This book has tried to provide a multifaceted look toward the role political narratives play in politics. In Chapter 1, I provided the theoretical and methodological framework of the book and introduced the main topics. In Chapter 2, I focused on how the competing visions of nationhood of Kemalists and Islamists are played out in the Ulus District of Ankara by providing alternative historical narratives of the nation. In Chapter 3, I discussed how economic development narratives are deployed by the AKP to suppress main elements of liberal democracy such as pluralism, and checks and balances. Chapter 4 adopted a comparative perspective and traced the place of narratives of economic development, patriarchy and history in the toolkit of populist leaders, illustrated through the cases of Austria, Hungary and Turkey. Chapter 5 focused on counter-narratives. Through the Gezi case, it analysed how counter-narratives are used to subvert the core patriarchal narratives of authoritarian governments in order to expose and challenge the core assumptions of hierarchical and arbitrary rule. Chapter 6 turned its attention to global discussions and focused on the implications of political narratives for policies and political actions. It first discussed how conspiracy theories, particularly the Replacement Theory (which is in fact a narrative), function in the political realm by ways such as bringing far-right ideas into the mainstream, encouraging bottom-up participation in exclusionary visions of nationhood, and by creating unified camps of ‘us’ and ‘them’. After showing the prevalence of and the deployment of the Replacement narrative by right-wing populists, I turned to the discussion of the potential for countering right-wing populists and their exclusionary, authoritarian and monist stories with inclusive, democratic and pluralist ones.

The different topics covered in the chapters of this book gave me the opportunity to provide a lively and panoramic picture of the political landscape of Turkey. They also enabled me to delve deeply into the functions that political narratives serve in politics and society. As I tried to show, narratives provide us a dynamic lens in situating and analysing political events and phenomena. Narratives play both individual and collective roles due to their essential role in co-constituting personal and communal (mostly national) identity.

To bear a burden with difficulty, to be weighed down by a burden

Oppress s.o. gravely, weigh heavily upon s.o.

To represent s.o., substitute for s.o., act in s.o.’s behalf

To declare war on s.o.

Vibrant with life

To soliloquise, talk to o.s., say to o.s.

Unparalleled, singular

Rarely

To wail, burst into loud laments

To adjure, implore s.o. to do s.th.

To declare war on s.o.

To show o.s. openly hostile to s.o., open hostilities against s.o.

To declare o.s. the enemy of s.o.

Youthful, of tender age

Soft to the touch

Valid, effective, in force

To act contrary to the dictates of one’s conscience

Ungrateful

Ungrateful

To harm s.o. or s.th.

To harm s.o. or s.th.

To find favour with s.o.

To cause damage, do harm, impair

To depreciate, discredit, defame, malign

It made the deepest impression on him

To do s.o. untold damage, harm s.o. grievously

To attain (the age of) maturity

He was close to fifty, he was pushing fifty

It is enough to mention . . .

Let it suffice you to know that, aside from the fact that . . .

How excellent is . . .!, to say nothing of, not to mention, let alone . . .

To be hostile to s.o., treat s.o. with hostility

Assistant magistrate (Isl. Law)

Vice chairman, vice president

Viceroy

He felt unable to remain in the place

Insubordination

To pay no attention to s.th., not to care about s.th., disregard s.th.

To reject or dismiss s.th. or s.o. with disdain, spurn or scorn s.th. or s.o.

To excel, be outstanding in

To save one’s life, save one’s skin

To save o.s. from

To pass the exam

To comb, card, tease (cotton)

To begin to show

In instalments

To show s.o. to the door

To walk towards the door

To follow s.o., to follow s.o.’s example, to be of the same nature, on the same line as

Our social relations are those of kinsfolk

It is only fair that we . . .

We belong to different camps, we stand worlds apart

Approximately, circa (with foll. figure)

Open-handed, liberal

To vow to o.s., make the solemn pledge to . . .

I vow to God that, I swear by God that . . .

We return to what is our present concern or to what we are just discussing

In 1936, Willa Cather briefly introduced her essay collection Not Under Forty with a famous proclamation: ‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.’ While this ambiguous break has been argued to refer to her personal life, literary history, American culture or as a key to her experiments with narrative form, I will offer a material account for this sense of rupture. Specifically, the early 1920s mark a change in how the environment was depicted and described in both image and language. Cather's fiction is a site in which the form of environment, aerial photography and the poetic image clash, disrupting realist narrative form and acting as the catalyst for her development as an experimental modernist. She described her work Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as a ‘narrative’ rather than a novel, which has cued critics to draw contrasts between the narrative structures of her earlier novels and the work after her 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning World War I novel One of Ours. But flagging ‘narrative’ as the crucial hinge in her work over-emphasises its role as the break between her early and late works. This has resulted in a strengthening of the binary in literary criticism between narrative and description, and backgrounds descriptive technique, particularly for presenting the environment, throughout her work. In this chapter I will compare her late novel Death Comes for the Archbishop with her second novel O Pioneers! as representative of her work before One of Ours.

