Chiunque conosca Alberto e conosca la sua opera, intesa anche come operare troverà in questo libro molte conferme e, come sempre capita con Alberto, molte suggestioni. Questa volta le suggestioni emergono già dal titolo del libro edito da Peter Lang: “Tradition and revolution. Law in action” che, come non capita poi così spesso, sintetizza perfettamente la volontà dell’Autore di ripensare categorie, appunto tradizionali, nel verso di una trasformazione, di un avanzamento.  È stato Gaetano Salvemini ad affermare, infatti, che la parola Rivoluzione contiene in sé due significati: il primo, quello di definire un movimento illegale, violento e rapido, che distrugge un regime sociale e politico, contro le autorità; la Rivoluzione francese del 1789-1792, le rivoluzioni parigine del 1830 e 1848, la rivoluzione russa del 1917. Il secondo, appunto, quello di designare un trapasso, un rinnovamento profondo di una situazione tradizionale, il quale può avvenire senza rapidi movimenti illegali e per evoluzioni graduale; la rivoluzione industriale inglese, ad esempio. Esiste anche una lettura storica e antropologica, rivoluzione come contaminazione, tensione, come condizione dell’umano mai fino in fondo risolvibile; mi pare essere questo il filo rosso che percorre l’opera di Alberto – e, dunque, anche questa ultima fatica – un approccio metodologico che non intende rassegnarsi dinanzi alle facili sovrapposizioni, alle opposizioni dialettiche, che pretendono di mostrarsi perfette e risolvere tutto in una irenica definizione dell’ordine, da tempo disincantato. L’ordine, per Lucarelli, non è mai presupposto, non è mai dato; la sua idea di action, fonda quello che chiamerei un costituzionalismo dinamico, un costituzionalismo in cui il “rumore” prevale rispetto alla quiete. La rivoluzione significa, in questo senso, dispiegamento completo delle potenzialità della Costituzione; una visione agonista, secondo il lessico della Mouffe, che Lucarelli ha spesso richiamato nei suoi libri, che rompe con l’idea di una razionalità statica, e, ovviamente contro ogni idea di organizzazione del potere e dei poteri che, per comodità e cinico e spietato calcolo, oggi si vorrebbe ancora una volta, come già accaduto drammaticamente nel corso del Novecento, sintetizzarsi in un Capo. Due idee percorrono questo libro e, direi, l’intero suo lavoro: la prima è che senza partecipazione, senza giustizia sociale non v’è democrazia; la seconda è che la democrazia stessa è un legame, nel cui ambito il popolo dispone delle competenze e della capacità politica di agire in funzione del bene comune. 

Su di entrambe, il libro si sofferma a lungo, in termini espliciti ed impliciti. L’intera costruzione e ri-costruzione del pensiero della coscienza civica, del comune, della proprietà pubblica, della funzione sociale della proprietà privata, è, in fondo, collegato al tema della socialità della giustizia, e a quello, ad essa, correlato, della capacità dell’uomo di contribuire in prima persona a lavorare e cooperare in funzione di questo obiettivo. La law in action si tramuta, così, nell’action for the law, per una legge che effettivamente possa essere rappresentativa dei bisogni e delle aspirazioni di un umano che desidera essere rappresentato. La cittadinanza, per quanto attiva, non basta, e certamente non basta l’idea, tipica di questo tempo, per ragioni che in questa sede non possono essere approfondite, che sia sufficiente un popolo collaborativo, consultato.

Conflitto e rappresentanza restano centrali, e, in questo senso, Lucarelli si conferma un autore pienamente repubblicano.

Quello che occorre fare, per Lucarelli, e anche per me, devo dire, è un “capovolgimento”, “capovolgimento” della situazione attuale, ricordando con chi ha ragionato sul suo etimo, che questa parola evoca la suggestiva immagine dell’aratro che rivolta la terra consentendo la semina. La rivoluzione, oggi, e di qui il principale legame con la tradizione, significa “immemorare” (Eingedenken), espressione suggestiva coniata dalla dottrina sulla scorta del pensiero di Bloch e Benjamin, che sta a significare l’irruzione nel presente di una “esigenza che viene dal passato”, esigenza che, si sottolinea, “non ha ancora avuto modo di attuarsi” (S. Marchesoni, Flashback – Forward. L’immemorare tra Bloch e Benjamin, in E. Bloch – W. Benjamin, Ricordare il futuro. Scritti sull’Eingedenken, a cura di S. Marchesoni, Milano, 2017, p.8). Rinnovare il presente, pensare un futuro che si nutra di quanto il passato ancora non ha espresso, nel verso dei principi sanciti dalla Costituzione, deve essere l’obiettivo di ogni futuro processo democratico.

Guardare al futuro è, dunque, possibile proprio se si tornerà più di prima alla Costituzione, a quanto ancora di inespresso può ritrovarsi nel testo, fornendo nuovo impulso all’insieme dei principi fondamentali che, dopo 70 anni, come si diceva, hanno dimostrato di non avere perduto il loro slancio teorico e simbolico. Ricostruire sistematicamente il loro significato “al presente”, tessere nuovamente le fila di una coesistenza armoniosa tra gli stessi, rivalutare il loro significato precettivo, continuare ad interrogarsi senza tregua circa il loro fondamento costituiscono, oggi, come ieri, obiettivi necessari per un futuro meno catastrofico. Una nuova unità d’azione statale, nel verso della Costituzione, implica, dunque, rimettere al centro le questioni che, in questi decenni, hanno inferto alla Carta colpi durissimi, che avrebbero potuto essere anche peggiori se il popolo non avesse deciso diversamente, tramite la via referendaria, rispetto ai progetti di grande riforma costituzionale promossi dal centro-destra, nel 2006, e dal centro-sinistra, nel 2016. Esse concernono, a mero titolo esemplificativo, l’asse delle relazioni tra Stato e Regioni, la cui crisi è stata definitivamente rivelata – semmai ve ne fosse stato bisogno – dalla vicenda pandemica, l’ordine delle fonti del diritto, in discussione da decenni, il problema del finanziamento dei partiti e, in generale, il ruolo e la funzione dei corpi intermedi, la legge elettorale, destinata, come hanno insegnato i grandi maestri della politica e del diritto, ad inverare la Costituzione, i rapporti tra democrazia rappresentativa e democrazia partecipativa, oggi fortemente sbilanciati (basti pensare al panico che sta creando la mera innovazione della raccolta digitale delle firme per il referendum), la funzione dei Parlamenti, il futuro digitale, la transizione ecologica e via discorrendo. Tutte questioni che riguardano direttamente l’attuazione della Costituzione. In questo senso, il libro insegna che occorre guardarsi da una logica dei fatti fine a se stessa, strumentale a marginalizzare il significato della Carta al fine di favorire processi di spersonalizzazione e neutralizzazione. Una nuova filosofia della storia costituzionale è il presupposto per dischiudere, nel futuro, le possibilità già presenti ma, potremmo dire, non ancora divenute. Immemorare, appunto. 

> Tradition and Revolution. Law in action by Alberto Lucarelli

In the aftermath of war, the bodies of fallen soldiers, whether hastily buried in makeshift graves or left scattered across battlefields, emerge as potent symbols of unresolved questions. My research delves into the complex and often overlooked issue of how to manage these remains, particularly those of soldiers from an invading force, such as German soldiers buried in Russia after World War II. How should these remains be treated? What responsibilities do the living have to the dead? Who has the right to access these graves, repatriate remains, and what role do these actions play in national memory, diplomacy, and ethical considerations?

I focus specifically on the post-World War II context in Russia and the enduring challenge of managing the millions of soldiers’ bodies left behind when relations between former enemies remain fraught. A key part of my research involves examining how the German Wehrmacht handled burials during the war and how Germany, in the war’s aftermath, sought access to the graves of its soldiers. Central to this inquiry are the moral and diplomatic questions surrounding a defeated nation’s right to commemorate its war dead on foreign soil—especially in countries they once invaded.

