I convinced myself it was original.

Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays

Outside of the musics to which their own temporalities have trained, explorative Black writings and films are the figural zones in which to most reliably find one's perceptual registers altered by Black people who, in James Baldwin's words, ‘are not controlled by the American's image of them’ – but who are animated instead by those private sounds and visions that know no negation or exclusion; no fixities of beginning or end; no identity that does not mutate; and no power either to assert or to relinquish power. Yet, these same phantasmal sounds, colours, textures and times take indissoluble hold in the shaping of the works bearing their mark. In her 1987 preface to a collection of her (then) nearly three decades of plays, Adrienne Kennedy illustrates the working ferocities of this imagistic abduction from anthropomorphic representation:

Without exception the days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head and days of walking … in Ghana across the campus of Legon, in Rome through the Forum, in New York along Columbus Avenue, and in London, Primrose Hill (hadn't Karl Marx walked there?). Walks and coffee, all of which seem to put me under a spell of sorts … I am at the typewriter almost every waking moment and suddenly there is a play. It would be impossible to say I wrote them. Somehow under this spell they become written.

The amnesic intervals in which the plays ‘become written’ as if by alien hand, inscribing invisibly the spaces of cities traversed incessantly and the durations of moments wakened interminably to the force of their own clamours, are what disclose the futurity of those plays in their incommensurability to the presumably ‘understood’: plays whose linguistic and aural-visual opacities articulate tenacious rapport with the subtextual depths of their sources, whether familial, literary, cinematic or pop-cultural.

Doubly dispossessed by the images besieging her and by the supplements through which to reassign the burden of finding terms for them, Kennedy narrates the scene of writing as a material takedown of ‘consciousness’.

I enter a large hall with three big tables. The room is lit in a warm, purple-tinted light that makes it seem like a party space. An expansive web of strings stretches across the entire space with little pieces of notepaper hanging at approximately eye level. Each table has around ten spaces to sit at. The individual space is set up with an old-fashioned analogue push-button telephone keypad, attached to a pair of headphones instead of a telephone receiver. The tabletops are covered in a psychedelic blackand-white wave pattern – like soundwaves or, at a stretch, an avant-garde tablecloth from the 1970s. This is apt, because I have entered what could be called a sound bar for philosophers. Next to each phone is a small wooden toolbox that accompanies me through the evening (see Figure 28.1): a set of different coloured pens for notetaking, paper clips, notepaper, dextrose goodies as brain food, and a set of Gedankenzettel (literally, notes for thought), some of which already have evocative images on them (a keyhole, for example). I find a seat, put the headphones on and start listening.

This is the setting of Philosophiermaschine (The Philosophising Machine), which opened in January 2020 at one of Berlin's major independent performance spaces, the Sophiensaele, and was conceived by the German performance collective Interrobang. Interrobang was founded in 2011 by co-artistic directors Nina Tecklenburg and Tillmann Muller-Klug, and its performances explore the underlying structures of contemporary society by developing participatory performance formats and theatrical installations that combine ‘game, fiction and narration […] as a means of emphatic questioning – as an interrobang’. In doing so, Tecklenburg and Muller-Klug prominently explore analogue and digital technologies as an interface for their theatre games and draw repeatedly on the history of radio drama with aurally based formats: Callcenter Übermorgen (2013) has participants enter into phone booths; The Müllermatrix (2016) brings GDR playwright Heiner Muller back to life in an elaborate audio installation; and most recently, Deep Godot (2021) offers a one-on-one conversation with an AI that is auditioning to become one's caregiver in later life. Die Philosophiermaschine combines many of these aspects.

Midway through Chekhov's First Play (2015) – a production by the theatre company Dead Centre, inspired by an early, untitled work of Anton Chekhov – a demolition ball suddenly appears and smashes through part of the naturalistic set, a country house interior. A spotlight picks out an audience member, who rises and joins the actors on stage. Modern-day street noises are heard through the audience's headphones, followed by electronic music. A flame is set alight on the demolition ball and the actors perform a synchronised dance to the music. Now, when they speak, they lipsynch to a recording of their own voices.

