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Mediated Terrorism
in the 21st Century
Edited by
Elena Caoduro · Karen Randell
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century
“Across its eleven scholarly yet accessible chapters Mediated Terrorism in the 21st
Century offers fascinating engagements with a range of topics in both depth
and breadth, marking it out as a lively, dynamic and original contribution to the
field.”
—Dr Terence McSweeney, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television, School of Film
and Television Faculty of Business, Law and Digital Technologies, Solent
University Southampton, UK
Elena Caoduro · Karen Randell ·
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Editors
Mediated Terrorism
in the 21st Century
Editors
Elena Caoduro Karen Randell
School of Arts, English and Research Institute of Media and
Languages Performance
Queen’s University Belfast University of Bedfordshire
Belfast, UK Luton, UK
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Department of Communication
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Athena
—Elena Caoduro
For John
—Karen Randell
One of my earliest night-terror dreams was when I was aged six, sick with
a mild fever. I was sleeping between my parents as warplanes began to
fly over me. Their engines purred and roared as their wings and bombs
descended. As terror dreams often do, these warplanes were near and far,
inescapably close and yet, high, high in the blazing red sky. Perspective
shifts in night-terror dreams: objects, lines of sight, time and space mutate,
merge and converge, so that all of you is caught in an impossible, somatic,
psychic dread. This terror of planes falling out of the sky has followed me
throughout my life, so much so that the mediated images of bombers
and drones found in terror texts immediately fill me with a shattering
sense of loss. To see so many planes now grounded, parked in hangers
or in massive holding parks, because of restricted air travel and the fear
of transmitting COVID-19, does nothing to lessen these fears. My night-
terror dream imagines these planes taking to the sky all at once, dropping
not bombs but disease. Terror, for me, is bio-molecular and a nightmarish
haunting.
This aviophobia is not a unique or singular perspective, of course. At
school, during the Troubles in the 1980s, children in Northern Ireland
painted and drew army helicopters into their local community or neigh-
bourhood scenes. Alongside drawings of green trees, a smiling sun and
blue skies, there would appear grey, metallic birds hovering over play-
grounds and gardens. These terror birds were real—they took up posi-
tions in these Irish communities—but they were also dreamed by news
vii
viii FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?
Pause
Think for a moment of the overfilled migrant boat capsized on the rough
seas, its children, women and men drowning. Think of the war drone, silently
gliding above a Syrian city, its guided bombonly noticed a few seconds before
its collateral impact. Think of villagers sleeping, slowly waking to the sound
of machine gunfire. Think of these not simply as mediated scenes, dreadful
dreams, or as an academic exercise, but as the searing call of terror as it
is felt within each individual as they face its reckoning. Think then of the
power structures and processes of difference that produce the bio-political
forces of terror. In all that we do, we should always remember what the felt
consequences of terror are. As the British sociologist Stuart Hallpowerfully
reminds us:
Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name
is the point of cultural studies?... At that point, I think anybody who is
FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT? ix
Play
Terror shifts because of political circumstances: terror once came from
outside, from the hands of an external enemy—Russia during the Cold
War, Saddam Hussein, China and the Wuhan virus. Then, terror was
let in, the enemy was within, was among us and needed to be outed,
expunged and defeated. War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg 2005) offers
us such a cleansing as Ray (Tom Cruise) not only saves and protects his
family from the diabolical enemy who had been lying dormant as sleeper
cells beneath New York City, but helps bring them down. Then, terror
was us, all of us, as the power-saturated binaries that once held us apart,
seemingly disintegrated. Terror moved from the night to the day, and
from the day to the night, a red blanket of fear and dread infecting all of
social life.
Joker (Todd Phillips 2019) powerfully captures this envelope of dread,
where menace haunts every street corner, rides on every train and bus,
shapes its anomic inhabitants and laisses-faire political and civic leaders.
Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) carries this terror within him: his otherness a
mark he seeks to hide, his loneliness forged out of a New York that is
brutal and cold. Joker brings terror to the world: he stalks his neigh-
bour, murders the bankers who sought to terrify him and unleashes a
city-wide riot that brings terror to the boil. Joker dreamed of the collapse
of New York, of America, before it happened. Taken up by Left and Right
protesters across the USA in 2020, Joker masks were worn as the cities
burned.
