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Chapter 1 is a study of Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and Surrealism. It discovers that Zukofsky based his poems ‘Mantis’ and ‘Mantis’: An Interpretation on an obscure text regarding the praying mantis written by the surrealist Robert Caillois. It discusses the surrealist interest in the figure of the praying mantis, and then argues that Lorine Niedecker’s triptych poems “CANVASS” and “Three Poems” cryptically refer to the surrealist praying mantis, and in particular to Salvador Dali’s writing and painting from the early 1930’s. Zukofsky’s objectivist and anti-allegorical poems may then be read as a response to Niedecker’s surrealist and allegorical pieces. The chapter demonstrates a generative tension in the poetics of 1930’s.

The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those objects unfold. The starting point in this chapter is one particular, uniquely fascinating surrealist object, namely Salvador Dalí's 1933 Buste de femme rétrospectif, a work to which this chapter often returns in its analysis. The chapter proposes the fetish as a more useful critical alternative, tracing some of the many domains in which it can signify. While it would be wrong to suggest that any one theoretical notion can account for all the many, heterogeneous manifestations of surrealist activity, an extended analysis of Dalí's rétrospectif demonstrates how very helpful concepts of fetishism can be as ways of approaching surrealist uses of the object.

This chapter addresses what happens when language is introduced into the picture-quite literally-in the form of the poème-objet, which combines text with three-dimensional collage. André Breton's own practice in the domain of object creation diverges from that of Salvador Dalí and others in one crucial respect: the incorporation of language into the surrealist object. The chapter considers how Breton's own involvement with visual forms of surrealist activity is motivated by particular aims, notably that of including language in the category of phenomena to be reappraised and inscribed in a dialectic of subjective and objective forces. For in seeking to prove the materialist credentials on which surrealism's political engagement relied, Breton created a class of poème-objet in which a power struggle takes place between word and image, between concealment and display, between fetishism and sublimation.

This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the fetishistic processes they portray. The presentation of the surface of the painting as transparent, as a window through which one looks out on (or into) the landscape of the mind, distances the painting from its own status as a material object, complicating the way it participates in its own fetish dialectic. In order to sustain such an argument, it is essential to recognise surrealist works as always threatened by the fetishising forces they represent. Their status as critical responses to the capitalist commodity society is precarious, but at times also powerful. It is in their binding of sexual and commodity fetishism in a dialectial relation that they are able to illuminate both.

The paradoxical surface, the glass/gloss of fetishistic seduction and denial, is at the heart of surrealism's power. In Salvador Dalí's painting, its pretence of transparency echoes the disavowal of violence at work in surrealist treatments of the body. In the objet surréaliste, it characterizes both the erotic allure of the commodity and the commodified bodily object, brought together in a parody of individual and collective desire. In the glass arcade, it embodies the very workings of commodity ideology. However, the surface also plays another role, one which has yet to be accounted for, and this chapter wants to conclude by delineating this final aspect of the surface as it relates to the political register of fetishism. On the one hand, it is an aspect that takes us back to the concept of the uncanny and issues of presence and absence, familiarity and estrangement.

Some Reformed ministers in Hungary and Transylvania were accused of being Puritans from the late 1630s. This chapter focuses on the troubled career in the northern Tisza church of János Tolnai Dali, who was among the first to be identified as a Puritan on his return from England in 1638. Those clergy who were labelled as Puritans came to adopt the term to indicate a sense of their superior commitment to Reformed religion. The charge of Puritanism was also related in Hungary and Transylvania to issues concerning church government and to the obedience that ministers owed to their clergy superiors. During this period, advocates of an episcopal style of government clashed repeatedly with Presbyterians over the scriptural basis for a clergy hierarchy. Presbyterianism was roundly rejected by the clergy leadership as a dangerous threat to good order in the church. These disputes over ecclesiastical authority in Hungary and Transylvania were contested not only by Reformed ministers, but also amongst members of the ruling princely family, such as the Rákóczi princes.

