#Cypriot civil war

[henk-heijmans]

A Turkish woman mourns her dead husband, a victim of the Cyprus Civil War between Greek Cypriotes and Turkish Cypriotes, Ghaziveram, Cyprus, 1964 - by Don McCullin (1935), English

[archiveofcyp]

Coloured photographs of a celebration held by the Union of Cyprus Youth for the Wounded from the war on Lebanon while receiving treatment in Cyprus.

Image source and information by Samar Ozrail, "The Palestine Red Crescent Society Collection". Archival Inventory. 30 April- 5 June 2018. The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.

[painthropologist]

Book review: Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Jeanne Favret-Saada, 1980)

This literature review was written in 2020 for my Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology.

Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (2010) is an ethnographic account of peasant superstitions in the Bocage country when challenged by the modernising France of the 1960s. The monograph deals with the ways in which cosmopolitan and rural French navigate beliefs of spells, witches, and ‘unwitchers’ through the cultural forces which mobilise them. While the monograph principally deals with the narrative and creative function of language in Bocage witchcraft, it is worth considering Deadly Words in the wider context of assessing the impact of modernity in rural France, and what it entails both nationally and in regards to the social mechanisms of mid-20th century Europe.

In order to understand and be privy to witchcraft in the Bocage, the author suggests that one must be credulous, that is, susceptible to be “caught” in spells. Diagnosing witchcraft is usually a manifold process, one which outlines the social stratification of the Bocage. While Christian priests and exorcists are meant to be the first point of contact regarding supernatural activity, peasants are usually dismissed to seek medical attention instead (97). What the author terms ‘ordinary misfortune’ (15) is the line backed by powerful social agencies, such as the Church and medical science. This process of dismissal demonstrates how official incredulity reinforces local superstition and reliance on country unwitchers, which is further compounded by the suspicion Bocage peasants treat urban Others they interact with (106). It also highlights the frustrations which witchcraft believers have with official incredulity, and the violent nature of unwitching can be considered an antagonism to mainstream religion in the Bocage (104). The environment of distrust reflects rural resistance towards the transformative force of modernity, particularly with regards to adopting hegemonic beliefs and practices as a means of integrating with wider cosmopolitan France. Higher social agencies within French society as such ‘constitute both the social order, and since this order prevails, social ‘reality’’ (15).

Post-war France, in its desire to uphold and invent a European image, adhered to the Weberian notion of modernity whereby those unable to adapt ‘would find their society arrested at the point of transition or mired in traditionalism’ (Wolf, 2010: 12). The aspirations to a collective French identity associated with civilized, cosmopolitan and equally modern citizens could thus be threatened by those who belonged to what was considered the France of the past. The ‘backwardness’ of the Bocage, whose people were unable or unwilling to abandon their ‘irrational’ beliefs, presented such a threat to the desired French identity, and superstitions were to be curtailed by skepticism and derision by powerful and official social agencies. As such, civil society at large succeeded in alienating the Bocage peasants by not only subjecting their beliefs to open ridicule in tabloid journalism (33-5), but also by causing them to construct around themselves a further affect of secrecy and suspicion against the cosmopolitan French. Argyrou (1996) argues that in their search for a European identity, Cypriots ‘are constituted as Western subjects’ (183). Likewise, the Bocage peasants can be considered subjects to the force of French modernity, in that they are pressured to adapt to European ideals of rationality and secularism by discarding their superstitions. 

Aspirations to cosmopolitanism have been largely related to France and French culture since the Enlightenment (Delanty & Rumford, 2005: 75), and as such, there is a historical basis to the intrinsic notion of Frenchness equating with cosmopolitanism. This bias is still largely reflected in Favret-Saada’s recounting of the tabloids who ridiculed the Bocage unwitchers (32-6), and the amused scorn with which doctors dismissed those who claimed to be bewitched (97-109). Witchcraft beliefs thereby act as a form of Othering in Bocage society, delineating the boundaries between the ‘nonsense’ local theories ‘which peasants can afford to adopt’ and the ‘attitude of educated people who know how to handle causal relations correctly’ (5). Cultural translation, which ‘transforms, or dislocates, both subject and object’ (Delanty & Rumford: 41), is a key feature of modernity and modernising projects. 

In dislocating social actors and their roles as subjects and objects, in this case Bocage peasants from an increasingly globalised urban France, the Other is a threatening abstract entity which takes form in witchcraft or a unified national identity. According the author, ‘by talking of the native as an object, as someone ‘other’…we reach the possibility of a discourse on a different culture.’ (27). However, this Othering is not unilateral; it also succeeds in marking outsider identities around which Bocage locals can navigate cautiously to avoid betraying their beliefs. Superstitious peasants adopt secrecy as a device to guard them from the critique of outsiders, but in doing so, ‘the bewitched himself only reinforces his own isolation’ by intentionally creating a divide between himself and those who prescribe to modern rational thought. Favret-Saada’s emphasis on the omnipresence of an Other on the topic of witchcraft alludes to the way in which peasants of the Bocage are estranged from the hegemonic behaviours and beliefs of cosmopolitan France. By ascribing herself Other status while in the Bocage, the perspectives of both the local peasants and urban French are portrayed as discordant dichotomies preoccupied with navigating modernity. 

In reflexively considering her cosmopolitan background, Favret-Saada remarks on the cultural difference she experiences during her ethnographic research, chalked down principally to fundamental values such as education and credulity to witchcraft’s existence (106). This clash between educated modernity and traditional superstition is alluded to repeatedly throughout the monograph, through the author’s often self-denigrating reflexivity. Reflexivity is a unique hallmark of Deadly Words. Favret-Saada does not portray herself as intellectually superior to her ethnographic subjects in the Bocage, and does not attempt to disguise her feelings of dislocation in the region as a cosmopolitan citizen of not just France, but of Europe. Rather, she Others herself and those who share her socio-economic background from that of the peasants in the Bocage. Much of Favret-Saada’s reflexivity is demonstrated in the ways she manages expectations of local life against her actual ethnographic fieldwork. Her confusion and disappointment in being unable to immediately access the world of Bocage witchcraft is similar that of Benson’s (2011) British migrants in rural France negotiate their understandings of locality through their culturally-informed imagining of country life. Locality in Favret-Saada’s case, rather than being territorial, is as such behavioural. She is accepted into the Bocage world of witchcraft by demonstrating to the locals that she, as an urban educated French citizen, is also susceptible to being ‘caught’ in spells (14). 