This juncture marks a shift from a relatively conventional presentation of Chekhov's play, at least with respect to the use of text and the acting style, to something more unpredictable and mysterious. The actors no longer perform Chekhov's play, but rather a text that is more obviously authored by Dead Centre. The world of the play is relocated from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Dublin. The recruited audience member is made to represent the hitherto unseen, but much discussed, character of Platonov and given private instruction via (visible) headphones. The stage action takes on a dreamlike, surrealist quality, with inexplicable occurrences, such as a pregnancy dissolving into gushing water. The characters undergo existential crises and out-of-body experiences, their identities ultimately becoming void as the actors remove their costuming. It is all very odd, and, on the face of it, very different to what Chekhov wrote. I remember sitting in the audience at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in October 2018 and feeling giddy and discombobulated as I experienced the performance, particularly the second half. I was caught between trying to follow what was happening, trying to make sense of it all, and being swept up by the dynamism of the performance and its peculiar affective mix of liberation and gloom – a signature Chekhov cocktail, served here with a twist.

Chekhov's First Play could be regarded as a postmodern production, given its ironic deconstruction of Chekhov's text and its playful collage of intertexts, including sources from popular culture (for example, Miley Cyrus's hit single from 2013, ‘Wrecking Ball’, which closes the show) and unannounced quotations from modernist literature (specifically, lines from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing), but that is not the conceptual frame I will use in this analysis.

Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: Since the mid-2000s, you have been one of the most prolific and dedicated voices researching, publishing and speaking about the concept and history of the avant-garde, especially in the creative arts. For readers of this book who are hoping to think more about modernism and its relationship to the contemporary, one of the issues that many will confront is the endless circulation of different terms connected to the topic, and how to sort out the prefixes – paleo, proto, retro, neo and post – applied to all these terms. When we realised that an accessible philosophical dialogue about the avant-garde might be more useful than a survey essay, we thought that you would be the ideal person to ask: is ‘avant-garde’ still a useful term? And in what ways might its usage enrich a discussion of either ‘modernism’ or the ‘contemporary’?

Sascha Bru [SB]: I think we need to make a distinction here between different groups qualifying what counts as avant-garde: artists, critics and the market. It is obvious that in the late-capitalist market the term ‘avant-garde’ is something of a marketing tool with currency reaching well beyond the field of art or theatre: Mercedes has a line of ‘avant-garde’ cars. Software and fashion designers, advertisers – all appear prone to affix the term to their products. On the surface, this seems to mean very little, were it not for the fact that such use of the term also marks how the market today still displays a certain reverence for the liveliness, innovativeness and futurity of the avant-garde by trying to retrofit, co-opt and integrate it. This is meaningful, I would say. We know that capitalism tends to be rather selective in choosing its most enduring fetishes; that the avant-garde would still rank among these lays bare that it still comes with a surplus value that hasn't quite been exploited to the full.

To artists, the term ‘avant-garde’ has always been an ambivalent one. Few artists in the twentieth century have drawn on this label as a self-denomination.

Traditionally, the science of epigraphy has focused on inscriptions that contain information of historical and art historical interest: dates of construction, names and titles of patrons, names of builders and designers, and the like. Most architectural inscriptions do not record the names of those involved in construction, rebuilding and endowing. With notable exceptions, only in the last decades have scholars of or treating epigraphy given weight to complete epigraphic programmes, including questions of epigraphic style, scale, colour and placement.

The primary topics of this chapter are not so much the subject matter, but the style and placement of inscriptions in medieval Syria, Anatolia and the Jazira. Much of what follows covers familiar ground, trod long ago by giants such as Max van Berchem (d. 1921) and Ernst Herzfeld (d. 1948). Since then, many scholars, prominent among them Yasser Tabbaa and Terry Allen, have turned their gaze to the architecture and epigraphy of medieval Syria. One epigraphic topic treated by all those named, and many others, is the change from angular (Kufic) to rounded (curvilinear, naskh) styles of writing Arabic inscriptions in the medieval Islamic world around the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century. A subset of this larger development was the switch in mid-sixth/twelfth century Syria by Zangid ruler Nūr al-Dīn Zangī (r. 541–65/1147–74) from angular to rounded styles for historical inscriptions, which has been considered as part of a multivalent programme of promotion of Sunni Islam against both the Crusaders and the Shi'a Fatimids on the part of this ruler. Herzfeld contrasted the epigraphic shift instituted by Nūr al-Dīn with what he presented as a longer, more gradual process in the Islamic east. Max van Berchem, a native of Geneva, began the association of Sunni Islam with legible, rounded manuscript hands now used by Nūr al-Dīn's masons for epigraphy, and in contrast to the difficulty of reading knotted, floriated and otherwise elaborated angular scripts, a linkage that has an air of the Protestant Reformation about it.

What new can another treatment bring to this subject? One is the widening of the field of epigraphic enquiry beyond a consideration of epigraphy as the study primarily of historical texts.