Joker dreamed the collapse of democracy before it happened on Capitol
Hill (January 6th, 2021). Stoked by a fascist, popularist President, the
mob entered Congress, sacking it as they did so. Members of congress
hid under tables, phoned loved ones, so terrified “they feared for their
lives”. Captured on hundreds of mobile phones, and news cameras, the
sacking was recorded live, so that the seismic shock to the foundation
of democracy played out in real time, as it did with the fall of the twin
towers, as it did in Joker.
x FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?
This terror text had been fermenting for months: claims made by
Trump that the election had been fraudulent, and that he had “won”,
fuelled conspiracy theories and a sense of injustice by those on the Right.
As a consequence, they lived in a state of imagined terror, as did those on
the Left, fearful that democracy would be upended. Terror fuels opposi-
tion, pitches one against the other and reduces each to a “bare life”. It
empties the Agora of public discourse and fills it with hate and bile. As the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observes, “the thought of security
bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task
and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked
by terrorism to become itself terroristic”.4
And yet such terror texts also draw attention to its machinery and
gears, obliquely reminding us that liberal democracy is only ever truly
demotic: it carries on its gilded wings power inequalities and fails to truly
empower those on the margins of society, to truly leave the Other’s imagi-
nary shadow behind. The cause of the sack on the Capitol is not “Trump”
and he is not the sole architect of terror: terror emerges because of a capi-
talist system that turns the world into markets and territories and with
it inequalities and inequities, and because of religious conviction that has
rendered faith a tool of direct and symbolic violence. To understand terror
is to understand the operations of capitalism and religion.5
Notes
1. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and other Essays (New York: Verso,
2013).
2. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds.), Reframing 9/11:
film, popular culture and the “war on terror” (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2010).
3. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” in Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 272.
4. Giorgio Agamben, “Heimliche Komplizen. Über Sicherheit und Terror”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No 219, (20 September, 2001), 45.
5. Noam Chomsky, “Terror and Just Response” in Milan Rai (ed.), War Plan
Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War On Iraq (New York: Verso, 2002).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. “Heimliche Komplizen. Über Sicherheit und
Terror,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No 219, (20 September,
2001).
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. New
York: Verso, 2013.
xii FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?
Films
Joker. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA, 2019.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, 2005.
Sean Redmond is Professor of Screen and Design in the Faculty of Arts and
Education at Deakin University in Australia. He researches in the areas of stardom
and celebrity; genre studies and science fiction cinema in particular; film author-
ship; film sound; film and affect; Asian Cinema; and whiteness studies. Redmond
edits the journal Celebrity Studies, short-listed for the best new academic journal
2011. He has chaired the Inaugural Celebrity Studies Conference in December
2012 and was on the organisation committee for the 2014, 2016 and 2018
conferences, the last one held at the University of Sapienza in Rome.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Elena Caoduro, Karen Randell, and Karen A. Ritzenhoff
2 The Body as Weapon: Paradise Now and the Allure
of Enchanted Violence 17
Robert Burgoyne
3 Spielberg and Terrorisms: Munich and War
of the Worlds 37
Frederick Wasser
4 Spinning Terror on TV: How The Grid Taught Us
What to Fear 59
Dahlia Schweitzer
5 “God, I Miss the Cold War”: The Imagination
of Terrorism on Post 9/11 American Serial Drama 79
Ariel Avissar
6 Battling It Out with Memes: Contesting Islamic
‘Radicalism’ on Indonesian Social Media 107
Leonie Schmidt
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
Index 279
Notes on Contributors
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
from South Asian fiction to Bollywood films. Her two current projects
focus on the Sikh-American diaspora in a resurgent, white Christian
nationalist America and the teaching of terror(ism) in the US academy.
