New World Rebels: From Diego Rivera and the Epic of One's People to Ti-Jean, Folklore, and Alfred Codallo

Walcott's interest in masters and masterpieces of the past and his debt to Craven's A Treasury has recurrently been framed in terms of European art. Yet, in his 1939 introduction to his artbook, the Kansan Craven declared: ‘the hope of painting lies in America’. Predictably, Craven's ‘America’, far from being the entire continent, was circumscribed to the United States, and his belief that ‘American’ art should be an organic manifestation of ‘American’ life governed his inclusion of painters who represented what he considered the most ‘authentic’ part of ‘America’, namely the Midwest. Craven enthusiastically championed Regionalist painters and muralists like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood or the New Deal muralist John Steuart Curry who, however, were not the only muralists featured in his book: Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in fact, were also mentioned as artists who gave ‘wall painting on a grand scale its first modern impetus’ and produced art inspired by the ‘turmoil of their own people’ and ‘passionate belief in the regeneration of [their] countrymen’.

Mexican muralism was the first modern art movement to emerge from the Americas in the twentieth century and, as such, it was bound to capture the attention of the young St. Omer and Walcott, and of their tutor Simmons. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott explains that the two young apprentices ‘adored’ the Mexican muralists whose ‘anger capsized the laid-out trestle tables of the Academy with the ferocity of [their] New World’ (OTC21, 18). In Another Life, Walcott puts Simmons side by side with artists like Raphael, Orozco and Siqueiros in a constellation of ‘people's medals’ (AL125) while in his notes for the poem, he remembers that, apart from modelling himself after Van Gogh and Gauguin (‘madness and isolation’ or ‘madness’ and ‘degeneration’), St. Omer ‘wanted to be not only Raphael, [his] “sweet painter” (that was [his] Catholic side) but Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera ([his] violent Trinity, the new world rebel in [him])’ (ALms1, 18, 110).

The small islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon symbolise France's final connection to its historic grasp on North America. A mere 12 nautical miles off the southern coast of Atlantic Canada's Newfoundland and Labrador, Saint Pierre and Miquelon are a territorial overseas collectivity of France and continue to be a significant resource for France with their offshore Atlantic cod and flounder. Saint Pierre and Miquelon are two of the area's eight small islands, forming an archipelago. Only Saint Pierre and Miquelon are inhabited. Of the two, the smaller island of Saint Pierre is more densely populated and functions as the islands’ economic centre while Grande Miquelon is connected to Langlade (Petite Miquelon) by a sand bar and is situated just north of Saint Pierre. Saint Pierre and Miquelon is recognised as part of Europe, due to its connection with France, as well as North America, due to its geographical position.

The archipelago is home to 5,800 islanders; 90% are urban dwellers with a very large majority of the population residing in the capital city of Saint Pierre on Saint Pierre Island. The majority of islanders are French-Canadian (95%), while the remaining 5% includes Anglo-Canadians (4%) and other inhabitants (1%). The archipelago mother tongues reflect these percentages, with French being spoken by 95% of the population and English by 4%, while the remaining 1% is unidentified. In light of the strained fishery industry, the French government has been exerting significant effort to help diversify the archipelago's local economy through tourism, fish and crab farming, and agricultural ventures, including vegetables, poultry, cattle, sheep and pigs.

From the time of its discovery by explorers José Alvarez Faguendes in 1520 and Jacques Cartier in 1535 until permanent French sovereignty was established through the Second Treaty of Paris in 1815, the archipelago had been subject to a continual power struggle between the French and British over its fishery resources. Canada likewise valued the rich fishing grounds. Extensive fishing eventually threatened codfish stocks, leading Canada to impose a cod moratorium in 1992 to help stabilise the population, causing the archipelago's main industry to plummet. France resisted the moratorium, referring to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which permitted French fishing around the islands, and responded with the ‘Codfish Crusade’ by fishing in forbidden Atlantic waters.