A significant part of my research explores the role of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK), the German War Graves Commission, which has taken on the monumental task of locating and exhuming Wehrmacht graves, identifying remains, constructing new cemeteries, and reburying the dead. Through my work, I shed light on the meticulous and sensitive efforts of the VDK, which involves not only recovery and identification but also navigating complex diplomatic relationships with local and national authorities. These efforts adhere to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, ensuring dignified burials for the fallen.

Germany’s Struggle with Remembrance and Responsibility

This ongoing endeavor is not merely about recovering and burying soldiers; it embodies Germany’s profound struggle to come to terms with its own losses while confronting the far more significant responsibility for the immense suffering it caused. Remembrance in Germany is inherently complex and multifaceted. Crucially, this process must prioritize the acknowledgment of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, ensuring that the memory of the dead is not used to glorify them but rather to recognize the crimes they were part of, directly or indirectly. It is not about honoring the soldiers as individuals detached from their actions but about confronting the brutal reality of the past and the roles these soldiers played in it. In this way, remembrance becomes not an act of hero worship, but a necessary reckoning with history—a sober reflection on how these individuals contributed to the horrors of war, and how their legacy must serve as a reminder of the dangers of unchecked ideology and the consequences of complicity.

The ongoing dedication of the German government and the VDK emphasizes the importance of these activities in the realms of state diplomacy, wider society, and the military. This commitment is seen in the resources allocated for materials, personnel, and the planning of exhumations. Efforts are made to meticulously collect individual remains and try to name the soldiers, often involving the identification of remains with intact ID tags and reaching out to potential living relatives. This process reflects Germany’s struggle to come to terms with its losses while grappling with its responsibility for the immense suffering it caused during the war.

However, the recovery and burial of soldiers stir deep emotions, both in Germany and in the nations once occupied by German forces. A central challenge lies in balancing the acknowledgment of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime with the act of commemorating the fallen soldiers. Remembrance in Germany is inherently complex and multifaceted, requiring a careful approach that prioritizes the acknowledgment of historical realities and war crimes without glorifying the military that supported a regime responsible for genocide.

This question is central to my research: how can a nation remember its fallen soldiers without glorifying the military that supported a regime responsible for so much suffering? In my exploration, I trace the evolution of German war graves, from symbols of heroism under the Nazi regime to places of peace and reconciliation under the stewardship of the VDK. This transformation mirrors Germany’s broader journey of reckoning with its past while striving for peace and reconciliation in the present. The ongoing maintenance of these graves, guided by international agreements and conventions, underscores the moral and ethical obligations nations hold toward their fallen soldiers, regardless of their roles in wartime atrocities.

The complexity of these questions resonates with General Alexander Suvorov’s 1799 observation: “A war is not over until the last soldier is buried.” This truth lies at the heart of my research, emphasizing that the dead continue to influence the living. Until every soldier is accounted for, the shadows of war persist. I trace the difficult and often controversial path taken by Germany and Russia in addressing this deeply emotional and politically charged issue. Despite ongoing tensions, my research explores how the Soviet Union and later Russia ultimately allowed Germany access to its soldiers’ graves—a process fraught with controversy and far from straightforward.

These burial sites have evolved into integral components of Europe’s memorial landscape, protected by war grave agreements and recognized for their universal value. The question of whether and how to continue exhumation and commemoration efforts remains a moral and ethical challenge. From a humanitarian perspective, regardless of nationality, the recovery and proper burial of a soldier’s remains are acts of compassion and respect. Nations uphold a lasting responsibility to commemorate their fallen soldiers, even as the decades pass and the likelihood of living relatives becomes increasingly remote.

The Evolving Meaning of Soldiers’ Graves in Post-War Europe

The treatment of soldiers’ graves plays a crucial role in shaping international relations and transnational memory. Bilateral negotiations over grave access and reburial efforts often mark the beginning of post-war reconciliation. These negotiations, extending beyond mere access to Soviet and Russian territories, also involve a re-evaluation of the war and the formation of national narratives tied to soldiers’ graves. The VDK has deliberately positioned its work as a means of fostering peace and reconciliation, as seen in its reconstruction of military cemeteries such as Sologubovka near St. Petersburg. However, Russia has been somewhat hesitant in fully embracing this approach, reflecting the complexity of the post-war relationships between former enemies. While the VDK aims to transform war graves into symbols of collective memory and reconciliation, Russia’s reaction underscores the ongoing sensitivities surrounding the interpretation of these sites. What began as the glorification of fallen soldiers under the Nazi regime has, over time, been reinterpreted as part of the broader process of reconciliation and peace—albeit one shaped by shifting social, state, and temporal dynamics.

The ongoing care of war graves has been enshrined in international treaties and agreements such as the Hague Convention and the Geneva Conventions, emphasizing the protection and preservation of the graves of prisoners of war and soldiers. However, this responsibility goes beyond mere legal obligations. It touches on broader humanitarian principles, the dignity of the dead, and the sensitivity required to navigate these complex narratives. The care given to the dead serves as a reflection of a society’s values and how it confronts the legacy of death and violence resulting from war.

In conclusion, my work underscores the need for critical reflection on how societies remember the war dead, the roles they played in the conflict, and the actions leading to their deaths. This reflection should always be sensitive to the reactions of others, particularly in the context of international memory and reconciliation. Through respectful burial practices and commemoration, nations can move toward a more just and peaceful future, ensuring that the legacies of conflict are acknowledged without being glorified. The ongoing care of these graves serves not only a cultural purpose but stands as a reminder of the past’s lessons for future generations.

Discover the book: Remnants of Wehrmacht Soldiers. Burial and Commemoration Practices of German Soldiers of the Second World War in Russia and Europe, 1941 – 2023.

Land der Frauen? Die „Übersetzung“ von Gewalt, Geschlecht und Sprache in Literatur

Dacia Maraini und Dagmar Reichardt im Autorinnengespräch auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse. Wir laden Sie ein am 18.10.2024, 14:30 bis 15:30 Uhr, am Peter Lang Group-Stand G48 in Halle 4.0.

Dacia Maraini ist die öffentlich nachhaltig engagierteste sowie bekannteste Schriftstellerin der zeitgenössischen italienischen Literatur. Zur Frankfurter Buchmesse findet am 18.10.2024 ein Gespräch zwischen ihr und der Wissenschaftlerin Dagmar Reichardt statt. Dabei dreht sich alles um zentrale Fragen der Übersetzung und Geschlechterthematik. Der Titel „Land der Frauen“ greift dabei den Namen der feministischen NGO Terre des Femmes auf und setzt ihn mit einem offenen Begriff von „Übersetzung“ in Beziehung. Die Diskussion basiert auf dem bald erscheinenden Werk Le tante traduzioni dell’opera di Dacia Maraini (dt.: „Die vielen Übersetzungen des Werks von Dacia Maraini“, 2024). 

Im Zentrum des Gesprächs stehen zentrale Menschlichkeits- und Frauenthemen

Im Zentrum des Gesprächs stehen Themen wie Sexualität, die historische und aktuelle Gewalt gegen Frauen sowie der gegenwärtige Status der Geschlechterbeziehungen. Marainis umfassendes Werk befasst sich mit zentralen Menschlichkeits- und Frauenthemen. Diese werden in globalen Kontexten betrachtet. Dabei spielen ihre transkulturellen Erfahrungen und die Einflüsse ihrer Familie eine entscheidende Rolle. Ebenso beschäftigt sie sich mit sozialen Problemen wie Krieg, Gewalt, Kinderrechte und Femizid.

