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Highlights from Oxford Music in 2015

It’s hard to believe, but another busy year at Oxford University Press has gone by. Join our music team as we take a look back at the year that was 2015, from new scholarship to new faces, with a combination of computers, cake, and chicken.

January

University Press Scholarship Online reached a milestone of over 500 works of music scholarship available online from 20 university presses and scholarly publishers.

February

We welcomed Ben Selby as the new Director of Music Publishing.

Ben Selby, OUP Director of Music Publishing

Music Theory Spectrum‘s most read article of 2015, “What Did Danger Mouse Do? The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture” by Kyle Adams, was published.

Music & Letters‘ most read article of 2015, “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and The Legacies of War” by Neil Gregor, was published.

March

Joel Sachs, author of Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music, spoke with Donald Macleod at the Royal Academy of Music’s museum and bookstore discussing what makes Henry Cowell such a fascinating biographical subject.

Early Music‘s most read article of 2015, “Which Genial Day? More on the court of origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with a shortlist of dates for its possible performance before King Charles II” by Andrew Pinnock, was published.

April

Grove Music Online updated with nearly 300 new articles from The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition, and nearly 300 from The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Second Edition.

The Opera Quarterly‘s most read article of 2015, “Wagner after Freud: Stages of Analysis” by Tom Grey and Adrian Daub, was published. (It appears in Opera after Freud.)

May

Our Twitter account @OUPMusic hit the 5,000 follower mark on Twitter.

Composer Bob Chilcott celebrated his 60th birthday with a special concert and party in Oxford.

Bob Chilcott. Photo courtesy of John Bellars.
June

The Grove Music team welcomed Daniel DiPaolo to the team as Associate Editor.

July

The summer of 2015 saw the publication of our Kodaly Today Handbook Series, the first comprehensive system to update and apply the Kodály concepts to teaching music in elementary school classrooms.

BBC Proms celebrated its 120th anniversary and several of our authors and composers were involved in special events.

August

We welcomed Music Marketing Assistant Celine Aenlle-Rocha to the team.

John Rutter’s new major work, The Gift of Life, was published. Five members of the Music Department enjoyed the UK premiere in Coventry Cathedral.

We celebrated John Rutter’s 70th birthday at the Association of British Choral Directors‘ (ABCD) conference in Manchester with a special cake and champagne reception.

John Rutter’s cake, photo courtesy of G Sherlaw Johnson

The Opera Quarterly published a special issue that focused on opera and dance.

September

The new James Bond song by Sam Smith was announced — the same month we published The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism by Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold.

The Musical Quarterly‘s most read article of 2015, ““Making Songs Pay”: Tin Pan Alley’s Formula for Success” by Daniel Goldmark, was published.

October

General Editor of the acclaimed Voiceworks series, Peter Hunt, presented workshops promoting the series at three different music education conferences in Canada.

The 47th annual Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award winners were announced! Several of our authors won including:

The Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism in the concert music field: David Brodbeck, Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna
Honoree: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind
Honoree: Jennifer Fleeger, Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song through the Machine

The Musical Quarterly published an issue this fall focusing on Tin Pan Alley.

November

On 22 November, a concert was held in memory of Sir David Willcocks at King’s College Chapel. The concert was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 1 December.

American Musicological Society awards were announced. Several of our authors won including:

Robert M. Stevenson Award: Carol A. Hess, Representing the Good Neighbor
Ruth A. Solie Award: Lily Hirsch and Tina Frühauf, Dislocated Memories
Marjorie Weston Emerson Award: Matthew Riley, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart
Music in American Culture Award: Carol J. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway

At the AMS conference, Music Editor Norm Hirschy bumped into his good friend Colonel Sanders.

OUP Editor Norm Hirschy and Colonel Sanders at the AMS conference in Louisville.
December

The premiere of Howard Skempton’s epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner took place on 4 December, performed by Roderick Williams and BCMG.

Early Music’s most recent issue focused on early music and modern technology.

Featured image: Image by Dark Rider. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Over a century of great judicial writing [infographic]

Over the last century, many judges have paved the way for great judicial writing. In Point Taken: How to Write Like the World’s Best Judges, author Ross Guberman examines the cases and opinions of 34 acclaimed judges, focusing on their use of figurative language, vivid examples, grammar, and other writing techniques. Below is an interactive timeline, which highlights some of these important cases and explores how “great judicial writing” was turned into “great writing.” Hover over the judge and case for more information and click on the quill to learn why that case earned a spot on Guberman’s list.

Image Credit: “My Trusty Gavel” by Brian Turner. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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The continuing conundrum of shared sanitation in slums

In an ideal world, each household would have their own toilet for privacy, practicality, and a sense of ownership—you’re much more likely to clean and maintain the facility if the toilet is yours. A toilet, latrine, or sanitation facility—these are several words to describe the same thing, namely the safe disposal of human waste, whilst providing privacy, dignity, and easy accessibility to all that need it (including young children or less abled individuals). According to the latest report from the Joint Monitoring Programme managed by WHO and UNICEF, 13% of the world’s population do not have access to a toilet—irrespective of it being a shiny water closet, a pour-flush squat latrine, or a basic dry pit with a bamboo superstructure. In addition, 9% of the global population have access to some sort of toilet, but have to share it with other families, their landlord, or the general public. The reasons for the need to share a toilet are vast and numerous, and include lack of space to build a toilet, lack of money or materials to construct one, or because it is not seen as a priority for the household.

Despite this, toilets are important. In fact, the British Medical Journal voted sanitation to be the most important medical advance since 1850. The reasons for households to build their own toilet can range from improved privacy, dignity and household pride, and convenience, such as was shown in rural Benin. But in areas with limited space and uncertain land tenure (urban slums, for example), building a toilet exclusively for your household is often not feasible. Some slums have large public sanitation blocks, which can be used for a fee such as the Sulabh public toilet complexes in in India. However, these may be unaffordable for large families, may be quite some distance from the home, or may not be open at all times, such as in the middle of the night. Alternative options may include sharing a facility with the landlord or with neighbours, which may increase accessibility, but potential cause complications with responsibility for cleaning and maintenance. Lastly, people may resort to open defecation, or the use of ‘flying toilets’.