While not wanting to overemphasise the definitiveness of Cather's statement, I will use the early 1920s as a point from which to track the different ways the form of environment appears in her work. The shift in her descriptions of the environment – in this case the Great Plains and the Southwest – can be tracked alongside material progress in other modes of descriptive technique: specifically, the relationship between flight, aerial photography and transportation during the rapid commercialisation and popularisation of aviation in the 1920s. But rather than construct a direct, mimetic relationship between literary representation and photography, the goal here is to tease out the basic shifts in environmental imagination that are afforded by the collision between foregrounded literary description of the environment and the form of environment it expresses.

Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays anthologises thirty-seven scholarly essays written by Colin McArthur between 1966 and 2022. Organised chronologically, containing works published in all decades between the 1960s and 2020s, and including twenty-one essays hitherto out-ofprint and a new authorial afterword, the book identifies and illustrates the central strands of critical enquiry and approach animating one of British Film Studies’ and Scottish Cultural Studies’ most pioneering, prolific and polemic careers. McArthur's multifaceted interests and achievements include: his role in legitimising the analysis of Classical Hollywood genre cinema within Anglophone Film Studies; his leadership, inspirational and controversial in equal parts, in establishing Scotland's cinematic representation as an accepted and widely practiced object of study; and his imaginative and informed interrogation of Scotland's distinctive identity and presence as a visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of domestic and international popular cultural traditions from the eighteenth century until the present. As well as showcasing an important individual contribution to the disciplines of Film Studies and Scottish Cultural Studies, therefore, collecting these essays together also illuminates key aspects of those disciplines’ respective post-1960 histories and trajectories. Many of the following essays contain new authorial and editorial annotation that aims to illustrate and explain the ways in and extent to which this is so.

McArthur's publishing career incorporates numerous monographs, edited anthologies, print journalism, scholarly book chapters and academic journal articles. Because they have until now represented perhaps the most logistically dispersed and least practicably accessible areas of his oeuvre, this volume focuses (with four exceptions) exclusively on the latter two categories. The exceptions to that editorial rule are as follows. An extended extract from McArthur's 1972 monograph Underworld U.S.A. is presented to underscore his significance as a pioneering Anglophone historian and theorist of Classical Hollywood cinema and to illustrate a transitional moment in early-1970s Anglophone Film Studies where auteurist theoretical approaches of the previous decade came into initial contact with structuralist and semiological counterparts that shaped the discipline's evolution during the 1970s. A transcript of a 1988 invited lecture, ‘The New Scottish Cinema?’ makes that work generally available for the first time and provides a useful snapshot of McArthur's thinking at the end of a decade during which his better-known published works on Scottish cinema history and theory comprehensively transformed academic awareness of and approaches to that subject.

Although the following words were written about Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), they are perhaps equally applicable to this essay's subject, Murray Grigor, given the uncanny resemblance between Grigor's career and that of Mackintosh:

It is not that Grigor is wholly unknown in Scotland. He has, for example, collaborated with prominent Scots in mounting exhibitions and sociocultural public advocacy campaigns, including ones aiming to bring to greater public attention the architectural heritage of Glasgow in the buildings of Rennie Mackintosh and Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson (1817–75). Nor has the Scottish press been uniformly hostile to his work. The run-of-the-mill press often responded warmly, if somewhat bemusedly, and more politically and culturally alert commentators were positively enthusiastic. In Grigor's case, the equivalent of the ‘stolid, unimaginative men-of-the-world’ who had thwarted Mackintosh were the uncomprehending apparatchiks in certain Scottish arts, broadcasting and film institutions.

The title of this piece describes Grigor as ‘auteur’, a term formulated within French film criticism (particularly, the magazine Cahiers du cinéma) to describe the kind of film director whose stylistic and thematic identity is discernible across the whole range of their work. This essay retains the ‘auteur’ idea of identity and coherence, but – while being centrally concerned with Grigor's films – extends it to include his journalism, public advocacy, graphic art and association with the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His directorship of the latter (1967–73) coincided with the importation into the UK of the cinephilia which had reanimated post- WWII French film culture. The ideas of authorship and mise-en-scène were taken up and applied by younger British critics primarily associated with the journal Movie (1962–2000) and the British Film Institute Education Department.