With the birth of film came film remaking. In the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction, filmmaking and remaking have been inherently intertwined. The long-running disparagement of remakes as merely pale imitations of the ‘originals’ is, therefore, best understood as symptomatic of the essentialist obsession with the ‘first’, which itself is nothing but a construct. The establishment of the field of film remakes studies over the past three decades has fundamentally challenged this original-copy hierarchy, underlining not only the socio-cultural-political contextualisation of film cultures and film remaking alike, but also the built-in intertextuality of the motion picture medium. Given the rhizomic nature of film industries and cultures across the world, remakes stand as the prime site for refuting Euro-American-centered film studies, while reckoning with the long-lasting ramifications of colonialism and coloniality, overlaid with global capitalism.

East Asian Film Remakes arrives on the scene to tackle precisely these over-arching issues. Divided into four sections, the essays in this volume, magisterially edited by David Scott Diffrient and Kenneth Chan, collectively unfurl a kaleidoscopic landscape of expansive filmic and mediatic connections, some of which have been obscured and understudied; and their resurfacing through the contributors’ rigorous research decisively reinforces the film medium's fundamental intertextuality and intermediality. Relatedly, the volume puts much-needed pressure on the very parameters of the object of study, namely, remakes. Highlighting the elasticity of the definition of remakes, the contributors demonstrate film remaking as part and parcel of filmmaking itself.

The volume's unique contribution, however, lies in its focus on East Asia (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan), a terrain rife with layered and convoluted contentions and connections both within and vis-à-vis other parts of the world. By foregrounding East Asian location-specific film remakes, this volume offers a fresh take on a multifaceted interactive filmic world that must be understood in terms of its own evolving ecology, rather than simply in reference to Euro-American cinema. It is energising to see East Asian, European, Australian and American scholars from diverse disciplines including Film and Media Studies, East Asian Studies and Cultural Studies collaborating on this critical project that charts out East Asian film remaking across history, space, politics, genres and aesthetics, inviting us to confront the pressing questions of what constitutes remaking in a medium that is predicated upon (digital) reproduction with differences; what do we gain by studying remakes in a world where connections go hand in hand with contentions, and, as co-editor Diffrient puts it, ‘familiarity’ and ‘newness’ become two sides of the same coin?

Throughout this volume, we have paid particular attention to the role of translators as agents mediating D’Annunzio's place in world literature. As a conclusion, we return to the role of translators, this time to consider our contemporary context. To this end, we contacted and interviewed a number of translators, working in different languages, who engaged with D’Annunzio's texts from the late 1970s to today. The questions we asked concerned a range of issues, including the translators’ backgrounds (whether they were familiar with D’Annunzio scholarship, and/or with translation theory), the context of their translation (whether they were commissioned the translation, or else their motivation for choosing this piece/author), their approach to D’Annunzio's style, their goals and who they had in mind as a reader. We also asked them to comment on their stance on aspects of D’Annunzio that were – at least in some contexts – controversial, such as his treatment/portrayal of women, his ideology and his relation to Fascism. We concluded with a question that concerned the value of translating D’Annunzio today, and what aspects of his writing may still speak to contemporary readers.

Establishing contact with translators was not always easy. D’Annunzio, despite the increasing interest in his persona testified by recent biographies, is far from being a popular author in our contemporary moment, and recent translations are thus relatively limited. Moreover, not all translators accepted our invitation. Others answered questions on background and approach but declined to comment on questions of gender and politics.

Even with these limitations, a look at the responses we did receive allows for interesting comparisons to emerge. We have paired the responses from these interviews with comments emerging from other venues, as well, to fill out the ‘story’ of D’Annunzio's place in contemporary translation. These other sources include a blog on translating D’Annunzio by Susan Bassnett (2020) and a recent conference panel at the MLA International Symposium held in Glasgow (2–4 June 2022). What follows is thus a reconstruction that draws on translators’ direct responses, which we quote or summarise as indicated (all quotes come from translators’ responses to our questionnaire unless otherwise noted), seeking not to exhaustively catalogue the responses but rather to ensure a fair representation while also putting translators’ thoughts and experiences into dialogue with one another.