As such, believers of witchcraft are persistently alienated by the growing importance of modernity to French and European identities. The ‘fight to the death’ (95) between a witch and their chosen victim could also be considered a fight to the death of local Bocage culture in favour of a hegemonic Hobbesian civil society of self-mastery, rationality and civility (Delanty & Rumford). Spells are viewed as a sign of the potency of their casters, and magic attacks on the impotent victim reflects a struggle for power centred upon a ‘constantly recurring overlap of biological, moral and economic planes’ (113). Power, potency and social hierarchy are thus intrinsically interlinked in the Bocage; witches are considered ‘superpotent’ and prey on others to assert their force, ‘beginning with one’s inferiors’ (109). The resulting struggle for power can also be viewed as the self-victimising bewitched actively participating in their own subjectification under a greater entity (in this case spells), often associated with a loss of agency and self-identity (Argyrou, 1996). Social hierarchies are as such revealed in questioning the motives of a suspected witch, which are often based on rivalry and discordant relations between local social actors.

To be bewitched in the Bocage is to lose power over one’s agency and self-mastery, thereby becoming an impotent victim. The loss of agency experienced under the rapidly encroaching influence of modernity is not only a threat to the traditional villages, ways of life and social hierarchies, but also to the superstitions they guard against incredulous Others. Deadly Words is a case study into the dying belief of country witchcraft in the face of the Europeanizing France of the 1960s. Urban civil society’s concerns with assimilating to a collectively imagined European image is reflected in the anxieties of the older generations of the Bocage, who relate to notions of power, agency, and Othering through the metaphor of witchcraft. The hegemonic social structures of modernity represent overpowering forces which challenge the people of the Bocage, in the form of official social agencies such as the Church and medical science. Favret-Saada relies on reflexivity in deconstructing her own ethnography, and in doing so reveals how the increasingly hegemonic societal norms of a cosmopolitan, collective French identity are navigated in the Bocage by the bewitched. 

References

Argyrou, V. (1996). The Dialectics of Symbolic Domination. In: Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: the wedding as symbolic struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170-183

Benson, M.C. (2011). Negotiating Locality. In: Smith, A.T. The British in Rural France: Lifestyle Migration and the Ongoing Quest for a Better Way of Life. Wiltshire: Manchester University Press, DOI: 10.7228/manchester/9780719082498.001.0001

Delanty, G. & Rumford, C. (2005). Rethinking Europe: Social theory and the implications of Europeanization. New York: Routledge

Favret-Saada, J. (1980). Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lӧfgren, O. (2012). European Tourism. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 339-354

Lowenthal, D. (1985). How We Know the Past. In: The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185-259

Macdonald, S. (2012). Presencing Europe’s Pasts. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 233-252

Wolf, E. (2010). Europe and the People without History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 7.15 (after 1900)

1910 – In his book Clinical Psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin gives a name to Alzheimer's disease, naming it after his colleague Alois Alzheimer. 1916 – In Seattle, Washington, William Boeing and George Conrad Westervelt incorporate Pacific Aero Products (later renamed Boeing). 1918 – World War I: The Second Battle of the Marne begins near the River Marne with a German attack. 1920 – Aftermath of World War I: The Parliament of Poland establishes Silesian Voivodeship before the Polish-German plebiscite. 1922 – The Japanese Communist Party is established in Japan. 1927 – Massacre of July 15, 1927: Eighty-nine protesters are killed by Austrian police in Vienna. 1941 – The Holocaust: Nazi Germany begins the deportation of 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to extermination camps. 1946 – The State of North Borneo, now Sabah, Malaysia, is annexed by the United Kingdom. 1954 – The Boeing 367-80, the prototype for both the Boeing 707 and C-135 series, takes its first flight. 1955 – Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, later co-signed by thirty-four others. 1966 – Vietnam War: The United States and South Vietnam begin Operation Hastings to push the North Vietnamese out of the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone. 1971 – The United Red Army is founded in Japan. 1974 – In Nicosia, Cyprus, Greek junta-sponsored nationalists launch a coup d'état, deposing President Makarios and installing Nikos Sampson as Cypriot president. 1975 – Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was the last launch of both an Apollo spacecraft, and the Saturn family of rockets. 1979 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter gives his "malaise speech". 1983 – An attack at Orly Airport in Paris is launched by Armenian militant organisation ASALA, leaving eight people dead and 55 injured. 1983 – Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan. 1996 – A Belgian Air Force C-130 Hercules carrying the Royal Netherlands Army marching band crashes on landing at Eindhoven Airport. 1998 – Sri Lankan Civil War: Sri Lankan Tamil MP S. Shanmuganathan is killed by a claymore mine. 2002 – "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh pleads guilty to supplying aid to the enemy and possession of explosives during the commission of a felony. 2002 – The Anti-Terrorism Court of Pakistan sentences British born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh to death, and three others suspected of murdering The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl to life. 2003 – AOL Time Warner disbands Netscape. The Mozilla Foundation is established on the same day. 2006 – Twitter, later one of the largest social media platforms in the world, is launched. 2009 – Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 crashes near Jannatabad, Qazvin, Iran, killing 168. 2009 – Space Shuttle program: Endeavour is launched on STS-127 to complete assembly of the International Space Station's Kibō module. 2012 – South Korean rapper Psy releases his hit single Gangnam Style. 2014 – A train derails on the Moscow Metro, killing at least 24 and injuring more than 160 others. 2016 – Factions of the Turkish Armed Forces attempt a coup. 2018 – France win their second World Cup title, defeating Croatia 4–2.

[fictionfromafar]

New publisher Foundry Editions to launch this summer, bringing stories from the Mediterranean Basin to English readers

LAUNCHING JUNE 2024

London, Thursday 1 February 2024. The new independent publisher Foundry Editions is excited to announce its launch in Summer 2024, publishing the first three English-translation titles from their award-winning catalogue of stories from and about the Mediterranean Basin.

Based in London, Foundry Editions is founded by Richard Village, a passionate linguist who speaks Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese and has always had his ears and eyes open to exciting writing in these languages. Foundry Editions’ ethos is threefold: a love for discovering and sharing new voices, a love for the Mediterranean and the people and lands that surround it, and a love of internationalism and reading across borders.