Ein besonderes Augenmerk wird auf die Frage gelegt, wie sich die Übersetzungskunst im digitalen Zeitalter weiterentwickelt. Hierbei werden moderne Technologien wie Künstliche Intelligenz und CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) sowie Learning-Programme wie ChatGPT thematisiert. Ebenso wird die digitale Welt hinsichtlich ihrer patriarchalen Strukturen hinterfragt und die Auswirkung der digitalen Geschlechterkluft (digital gender gap) analysiert.

Weitere Themen sind die fortschreitende Hybridisierung der Geschlechtsdefinitionen, etwa in Patchworkfamilien oder bei homosexuellen Elternschaften. Auch die Frage, wie weibliche Interessen sprachlich und narrativ hervorgehoben werden können, wird diskutiert. Macht- und Unterordnungsfragen im gesellschaftlichen Kontext spielen dabei eine wesentliche Rolle. Es wird untersucht, wie Körperbilder (von Body Shaming zu Body Positivity) und Selbstfindungsprozesse hin zu homoerotischen und transsexuellen oder queeren Identitäten mit Marainis Werk sowie mit der europäischen und italienischen Literatur und Kultur in Wechselwirkung stehen.

Erhalten Sie hier mehr Informationen zum Event: https://connect.buchmesse.de/newfront/sessions/4526

Dacia Maraini – Ein Leben im Zeichen von Kunst und Engagement

Dacia Maraini wurde 1936 in Fiesole, Florenz, geboren. Ihre Mutter, Topazia Alliata,war Künstlerin und stammte aus einer sizilianischen Adelsfamilie. Ihr Vater, Fosco Maraini, war als Ethnologe und Anthropologe bekannt. Maraini verbrachte ihre Kindheit in Japan und Sizilien, bevor sie in Rom ihre erfolgreiche Karriere als Autorin begann. Mit über 120 veröffentlichten Werken – darunter 22 Romane und ebenso viele Theaterstücke – zählt sie zu den bedeutendsten Schriftstellerinnen der italienischen Literatur. Insbesondere ihr Engagement für Frauenrechte und ihre Gründung des ersten italienischen Frauentheaters, das Teatro della Maddalena in Rom, machen sie zu einer wichtigen Stimme in der zeitgenössischen italienischen Kultur.

Dagmar Reichardt – Übersetzerin und Wissenschaftlerin

Dagmar Reichardt, Professorin für Transkulturelle Studien an der Lettischen Kulturakademie in Riga, hat zahlreiche italienische Autor*innen ins Deutsche übersetzt, darunter Werke von Cesare Cases, Pier Paolo Pasolini und Dacia Maraini. Sie ist zudem Mitglied des Exil PEN und wurde für ihre wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Reichardt gründete 2016 die Buchreihe Transcultural Studies – Interdisciplinary Literature and Humanities for Sustainable Societies (TSIL) und erhielt für ihre Übersetzungen und wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten mehrere Preise, darunter den Übersetzerpreis des italienischen Außenministeriums.

An early interest in the British Imperial relationship with India prompted my academic focus on the governance of the Raj. How and by what mechanisms was such a vast territory and enormous population efficiently and effectively administered?

Initial research revealed a highly qualified and competent cadre known as the Indian Civil Service. Seen as an elite these young men were specially selected and trained in Britain and sent to India to commence a lifetime career in the various provinces and presidencies. Starting at the bottom of a bureaucratic hierarchy in the various departments of state, which administered India, over time and in accordance with their respective abilities and competence they were able to rise through the ranks to become, at the peak of their careers Governors. Remarkably, these men during the period of the British Raj were few in number and during Sir Harcourt’s time consisted of around 1000 men who administered an Indian population of approximately 300 million in 1900 increasing to 400 million by 1947.

Part of their preparation in Britain involved language training, which facilitated their ability to communicate with the peoples of their provinces. Their initial work in India could involve activity as settlement officers in the rural areas of their provinces, assessing the productivity of land for taxation purposes. This brought them into close contact with farmers and country people, which required fluency in the vernacular. Often, they worked alone travelling over large distances. Thus, in the early stages of their careers they very often developed a familiarity and affection for India and its peoples, particularly in their own provinces. The careers of junior ICS men could involve work in a broad range of departments such as agriculture, health, finance, forestry and others. Proficiency in their duties could see them rise through the ranks to become District Collectors responsible for provincial districts, Commissioners in charge of provincial divisions, Lieutenant Governors and Governors of whole provinces. Interestingly, it was a long-standing convention that only British aristocrats, often with political connection were appointed as Governors by the British Government to the Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay. This was also the case with appointment as Governor General or Viceroy.

This broadly sets out a background to the framework that the British created and implemented to administer India. However, I found little analysis available in the scholarship, with few exceptions of how this framework actually functioned at its senior levels. What did the ICS and Governors actually do? I found the focus of much contemporary research and scholarship on British India tends to be focused on Indian nationalism and its relationship with the Viceroy and the British Government. I could find very little written about the Governors of British India and their function (and thus the supporting function of the administrative hierarchy beneath them) except in general terms as part of broader texts. This prompted me to embark on my own investigation and research into the administrative working of the Raj using an analysis of the relationship between the Governors, Viceroy and the British Government and Parliament to do so. My core discoveries were quite interesting (See a Governors’ Raj, Macnamara, 2015). While ICS Governors of the provinces were never appointed as Presidency Governors or to the position of Viceroy it was in fact these men who provided the critical foundation for the efficient administration of British India. It was the Governors, drawing on their extensive broadly based knowledge of India and Indians gained during their careers who provided the necessary advice both political and administrative to the Viceroy during his tenure, particularly in its early stages. Given the Viceroy almost invariably had little to no knowledge of India before arrival he very quickly sought advice from the Governor cadre who were experts in their administrative and political knowledge of their provinces and in the context of nationalism. It was the Governors who could advise the Viceroy on the temperature of local nationalism and provide policy advice on how to meet it. It was they who actually knew the leading nationalists, their personalities and behaviours. It was they who understood the administrative requirements necessary for the efficient running of their provinces and of the whole of India. The Presidency Governors were to rely on their ICS cadre for their advice and support in a similar way.

I had chosen the period of Lord Irwin’s Viceroyalty from 1926 to 1931 to examine the nature of the governing and administrative relationship between the Viceroy, his Governors and the metropolis to gain a broader understanding of the governance of British India. This required research into the functioning of the eighteen Governors who served under Irwin during his tenure. All apart from the six Presidency Governors had long and distinguished careers in the ICS. These twelve had a deep knowledge and expertise in the functioning of their respective provinces and how to keep them running effectively. And thus, as an extension British India as a whole. Lord Irwin, while he had an advisory Council, personally drew extensively on the Governors’ more specific expertise to provide himself with the necessary background to function effectively. It was the Governors’ guidance he used to formulate policy advice to the British Government and thus to the British Parliament.

Of all the Governors who worked with Lord Irwin I found the most interesting of all to be Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler (who incidentally preferred to be addressed as Harcourt). Sir Harcourt was the most personable and he was clearly the most highly regarded rising through the ranks of the ICS very rapidly. Beginning his Indian career in the United Provinces in 1890 aged 21, he served as an Assistant Settlement Officer. Then followed progressive promotion to the positions of Joint Secretary to the Board of Revenue; Secretary to the Famine Commission; Director of Agriculture; Secretary of the Royal Commission upon Decentralisation. Following transfer to the central Government of India in Calcutta and Shimla, Butler became the second youngest person, at 39 ever appointed as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. Then followed appointment as Education Member of the Viceroy’s Council. As effectively the Minister for Education he was extensively involved in education reform including the establishment of several Universities in India. In his position in the Government of India he was called upon for his ideas on the planning of New Delhi (he was the first President of the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club). Before his first appointment at the Gubernatorial level, he was appointed as Vice President of the Imperial Legislative Council. Then followed appointments as Lieutenant Governor of Burma then of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and then later their full Governorships. Sir Harcourt was regarded so highly he was mooted by his contemporaries for appointment as Viceroy, which would have set an exceptional precedent. This was not to happen, but his vast experience and expertise was heavily drawn upon by the six Viceroys he served under ranging from Lord Curzon in the 19^th Century to Lord Irwin in the 20^th.

