The pun in the title of Barbara (1944–94) and Murray Grigors’ Scotch Myths exhibition indicates the wit and sense of fun with which it was mounted. However, this should not obscure the fact that the exhibition constitutes a major political intervention in Scottish affairs, albeit across the terrain of ideology. Its political purpose was to provoke debate about the representation of Scotland and the Scots and the first effects of this have already been seen in the Bulletin of Scottish Politics issue which includes two separate reviews of the exhibition itself and four other contributions which address the same problem the exhibition poses. The purpose of this article is to give some indication of the strategy of the exhibition and to point to some of the ways it needs to be followed up so that the issue of ideological representation remains firmly on the agenda in Scottish political debate.

Lindsay Paterson's review of the exhibition is the more supportive, in that it recognises that the key issue posed is to what extent certain representations of Scotland and the Scots have become (and remain) dominant at the level of popular consciousness. Paterson agrees with the Grigors that the central traditions to be exposed and countered are Tartanry and Kailyard, particularly the former. The other, less supportive, review by P. H. Scott makes the argument that these traditions have less current political force than an earlier myth:

Whatever objective historical truth might underlie Scott's position, it betrays a certain blindness as to how ideology works, in the Scottish context, as a multifaceted system of images and categories of thought into which Scots of the last century and a half have been – to use Louis Althusser (1918–90)'s term – interpellated, set in place as social actors, their consciousness being defined within the limits of the capitalist system.

Vampire hunters are necessarily brave. Their prey is powerful. Their prey is supernatural. And their prey sees them as prey, hence the need to be well prepared, mentally, spiritually, and practically. In 2022, a vampireslayer kit from the nineteenth century auctioned for over $15,000, its contents including holy water and brass crucifixes.

In the eighteenth century, Dom Antoine Augustin Calmet recorded the use of decapitation, impaling, burning, and staking to make dead the undead. Nearly two centuries later, Montague Summers explained, “The only way to obtain deliverance from their molestations is by disinterring the dead body, by cutting off the head, by driving a stake through the breast, by transfixing the heart, or by burning the corpse to ashes.” In Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing also keeps garlic close at hand.

The means of destroying a vampire are many, of course. In F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (Prana-Film, 1922), Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder) keeps Graf Orlok (Max Schreck) in her bed all night until the cock crows at dawn. She captures a dark entity long enough to expose him to the light, thus creating an unforgettable image, his disintegration. The process is not unlike the image capture intrinsic to filmmaking. In 1928, the book Amateur Movie Making instructed readers that the filmmaker “must capture spirit and emotion and imprison them upon his celluloid ribbon, and for this purpose, nothing is more efficient than the lamp.” Artificial light or real, supernatural vampire or reel, professional vampire hunter or hobbyist, fiat lux are words to the wise. Light dispels the dark, even as it produces new images, new shades, new shadows.

Amateur filmmaking, the production of “home movies,” became a somewhat popular pursuit in the mid- to late twenties, particularly for the wealthy, being spurred by cameras and projectors that used smaller gauges than 35mm.

This book has traced the figure of invisible architecture, in its combination of the hidden, the mobile and the transparent, across a range of nineteenth-century writers, cities and spatial forms. Throughout, I have attempted to show how apparently disparate features of urban space, and the drives that accompany them, gain new significance when read together as dimensions of this larger spatial complex. I have also sought to expand the ways we might think about architecture in relation to urban space and literature, moving beyond its most straightforward and obvious manifestations. Yet although I have proposed invisible architecture as a concept associated with modernity (which is itself, of course, not a stable or singular notion), it is not only applicable to the nineteenth century, nor to the cities and writers I have discussed. In this Conclusion I offer one example of how the ideas and approaches pursued in this book might be extended to another context, that of twentieth- and twenty-first-century New York. Applications to global and historical contexts at a greater remove from the texts I have discussed would also be possible, but New York since 1900 offers a combination of literary, cultural and architectural connections to, alongside divergences from, the concerns of this book that make it a fitting place to carry my readings one step further. I take as a starting point Christoph Lindner's claim that in New York, ‘the modern city does not disappear or perish in the era of globalization, but is subsumed and reconfigured’. If this is so, the question becomes: which features of invisible architecture are preserved or reconfigured in an increasingly globalised New York, and in what ways? In offering a provisional response to this question, this Conclusion begins to articulate how invisible architecture might continue to be of use beyond the primary framework in which I have developed it.