Globalgothic Ecologies

Globalisation has devastated world ecosystems and silenced queer identities over time. It has been a neo-colonial force that continues to contaminate and subvert cultural traditions and values, an idea that gothic fiction in recent years has begun to explore. ‘Gothic fictions that address the issue of globalization,’ Glennis Byron writes, ‘particularly those . . . that represent globalization as neo-imperialism, tend to explore the darker side of the new world order, most notably in ways they register disturbances to traditional identities and cultures’ (2012, 372). Yet, what is often referred to as globalisation is only the latest phase in five centuries of coloniality and the capitalist expansion it has produced. Since the Renaissance, European colonisation has obliterated indigenous sexualities and genders, dismantled indigenous naturecultures, and set out to classify and denaturalise non-heteronormative sexualities and non-binary genders using justifications that were both theological and secular. As Walter Mignolo notes, ‘Proponents of both were Christian, white, and male, and assumed heterosexual relations as the norm – consequently they also classified gender distinctions and sexual normativity’ (2011, 9). The ecologies of those colonised by Europeans were quite queer – diverse, varied and in a constant state of becoming something new. The colonial discourses produced of race, gender and nature continue to organise socio-ecologies on a global scale. Some gothic fictions have found ways to disrupt the continuation of colonial hegemonies by reappropriating gothic tropes in ways that help to reclaim and naturalise queer identities for indigenous cultures, in turn rebuilding the naturecultures of the past. Caribbean gothic stories, for instance, sometimes use queer ecologies to scrutinise the ways in which coloniality has neglected, subverted or erased sexualities and gender identities, and, when doing so, I argue, contribute to a process of decolonisation. In such cases, the globalgothic becomes something new in the way it acts as a mode of recovery that resituates ecologies.

Queering globalgothic ecologies reclaims the past from modernity and coloniality. Part of that reclamation must include a critique of the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and environment. Of course, the gothic has a long tradition of interrogating and negotiating anxieties about genders and sexualities. Gothic supernatural elements and tropes, such as spectres and sublime landscapes, often appear in postcolonial gothic fiction wherein plots of insurgence and resistance are found that include and are sometimes led by queer(ed) characters.

Gender is not something we have but is something we do. Gender is the behaviours a society expects of people based on perceptions of their biological characteristics, and so gender is something we learn to perform – how to move, how to dress, how to speak, how to relate to other people based on our perceptions of their gender. In the dominant culture in North America, gender is divided into two categories: male and female. This is called the gender binary, and almost all people are assigned to one of these two categories at birth. Our internal sense of gender – our gender identity – however, might or might not fit with our gender assignment. People whose sense of gender identity fits more or less well with their gender assignment are denoted cisgender. People whose sense of gender identity does not fit with their gender assignment are transgender, gender non-binary, gender non-conforming or any of a number of other gender identities.

The gender binary plays an important role in reinforcing sexism, the system of oppression that maintains a hierarchy with men over women. This hierarchical structure is known as patriarchy. This system is pervasive, affecting and supported by social institutions like government, education, media, health-care, family and religion. The gender arrangements of patriarchy, the ways in which beliefs, relationships and institutions force people into patterns of behaviour, compel patterns of constraint, discrimination and oppression that appear in many Christian institutions in North America as limitations on women's religious leadership, restrictions on women's control of their own sexuality and fertility, gender violence, and condemnation of transgender and gender non-binary people. It also limits the scope of acceptable masculinities, boxing men into stereotypical roles of patriarchal authority and dominance. These arrangements also reinforce and are reinforced by heteronormativity, the assumption that everyone is heterosexual and the social practices that underpin this assumption (forms that ask for mother and father, wedding paraphernalia for bride and groom, etc.) and heterosexism, the system of oppression that maintains heterosexual dominance through norms, laws, policies and practices (such as excluding LGBT people from ordination or, until recently, from marriage).

People, however, do not simply go along with their oppression; they also resist. Feminism is, as feminist scholar bell hooks puts it, a movement to end sexist oppression.

Opening up Oedipus

Many readings of Berg have attended to this superb opening. As Kate Zambreno puts it, ‘that first line of Berg, so stunning in its simplicity as to require its own page’. Danielle Dutton has remarked, ‘Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention’, and Dulan Barber, Quin's editor, claimed that this opening announces the ‘plot and essence’ of the book and is ‘incredibly well designed to lead the reader in and on’. The ‘intention’, or ‘plot and essence’ of the book are this: Aly Berg, disguised as Alistair Greb, and inspired by an anxious, uneasy desire to please his mother, Edith, tracks down his estranged father Nathaniel, moves into a bedsit room next door to the one occupied by Nathaniel and his lover Judith, and fantasises about patricide.