Basic latrine with limited privacy or protection from the elements. Photo by M. Heijnen. Bhubaneshwar, India, 2013.

So the provision and use of sanitation facilities for all slum residents is complicated—cost, ownership, distance to facility, accessibility, and safety for all users (think about elderly people, young children, or pregnant women) all play a role. A household may not be willing to invest in building or maintaining a toilet, as they don’t know if they may be evicted next week, or perhaps believe it is the responsibility of the landlord to provide the facility. The maintenance of the toilet in the slum may be particularly tricky—toilets with (septic) tanks may have to be emptied manually if the lanes are too narrow for a desludger. Slums often consist of a mixture of people from a range of places, with different customs and cultural and religious beliefs. This, together with the transitory nature of slum-life, makes the formation of ‘sanitation management committees’ or similar units who could collect funds and manage and maintain the sanitation facilities difficult.

The health benefits of sanitation—the safe disposal of human faeces—together with hand washing with soap after using the toilet are undisputed. However, do these health benefits still exist when a toilet facility is shared with many households, with potentially limited cleaning and maintenance of the facility? And what if not everyone in the household uses the toilet (and instead practices open defecation) or does not use it all the time (for example using a ‘flying toilet’ during the night)? The difficulty in measuring a health benefit, together with the complexities of slum life mean there is no easy answer. A recent study in Orissa, India showed that within a selection of slums, households which had their own toilets were wealthier and more educated, and their toilets were cleaner and had fewer flies and faecal matter in or near the cubicle. A follow up study, which focused on the households sharing sanitation facilities, showed that households using communally-managed facilities (frequently used by large numbers of households) were poorer and less educated, and the facilities were less clean and maintained as compared to households sharing a sanitation facility with only their neighbours or landlord. Thus it seems that the more ‘localised’ form of sharing, with individuals known by the household using the toilet, increases cleanliness, as well as accessibility.

Image: ‘Shared’ Sanitation ladder, as determined from 570 households in 30 slums in Orissa, India. Provided by M. Heijnen, 2015.

So what does this mean for shared sanitation in slums? Some have argued that shared sanitation facilities are the only solution in slums, due to space and cost limitations. But the discussion continues—some research argues that the focus should be less on the user of the shared facility, and more on the facility itself. Others note that sanitation provision needs to go beyond technology or user-numbers, and include factors of culture, affordability and ownership. Overall, research shows that a simple statement of ‘shared sanitation’ does not account for the diversity of shared sanitation found in different settings—the different ‘forms’ of shared sanitation and the lack of consensus on definitions complicates monitoring for international targets.

With increasing urbanisation, sanitation in slums will become a more pressing issue. Providing adequate, safe and accessible sanitation for all users in slums is a public health priority which requires a multifaceted approach, considering the actual facilities as well as increasing education and empowerment among the potential users. In addition, accountability from landlords and local government is essential. In order for shared sanitation facilities to be a sustainable step on the sanitation ladder, policy makers, programme implementers, and target communities must join forces to ensure the facilities are culturally appropriate, affordable, well-maintained, and user-friendly. Then hopefully, we can ensure that all facilities—whether shared or used by one household—provide the health, comfort, and privacy benefits that a toilet really should.

Featured image credit: Large pay-per-use sanitation block. Photo by M. Heijnen. Bhubaneshwar, India, 2013.

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International law at Oxford in 2015

It’s been another exciting year for international law at Oxford University Press. We have put together some highlights from 2015 to reflect on the developments that have taken place, from scholarly commentary on current events to technology updates and conference discussions.

January

In early January, Al-Qaeda gunmen stormed the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo killing 11. Robert Diab, author of The Harbinger Theory: How the Post-9/11 Emergency Became Permanent and the Case for Reform, published a piece on the OUPblog reflecting, in part, on this attack. Has ISIS become the new pretext for curtailing our civil liberties?

February

On 2 February, Judith Butler delivered the second London Review of International Law lecture at LSE titled “Human Shield”. A video and podcast of the talk are available through LSE, and her full length article on the topic is free to read in the London Review of International Law.

March

We launched our new Facebook page for Public International Law. We have been highlighting free content from our international law journals, books and online products including video and multimedia content, reflections from key scholars in the field, and more.

EJIL launched an app for smartphones and tablets, available for both Apple and Android devices. Access to content through the app is limited to individual subscribers and ESIL members. To access, subscribers should visit this page and enter their OUP customer ID number for authentication, then simply follow the links from that page to install the app to their device.

To mark the beginning of a new tradition in EJIL, Jan Klabbers published the first Foreword (with a higher word limit of 40,000 words), discussing the ongoing transformation of international organizations law. Read his Foreword in full, or watch a conversation with Professor Klabbers and Professor Weiler discussing the Foreword on EJIL Live!

April

Our own John Louth pulled together reviewing all of the books on international law published between April 2014 and March 2015. The list includes 401 titles as well as information about the language of publication, publisher, and subject matter.

On 22 April, we celebrated Earth Day with a collection featuring recent articles on environmental law, including articles published in Yearbook of International Environmental Law and Journal of Environmental Law.

We were busy preparing for the 109th ASIL Annual Meeting. In recognition of the American Society of International Law’s conference theme, International Law in a Changing World, we worked with editors from many of our international law journals to identify recent articles which addressed the topics to be covered at the conference.

The American Society of International Law awarded Ben Saul, David Kinley, and Jacqueline Mowbray the 2015 Certificate of Merit for High Technical Craftsmanship and Utility to Practicing Lawyers and Scholars, for their book The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Commentary, Cases, and Materials. Symeon C. Symeonides, was announced as the winner of the ASIL Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law 2015, for his book Codifying Choice of Law Around the World: An International Comparative Analysis. And Gilles Giaca won the ASIL Francis Lieber Prize, for his book Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in Armed Conflict.

May

In recognition of the 70th anniversaries of the 12 Nazi camps liberated in April and May of 1945, we created a visual article collection on subjects ranging from justice to memorials.