The negotiations with the Ottomans over how exactly to define the boundary separating each party's domain were largely confused by a completely different set of criteria. The Ottomans constantly argued that the areas they claimed (large areas of which the British contended existed within Dali territory) had historically and thus always formed part of the Ottoman territory. They installed troops in the areas in dispute and actually started to collect taxes, in part thanks to Muqbil's aggressive alliance-building. The longer this physical presence was maintained, the more difficult it was for the British to argue that these areas were actually Dali. It was largely the growing insurgency in Ottoman Yemen, in some respects a product of British machinations, that ultimately led to the 1903 capitulation by the Ottoman authorities to British demands for formal control of the Dali plateau.

This chapter maps a journey into the history and nature of Salvador Dalí’s involvement with science fiction and ‘futurism’ (the pseudo-science, not the avant-garde movement). It proposes that Dalí used these as a locus for engaging with, and critiquing, mass culture, as well as encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to art, SF and popular culture. Beginning with Dalí’s introduction to America’s fascination with things futuristic and the so-called Atomic and Space Ages, this exploration traces his most notable pseudo-scientific activities and fictive projects throughout his later career, and positions Dali as an agent for mobilizing cultural satire and broadening the boundaries of then-contemporary art. The period in question begins in the late 1930s, when he left the Surrealist movement, and culminates in what was perhaps his most satirical and revealing project in this vein, as well as the least known and most poorly documented; that is, his flamboyant promotional program for the 1966 Twentieth Century Fox SF film Fantastic Voyage, recorded by New York documentarians David and Albert Maysles.

Simplicity and symmetry are the heart of beauty in mathematics. Beauty often motivates mathematicians and physicists. Einstein said that his theory of general relativity had to be true because it was so elegant. Archimedes was thrilled with his discovery that the ratio of the volume of a cylinder tightly enclosing the volume of a sphere is 3:2. Mathematics offers beauty without defects. Salvador Dali produced two religious paintings that have important mathematical components. Mathematics have very precise norms for proving theorems, but these generally don’t apply to ordinary life or other academic disciplines. Kurt Gödel brilliantly proved that a mathematical system could be proven either complete or consistent, but not both. This means mathematics is open to the transcendent, as must other disciplines be as well, since they are less precise than mathematics. Every type of rational discourse must be judged according to its own procedures and limitations. By developing n-space, the mind shows it is made in the image of God. It is helpful to compare theology with mathematics. Both subjects always have new problems to solve. It is now known that Gödel developed a proof for the existence of God based on the ontological argument.

In Salvador Dali's joking aphorism, the virility of the concept of justice clashes with the grammatical gender of the word, ‘la justice’. Justice persists in the notion of a normal, adjusted, fitting, right division of sexual characters that the bearded lady contravenes. For, although she figures sexual ambiguity, in so doing she also keeps it at arm's length as freakish. This chapter explores the currency of the bearded lady in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature. In particular, it examines ways in which that currency is caught up in techniques of unexpected juxtaposition and displacement associated with avant-garde movements of the period, in particular Surrealism and Dada. The avant-garde is not entirely uninvolved with ladies with whiskers. The chapter considers the bearded lady, displacement and recuperation in Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917). It also comments on the feminine body in Apollinaire's first published book, L'Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), and Tristan Tzara's play Le Coeur à gaz, first shown in 1921.

In this chapter, the author narrates her travel to Lucknow, where she knew a couple of Begams: Professor Mujeeb's wife and his sister Shakira. She stayed at a house called ‘Dali-Bag’ (Dolly's Garden), which belonged to Mujeeb's brother and where three generations lived. The master of the house was Mr Wasim, Mujeeb's eldest brother. Begam Wasim belongs to the second generation, whose brothers include Haliq Zaman and Dr Salim Zaman, Shakira's husband. The author also talks about a famous public figure of Lucknow, Sheikh Mushir Hosain Kidwai of Gadia. The Sheikh was an active member of the Khilafat movement in India, in addition to other political movements. When Mahatma Gandhi stopped the Khilafat movement, Sheikh Mushir Kidwai condemned him. The Sheikh was a co-founder, along with Hasrat Mohani, of the All-Indian Non-Communal Independent Party. He is also strongly inclined to socialism derived from Islam.

