An awareness of the industrial and economic strengths of Dundee has tended to obscure the consideration of the artistic and academic life of the city. The purpose of this chapter is to give a sense of such activity as it flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In order to do this I will give specific consideration to the artistic and intellectual activities of three figures whose careers were interlinked: James Martin White, Patrick Geddes and John Duncan. White was the inheritor of industrial wealth and an imaginative and informed patron both in his home city of Dundee and, subsequently, in London. Patrick Geddes was a remarkable polymath – among other things a pioneer of ecologically and culturally based town planning – who, thanks to White's financial support, was appointed professor of botany at University College, Dundee, in the early years of that institution. John Duncan, born and trained in Dundee, was the leading artist of the Celtic revival in Scotland. He was, during the period in question, a close colleague of Geddes, whose thinking had a profound influence on the direction of his work. He numbered both White and Geddes among his patrons.

On 9 February 1881, the textile-mill manager Peter Carmichael (of Baxter Brothers) attended a meeting of the Dundee Naturalists’ Society. This society had been founded in 1874 and it quickly built up a membership which included as associates not only Peter Carmichael but his fellow industrialists James Guthrie Orchar and James Farquhar White. Speakers to the society addressed a range of topics, from those of local geographical interest to explorations of developing technologies.

If you will vote for those who join house to house and lay field to field, then mock not your God by praying ‘Thy will be done.’ As a preacher of truth and righteousness I warn you against advancing by your vote that tyranny and wrong which has ruined our land, and made our brethren to be the prey of evil beasts. Why will you honour, and give power to, your deadly enemies?

The HLLRA dominated political debate in the Highlands at the critical juncture when crofters were enfranchised in 1885. The combination of impassioned political argument, deeply held religious conviction, and exceptionally high turnout made the electioneering of that year memorable. Although the HLLRA movement itself has left little documentary evidence to posterity, an abundance of contemporary newspaper coverage affords us a wide view of the main developments and events. In particular, we notice the contribution of the man who – through statements such as the one quoted above – became the leading clerical proponent of land reform. But before examining the political campaign fought by the land reformers we must first consider more closely the relationship which existed between the HLLRA and the ministers.

Ministers and the HLLRA

By 1884 the question of whether ministers should encourage their congregations to join and form branches of the land reform associations was a pressing one. In Glenelg, Inverness-shire, for example, the close formal links between Christians and land reformers during the height of the agitation were apparent

INTRODUCTION

In recent years questions of memory and the visual have become critical in cultural studies of modernity. What Richard Terdiman termed modernity's ‘memory crisis’, or the anxiety about memory which pervades late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century self-conceptions and social practices, is foregrounded most powerfully in representations (Terdiman 1993). Photography has a particular purchase on this larger story of visual modernities because it more evidently reveals ideological, familial and historical pressures. If we consider the entire continuum of photographic practices, including amateur photographs, then photographs are fundamentally implicated in the making of modern identities by bringing together public and private realms of memory in the defining trope of modernity – specularity. While, as Patrick Hutton claims, our recent interest in memory and the visual might be more to do with a postmodern obsession with images, and memory means different things at different times, the study of modernist women's photographic memories can tell us something about modernist subjectivities and the specifics of female subjectivity within modernity (Hutton 1993).

Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas goes even further than this by using photographic memories to counter patriarchal fascism. Her use of photographs resonated with her readers: ‘P.S. The war has already given us two delightful footnotes to Three Guineas. 1, the announcement by the B.B.C. on the day that war was declared that the King and his Household had donned military uniforms, and 2, the picture of the King broadcasting on Xmas day wearing an Admiral's uniform’ (Letter to Virginia Woolf from Shena D. Simon, January 1940, in Snaith 2000, p. 163).

Rather than return to what has already been covered in this book, I want to take the opportunity afforded by what pages remain to look ahead, and suggest how ideas considered within this study can be pursued further. I have argued that the intuitionist realist tradition within European film theory and cinema is of considerable value. However, I also want to argue that the issue of realism itself is extremely important, and that it transcends the boundaries of film theory. That this is the case becomes clear, for example, from even the most cursory study of the theories of Kracauer and Bazin, both of which are concerned with far more than the technical elaboration of a theoretical system.