The examples that follow are necessarily highly selective. If New York is, as Kenneth Goldsmith's 2015 reimagining of the Arcades Project has it, the capital of the twentieth century, as Paris was of the nineteenth for Benjamin (and it has at least a reasonable claim to the title), then I cannot possibly do it justice here.

Crammed, overflowing

To make things worse, aggravate or complicate the situation

His prestige has risen

To make a thing worse

To increase one’s knowledge

To make things worse, aggravate or complicate the situation

To visit s.o. at intervals

To combine two jobs

An acute angle

He was thrown into prison

To get o.s. embroiled in an issue

To scold s.o.

To discourage, to restrain s.o. from s.th.

To force s.o. out of their position

The vanities of this world

Flowers of speech, rhetorical flourishes

To be full of, to teem with, to burst with

Florid speech

Ecological farming

Organic farming

Heart transplantation

To put a smile on his face

To sow fear

To sow seeds of discord

Agriculture and stock farming

In groups and alone

To give s.o. a black eye

Political leadership

To destabilise the country

To claim for o.s.

The party leader

Religious leader

He conveyed the good news to

The wind whistled

The chirping of birds

Obligatory alms at the end of the month of Ramadan

To pay alms

Sweet-smelling

The earth convulsed

Reins of power

Primeval times, pre-Adamic period

Fellow student, classmate

Co-worker

A lawful marriage

A storm in a teacup

Stepmother

Provide intelligence with information

To supply them with food

Civilian clothes

A uniform

An increase in production

A slight increase

A substantial increase

State visit, official visit

Playboy, womaniser

To embellish s.th.

Make-up

To have a low opinion of s.o., think ill of s.o.

He fell on evil days, he met with evil fortune

Lost in thought

Premature

Formerly, previously

Previously – later on, at first – subsequently

To draw s.o. into a conversation, have a talk with s.o.

Battlefield

To wander aimlessly

To walk, or follow, in s.o.’s footsteps

He walked about the room

Distracted, absent-minded

To steal a glance at s.o., glance furtively at s.o.

To take a short nap

To whisper in s.o.’s ear

In force, effective, valid

Twenty to two (time)

A quarter to two (time)

His right hand, he is indispensable to him

Deceased person (lit. inhabitant of paradise)

His mouth watered for . . .

To implore, adjure s.o. that he . . .

To ask s.o.’s opinion, consult s.o.

To ask s.o. a question

To enquire of s.o. about s.o. else

To humiliate, degrade s.o.

Arms race

Regatta, boat race

Main reason

Compelling reason

Cause and effect

Sound reason

To praise, glorify God, by saying (‘praise the Lord!’)

To sing s.o.’s praise

The sublimity, or the august splendour, of God’s countenance

God is far above, God is beyond . . .

To fertilise the land

To probe the depth of s.th., get to the bottom of s.th., study s.th. thoroughly

Liberal, open-handed, generous

Premeditation, wilfulness (jur.)

He had been previously sentenced to . . .

One has to accept the accomplished fact, there is (was) nothing we can (could) do about it, it was already too late (lit. the sword anticipated censure)

We have previously (already) said that . . .

He had already done it

He had already met him before

It happened to me before, I experienced before that

Slip of the pen, lapsus calami

To surpass, beat s.o.

To burst out impulsively (with an utterance)

Accuracy, precision

To keep up appearances

To score s.th. (e.g. a hit)

To go on record for (doing or being s.th.)

To inscribe s.th. with golden letters

To record s.th., to capture

In the course of four centuries

All day long

To extend the applicability of s.th. to

It rained cats and dogs

Away with him! To hell with him!

Early Islamic traditions claimed that there were tens, or even hundreds, of prophets buried in the cities and regions spread throughout the Near Eastern world. One of these many prophets buried underground, unknown and uncelebrated, was Khālid b. Sinān: a wonder-worker from the Arab tribe of ʿAbs, who was said to have appeared in the Ḥijāz in the generations immediately preceding the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad. In a story found in early ḥadīth and akhbār texts, Khālid's daughter (named Muḥayyāt in some versions) visits Muḥammad in Medina. The Prophet welcomes her: ‘Greetings, daughter of my brother, daughter of a prophet abandoned by his people!’

