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This book provides the conceptual framework for a rediscovery of regionalism in France. The occultation of regionalism persists today despite its reappearance in some academic fields. Where regionalism has reemerged as a subject worthy of study, two developments in particular have helped to shed light on it. The revival of ethnology in the late 1970s had a strong influence, inclining contemporary students of folklore to take greater account of their predecessors in the Belle Époque. The second development that has drawn new attention to Belle Époque regionalism has been the success of cultural history, and in particular one of its central paradigms, the ‘construction of identity’. This book looks at the occultation of regionalism in French history and the history of the French political thought, the political ideas of Jean Charles-Brun and the role of Fédération Régionaliste Française (FRF) which he founded in 1900, the link between regionalism and the right, and the association between regionalist movement and political eclecticism.

One of the iconic persons of Edendale, Los Angeles was Julian Eltinge, a film and vaudeville sensation. While he was hailed and adored as one of the best performers of his time, Eltinge lost his splendor as a star. Sixty years after his death, his name was not remembered, because Eltinge was a particular kind of performer; one whose performances made him a star in the 1910s, but whose mode of performance was scorned by the mid-century and largely forgotten at the century’s end. Eltinge was a spectacular female impersonator. This book is not only about Edendale and its communities. It discusses identities, such as those of the artists, the Communists, and the homosexuals. The book discusses the politicization of sexual identity, and the changing notions and practices of selfhood. It traces the intellectual developments and the application of those ideas in how people built individual lives and communities. The construction of identity emerged from complex interactions. The emergence of homosexual politics and identity politics was not only a creative product of many homosexuals; rather, it was shaped by the community that was re-imagining the relationship between emotions and politics. Los Angeles, captivated by the ties between vice, race, and politics, participated in that transformation, which led to a political world.

A telling incident occurs near the beginning of She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1999), a reworking of Pygmalion that was typical of the highly allusive cycle of teen movies in the late 1990s. The film introduces us to Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr), who is not only the class president and captain of the football team, but also an A-grade student with a probable Ivy League future. To no great surprise, he later adds Prom King to these accolades. It is in this context that we view the character walking into school and spotting a photo portrait of himself which bears the caption, ‘Zack Siler: Student Body President 1999’. Seemingly instinctively, he quickly moves his features into the smile and pose seen in the photograph. Although Zack is characterised by confidence and success, this brief moment reveals that this is an identity that has not emerged by chance, but is the result of continuous, repeated labour.

Locating the qur’anic event in Late Antiquity, understood not as a historical epoch but an epistemic space, the chapter focuses on textual strategies rather than on the transfer of semantic knowledge or extra-textual circumstances. Qurʾanic speech oscillates between literal and ‘allegorical’ expression. Among the last mentioned, typology, hitherto widely neglected—although perhaps the most representative textual practice in the late antique culture of debate—appears a useful key to the question of the qur’anic community’s rapid development of a theology of its own and its attainment of social coherence. Sifting the changing modes of qur’anic typology—from the ‘simple’ mode of restaging biblical events and the mimesis of biblical figures via the more demanding pattern of promise and fulfilment to the daringly innovative mode: mythopoiesis—allows us to trace the successive stages of the first listeners’ construction of a communal identity of their own.