For both theorists, realist aesthetic experience is based on the flood of correspondences which are released, and revealed, under the pressure of the spectator's gaze. Following Bazin and Kracauer, one way of theorising the experience of aesthetic realism is to conceive of it as both consisting of a set of representational forms and techniques which correspond in a number of ways to our perception and memory, and the active contemplation, by spectators, of truth claims about the world, where those claims are assessed against the spectator's own experience. For, to judge that a film is true to life, or ‘realistic', is to make a double judgement. First, it is to make a judgement about what it is that the film depicts. Second, it is to make a judgement about what life is like. Whilst the spectator is making this complex, double judgement, the film continues to tell its meandering, convoluted story, and the spectator is rarely in a position to fully assess the truth or falsity of particular truth claims. This implies that, as Bazin and Kracauer suggest, far from being inherently normative, cinematic realism is inherently indeterminate, and has an important role to play in creating what Bazin referred to as the ‘seeking being'.

The Tay Road Bridge was opened with great but curious ceremony on 18 August 1966. It was a major engineering and industrial achievement, and a material embodiment as well as emblem of Dundee's modernisation. Its construction, over four years, cost £5 million and the lives of five workers, killed or drowned in three separate incidents: A. Bowness, on 27 April 1964, A. Keir, on 13 March 1965, and James Lennie, John McQueen and Donald Ross, all on 11 November 1965. This feat of industrial modernisation, marred by the tragedy of the fatal human casualties, was marked in typically incongruent British ceremonial manner. Maurice McManus, Lord Provost of Dundee, and Willie Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland, welcomed the Queen Mother and an entourage of Lord Lieutenants and others of feudal rank who had no direct connection with the architectural, engineering, construction and labour processes that had made the bridge possible. The mild perversity of this situation is captured in still photographs of the ceremony, and a motion picture commissioned by Films of Scotland. The workers and other citizens of Dundee were kept well back from the chief celebrants and ceremonial dais by a line of police officers, and then watched as the Queen Mother and others were taken for a drive over to the Fife side and back again.

The bridge's association with Dundee's modernisation is worth emphasising. It was embedded in the search for economic development that, in the spirit and practical application of the 1950s and 1960s, privileged road transport as the most efficient means of promoting and developing new forms of commercial and industrial activity. Progress necessi-tated new roads and peripheral industrial estates, and the running down and eventually the displacement of older industrial infrastructure.

Refiguring the body is a central activity of contemporary culture. Questions about the body's appropriate shape, age, sexual practices and desires are the constant topics of magazines, television programmes, and health books, as well as popular science and psychoanalysis. These questions about body fallibility and bodily reproductions lead directly to questions about gendering, about women's differences from men and their consequent subordination. For these reasons the trope of the body is at the centre of current feminist theory. In the contemporary world it is women's bodies in particular which are bounded by common misconceptions about sexual differences and the reproductive technologies which keep such differences in place and in which feminist theory has a fundamental interest (Haraway 1989).

Popular culture, particularly film, frequently portrays women's bodies as at best fallible and at worst corrupting or diseased - as metaphors for larger social problems (Douglas 1975). Currently feminist theories of science, psychoanalysis and postmodernism focus on the body as an object of gendered knowledge in order to understand the connections between gendering, the maternal, body imagery and the psychic (Grosz 1994; Butler 1990; Kristeva 1983).

Many contemporary films resonate with fears of women's bodies (Alien) and pathologise women's reproductive power (Carrie). Films also portray modern medicine as obsessed, like the spectator, with issues of body control and reconstruction (Coma). For these reasons critics frequently assign David Cronenberg's films, particularly Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Dead Ringers (1988) to this apocalyptic visionary genre of physical disease and women's monstrosity (Nguyen 1990).

Between 1922 and 1943 Italy was ruled by a fascist dictatorship which used mainstream cinema as a means of disseminating officially sanctioned conceptions of national identity. A national regulatory body, the Direzione Generale della Cinematografica, was established in 1934 in order to review and ammend film scripts, and to promote pro-fascist films such as Vecchia Guardia (The Old Guard, Alessandro Blasetti, 1933): a film which commemorated the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's ascendency to power. The Centro Cattolico Cinematografico was also established in 1934, with the task of policing the moral and religious content of Italian cinema, and, in 1935, the foundation of the Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche enabled the State to exercise more or less complete control of the film industry.