The introduction gives an overview of the goddess Baijie’s four identities and the book’s main themes of religion, ethnicity, and gender. It starts by examining the relationship between deities and society, with a focus on gendered deities, local deities, and deities of the Chinese frontier. It also introduces the Dali region, which it locates both in Zomia, the mountainous, stateless region that covers much of Southeast Asia and southwest China, and in relation to the Chinese state. Baijie’s different forms illustrate how people in Dali managed the tensions between their local identities and the increasing proximity of the Chinese state. Finally, the introduction addresses historiographical and methodological issues that arise in studying Dali and concludes with an outline of each chapter.

Chapter one goes back to the Nanzhao (649-903) and Dali kingdoms (937-1253) to understand the broader context in which the Buddhist Baijie arose. It shows that though Nanzhao and Dali rulers adopted most of their Buddhist texts from Chinese territory, they embraced Indian Buddhist images and claimed Indian origins for their Buddhist tradition. Moreover, it was their worship of distinctive deities with Indian iconography that distinguished their Buddhist tradition from that of Tang and Song China. This emphasis on India did not just stem from India’s prestige as Buddhism’s birthplace, but also from Dali’s position in relation to China. While Nanzhao and Dali rulers could not claim equality with Chinese rulers as Sons of Heaven, their relative proximity to India meant that they could claim superiority as Buddhist monarchs.

The second chapter focuses on the Buddhist Baijie Shengfei, a hybrid figure whose identity combines elements of the Indian goddess Lakṣmī and local dragon maidens. This chapter demonstrates how her hybridity and gendered characteristics relate to Dali rulers’ religious self-representation. It argues that though Baijie Shengfei appears in tantric Buddhist materials as the consort of the wrathful Indian Buddhist protector Mahākāla, she herself does not embody the sexuality or violence seen in images of many Indian and Tibetan tantric goddesses. Dali rulers embraced images of fierce tantric masculinity, as shown in Dali-kingdom depictions of Mahākāla, but this did not extend to female figures like Baijie. This stemmed from Dali rulers’ close interactions with China, in which Dali could exploit stereotypes of martial masculine barbarism to their advantage, but not stereotypes of sexually uninhibited barbarian femininity.

This chapter examines the images and prints of Abraham Lincoln in Europe. It explains that Lincoln suffered an image problem at the start of his presidential career and that his critics used rugged pictures of him abroad. It describes the images, engravings, and lithographs of Lincoln produced by various artists including D. J. Pound, J. T. Whatley, and Salvador Dali, and the cartoons that lampooned him in several magazines including Vanity Fair, London Fun, and Punch.

This chapter focuses on two rituals, each unique to a specific locale (Taidong and Dali) and both characterized by dramatic public displays of male bravado. Both the ritual of Blasting Handan Ye (Taidong) and the Torch Festival (Dali) feature the controlled but inherently and conspicuously dangerous exposure of (male) bodies to fire and incendiary explosives (that is, firecrackers). Participants risk injury and even death, ostensibly for the sake of communal fertility, but also in pursuit of individual affirmation as a particular kind of vigorous, aggressively masculine man. It is argued that the defiant, violent, even rebellious style of macho aggressivity displayed by the risk takers is instrumental to the community-affirming outcome of the ritual through the implied link between aggressive masculinity and male sexual prowess that is ritually shared across the group through the public “sacrifice” of the actors. The chapter also describes how both rituals have served as sites of political conflict: both were suppressed by the authorities in the late twentieth century, reemerging briefly as expressions of autonomous local identity in the late 1980s, only to be quickly coopted by the vicissitudes of globalization and economic development (specifically tourism) since the early 1990s.

This chapter examines three modes of visualising the ‘Amiri’ landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is the 1892 travelogue of journalist and Royal Geographical Society fellow Walter Harris, which narrated his 1892 journey from Aden to Sanaa and included the only descriptive account of Daliʻ from this period. The second is the Anglo-Ottoman Boundary Commission (1902–05), directed by R. A. Wahab of the Survey of India, which sought to delimit the boundary between the Aden Protectorate and Ottoman Yemen. The third is the Daliʻ Agency (1902–07) under Col. Harold Jacob, which was tasked with managing tribal relations in the territory of the Amir of Daliʻ in the period during and after the Boundary Commission. These three modes of appropriating and representing the landscape aimed at making the social and political space of the tribal hinterland legible, whether through the genre of the travel narrative, the map, or the practice of colonial governance.