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The essay explores the connection between the ways in which the new generation of Indonesian filmmakers channelled their aspiration through Masyarakat Film Indonesia/MFI and the larger discourse of post-Soeharto sexual politics. How do the new filmmakers see sexuality, and how does this perspective differ from that of the state? What is the significance of depicting sexuality in contemporary Indonesian cinema? The focus is on the debates around censorship between MFI and the Censorship Board in the Constitutional Court as well some films, particularly “Chants of Lotus” and “Women: In the Cut”, a documentary on how “Chants of Lotus” was afflicted by censorship.

Shifts attention to a different register of language of Tahrir, namely, the polyphonic tapestry of the lyrical and poetic life of the midan that served to sustain the revolutionary experience and unite Egyptians from all walks of life through chants, songs, and poems. The authors translate selections from this open epic of Tahrir and capture how certain poetic elements became part of a common narrative across the lyrical tapestry of the revolution particularly through the concepts of al- sha'b (the people) and al watan (the homeland/ country). The selections in this chapter map out the transformations of these signifiers, as they were given new meanings and new significance during the January 25 uprising. Significantly, many of the poems chanted, tweeted, and exchanged on scraps of paper during the uprising against Mubarak have already acquired new meaning during the “Second Revolution” of November 18 against the SCAF. The most prominent examples had been written in January against Mubarak, but, ten months later, have come to speak to the SCAF's violence and counter-revolutionary design.

Addresses the question of how to translate the use of slogans in simultaneous support and opposition to the army from January well into the time of writing in August 2011. Through the varying terms of language (slogans, gestures, songs, and images) the author maps out how the fetishized myth of “the army and the people are one hand” is historically constructed and gradually undone even as demonstrators continue to make a difference between the army as “family” with its historic allegiance to the people and the authoritarian SCAF that is generally viewed as part of Mubarak's regime that continues to ally itself to the interests of the US and Israel instead of the demands of the people.

This chapter is devoted to the first song of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror. It brings a significantly and qualitatively different scene of production of the text into view: rather than letting itself be framed in terms of a psychoanalytic primal scene, it turns the psychoanalytic understanding of such scenes upside down. Even though this scene of production, with all its phantasmatic décor, still seems modeled after a psychoanalytic Urszene, the text of the Chants itself complicates its structure and subverts its own status as a primal or originary scene that could help to genetically account for the text itself. As a result of the uncompromising war against all filiation, descent, and derivation staged in this scene that thoroughly undercuts its own generative power, the very notion of a scene of production will have to be recalibrated.

This chapter looks at how the carnival fan groups expressed their collective identity at and around matches. It argues that humour, the ‘piss-take’ (Willis 1977) and the desire to witness and re-tell stories of ‘incident’ was central to the identity of the groups. It considers the creation and content of football chants (including racist and indecent chants) and the importance of ‘atmosphere’ at matches. It also looks at how different sub-cultures within a match-going support differentiate themselves and elevate their mode of support through stereotype and derision. Finally it considers the use of language and both regional and club-specific slang in creating group identity.

In this chapter on the two song cycles Poèmes pour Mi and Chants de Terre et de Ciel, the focus is on Messiaen’s musical responses to his first marriage to Claire Delbos, and to the birth of their son Pascal in July 1937. Burton is particularly puzzled by the gradual elimination of Claire from the songs supposedly dedicated to her, which he even categorizes as ‘not Poèmes pour Mi but Poems for Me …’ Among the topics discussed are the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, ‘towards both of which … Catholicism, historically, has had the most ambivalent of attitudes’, and Messiaen’s interest in Prosper Mérimée’s story La Vénus d’Ille, which the composer cites as a source of imagery in the Turangalîla-Symphonie. Burton also offers an explanation for ‘the collapse of sulphurous geometries’ in the sixth Poème, which has so far eluded annotators.

This chapter considers Hugo’s three verse collections Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), and Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840). It discusses his continuing ambivalence about the poet’s role and how he seeks to resolve the tension between the private and the public functions of poetry in the figure of Olympio: the poet as a living being of flesh and blood to whom is granted a godlike, Olympian perspective on human experience. This figure had already appeared in the first preface to the Odes and with increasing frequency in Hugo’s first three collections, but it now comes to the fore, temporarily under the name of Olympio: the poet as the intimate self writ large and offering moral leadership on the basis of superior philosophical insight into the inner workings of the universe; the poet as author of ‘Le Poème de l’Homme’, the poet as God.