Karen Randell is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Research Institute
of Media and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire where she is
a Professor of Film and Culture. Randell is coeditor of six books including
The War Body on Screen and Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-
Horror to American Cinema. Her most recent book is The Cinema of
Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World. She has also been published in Screen and
Cinema Journal. She is currently working on a British Academy project
entitled, “Horror and Romance in the Technologizing of the body: Lon
Chaney and Elinor Glyn ‘suffering for their art’ in five films of the 1920s”
with Professor Alexis Weedon.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Communica-
tion at Central Connecticut State University (USA). She is affiliated with
the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and cinema studies.
In 2019, her co-edited book (with Clémentine Tholas and Janis Goldie)
on New Perspectives on the War Film was published by Palgrave. Also, in
2019, a co-edited collection of essays on The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching
Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders came
out. In 2015, she coedited The Apocalypse in Film with Angela Krewani
(Germany); Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn
with Catriona McAvoy (UK); and Humor, Entertainment, and Popular
Culture During World War I with Clémentine Tholas-Disset (France).
Ritzenhoff is also co-editor of Heroism and Gender in War Films (2014)
with Jakub Kazecki; Border Visions: Diaspora and Identity in Film (2013)
with Jakub Kazecki and Cynthia J. Miller; and Screening the Dark Side of
Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (2012) with Karen Randell.
Leonie Schmidt is Associate Professor in Media Studies in the Media
Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author
of Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular
and Visual Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Currently, she is
working on a postdoctoral project titled: “Pop Preachers and Counter-
terror culture: contesting Violent Extremism through Social Media and
Popular Culture in Indonesia”.
Dahlia Schweitzer is an Associate Professor at the Fashion Institute
of Technology. Her latest book, Haunted Homes (2021), examines the
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 7.2 “‘Jis tann lãgé soee jãné’…Only she whose body is hurt,
knows,” Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital image
copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 135
Fig. 7.3 “Postmemory—that messy archive of trauma and its
transference.” Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital
image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 137
Fig. 7.4 Taranjeet’s living quarters, Gauri Gill, 1984
(Photograph/digital image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019.
Courtesy of Gauri Gill, http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 138
Fig. 7.5 “’84 De Shaheedan Nu Samarpit” (“Dedicated
to the Martyrs of ’84”), Gauri Gill, 1984
(Photograph/digital image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019.
Courtesy of Gauri Gill, http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 143
Fig. 7.6 The wall of truth, Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital
image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 144
Fig. 8.1 “What’s this little weapon which hurt us so much?”
Reproduced with the permission of the artist Satish
Acharya 170
Fig. 10.1 Katja (Diane Kruger) is strapped down to the ground
as she breaks the cordon line after the terrorist attack 204
Fig. 10.2 Katja waits to bleed out, following the violent death
of her family 205
Fig. 10.3 The campervan, parked by a tranquil Greek beach,
explodes with Katja and the neo- Nazi couple inside 213
Fig. 11.1 The Joker (Heath Ledger) is seen from the back in The
Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), waiting
with a clown mask in his left hand at a crossroads
in downtown Gotham 223
Fig. 11.2 James Bond (Daniel Craig) stands, similar to the Batman
character in the super hero franchise, in a dominating
position on the rooftops of the city of London in Skyfall
(directed by Sam Mendes) 234
Fig. 12.1 British Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is
working in a home office close to her kitchen to visualize
her manhunt of international Al-Shabaab terrorists in Eye
in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015). She uses old-fashioned
threads to connect the dots as well as cutting edge digital
technology 246
LIST OF FIGURES xxi
Introduction
E. Caoduro (B)
School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK
K. Randell
Honorary Research Fellow, Research Institute of Media and Performance,
University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK
K. A. Ritzenhoff
Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University, New
Britain, CT, USA
e-mail: Ritzenhoffk@CCSU.edu
the historical situation with current conflicts in the Middle East, espe-
cially in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Padilha’s film establishes
a cinematic space that intersects different times and places, experiences
and memories that demonstrate the entangled character of terrorism as
a contested memory. By focusing on Holocaust memory frames and
the representation of the German terrorists in 7 Days in Entebbe and
comparing it to earlier films, as well as by analyzing the interrelation of
different spaces in these films, the chapter reviews Entebbe as a specific
cinematic place and significant case of CineTerrorism, a cinematic imag-
ination of terrorist violence and its repercussions with the past and the
present.