Struggling to write at the midpoint of the twentieth century amid the cultural devastation and material depredation of post-occupation Paris, Samuel Beckett opened his novel The Unnamable with three questions: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ Tackling (respectively) the dynamics of space, embodiment and time, these questions, asked in a novel that takes the form of a long monologue, might make us think of theatre. They engage the reader in the process of building a world; they announce a voice striving to come into existence, emerging from an otherwise empty space. They expose the authorial condition directly to the audience, thus complicating the notion of ‘character’ as conventionally understood. Even while they stabilise the novel's beginning with the appearance of a logical progression, they also announce that identity, position and temporality are no longer part of ‘given circumstances’, but instead that all three are subject to radical instability (and not only in the realm of art). It was during this novel's composition that Beckett turned to the theatre – he said ‘to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’ – and wrote En attendant Godot in a matter of months.

It is no accident that Beckett, whose work has been variously classified and reclassified as avant-garde, high modernist, late modernist, postmodernist and sui generis outside all categories, becomes almost a patron saint of this volume's last pages (having already haunted many that came before). Part IV, entitled ‘Slippages’, represents a performative refusal to submit to strict boundary conditions: its theme is the persistence of temporal, spatial, embodied, conceptual, political, generic and technological slippages in what ‘defines’ modernist or contemporary theatre. Having already noted the capaciousness of the term ‘modernism’ and the challenge of attending to its historical specificity even as its vector travels into the ‘contemporary’, what this section highlights is the role of elasticity, porousness, fluidity, flexibility and transformation in how these concepts continue to operate. In this book's introduction, the editors returned to the affective character of modernism and underlined the embodied nature of its thought; previous sections have addressed the qualities of memory, reimagination and transmission as revealing the enduring impulses of modernism.

The desecuritisation approach towards Greece in Turkey's foreign policy has positively affected political, economic and social issues. The absence of any tangible changes in the core disputes between the two countries is incontrovertible, yet both Greece and Turkey managed to establish a dialogue during the post-1999 period. Despite the promising landscape, new disputes – including the extradition of eight military officers who fled to Greece following the failed 15 July 2016 coup attempt, the migration-related crisis, the Hagia Sophia's conversion into a functioning mosque and the mounting tension in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean – have gradually begun to dampen this atmosphere. In an elite survey conducted by Triantaphyllou and Dizdaroğlu in 2016, more than 40 percent of Turkish elites (representatives from academia, the military, journalism, diplomacy and business) evaluated the current state of the relationship as either ‘good’ or ‘rather good’, and more than half of elites (53.5 percent) considered a crisis between the two countries within the next five years ‘improbable’ or ‘rather improbable’. However, Turkish decision-makers, or securitising actors, have once again adopted the securitisation approach due to the political tension within Turkey as well as its isolationism in foreign policy. For some, this shift occurred when eight soldiers accused of involvement in the 2016 coup attempt fled to Greece, although other incidents and political dynamics also contributed. This part of the book evaluates these emergent crises, large and small, which accompanied the changes in Turkish domestic politics and precipitated adjustments in the rhetoric of Turkish decision-makers. These adjustments can be evaluated as a reverting to the default securitisation settings in Turkish foreign policy. Particularly, Turkey's official statements, along with naval deployments in the Eastern Mediterranean, present a good example of securitising practices, as argued by the authors of the Paris School. Accordingly, security professionals’ practices are crucial for the securitisation of issues (Bigo, 2014). Therefore, this part is devoted to the analysis of the post-2016 period in bilateral relations, so as to understand the shift from the previous period's desecuritisation back to securitisation.

In 1974, the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) shelved its first documents, a complete set of The Ladder, in a small room off the kitchen of Joan Nestle's New York City apartment. Forty-five years later, the Archives fill every crevice of a Brooklyn brownstone, the fourth floor reserved as a caretaker's residence following the founding principle that the Archives will continue to be someone's home, and without the bars to access common to research libraries and universities. Thousands of annual visitors, in person and virtual, encounter overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, rooms full of filing cabinets, tabletops covered with cardboard boxes, and a basement full of recent acquisitions. Materials spill over into offsite storage units, temperature and moisture controlled, and electronic clouds full of digitised sound and image recordings. Readers, academic and casual, from across town and across continents, use the Archives to access the largest collection of lesbiana in the world, including thousands of books, periodicals, pulp novels of the 1950s housed on shelves labelled ‘survival literature,’ newspaper clippings, published articles, essays by college students, the papers of well-known poets including Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, as well as the papers of a great many more lesbians who may have lived obscurely, but whose photos and letters, T-shirts and posters, shoes and music, banners and buttons have been solicited, acquired, appreciated, catalogued and preserved by multiple generations of volunteers who call themselves archivettes, and who are trained by those who came before them in the unique archival principles of the LHA.

