virginia. This year, 1896, was also the one in which Vanessa began drawing classes, ‘first with Ebenezer Cooke’, then with Sir Arthur Cope. R. A. (Marler 1993, p. xxii). Bell's new attention to the combined visual spaces of canvas and view-finder suggest that, for her, photographs would have a far greater visual value than simply as documents of holiday moments. Indeed photography became a passionate part of her life. Throughout her entire career as an innovative modernist painter, Bell took, developed and mounted into family albums over one thousand photographs.

In what follows, I look first at the problematics of gender, modernism and domestic photography, then at the occlusion and misrepresentation of Bell's photography by art historians and her children, then at the impact of Roger Fry and Julia Margaret Cameron on Bell's work, and finally at Bell's photographs in detail and issues of objectification and the maternal.

The epithet ‘women's town’ has long been applied to Dundee. Norman Watson's detailed study notes how frequently and enthusiastically this designation has been used, perhaps most colourfully by Scotland on Sunday in 1994: ‘Dundee women are strong, gallus and an inspiration to their sex. Today, as in the past, Dundee women are different.’ As Valerie Wright shows in ‘Juteopolis and After: Women and Work in Twentieth- Century Dundee’, Chapter 6 below, such views have an obvious material base in the peculiarities of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Dundee is pre-eminently a city of women and of women workers’, wrote Mary Walker in 1912, and contemporary data supports this. In 1901 there were 127 women for every 100 men in the city, and the employment figures show almost 28,000 women in textiles (overwhelmingly in jute) out of a total of 40,000 operatives. Dundee circa 1900 was unusual in this numerical predominance of women and the prevalence of married women's employment. Though there were more men than women in the total labour force, employment openings for men were limited by the small number of male job openings in jute, and many men joined the forces, emigrated, or worked away from the city. The employment opportunities available to women meant that they also played a prominent role in many household economies (Table 5.1), data which provides a nice counterpoint to any simple notions about male breadwinner households predominating in Britain before the First World War.

INTRODUCTION

Feminism has no single vision, although it is a visionary way of seeing. Film, on the other hand, often and anxiously envisions women stereotypically as ‘good’ mothers or ‘bad', hysterical careerists. From Jane Fonda's brief flirtation with independence and inevitable marriage to Klute in the 1970s, to Dead Ringers’ masculine appropriation of reproduction in the 1980s, to today, every Hollywood woman ‘is someone else's Other’ (Gentile 1985, p. 7). Films’ powerful misfiguring of the female is what feminism seeks to disempower. The visual is therefore a crucial visible part of any feminist theory.

This is for two reasons: first because the visual is epistemologically privileged in Western knowledge and second because cultural images often subtly, or not so subtly, codify and articulate ‘backlash’ misogyny (Faludi 1992). It is hard not to sense that the ostentatious display in Fatal Attraction of a hysterical career woman and the audience delight in her murder reflects an ineffable feeling of a more deep-rooted hatred. The goal of feminist aesthetics is to appropriate the power, if not the privilege, of such dominant images.

Yet feminist film theory, although a sophisticated body of work, often places mainstream cinema in a space of pure difference. Over the past two decades, since Laura Mulvey's germinal vision of Douglas Sirk's films, theorists drawing on psychoanalysis argue that mainstream cinema encourages an inevitably voyeuristic male gaze and reproduces fetishistic stereotypes of women.

A number of distinctive and innovative epigraphic styles emerged in Ma Wara’l-Nahr in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this short penultimate chapter comparisons are made between the monumental epigraphy on the various surviving buildings, which have been examined in detail in previous chapters, and the related smaller-scale scripts found on Qarakhanid coinage and tombstones. Combining numismatic, lithic and architectural evidence, it is possible to demonstrate that regionally distinctive letter forms and delineations of certain words were employed across various scales and media.

For all the architectural remains, and increasing archaeological evidence of lost buildings, the main remnants of the dynasty, in both the eastern and western realms, are coins, and there is an extensive literature on the subject of Qarakhanid numismatics. However, limited attention has been devoted to the epigraphic style, as opposed to the textual content of the inscriptions, and its use in deciphering the almost impenetrably complex system of changing names and titles of the Qarakhanid rulers. Aside from the clear orthographic links between the miniature scripts seen on coins and the monumental scripts on Qarakhanid buildings, the increased use of the Persian language over the previously ubiquitous Arabic is another significant development during the period of study. This is in notable contrast to the Samanid period, where Persian names and terms are virtually absent from the coinage of that dynasty, and it was not until the Qarakhanid era that a major shift from the canonical form of Islamic coinage began.

This book examines the relationship between the two major traditions which dominate European film theory and cinema. The origins of the first of these, the intuitionist modernist and realist tradition, can be located in a philosophical lineage which encompasses German idealist philosophy, romanticism, phenomenology, and the Frankfurt School. The intuitionist tradition within European film theory and cinema emphasises aesthetic qualities such as irrationalism, intuitive insight, artistic autonomy, and indeterminate expression. Like the body of philosophical thought from which it stems, this intuitionist film culture is also concerned with both the role played by instrumental rationality within contemporary life, and the experience of alienation, or what Max Weber referred to as ‘disenchantment', which afflicts the subject within modernity.

Early intuitionist, modernist film culture is often thought of as distinct from later European realist film theory and cinema, and distinctions between ‘realism and anti-realism', or ‘realism and modernism', are widely accepted within the field of media studies. However, these distinctions are misleading, and, in fact, early intuitionist film culture and later theories and practices of cinematic realism form part of one continuous tradition. There are, for example, clear intellectual and stylistic links between modernist movements such as Russian formalism, Weimar cinematic modernism, and French cinematic impressionism, the realist film theories of Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, and the work of post-war film-makers such as Antonioni, Pialat, Fellini, Reitz and Erice. One of the central concerns of this study is to explore this intuitionist tradition, and to establish its relationship to the post-Saussurian paradigm of film theory and cinema. As a consequence, this book substitutes a conventionally upheld distinction between modernist and realist film theory and cinema for one between an intuitionist modernist/realist paradigm, and a post-Saussurian one.

INTRODUCTION

Issues of vision and specularity haunt modernity. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists, natural philosophers and artists set about appropriating visible and ‘invisible’ worlds through new technologies of vision: through photography, stereoscopes, X-rays and cinema (Jenks 1995). Modernity witnessed a transformation in the production of the visual more profound than the discovery of Renaissance perspective. According to Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer, capitalist modernity effectively demolished classical vision by separating the spectator from the optical devices such as the camera obscura which, hitherto, carried the look of the spectator (Crary 1990). What late romanticism and modernism celebrate, Crary argues, is the eye's independence from the technology which earlier defined the act of viewing. In turn, twentieth-century modernism is obsessed with issues of visuality. And in the major years of modernism, the first decades of the twentieth century, new vocabularies of vision were transforming literary and cultural texts.

Descriptions of acts of observation are a major trope in literary modernism. For example, James Joyce makes the concept of parallax (how the same phenomenon looks different from alternative angles or perspectives) a structuring device in Ulysses (Joyce 1922). In the first six chapters of Ulysses, the same day in Dublin is seen from the two perspectives of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus (Schwarz 1997). Virginia Woolf concerns herself both with visible and ‘invisible’ vision, with what contemporary physics was recognising in Einstein's theories of spacetime, as kinesis, that is the flow of differing perspectives (Beer 2000).