In Chapter 9, “In the Fade: Motherhood, Grief and Neo-Nazi
Terrorism in contemporary Germany,” Elena Caoduro examines the
representation of far-right terrorism in German cinema and specifically
analyses Fatih Akin’s film, In the Fade (2017), focusing on the blurring
of the conventions of the action film and melodrama. The film repre-
sents a reflection and reaction to the discovery of a network of far-right
terrorists, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and the presence
of Akin’s name in the list of possible targets. Differently from contempo-
rary films about terrorism which take the perspective of the perpetrators,
investigating their motivations, or those fighting terrorism, Akin shifts
the attention to the victims and survivors of terrorist violence proposing
a visceral portrayal of grief and revenge. Caoduro explores Diane Kruger’s
performance as Katja, a bereaved widow and mother whose family is assas-
sinated in a xenophobic bomb attack. Following the tripartite subdivision
of the film in chapters, In the Fade articulates how the environment of
survival (the domestic space, the institutional space of the courthouse,
and the landscape of Greece) produces a social space where motherhood,
grief and violence are intertwined. Caoduro concludes that this consid-
eration of spatial politics adds a productive perspective to the study of
representation of traumatized survivors, since power and gender relations
are often negotiated through space and embedded through setting.
In Chapter 10, “Tales of Revenge and Chaos: Exploring Terror-
ism’s Melodramatic Use in The Dark Knight (2008) and Skyfall
(2012)”, Charles-Antoine Courcoux describes how an enigmatic inter-
national terrorist creates a wave of chaos in a city whose complexity
and multiple ramifications make control difficult. The criminal master-
mind gets captured, but only for the hero to realize “too late” that
getting caught was part of the terrorist’s plan from the very beginning.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
Indeed, after having foiled once again the hero and the authorities, the
villain peruses his criminal endeavor, pushing thus the hero into his last
entrenchments, until the latter finally finds the resources to neutralize
him. Courcoux argues that this scenario, which stages the confrontation
between an all-powerful terrorist figure and a disqualified masculine hero
within a highly mediated urban space emblematic of the world’s great
capitals, has structured the narrative stakes of two of the most critically-
acclaimed and commercially successful films in recent memory, namely
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) and Skyfall (Sam Mendes,
2012). Yet, despite this and these two films’ ostensible usage of 9/11
iconography, none of them ever deals with or verbalizes the issue of
modern terrorism and its political implications. Starting from this obser-
vation, Courcoux’s chapter investigates the nature of the discursive use
these films make of the figure of the mastermind terrorist and the urban
space in which he thrives (Gotham City, London). Primarily centered on
issues of gender, age and sexuality, this comparative analysis shows that,
despite their anchoring in different genres (the superhero film and the
spy thriller), these two productions display a relatively common usage of
terrorism (that is “queer” and technologically determined) in order to
justify the actions of two types of masculine heroes who, in the end, are
supposedly more adapted to the challenges of their/our globalized time.
In Chapter 11, “Terrorism and Gender in Eye in the Sky and Zero
Dark Thirty: Women and Girls on the War Front in Contemporary
Cinema,” Karen A. Ritzenhoff analyzes the ways in which new technolo-
gies have entered the war film narrative. Terrorist attacks are commonly
staged at crowded sites to provoke ample global media coverage that
depicts amok among civilian populations: the recent bombings in Euro-
pean metropolitan areas targeted concert venues, subway stations, airports
and shopping malls in Brussels, Paris and Munich. Ritzenhoff discusses
two recent war films from the United States and Britain that depict
women as leading decision makers in the fight against international
terrorism. Several Hollywood and mainstream war films since 9/11 depict
the fight against terrorists as a necessary and unavoidable task, even
if it involves civilians. The question of modern warfare and “collateral
damage” is heightened when children are involved. Eye in the Sky (2015),
by the South African director Gavin Hood, focuses on a central dilemma
concerning whether a little girl in Kenya should be sacrificed to prevent
a terrorist suicide attack in a civilian mall that would kill even more
12 E. CAODURO ET AL.
and friends across borders, we seem to contribute to the ideal that world peace is
not beyond our reach despite the threats of international and domestic terrorism.
