This response to Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary considers the ways nature programs such as Planet Earth and Our Planet make the natural world newly visible yet imagine wildlife and ecosystems almost entirely separate from human contact or intervention, despite concurrent discourses of the Anthropocene and climate crisis.

The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther: first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be argued, offer a powerful criticism of indifferent, ideology free, and barely disguised fatalism that has driven notions of freedom across the world since the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Storytelling in Black Panther enjoys global acclaim because it revivifies the life-affirming value of high stakes, unabashedly teleological grand narratives, even as it upholds the political valency of strident, non-oppositional difference.

In more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

In her response to the forum on Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017), author Pooja Rangan takes up a range of issues that emerge in responses to her book by Rey Chow, Lucas Hilderbrand, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Naomi Waltham-Smith. Rangan’s response revolves around the question: Has reflexivity become untimely? What is the role of reflexive critique in a time of existential crisis? In answering this question, Rangan argues that alongside a “non-naive commitment to a notion of the truth” (a topic that emerges in several of the responses as well as in recent literature on documentary), documentary scholars must pursue a radically uncynical commitment to reflexivity. Redefining reflexivity as a form of “restoration work” (Eli Clare) or “wake work” (Christina Sharpe), Rangan traces the shared investments of documentary critique and contemporary analyses of disability and Black existence.

If V. S. Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of what I have called postcolonial naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the double-voiced discourse of the hysteric. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the registration of globalization’s volatile new dispensation and refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the lived experience of exile, Nkosi’s apartheid-era debut novel Mating Birds articulates in both form and content the noble self-exemption of Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given. Such an accounting helps to reframe split critical appraisal of the novel by reading its complex of form and content as the living crystallization of historical processes.

This response to Pooja Rangan’s bold provocation in Immediations reflects, from a Derridean standpoint, on the impossible responsibility of speaking for the other. In particular, it examines the role played by the microphone as technological prosthesis for the voice in activist practices of audio documentary, analyzing the actions of performance artist Sharon Hayes and sound art collective Ultra-red.

Andrew Forcehimes and Luke Semrau argue that agent-relative consequentialism is implausible because in some circumstances it classes an act as impermissible yet holds that the outcome of all agents performing that impermissible act is preferable. I argue that their problem is closely related to Derek Parfit's problem of ‘direct collective self-defeat’ and show how Parfit's plausible solution to his problem can be adapted to solve their problem.

The tumult of the twentieth century had a great impact on the role of religion in Chinese society. Antipathy toward religion reached its height in China during the Cultural Revolution, one of the few times in history when religion was almost completely wiped out in a single country. Religion in China has experienced a resurgence since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period in 1978. With the renewal of religious practice, new proposals have been put forward for the role of religious ideas in public life. In addition to the endurance of Marxist and liberal conceptions of the place of religion in society, new voices have emerged, arguing for return to Confucianism as the source of moral vitality in public life, or advancing Christian public theology as a moral resource for individuals adrift and alienated by the rapid changes of a modernizing economy. These realities have reshaped debates about the protection of religious freedom in China. This article introduces these new social and discursive realities and sets the stage for the articles that follow.

This article is a brief discussion of Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations, highlighting her argument for the need to analyze carefully the audiovisual materialities and ideological assumptions of documentary as a medium.

Previous research has shown that physical violence had a normative presence in medieval Nordic societies. In this study, weapon-related trauma (WRT) was examined in human skeletal assemblages from two religious houses, Skriðuklaustur in Iceland, and Västerås in Sweden. The aims were to identify patterns of WRT and to relate these to the masculinities of different groups of men. Violence was a prominent component of identity among lay men, especially for men with warrior experience. The use of violence was more problematic among clerics. The hypothesis that these notions of ideal masculine behaviour would affect the ways in which masculinities were enacted and would be reflected in the patterns of WRT was borne out by the results of this study. No WRT was identified among the canons and lay brothers in Skriðuklaustur, but it was present in about thirty per cent of the males interpreted as belonging to the lay elite buried in the northern part of the church at Västerås.

This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or ‘poetics of touch’ (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites (‘Old Furniture’) many of those studied here are routinely overlooked.

A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself.

The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem ‘Haunting Fingers: A Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments’, which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel ‘old muscles travel/Over their tense contours’. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing ‘death’ and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch.

Paying attention to the reading and note-taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.

With roots in social psychology, second language (L2) motivation has largely been investigated using self-report techniques. Studies drawing on observational data gathered in contexts where learning takes place are rare, and understandings of how motivation evolves in classroom interactions remain limited (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, 2015). In a position paper in Language Teaching, Ushioda (2016) maps out an agenda for qualitative research examining motivation that emerges in language classrooms. With a focus on psycholinguistic processes, and with the aim of understanding how motivation ‘connects with specific aspects of second language acquisition [and] particular features of linguistic development’, Ushioda makes the case for researching L2 motivation ‘through a small lens’ (p. 564). Furthering this agenda, I make proposals for research with a relational focus where, through a somewhat wider lens, motivation and engagement generated through connections created by teachers in their classroom practice can be investigated. To frame these proposals, I use the concept of connective instruction (Martin & Dowson, 2009). Connective instruction holds that motivation and engagement increase when students can connect with the teacher as a person, with content that the teacher enables them to get involved with, and with the working methods that the teacher promotes.

The theory and methods of space syntax can help to rebalance the prevailing cultural perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach that emphasizes maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded in built forms. The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past that can help in the interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial culture. In this article, the authors explain how space syntax, a theory and method originally developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to research in social and urban history. The key principles of the method are explained by clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) and through a worked example of research undertaken into political meeting places. A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also demonstrates the range of innovative contributions that this interdisciplinary approach is able to advance. A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a space syntax perspective.