With this mention of ‘a prophet abandoned by his people’, Muḥammad evokes the story of Khālid b. Sinān's death and burial, and his grave's abandonment by Khālid's community. According to this story, when Khālid neared death, he called his tribesmen and announced:

Three days after Khālid's death and burial, the herd arrived and the tail-less donkey acted just as Khālid had predicted. When his people were on the verge of exhuming Khālid as he had commanded, disagreement broke out among them about the acceptability of disinterring the dead. In several versions, Khālid's family dislike the idea, with Khālid's son worrying that he would be derisively known as Ibn al-Manbūsh, ‘Son of the Disinterred’. In other versions, members of Khālid's tribe, the ʿAbs, are anxious over what their reputation among the Arabs will be for such actions with the dead. As a result of these reservations, they leave Khālid in his grave: abandoned, and apparently never to be uncovered.

Although Khālid's status as a prophet was debated among early Muslims, traditions indicate that many people (including the Prophet Muḥammad) recognised him as such. With this in mind, Khālid's prediction – that he would emerge after three days with knowledge of all that would happen until the end of time – is compelling. In some versions, Khālid specifies that he will be found ‘alive’ (ḥayy) in his grave after three days.

Introduction: Why Hitchcock?

Aside from the convention that artists’ centenaries are good moments for reassessing their work, several factors combined to give this essay its particular orientation. Designing a course on Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) during the late 1990s, I was obliged to address the question of what might constitute an appropriate critical discourse at that historical moment. On the one hand, I had noted the marked contemporary turn towards British film history in academic Film Studies in the UK and beyond and wished to connect with that movement. On the other hand, and not least, I had also become increasingly uneasy about the unseemly haste with which the category of class had been evacuated from political and cultural discourse in general and from Film Studies in particular.

To mount a dedicated course on a named director might seem rather old-fashioned, but the Film Studies cat can be skinned in any number of ways and I retain an enormous personal investment in the pleasure to be derived from certain directorial signatures, not least Hitchcock’s. That said, the trajectory of film theory over the last three decades of the twentieth century made (and still today makes) it problematic simply to erect a descriptive/celebratory course on any filmmaker. Greatly influenced by Robert E. Kapsis, my syllabus therefore took the form of examining the successive critical paradigms which had been brought to bear on Hitchcock's films: the early ‘master of suspense’ paradigm; the auteurist (in its French, British and North American variants and its structuralist and narratological inflections); the feminist/psychoanalytic; and, most recently, the gay/lesbian/queer. Needless to say, those paradigms do not succeed each other in any neat, hermetically sealed way, but are heavily interpenetrated. At the time of designing my course, there were also some stirrings towards Hitchcock among reader reception critics, but not yet a paradigm. The most curious absences from this list were, of course, race and class: those missing paradigms became an additional topic of the course and, in the case of class, this essay's central focus.

Oh what a pity! It’s too bad! Alas!

To make a firm resolution on, intend firmly (to do s.th.)

It is your duty

Front line

One by one, single, one after another

Each of them

One by one, single, one after another

What a pity! Too bad!

I mention, among them, especially

To bury s.o.

Imports and exports

Widespread

Abounding in mercy (in justice)

Patient, forbearing, generous, magnanimous

Comprehensive, extensive, far-reaching, large-scale

Very well-off!

To work by day and night

To make untiring efforts for

Self-evident, self-explanatory

Occupier

His fate overtook him

Reality, the real, material world

Factual findings, facts

Let alone that, not to mention that, to say nothing of . . .

Under these circumstances, such being the case, things being as they are

One may say, it must be admitted, it’s only fair to say, say what you will . . .

In short, briefly

And vice versa

And the rule is, as a rule . . .

By God!

Obviously, evidently . . .

In the following, the reader will find what . . .

The matter is, as follows

And why shouldn’t he?

(with على to express regret) Too bad for . . .!

With him

And everything else that belongs to it

Official documents

To make smooth (s.th. esp. the bed)

To have self-confidence

It is his duty to, he is duty bound to, he has to, he must

He became distracted from it in

Toothache

That much, at least, can be said that . . .

In short, to sum up, briefly stated . . .

In short, to sum up, briefly stated . . .

