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Malformations of Cortical Development

Renzo Guerrini and Francesco Zellini

in Neuroimaging in Epilepsy

Abnormal cortical development represents a major cause of epilepsy. Most such abnormalities may now be detected using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), although some remain undetectable even with the ... More

Abnormal cortical development represents a major cause of epilepsy. Most such abnormalities may now be detected using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), although some remain undetectable even with the best imaging techniques. The largest malformation groups express different perturbations of developmental stages and carry a variable propensity to epileptogenesis, preservation or reorganization of cortical function and for atypical cortical organization. Some patients have obvious neurological impairment, whereas others show unexpected deficits that are detectable only by screening. Drug-resistant epilepsy is frequent but might be amenable to surgical treatment in some patients. Surgical planning should be based on assessments of structural, and if possible functional imaging, as well as clinical and electrographic features. Most malformations of cortical development are caused by genetic defects and brain imaging has been instrumental to the identification of causative genes. Nowadays many patients with epilepsy due to malformations of cortical development can be offered genetic counseling.Less

Making and Staking Sacred Terrain: Rajneeshee and Diasporic Hindu Settlers and Unsettlers

Corinne G. Dempsey

in Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion

Chapter 3 explores traditions that confer sacred meaning and power onto landscapes; the communities compared—one largely Euroamerican and the other South Asian—both strove to transplant their South ... More

Chapter 3 explores traditions that confer sacred meaning and power onto landscapes; the communities compared—one largely Euroamerican and the other South Asian—both strove to transplant their South Asian traditions onto North American terrain during the late twentieth century. Here, the increasingly utopian Rajneesh community that briefly settled in eastern Oregon in the 1980s is contrasted with diasporic Hindu communities whose ongoing religiously informed settlements are labeled as heterotopian. This chapter argues that whereas the Rajneesh community's abstracted utopian vision enabled settler dynamics reminiscent of colonial times, Hindu diaspora communities’ sense of sacred terrain that is historically and religiously—and therefore more realistically—layered creates settlements that tend to steer clear of colonizing impositions. Despite these differences that ultimately distinguish failed and successful settlements, a shared challenge faced by these communities has been an ironic “indigenous” nationalism that likewise expresses itself in religiously laden, utopian claims on the land.Less

Baṣrayaātha: Self-portrait as a City

William Maynard Hutchins

Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head (eds)

in The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives

Basrayatha, Muhammad Khudayyir’s innovative book, is both a personal memoir and a cityscape of Basra, Iraq. In it the author created a model city called Basrayatha, which is both based on but also ... More

Basrayatha, Muhammad Khudayyir’s innovative book, is both a personal memoir and a cityscape of Basra, Iraq. In it the author created a model city called Basrayatha, which is both based on but also serves as a mirror and critique of the actual city of Basra. This model then took on a life of its own and appeared in other works by Khudayyir. The book can be enjoyed at face value but is best understood with reference to his many critical writings. The work’s blend of influences from the visual arts, local history, and stories about the storyteller is rather special if not unique in Arabic literature.Less

Gothic Comedy

Catherine Spooner

in Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy ... More

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.Less

A Home in Becoming: Forging Taiwan’s Imagined Community in Jiufen

Dennis Lo

in The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas

Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, ... More

Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, transformed into Taiwan's first site of historical origins almost entirely re-imagined by the Taiwan New Cinema, making it a truly postmodern nativist landmark. This chapter demonstrates how Dust’s rural representations not only stem from the filmmakers' practices of location shooting as cultural remembrance, but also provide spectators with a visual framework for recollecting their own memories. Jiufen is imaged as a paradigmatic Taiwanese hometown, a space in which one has learned to accept one’s unfulfilled aspirations. City re-shapes this image of Jiufen into a metonym for the entire nation, a home where all – regardless of identity – must remember and accept personal loss as part of their collective history. Through City, Jiufen materializes into a paradigmatic site of Taiwan’s coming of age, a heterotopic microcosm of the nascent Taiwanese imagined community. Thrown into the national spotlight by the Taiwan New Cinema, Jiufen transforms off-screen into a socially contested space, attracting the diverse and competing attentions of local and international tourists, preservationists, advertisers, filmmakers, historians, developers, and politicians.Less