The independent publisher aims to bring to the attention of the English-speaking world literary gems written in languages from the Mediterranean Basin, with high-quality translations always produced directly from the original language.

Richard Village said, “We are on a mission to uncover authors who are new to English speakers, and to share the joy of reading their stories, which come from a part of the world that has always been a source of cultural and emotional inspiration for English-language readers.

“Foundry Editions wants to bring that writing to a wider audience. Because of the increasing acceptance of non-Anglophone cultural output as part of the mainstream and the more porous nature of national and linguistic boundaries, the need for dedicated presses who can satisfy the increasing demand for international fiction and have the courage to bring it to market, is also growing. We want to be an exemplary part of that significant cultural movement that puts quality translated fiction into the hands of readers.”

All Foundry Editions titles have been beautifully designed with a consistent branded look, created by Richard and Hélène Marchal from Murmurs Design. The striking aesthetic is inspired by iconic design and artists from the origin countries and reflects the distinctive nature of the countries and regions represented, as well as the bold and transporting quality of the writing.

Foundry Editions will be launching their catalogue from June 2024 with three titles for summer that not only showcase the quality fiction the Mediterranean Basin has to offer but offer unique social commentaries and viewpoints from the region.

The first country to be spotlighted is Cyprus, in Constantia Soteriou’s inventive novel BRANDY SOUR, translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa. Set against the backdrop of the Cypriot civil war, Soteriou cleverly uses Nicosia’s iconic Ledra Palace Hotel – built in the fifties as the first grand hotel in the region, and a symbol of the island’s modernisation – as a metaphor to explore the turbulent history of the Republic of Cyprus. Winner of the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus, The Guardian’s Lucy Popescu describes it as a “story that celebrates human resilience and deftly takes us through the years of the Cypriot conflict.”

Foundry Editions’ second title hails from Italy, bringing Maria Grazia Calandrone’s critically and commercially acclaimed autobiographical piece, YOUR LITTLE MATTER, to English readers for the first time. Translated from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, Calandrone explores the heartbreaking reasons why a mother might abandon a child, in turn giving voice to the impoverished, marginalised women of the Italian South. Shortlisted for the 2023 Premio Strega, Your Little Matter combines poetic and philosophical insight with forensic investigation to reflect on a real-life case which helped prompt social and legal reforms in Italy.

Lastly, Foundry Editions turns its attentions to Spain with its third, atmospheric title, FAR. Written by one of the queens of Spanish noir, Rosa Ribas, and translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Coombe, Far is Ribas’ first foray away from crime fiction. Painting a truly evocative picture of post-crash Spain, Ribas’s satirical novel places her unnamed characters in an urbanisation in the middle of the nowhere, one of the many that were built in Spain, but never finished due to the country’s financial crash.

Foundry Editions will be publishing one further book this year, eight books in 2025, with the ambition of eventually publishing between ten and twelve books a year, and will release further info in due course. Find out more about Foundry Editions on their website here, and follow the latest updates on Instagram via @foundryeditions.

For all publicity enquiries, interview requests and review copies, please contact Midas:

Hannah Bright | Hannah.Bright@midaspr.co.uk | +44 (0)7476 968 336

Emily Laidlaw | Emily.Laidlaw@midaspr.co.uk | +44 (0)7384 268 734

Website:

Instagram: @foundryeditions

Foundry Editions titles are sold by Inpress and are distributed by BookSource. For further information, please contact:

Inpress | enquiries@inpressbooks.co.uk | +44 (0)191 230 8104

BookSource | orders@booksource.net | +44 (0) 845 370 0063

[its-suanneschafer-author]

Book Review: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Book Review: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

The Island of Missing Trees is undoubtedly the most beautiful, most lyrical book I’ve read recently. I previously enjoyed Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul but feel she outdid herself with this newest book. Shafak writes with imagination, originality, and a hefty dose of magical realism of the people and natural environment of Cyprus. Cyprus has a turbulent history, governed in succession by…

[howieabel]

“1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.” ― Christopher Hitchens

[horsesarecreatures]

Book review - The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

This book is the story of Cyprus, revealed by a fig tree as she tells the life of her rescuer, a botanist named Kostas, who is a Greek Cypriot, and his lover/eventual wife Defne, an artist, archeologist, and Turkish Cypriot. Without being pedantic, the book unravels the recent history of the island and how it was divided during the civil war where thousands on both sides were killed. To this day it is still divided, though tensions have lessened to an extent. 

The books starts off in England, focusing on Kostas’ and Dephne’s daughter Ada, who is struggling with the death of her mother. She knows her parents are from Cyprus, but knows nothing of their love story or the suffering they went through while there. The fig tree, which is also from Cyprus and knew Kostas and Dephne years ago from when they met secretly at a tavern called The Happy Fig with the permission of it’s owners Yusuf and Yiorgos, narrates their part of the story. Kostas and Dephne got separated during the war, and how they eventually united 25 years later and why Dephne passed away is a mystery that is revealed more and more as the book goes on.

The book, which is dedicated “to immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless..” is not just about history, but also eco-consciousness, interconnectedness, and generational trauma. The story itself is compelling, but what especially stood out to me are some of the beautiful quotes, which are as follows:

“So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.“

...

“People assume it's a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget.”

...

“Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings.“

...

“Humans are strange... full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like and undecided fist.

Humans find mice and rats nasty, but hamsters and gerbils sweet. Doves signify world peace, whereas pigeons are nothing more than carriers of urban filth. They proclaim piglets charming, wild boars barely tolerable. Nutcrackers they admire, even as they avoid their noisy cousins, the crows. Dogs evoke in them a sense of fuzzy warmth, while wolves conjure up tales of horror. Butterflies they look on with favor, moths not at all. They have a soft spot for ladybirds, and yet if they were to see a soldier beetle, they would crush it on sight. Honeybees are favored in stark contrast to wasps. Although horseshoe crabs are considered delightful, it’s a different story when it comes to their distant relatives, spider... I have tried to find logic in all this, but I have come to the conclusion that there is none.”

It’s a bittersweet book with lots of sad moments but also lots of hope. I enjoyed the unique narrator of the fig tree, who at the end is revealed to be not just one being but two. 