This chapter looks at two competing historical narratives in Turkey in their struggles over collective memory for the production and contestation of communal identities. As Art (2006, 18) notes, ‘although many political scientists would agree that “memory matters”, there have been few studies that trace the nexus between ideas about the past and political power’. In parallel, Kansteiner (2002, 184) similarly points out that ‘despite this relatively obvious link, the connection between memory and identity has as yet been rarely discussed in memory studies’. As this chapter will illustrate, historical narratives open a fruitful strand of research into the study of society and politics that has so far been left relatively unexplored. In order to delve deeply into historical narratives at work in the Turkish case, this chapter focuses on struggles over (re)defining a nation through historical narratives by specifically focusing on the case of Ulus, Ankara. Ulus, which literally means ‘the nation’ in contemporary Turkish, became central first to the Kemalist modernisation efforts and later to the political Islamist goals of reshaping the nation once the political Islamists captured first municipal and then state level rule. The chapter compares how the secularist and Islamist versions of Turkish nationalism turned Ulus into an epicentre of hegemonic struggle by writing different historical narratives through different museums, ‘pilgrimage’ sites and monuments.

The past provides raw material for projects in the present and in the future. Like ideas, the past is not automatically transmitted either and it too needs to be mediated. History is narratological in character. It is always presented to us in narrative form, which attributes separate, objective facts, the continuity of a subject (Balibar 1992, 86). Narratives create a web of meaning around separate images and events of the past and facilitate the transmission of different perceptions of the past. Historical narratives create historical continuity between separate events. These connections are not necessarily predetermined and they involve political agency. It is always possible to narrate historical events in more than one way (White 1978; Zerubavel 2003) and different historical narratives have different political implications (Davis 2005; Ugur Cinar 2015a; Zerubavel 1995).

In 1988 Arthur Bell & Sons initiated an advertising campaign on hoardings and in the colour supplements of the broadsheet press, which was of the greatest interest to students of how signs operate in society. The contents of each individual advertisement altered but the form remained constant – a kind of trompe l’oeil realism best exemplified by a certain tradition in American painting which reached its popular apotheosis in the work of Norman Rockwell (1894–1978). Each advert depicted a shelf-cum-bookcase (and, in one case, a pinboard) carrying objects with Scottish associations: a Balmoral bonnet; antique copies of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832); historic golf balls of the period 1850– 1905; an old Scots postcard; an antique microscope beside a copy of Sir Alexander Fleming (1881–1955)'s book on penicillin; part of the manuscript for Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)'s The Hebrides overture (1830– 32); tickets for a Scotland versus France rugby match; the hilt of a claymore; and so on. The single recurrent item in each advert was a bottle of Bell's Extra Special Scotch Whisky.

The strategy of the campaign was clear. Bell's whisky was consistently located among objects which signified, most obviously, ‘Scotland’, but which also signified non-nationally specific ideas such as venerable old age, tradition and a certain kind of comfortable living, thereby transferring those qualities, by association, to the whisky itself. This cluster of meanings was enhanced by the advertisements being painted rather than photographed. While rendered in a highly realistic style, the advertisements, by bearing all the signs of the process of easel painting, were located in yet another discourse (that of High Art) and thus further reinforced the campaign's central appeal to discourses of age and tradition.

What interested students of signification about the Bell's campaign was what could be called its semiotic overkill, its piling, one on top of another, of every conceivable emblem which might signify the conjunction of ‘venerable’ and ‘Scottish’. Redundancy, the process of offering more channels of meaning than are strictly required for any given message to be understood by its intended recipient, is a feature of most sign systems, but seldom can redundancy have been carried further than in the Bell's campaign, which corrals emblems from virtually every discourse within which Scotland and the Scots have been signified, historically speaking.

Richard Hofstadter (1916–70), in his 1964 essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, traces the recurrent fear of conspiracy which dominated the thinking of certain minority political groups in the United States from the Anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s to the Black Muslims and White Citizens of the 1960s. That fear has recurred in forms as disparate as Nativism and Anti-Catholicism, certain elements of the Anti-Slavery Movement, Anti-Mormonism, the Manicheanism of particular Greenback and Populist writers, and anxieties regarding a munitions makers’ conspiracy during World War I. The early 1950s, the period in which Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) appeared, provided two significant examples of this recurrent American impulse: the hysterical Anti-communism associated with the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–57), and the (possibly more reasonable) allegations, associated with the name of Senator Estes Kefauver (1903–63), of the existence of a nationwide, Mafia-controlled crime cartel. Both of these fears of the period relate, in different ways, to Samuel Fuller (1912–97) and Pickup.