Photographs and Favelas: Toward a Process of Self-Discovery and Belonging

Kátia da Costa Bezerra

in Postcards from Rio: Favelas and the Contested Geographies of Citizenship

The chapter studies two photographic projects organized by groups of favela photojournalists in Rio de Janeiro. Moro na Favela (I Live in a Favela) was an itinerant exhibit that was displayed in ... More

The chapter studies two photographic projects organized by groups of favela photojournalists in Rio de Janeiro. Moro na Favela (I Live in a Favela) was an itinerant exhibit that was displayed in various communities and cultural centers from 2006 to 2008, and Imagens do Povo (Images of the People), a book published in 2012, contains 102 photographs taken by 25 community photographers. The chapter examines the ways in which the photographs propose an alternative aesthetic of representation, challenging a regime of seeing through which the city has traditionally sought to recognize itself. It illustrates how the two photographic projects expose aspects that are part of the realm of daily life that are traditionally over/mislooked. The chapter also addresses briefly the spaces of circulation of the two cultural productions.Less

Godard’s suburban years

Térésa Faucon

in Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s

Far from a simple backdrop, the lived environment was for Jean-Luc Godard capable of eliciting specific modes of cinematographic thought; choice of locations could impact the shape and feel of a film ... More

Far from a simple backdrop, the lived environment was for Jean-Luc Godard capable of eliciting specific modes of cinematographic thought; choice of locations could impact the shape and feel of a film more than its screenplay. Prevalent in his works of the 1960s are suburban landscapes and locales, from the villas, cafés and roadways frequented by the characters of Bande à part (1964) to the high-rises of La Courneuve shown in the essay in phenomenology 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Without positing an equivalence between suburban heterogeneity and Godard’s jarring late-modern aesthetic, the author argues for the generative, transgressive capacity of a capitalist space in the throes of transformation and shot through with fragments of history. Shooting near Joinville-le-Pont and Vincennes in Bande à part, Godard pays homage to those pioneers who came before him, like Mack Sennett or Louis Feuillade. In other contexts, like the science-fiction sendup Alphaville (1965), he finds signs of the future in the present, showing Lemmy Caution moving through sleek, well-lit neighbourhoods of high-rises. The spatio-temporal rupture characteristic of Godard’s approach to suburban space resurfaces to surprising effect in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012).Less

Wave That Flag: An Apolitical Band

Ulf Olsson

in Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation

Stubbornly maintaining that the band was not into politics of any kind, the Grateful Dead still performed for many different more-or-less political causes and in environments characterized by ... More

Stubbornly maintaining that the band was not into politics of any kind, the Grateful Dead still performed for many different more-or-less political causes and in environments characterized by distinct political aspects. The band and its culture can be seen as a form of “republic” based on practices of “citizenship”: the formation of subjects (in Foucault’s sense) is a central aspect of the Dead as political phenomenon. The band opened a space that served as a resistance to mainstream America, and supported the testing of alternative identities: a heterotopia. Drugs, as a way of intensifying experience, were a central aspect of this growing culture. But the Dead became political by doing service for their community as well, such as the many benefit concerts they performed.Less

Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck as Heterotopia

Susanne C. Knittel

in The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

Chapter 1 presents a detailed history of the Nazi euthanasia program and of its commemoration by means of an analysis of the former killing center of Grafeneck in southern Germany and various recent ... More

Chapter 1 presents a detailed history of the Nazi euthanasia program and of its commemoration by means of an analysis of the former killing center of Grafeneck in southern Germany and various recent commemorative events associated with it. This analysis facilitates an exploration of the historical reasons for the marginalization of the memory of Nazi euthanasia within the discourse on the Holocaust, as well as the various steps that have been and are being taken to overcome this marginalization. The chapter incorporates not only Grafeneck's postwar history but also its present-day function as a home for the disabled. This ambiguous status challenges visitors’ assumptions about what commemoration is or should be and how it invites them to consider the place of disability in contemporary society. The chapter concludes with a reading of Grafeneck as what Michel Foucault terms heterotopia, a liminal space suspended between reality and unreality, past and present. This offers a key to understanding the uncanny character of the site.Less