[argyrocratie]

“when after the Civil War ended she joined a number of anarchist women in an enterprise started by another Russian anarchist Marie Goldberg. They had a tailoring workshop in Holborn and were joined by Suceso Portales (of the “Mujeres Libres” organisation) and others.

The babble of tongues in broken English, Yiddish, Polish, bits of French, Spanish, broad Scots, Catalan and Greek-Cypriot over the rattle of the machines, made me wonder how they ever understood one another but they made up in volume what they lacked in linguistic conformity. The postman once said to me on the stairs, “I can never work out what nationality those ladies are. They told me they come from somewhere called Anarchy, but Christ knows where that is.”

-Albert Meltzer,  “I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels: Sixty Years of Commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation” chapter 22

[baeddel]

dispatch on the unrest in belfast

in the late 1950s a group of British Army soldiers from Northern Ireland became notorious for butchering civilians in Cyprus. they were defending the British occupation from the EOKA, led by (no, really) General Grivas, who wanted reunification with Greece. despite Grivas attempts to prevent it the war quickly became a sectarian conflict between Christian Greek Cypriots and Muslim Turkish Cypriots. it was an extremely bloody conflict fought with civilian lives. for the first time in war the pipe bomb replaced the heavy artillery.

when the British surrendered in 1960 those soldiers returned home and, in order to combat the Catholic civil rights movement, became involved in civilian loyalist organisations like the Loyal Orange Lodge until in 1966 when they formed the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). their innovation was to apply the experience in Cyprus to Northern Ireland to defend a partition which was not, at this stage, actually under attack. that year they carried out a string of random killings on the Catholic Falls Road. the civil rights movement developed into an armed struggle for national liberation, the British Army was deployed to combat it, and the UVF were transformed into anonymous soldiers for apartheid, armed by the South African regime, among others, and receiving clandestine support from the British.

pictured: Gusty Spence, first prince of loyalist terror, flanked by his retainers

when Gusty Spence, the leader of the UVF, was caught and imprisoned, he gradually lost control of the organisation. by the end of the 70s it had turned from a politically motivated death squad into an organized crime syndicate and was competing with several other paramilitary rackets, especially the UDA who still control the drug trade in Protestant areas. when Gusty Spence got out of prison he and several other former UVF brigadeers would join the Progressive Unionist Party, which combined loyalism with socialism. they were instrumental in negotiating the ceasefire known as the Good Friday Agreement in the 90s.

the sectarian killings died down but never disappeared. the far-right DUP, led by arch-reactionary Ian Paisley and maintaining secretive associations with both the Loyal Orange Lodge and the UVF (alongside Paisley’s several failed attempts to create his own paramilitary organization known as Third Force), became the dominant unionist party and the dominant party in Stormount, while Sinn Feinn, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, had become the leading republican party throughout the 1980s. apart from a few weak gestures they both agreed on a bunch of austerity cuts and fought tooth and nail against abortion and so on, reiterating the “carnival of reaction north and south” in microcosm.

throughout the 2000s a lot changed. the sectarian Royal Ulster Constabulary was disbanded and replaced with the dysfunctional Police Service Northern Ireland. the loyalist paramilitaries generally decomissioned as requested. it seemed like things were changing. by 2011 the final report of the Independent Monitoring Comission was cautiously optimisitc, writing that “In our first year [2004], each week there were on average four victims of paramilitary violence, some in sectarian incidents. In the last six-monthly period on which we reported the number was about a third of that and none were sectarian” (IMC, pg. 14). but already in 2003 Peter R. Neumann, a researcher on terrorism and partisan conflict, predicted that “the current peace process may not be the ending of the conflict but the suppression of it into the politics of threat and coercion” (Neumann, Britain’s Long War, pg. 1). fifty years after Marcuse was worried about ‘repressive desublimation’ in America, we were finally enjoying the good old ‘disciplinary society’ in Northern Ireland.

the loyalist paramilitaries went through a profound involution, becoming ethnoreligious dictatorships with exclusive police authority over the communities they claim to represent, battling among each other for control over housing estates. they possessed exclusive control over the black market, forced all businesses to pay them protection, and controlled most commercial services (taxi cabs, window cleaners, and so on). they exiled troublemakers, wounded lawbreakers, and murdered their opponents. your neighbours are taken away in the middle of the night and no one asks what happened. you wake up to breaking glass and gunshots, but no screams. then the paramilitaries appropriate the house of their victim and lease it out themselves. the IMC make an uncharacteristically wry remark that this is just “one amongst many ways in which paramilitaries continued to do what they had always done, namely doing violence to their own communities.” (IMC, pg. 14)

The Comission writes that “when we started we observed a scene from which terrorism against the organs of the state had largely disappeared,” yet “as we close we see classic signs of insurgent terrorism” (IMC, pg. 15). the very next year, in December 2012, the UVF and UDA were able to mobilize a huge crowd of Protestants in a campaign of civil disobedience over the removal of the Union Jack from City Hall. this was the first time since the partition that loyalism had taken on the appearance of a genuinely popular movement, looking more like Catholic civil rights marchers of the 60s than Black & Tans. the transformation of loyalism into a form of militant political activism with its own demo circuit was one of a few significant changes of the last decade (we won’t have time for the others in this post). throughout the 2010s they carried out agitprop, pamphleteering, posting up placards and organizing protests against the traitors, touts and frauds at Stormount, even training their own professional activists like Jamie Bryson, all soliciting Protestants to help them protect their cultural identity, heritage and the usual hogwash.

the sedition intensified when, on the 11th of July, 2018, in order to protest ... something, all over Co. Down and Belfast masked and armed volunteers hijacked busses and cars and burned them out, blockaded the roads with burning tires, and hid pipe bombs in the wreckage (BBC). but there was no pretension that this was an act of popular will. it all happened before 5am, and the UVF immediately contacted the police and the press to claim responsibility.

now on the seventh day of violent unrest in Belfast we find this tendency reaching its fullest expression. the events are widely reported on as ‘riots’, but the attacks are identical to the UVF sedition in 2018 and, anyway, require a level of organization which only a paramilitary possess. the difference is that in this instance, like in the Flag protests of 2012-2013, the paramilitaries were able to mobilize ordinary Protestants. but how mobilized are they?