Nevertheless, and despite this degree of state intervention, the majority of films produced within the Italian cinema of the fascist period were conventional, commercial vehicles, rather than platforms for explicitly pro-fascist propaganda. The films which emerged from this context of generic, commercial production included ornamental and overheated ‘filmed operas', extravagant Roman epics such as Alessandro Blasetti's La Corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1940), and glossy ‘white telephone’ comedies of manners, such as Max Neufeld's Mille lire al mese (A Thousand Lire a Month, 1933). During the war years the Italian Government introduced protectionist legislation, and this led to an increase in the production of such films, until, by 1942, output had reached a peak of 119. However, the majority of these films were, according to one critic, characterised by ‘artistic mediocrity and … startling separation from reality'.

How do we reckon with the lessons of pandemics past? Living through the COVID pandemic has raised questions about the meaning and scope of public health in ways that have not been experienced since the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic – a horrifying threat to health that entangled medical care by military institutions and efforts to prevent and treat civilian communities terrified by the likely spread of the disease – has been consistently used as a critical historical parallel to COVID. Allusions to the ordering of American civilians to stay at home in a strategy called ‘home quarantine’, with local health departments placarding houses warning outsiders not to enter and residents not to leave, have been irresistible. So, too, have the iconic century-old masking practices, as well as the attendant scepticism regarding these preventive practices and perceived government over-reach.

The history of disease offers important insights into public views of the proper use of state power. Epidemic disease and efforts to fight it have tested existing infrastructure and claims to authority. In twentieth- century America during times of crisis members of the public accepted some public health measures as temporarily legitimate, but also interpreted them as a threat to individual liberty. Fundamental to such struggles were efforts to determine who was a legitimate source of expertise and who should have the power to dramatise the dangers of disease and to prescribe preventive measures. With the expanding role of federal government in matters of health and well-being, those who claimed authority over health governance were increasingly and visibly immersed in political and ideological struggles around the rights of citizens and the power of experts.

The American Century, the time in which the United States pursued worldwide political, economic and cultural hegemony, has been bracketed by two gilded ages – one forged in late nineteenth-century capitalist industrialism and the other in late twentieth-century global technocapitalism. Each age was marked by gross and growing inequalities, racial, class and identity conflict, and cultural agendas largely set and reinforced by mass media: the mass circulation of books, newspapers and magazines then, media conglomerates and a largely unregulated social media apparatus today. Global public health crises, a century apart – rampant tuberculosis that was only beginning to be managed in the late nineteenth century and now the COVID-19 pandemic – also draw parentheses around this era in which the United States both exerted its power outwards and asserted its global gravitational pull. This chapter focuses on the role of public health crises (and the policies that ensued) in defining US identity, and especially the iterative reassertion of whiteness in the face of a diversifying demographic. We emphasise the case of the ‘Lung Block’ at the turn of the twentieth century on New York's Lower East Side and efforts by Progressive reformers to cast it and its inhabitants as a threat to the city and to the established social order.

At one level, the origins of structuralist methodology can be traced back to the 1880s, and to an emerging emphasis on the symbolic constitution of representational systems, within the disciplines of linguistics, philosophy and symbolic logic.2 The work of the American philosopher C. S. Pierce, the German logician Gottlob Frege, and other theorists within these fields, was then taken up at the turn of the century by Polish, Czech, Swiss and Russian linguists such as Mathesius, Scerba, Baudouin, Jakobson, Saussure and Trubetskoy, as part of a general shift within linguistics from a historical, philological approach to the study of language, to one concerned with understanding the structural relations which existed within contemporary language systems. One of the most influential works within this emerging perspective on the study of language was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916). However, the Cours was not, in fact, written by Saussure, but compiled three years after his death in 1913, from the lecture notes of students. Although the Cours is, as a consequence, an often uneven work, it did, nevertheless, prove an influential model for the development of structural linguistics within Europe from 1916 onwards.

After 1916 Saussurian structural linguistics also influenced the Russian formalist movement, and the work of formalist theorists such as Roman Jacobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Vladimir Propp. However, debates on the symbolic and structural nature of linguistic and aesthetic representation had also taken place independently in Russia, with the establishment of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915, and the St Petersburg-based Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1916.