Karen Randell—I would like to thank my ever-constant support team for
always being in my corner. My family; Victoria Jane, Wills Brant, Alex Brant,
Parker Lucas, Rick Randell, Lou Randell, Kev Randell, and Jane Chapman.
Thank you to my besties and chosen family, Kim Furnish, Jill Langford, Alexis
Weedon, Wendy Leeks and Amanda Oliver. Thank you to the Tap on Tour:
Mark Margaretten, Keith Jebb and Lesley McKenna, still crazy after all these
years! Thank you to Chris Holmlund for our virtual chats and sanity checks, you
were there when I needed you most. Amy Chaps, thanks for the bants. Big love
and thanks to my Rockies: we know that singing will solve anything; thank you,
JoJo, Lesley, Jayne, Jan, Samantha, and Wendy for “standing by me” even if it
was mostly virtual. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to one woman in particular;
thank you, Rachel Challen. I would not have made it through 2020 without your
constant support, loud laughter, lattes in the churchyard and unyielding belief in
me. Te iubesc.
And I have dedicated this book to John, who I thank for watching the films
endlessly with me and for delivering coffee and tea, making the best food, and
the best cakes, while I worked on this volume. You make everything we do
together so joyful, thank you. I know that you would have preferred for me to
work about Jason Bourne…maybe next time.
Finally, we three have nurtured each other through this process, it has been
quite a year, and what our process has revealed is that kindness and unconditional
support go much further than panic and stress about deadlines and font size
and referencing style. The book is testament to the drive of Karen (Katti), the
dedication to the cause of Elena and the feel the fear and do it anyway resolve
of Karen. It has been an honor.
Notes
1. Brian Marks, “Nicolas Cage’s 2004 Movie National Treasure Goes Viral on
Twitter…After Users Compare the Film to the Capitol Hill Insurrection.”
Daily Mail Online, 8 January 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshow
biz/article-9126493/Nicolas-Cages-National-Treasure-goes-viral-users-
compare-Capitol-Hill-insurrection.html.
2. With thanks to Sumaira Wilson and Tim Highsted.
3. BBC News, “The Storming of the Capitol.” Facebook, 8 January 2021,
https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/399443771120066.
4. For instance, In the Line of Fire (1993); Vantage Point (2008); White
House Down (2013); Olympus has Fallen (2013); Designated Survivor
(2016–19).
1 INTRODUCTION 15
Works Cited
BBC News. “The Storming of the Capitol.” Facebook, 8 January 2021, https://
www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/399443771120066.
Marks, Brian. “Nicolas Cage’s 2004 Movie National Treasure Goes Viral on
Twitter…After Users Compare the Film to the Capitol Hill Insurrection.”
Daily Mail Online, 8 January 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshow
biz/article-9126493/Nicolas-Cages-National-Treasure-goes-viral-users-com
pare-Capitol-Hill-insurrection.html.
Shaw, Tony. Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film. London:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Watts, Lindsay. “12 National Guard Members Removed from DC Mission.” Fox
5 DC, 19 January 2021, https://www.fox5dc.com/news/12-national-guard-
members-removed-from-dc-mission.
Robert Burgoyne
R. Burgoyne (B)
University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
sides of the barrier. For the checkpoint also degrades those who are
enrolled in its operations: ‘You become a machine of the checkpoints.’”4
As the narrative of the film begins, Said and his friend Kahled (Ali
Suliman) appear to lead ordinary lives of semi-skilled labor at a car
repair shop, a life defined by quotidian regularity. Work, glasses of tea,
family dinners unfold as usual, except for the occasional provocation like
the reminder by an irascible customer that Said’s father was executed
some years earlier for collaborating with the Israelis, an insult that Said
accepts with seeming impassivity, while Khaled leaps to his defense. The
monotony of daily life, the sense of a world that is without prospects or
potential for positive change, comes through in small, dissonant details,
and in particular in the flattened affect of Said, who seems to have stifled
his emotional life under a blanket of low-level resentment. The Pales-
tine of the film is portrayed as a nation that has been forcibly removed
from history, stripped of a sense of its place in the movement of nations,
intentionally cut off and moved back in time. The brute confusion of
war is here reduced to the low buzz of the occupied territory, with all the
tension that this condition implies. Rather than the spectacle of confronta-
tion in a contested space, a trope that has been a defining feature in war
films for a century, Paradise Now focuses on the inner feedback loop,
the daily experience of guilt and shame and the way it forecloses both a
positive connection to the historical past and to the possibility of a future.