“When the hostage espouses the cause of the terrorist ... then another justice is active than the justice of the law, other scales than the scales of justice.” (Baudrillard, Cool Memories V 2000-2004)

whenever an ordinary person is beaten, shot, exiled or killed by the UVF, our neighbours do not, as we do, hide under their beds and pray. instead, very often, they celebrate. they regard acts of terror as occasions for saturnalia; they come out into the street and cheer, they open buckfast or bacardi, they call their friends to let them know, and in their voices one hears earnest excitement. after the involution of terror we can no longer really blame this on the red mist of bigotry. it makes no difference to armoured Protestants whether the victim is enemy or friend. the order of the spectacle wins out over the mode of terror.

if one looks closely at the events in belfast, common people are present but they are spectators, not participants. elderly women and babies in prams along with their families line up along the sidewalk to watch and cheer while the professionals blow things up. if this is a riot, it’s a strange kind of riot. in some sense The Belfast Riots Did Not Take Place. the pipe bomb returns to Belfast as a simulation of the pipe bomb of the Troubles, already a simulation of the pipe bomb of the Cyprus Emergency, a retaliation to an attack that hasn’t happened yet. but pay close attention to the redirection that has taken place; the bomb is thrown, not into the window of a Republican bar, like the petrol bomb that killed Matilda Gould, but into a line of riot police, like the pipe bomb at the Haymarket riot.

so, what’s next?

some commentary has been made about the fact that the military has been deployed to settle the unrest. this seems like something new, perhaps the first time since the Good Friday Agreement. but, in fact, the military were already deployed in Northern Ireland from the beginning of COVID-19 to support the health services and supply logistics (BBC). it’s significant that they were not called in for the 2012-2013 Flag protests or the ‘Day of Disorder’ in 2018. the state of exception brought about by the pandemic has possibly adjusted the scales. furthermore, the military, previously arming and collaborating with the UVF, are now being deployed specifically to prevent them.

the IMC reported that very few of the killings, by 2011, were sectarian. the Flag protests were sectarian only indirectly, affirming the Protestant ‘siege mentality’, but the enemy was Stormont and not the specter of armed republican revolution. the 2018 disorder had no sectarian content at all. conversely, the incident which incited this week’s Belfast Riots was much more explicitly sectarian. it’s a lot of horseshit: they (prominently, the DUP) wanted Michelle O’Neill, Deputy First Minister and member of Sinn Feinn, arrested for violating COVID restrictions to go to a funeral. the riots began the day the PPS decided not to prosecute. the contention is that COVID restrictions are being unequally enforced between Protestants and Catholics. a paranoid inversion of the real inequality was typically a justifciation for sectarian violence during the Troubles. in one of the most violent moments of the riot the Lanark Way peace wall, separating the Falls and the Shankill, was set on fire and breached, Protestant rioters storming the Catholic street and attacking its residents (the Guardian).

is this the last gasp of an old order of sectarian violence, quickly being replaced by a new kind of reactionary populism? or are these the early ripples of a new, increasingly violent sectarian resurgence? will the tensions between the UVF and the British Army continue to escalate, or will the civil war transform into an ethnic conflict, like in Cyprus? we cannot anticipate the outcome. but the last 6 days seem like significant ones to me. we should remain sensitive to the changes that are coming.

[rpdtactus]

In Jerusalem, Israeli and Jordanian militias patrolled a fortified, impassable Green Line from 1948 until 1967. In Nicosia, two walls and a buffer zone have segregated Turkish and Greek Cypriots since 1963. In Belfast, "peaceline" barricades have separated working-class Catholics and Protestants since 1969. In Beirut, civil war from 1974 until 1990 turned a cosmopolitan city into a lethal patchwork of ethnic enclaves. In Mostar, the Croatian and Bosniak communities have occupied two autonomous sectors since 1993. These cities were not destined for partition by their social or political histories. They were partitioned by politicians, citizens, and engineers according to limited information, short-range plans, and often dubious motives. How did it happen? How can it be avoided? Divided Cities explores the logic of violent urban partition along ethnic lines—when it occurs, who supports it, what it costs, and why seemingly healthy cities succumb to it. Planning and conservation experts Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth offer a warning beacon to a growing class of cities torn apart by ethnic rivals. Field-based investigations in Beirut, Belfast, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia are coupled with scholarly research to illuminate the history of urban dividing lines, the social impacts of physical partition, and the assorted professional responses to "self-imposed apartheid." Through interviews with people on both sides of a divide—residents, politicians, taxi drivers, built-environment professionals, cultural critics, and journalists—they compare the evolution of each urban partition along with its social impacts. The patterns that emerge support an assertion that division is a gradual, predictable, and avoidable occurrence that ultimately impedes intercommunal cooperation. With the voices of divided-city residents, updated partition maps, and previously unpublished photographs, Divided Cities illuminates the enormous costs of physical segregation.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.14 (after 1930)

1933 – Loggers cause a forest fire in the Coast Range of Oregon, later known as the first forest fire of the Tillamook Burn; destroying 240,000 acres (970 km2) of land. 1935 – Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, creating a government pension system for the retired. 1936 – Rainey Bethea is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in the last known public execution in the United States. 1941 – World War II: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt sign the Atlantic Charter of war stating postwar aims. 1947 – Pakistan gains independence from the British Empire. 1948 – Beaver drop a Idaho Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers from Northwestern Idaho to the Chamberlain Basin in Central Idaho. The program involved parachuting beavers into the Chamberlain Basin. 1959 – Founding and first official meeting of the American Football League. 1967 – UK Marine Broadcasting Offences Act 1967 declares participation in offshore pirate radio illegal. 1969 – The Troubles: British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland as political and sectarian violence breaks out, marking the start of the 37-year Operation Banner. 1971 – Bahrain declares independence from Britain. 1972 – An Ilyushin Il-62 airliner crashes near Königs Wusterhausen, East Germany killing 156 people. 1980 – Lech Wałęsa leads strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland shipyards. 1994 – Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as "Carlos the Jackal", is captured. 1996 – Greek Cypriot refugee Solomos Solomou is shot and killed by a Turkish security officer while trying to climb a flagpole in order to remove a Turkish flag from its mast in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus. 2003 – A widescale power blackout affects the northeast United States and Canada. 2005 – Helios Airways Flight 522, en route from Larnaca, Cyprus to Prague, Czech Republic via Athens, crashes in the hills near Grammatiko, Greece, killing 121 passengers and crew. 2006 – Lebanon War: A ceasefire takes effect three days after the United Nations Security Council’s approval of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, formally ending hostilities between Lebanon and Israel. 2006 – Sri Lankan Civil War: Sixty-one schoolgirls killed in Chencholai bombing by Sri Lankan Air Force air strike. 2007 – The Kahtaniya bombings kills at least 500 people. 2013 – Egypt declares a state of emergency as security forces kill hundreds of demonstrators supporting former president Mohamed Morsi. 2013 – UPS Airlines Flight 1354 crashes short of the runway at Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport, killing both crew members on board. 2015 – The U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba re-opens after 54 years of being closed when Cuba–United States relations were broken off. 2021 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake strikes southwestern Haiti, killing at least 2,248 people and causing a humanitarian crisis. 2022 – An explosion destroys a market in Armenia, killing six people and injuring dozens. 2023 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is charged in Georgia along with 18 others in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state, his fourth indictment of 2023.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