That Quin is reworking Oedipus – in terms of both the Greek play and the psychoanalytic ‘complex’ – is clear, and this offers one way in to reading Berg. As Barber rightly points out, though, ‘Berg is an uncompromising, a ferocious Oedipal statement. It is not a retelling of the Oedipal story.’ Quin's setting is an out-of-season ‘seaside town’, and the Oedipus story is subverted via a bawdy camped-up theatre of hair, make-up and character substitution. Take, for example, Berg as Greb. Reversing the letters of Berg's name so that the invented and inverted Greb takes his place means that its protagonist enters the text as an already parodic, back-to-front subject. The name ‘Greb’ is like a nonsense word, and the narrative plays with the idea of who the ‘real’ or ‘original’ version is, Berg or Greb, as well as whether the fantasised patricidal act would enable him to become his ‘real’ self. As Berg suspects, however, this is a world in which ‘not even the most indulgent of all actions “I shall kill” can make me declare “I am”’ (31). As this example suggests, and as my readings throughout this chapter show, Quin's brilliant and witty reimagining of Oedipus works to open up and deconstruct both the form and content of the story, to reimagine its triangular geometry, and to refuse closure and heteronormativity, retaining space for uncertainty and, as Loraine Morley puts it, ‘uninhibited exploration’.

A short time before my second marriage, which took place within the twelve months after the death of my sanctified Rebecca, the introduction of the cut nails began to cut me off from earning a living by my hammer, and the business of my hardware store being of itself insufficient for the maintenance of a family, I bethought me of invading the borders of the grocery line. I ought not, however, to say that I did so of my own conceit, for I was led into it by one of those wonderful providential suggestions, of which I have had such a large experience.

One day, as I was standing in the store, wiping and blowing the dust and stoor from the knives and shaving-boxes that made the brick-bats and wooden blocks shine on my shelves, a sailor from the West Indies came to the door with a bag of coffee-beans on his back. There might be the better part of two whole hundred weight, but though he offered them at a cheap rate, I had not money enough to make a bargain with him. After some confabulation, however, into which I threw a spice of my natural jocosity, we came to an understanding; and from less to more, I proposed that we might trade, if not for the whole, at least for a portion. This, as he was going back to New Providence, where he had bought the coffee from a wrecker, was not out of his way, especially when I showed him how he might sell the razors, and knives and forks, at a great profit in Nassau, the chief port and place of business in the Bahama Islands, whereof New Providence is the principal.

Accordingly he in the end consented to leave the bag of coffee with me, and to come back in the afternoon, when the part of the price that was to be paid in money would be ready for him, and the cargo of hardware with the invoice made up.

There is a gothic tradition in Nordic literature and film dating back to the Romantic period. Nordic writers and filmmakers have frequently employed gothic tropes and narrative strategies to evoke feelings of terror and horror; their works have been produced in response to the international tradition of gothic with references to works published and produced outside the Nordic countries. Since the beginning, Nordic Gothic has been densely intertextual while at the same time it has been adapted to the local audiences. Due to the notoriously realism-prone literary tradition in the Nordic countries, it was not until the 1990s that the existence of gothic fiction was systematically examined by a number of scholars (Leffler 1991, 2013; Fyhr 2003, 2017; Wijkmark 2009; Johnsson 2009; Kastbjerg 2012, 2013). Most of the early studies were dealing with nineteenth-century literature and canonised writers. In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in gothic stories in different media after the millennium (Troy et al. 2020; Leffler 2013; Kastbjerg 2013; Launis 2013). Building on these studies, this chapter will begin by giving an introduction to the Nordic tradition of gothic from the early nineteenth century until the present moment. Thereafter, three works will be discussed in detail: John Ajvide Lindqvist's vampire novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004; Let the Right One In), Leonora Christina Skov's transgendered gothic story Silhuet af en synder (2010; Silhouette of a Sinner), and André Øvredal's mockumentary Trolljegeren (2010; Troll Hunter). This will highlight some distinct features in today's Nordic Gothic, such as a combination of gothic and social realism, a transgendered version of Female Gothic, and the uncanny wilderness and environmentalism in Nordic stories. It will also demonstrate in what way Nordic Gothic engages with globalgothic, that is, gothic in a globalised space, and then in particular with globalisation and global threats from a specific regional vantage, the Nordics.