Arguably, the most unusual thing about this highly unusual archive is its continuing existence and growth through the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s, and into the queer theoretical turn – years during which lesbianism is often considered passé and the vast majority of lesbian and feminist organisations that were started in the 1970s, from bookstores, to presses, to health collectives, have collapsed.The continuing existence and growth of the LHA can be understood, in part, as a function of material conditions. More compellingly, and more germane to the questions about the continuing relevance of lesbian modernism posed by this collection, the sustainability of the LHA provides an aspirational model for a transformed public operating from a politics of accountability, reparations, kinship and love, and resistant to what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics – a feature of colonialism and modernity alike – in which a continually shifting demographic of people, often brown, black, indigenous and/or queer, are cast as waste, and thus properly dead.

Many of the monuments in Cairo reveal the stories of the personas involved, which help us understand and shed light on their raison d’être. One is always fortunate when the primary sources and the inscriptions on the walls of these edifices harmoniously weave together accounts of such individuals. With its plethora of chronicles and biographical dictionaries, no era in Egyptian history is better equipped than that of the Mamluks to offer this melodious interplay between sources and epigraphic programmes. This is crucial for several disciplines, art history, history and historiography, textual studies and Islamic studies being chief among them. They can help answer questions relating to ownership, agency, commemoration and intention. An example of such an epigraphic programme from the Mamluk period, which sheds light on the individuals and its history, is the one amir Shaykhū al-'Umarī al-Nāṣirī (d. 758/1357) ordered on his buildings in Cairo: the mosque-madrasa (built in 750/1349), the sabīl (built in 755/1354), and especially his khānqāh (built in 756/1355). This chapter examines the employment of hadith to adorn, commemorate and provide a raison d’être for construction, and the unique usage of admonitions and Sufi texts painted below the ceiling of the qibla area in the khānqāh, tracing their provenance. My analysis also considers the ostensible involvement of both the patron of the buildings, amir Shaykhū al-Nāṣirī, and the shaykh and great muḥaddith Akmal al-Dīn al-Rūmī, the nāẓir of the waqf, in the choice of these inscriptions. Both these men had agency and their connection showcases the nuanced relationship between the Mamluk ruling class and the ulema.

Who was amir Shaykhū b. ‘Abdallāh al-'Umarī al-Nāṣirī?

The chronicles of the period are replete with data relating to Shaykhū; the last section of the second volume of al-Maqrīzī's al Sulūk is almost entirely dedicated to events relating to the amir and so they detail the trajectory of his career. To be highlighted are events relating to his position in the state and anecdotes describing him as an advocate of hadith and Sufism. As a young Turk, probably Qipchaq – turkī al-jins – he started his career when he was sold by Khawāja ‘Umar, hence his nisba al-'Umarī, to Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (r. 693–4/1293–4, 698–708/1299–1309 and 709–41/1301–41).

The practice of peacekeeping has been legitimised by its association with a normatively desirable outcome: peace. Daniel Levine has written that peacekeeping is ‘distinguished from other forms of warfare by its object rather than its nature’ (Levine 2014: 193, emphasis added). It is therefore important that we consider the object of peacekeeping – peace – that is promoted in the mythologisation of the construct.

I first offer a brief exploration of scholarly approaches to peace and the ways in which these ideas have been embedded within, and are influential of, contemporary understandings of ‘peacekeeping’. I then explore how, far from an objective observable condition, ‘peace’ is a normatively loaded political concept, particularly in the ways it is employed in aspirations for global peacekeeping. I proceed to illustrate why these imaginations about peace and peacekeeping are important for understanding militarism, and, as the book promises, the legitimisation of warfare. While extensive interdisciplinary scholarship examines the links between militarism and war (Cockburn 2009; Sjoberg and Via 2010; Stavrianakis and Selby 2012; Bacevich 2013; Basham 2013; Mabee 2016), my work instead focuses on the intersections between militarism and peace. Drawing upon Allison Howell's framework of martial politics, I explain how peacekeeping discourses evoke a particular vision of peace – martial peace – that legitimises military deployments for the desired goal of peace. I conclude the chapter by signalling why martial peace is problematic and what we need to know about this vision of peace to understand about the politics of the peacekeeper myth.