While Butler’s ICS career can be regarded as exceptional his pathway provides a clear guide to the role and functioning of the British Governors in the administration of British India. A study of his career illustrates the method and manner in which the British ruled India. Each of the positions he held provides the background to the actual administrative and policy process taken to achieve efficient government. His personal relationships with important Indian figures, including Princes, Talukdars and the Indian nationalists provide clear illustration of how the British used formal and informal contact to achieve outcomes.

An examination of Sir Harcourt’s record in India also gives the opportunity to explore the British attitude to the possibility of Indian Independence. A school of thought has it that the British did not wish to give up India, despite for example the introduction of legislation such as the Morley Minto Reforms, that could lead in that way. Butler was involved in policy advice (Butler’s advice was regarded at the time as liberal) leading to the reformist 1919 Government of India Act, which included provision for a review, every ten years of the ability of Indians to govern themselves. This review process has been pointed to as a means for the British to delay independence indefinitely. Political parties and persons in Britain sent different messages regarding their intentions for the future of India. Butler was at the heart of the policy making process which developed the British response to nationalism and attitude to future independence. His papers reveal the somewhat schizophrenic and confused position on this question the British held that permits a view that they were prevaricating. On the one hand Butler reveals he believes that India cannot do without the British and that he doesn’t believe in democracy and on the other he actively and enthusiastically implements democratic principles and practices in India and Burma, which must inevitably lead to independence. Further, he actively cultivated strong personal relationships with India’s ruling Princes and large landowners as supporters of British rule. Was it really nationalism and the economic pressures of two World Wars that forced the British to give up the Raj? Butler’s apparently confused approach personifies the overall contradictory nature of the British position on this question.

Sir Harcourt served in India for some 38 years. During this time, he was a contemporary and often a close friend, including of some Viceroys of many important historical figures. He met with British Kings, British and Indian Princes and Prime Ministers and worked with such famous men as Generals Kitchener and Birdwood. He developed personal relationships with leading Indian nationalists. His papers provide not only historical insights into these people and into the times in which they lived but also into how the British lived their personal lives in the Indian environment so remote from their home.                              

My research and work on Sir Harcourt Butler has led to the forthcoming publication, in the near future, by Peter Lang of my book: Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler: A Master Governor in British India: 1890-1928. Drawn from Butler’s extensive personal papers held in the British Library the book provides the condensed detail of his official and private life in some 300 pages (?). The publication allows a detailed exploration of the themes and questions raised above and as a research tool is an entry into Butler’s archive. It will be of interest not only to scholars but also to the general reader.

Image credit: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harcourt_Butler_(cropped).jpg

Nandu was worried. His son, Ajay, should have been home by now. While parental concerns for one’s child’s safety and whereabouts seem normal enough, in Nandu’s case these were always exacerbated by the secret about his son’s identity that he had fought hard to harbor. Uneasy and restless Nandu starts to search for his son. He would later learn of a lynched corpse hanging near the Dimapur train station. Despite being defaced, the corpse had been identified as Muslim. It was as though Nandu’s worst fears had been realized, because he instinctively knew that the corpse was his son’s.

This forms the denouement of a short story titled, “The Platform” that appeared in Temsula Ao’s last published collection, The Tombstone in my Garden. The story follows the life of a migrant worker in Nagaland around the 1960s who ends up finding work as a porter in the Dimapur train station. He is referred to as a “Bihari” a term used for most migrant workers in Dimapur at the time, often regardless of which part of India they came from. As the years roll by, Nandu becomes increasingly aware of a new kind of outsider called the “Bangladeshis” whose presence becomes increasingly unsettling in Dimapur. It is not the “natives” who are quite as troubled by the rising ranks of the new outsiders, the narrator tells us, but rather other groups of outsiders who unlike the Biharis or the Bangladeshis had established stakes in the macro-economies of Nagaland. The story subtly alludes to the ensuing refugee crisis from the Bangladesh Liberation War when Nandu ends up fostering an orphaned refugee boy he finds cowering in a corner of the Dimapur station. He tries and fails to get the boy, who seemed to be in a shock induced stupor, to wash and clean himself. Taking charge of the situation he decides to bathe the boy and discovers that the boy was Muslim.

Overcome with panic, Nandu tries to calm himself by resolving to conceal the boy’s true identity. He impresses upon the boy that his name would now be Ajay. The boy as though gradually emerging from a long torpor finally speaks, ‘My name is Ajmal’. Nandu starts to panic again, and shouts at the boy saying that he would henceforth only answer to the name Ajay. The frightened boy concedes, and in the years that follow Nandu goes to great lengths to conceal the boy’s true identity and raises Ajay as his adopted son. As Ajay grows up, tensions around the increasingly visible presence of the newer unwelcome outsiders rise, but Nandu is able to shield his adopted son from being discovered as a “Bangladeshi” and a Muslim. However, through a cruel turn of events, Ajay’s true identity is discovered. By the end of the story, we are told that Nandu was never seen in the Dimapur train station again. Both his presence and his grief over his son’s brutal death were, “wiped off the face of the earth without anyone noticing that anything was amiss.”

In trying to find a language with which to understand such erasures, I am often reminded of two insights that have left a lasting impression on me as a reader. The first comes from an observation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers in Death of a Discipline, “Whatever our view of what we do, we are made by the forces of people moving about the world.” The observation is contextualized within a history of the 1965 Immigration Reforms enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the United States. It is, however, hard to imagine that its purported significance is to be limited to such a contextualization alone. I think of Nandu, whose character in Ao’s short story is that of a migrant worker who settles in Nagaland. I also think of Ajay who was a child refugee orphaned and displaced by the forces of war.

The second insight invokes the frame Arundhati Roy sets up in The God of Small Things, that such forces have been circumscribing our places in the world for much longer than we probably realize or care to acknowledge. The conflict at the heart of her narrative, the narrator of Roy’s novel suggests, harks back to a prehistory when the “love laws” were made, the laws that laid down who should be loved, how and how much. It may be argued that the same is true of difference as an existential reality that stems from the fundamental separation between beings—between Self and Other. Difference in such a sense is never wholly reconcilable but facilitates a movement of endeavoring towards one another. For example, such a radical separation between Self and Other is a necessary precondition, according to philosophers such as Roland Barthes or Emmanuel Levinas, for desire or love. However, such a separation that precludes the possibility of ever entirely knowing another, can just as easily be the source of fear. One could think here of the famous passage in Abert Camus’ L’Étranger when the protagonist, Meursault, shoots “the Arab”, feeling threatened by his presence.

While I refrain from a detailed philosophical or anthropological discussion of how an engagement with difference or otherness is foundational to an understanding of the human condition, I do wish to posit the same as a basis for comparison as an interpersonal or intersubjective practice. Given the locus of my academic training, I am especially thinking Comparative Literature as an academic discipline in terms of how it has been situated over the years within discussions of inclusivity, often based on an assumed correlation between a politics of inclusion and an ethics of comparison. To begin with, can one broach such a question of inclusion, both ethically and politically, without first acknowledging marginalization as a precondition? Furthermore, do such claims towards inclusivity also run the risk of disremembering our complicity in violences of marginalization? And lastly, do such acts of inclusion run the risk of coopting the Other in self-serving ways?