My work is a silent protest against the futility of war.

- Sir Don McCullin

Don McCullin’s 60 year photographic career started during his period of National Service in the RAF. He failed to pass the written theory paper necessary to become a photographer in the RAF. So, he spent his service in the darkroom. During this time, he bought his first camera, a Rolleicord, which he pawned upon returning to the UK due to a funds shortage. His mother used her own money to buy it back for him.

Since that time, he’s covered conflicts all over the world, including Vietnam, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iran and the Congo. In 2016, At 81 years old, he travelled to Iraq to photograph the Battle of Mosul and photograph people fleeing the city. His life has been an incredible journey from very humble beginnings. It was also in 2016 that the Queen granted him a knighthood.

As a veteran of a war in Afghanistan, I believe that McCullin's many iconic photographs do not actually depict the futility of war. Indeed they show something much worse: its unquantifiable wastefulness. They remind us, poignantly, that we are not dealing with statistics nor casualties, but actual human beings who suffer and a pay a price in blood, limb, and tears. 

**A Turkish woman mourns her dead husband, a victim of the Cyprus Civil War between Greek and Turkish Cypriotes that began the previous year. Ghaziveram, Cyprus, 1964. © Sir Don McCullin

[rvexillology]

New Revamped Flag for LEBANON

from /r/vexillology Top comment: The existing Lebanese flag has bottom and top red strips. The red color symbolizes the bloodshed for Liberation. However, much of our history changed during the previous hundred years. The new color bands represent three main components: peace, liberty, and adaptation. * **Peace (White):** Lebanon never waged a war on any country. In fact, it hosted Armenian refugees after Armenian genocide, Palestinian refugees, Syrian Refugees, Cypriots refugees, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc. Lebanon currently has the highest refugee per capita. * **Liberty (Green):** Lebanon lost sovereignty over its lands multiple times over the last 100 years: * 1968-1982: Palestine occupied south of Lebanon. * 1976-2005: Syria occupied entirety of Lebanon politically and militarily. * 1982-2000: Israel occupied south of Lebanon. Sovereignty is a big deal of Lebanon, especially since it hosts unique demographic constituents that do not exist outside of Lebanon including the Maronites, Melkites, and the Druze. * **Resilience and Adaptation (Blue):** Lebanon has experienced multitude of atrocities since its genesis including a 15-year civil war. Lebanese always adapted through the hard events, and rebuilt their cities. In fact, Beirut was destroyed 7 times throughout history, and was rebuilt 8 times. After the last explosion in Beirut, Beirut is now officially destroyed 8 times, and Lebanese are looking to build it for the 9th time. The flag has similar colors to the flag of Sierra Leone. Taken from: [https://www.instagram.com/p/CDtH67HJMdY/?utm\_source=ig\_web\_copy\_link](https://www.instagram.com/p/CDtH67HJMdY/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)

[peckhampeculiar]

Unsung heroes

Words: Rebecca Thomson; Photo: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

There are over 100,000 war memorials in the UK, but only one has been dedicated to African and Caribbean soldiers. Unveiled on Windrush Square in Brixton in 2017, it was met with surprise by those it was designed to honour. Alan Wilmot, a WW2 veteran who served in the Royal Navy and lived in south London, told the BBC: “I did not dream I would be around to see things like this happening.”

For years, little has been done to make people aware of the crucial role played by these men and women. Many faced the same horrors of war as their white counterparts while also coping with institutional racism. There are few letters and diaries from these soldiers and the records of the British West Indies Regiment were apparently lost in a WW2 air raid.

From academic history to the entertainment and publishing industries, the stories told about the wars are missing a large part of the picture. Peckham historian and author Stephen Bourne, whose most recent book Black Poppies is about the wider contribution of black WW1 servicemen and women, says: “The subject has been ignored by historians and chroniclers for such as long time that there’s very sparse information.

“These soldiers also came from a generation that was seen and not heard - they weren’t encouraged to talk about their lives. It is only now, with the Windrush scandal, that people are becoming interested.”

The national narrative surrounding the ethnicity of British soldiers in WW1 and WW2 has been whitewashed. But without African and Caribbean soldiers, as well as the Indian army and other soldiers from across Asia, both wars could have ended differently.

Alan Wakefield, Head of First World War and Early Twentieth Century at the Imperial War Museum, says: “The numbers are significant. It would have been very difficult to win a number of the campaigns the British were fighting without these soldiers.” The museum is hosting an installation called the African Soldier by artist John Akomfrah until March 2019, but Wakefield says that even an institution like IWM, with access to resource and expertise, has found it hard to breathe life into the stories of black soldiers.

“Immediately after the first world war, the empire’s contribution and a lot of these stories got overlooked. Even our collections here - we’ve got some good materials, but we’re quite short of 3D objects, letters and diaries from black servicemen. There’s very little directly relating to the soldiers themselves.” There are hundreds of photographs, he adds, but relatively little to explore the stories of the people in them, because so little was saved.

It’s difficult to measure the number of African servicemen who served, but they were spread all over the world and around two million were thought to be involved during WW1 alone. Around 15,500 Caribbean troops volunteered in WW1, including 10,000 from Jamaica. In the second world war around 16,000 troops volunteered, with 6,000 serving in the RAF.