The Rise of Gothic Fiction in the Nordic Countries

By the end of the eighteenth century, many of the first English, German and French gothic novels were translated into the Nordic languages. For example, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) was published in Danish and Swedish in 1800 and 1800 to 1804 respectively. Five novels by Ann Radcliffe were distributed in Swedish between 1800 and 1806, among them The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794).

Young director Yoshimura Kōzaburō could hardly believe his good fortune when Shōchiku, one of Japan's ‘Big Four’ motion picture studios, offered to let him make his feature film directorial debut with the adaptation of Kishida Kunio's best-selling novel, Warm Current (Danryū, 1939). But there was one condition: Yoshimura could make this romantic melodrama only if he promised that his next film would be The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi (Nishizumi Senshachō Den, 1940), the story of an ordinary conscripted soldier from rural Kumamoto in Kyushu, Nishizumi Kojirō (1914–1938), who had recently been killed in battle in China (Jackson 2019, 4–5). Yoshimura kept his end of the bargain and made The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi in 1940 with superstar Uehara Ken in the title role (Yoshimura 1976, 61–3). The cinematic apparatus was deployed to construct a hero for specific imperialist purposes (Iida et al. 1940, 55–6).

Thirty-five years later, Fukasaku Kinji brought another real-life figure to the screen for a completely contrary agenda. Graveyard of Honor (Jingi no hakaba, 1975), based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by Fujita Gorō, tells the true story of Ishikawa Rikio (Watari Tatsuya), a self-made yakuza whose excesses included unsanctioned crime sprees, heroin addiction, murder and, eventually, suicide in prison. Fukasaku's narrative closely related Ishikawa's rise to the desperation of early post-war Japan. Although Ishikawa Rikio is considered an anomaly in Fukasaku's film, the ability of that anarchic, self-destructive subject to attain a powerful status within organised crime is intimately related to the aftermath of the Second World War. Both Ishikawa's sociopathy and its shocking success are indices of the physical and psychological devastation in which Ishikawa operates: the mass poverty and starvation immediately after the war; the cynicism of the police; the betrayal of a humanised emperor; and the contradictions of the compulsory democracy imposed by the US occupation that in itself had begun to sympathise with the right-wing politics of its war criminals.

Just after the turn of the twenty-first century, another iconoclastic Japanese filmmaker, Miike Takashi, attempted a thought experiment with New Graveyard of Honor (Shin jingi no hakaba, 2002), his tellingly titled remake of Fukasaku's film: what if there were an Ishikawa born a couple generations later, whose career began to peak at the end of the 1980s before careening into mayhem along with the post-bubble economy?

As the day began to dawn I awoke; the snow was still falling, but the wind was solemnly lulled. The silence was awful—it was dead, and Nature lay cadaverous in a winding sheet. Once, indeed, I heard the wood-partridge drumming on a neighbouring tree,—a muffled hollow sound, which reminded me of the nailing of a coffin. As I stood at the door of the shanty, thrilling with desolate fancies, the labouring forest, oppressed with the wintry weight, fetched as it were a deep and weary breath in adjusting its burden, and the snow fell in dumb masses around, as numerous as the yellow leaves in autumn, suggesting spectre thoughts about the end of all things. It was altogether such a morning as may be when the death of universal life shall have come.

The snow reached above my knees, and we were still upwards of eight miles from Babelmandel: as it had fallen so early, it was thought it would not stay long; and we had some idea, our provisions being still sufficient for two days, to remain where we were, in the hope of a thaw; but Bailie Waft sensibly remarked, “What if another snowstorm come before it?” This settled the question. After having taken breakfast, we prepared for the road, but in less desultory array than when we took the field.

The bailie, as compass-bearer, of course led the van—no man could do the duty more carefully. He carried the instrument cautiously in the palm of his out-stretched hand, and without uttering a word, as on the preceding day, he studiously, and with undeviating eye, followed the pointing of the needle. The men with the burdens went next, and then my son, and last of all, to have the benefit of their trodden path, I hirpled in the rear.

It would fatigue the indulgent reader to recount the toil and hardships of that journey, the indescribable labour of the bush travelling being increased manifold by the deep snow.

