‘Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art’ is a venture that offers readers easy access to the most up-to-date research across the whole range of Islamic art. Building on the long and distinguished tradition of Edinburgh University Press in publishing books on the Islamic world, it is a forum for studies that, while closely focused, also open wide horizons. Books in the series, for example, concentrate in an accessible way, and in clear, plain English, on the art of a single century, dynasty or geographical area; on the meaning of works of art; on a given medium in a restricted time frame; or on analyses of key works in their wider contexts. A balance is maintained as far as possible between successive titles, so that various parts of the Islamic world and various media and approaches are represented.

Books in the series are academic monographs of intellectual distinction that mark a significant advance in the field. While they are naturally aimed at an advanced and graduate academic audience, a complementary target readership is the worldwide community of specialists in Islamic art – professionals who work in universities, research institutes, auction houses and museums – as well as that elusive character, the interested general reader.Professor Robert Hillenbrand

In Adam's Rib, Spencer Tracy tells Katharine Hepburn: ‘You get cute when you get causey7. One of the many reasons I began to explore feminist theory was my very sad discovery that there is a vast discrepancy between Tracy's delight and most other men's attitudes. What such an exploration inevitably teaches is that forms of language are not simply technologies of communication but are intensely caught up in social judgements about gender. This applies equally to visual languages and thus the language of film. Yet in film studies, contemporary feminist social theories and film analysis are not usually considered together. Film studies, like much of communication studies in general, often separates its areas of inquiry from feminism's social insights. There are good historical reasons which go some way to explain why film theory is somewhat immured in racially undifferentiated psychoanalytic theory at the expense of other more general ways of thinking: for example, the institutional centrality of important, key theoretical journals like Screen as well as social sciences'and humanities'focus on specific theories of psychoanalysis at the expense of more racially problematised theories. But currently in a time of backlash against feminism there is a good deal at stake in extending, not curtailing, feminist critiques and in trying to use feminism's analytical tools.

Feminism and Film, then, involves a discussion both of feminist theories and of what feminist theories can help us to see and newly understand in some contemporary films.

In recent years, the role and function of music in nineteenth-century urban society has been the subject of numerous historical studies in Scottish, English and Welsh towns. In the early twentieth century, patterns of musical activity continued to be influenced by these earlier developments. However, the period between the two world wars saw advancements in sound and communications technology, which alongside other social and economic developments, transformed the ways in which people experienced music. In the decade preceding the First World War, Dundee already possessed a diverse musical culture. However, while most sections of the community experienced music in some shape or form, the main beneficiaries of this musical culture were, arguably, the prosperous middle classes, who had the time and money to participate in a broader range of recreational activities. As in the nineteenth century, affiliation to a musical society such as the Dundee Amateur Choral Union or the Dundee Orchestral Society conferred cultural and social refinement, and membership remained restricted to the influential middle classes. Although the Dundee Orchestral Society appears to have prioritised musical ability over social status, the long working hours and pitiful income levels of the working population conspired with the cost of instruments and tuition fees and anxieties about dress, behaviour and social acceptance, to exclude a large section of the community. There were, however, some notable instances of social inclusion: for example, following the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, the teaching of music to all children in local Board Schools had borne fruit in the high standard of children's choirs, and an expansion in the number of popular adult choirs from the 1880s onwards.

It was during the final stages of my doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, examining the development of Rum Seljuq architecture, that I came across an image of the original section of brick strapwork decoration on the façade of the tomb of Nasr ibn ‘Ali in Uzgend. I subsequently received funding from the university to travel to Kyrgyzstan in order to study the surviving Qarakhanid monuments in Uzgend, Safid Buland and Balasaghun. From this trip grew a project to reassess the surviving corpus of buildings and examine the increasing volume of archaeological material from the region. The award of a three-year post-doctoral research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust allowed me to conduct this project in full. The aims of this book are to present the individual monuments in close detail, and to integrate the study of Qarakhanid architecture into the architectural and cultural context of the wider region of Central Asia and eastern Iran in the period from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries.

This interdisciplinary volume uses a range of methodologies, but in essence the overall approach taken is to return to first principles, and the primary aim is to provide as detailed a study as possible of all of the surviving monuments in the corpus. Whilst all the buildings covered have been published somewhere over the last century and a half, for the most part they are quite poorly documented and the material is widely dispersed throughout the huge body of scholarship produced during the Soviet period. Much of the work is admirable, if hard to find, but in many cases it is hidebound by the nationalist methodologies enforced by the authorities from the 1920s onwards. This nationalist paradigm has only intensified since the establishment of the post-Soviet republics in the region. One aspect of this study is to move away from the anachronistic nationalist approach to monuments that were built under the aegis of a decentralised dynasty whose territory now falls within the boundaries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and China.