With so many stories lost, it is vital to remember those we do have. Sam King, who lived in Peckham until his death in 2016, served in the second world war as an engineer in the RAF. He returned to Britain in 1948 on the Empire Windrush - around a third of the boat’s original cohort were WW2 veterans.

He went on to raise a family in the borough, worked for the Post Office for 34 years, and became a community activist. He worked with Claudia Jones to set up the Notting Hill Carnival and was involved with Britain’s first black newspaper the West Indian Gazette. He campaigned on migrant welfare issues and in 1982 was elected as the first black mayor of Southwark, a role his granddaughter Dione McDonald, who lives in Herne Hill, said was among his proudest achievements.

“I would go to the market with my grandad, and the Cypriot shopkeepers would call him Mr Mayor years after he was. They said he was still their mayor. People called him that until the year he passed away and he still felt proud of it. For him it wasn’t just a superficial role, it was finding a way for everybody to have a voice, ensuring everyone was represented and their needs were being met.

“His story is unique - he came at a time when there was a real awakening of the British civil rights movement.”

King also set up the Windrush Foundation with Arthur Torrington in 1996, with the aim of fundraising and organising for the 50th anniversary of the Empire Windrush’s arrival. “We decided to set it up for the 50th anniversary,” Arthur Torrington says.

“And from then we have moved it to be a national thing.” He says the aim of the organisation now is to improve knowledge of and education around the Windrush and other migrant stories, particularly in schools. “Our goal is to have it taught in every school, helping youngsters to understand their ancestors.”

Caribbean stories have come to the fore recently, as the country celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving at Tilbury docks. Many of the former servicemen and women who arrived on the boat settled in South London.

Post-WW2, they were joined by veterans from across the world. In 1948 the government passed the Commonwealth Act, giving people throughout the empire full British citizenship and the right to move to the UK. Veterans from India, European countries such as Poland, and African countries from Gambia to Ghana chose to make their home in the country they fought for.

It is difficult to gauge how many veterans made their way here, but it is safe to assume, given the millions of Indian, African and European people who served on Britain’s behalf, that they made up a significant number of the post-war population shift, and arrived not as immigrants, but as British citizens.

“Not only did they support the country in two world wars, they came back afterwards and helped to rebuild it,” Bourne says.

The post-war generation were not the first to arrive, however. Dr Harold Moody moved to London from Kingston, Jamaica in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College, but despite being fully qualified was denied a job at a hospital. He set up his own GP practice in King’s Grove, Peckham, moving to Queens Road a few years later and living there with his wife Olive and their six children.

Having suffered appalling racism during his career, Moody dedicated his free time to campaigning to make Britain a fairer place. Among other things, he fought for black servicemen to be able to rise above the rank of sergeant - one of his sons, Charles Arundel Moody, went on to become a colonel in WW2.

In 1931, Harold Moody formed the League of Coloured Peoples, which was created to campaign for economic, social and civil rights in Britain and beyond. The organisation's work was credited with laying the groundwork for the Race Relations Act of 1965, the first piece of legislation to outlaw discrimination ‘on the grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origins.’

King and Moody were notable for their political achievements, but they were just two of many thousands of people whose contributions have been overlooked. “If politicians had been better informed about these subjects, maybe the situation would not have deteriorated as it has,” says Bourne.

Sam King’s granddaughter Dione McDonald says the focus should now be on education. “This is a part of history that you are not allowing the next generation to understand. All children need to understand why their city and country is the way it is. Ignorance is not fun, and it’s unfair if people are not given the option to deal with it. You deny people an understanding. We still have a long way to go.”

Just as the Windrush Foundation is campaigning to improve education around stories of migration, McDonald says the topic should not be optional for schools.

“The next generation are part of a global world, not a local one, and if you are going to talk about the topic you might as well talk about it properly. If you want a society that’s united and has a sense of community and responsibility you need to give them the information to begin to be accepting.”

Britain has lost heroes from its own story - by forgetting these people, we are erasing the bravery and civil rights work that helped to make the country what it is. It required an unusual dignity and drive to achieve so much in a country that ignored such contribution; throughout their lives, these veterans showed both.

[sugarcoatedwords]

Assignment

1. Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn], plural Bildungsromane, German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːnə]) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age),[1] in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education", alternatively "forming") and Roman ("novel").

Example: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—popularly known as Fanny Hill—is an erotic novel by English novelist John Cleland first published in London in 1748. Written while the author was in debtors' prison in London, it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel”. It is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history.

2.    A Künstlerroman- "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It could be classified as a sub-category of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age novel.

Example: The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth.[1] Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem The Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished, The Prelude is an extremely personal work and reveals many details of Wordsworth's life.

Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1798, at the age of 28, and continued to work on it throughout his life. He never gave it a title, but called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" in his letters to his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. The poem was unknown to the general public until the final version was published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850. Its present title was given to it by his widow Mary.

3.    Psychological novel- work of fiction in which the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the characters are of equal or greater interest than is the external action of the narrative.

Example: The Silent Patient is a 2019 psychological thriller novel written by British–Cypriot author Alex Michaelides. The debut novel was published by Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers, on 5 February 2019. The audiobook version, released on the same date, is read by Louise Brealey and Jack Hawkins.

4.    Prose is verbal or written language that follows the natural flow of speech. It is the most common form of writing, used in both fiction and non-fiction. Prose comes from the Latin “prosa oratio,” meaning “straightforward.”

Tale- a fictitious or true narrative or story, especially one that is imaginatively recounted

Example: “Cinderella” is a prose fairy tale.

5.    Minisaga, mini saga or mini-saga is a short story based on a long story. It should contain exactly 50 words, plus a title of up to 15 characters. However, the title requirement is not always enforced and sometimes eliminated altogether.

Below is an example by author Daniel H. Pink:

When I was shot, fear seized me at first. No surprise that. But once I realized I wasn't going to die – despite the thermonuclear pain and widening puddle of weirdly warm blood – my mind recalibrated. And one thought, comforting yet disturbing, leapt into my head: I need to Tweet this.

6.    Dystopian - relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of a dystopia

A twisted romantic haunted by dystopian visions, Gibson borrows the language of science fiction and crafts doomed love stories with high-tech trappings.