After we had enjoyed our laugh, the minister proposed that he and I should take a turn in the provost's garden, whilst the provost apprised the town's folk that the affair was a matter of moonshine, and so procure a dispersion of the crowd, which, by this time, to the number of many hundreds, were assembled before the door.

“Mr. Todd,” said he, “I hope you will pardon the freedom I am about to take. Both by duty and feeling, I am as little disposed as any man to overlook violations of propriety. The first report of this business was very bad; but, knowing the character of poor Miss Beeny, I did not put much faith in it. Still, with reference to the station she occupies, it must be considered, that you took a most unusual liberty. Unless, therefore, some means can be devised to produce a proper extenuation, I doubt it will affect your intercourse with the good society of the town, among whom delicacy of manners is particularly observed and cultivated.”

The best answer I could give, was to acknowledge the plain truth, that perhaps I had used a freedom beyond propriety; but my mind was innocent of all intentional rudeness. “I was not, Doctor,” said I, “fed with a silver spoon in my youth, nor have I since been much in the way of ceremonious company; besides I am naturally of a light familiar humour. These things should plead for me with ‘the good society’ of the place.”

“Yes,” replied the Doctor, “they will do so, and will procure you pardon, I doubt not; but they will become reasons against taking you into fellowship, unless, as I have already hinted, you can devise some method of convincing them with whom you would desire to associate, that you possess redeeming qualities. Excuse my freedom; for although I confess this affair has been eminently absurd on the part of that fantastical old woman, I yet know it may essentially impair your comfort amongst us; and were you hastily to leave the town, it might ever remain as a stain upon your character.”

Instead of writing to the foreman of the deputation, by whom I had been solicited to allow myself to be nominated a candidate, I resolved, after considering the business well, to make my communication to a public meeting. Accordingly it was given out, that on the day I had promised to send my answer, I would explain personally to my friends, in the ball-room of the Eagle tavern, the sentiments by which I was actuated.

At the time appointed a multitude assembled; the room was crowded, and besides my friends, a great number of persons were there from curiosity, and a few, no doubt, for a less commendable purpose. Among others, was our minister, of whom, in the mean time, it was reported that he had openly withdrawn himself from my cause, and had represented me as a weak, vain, and indecisive character, incapable of expressing two consecutive sentences with becoming seriousness.

Whether I merited any thing so derogatory from the lips of Mr. Bell, or whether, from my opinion of the man up to this period, I was likely to have believed he would be guilty of such backbiting, the courteous reader has the means of judging. However, the report was not without foundation; and in the meeting, and at the head of the room, there he was, sitting with the proud and crimson countenance of a conqueror, as he thought himself. But though I must thus speak of him as the truth claims; and though I also must say, that from this epoch I regarded him as a man too much given to secular ambition for a minister of the Gospel; the truth of his doctrines, and his power in the pulpit, still obtained from me the reverence which I entertained towards them from the first time of his preaching at Babelmandel.

Another thing which I heard of just before the hour of meeting, also disconcerted me. It was the part Bailie Waft and Dr. Murdoch were playing: lifted out of themselves by the success of their manoeuvres, they did not wait for the trumpets of others to sound their praises, but went about bragging of what they had done, and how they were the means of obtaining in me, for the state, a man of the greatest natural talents any where to be met with, and other such fustian phraseology.

‘Oh’ appears on screen eight times in eight different fonts, each one superimposed over the other, at the same time as the word is sung over and over, in a light and fruity vocal, by singer-songwriter Charli XCX. A tone in the background, like in inverted cymbal crash, grows and takes us into the start of the song proper, as Charli sings about the thrill of getting calls from her crush. Like a karaoke video, the lyrics continue to appear on screen at the same time as they are sung. But unlike karaoke, they manifest in a stagger-ing array of fonts, and they pulse and stretch to correspond with the aural qualities and inflections of their vocal articulation. At times they become completely illegible, a mass of neon globules and baffling superimposition. After the first chorus – in which Charli describes how her boy's unique ring-tone is the only one she knows – pop trio Kero Kero Bonito arrive into the song and ruminate on how a ringtone ‘could be anything’, even a ‘barking dog’ or a ‘revved engine’. The key, as they sing, is that the noise must capture the user's attention. Each line of this verse is plastered across the screen: the word ‘ringtone’ dominates in a chunky 1970s font, purple outlined with orange, beating like a heart with the rhythm of the song; subsequent lines appear over this, with ‘dog’ and ‘engine’ accompanied by low-resolution images of these things.