On 27 May, seven FIFA officials were arrested on accusation of corruption through fraud, bribery and money laundering. Professor Robert Cryer wrote a reflection in response to these arrests on how they represent an internationalisation of criminal justice.

Carsten Stahn’s The Law and Practice of the International Criminal Court published. Some of his most revealing findings include the cost — and cost allocations — of the ICC.

June

In commemoration of World Refugee Day on 20 June, we selected articles from key refugee studies, international law and human rights journals. We also created a graphic illustrating data released in the UNHCR Global Appeal 2015 Update.

President Omar al-Bashir of the Republic of Sudan attended the 25th Summit of African Union in Johannesburg, and was able to return to Khartoum without being arrested. Nerina Boschiero discussed the South African government’s actions in al-Bashir’s escape from the ICC.

July

From 1-3 July, the International Society of Public Law held its second annual conference in New York on “Public Law in an Uncertain World”. At the conference, Michaela Hailbronner was awarded the inaugural I•CON Best Paper Prize for, “Rethinking the rise of the German Constitutional Court: From anti-Nazism to value formalism.”

August

We shared a project we had been working on featuring a timeline mapping the broad history of public international law. Explore major developments in the history of international law and learn more by clicking through to freed-up chapters from Oxford Historical Treaties, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, relevant book chapters, blog pieces, and journal articles.

On 3 August, in advance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting, we brought together a small collection of papers from the Chinese Journal of International Law to answer some questions about the rising geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.

In anticipation of the European Society of International Law meeting to be hosted the following month in Oslo, we created a quiz testing, “How much do you know about Nordic countries and international law?”

Users of our online services are now able to search all Public International Law content from one quick search, with journal articles appearing in search results alongside results from our online services.

September

In response to the refugee crisis in Europe, we created a Resource on Refugee Law including more than 30 book chapters, journal articles, and pieces of content from online resources to assist those working with refugees on the ground, as well as anyone who would like to know more about the framework of rights and obligations concerning refugees. The materials are structured around four key questions: who is a refugee, what rights do they have, what are transit states’ obligations, and what are the duties of the state where a refugee applies for asylum. Other useful resources are linked to at the bottom of the page.

In advance of the ESIL conference, we created a journals article collection on the theme of Judicialization of International Law. Articles were grouped into two categories: those which reflect on judicialization, and then those which consider applying the system to new problems or novel areas.

This year at ESIL, Mónica García-Salmones Rovira was awarded the Book Prize for The Project of Positivism in International Law. Even if you couldn’t make it to the conference, recordings of selected sessions are still available through PluriCourts.

Keynote Panel: A Turn to the Rule of Law in International Politics: The Role of the International Judiciary with Martti Koskenniemi and Judge James Crawford moderated by Jutta Brunnée via @carlos_dem

On 17-18 September, the Journal of Environmental Law and KCL organized several #ClimateCourts lectures. “Climate Change & Rule of Law,” a lecture from Philippe Sands QC, chaired by Lord Carnwath, can be viewed online.

Patrick Macklem’s new book The Sovereignty of Human Rights hit US bookshelves as did The European Convention on Human Rights: A Commentary by William A. Schabas.

October

We attended the ASIL Research Forum in DC. Ahead of the meeting, we put together a list of what delegates might want to read before attending.

On 9 October, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet. In recognition of this achievement, we freed up scholarship which focused on Tunisia in the last five years, constitution-making in the Middle East, democratization in the Middle East, and organizational cooperation in nation building in the Middle East.

Author Başak Çali, editor of a module of Oxford Reports on International Law, discussed why it is important to report on legal developments and the benefit to academics, practitioners, and researchers in international law.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions A Commentary, edited by Andrew Clapham, Paola Gaeta, and Marco Sassòli published. Andrew Clapham discussed the challenges of pulling together a commentary of this magnitude.

November

In advance of International Law Weekend (5-7 November), we asked some of our key authors to provide a short reflection in response to: “What are the biggest challenges facing international lawyers today?”

We announced a Call for Rapporteurs for those interested in contributing to a database of annotated documents pertaining to the law of international organizations. This will include documents such as resolutions of international organizations, reports of legal advisers, judicial decisions, international agreements, or any act of legal relevance.

International Law: A Very Short Introduction, authored by Vaughan Lowe, published. This VSI explains what international law is, what its role in international society is, and how it operates.

In the wake the assassination of the IS militant known as “Jihadi John”, we made freely available a number of resources explaining the legal background and debates in this area of international law known as the law on targeted killing.

December

We’ve been celebrating Human Rights Month throughout December, providing free access to recent materials through the end of April.

Featured image: Bandon, United States. Photo by Jeena Beekhuis. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Why have we normalized Islamophobia?

The horrific attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have captured headlines and triggered responses from journalists, politicians, and religious leaders. Some Western heads of government have once again threatened a global war against terrorism, while some political commentators have even invoked World War III.

In the United States, Republican presidential candidates and some thirty governors have called for a freeze on accepting refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria. Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States, has pushed the envelope to its extreme, advocating a temporary freeze on all foreign Muslim immigration, as well as the monitoring or even the forced closure of American mosques. The result? Trump soared in the polls, as did fellow presidential candidate Ben Carson, who stated that “for a Muslim to become president of the United States…you have to reject the tenets of Islam.” In Europe, far-right political candidates continue to make political headway. The far-right Front National party of Marine Le Pen won nearly 30% of the vote in the recent French regional elections; although the party did not win any of the regions outright, the strong showing positions Le Pen as a future presidential candidate.

Fear of Islam and Muslims in general—not just Muslim extremist and terrorist movements specifically—have become normalized in popular culture in both America and Europe. The anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim hate speech, bias, discrimination, and hate crimes—commonly referred to as Islamophobia—are on the rise. Islam Muslims and the vast majority of Muslims have been brush-stroked by and often equated with the kind of militant extremism and terrorism practiced by a mere fraction of Muslims, obscuring the fact that the vast majority of terrorist victims are themselves Muslim. This, in turn, has had a significant impact on the growth of Islamophobia as well as the domestic policies that have threatened Muslim civil liberties. But what are its causes?