The film’s close dramatization of the psychology of political self-
sacrifice, illustrated through the character of Said, attempts to shed light
on the elusive, seemingly opaque subject of the emotional life and psycho-
logical motivations of the suicide bomber. At the beginning of the film,
the act of suicide resistance is accorded a heightened, dramatic meaning,
set forth as the amplified voice of Palestinian suffering: as theorist Gayatri
Spivak says, “Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when
no other means will get through.”5 As the narrative progresses, however,
the film peels away the ceremonial trappings to underscore the isolation
of the human bomber, suggesting that the act of human bombing now
carries very little in the way of community sanction. Suha, the daughter
of a famous Palestinian revolutionary and martyr who has lived most of
her life outside Palestine, at one point argues heatedly with Khaled against
the practice of human bombing, opposing it on both practical and moral
grounds. In many ways, Suha serves as the film’s focalizer, and its moral
compass, the prism through whom the audience reads the film. Sympa-
thetic, worldly, responsive to Said, Suha draws the main character out, and
2 THE BODY AS WEAPON: PARADISE NOW … 21
directly challenges some of his positions. For all her insight and sophistica-
tion, however, Suha is an outsider; she has spent the majority of her years
in comfortable settings in Morocco and France. Her emotional response
to Said is marked by a kind of optimism and determination that is in
marked contrast to the Palestinian characters we see.
Abu-Karem (Ashraf Barham), the leader of the Palestinian terrorist
group that recruits Said and his friend Khaled, serves as the counterweight
to Suha, quietly and effectively playing on the frustration and emotional
vulnerability of the two young men, seeming to offer an antidote to
the sense of impotence that defines life in the Palestinian territories.
His gravitas, his “legendary” status in the community, brings an almost
mythic sense of martyrdom into view, recalling its traditional meaning and
purpose as a means of bearing witness to a cause, of giving testimony. The
quietly charismatic terrorist leader emphasizes the honor their deaths will
bring, and the value of their sacrifice for the Palestinian cause. In his quiet
demeanor and sense of old school revolutionary purpose, Abu-Karem
embodies the potent appeal of violence as a mode of organic renewal,
or perhaps more precisely, of sacrifice as a mode of political speech.
The ritual surrounding the act, from videotapes recording a last will and
testament, to headbands and banners, are symbols of the empowered indi-
vidual making a free choice to self-sacrifice for the cause … these rituals
turn the act ‘into performative traditions and redemptive actions through
which the faithful express their devotion.’14
everything resides in the defiance and the duel, in a dual, personal rela-
tionship with the adverse power. Since it is the one that humiliates, it is
the one that must be humiliated—and not simply exterminated. It must
be made to lose face […] The other must be targeted and hurt in the full
light of the adversarial struggle.16
Language: English
AN ACCOUNT OF THE
A N T I QU I T I E S,
AND REMARKABLE
C U R I O S I T I E S
IN
N AT U R E OR A R T,
OBSERVED IN TRAVELS THROUGH
G R E A T B R I T A I N.
ILLUSTRATED WITH COPPER PLATES.
C E N T U R I A II.
TO WHICH IS ADDED,
L O N D O N:
Printed for Messrs. Baker and Leigh, in York-Street, Covent-Garden.
M.DCC.LXXVI.
Table of Contents.
ADVERTISEMENT
The BRILL, Cæsar’s Camp at Pancras.
ITER BOREALE.
RICARDI MONACHI LIBER PRIMUS.
RICARDI MONACHI LIBER SECUNDUS.