— Maitland McDonagh

Dystopian visions are in a sense mythopoeic: depicting a creation myth in a future world of darkness and silence.

7.    Local color or regional literature is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. Influenced by Southwestern and Down East humor, between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century this mode of writing became dominant in American literature. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (439). Its weaknesses may include nostalgia or sentimentality. Its customary form is the sketch or short story, although Hamlin Garland argued for the novel of local color.

Regional literature incorporates the broader concept of sectional differences, although in Writing Out of Place, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have argued convincingly that the distinguishing characteristic that separates "local color" writers from "regional" writers is instead the exploitation of and condescension toward their subjects that the local color writers demonstrate.

Example: Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) In the Tennessee Mountains (1885)

8. Roman à clef   : a novel in which real persons or actual events figure under disguise. 

 Example: The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights.

9. Fable (pronounced fey-buh l) is a short fictional story that has a moral or teaches a lesson. Fables use humanized animals, objects, or parts of nature as main characters, and are therefore considered to be a sub-genre of fantasy.

The word fable comes  from the Latin fābula meaning discourse or story.

Example: An ugly, warty frog sat on his lily pad enjoying the sunshine. Another frog hopped along and said, “wow, you are hideous! There is no way you will ever find a mate!” Just then, a beautiful princess came to the pond, scooped up the ugly frog, and planted a big kiss on his warty nose. He instantly turned into a tall, handsome prince, and walked off hand in hand with the princess as the other frog watched with his mouth wide in astonishment. Never judge a book by its cover.

10. Flash fiction-  is a style of writing which involves producing very short pieces of fictional literature. This is quite different to the concept of a short story, which is usually several pages long and can notch up thousands of words.

 Example: “Everyone Cried” Famous for her very short stories, Lydia Davis is the modern master of packing a lot of emotion and meaning into a few words. Her 423-word work, “Everyone Cried,” is an example of an effective flash fiction story. Often, people cry when they are unhappy.

11. Epistolary Novel- is one that tells a story through documents and written correspondence between characters. Epistolary novels can use letters, emails, diary entries, news clippings, or any other kind of document.

Example: The Color Purple (By Alice Walker)

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purpl, is a good example of an epistolary novel in which an impoverished black teenage girl, Celie, tells her story through writing letters to both her sister and God. Here, readers can learn about the difficult life of Celie through her words and the direct experiences she has faced. Alice Walker has chosen to let the readers encounter this story by using Celie’s voice, providing Celie a power that she could not have in everyday life. However, in the film adaptation of this novel, these letters echoed through the monologues of characters.

12. Picaresque Novel- early form of novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish pícaro) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive.

Example: The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, written in Florence beginning in 1558, also has much in common with the picaresque.

13. Novel of Social Protest- also known as the social problem (or social protest) novel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel".

Books In This Genre: Shirley (novel); Felix Holt, the Radical

14. Allegory - Allegory is a narration or description in which events, actions, characters, settings or objects represent specific abstractions or ideas. Allegory generally operates on two levels as a literary device. The overt or surface narrative/description is meant to have enough literary elements to be a standalone work that is interesting and/or entertaining by itself. However, the emphasis of allegory is typically placed on the abstract ideals represented or symbolized by the work’s literary elements. In other words, the meaning behind the surface narrative has even greater value as a literary work. Though many allegories are intended to be didactic in providing a moral, ethical, or religious lesson, not all allegories set out to achieve this goal.

Example: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is considered a classic allegory and a fundamental text in classical literature. In the story, Plato sets forth a narrative of people living in a cave who are only able to see objects as shadows. These shadows are reflected on the wall of the cave from the firelight, and therefore the inhabitants of the cave cannot see the objects directly. However, the shadows are their reality. This allegory is a philosophical representation that symbolizes how humans understand their surroundings and the world at large. The surface narrative consists of events and people in the cave. The allegorical narrative, on a symbolic level, is meant to indicate a contrast between human perception and reason, or belief and knowledge.

15. Novella- In literature, a novella is a type of prose fiction, which is shorter than full length novels and longer than short stories. It originates from an Italian word “novella“, which means “new.” It is a well-structured yet short narrative; often satiric or realistic in tone. It usually focuses on one incident, or issue with one or two main characters and takes place at a single location.

Example: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness is a strictly controlled novella, with a classic status, describing a story of late nineteenth century about imperialistic and colonialist process. This novella focuses on the search of the central character, Kurtz, who goes too far for exploitation of the natives for the sake of an ivory trade. Conrad’s readers plunge deeper into the horror of darkness to see what happened after the invasion of the Europeans.

16. Gothic Fiction- refers to a style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and very high emotion. These emotions can include fear and suspense.

Example: Contemporary American writers in the tradition include Joyce Carol Oates in such novels as Bellefleur and A Bloodsmoor Romance and short story collections such as Night-Side (Skarda 1986b), and Raymond Kennedy in his novel Lulu Incognito

17. Philosophical Novel- can be minimally defined as a genre in which characteristic elements of the novel are used as a vehicle for the exploration of philosophical questions and concepts. In its “purest” form, it perhaps most properly designates those relatively singular texts which may be said to belong to both the history of philosophy and of literature, and to occupy some indeterminate space between them. Today the term is often used interchangeably with the more recent concept of the “novel of ideas,” though some theorists have sought to establish a clear division between the two (Bewes).

Example: The Stranger by Albert Camus,  also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy, absurdism, coupled with existentialism; though Camus personally rejected the latter label.

18. Thesis Novel- is a kind of novel that treats a social, political, or religious problem with a didactic and, perhaps, radical purpose. It certainly sets out to call people’s attention to the shortcomings of society.

Example: Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850)

-is an 1850 novel, by Charles Kingsley, written in sympathy with the Chartist movement, in which Carlyle is introduced as one of the personages.

19. Prose Satire-  is a type of social commentary. Writers use exaggeration, irony, and other devices to poke fun of a particular leader, a social custom or tradition, or any other prevalent social figure or practice that they want to comment on and call into question.

Example: A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729.

20. Graphic Novel- in American and British usage, a type of text combining words and images—essentially a comic, although the term most commonly refers to a complete story presented as a book rather than a periodical.

 Example: Batman comes out of retirement and gets help from a teenage sidekick. He faces off against the Joker and Two-Face before a battle to the death begins against Superman.