Is Islam the primary cause and catalyst for terrorism?

Major polls have consistently reported that Islam is a significant component of religious and cultural identity in Muslim countries and communities globally, and thus an attractive tool for violent extremists as an instrument for legitimation and mobilization. However, the primary catalysts for extremism and terrorism are political grievances often intertwined with the use or misuse of religion. Osama Bin Laden and others like him appealed to long-standing political grievances among many in the Muslim world, the mainstream non-violent majority and extremists alike: Western influence, invasion, occupation; Western support for authoritarian regimes that claim to speak for all Muslims; uncritical bias and support for Israel from the American government in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Add to this the Iraqi and Syrian (Shiah-dominated) governments’ repression and killing of tens of thousands of civilians and other crimes.

ISIS has shown a particular talent for coopting and exploiting all of these issues. Their execution videos, released when ISIS called itself the Islamic State of Iraq (October 2006–April 2013, Al-Furqan Media Foundation), underscored the importance of political grievances for legitimation of their actions and as a tool for recruitment.

In addition to this, public displays of Islamophobia in the West, from political speeches and demonstrations to negative portrayals of Muslims in the media and hate crimes, are also effective tools for recruitment. Major studies have also found that Islamophobia increases significantly not only with incidents of domestic terrorism but also at election time, as seen in the 2008 and 2012 presidential and the 2010 Congressional elections. During those races, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and others sought to gain attention by making reckless statements about Muslims. In 2010 in particular, the public debate over the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque in New York became fodder for candidates looking for media coverage. Today, that trend continues with candidates such as Trump, Carson, Cruz, and others.

Most Americans—who live in a country with a relatively small Muslim population—say they know little or nothing about Islam. Thus, it is not surprising that when terrorists commit their acts of violence in the name of Islam in Paris and San Bernardino, they are drawn to demagogues in America like Donald Trump and in Europe who bring Muslims and the Islamic faith to the forefront of the political debate.

As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently wrote in the New York Times: “Trump is ISIS’s greatest triumph: the perfect Manchurian Candidate who, instead of offering specific and realistic policies, preys on the fears of the public, doing ISIS’s job for them.”

To what extent has media contributed to the problem?

Media Tenor, in its 2011 report “A New Era for Arab-Western Relations,”found that out of nearly 975,000 news stories from US and European media outlets, networks significantly reduced coverage on events in MENA to actions of Muslim militants. A comparison of media coverage in 2001 versus 2011 demonstrates the shocking disparity of coverage. In 2001, 2% of all news stories in Western media presented images of Muslim militants, while just over 0.5% presented stories of ordinary Muslims. In 2011, 25% of the stories presented militant image, while the images of ordinary Muslims remained stuck at 0.5%.

The net result is an astonishing imbalance of coverage: an exponential increase in coverage of militants but no increase at all over the 10 year period in the coverage of ordinary Muslims—and that despite census figures confirming a rapidly growing Muslim population. The situation got worse, for example—between 2007 and 2013, 80% of all American news coverage about Muslims/Islam was negative.

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of social media websites targeting the Muslim community, with serious international and domestic consequences. A cottage industry of ideological, agenda-driven, anti-Muslim polemicists has sprung up, consisting of pundits, bloggers, authors, lobbyists, elected officials, and their resourceful and wealthy funders.

An August 2011 Center Report, Fear, Inc., documented, based on IRS information, that $42.6 million flowed from seven foundations over ten years to support Islamophobic authors and websites. A CAIR Report in 2013, “Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States,” reported that the inner core of the US-based Islamophobia network enjoyed access to at least $119,662,719 in total revenue between 2008 and 2011.

Totally lost or obscured in the fear and fog of war are the facts on the ground regarding American Muslims. Data from major polls (Gallup, Pew and others) and studies have reported that the vast majority of Muslims in America, for example, are educationally, economically, socially, and religiously an integral part of our American mosaic: members of Congress, the military, corporate, education and religious leaders, physicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists and small business owners. American Muslims were among the victims and first-responders on 9/11. In contrast, Muslim terrorists are a fraction of a fraction of 1%. No wonder that the US Attorney General, Senior Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, as well as leaders in the Democratic and Republican parties, have rejected Donald Trump’s outrageous and inflammatory rhetoric and its threat to American principles and values and to the civil liberties of American Muslims.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) offered the simplest and most direct rebuttal Tuesday, the day after Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States: “Freedom of religion’s a fundamental constitutional principle,” Ryan said.

“It’s a founding principle of this country….This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for. Not only are there many Muslims serving in our armed forces dying for this country, there are Muslims serving right here in the House, working every day to uphold and to defend the Constitution…. Some of our best and biggest allies in this struggle and fight against radical Islamic terror are Muslims—the vast, vast, vast majority of whom are peaceful, who believe in pluralism, freedom, democracy, individual rights. I told our members this morning to always strive to live up to our highest ideals, those principles in the Constitution on which we swear every two years that we will defend.”

As President Barack Obama recently observed:

[I]t is the responsibility of all Americans—of every faith—to reject discrimination. It is our job to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It is our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose…We were founded upon a belief in human dignity—that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.

Image Credit: “IMG_4686” by Trocaire. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Interpreting “screen time”

The screen is so unremarkable in its ubiquity that it might seem to take going out to the very limits to make us aware of the extent to which image projection has become our very condition. Take the migration of the phrase “screen time” from its place in film analysis as the descriptor for the edited duration of an action on screen. Screen time now demarcates the time we spend facing the screen. The new use of the phrase makes us aware of the screen only to the extent to which it encroaches. Or, rather, through the device of “parental controls,” screen time is what must be restricted from “children”– that displacing shorthand for those deemed vulnerable to the screen’s altering powers. But it is not just the situation of the ubiquitously scattered and presumptively attention-scattering screen that constitutes our condition. The scene of projection functions as an apparatus of power by just such displacing projection—casting off vulnerability onto the “children” who figure the precarious susceptibility we might refuse to admit.