RICHARD OF CIRENCESTER I.
RICHARD OF CIRENCESTER II.
RICHARD OF CIRENCESTER III.
NOTÆ in CAP. I. et II. LIBRI PRIMI.
THE WEDDINGS.
INDEX
INDEX COMMENTARIOLUM GEOGRAPHICUM
THE PLATES
A D V E R T I S E M E N T.
T HAT Dr. Stukeley had altered the plan of his intended History of
the antient Celts, &c. mentioned in the Preface of the former
part of this work, plainly appears by his publishing Stonehenge
and Abury separately: but, as many of the Plates he left unpublished
were undoubtedly intended for that Work, and others for a Second
Volume of the Itinerarium, neither of which were ever completed; the
Editor hopes it will give pleasure to the Learned to see those Plates,
together with such of his Tracts as relate to them, collected into one
Volume, and that they will be found not altogether unworthy of their
attention;—sensible however that the many defects which must
unavoidably happen in publishing a Posthumous Collection from
loose papers, and notes carelessly thrown together, will stand in
need of their candid indulgence.
The Itinerary of Richard of Cirencester, together with Dr.
Stukeley’s Account of, and Observations upon it, were thought by
some Friends of the Doctor a very proper addition. It is a tract truly
valuable for the new light it has thrown on the study of British
Antiquities, and being out of print is now become very scarce.
It may be expected that some account should in this place be
given of the Author, and his Works. A Catalogue of those which have
appeared in print we subjoin; and for his Life we refer the reader to
Mr. Masters’s History of Benet College, Cambridge, printed in quarto,
1753; adding only, that he died March 3d, 1765, in his 78th year, and
was buried in the church-yard of East-Ham in Essex, having ordered
by his will that no memorial of him should be erected there.
A CATALOGUE of Dr. STUKELEY’s Printed
WORKS.
4to. An Account of Arthur’s Oon and the Roman Vallum in 1720
Scotland
Fol. Lecture on the Spleen 1722
Fol. Itinerarium Curiosum 1724
12mo. A Treatise on the Cause and Cure of the Gout 1734
4to. An Explanation of a Silver Plate found at Risley in 1736
Derbyshire
4to. Palæographia Sacra, No. 1. or Discourses on the 1736
Monuments of Antiquity that relate to Sacred
History
Fol. Stonehenge, a Temple restored to the British Druids 1740
4to. A Sermon preached before the House of Commons, 1741
30 Jan. 1741
Fol. Abury, a Temple restored to the British Druids 1743
4to. Palæographia Britannica, No. 1. or Discourses on 1743
Monuments of Antiquity that relate to British History
4to. Palæographia Britannica, No. 2. 1746
A Philosophic Hymn on Easter-Day 1748
Verses on the Death of the Duke of Montagu 1749
4to. A Sermon before the College of Physicians, 20 Sept. 1750
4to. Palæographia Britannica, No. 3. 1751
An Account of Lesnes Abbey, read before the
Antiquarian Society, 12 April, 1753, and published
in the Archæologia
An Account of the Eclipse predicted by Thales,
published in Phil. Trans. Vol. 48
An Account of the Sanctuary at Westminster, 1755
published in the Archæologia
12mo. The Philosophy of Earthquakes, 2 parts 1755
4to. Palæographia Britannica, No. 3.
4to. Medallic History of Carausius, Emperor in Britain, part 1757
1.
4to. Medallic History of Carausius, part 2. 1759
4to. Palæographia Sacra, No. 2. 1763
4to. A Letter from Dr. Stukeley to Mr. Macpherson on his 1763
publication of Fingal and Temora, with a Print of
Cathmor’s Shield
Several Moral Papers in the Inspector.
He was also engaged, at the time of his death, in a work entitled
the Medallic History of the antient Kings of Britain; and had engraved
23 Plates of their Coins, which were published by his Executor; but
the Manuscript was too imperfect to be given to the Public.
61·2d. CAESAR’S Camp called the Brill at
PANCRAS. Stukely desig. dec 1758
The BRILL, Cæsar’s Camp at Pancras.
October 1758.
58·2d.
62·2d.