In contexts such as the United States in the years following World War II, we see how the immigrant experience starts to become increasingly central to a practice of Comparative Literature. A concern for marginality, one might argue, emerges as a result of marginal experiences finding an academic home in this discipline. In an autobiographical piece she wrote for a volume titled Building a Profession edited by Lionel Gossman and Mihai Spariosu, Anna Balakian poignantly mentions, that she was born in Constantinople, “just before it turned into Istanbul”. She goes on to reminisce about her childhood as an émigré, moving from one national education system to the next, as her parents made their way across Europe, until they finally settled in New York which she describes as a polyglot and international city. Despite her initial hesitations regarding calling herself a comparatist, Balakian recounts, there was something almost organic about such a practice that resonated deeply with her life’s experiences. Being a child of immigrants in America, the pressure to master the English language without any trace of an “ethnic” accent dominated her early years, and yet she could not think of life monolingually. Her love for the French language would lead her to study French at college and university, where she was taught by Paul Hazard, the famous French littérateur and historian of ideas.

In such a sense comparison as a foundational practice within Comparative Literature has always had a strong experiential aspect to it. Scholars in the field have often opined that a methodology for practices of this discipline has in fact emerged from experiences of having lived “comparative lives”. In the aforementioned piece, Balakian states that when she thinks of what it means to be a comparatist, she thinks of someone like her teacher Paul Hazard, whom she describes as having a refined and cosmopolitan worldview. It is often such a sense of cosmopolitanism that suggests, as I mentioned earlier, a correlation between inclusivity and comparison. As a comparatist inhabiting a context that is markedly different while at once being impinged upon by globalist modalities of thought and knowledge, I frequently imagine the work of comparison on more cellular levels. What does a comparative life look like when circumscribed by an incontrovertibly localized experiential frame?

When I think of comparative lives as an experiential and historical frame, I cannot help but think of Ajay, who was once Ajmal. He had spoken this name in Bangla and was shouted at in Hindi to never go by it again. I think of this child, displaced and orphaned by war. He was a war refugee, adopted and nurtured by a migrant worker. A less tolerable outsider loved and cared for by another slightly more tolerable outsider. I think of the life Ajay could have had. I think of his lynched corpse, of how everybody knew but chose not to utter his name, and of Nandu’s grief that remained forever unspoken. I often wonder whether their lives too count as comparative lives.

Sporting Shadows

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, postponed to the summer of 2021, stick in the mind as the first Games held in near-empty stadiums. Yet while the trail of the Covid pandemic cast its pall over the event, a different kind of shadow loomed over the Games’ first week of competition.

US gymnast Simone Biles’ sudden exit from the women’s team competition, and subsequent departure from most of her individual events, offered the most striking evidence of the pressures felt by even – or especially – the world’s most high-profile and decorated athletes (Biles, expected for great things in Tokyo, had won four gold medals in Rio 2016). Biles’ withdrawal, on psychological grounds, was perhaps more notable for coming only weeks after Naomi Osaka – then the world’s number two-ranked female tennis player, and soon to be carrying the flag for Japan in Tokyo – pulled out of the French Open and Wimbledon, citing mental health reasons, before taking a hiatus from the professional tour.

The idea that Tokyo 2020 took place in empty arenas is, of course, somewhat misleading. Elite athletes like Biles and Osaka are always under the eye and scrutiny of an ever-watchful media audience in the hundreds of millions, and subject to what, arguably, is sport’s ever-intensifying relationship to this same media. While sports events and athletes’ participation in them is both determined and even demanded by media scheduling, the emergence of what are effectively franchise tie-in shows – series such as Netflix’s Break Point and Formula 1: Drive to Survive – have made the collusion between media and sport, and the expectations to perform, all the more apparent.

The Subject Behind the Star

If this media landscape forms some of its backdrop, one of the aims in my new book, Sport, Film, and the Modern World, recently published by Peter Lang, is to look at film’s role in both exploring and questioning these contexts of sporting performance. I consider what film might say, on the one hand, about the ideologies and cultures that encourage and produce elite athletes; and on the other, how film can be used to reveal the subject behind the sports ‘star’ – the individual, in other words, otherwise inaccessible to the TV cameras and sports broadcasting regimes.

Appropriately enough, Biles’ personal story of crisis and return is told this same month in Netflix’s Simone Biles: Rising; just in time for this summer’s Paris Olympics, even if a little too late for my book. But a version of Osaka’s story, in the form of an eponymous Netflix mini-series (shot by award-winning documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley), appeared just a month after her public admission of mental-health concerns. This coincidence inevitably shapes our viewing and understanding of Bradley’s intimate film. But in some respects Naomi Osaka is revealing enough on its own, choosing to cast its focus away from the glitz of tournament play and success, focusing more – via lingering cameras and home-movie footage – on Osaka’s ceaseless training regime, publicity commitments and endorsements. It’s the portrait of a sportswoman as a kind of commodity, in other words, offering at the same time a glimpse into the person, and the psyche, behind the image.

A key focus in my book is the way, in fact, recent documentaries – works such as Zidane: A Portrait of the 21^st Century (2006), or Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010) and Diego Maradona (2019) – have used conventions of fiction filmmaking (mainly, through the use of suggestive editing, close-up cameras and experimental sound mixes) in order to evoke ‘subjective’ experience and point of view: an increasingly frequent tendency, I suggest, in cinema’s growing concern with the tough realities behind sporting lives. One question this approach raises, in fact, along with the examples of Biles and Osaka, is what we might understand by the value, ethics, or more broadly the ‘ends’ of sport, once it crosses the line from play to professionalism, and then to the subjection of the body to forms of physical and emotional violence. The latter, arguably, is inseparable from modern sport, and the modern Olympic Games especially, with its motto of faster, higher, stronger. This creed, as John Hoberman suggests in his seminal study Mortal Engines, sustained a drive to extend through sport the limits of the human, almost by any means necessary: the Games, in other words, as a “gigantic biological experiment”. (1)

Olympic Victims

This experiment still has its casualties. The quadruple jump landed by 15 year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva, on her way to winning a team gold medal, was a high point of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Yet just a few days later, Valieva was under the spotlight for very different reasons, when a drug test revealed banned substances in her system. The generally sympathetic media response to Valieva’s misadventures (though her four-year competitive ban would eventually be upheld) seemed premised on her extreme youth. The fault, it was implied, was with a Russian sporting system already tainted by doping allegations and banned, at that time, from fielding athletes under the national flag. Such perspectives might be further informed by films such as Marta Pruz’s Over the Limit (2017), focusing on the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun, in the run-up to the 2016 Rio Games. Pruz’s masterstroke (*spoiler alert*) is to show, in intensive and uncomfortable detail, the verbal, emotional, and near-physical abuse endured by Mamun – only at the end, to deliberately not show Mamun’s success in winning the individual title, restricting the information to a blank piece of text. By downplaying the glory, Over the Limit both shines a light on the price of winning gold, and asks whether such achievements are ultimately worth the cost.

As I consider in my book, however, we also need to look at a wider, and less obvious contexts to understand the broader ethical implications of the Olympic sporting dream. I, Tonya (2017), for example, a biopic of the disgraced ice-skater Tonya Harding, focuses on a figure easily ridiculed both for her abrasive, even ‘trashy’ style, as well as for her supposed involvement in a piece of tabloid criminality (the physical attack, planned by Harding’s husband, on a rival skater). I, Tonya is nevertheless notable for its reminder that the pursuit of success is woven into the fabric of the working-class American life in which Harding was raised. More significantly, though – in its focus on a pre-school Tonya being effectively pushed onto the ice by her ambitious mother – that this relentless drive is also, by necessity, something that female athletes above all must pursue from very early infancy. This is especially the case in sports such as skating and gymnastics, where female performers (like Valieva, or Biles, also 15 at the start of her competitive career) peak young. Even if her end result proved more nightmarish, Harding’s pursuit of the sporting dream – and the committing of children to extreme training programmes – is one that underpins all stories of sporting success: a fact we as a global sports audience might tacitly accept, whether we realise it or not.