However, the scene of projection as an apparatus of power can also be turned to critical and potentially transformative effect by calling out our “screen-time” susceptibility and calling on its performative magic to substantially alter us. Recent art projects that take up the phantasmagoria machine and camera obscura demand an extension of this theorization. Take the particular hailing of Philippe Parreno’s art installation hyped as the “art event of the summer” that, if not inducing an actual trance state, sets itself the challenge of luring us away from our wrists and handhelds and keeping us in thrall enough to stay for at least two hours. The sound, light, and image machinery of Philippe Parreno’s art installation H (N)Y P N(Y) OSIS (fig. 2) occupies the drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory (11 June to 2 August 2015) to play out the conceit of opening the black box or camera obscura of cinema and photography, the dark chamber of the unconscious, and the black hall of undeveloped history. (The Armory was built for the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard in the aftermath of the US civil war, a war over racial violence, property, and the carceral state that’s far from over). In what the Armory’s President Rebecca Robertson described as an “infernal machine” of digitally-orchestrated automation, the engineering of the armory’s architecture becomes part of the playable assemblage. Shuttered windows and skylights rise to admit the light from outside while ricocheted live feed of the hum of traffic noise from Lexington Avenue vibrates along with the rumble as three large cinema-scale screens lift and lower like the safety curtains of the old-school cinema, concert hall, and musical theatres from which the rest of the machinery takes its melancholy echo. Twenty-six light sculptures and an LED screen suspended in two parallel rows relay the lights of Broadway. But, while these marquees convert the central axis of the drill hall into an avenue of attractions, the brands of Times Square are flagrant in their absence. The on and off flash of the marquee’s white lights do a dramatically different striptease–it is the signs that are naked and the “live girls” are somber adolescents. In intermittent performances conceived by collaborating artist Tino Sehgal, the girls introduce themselves as incarnations of the manga character AnnLee whom Parreno bought with Pierre Huyghe in 1999. Each asks of us the piercing question, “What is the difference between a sign and melancholia?”

While the bleachers situated between the three screens at the back of the hall rotate slowly, the burning question of loss and the refusal to let go of lost objects of desire suffuses the haunted hall with a dragged sense of time. The ghosts of what was relegated to a pre-cinema past (from the magic lantern and prism to vaudeville) join the motley phantasmagoria show of a present recast as deeply mixed inside and out. That is, the black box of the Drill Hall as an altered and porous camera obscura doesn’t just appear to open to the world beyond it. In the words of Parreno’s advance statement, the “prismatic” machine is to function as a “mirror” of the city, reflecting the New York whose branding letters are to be seen but not heard in the show’s title. Despite the parenthetical stutter of the extra “N” and “Y,” it is still spoken like “hypnosis,” the old school tool of psychoanalysis which Sigmund Freud replaced with free association on the couch. And that is all to the boomeranging point. When the screen on the left descends, Parreno’s film Marilyn (2012) focuses our attention dreamily on the empty couch (fig. 3) at the center of what Parreno describes as a phantasmagoric re-creation of the apartment at the Waldorf Astoria where Marilyn Monroe lived while taking acting lessons from Lee Strasberg and undergoing intensive psychoanalysis. The camera slowly scans the rooms while we hear the contents described in that distinctively breathy voice and a pen scratched across the hotel stationery, inking a version of the waking dream diary Monroe wrote while in analysis. Although the Waldorf Astoria is not where Monroe was found dead, the dramatic pathos builds as rain beats against the windows and the phone’s insistent ring goes unanswered until suddenly the camera pans back to expose that the hotel room is a stage set and the pen’s automatic writing is propelled by a robot arm.

This move might seem to re-enact the classic ideological reveal, disclosing the machinery to dissolve the seductive hold of the cinematic illusion for which “woman” is the image incarnate. Yet, there would seem to be nobody and no body to be seen here. Much has been made in film theory, media archaeology, and the history of art about the ostensible occultation of the device of image projection itself–as if the shaping power of the apparatus depends on whether or not one can see the machine, its internal workings, and its labor of operation. Yet what the scene of projection as an apparatus of power conventionally pulls off is a rather different trick of performative magic than hiding or revealing the levers or the “man behind the curtain.” By giving us a kind of fall girl, the scene of projection as a persistent and punishing pedagogy in rational, discarnate vision trains us not to occupy the place of feminized frailty. But the surprise and the bite of H (N)Y P N(Y) OSIS is not that the giant metal robot rig points to the elements of construction we cannot see, exposing that Marilyn is an assemblage of biometric algorithms for voice, hand, and eyes. Rather, as in each of the films screened in the installation, the pierce is in the point of view and the way in which it becomes ours and we become other than we think we are. Whether it is the position of the camera as a ghostly machine Marilyn (Marilyn, 2012), the seemingly impossible point of view of the dead body of John F. Kennedy on the train that took the corpse back to Washington (June 8, 1968, 2009), or the paranoid perspective of one of the “invisibles,” the Chinese immigrant boy in Manhattan’s Chinatown whose paranoid visions of monsters (etched into the skin of the film) constitute his superhero power (InvisibleBoy, 2010), the paranoid and exterminating projection, rather than enable us to displace our vulnerability onto anti-types, becomes a vehicle for facing the screen time of what we’re taught to abjure, including our own dependence–maligned as weakness or susceptibility and social and economic precarity.