Bildungsheld or Pícaro, Canon and List: A Heterotopology for JS

Adam Zachary Newton

in Jewish Studies as Counterlife: A Report to the Academy

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS ... More

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS is especially pertinent here: “Jewish Studies has emerged as an autonomous field that is strictly speaking neither secular nor religious, but academic.” The chapter turns, therefore, to the precedent of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Frankfurt, whose short heyday in the 1920s has bequeathed a model for extra-academic Jewish education, subsequently refashioned by others. What would JS look like if it weren’t tied to the institutional vicissitudes of academicized knowledge practices, if the reproduction of the academic system and social field, the magister-discipulusrelation, were not its determinative economy? Is, or can Jewish Studies be, a kind of heterotopia within the university’s borders? What would it mean for JS—as Rosenzweig envisioned for his students in Lehrhaus—to bring the outside in? As counter-example to Neusner’s essays in chapter 3, Rosenzweig’s essays determine this chapter’s focus. Implications of the chapter’s title, with its tension between hero and adventurer and closed or open catalogue, are taken up in the concluding pages.Less

Material Memories: (Re)Collecting Clandestine Crossings of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Sam Grabowska and John Doering-White

in Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting

Drawing from ethnographic and archaeological data collected by The Undocumented Migration Project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter investigates the ways in which unauthorized ... More

Drawing from ethnographic and archaeological data collected by The Undocumented Migration Project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter investigates the ways in which unauthorized border-crossing is remembered. The memories are posited as heterotopic, that is, as institutional counter-sites with various actors who have competing aims, different experiences, and polarized socio-political positions. Grabowska and Doering-White highlight how identity, landscape, and materiality oscillate while memory works through personal recollection, cultural construction, and analytic interpretation. Grabowska and Doering-White show, for example, how artifacts can recall stories that migrants forget, and how the memories of border-crossers can equally contest the agendas of humanitarians and anti-immigration militias. In so doing, Grabowska and Doering-White seek to add variation to the border-crossing narrative while self-reflexively considering the strength of a mixed methodology.Less

The Structural Transformation of the Coffeehouse: Religion, Language, and the Public Sphere in the Modernizing Muslim World

Michiel Leezenberg

in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality

This chapter discusses the Ottoman coffeehouse against the backdrop of the understanding that the emergence of the coffee house in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe ... More

This chapter discusses the Ottoman coffeehouse against the backdrop of the understanding that the emergence of the coffee house in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe indicates the rise of a modern liberal and secular public sphere. The new institution of the coffeehouse (just like coffee itself) had, after all, been imported from the early modern Ottoman Empire, where it had emerged as early as the sixteenth century, thus well before any substantial European influence. The Ottoman coffeehouse, it is argued, operated as a Foucauldian “heterotopia,” constituting a public and secular counterpart to the mosque. The absence of the outspoken anticlericalism featured by its European counterpart reveals, however, the Eurocentrism of Habermas's rationalist conceptualization of the public sphere.Less

This is the Sea

Sean Redmond

in The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood

This chapter analyses the sea as a particular type of liminal heterotopia where time is unwound, and sensations lost in the urban world are newly found or reignited. The sea and the beach are the ... More

This chapter analyses the sea as a particular type of liminal heterotopia where time is unwound, and sensations lost in the urban world are newly found or reignited. The sea and the beach are the most significant sites for this limitless becoming. They are the places of play and of contemplation; a retreat, the last “exit” and the point-of-no-return. They are feminine and enigmatic; a timeless landscape in which time has stopped and yet where it is running out for those who have gone there to escape and rejuvenate. It is suggested that Kitano uses the beach and the sea to play out the liquid politics of time in an attempt to find new temporal realities beyond the horizon of representation.Less

Science as heterotopia: the British Interplanetary Society before the Second World War

Charlotte Sleigh

in Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914-79

This chapter examines a little-known scientific organisation made up of scientific outsiders, the British Interplanetary Society. It is considered within the Foucauldian frame of the heterotopia, a ... More

