Tristan Sturm

Prophetic Eyes: The Theatricality of Mark Hitchcock's Premillennial Geopolitics

Geopolitical analysis has left religion in the margins and footnotes of its scholarship. This paper will help rectify this shortcoming. Evangelist Mark Hitchcock and his prophetic biblical interpretations have proliferated in the United States, influencing millions of Americans. Hitchcocks exegesis is based on four ‘evil’ geopolitical containers: the ‘Muslim alliance’, the ‘Roman Empire’, Russia, and the ‘kings of the Far East’. This paper will critique Hitchcocks geopolitics and how he claims to ‘know the future’ through unproblematised theatrical and visual analogies that remove him from the analysis, allow him to see the world as a whole, and give him the power to ‘know’ the Other. Belief and interpretation in the age of hyper-accessibility to information deserves critical attention when geopolitical licentiousness leads to justifications for the militarisation of space and enmity toward the Other.

Religion as nationalism: the religious nationalism of American Christian Zionists

ABSTRACT The term ‘religious nationalism’ is often theorized, at worst as antithetically conjunctive where religion is defined as the allegiance to God and nationalism is the allegiance to the nation, and at best as instrumental. I argue here that this fusion of religion and nationalism takes place most convincingly if we understand religion as adherent performance rather than solely as a theological container of tenants. I illustrate this through American Christian Zionist performances and discourses regarding their self-imagined identity as being in a national diaspora for Israel. I argue this religious nationalism is possible because Christian Zionist performances of a national allegiance to Israeli Jews are grounded in an apocalyptic narrative of the future.

Feminist legal geographies of nonconsensual pornography online: Using copyright logic to combat the unauthorized distribution of celebrity intimate images in cyberspace

Women’s rights are often curtailed online due to the pervasive internet atmosphere of cybermisogyny. Extreme examples include ‘image-based sexual abuse’, a term which encompasses the non-consensual creation and/or distribution of private sexual images. The harms attached to this phenomenon are well documented. In this paper, we explore how copyright logic, despite its male-centric and property oriented worldview, presents one legal solution to this problem. We assert that Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown Notices, a copyright mechanism that notifies websites they are hosting infringing content and requires the prompt removal of the content, represents a novel legal mechanism to force websites to remove image-based sexual abuse from women’s online spaces. By using critical discourse analysis to review how Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown Notices attempt to provide solutions to the socio-spatial problem of image-based sexual abuse, we argue that copyright can subvert its current leanings to return to its original purpose: supporting creativity. Supporting creativity also helps to protect against the reproduction of gendered harms, from the real world to virtual spaces. This theorization represents not just legal geography but a feminist legal geography, in that it recognizes the internet should be a safe and legal space for women. In endorsing a pragmatic legal solution for women to regulate the sexually violent and nonconsensual distribution of their intimate images online, copyright is one mechanism that affirms women’s right to cyberspaces.

William J. Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada: The Orange Order and the Shaping of Municipal Culture

and episodic plots liken them to the classical epic. Looking in greater detail at Louis Bromfield’s The Farm (1933), Ringuet’s (Philippe Panneton) Trente arpents (1938), and Grace Campbell’s The Higher Hill (1944), Freitag argues that “[w]hat distinguishes American, English Canadian and French Canadian farm epics from one another is the way they portray and evaluate these changes” (268–69). Whereas in the United States they typically sanction progress, in French Canada the farm crisis signals the nation in crisis, and in English Canadian rural idylls “the impact of progress on the rural world seems so slight as to be almost negligible” (269). An epilogue traces the ongoing presence of the farm novel in North America after 1945. In its closer readings of classic American and Canadian texts, The American Farm Novel may appear to work over well-plowed fields, but writing from the outside, the German scholar Freitag takes care to respond to previous criticism and offer new insights. Above all, however, its unique comparative approach that includes American, English Canadian, and French Canadian works makes this a valuable contribution to the field.

Religious Nationalism and Christian Zionist Pilgrimages to Holy Landscapes

Many studies on nationalism ignore religion or explain it as a function of nationalism. In this view, nationalism is a modernist project that replaces religion by emphasizing socioeconomic factors or cultural or political modernity. Care must be taken in fusing these terms as “religious nationalism,” because there are often many reasons for, expressions of, and geographically specific types of nationalism, the use of religious signifiers being but one of them. It is often of secondary influence, an epiphenomena, or used as a guise for political means. I argue that this fusion takes place most convincingly not in how national discourse is inflected by religious language or how religious discourse is inflected with nationalist language, but rather, following Talal Asad’s demand, that we understand the category of religion as one of practice rather than solely as belief. What we assume to be nationalist language is also religious practice through prayers, sermons, and pilgrimages. Nationalism can also be a religious practice. Christian Zionists practice a particular form of diasporic nationalism that challenges notions of nationalist exclusivity. They can be best described as performing a type of nationalism: an ethno-religious nationalism. This nationalism emerges from American social, economic, ethnic, and racial anxieties and forces us to reconsider how nationalism, religion, and space can be conceived together. I provide a case study illustrating this fusion by fleshing out through Christian Zionist discourses how they imagine themselves to be a religious nationalism diaspora despite living in America and performing a “civic” secular constitution-based nationalism. It is this imagination and identification allows them to have a diasporic national self-image, a national identification to Israel and Jews that is grounded in an eschatological narrative of the future.