The minor hope in the counter-version of the society of spectacle orchestrated by H (N)Y P N(Y) OSIS is most palpable via the new film produced for the installation, The Crowd (2015). Filmed in the cavernous space of the drill hall itself, a mixed mass of spectators (in terms of age, gender, race, and bodily type and capacity) flow on screen in patterns of attention oriented toward a spectacle that remains ominously off-screen. The effect hovers somewhere between the staging of a sci-fi alien encounter and the uncanniness and narcissism of the mirror in which we start to see ourselves, the audience, as both resembling and yet—we might insist—fundamentally not like this crowd whom Parreno claims were hypnotized for the performance. Here in this encounter with the screen-time question of whether we are, if not literally hypnotized, open to our vulnerability sits both the shiver of possibility and the dangerous fall. Parreno calls H (N)Y P N(Y) OSIS a “paranoic formula” that functions “sort of like Alice in Wonderland.” But one may well wonder for the scene of projection may persist in reconsolidating the fantasy of the fortress ego of a phantom sovereignty. The machinery of paranoid projection is deeply volatile. Projection has a lethal force in the material real of screen time. The Black Lives Matter movement recalls our attention to the way in which paranoid projection animates the long history of police brutality as a continuation of the terrorism of lynching redressed in cop clothes.  Paranoid projection does not just cast out the violent fantasies we do not admit but returns them to us in the alien forms in which the targets of our own dark inventions transform into external threats requiring extermination.. Yet at the same time, the volatile contacts between bodies, screens, affects, sensations and the material residue of ghosts in the opened dark chamber of the drill hall also produce a mixed zone for the radically imminent possibility of transformation. Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura experiments leading up to 945 Madison Avenue (2014) at the last Whitney Biennial in the old building show us that the dark enclosure of the room with its walls turned screens for the projection of an image of the world outside is not necessarily an isolation chamber or armored armory for the formation of a militantly walled subject. (The camera obscura, through a small aperture fitted with a lens, projects its image of the street outside onto the wall opposite – but upside down.) Leonard analogizes the experience of looking together in the social space of the camera obscura to the collectivities of dialogue and politics. It is hard to dispel the no less imminent possibility that screen time in the opened dark chamber may be fiercely social, providing a habitable miniature of the unseen conditions of mass enthrallment. At the same time—call it hope or melancholy—we might find here the platform for a commons that doesn’t demand sameness or even identity. That is, we might lose ourselves in a camera collectiva that affords the experience of ways of navigating screen time for other forms of being and becoming besides the subjection of the fortress ego and its abject objects. Such a scene of projection is an object of desire hard to let go.

Image credit: “VS211947” by Joris Leermakers, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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A history of modern scholarship on Ancient Greek religion

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are a key period in the history of modern scholarship on ancient Greek religion. It was in nineteenth-century Germany that the foundations for the modern academic study of Greek religion were laid and the theories formulated by German scholars as well as by their British colleagues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exercised a profound influence on the field which would resonate until much later times.

Throughout this period fierce debates were conducted over the interpretation of Greek religion: what were the origins of the Greek gods and what light did they shed on their conception in historical times? Was there a monotheistic strand in Greek polytheism and if so, how was it to be explained? In terms of an innate human tendency, or diffusion from abroad? And if the latter, where from? How similar or different was Greek religion to the religions of other Indo-European peoples, to the non-Indo-European religions of the ancient Near East, or to the modern polytheistic religions of Africa and Asia? At a time of growing scientification and professionalization in the discipline, classical scholars in Germany and Britain drew on developments in philology, archaeology, comparative mythology, anthropology, and later sociology to propose strikingly different answers to these questions.

Consider the issue of origins, for example. According to a very influential tradition of comparative interpretation in the nineteenth century, the Greek gods, like the gods of other ancient religions, derived from the personification of natural elements and domains—Zeus of the sky, Poseidon of the sea, and so forth. Because of the variety of natural forces and phenomena, Ludwig Preller (1809-1861), one of the most eminent representatives of this approach, described polytheism as an inherent weakness of Greek religion.

In the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, this view was strongly opposed by scholars such as Heinrich Dietrich Müller (1819-1893) and Ernst Curtius (1814-1896), who rejected the idea that Greek religion was inherently polytheistic and to whom the worship of natural powers was redolent of irrationality and mysticism. In their eyes, it was typical of Asian religions, but could not have provided the basis of the religion of the Greeks. Far from being personifications of different elements of the natural world, they suggested that Zeus, Poseidon, and the other Olympians were originally universal, omnipotent gods—like the God of Judaism and Christianity. Ascribing a form of monotheism to the Greeks they argued that initially each Greek community had worshipped a single, all-powerful god. Greek polytheism was a late outcome of historical contingencies as the separate gods of the different communities were gradually brought together and their once universal powers started to contract.

This theory was, in turn, challenged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by British anthropology and evolutionism. The concept of gods endowed with universal powers was now seen as belonging to late stages of religious development rather than its beginnings. Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first to apply sociological theory to the study of Greek religion, in fact envisaged an early stage of Totemism in ancient Greece where no gods at all had existed. In her view, what was primary in Totemism was “the idea of the unity of a group.” Gods were a “by-product” that emerged gradually out of pre-existing rituals which expressed group cohesion.

These issues were far from being of mere antiquarian interest. The interpretation of Greek religion during the nineteenth and early twentieth century was heavily affected by, and closely implicated in, contemporary discussions of crucial questions concerning the origins and nature of religion, the roots of Western culture and its relation to the “Orient,” or humankind’s attitudes to nature. Clashes between devout Christian scholars and proponents of “scientific atheism,” confessional rivalries between Catholics and Protestants and national rivalries between the Germans and the British were some of the factors that informed the study of Greek religion and made it highly relevant to present concerns.

The modern assumptions and agendas of past interpretations of Greek religion highlight the intersection of the history of the discipline with contemporary intellectual, cultural, and religious history. They not only shed light on why the field evolved in the way it has, but also invite us to reflect on the interrelations between current views of Greek religion and their context.

Image Credit: Hermes, Dionysos, Ariadne and Poseidon (Amphitrite is also depicted but cannot be seen here). Detail from the belly of an Attic red-figure hydria, ca. 510 BC–500 BC. From Etruria. Photo by Jastrow. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Shakespeare and Islam

Without Islam there would be no Shakespeare. This may seem surprising or even controversial to those who imagine a ‘national bard’ insulated from the wider world. Such an approach is typified in the words of the celebrated historian A.L. Rowse, who wrote that when it came to creatively connecting with that world, Shakespeare, the ‘quiet countryman’, was ‘the least engaged writer there ever was’.