Beyond the Finish Line

Moving forward, one of my main interests in this summer’s Olympics, and a likely subject for future research, will focus on different kinds of ‘ends’: namely, what happens to elite athletes at the culmination of their sporting lives, and what kind of cinematic narratives and forms might represent this transition? The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam champion, is likely to end his twenty-year professional career in Paris. This will mark a suitable dénouement for a great player who also won back-to-back Olympic titles in 2012 and 2016. But after Paris, what comes next?

As I’ve recently pondered elsewhere (2), this same question lies at the troubling heart of Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024), recently released on Amazon Prime, which raises the notion of the elite athlete ‘dying twice’: the first death occurring when competition ends, and at an age that is for most others the prime of life, obscurity and empty days beckon. It’s the same question that haunts the earlier Andy Murray: Resurfacing (2019), which candidly records the player’s physical struggle to continue performing at the top level, and the equally painful existential questions accompanying it. In both films, we get to witness the material wealth and space afforded to such sportsmen at the very height of the sport. But at the same time, the film asks us to reflect on how these same environments will be filled, once each man can no longer do what has defined them and shaped their daily routines for almost their whole lives.

It’s not the place of the Olympic Games themselves, of course, to engage with these issues. The limitation of the popular sporting narrative, I would suggest, as too with many sports films over the years, is that both culminate with the moment of triumph – though without asking what the pursuit of victory may have cost, or what may be lost when the crowd has dispersed. And it’s here, as my work explores, that the imaginative resources of film step in to explore the gap.

A final thought on this same point: “I’m almost too frightened to win”. So says Ben Cross’s Harold Abrahams, minutes before the 100 metres sprint final in Chariots of Fire (1981), set during the previous Paris Games exactly one hundred years ago. It’s an enigmatic but increasingly suggestive line, reminding us that winning gold is not the end, but the beginning of something else. But it’s a reminder, too, that winning is also an achievement that may raise more questions – about the routes one takes to get there, and how these matter – than those it answers.

(1) John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 84.
(2) ‘You Only Live Twice’, More Than Coping,25 June 2024, https://morethancoping71.blog/2024/06/25/you-only-live-twice/

What is it like when one realizes that they belong to two generations at once? Not chronologically, but in terms of identity and content? Throughout my life I have had a sense of fluid geographical or even national identity, personal identity, professional identity and the like, but only in the past few years did I realize that my generational identity lay at the bottom of much of it.

Generational identity is formed by numerous factors but is not something that is in our hands. We inherit it from our parents and grandparents, and it is passed down to us during our upbringing in direct or subtle ways. It’s a feeling of being part of something bigger than oneself, in which we have a lot of company, and not necessarily the kind we would choose of our own volition. Why? Because belonging to a generation doesn’t always have to do with one’s personal, professional, or gendered identity which often have greater influences on one’s life, personality, and experiences than any other factors. But I’m getting ahead of myself and sound too much like the academic that I am in my professional life. So let me explain what I mean in more personal terms.

I belong to two generations, one on my mother’s side and one on my father’s. Because there was a quarter century difference of age between my parents, something rather significant when they met at 25 and 50, one could say that we are talking about true chronological generations. My mother’s statement to young adults looking for their mate – “At least you can be sure that your spouse was already born” – didn’t necessarily hold true for my father until he was over 25! But that’s not the kind of generation I am referring to, rather more of an experiential and cultural generation.

My mother was an American-born daughter to parents who had been Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and came to the United States in the early years of the 20^th century. On her side that made me a “next generation”, meaning a second generation American, a grandchild of immigrants. Carrying some of their culture with me, I was already firmly rooted in America in general and my birth city of New York in particular. In view of the 2.2 million Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America between 1881 and 1914 (the years of the “Great Wave of Immigration”), many of whom settled in the general New York City area, I also had a lot of company in that generation.

My father’s experiences, both geographical and personal, were very different than those of my mother. Born in a small town in Poland at the turn of the 20^th century, like many Eastern European Jews, he migrated to Germany with his family during the First World War and ended up staying there. Settling in Frankfurt, he married a girl from his hometown and had two children, but the rise of Nazism put an end to their peaceful lives. My father was incarcerated in Buchenwald and later in Auschwitz, his small children became unaccompanied refugee children in Belgium, France, and finally reached the United States in the middle of the war. His wife, who had returned to her parents in Poland during the war, was murdered along with them. After his liberation, my father ended up founding a postwar Kibbutz, brought its members to Palestine, travelled to the United States to find his children, and ended up staying there for over two decades, during which he met my mother, married, and I was born.

On my father’s side, therefore, I was a member of the “Second Generation”, children of Holocaust survivors, making me a member of two generations at once, the “Next Generation” and the “Second Generation, each with their own characteristics and issues. I wasn’t alone. Quite a number of Holocaust survivors married American-born spouses, which made me part of a much larger cohort, including some with whom I went to school. As children we never spoke about our background, but we definitely had a lot in common, things that we didn’t have to express in order to feel and understand.

Had it ended there, I would have been one of many Second Generation American-born children of Holocaust survivors who were also grandchildren of early 20^th century Jewish immigrants to America, living in the United States. But here comes the twist. When I was 15 my family decided to move to Israel, enabling me to experience the “immigrant experience” myself, and not just hear about it from my grandparents or father.

What generational group did I really belong to? From the time I was 15 I was not just a member of the “Next Generation” and\or the “Second Generation”. I was a second- generation American who was also a child of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel. Additionally, we were Orthodox Jews, which put me into yet another category. For the pièce de résistance, I then became a Holocaust historian, merging my professional identity with part of my generational one.

Sounds complicated? In some ways it was a lot easier than it sounds as the parts fit together pretty well, especially after my American-born mother decided to make anything having to do with Holocaust commemoration a central part of her being. Sounds lonely? Actually not. Quite a number of Orthodox Jewish families where one parent was American-born and the other a Holocaust survivor, moved to Israel during the years that we immigrated. In my neighborhood alone, I knew at least ten teenagers and young adults who fit into the same generational categories as I did. And believe it or not, I wasn’t the only Holocaust historian who fit into those two generations. Even in Israel. I had company.

“The Next Generation” is the story of what I did with all those identities and generations. How I weaved them into the person I became personally and professionally. How I grappled with the legacies of the two generations, along with the personal legacies of my family, and how I came to terms with deciding what parts of that legacy I wished to emulate, replicate, and pass down to future generations. At the same time, each part of the story is not just my personal story, but rather the story of a generation, colored in part by issues of specific personalities, tendencies, desires, and experiences. Writing the book was a labor of love that took many years, causing me to think and rethink those identities and their significance.

Many of us often speak about personal resolutions that we wish to adopt, and as we get older, quite a number of us put together “bucket lists” of what we want to achieve and experience in the time that is left to us. Writing “The Next Generation” gave me the opportunity of understanding the dynamics of my past and my identities in order to enable to me formulate the resolutions I wished to make and the “bucket list” that I still wanted to experience. It was a difficult process that is still an ongoing one as I write these words, but its ongoing nature is also exhilarating, proving that at every age we still have the capacity to develop, grow, and change.

The book “The Next Generation” can be bought here

Inspired by BBC Radio’s “Desert Island Discs,” the Peter Lang Group presents ‘Peak Reads & Playlists’.

Join us on a journey to the mountain peaks near our Lausanne headquarters where we speak with our esteemed series editors.  

In this interview format, our guests usually share the books, music, and food that would keep them company if they were whisked away alone to this beautiful mountain setting.