By the seventeenth century Gaelic Scotland was already engaged in various confrontations which were beginning to establish the pattern of a beleaguered minority community and culture within Scotland. This was scarcely as yet a linguistic minority, or at any rate what imbalance there was linguistically was not severe, but the relative isolation and autonomy which the Gaelic regions had enjoyed was breaking down. The forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in the last decade of the fifteenth century was one of the earlier signals of the new order. The Statutes of Iona in 1609, and succeeding Privy Council enactments, helped to sap the power of the clan system by a policy of denationalizing of the clan leaders: ensuring that they were schooled in the Lowlands, and through English. (The further development, that of schooling potential chiefs and lairds in the caste-schools of England, came without benefit of legislation.) Religious differences, exacerbated by the civil war of the mid-seventeenth century, helped to reinforce older clan divisions and undermine racial or linguistic unity. The dynastic struggles of Scoto-English and German royalty were a further pathetic source of disunity in Gaelic Scotland. It is against this somewhat tawdry background that we observe the surviving work of Gaelic poets of clan and politics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Sometimes they are involved, usually in a peripheral way, in national politics, sometimes they appear to be playing the game that might have delighted the enemies of their race (as where Iain Lorn whips up the hatred of the MacDonalds against their fellow Gaels, the Campbells). At other times they are seen as still immersed in the age-old history and legend of their own race, enjoying, for example, the euphoria of simply being Macleans or MacDonalds.

There is a surprisingly limited number of surviving monuments from a dynasty that controlled dozens of major cities and ruled over thousands of square miles for more than two centuries. However, the evidence seen throughout this book shows that there was a rich and diverse tradition of building across Ma Wara’l-Nahr in the period from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries. Within that diversity, several trends and specific motifs can be found, and it is possible to determine a clear, if irregular, process of development. There was a slow but steady shift from an aesthetic based on the use of cut brick and incised stucco ornament towards one which had a greater reliance on terracotta and glazed tiles. The craftsmen responsible for building the monuments that have been examined in detail in the preceding chapters were well aware of the wider regional trends, and were capable of integrating some of these elements into their work, while still preserving and developing a unique and distinctive local style.

There remains a vast amount of literature and material resulting from over a century of both Russian and locally run archaeological excavations that has yet to be addressed by many western scholars and integrated into the available literature. This often hard to find, and in some cases unpublished archival material, coupled with the steady stream of data from new excavations, would be of great use in the process of developing an even deeper and more nuanced understanding of the scope and nature of urban and other architectural developments across Central Asia. The aim of this book has been to give as detailed an account as possible of the form and ornament found on the extant corpus of buildings. This has required occasional references to relevant archaeological material at times, in order to show that seemingly unique, or even entirely missing types of structure such as madrasas, were in fact part of a much broader process of architectural development.

DE-GLOBALISATION

Long a significant international port city, with especially important sea connections with the Baltic, Dundee by the beginning of the twentieth century was a highly ‘globalised’ city. Despite much twenty-first-century rhetoric about the novelty of global integration, the welfare of Dundonians was far more affected by international economic factors around 1900 than a hundred years later, a consequence of its distinctive economic structure. While Dundee has partaken of some elements of cultural ‘globalisation’, especially through the impact of modern mass media, in economic terms changes in that structure have made the century one of ‘de-globalisation’.

While famous for ‘jam, jute and journalism’, the economic fortunes of Dundee around the turn of the twentieth century rested upon the jute industry, directly employing half of the local workforce at the industry's peak in the Edwardian period, and indirectly influencing the prosperity of many more. Few if any cities have been so synonymous with one economic sector, so the title ‘Juteopolis’ has been aptly applied.

Jute manufacturing was characterised by export dependence on worldwide markets, and a raw material entirely imported from Bengal. This meant that the industry’s, and much of the city’s, short-term fortunes were tied to fluctuations in foreign demand for jute products and variations in raw jute prices. A stock market crash in the USA (such as in 1907), or a sharp rise in jute prices (such as in 1901) could seriously reduce activity. The longer-term trends in the industry were very much affected by foreign, overwhelmingly Indian, competition, and it was this factor that meant the industry's employment reached its all-time high in 1908, and thereafter was in inexorable, if periodically slowed, decline, until it disappeared in 1999.

During the 1970s the ascendency of post-structuralism and political modernism drove the realist and intuitionist paradigm, which had dominated European film theory from the 1920s to the late 1950s, to the margins of critical consideration. One consequence of this paradigm shift was that the tradition of realist film theory, in particular, became ignored, ostracised, and seriously misinterpreted. For post-structuralists, realism was an effect of dominant ideological socialisation, and any theory based on realist, as opposed to deconstructionist premises, was complicit in such socialisation. It is only since the late 1970s that substantial critical re-evaluations of the major proponents of cinematic realism have appeared, and this process continues up to the present day.

One of the reasons why the realist film theories of John Grierson, Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin have been so misinterpreted in the recent past is that critics have failed to fully understand the extent to which they stem from complex philosophical positions. Yet, as this chapter will make clear, the work of all three theorists is derived from the same philosophical tradition, and one which links them to intuitionist movements in European cinema such as impressionism, Weimar modernism, surrealism, and early Russian formalism.

The first major realist film theorist, John Grierson, developed a theory of modernist documentary realism during the 1920s. Grierson believed that film, and documentary film in particular, could play a crucial role within society by providing an effective medium of communication between the state and the public. Grierson initially developed this position during a visit to America between 1924 and 1927, where he undertook a programme of research into the impact of immigration on American society.