Yet without Tudor and Jacobean England’s rich and complex engagement with Islamic cultures the plays written by William Shakespeare would be very different, if they existed at all. This is evidently true in terms of content. Take away around 150 references to Islamic motifs in 21 plays – to Turks and Saracens, to ‘Mahomet’, Morocco and Barbary – and the corpus looks very different. Take away The Merchant of Venice and Othello, both of which foreground encounters with Islam, and two of the best known and most frequently performed of the plays are lost.

To argue that most of these references are insubstantial or irrelevant is to misunderstand the ways in which they are used. Throughout the history plays, for instance, Shakespeare embeds a rhetoric of crusade, of fighting for ‘Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field’ against ‘black pagans, Turks, and Saracens’, in order to define martial Christian valour and to demonise enemies. Alternatively, the apparently casual references to silks, taffetas, ‘bags of spices’, ‘Turkish tapestry’, and ‘Turkey cushions bossed with pearl’ that litter his drama are intended to signal a particular kind of opulence, but they simultaneously reveal England’s expanding commercial horizons as the material products of Islamic cultures were increasingly brought into English homes.

Such developments were the result of Elizabeth I’s alliances with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire, and Shakespeare need only have looked around the places he lived and worked to encounter Islamic worlds. English moralists were routinely aghast at how the English luxuriated in Muslim fashions (in ‘the Turkish manner’, in ‘Morisco gowns’ and ‘Barbarian sleeves’), and lambasted the apparently insatiable appetite of English women for ‘Turkish trifles’ – jewellery, fabrics, trinkets and spices – and the predilection of English men for the infernal Turkish ‘moustachio’. It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare became fascinated by the challenge of conjuring such worlds onto the stage.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Elizabeth I (circa 1600). University of Birmingham. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Although England’s Islamic alliances had brought Muslims and their goods into England, it was the interconnected popularity of what is known as the ‘Turk play’ on the Elizabethan stage that pushed Islam and Islamic cultures to the fore of the English imagination. The caricatures, pomp, and bombast of such plays dominated London’s stages as Shakespeare began to forge a career, and had begun with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587). Within a few years every playing company in the capital had its ‘Turk play’. Not everyone was a fan: Ben Jonson lamented that ‘Turk plays’ were nothing more than ‘scenical strutting and furious vociferation’ appealing only to ‘ignorant gapers’. For a young playwright looking to make a name in the early 1590s this presented an opportunity. After some early experimentation – probably in collaboration – in which elements of the bloody and grandiloquent ‘Turk play’ were translated into English historical (with the Henry VI plays) or Roman (with Titus Andronicus) contexts, an increasingly experienced and newly emboldened Shakespeare chose instead to ridicule and reject such plays.

Shakespeare’s satirising of the ‘Turk play’ appears first with the pompous braggart Pistol in 2 Henry IV. Pistol is a transparent parody of the raging ‘Grand Turk’ protagonist, entirely excessive, martially obsessed, lacking any capacity for self-awareness or self-doubt. Shakespeare even has him misquote famous lines from three of the most prominent examples of the genre to punctuate a tavern-brawl with a prostitute. Around the same time Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, which features the Prince of Morocco taking Portia’s casket test. With his proud brandishing of a scimitar ‘That slew the Sophy, and a Persian prince, / That won three fields of Sultan Solyman’, he too is a comic parody. By the end of the 1590s the first wave of ‘Turk plays’ was abandoned as audiences tired of its absurd clichés. In its place new dynamics and a more nuanced version of heroism and of encounter emerged, with Shakespeare at the forefront.

Why then did he return to the matter of the ‘Turk play’ in Othello (1603)? Partly he did so to capitalise on the continuing currency of Islam and Islamic themes in England – a Moroccan embassy had been resident in London in 1600-01 – and partly to innovate. Indeed, Othello rips up the rulebook. An audience is presented with a protagonist from beyond Christendom, a Moorish warrior-convert, and given expansive Mediterranean geographies across which they expect to see him battle the Turkish foe. At the very least they would have anticipated an enactment of the great siege of Cyprus (conquered by the Ottomans in 1570). Instead those geographies rapidly contract into suffocating domesticity, the Turks never appear and Othello only draws his sword on Desdemona and himself. The play’s tragic conclusion, when Othello smites the ‘circumcised and turbanned Turk’ that he has become, completes this process of turning the ‘Turk play’ inside out.

Othello reveals a dramatist continuing to challenge theatrical precedent, in particular hackneyed caricatures of Muslims and ‘Mahometanism’, and producing something more elusive, more reflective of the complex ways in which his culture engaged with Islam. Moreover, it was out of this long and fruitful contention that something distinctively Shakespearean emerged.

Featured image credit: Battle of Lepanto in 1571 by Yogesh Brahmbhatt. National Maritime Museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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From teaspoons to tea-sots: the language of tea

Tea was first imported into Britain early in the seventeenth century, becoming very popular by the 1650s. The London diarist Samuel Pepys drank his first cup in 1660, as recorded in his famous diary: “I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I had never drunk before.” The word tea derives ultimately from the Mandarin Chinese word chá, via the Min dialect form te. The Mandarin word is also the origin of the informal word char, heard today in phrases like a nice cup of char. The Chinese origin of the plant is remembered in the idiom not for all the tea in China, meaning “certainly not,” “not at any price,” which originated in Australian slang of the 1890s.

By the eighteenth century, tea had become a symbol of fashionable society and a staple of the coffee house culture. Samuel Johnson was a self-confessed “hardened and shameless tea-drinker…whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.” As tea-drinking developed into an elaborate social ritual, so did the associated paraphernalia. From the eighteenth century we find references to tea-spoons, tea-boxes, tea-tongs, tea-kitchens (similar to a modern tea-urn), tea-caddies (from catty, a unit of weight, ultimately derived from Malay kati); sets comprising cups, saucers, tea-pots, and other essentials were known as tea-equipage, or rather more prosaically as tea-things, or tea-services (as they still are today). The trade in growing, selling, and administering tea created a need for tea-growers, tea-sifters, and tea-ladies (nowadays associated with a tea-trolley and tea-urn); the grandest ceremonies were overseen by a tea-hostess or tea-master to ensure proper etiquette was observed.