Visions of Peace

The UN Charter makes forty-five references to peace, yet the term is not actually defined; former Secretary General Boutros-Boutros-Ghali described the concept as ‘easy to grasp’ (Otto 2020: 26). I disagree, and an overview of peace scholarship confirms my opinion. IR and peace studies have evolved disciplinarily as systematised areas for the study of war and how to end it, with the latter discipline embracing the normative goal of finding peace. The Journal of Peace Research's founding editor, Johan Galtung, argued that peace ‘is among the most consensual’ values (Regan 2014: 347). Yet peace itself does not have a clear definition or conceptualisation, despite the vast literatures devoted to exploring it. As the editorial of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1957) notes, ‘we are all interested in peace but we too often abuse the term “peace”’ (Regan 2014: 346).

Upon the death of the celebrated Umayyad ḥājib Muḥammad b. Abī 'Āmir al-Manṣūr in 392/1002, a mawlā of King al-Musta'īn b. Hūd of the Taifa of Zaragoza, with the name Shujā' (literally ‘brave’ in Arabic), set out to meet King Alfonso. Soon discovering that the king had headed for al-Manṣūr’s tomb in the city of Sālim (Medinaceli), Shujā' followed him. There he found Alfonso sitting on a throne that he had installed over the tomb, while his wife leaned next to him. When Alfonso saw Shujā’, he proudly proclaimed: ‘Can’t you see that I have seized the lands of Muslims, and sat on the tomb of their king?’ Almost as if performing his name, Shujā’ was ‘carried away by bravery’. He replied in defense of al-Manṣūr: ‘Were the owner of this tomb to breathe while you sit over it, we would not have heard from you such abominable words, and no decision would have settled in you.’ Alfonso’s rage and imminent attack on Shujā' was prevented by his wife. Standing between the two, she scolded Alfonso and affirmed Shujā's words: ‘Should someone like you pride himself on such an act [sitting over the tomb]?’

The theme of Western leaders ‘visiting’ the tombs of Muslim rulers to proclaim victory is a recurring topos in Islamic (including modern) history, and one that is difficult to corroborate. In fact,this anecdote narrated, among others, by al-Maqqarī (d. 1041/1631), citing Ibn Sa'īd al-Andalusī (d. 685/1286), may have never taken place; and if it did, there is no proof of the Alfonso-Shujā' drama. What interests me, however, is not the portrayal of the religious conflict in medieval Arabic sources. Rather, it is Alfonso’s movement toward al-Manṣūr’s tomb, and his act of constructing a throne, that at once animate the Andalusī funerary realm and free it from its physical stagnation, as well as from its aesthetic isolation. The funerary realm was indeed informed by religious interaction. While this interaction still demands the attention of art and architectural historians, this article will focus on a very narrow, yet important, aspect of funerary epigraphy – specifically the presence of Islamic ad'iya (or supplications) in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Christian funerary projects in the Kingdom of Castile, in its two capital cities during this time period: Burgos and Toledo.

The interior of the mausoleum of the Ilkhanid ruler Öljeitü at Sultaniyya is notable for having been redecorated not long after it was first built. In each of these two campaigns the name of Muḥammad figured prominently in striking compositions, both in isolation and accompanied by other sacred or revered names [Figure 6.1 a–c]. This is arguably the zenith of a phenomenon that is striking for the variety, elegance and inventiveness of the epigraph. Although Islam-wide, their use was particularly common through the fifth/eleventh–tenth/sixteenth centuries in the central lands of Islam. This study will follow the trajectory of some of the most notable examples, many of which exhibit symmetrical star designs, and will explore the reasons for their popularity.

Well before its architectural manifestations, the veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad had a long tradition in Islam. Muḥammad's status as the ‘seal of prophets’ (khatam al-nabiyyīn) in the Qur’an is echoed in the shahāda which proclaims that Muḥammad is the messenger of God. His exemplary conduct and physical qualities were lauded in a variety of sources and contexts, in the Qur’an itself, the compilations of accounts of his life (the sunna), his earliest biographies, and countless later hagiographies. His roles as intercessor and the possessor of a divine light (the nūr Muḥammad) that can lead Muslims toward enlightenment have been cited as reasons fo the prominence of his name in epigraphy. The combination of Muḥammad with ‘Alī (both hidden and manifest) is particularly common, and I shall be examining why this was so not only in Shi’i but also in Sunni communities. In particular I shall examine the symmetrical star-shaped and polylobed examples to ask why they were so popular, examining their links with, respectively, the seal of Solomon and roseate metaphors for the Prophet.

I shall begin by looking at examples where the name occurs by itself, followed by its appearance in combination with other names. Elements of design that will be also considered include the type of script (Kufic, cursive, bannā’ī and square Kufic) and the shape: non-symmetrical, and square, circular and star-shaped symmetrical forms.