In Dwight Taylor (1903–86)'s original story for Fuller's film, the plot revolves round drug trafficking. The politicisation of that original story material comes with Fuller's adaptation of it, in which the revised plot involves microfilm which communists are trying to smuggle out of the United States. Contemporary British reviewers, ignorant of Fuller's wider work, saw this as the only level of politicisation within Pickup and dismissed the film as a McCarthyite tract. And yet, Pickup is, politically speaking, perfectly consistent with what we know of Fuller both as artist and man. On one level, the political impetus Fuller gave to Pickup's plot is consistent with his romantic nationalism which, in the climate of the early fifties, could scarcely fail to view communists as the enemies of America. On another level, the politicisation seeps some way into the fabric of the film so that, as in earlier Fuller films such as The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets! (1951), America is seen once more defended by outcasts from American society. In Pickup's case, that defence is provided by the petty criminals of the New York underworld, and the most virulent attacks on communism come from Moe (Thelma Ritter) and Candy (Jean Peters), characters who are no more capable of understanding the ideological debate between communism and capitalism than are Fuller's mercenary soldiers in his earlier war movies.

While the Alhambra was triggering so much interest and so many passions in the West and in Spain, how was it perceived from the Orient, or more particularly from the Islamic world, whose heritage it was allegedly an essential element of? After all, travellers, artists and architects kept reminding their audiences of the place the Alhambra occupied in the evolution of Islamic art and civilisation. Was this discovery being made unbeknown to those who were supposed to be the heirs and worthy descendants of this civilisation? The question is all the more justified if one considers that it was more or less implicitly embedded in some of the works mentioned earlier. Indeed, the illustrated plates depicting the interior of the monument often staged Moors, whose costume and presence contributed to the feelings of exoticism and authenticity sought by these authors. Of course, in most cases, this was a mere artistic fiction, which does not warrant the quest for possible traces in contemporary reality. Nevertheless, some of these images stand out due to the context of a Muslim – or Arab – presence of an unmistakably concrete nature. An excellent example is plate XXXIV in Laborde's work, representing the ‘Court of the Lions’ (Figure 2.1). There, halfway between the famous fountain and the gallery surrounding the court, a group of three men can be spotted, whose turbans and wide cloaks leave no doubt as to their Muslim, Arab or North African identity. True, Laborde would often spice up his plates with fantasy scenes and figures, such as plate XXXIII, representing the ‘Court of the Baths’, which displayed a naked woman dipping her feet in the pool. However, in the case of the plate mentioned earlier, the fact that the three turbaned men are preceded by a Westerner wearing a bicorn hat and whose gesture suggests that he is guiding them, allows us to assume that this time there was more to it than just a decorative element.

Across the 1930s, Olaf Stapledon produced three novels of unprecedented scale – 1930's Last and First Men, 1932's Last Men in London and 1937's Star Maker. Each spans billions of years, imagining potential trajectories for the development of humankind and its relationship to the universe at large. In so doing, Stapledon probes the limits of the novel as a form, testing the binding of the novel to individualism through rescaling far away from the lifespan of the individual, to cover the rise and fall of species and solar systems. Zoomed out to this degree, Stapledon's cosmic novels challenge the most basic interpretative apparatus. For Frederic Jameson, the scale of Stapledon's cosmic novels means that ‘human beings can scarcely even recognize themselves any longer’ (168), meaning, in his view, that the novels must ‘be allegorized […] in order to bring such figuration back to any viable anthropomorphic and Utopian function’ (168). In effect, for Jameson, the absence of individuated human beings in these novels implies a need to read as if there were individuated human beings, that being how novels are read. However, while there is mirrored exploration of the cosmos and the self in Stapledon's work, underlying this is not allegory, for Stapledon, but interfusion of humanity and cosmos. Not only, in his view, can human thought be transmitted, but moreover that possibility speaks for a universe structured, perhaps designedly, to make that transmission possible. Telepathy, taken by Stapledon as real, allows for human thought to exist outside human minds, and so, he finds, the universe must contain something human across its expanse. Stapledon's project, then, points at a core question underlying a literature of psychic connection: that of how we are to read the spaces between people if thought can fill them. Stapledon's optimism that the cosmos is innately knowable and accommodating to the human is a vision rejected by later novels of cosmic exploration offered by the likes of Naomi Mitchison, Stanisłav Lem and Doris Lessing.

Writing at a time when J. B. Rhine's experiments at Duke University were giving telepathy the veneer of academic backing, Stapledon follows the Rhines in taking as possible not only the emanations of psychic force, but the transmission of thought with content.