Users and dealers

The large sums of money involved in the importing of this luxury commodity prompted efforts to regulate the trade, resulting in tea-tax, tea-duty, and tea-broker. The Boston Tea Party of 1773, when British tea was offloaded from ships into Boston harbour in protest at taxation, is the inspiration behind the name of the US Republican Tea Party movement; although some commentators have interpreted this as a backronym (an unhistorical explanation of a word’s origin) for “Taxed Enough Already.” Historical terms like tea-user and tea-dealer resemble the lexicon of today’s illicit drug trade, while in modern US slang a tea-head refers to someone who regularly smokes marijuana and a tea-pad to a drugs den.

The drinking of tea became such an established feature of English social life that we find references to tea-breakfasts, tea-soirées, tea-picnics, tea-visits, tea-dinners, and even tea-fights (a slang term for a tea-party rather than a bun-fight). A great frequenter of such events, assumed to be acting from disreputable motives, was known as a tea-hound. The light refreshment taken in the afternoon is still known as tea, although in some parts (particularly in Northern England) this is now used to refer to the evening meal. But how many households retain the tea-bell, used to summon the family to assemble at the appointed hour? A love of tea is so ingrained in British life that the phrase cup of tea has come to stand for anything viewed positively. In the 1930s, what interested someone was termed their tea; today we are more likely to express our dislike for something by saying: it’s not my cup of tea. When someone is distressed or bereaved, we console them with tea and sympathy, a phrase taken from the title of a 1950s film.

More tea, vicar?

The dangers of excessive tea-drinking are apparent from tea-sot (sot is an archaic word for a drunken fool) and tea-drunkard: “one who habitually drinks tea to such excess as to suffer from its toxic effects.” To be described as tea-faced implied a “sallow or effeminate countenance like one addicted to tea-drinking.” Over-consumption of tea can also be a source of flatulence, as suggested by the origins of the expression “More tea Vicar?” used to cover the embarrassment prompted by some social faux pas. This phrase is supposed to originate in an effort to fill an awkward silence caused by a vicar breaking wind at a tea-party: “More tea vicar?” the genteel hostess asked in a deft attempt to save the clergyman’s blushes. But the vicar—unversed in the niceties of social etiquette—responded bluntly: “No thank you, it makes me fart.”

A version of this blog post originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Image Credit: “Tea Time with Mooncake Pt. II” by Laura D’Alessandro. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Mythology redux: The Force Awakens once again

For some time now, I have been among those who have argued that the fandom associated with the Star Wars franchise is akin to a religion. There are those who will quarrel with the word choice, but it is hard to gainsay the dedication of fans to the original films, to the point that (as I have argued) the most devoted fans were made livid by the changes to the “canon” made by George Lucas in the special editions of Episodes IV, V, and VI—arguing with great passion, for example, that Han really did shoot Greedo first—in a way that suggests these films have taken on the character of sacred texts for the fans. In addition, as is well-known, Star Wars has its own mythological structure of the “hero’s quest” which Lucas borrowed freely from the works of Joseph Campbell, and which underlies the original trilogy as the hero is called to an adventure that leads him to confront his own “dark side” complete with Oedipal dimensions.

The fans of the original films (myself included) also did not disguise their distaste for the prequel films (Episodes I, II, and III) which were widely viewed by them as a gigantic disappointment after waiting some 16 years between Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999).  For the true believers, then, the anticipation that has led up to the release of The Force Awakens has been a mixture of dread and hope—as they feared it might be impossible to make a good Star Wars film that lives up to the originals, but they also hoped that fellow fan and director J.J. Abrams might create an episode worth watching.

So far, the fans seem pretty happy. A fan thread on reddit.com, for example, contains some criticisms of the film, but overall favorable reviews that see it as delivering a good story and good characters. An addition to the myth has been vetted and accepted.

Of course, there are other additions to the “canon” that have been considered. Besides the prequel films, Lucasfilm created two animated television series, The Clone Wars (which also included a theater-released film) and Star Wars Rebels. And there are also video games, novels, and fan fiction that occur in the so-called “Expanded Universe” of Star Wars, although once Walt Disney Corporation acquired Lucasfilm in November 2014, all these materials were rebranded and dubbed Star Wars Legends to indicate their “non-canonical” status. The debates about what should be included in the authoritative story canon are dizzying, and mirror the sort of debates that religious traditions have had throughout the ages about their own scriptures.

Image credit: “Star Wars” by aldobarquin. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

But The Force Awakens is somehow in a different category. As an official addition to the film episodes, it really had to find a way to be authoritative for all, and further the myth in the process. And it’s not easy to add to a myth.

The success of the film for fans then had to be built on it not quite being a remake, but something close to it—a mashup or remix of elements that have worked before, as Christopher Orr wrote in the Atlantic, but sufficiently new to be interesting. And this is what J.J. Abrams delivered.  As “Captain_Flemme” put it in the aforementioned reddit thread:

“I think Disney and Abrams decided that episode VII had to be a copy of episode IV because it is the backbone of the Star Wars saga. Now that this episode exists, the new trilogy will forever be linked to the original trilogy. They have completely eliminated the risk that people say ‘This is not Star Wars’, because it is exactly Star Wars.”

Those of us who have been talking about the mythic power of Star Wars for decades should not be surprised that this film has succeeded not by being novel, but by being derivative. What interests me is that the fans fully understand and accept this. They are not unwitting dupes who consume whatever the culture industry produces; they didn’t like The Phantom Menace because it didn’t follow the myth closely enough, and they will like The Force Awakens because it does, with enough interesting additions for them to discuss for years. And this also should be no surprise, because this is how religions operate, by returning to their foundational stories even as they find new ways to look at them—and films offer one way to do so. Think of all the film versions of the life of Jesus Christ that have been made in the last hundred years; the people who flocked to see them were not looking for a new episode, but “the old, old story.”

Featured image: J. J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley & Oscar Isaac by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.  

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