Jonathan Z. Smith's comparison of the Corinthians, as known from Paul's letters and the Atbalmin of Papua New Guinea, provides a remarkable opportunity for scholars of early Christianity. The study of the New Testament has understandably been dominated by the internal perspectives of Christian theology. This means that approaches to Paul's letters continually reinscribe a notion of incomparable uniqueness and irresistible relevance. Privileged meta-narratives ensure that the ways scholars imagine Paul and the Corinthians elide many of the human social and cognitive processes that students of a contemporary culture or a scholar in a department of history would assume as requirements for construing the people in question as human. Smith's bold comparison breaks through these constraints and creates an opening for imagining Paul and the Corinthians in ways that are quite normal in the humanities and the social sciences.

I want to take advantage of the opening created by Smith's article to raise some questions about certain social and cognitive processes that traditional approaches usually hide. In a more comprehensive study, I would theoretically develop the concepts of doxai, interests, recognition, and attraction that I believe need to be added to Smith's concepts of incorporation and resistance. I understand all of these as attendant to the processes of ongoing mythic formations that Smith's paper allows us to imagine for the Atbalmin, and for Paul and the Corinthians. For the purposes of this chapter, I will stipulate the following. A “doxa” is a body of taken-for-granted beliefs, practical skills, assumptions and understandings that the researcher through historical investigation imagines that the people in question brought to a social situation. Interests are the most basic and important projects and ends that motivated the people in question. “Most basic” should be a matter of debate and corrigible for scholars. “Recognition” meanwhile is the process of someone taking someone else or another group to be someone of a certain type or identity that to various degrees makes sense to them, and that often entails to some degree of legitimacy or social capital. “Attraction” is the process of recognizing some sort of mutuality of interests that can be the basis for individuals or groups engaging in common practices or entertaining the possibility.

The Beginnings of an ‘Enlightened’ Diplomacy

Ottoman diplomatic missions to the Spanish court started anew after the legation was re-established, following an interruption of over twenty years. Hüseyin Sermed Efendi (1832–86), a career diplomat, took over the mission in 1881 and died in Madrid in 1886, while still in post. On 25 February 1883, he visited the Alhambra and left a short inscription in the visitors’ book: ‘Here is the palace of the exemplary kings and sultans of Islam’. Such concision does not allow for much interpretation; nevertheless, it is worth noting that he was the only one on the page to have felt the need to leave more than just a signature behind. The Granadan press, once so excited at the sight of a ‘Turk’ seemed indifferent: ‘After spending a few days at the Alhambra in the magnificent hotel of Siete Suelos, the Turkish ambassador in Madrid has left [Granada] to pursue his journey through Andalusia.’ If we assume that he visited the Alhambra and signed the book immediately upon arrival, on 25 February, it seems that Sermed Efendi spent about a week in Granada, lodged right next to the monument. Should we take this as an indication of a curiosity that the press simply did not see worthy of comment? Not necessarily; nevertheless, it should be noted that visiting Granada and touring Andalusia had become one of the conventional duties of Ottoman ministers in Madrid.

Sermed Efendi's successor, Turhan Hüsnü Bey (1846–1927),5 who filled this post from 1886 to 1894, visited the Alhambra on 1 May 1889. The inscription he left in the visitors’ book suggests that a new stage had finally been reached concerning Ottoman awareness. The text was so rich that a note in Spanish called it ‘a poem written by the ambassador of Turkey’. Actually, it was only prose, but Turhan Bey had undeniably embarked upon a lyricist streak (Figure 4.1):

Private secretary

Court clerk

Writer, novelist

Secretary

To harm by artful machinations, lay snares, conspire against s.o.

He almost died

To deceive s.o.

In the twinkling of an eye, instantly

Natural catastrophe, torrential rains

Overfull cup

Minesweeper

To harbour hatred towards s.o.

To manifest open hostility towards s.o.

To manage one’s affairs personally

To defend s.th., fight for s.th.

Ungrateful

To compare by measuring

To heap abuse on s.o.

To pay s.o. back twofold, bring double retaliation on s.o.

To give s.o. a beating, thrash s.o.

As before, as at the beginning, as from the outset

As before

As it must be, properly

Fluently, smoothly, like clockwork

As usual

To measure s.th., to weigh s.th.

