This chapter considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema. The cinema has been fundamentally heroic and epic in both subject matter (the mythic past) and elevated visual style since its birth in 1895. Rather than resurvey this prominence of epic themes in the history of film, Winkler demonstrates their power through a reading of the cinema’s own epic genre par excellence – the Western. The chapter first shows how the American Western follows archetypal heroic models in both plot and character and how many films are patterned explicitly on Homeric epic. Winkler then turns to specific archetypal aspects of ancient epic, primarily Homer’s, in the Western. These include fame (kleos); rivalry to be the best (aristos Akhaiôn / fastest on the draw); the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (arming before duels/showdowns as forms of aristeia); and fundamental story patterns, primarily the development from savagery to civilisation (chaos to kosmos) in the form of ktisis narratives connected with revenge (tisis). Winkler details the power of these archetypes by examining one of the most profound epic-mythic Westerns.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

This chapter is centered on the scientific conceptualization of the term “photography” and its relationship with the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer, including that which is existent between the photographer and the camera, especially the chemistry between both lenses — biological and technological — the synergy and the differences. Photographs, according to the chapter, are representations of the reality of a particular timeframe. By answering certain expedient questions, the author engages his collections (with pictorial evidence) to illustrate the nature of photography vis-à-vis other factors that contribute to the shot, such as the camera and how it is received by the people. Moreover, the chapter views photography as a “social contract” between the photographer and the photographed, and “construction” as the process of taking the shot and reproducing the image. As for the interpretation of the picture by the viewer, it is believed that the pictures themselves dictate how they are to be interpreted or engaged, although this is also highly dependent on the viewer’s understanding. In addition, the chapter explores the effect of photography at its dawn and what its exclusion of African peculiarity, color-wise, meant.

“My Archive,” as depicted in this chapter, documents the author’s wealth of experience as a “scholar and researcher, teacher and mentor” in the form of a dialogue with his past to interrogate African studies and, in particular, Yoruba history. With a natural life experience, the author having lived in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, the chapter investigates and interrogates the cultural history of Africa (with focus on the Yoruba) vis-à-vis its evolution into modernity. Autoethnography is noteworthy a narrative of (parts of) self. It is composed of primary sources of two facets – the author’s life works and cultural collections. The archive also, via the latter, interrogates the two colonially imposed eco-political systems of capitalism and socialism as with other cultural impositions and their far-reaching consequences. Each chapter’s categorization is summarized at the latter part of the chapter.

Enlightenment philosophy introduced the notion that social evolution and progress resulted from scientific inquiry and technological advancements. This view evolved out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment idea that all societies progressed in a linear fashion toward modernity, the pinnacle of which was European civilization. In this construction “modern” or “progressive” societies were those that mimicked European cultural, social, economic, and political structures. Western missionaries’ efforts in the nineteenth century to bring “Christianity, commerce and civilization” set in motion a progressive ideology that led to modern development practice in Africa. These three words captured the Enlightenment ideology of social progress, the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, and the mating of Christian doctrine with secular social Darwinian ideas. By defining poverty as a lack of access to capitalist systems “modern” societies defined any cultures not fully participating in capitalism as poor. These concepts are the bedrock of modern development theory. They presume that Western civilization is the highest form of social development, that all societies must progress in a linear fashion to attain this status, and that development will come through an economic transformation that will reshape social and cultural aspects of societies.

Even though Cormac McCarthy’s position in relation to the Western genre is subversive, working against a genre still requires thorough familiarity with the conventions of that genre. Two of McCarthy’s Western novels, namely Cities of the Plain (1998) and No Country for Old Men (2005), were originally written as screenplays, placing his writing within the context of the cinematic Western. Given McCarthy’s interest in both the genre and medium of Western films, an investigation into his cinematic influences is apposite. The publication dates of McCarthy’s Western novels follow the emergence of a revisionist shift in the Western film genre. The first wave of revisionist appeared in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. Largely influenced by social and ideological disillusionment following the Vietnam War, the films were characterized by their cynical, amoral, and above all violent portrayals of the so-called Wild West. There are numerous nuances of similarity between McCarthy’s Western novels and the most influential Western films of the pre-revisionist and revisionist eras, namely, those directed by John Ford, Sergio Leone, and especially Sam Peckinpah.

The discursive sphere of Islam explored in this book emerges through the interaction of texts of many genres, elaborating faith and engaging with multiple previous, neighboring, and intertwined cultures, and disseminated through ritual, poetry, music, geometry, and painting. The ideas about perception woven through them suggest that the questions that we ask through modern, Euronormative frameworks of religion, art, and history often veil Islamic culture in the name of revealing it. This not only alters dominant understandings of Islam and its arts, but also destabilizes the presumed universalism of disciplinary art history. Positing the broader category of ‘perceptual culture’ against the analytic limitations implicit in the categories ‘art’ and ‘history,’ this introduction critiques the modern segregation of culture from religion as disingenuous. Rather than inviting a ‘Western’ reader trying to understand an Islamic ‘other,’ it situates the reader, regardless of faith or heritage, as a modern subject using historical theological, philosophical, and poetic discourses to enter an earlier episteme and engage with Islamic cultures of the past. The resulting study emphasizes interfaith communication and Sufism as central aspects of Islamic perceptual cultures. It reflects on the performative character of perception as experienced through the eye, the ear, or the heart.

It might come as a surprise that the American Western adaptation of King Lear should be the product of European collaboration between British Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart and German director Uli Edel. This contribution tries to show how the adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into King of Texas (2002) is influenced by the problematic relation both to its source, to the chosen setting of the young Republic of Texas and to the cinematographic genre of the Western that the adaptation belongs to. Combining methodologies of source studies and of the theory of adaptation, the chapterexamines the numerous questions that the film raises on three fronts: that of authorship, as the genesis of the film reveals an authorial instability that makes the usual tension between source and target authors even more complex; that of the adaptation itself, namely the transposition of a seventeenth-century play text to a twenty-first-century film whose plot is set in a nineteenth-century Texas; and finally that of the interpretation that replaces or displaces the questioning of royalty and nobility and of the social issues related to birth with new issues of race that find themselves grafted onto the play.