This is the lyric video for the song ‘ringtone (remix)’ by the experimental hyperpop duo 100 gecs (2020a). Available on YouTube, this extremely lo-fi video relies on a tight intermingling of image and sound – and little else. As a lyric video rather than a more traditional or official music video, it prioritises the words of the song, and seems to have very little production value (a single talented individual might have put it together in an afternoon using After Effects). But this does not mean it is sparse, simplistic, or that the relationship of the visuals to the music is purely that of semantic illustration. Rather, the bubble-gum baroque designs on display articulate the aural qualities of the voice, key, rhythm, timbre, and pitch of each particular moment of the song in peculiar but tightly bonded ways.

Introduction: The Paradox of the Martial Concubine

In Hollywood action cinema, as in Western culture at large, heroism and masculinity are more or less interchangeable. Even today, the rare femalecentred Hollywood action film is prefaced by apologetic advance publicity, as if to prepare audiences for ‘empowered’ images of heroic women. Chinese literature and film, of course, have long valorised martial women, presenting them as equals to their male counterparts. Countless short stories, novels, stage dramas and operas have presented swordswomen as forces that potentially complicate or destabilise Confucian standards of patriarchal power. In his study of China's literary swordswomen, Roland Altenburger identifies the Tang heroine Nie Yinniang as an archetypal heroine who ‘radically subverts the conventional [Confucian] system of gender roles’ (2009, 75). According to Altenburger, Ming writer Hu Rujia's tale Lady Wei Eleven represented a further advance in this tradition, as the titular heroine expressly defines herself as a ‘sword knight (jianxia)’ who roams beyond the domestic sphere (2009, 138). Lu Hsun's A Brief History of Chinese Fiction cites the Qing novel The Gallant Maid – filmed by Li Han-hsiang as The Adventure of the 13th Sister (Ernü yingxiong chuan, 1959) – as a new turning point in the modern, secular portrayal of the swordswoman. Here, the martial woman is an ‘artificial’ ideal, combining ‘heroism and the traditional feminine virtues’ without any of the mythological trappings of the Journey to the West tradition (Lu Hsun 1959, 339).

While centuries of swordswomen have challenged Confucian gender roles, it is important to recall that the wuxia genre itself violates much of Confucian morality. Granted, martial arts films dealing with Wong Fei-hung or Shaolin monks generally espouse conservative, male-dominated Confucian norms. Wuxia heroes are usually wanderers exiled from family units and governmental institutions, for they embody the societal detachment of Daoism more than the obligatory relations of Confucianism. As James J. Y. Liu observes in The Chinese Knight-Errant, the wuxia hero pledges loyalty and devotion to strangers as well as friends – a notion that radically violates Confucian social norms (Liu 1967, 7).

Catholicism has for centuries played a central role in Francophone Canada. Even today, visitors notice the numerous villages and streets named after saints and the prominence of a large parish church at the centre of every community. The bond between language and religious identity was established naturally in the early years of French colonisation. Despite a rapid secularisation in recent decades, the imprint of Christianity on Quebec's society is still noticeable.

Francophone Canada refers per se more to a population than a place, though for the first century and a half of Christian presence in this land they tightly overlapped. The Francophone presence in Canada now extends to all provinces, but its institutional heart is in Quebec, which houses the majority of French-speakers in the country and is itself the only majority French-speaking province. For this reason, this essay focuses on the sociopolitical entity of Quebec, while leaving aside its Anglophone component.

In order to understand the contemporary reality of Christianity in Quebec, a journey through the various historical layers of Christian living is crucial. It will proceed in six stages. The first three uncover historical roots: the early presence in the seventeenth century, the regime change of the mid-eighteenth century, and the role as driving social force from the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth century. The last three stages usher us into the contemporary period, from the ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s to the current realities.

