Terrorist transgressions: exploring the gendered representations of the terrorist

Abstract: The primary aim of the Terrorist Transgressions network which is presented here was to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. Although terrorism, its contexts, histories and forms, has been the focus of intense academic activity in recent years, especially in the fields of politics and international relations, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organizations since the late nineteenth century. Particularly since the 1980s, women have perpetrated suicidal terrorist attacks, including suicide bombing, where the body becomes a weapon. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The network established that there is a shift away from analyses of cultural representations of the Red Army Faction, which have dominated the literature since the 1980s. New work has emerged examining representations of the terrorist and gender, including investigations of material from the 1970s, recently made available in archives. There also has been a shift in terms of military discourses around the figure of the enemy or terrorist insurgent in relation to visualizing the invisible enemy. Emerging work on colonial insurgencies contributed to a historical understanding of such debates

Parallelotopia: Ottoman Transcultural Memory Assemblages in contemporary art practices from the Middle East

This article engages with the conversations taking place in the photographic space between then and now, memory and photography, and with the symbiosis and ethnic violence between different ethnic communities in the ex-Ottoman Empire. It questions the role of photography and contemporary art in creating possibilities for co-existence within the mosaic formed by the various groups that made up the Ottoman Empire. The essay aims to create parallelotopia, spaces in the present that work in parallel with the past and which enable the dynamic exchange of transcultural memories. Drawing on memory theory the article shifts these debates forward by adopting the concept of ‘assemblage’. The article concentrates on the aesthetics of photographs produced by Armenian photographic studios in Istanbul during the late 19th century and their relationship to the present through the work of contemporary artists Klitsa Antoniou, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige and Etel Adnan as well as photographic exhibitions organized by the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens Greece

Ottoman transcultural memories: introduction

This introduction lays out the context and aims for the special issue’s focus on Ottoman transcultural memories. We explain the pertinence of transcultural memories for the Ottoman Empire, and we discuss contemporary politicizations of Ottoman nostalgia, or neo-Ottomanism. We define the key terms in our analyses, rooting our approach in memory studies, and distinguishing a transcultural approach to memory from comparable approaches in postcolonial studies. The introduction further sets out how the special issue refigures memory studies, transcultural, and Ottoman studies. The issue’s contents are outlined, with the interdisciplinary and transmedial contributions necessarily driven by the diverse archives of Ottoman transcultural memories. Creative selections are informed by the affective resonance of Ottoman transcultural memories, in turn refiguring postmemory

The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul

This essay looks back upon Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction book, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), and unpacks its multi-layered representation of the city as landscape. It is here that Pamuk pursues most overtly “the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” which won him the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Weaving personal memoir and historical essay into a unique narrative tapestry, Pamuk’s book explores a series of tensions that define the city’s image and identity; insider/outsider and East/West polarities, in particular, are tirelessly deconstructed. The essay examines Pamuk’s poetics and politics of memory in relation to works by other authors, notably Walter Benjamin. In conclusion, the new edition of Istanbul (2015) is discussed against the background of the social and spatial changes that have beset Turkey’s cultural capital in the interim

Nicosia/Istanbul: Ruins, Memory and Photography

When Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy chose to announce the award by concentrating on Pamuk’s memories of Istanbul in his autobiography, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005).1 The book, a melange of Pamuk’s autobiography and the history of Istanbul during the author’s childhood combined with flashbacks to the Ottoman past of the city, concentrates on the author’s and the city’s melancholy, or to be more precise it focuses on the Turkish equivalent of the Western idea of melancholy, huzun. There are around two hundred photographs and illustrations in the text, from Orientalist images of the city to photographs by Turkish photographers and a collection of family photographs

Researching (Homo) Sexualities: Working with Military and War Archives

When I began my research into the representations of masculinity and sexuality in the visual culture of 1920s Britain in relation to the commemoration of the First World War, I set out for my first visit to the archives of the Imperial War Museum where I had the false notion that in the archival space of the museum I would have been able to find with great ease diaries, memoirs, letters and documents that would very clearly provide the evidence for my research. I arrived at the archive equipped for battle, like the soldiers I was going to research, with all the questions I wanted to ask the archivist. My first question of course was if there are any documents relating to homosexuality, to which question the archivist replied monosyllabically: ‘None’. An ‘archive fever’ suddenly enveloped me. As Jacque Derrida (1995: 57) argues in his essay of the same title, this ‘archive fever’, the mal d’archive, the archive sickness, is more precisely described as en mal d’archive, in need of archives. Derrida eloquently describes this state of all consuming anxiety, in which one burns ‘with a passion’, that does not allow ‘to rest searching for the archive right where it slips away’. This ‘compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire’ is for Derrida the desire to ‘return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’

Gilbert Ledward

Book synopsis: This handbook represents the culmination of a long-held ambition. The Henry Moore Institute is proud to represent ‘sculpture’ across various media, not simply sculpture itself. We regard graphic, archive and library material as equally important in terms of studying sculpture, and in terms of seeing how it has been studied in the past. Though we have earlier produced concise catalogues of the sculpture, graphics and archive holdings of Leeds Museums and Galleries, it is infinitely preferable to have, here in one handbook, a guide to all the 20th-century holdings and to see them as representing one collection

Selective Empathy in the Re-designed Imperial War Museum London: Heroes and Perpetrators

Koureas concentrates on curatorial practices in the Imperial War Museum to discuss the complexities of the representation of the perpetrator. Focussing on particular exhibits and unseen narratives from the archives of the museum, the chapter argues that a hierarchy of empathic identification is in operation. This hierarchy ranks certain conflicts, often in the name of security and humanity, as justifiable, and labels particular populations as ‘heroic’ and to be empathised with, whilst others are reduced to perpetrating and violent ‘insurgents.’ These practices result in the normalisation of certain acts of violence and the condemnation of others. Koureas addresses the dynamics and exchanges that take place between memory, history (and in particular, British Colonial Wars), the victim and perpetrator, and selective empathy in order to reveal the contingent and ambivalent nature of ‘heroes’ and ‘perpetrators’ and their representations