This chapter examines a little-known scientific organisation made up of scientific outsiders, the British Interplanetary Society. It is considered within the Foucauldian frame of the heterotopia, a space in which normal rules are suspended or subverted in order to create a utopian alternative. In this instance of scientific governance that space was provided by scientifiction. The content of the stories offered different ways of thinking about science, but perhaps even more importantly the material and social reality of their printing and distribution instantiated a different kind of scientific organisation in itself. The BIS was both an attempt to organise science differently – a space for different membership, aims and rules – and also a construction of this alterity through its interlocution with utopian accounts of space itself.Less

The Oloffson

Alasdair Pettinger

in Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio

The small, idiosyncratic, family-run Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince has long been favoured by literary travellers to Haiti. Alasdair Pettinger draws on a selection of English-language accounts from ... More

The small, idiosyncratic, family-run Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince has long been favoured by literary travellers to Haiti. Alasdair Pettinger draws on a selection of English-language accounts from the last twenty years by authors who have described their stays there and argues that an imagined cartography of safety and danger shapes their experience in ways that are more conventionally associated with the larger chain hotels that dominate coastal resorts elsewhere in the Tropics. It pays special attention to two rhetorical devices which are deployed with some regularity: (1) the embedded mini-narratives in which the author leaves the safety of the hotel to risk the city beyond; (2) scenes in which reminders of these risks seem to intrude on the private space of the hotel itself in the form of overheard sounds, such as helicopters, gunfire and screams.Less

Freiheitsdreck (2)

Seth Brodsky

in From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

This chapter adopts Michel Foucault's canonical conception of heterotopia as another heuristic, a way of suggesting that New Music, as an otherwise extremely heterogeneous field of labor and mode of ... More

This chapter adopts Michel Foucault's canonical conception of heterotopia as another heuristic, a way of suggesting that New Music, as an otherwise extremely heterogeneous field of labor and mode of cultural production, could be considered precisely such an “other space,” one in which the more robust and hegemonic cultural fantasies of greater Europe are analyzed, broken apart and broken down, eventually traversed. It further suggests that these hegemonic fantasies first come to New Music as music. That is, it is in the medium, the form and format of (older) music, that these fantasies are made accessible to New Music in the first place. New Music encounters “joyful brotherhood” not primarily as a complex signifier, but insofar as it has a sound, a body, a coordinate in the symbolic order “music” that is, in this case, Beethoven's Ninth.Less

Chabrolean Spaces as Heterotopias of Crisis

Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

in Claude Chabrol's Aesthetics of Opacity

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or ... More

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or functional buildings (the hospital in Le Boucher) become places in which generic battles take place and the real and the virtual come to a head. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is used to illuminate these unstable and overcoded Chabrolean topographies through the following case studies: the boarding house and park in La Rupture; the crystal house in Juste avant la nuit; the hotel room in Violette Nozière and the Gothic houses in Poulet au vinaigre and La Demoiselle d’honneur.Less

Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions

Hajnal Király

in Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics

Despite their stylistic differences, contemporary Hungarian and Romanian films show a striking similarity in representing aborted, delayed, interrupted journeys, often culminating in situations of ... More

Despite their stylistic differences, contemporary Hungarian and Romanian films show a striking similarity in representing aborted, delayed, interrupted journeys, often culminating in situations of entrapment. The three analysed films - Iszka's Journey (Csaba Bollók, 2007), Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009) and Bibliothèque Pascal (Szabolcs Hajdu, 2010) - represent the incomplete, fragmented journeys of female protagonists of different ages, thus constituting a coherent, representative narrative of a quest for a home, endangered by (male) trahison and physical or psychological aggression. All three films are Hungarian-Romanian co-productions, an aspect which opens the topic of mobility out to new figurative, meta-narrative interpretations of the fims’ heterotopia, of the limits and limitations of intercultural exchange. Following an overview of central heterotopias the chapter performs a typology of these female travellers, with the aim to deconstruct (Western) cultural stereotypes related to (Eastern) female mobility.Less