Latent, hidden, concealed, secret

Expressing duration in the past = English progressive past (past continuous) ‘used to’, ‘would’

It was his greatest worry

It was hoped that . . .

To be the cause of s.th., it was because of

Some of the group were silent and some were talking

To be assigned to, be the lot or share of, be left to, be due (s.o.)

The first thing he did was . . .

To keep away from, remain aloof from, not get involved in

To be safe from, be secure from, be safeguarded against

We should be please if . . .

To be entirely dependent on

He had not known Europe until recently

To be incumbent on, be the duty of

To be on tenterhooks, be in great suspense, be dying with curiosity

To be prepared, be set for, to be ready, willing, inclined, in a position to

To be on the wrong way, be wrong, be mistaken

To do or think the opposite, take an opposite stand

Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958) is set in Poland on 7–8 May 1945, the last day of war and the first of peace. This period of transition is one in which, the German occupying forces having been driven out, the Red Army is supervising the setting-up of communist central and local government. The communiques blaring from the public loudspeakers talk of victory, peace and a glorious future, but in ironic counterpoint to this, Poles have begun to slaughter each other. Certain right-wing elements in the resistance, the army and the aristocracy are attempting to undermine and change the orientation of the new communist government. These elements, seeking to make their presence felt, detail two young ex-resistance fighters, Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), to kill Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski), the new secretary of the local Communist Party, and his assistant, Podgorski (Adolf Chronicki). Andrzej and Maciek kill the wrong men and have to remain in the area for another chance. Maciek signs in at the same hotel as Szczuka and becomes involved with Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), a barmaid at the hotel, to such a degree that he changes his mind about killing Szczuka. However, Andrzej convinces him that he should go through with it. Maciek kills Szczuka, but is himself killed while running away from some soldiers whom he encounters while attempting to escape.

The film opens with Andrzej and Maciek waiting to ambush and kill Szczuka. Wajda's handling of the opening sequence underlines the contrasts between peace and war, life and death and past and present which form the mainspring of the film. From the opening image of a church tower with a cross on top, suggesting peace and goodwill, the camera tilts downwards to pick up Andrzej and Maciek lying on a bank and enjoying a beautiful summer day. The singing of birds is loud on the soundtrack and a child with flowers for the altar comes to ask Andrzej to open the church door for her. At that point Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela), secretary to the local communist mayor but also in the pay of the right-wing group, warns them that a jeep is approaching.

Ruler, potentate, monarch

Subject to, liable, susceptible to

Irrevocable

Curable

Mortal

To return like for like

To welcome s.o. or s.th.

Divisibility

Damned bastard! (lit. may God fight him!)

Leading thinkers

Flamethrower

Minesweeper

Gunboat

Motorboat

Lifeboat

Middle of the road

To compare two things, draw a parallel

The gentle reader

To die a thousand deaths

To go through the worst, be exposed to the greatest hardships

To compare two things

Hard-hearted, callous, pitiless, cruel

Helpless, impotent, parsimonious, niggardly

Chaste, demure, modest (of a woman)

Mortal blow, catastrophe

Everybody, all people (lit. the distant one and the near one)

Brigand, waylayer, highway robber

To interrupt s.o., cut s.o. short, cut in on s.o.’s talk

Riverbed

Slacker, inactive, idle

Capital of the country

General rule

To motion with the head, signal, beckon

He said in a voice full of mercy . . .

Among other things, he said . . .

To mention casually, say among other things

He said what he had to say, he had his say

He said with a smile

Chunk of cheese

Sugar loaf

Bar of soap

Proof had been furnished for

Truth became or was manifest

To go to

To consist in, be founded on, be based, to carry out, execute, perform

To assume the burdens of government

To meet one’s obligations

To defray the costs, pay the expenses

To do one’s duty

To provide for s.o.’s needs, stand by s.o. in time of need

To play a part

To take care of s.o., look after s.o., take s.o. under one’s wing

To keep one’s word

To be built on, to manage, tend, guard

To become fully effective, be in full progress, be in full swing

To rise or turn against s.o.

To stand up to s.o., against s.o.

To resist, oppose, defy s.o.

To rise in honour of s.o.

To replace s.o., substitute for s.o., take s.o.’s place, replace s.th.

To take the place of s.th. with s.o.

To be in a state of great anxiety, be seriously upset, be very agitated

To begin to do s.th.

The war was or became violent, war broke out

Time of prayer has come

To get excited, get angry, become furious, all hell broke loose in it