Early Presence and Mystical Invasion

Although the French had already explored the territory of Canada in the sixteenth century, not until 1608 did Samuel de Champlain establish Quebec City as the first successful permanent colonial settlement. Religious communities soon came: first the Franciscan Récollets, then the Jesuits. These Catholic missionaries contacted the many Indigenous nations (Hurons, Algonquins, Iroquois), patiently making inroads among peoples who were often semi-nomadic and whose culture was fiercely different. Many natives converted to Christianity. One of them was Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–80), born at Ossernenon. To live fully her Christian faith, she moved to the St Francis-Xavier mission, a Mohawk village of converts near Montreal. There, while living as an Indigenous, she devoted herself to prayer and works of charity with like-minded women, refusing to follow the custom to marry. She was the first North American Indigenous woman to be canonised, in 2012. On the side of the missionaries, some encountered a violent fate.

Deep inside the Chicago headquarters of technology company Kinetic Solutions Incorporated (KSI) is a top-secret military wing. During a tour of this facility, the company's supercilious CEO Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) exhibits the ‘quantum leap’ that he believes will give KSI the edge on all global competitors. ‘It's the Holy Grail: Transformium’, an associate ( James Bachman) calls it, which Joyce jumps in to explain is a catchy, focus-grouped and trademarked moniker. What is so special about this substance? It is ‘programmable matter’, and now that KSI have ‘mapped’ its ‘genome’ they can control it as they see fit. To demonstrate this, Joyce lifts a small white ball from the table in front of him; the ball begins to float above his hand, before suddenly disassembling into a seemingly weightless, endlessly squirming cloud of small white cubes and intersecting geometric lines. ‘Sensual, almost’, Joyce comments as this cloud moves with sinuous elegance in the space between his hands. ‘Do you like music?’ he then asks, and the undulation of cubes suddenly coheres in his outstretched hand as a Beats Pill, a brand of portable Bluetooth speaker. ‘Perhaps something a little more violent?’ he prompts, and the substance morphs into a handgun.

This sequence takes place halfway through Transformers: Age of Extinction, a 2014 blockbuster. The subject of Kevin B. Lee's Premake video essay discussed in Chapter 1, the film is either a barrage of nonsensical and offensive spectacle or a trace of the ‘reinvention of cinema in the age of polymorphous and ubiquitous screen culture’, depending on who you ask (Koepnick 2018: 19). Indeed, it may well be both. This sequence, and the sub-plot it kick-starts involving an army of KSI-produced robot soldiers hijacked by the consciousness of franchise master-villain Megatron, indicates the film's own preoccupations with polymorphism. The enormous robot aliens of the series are heavy and machinic: they wreak palpable physical destruction and emit mechanical clunks and whirrs. But they are also light and digital, products of VFX work which, for all the perceptual realism in play, can seem disconnected from all physical surroundings. They shapeshift fluidly, impossibly, hypnotically, and fling themselves through space in inconceivable ways.

Mr. Bell had not left me many minutes, when the puff of passion to which he had put the spunk was out, and I began to repent of my rudeness—for rude I had been, and more so than the provocation warranted; at least it seemed so, when I came to reflect on whose service he was in, and the livery by which he was protected.

While I was in this vexed and contrite mood, meditating on the course I should take to procure a reconciliation, who should come into the store to console me but Bailie Waft, from Babelmandel. I had not seen him for some time, and although I might, probably, on proposition, have eschewed a meeting, I was yet glad at his now coming, as he did unawares upon me; for it is an infirmity of my nature to take an attachment to every thing I happen to grow familiar with, and I really liked the bodie almost for the tribulations he had inflicted.

“How do you do, Mr. Todd?” said he, looking behind cautiously, as if he was followed, or was likely to have been overheard. “What can have come o’er the minister? I met him, stalking, as it were, with seven-league boots; his eyes looking up through the hair of his bushy eyebrows, his lips drawn back, and his teeth grinning like an atomy’s, while his hands and arms were going like a drummer's with the firebeat.— Gude guide us, Mr. Todd!—surely yon man's delirious!”

As the conduct of the bailie, subsequent to the first day, had been in every way praiseworthy towards Mr. Bell, I was desirous to drop the curtain on the scene of our altercation, and to avoid saying any thing that might tend to diminish the respect with which the unfortunate man had re-inspired him. Accordingly, I merely remarked, in an off-hand manner, that he and I had a few words of argument about the church, which, in consequence of the rent the Methodists had offered, the Presbyterians were cut off from the chance of obtaining.