However, in acknowledgment of the fantastic series mentioned below we’ve swapped out music for film! Simon Bacon explores the reasons behind these choices, revealing the impact and influence each has had. Get a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the Peter Lang community.

Name: Simon Bacon
Job Title: Independent Scholar
Series: Genre Fiction and Films Companions and Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead

Books

> Which FICTION title would take the coveted first spot on your list?

I’m terrible at doing “top tens” and the like, as it’s always changing! The most influential would have to be Dracula, as I quote it so much, but would I want to be stuck on a Swiss mountain too with it? Not necessarily.

I’ll go with something new, as it’s way more likely to keep me entertained for longer and it’s an unfinished series so I’d be able to air-drop the latest instalments. So my choice would be the graphic novel series #DRCL Midnight Children by Shin’ichi Sakamoto. It’s so beautifully drawn and imagined and it does all these crazy, genre-bending things with canonical texts that only manga can do! If you didn’t think Dracula was a Folk Horror Eco-story before, you will once you start on this.

> If you were offered the chance to take a NON-FICTION title, which would you choose?

Oddly, this is easier to choose than the previous question: A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, which I was reading when I met my wife (both life-changing experiences). It really changed how I read everything afterwards in terms of trajectories, change and futurity (unsurprisingly my first monograph was called Becoming Vampire).

> We’re feeling generous so we’ll allow you one more book, your choice of FICTION or NON-FICTION – which one makes the list?

I’m going to be cheeky here and list a few that are from both lists and then make a final choice. For non-fiction, the important ones that would make any list are Stacey Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires, Jeffrey Weinstock’s Vampire Cinema, Rob Latham’s Consuming Youth, Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire, Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows, and Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death. For fiction, I’d go with Let the Right One In by Lindqvist, The Strain Trilogy by del Toro and Hogan, The Maltese Falcon by Hammett, Blood of the Vampire by Marryat, and Lost Girls by Moore.

And the winner would be … Let the Right One In, as it’s so different from any of the film adaptations and it is beautiful, scary and outright weird in equal amounts.

Film & Television

> It’s hard to tear your eyes away from the panoramic views, but everyone loves their screen time.

Which 5 FILMS OR TV SHOWS would you take to enjoy whilst up on the summit and why?

1. Again, trying to choose 5 is almost impossible, as on another day it would be 5 completely different films! Unlike most horror/vampire fans, I really didn’t like horror at all when I was growing up and it wasn’t until I went back to university in my 40s that it became a thing for me. For my MA dissertation, I decided to write about vampires as a site of memory for America, starting with Browning’s Dracula. However, the film that has remained with me, and the one I actually owned before turning to the dark side, is Blade. It’s such a great film and only Wesley Snipes, at that time, could make the character work that well on screen. It’s a film I’ll happily watch anytime it’s on (and the two sequels of course).
Film trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2746876185

2. Another film that falls into the category of “I’ll watch it anytime it’s on” is Constantine (2005). It’s one of those films — not unlike The Thing (1982), Aliens (1986), AVP (2004), Hellboy (2004), Silent Hill (2006), Legion (2010), and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) — that has no right to be as good as it is. Keanu Reeves as the lead looks absolutely nothing like the comic character it’s taken from, but he owns the part, and brilliant performances from everyone (especially Peter Stormare) just pick you up and drag you along with it until the end. I could spend a lot of time on the mountain top watching this over and over.
Film trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2357507609

3. I should choose a TV series, both because there’s been some great vampy ones over the years and because some have been extremely long running: Dark Shadows (1966-71), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), True Blood (2008-14), and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17), including various spin-offs for most of them. There have been newer ones of note, namely the extremely popular What We Do In the Shadows series (2019-24), and the more vampirically ambitious Dracula miniseries (2020-20) from the BBC, and there is much about both of these which repays repeated watching.

However, for my third choice I shall go for a somewhat more problematic production that offered much more than it was ultimately able to give yet still created moments of brilliance, and that’s the Dracula (2013-14) series by Cole Haddon. Here, the Count becomes something of an eco-warrior fighting the imperial “crew of light” to break their hold over the world through the exploitation of fossil fuels. In a steampunk London, Dracula, under the guidance of Van Helsing, creates a generator to produce wireless electricity (an idea borrowed from Nikola Tesla), taking society by storm. Featuring a very rare black Renfield and a fabulous female vampire hunter, the series does much to overturn expectations but allows itself to get bogged down in an unnecessary eternal-love story that drains energy out of the narrative. However, not unlike its vampiric lead, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, when it’s good it is very, very good.
Series trailer here:  https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3827148313

4. I want to go for something older for the fourth pick, if only to mix it up a bit while I’m stuck on the mountain. Again, there’s so many great early vampire films (and vampire-less vampire films) that it’s difficult to choose just one. Apart from the obvious biggies (Nosferatu, Vampyr, Dracula), films like Condemned to Live (1935), The Return of Doctor X (1939), The Devil Bat (1940), The House of Dracula (1945), and Blood of Dracula (1957) are all largely overlooked.

To continue with that idea, I’ll choose The Vampire Bat (1933). It’s another of the vampire-less vampire films with a killer covering his tracks by pretending there is a killer vampire bat on the loose. It stars Melvyn Douglas and Fay Wray, but our reason for choosing this is none other than Dwight Frye. Only a few years on from playing amazing roles in Browning‘s Dracula and Whale’s Frankenstein, he was already a victim of the “vampires curse” that is alleged to have affected many from Browning’s film and was typecast as a lunatic or disfigured servant, severely limiting his cinematic career (Lugosi of course suffered a similar fate in relation to the roles he was offered). He’s great in this and, as expected, plays the village idiot who is wrongly accused of the crimes and eventually gets staked – all due to his fondness for bats. Meanwhile, the evil Dr Niemann has created a new lifeform in a tank and needs fresh blood to feed it on, bringing a suitably left-field plot to a close, just so Melvyn and Fay can end the film together.
Film trailer/clips here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd1GxHgiaHM

5. To finish, I want to choose something more recent, not least because there have been some great vampire films since 2000, even while the zombie seems to have consumed the popular imagination around the 2010s. Netflix has kept the vampire as a staple during that time, though not always producing the best films, but Blood Red Sky (2021) was interesting and Vampires vs the Bronx (2020) was hugely entertaining. Lower budget, general release films like Strigoi (2009) by Faye Jackson, Carmilla (2019) by Emily Harris, and Bliss (2019) by Joe Begos have taken the vampire mythos into newer directions. The recent upturn in interest in all things vampy has seen big-budget projects produced like Morbius (2022), The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), and Renfield (2023), although these have not quite returned on their initial promise. Abigail (2024), however, while maybe setting its bar slightly lower, kept its vision and performances tightly together and moving in the right direction to produce a highly enjoyable film.

Having said all this, I’m actually going to return to a much smaller production from 2014 that gets nowhere near the attention it should and that is Nosferatu in Love by Peter Straughan. It’s part of the Playhouse Presents TV series and tells of an actor (Mark Strong) sent out to the Czech Republic to make a film about Murnau’s Nosferatu and using some of the original locations. However, the actor has just split from his long-term partner and is going through something of a breakdown. Through an odd mirroring of parts of the original film, the actor, still dressed as Graf Orlok, meets a Renfield/Knock who takes him round the local dives of the town, gets drunk, and attempts to release thousands of rats from the film set into the town on his road to redemption. Then he vanishes in the light of day. I had the good fortune to speak to the director himself, who was as lovely as the film itself, and it’s a short movie I will never not enjoy.
The short film can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a02r2DmzPec

Food

> We couldn’t let our community feed their souls but not their bodies, so which FOOD DISH would you choose to take with you on the mountain retreat?

Marzipan. I know it’s not a dish, but I have an insanely sweet tooth and if I’m going to be stranded anywhere the only way to ensure my sanity is a ready supply of marzipan.

Thank you for joining us up on the mountain!

Discover the series here: 
Genre Fiction and Film Companions
Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead

I was delighted to be invited as a special guest by Dr Graham Speake, Chairman and founder of the Friends of Mount Athos, for their summer conference held at St Anne’s College, Oxford University on 8th June 2024. It was their thirty-third such event.

Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, is a pan-Orthodox male monastic enclave with UNESCO World Heritage status.

Graham Speake was my predecessor at Peter Lang Ltd, and I was originally hired to replace him upon his retirement at the very end of 2010. Anyone who is anyone with an interest in Athonite scholarship and spirituality will know that Graham Speake is synonymous with writings of an exceptionally high standard. Indeed, he has won the Criticos Prize and is, I am delighted to say, one of our series editors for Studies in Eastern Orthodoxy and a prolific author, editor and contributor to the canon of works, including Orthodoxy and Ecumenism and Neagoe Basarab – Princeps Christianus.

I am not an Orthodox Christian, and yet many years ago now, Graham (or Gregory, as he is known in the Church) gave me the name Fotini to denote my “associate” status to Eastern Orthodoxy as the root meaning of the Greek echoes the Latin origins of my name, Lucy, meaning “light”.

As a woman, it was very telling to listen to and see the first speaker, Dr Vanessa de Obaldia, present on her three-year project to catalogue, digitise and translate the entire Ottoman archive of Simonopetra Monastery. This is a monastery, like the other twenty or so on Athos, that she will never visit as women are prohibited from visiting Athos. She showed a picture of herself at the land border to Athos, which is a peninsula – that is as near as she can ever get. It was interesting to note in the coffee break that a few other delegates were also discussing this anomaly, which to most adherents of the faith will just be accepted as part of the ancient tradition that after several monks reported visions of the Virgin Mary, it was decided that they would devote themselves to her, and that no woman should be allowed to outshine her. All women were banned from the Holy Mountain thenceforth, and indeed all female animals along with them.

The second talk was by Professor Stavros Mamaloukos “Byzantine Athonite Architecture – An Overview”.

This was a very rich and detailed exploration of the buildings and architectural hinterland of Mount Athos. Around 60 ecclesiastical structures survive in some form from the Byzantine period today.

This talk was fascinating – literally layers of history were uncovered and the connections and echoes of Byzantium in so many buildings in the diaspora were clearly shown.

There is plenty of engagement at these talks, but it is a fact that the audience in attendance are an ageing populace, and although I sat through the AGM and heard of new subscribers this year, there will have to be a concerted drive to encourage younger people interested in Athonite spirituality, scholarship and theological practice. After all, the patron of the FoMA is King Charles, who has continued his affection and support of its endeavours after his accession to the throne, and with such lofty support, one would hope for a long and sustained support and enrichening of the work and efforts of the dedicated members.

The last talk was by on the society’s 2023 pilgrimage to Bulgaria. Pilgrimage Studies and pilgrimage in general are enjoying a revival right now and this may prove to the route to brining in new members to the Society who have a interest in exploring and experiencing the rich cultural, ecclesiastical and spiritual offerings of those countries with an Orthodox history.

Discover our Pilgrimage Studies and our Studies in Eastern Orthodoxy series.

Peter Lang Group titles edited by Graham Speake include Pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Spiritual Guidance on Mount Athos, The Life of Prayer on Mount Athos, Mount Athos and Russia: 1016-2016, and more.

Discover more at The Society of the Friends of Mount Athos

“You changed my life” – this is the gist of the fan mail Patricia Nell Warren received for her 1974 novel The Front Runner. It is the story of Billy, the 22-year-old front runner, who falls in love with his coach and participates in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Billy wins the 10,000-meter race; one week later, at the 5,000-meter race, as Billy pulls away in his finishing sprint to win the gold medal and set a new world record, tragedy strikes… but read for yourself! A meaningful emotional relationship between two men that culminates in a “gay wedding” ceremony, an Olympian that has no issues with his sexuality and who is supported by fellow athletes, a welcoming campus atmosphere, the question of queer surrogacy – all this in 1974, just one year after the American Psychiatric Association finally struck homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

June is Pride month, and next month Paris, France hosts the thirty-third Olympic Games. A record number of queer athletes is expected to compete, more than in Tokyo in 2021 and in Rio in 2016. Warren can be credited with paving the way for them. In 2006, when the Outgames (nicknamed the Gay Olympics) were held in Montreal, the site of Billy’s greatest triumph and tragedy, Warren was honored with running the last lap of the men’s 5,000-meter race, a tribute to her trailblazing role in combating homophobia in athletics. In 2012, The Front Runner was recognized as instrumental in inspiring the launch of the Gay Games, and Warren was awarded a special “Personal Best” and gold medal by the International Federation of Gay Games.

However, there are still barriers to coming out. In the United States, in football, baseball, and basketball, very few openly gay athletes play (and often athletes come out upon retirement). British diver Tom Daley, one of the proudest athletes of our time, gave an emotional statement about his sexual orientation after he won gold with his partner Matty Lee: “I hope that any young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now, you are not alone and that you can achieve anything. There is a whole lot of your chosen family out here ready to support you.” He was indirectly addressing LGBTQ youth in countries like Hungary, China, and Japan, where queer people continue to face discrimination. He concluded: “I am incredibly proud to say that I am a gay man and also an Olympic champion. I feel very empowered by that”. (1)

Half a century before Tom, Warren gave us such an incredibly proud gay Olympic champion.

Later this year, my book Patricia Nell Warren: A Front Runner’s Life and Works is coming out from Peter Lang. As the first book on Patricia, it begins with a long biographical chapter, followed by accessible discussions of all her works, including the voluminous reader responses. While The Front Runner is of course her blockbuster, she published a lot more. Two sequels, Harlan’s Race (named after the coach and set in the 1980s, the decade of AIDS and the Moral Majority) and Billy’s Boy (a science fiction adventure set in the 1990s), have appeared, while a third one, Virgin Kisses, was finished by Patricia weeks before her passing but remains unpublished. Some of her other novels focus on gay pride in the Catholic church (The Fancy Dancer), homophobic politics (The Beauty Queen), and a queer bullfighter in fascist Spain (The Wild Man).

The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different collects pieces originally written for Jim Buzinski and Cyd Ziegler’s online magazine Outsports.com and chronicles proud pioneers in athletics. The volume is exhaustively researched, and many living sports figures granted interviews to Warren: Achilles and Patroclus; Joan of Arc; Roman gladiators; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (now acted by Nicholas Galitzine of Red, White, and Royal Blue fame in Mary & George, where he plays the real-life lover of King James I of England); tennis player Bill Tilden; aviatrix Amelia Earhart; boxer Wilhelm von Homburg; open-water marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (now subject of the 2023 biopic NYAD with Anette Benning and Jodie Foster); tennis star Martina Navratilova; and David Kopay, the first professional athlete to come out.

While Patricia participated in Gay and Lesbian Pride marches (she was the grand marshal at parades in Boise, Los Angeles, Helena, New Orleans, Palm Springs, Reno, San Diego, St. Louis, Albuquerque, and other cities), memorials for gay and lesbian veterans, sports broadcasts (such as the Beijing Summer Games of 2008, which she covered for gay and lesbian networks), Democratic fundraisers, literary and cinematic events, college conferences, bookstore readings, and more, maybe what she was most proud of is her own press, Wildcat, which published all her books (and still does). Now there is a book about Patricia, another addition to Peter Lang’s exciting queer series. We could call it a win-win situation.

(1) https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tom-daley-olympic-gold-tokyo-gay-lgbtq-community-message_uk_60fe9bfce4b0a807eeb41118