Anthem Press

In this book, Hogue re-configures the history of modern America and re-represents the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, nature, the non-rational, the non-human, consumption, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, eventually highlighting that modern American history and literature are not singular. They are much more complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and richer because modern American history is a series of economic, social, anti-colonial, feminist, and political and social movements, levels, and conditions, with a whole interplay of differences. The book explains how, historically and institutionally, in the 1920s and 1930s modern American society and modern American literature have been represented singularly and monoculturally, with modernity breaking with the past/nature/the non-human—animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the non-rational, and/or indifferent forces of nature such as hurricanes.

This book focuses, first, on the transformation of modern American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The transformation created a new and different and unequal modern American society through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously, the United States in the early 20th century grew into an economic superpower. Second, the book examines the darker side of this unequal modern American society: the legal racial segregation of people of color and the deadly economic exploitation of the working class, women, people of color, colonized nations, incorporated territories and protectorates. Third, it focuses on how vulnerable and marginalized people of color, women, working-class European immigrants, colonized nations, incorporated territories, protectorates, and writers, who were denied justice, difference and equality, resisted, challenged, re-wrote, and transformed this modern America.

The reconfiguration of the history of modern America is explored using Althusser’s concepts of the Repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State apparatuses, and postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytical, deconstructive, cultural theories and Foucault/Deleuze’s notion of history, showing how the US in the 1920s and 1930s emerged as a rational, mechanical society with a business civilization, where mass production, consumerism and advertising contributed to the construction of the social and the subject. The book explains how progressives, labor unions, workers, the NAACP and the Garvey movement, socialists, communists, bohemians, Asian and Native American resistance movements, the Anti-Imperialist League, and the various sectors of the women’s movements—which co-existed and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, commingle in their becomings—challenged, contested, and, at times, transformed this economically, socially, and racially unequal, modern America.

The book is an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). The volume recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of the sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies. 

It is a broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. As a learning process, sociologists develop this inheritance in new and stimulating ways by situating the most pressing changes and continuities facing human societies in long-term perspective.

Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.

Statistics and the use of numbers, in general, are becoming increasingly important in journalism, this to the point that it cannot be overemphasised. In the age of the so-called big data, journalists’ engagement with numbers is seen as the Holy Grail to save the news media from declining streams of revenues, hyper-fragmentation of audiences and the de-politicisation of society in general. Indeed, for some the interaction between journalists and numbers is the future. These voices often refer to the ‘datafication’ of news – and society in general – and vehemently call for the incorporation of statistics and data into journalism practice as a way of improving the quality of news. They see in the ‘data revolution’ a real possibility to revolutionise the way journalism is done, making news stories more comprehensive, relevant, accessible and engaging. It is a quest that pretends to use numbers to enhance journalism and provide better public service journalism. To be sure, many journalists are now expected to deal and examine big and small numbers almost on a daily basis at least in ways that they were not asked to do in the past. This against the pressure of time, declining resources and growing masses of quantitative information related to economic, political and social phenomena (including scientific and academic research reports, public opinion data, political polls, and official and non-official datasets, among others). 

Therefore, it is impossible today to disassociate the discussion about quality in the news from the use of numbers. In this sense, there are important questions to ask: How do journalists use statistics to articulate news? What are the reasons and rationale behind incorporating numbers in the news? Are news stories really better because they present the audience particular numbers or data? Does the incorporation of statistics make news stories more comprehensive and accessible? The book is an attempt to answer this along other more fundamental questions such as: What do we understand by quality in the news? Is data really the future for journalism?

In this book, we aim at challenging some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. In doing so, it seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.

To start with, the notion of ‘quality’ in the news remains not only elusive but also contentious. On the one hand, as it is argued here, the notion of ‘quality news’ and ‘quality news providers’ has centred around the normative claims of journalism being a public service to society; something that, as we will argue, is questionable both factually and historically. On the other, there is ample evidence to suggest that contrary to the common assumptions statistics do not necessarily bring accessibility, reliability, validity nor credibility to the news stories. Indeed, based on extensive research and drawing from original data, the book explores the use of statistics within the practice of journalism through the lenses of five quality dimensions: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, interpretability and accessibility. According to the authors, by studying each dimension as a threshold that seeks to guarantee the quality of information in news it is possible to understand the whole journalistic workflow, from production to consumption, on how statistics are articulated throughout in order to substantiate quality news stories. The authors highlight the dichotomy between the normative and professional aspirations of journalism, whereby statistics help support the quality of news, and there is a desire to strengthen the ability of storytellers (journalists) through the use of numbers. The book tries to underpin the tensions and issues around journalism and statistics. The central point made is that while the concept of quality and its dimensions remains a theoretical aspiration among journalists, what they really aim to achieve is ultimately credibility and authority. Hence, drawing from this last dichotomy we argue that not only the use of statistics automatically translates into quality journalism but that in some occasions it even hinders the possibility of greater civic engagement with the news.

This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.

‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ offers a collection of essays based on the speeches delivered by Reddy during his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2003 and September 2008, a period of rapid growth for the Indian economy as well as extraordinary challenges for the conduct of monetary policy. He has earned universal acclaim for his gubernatorial management of India’s calibrated financial integration with the global economy.

These essays provide informed critical insights into the making of public policies across a spectrum of areas during those years, while presenting an inside view of the dynamics that are played out behind the scenes. They respond to the interest in India's management of a financial sector that has facilitated growth while maintaining stability, markedly contrasting to the fragile financial climate of the USA. The volume describes India's financial situation, the Reserve Bank of India's perspective, and its policies. ‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ was selected as Financial Book of the Year 2010 by ‘China Business News’.

Philosophical liberalism is the dominant view in the world today. Even those who reject liberalism philosophically, subscribe to its view of freedom, which is a negative view, common to liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism. The alternative is recognition of nature, thoroughly, applied fully to human beings. The Buddha set it out as a philosophy, and he lived it. It was a practice. 

It brings death back into life. The common view is that death is the opposite of life. Yet death is part of life, from the beginning. We see this in many great writers, Dostoevsky, for example. His characters find human communion in suffering, despite their differences. Contradictions are inherent in life, but we find our way, not a single way. It brings realism back, which is truth. 

It has been present in human societies throughout history. It has been banished because of a false view of truth, connected to a false view of freedom. It could be recognized as philosophy. The Buddha taught people simply. There was no dogma. He did not teach them to follow him but to be masters of their own salvation. Unless this view is recognized as Philosophy, as it should be, including truth, it will again become religion, rather than a way of life, an art of living.

Winch is best known as the founder of post-war analytic philosophy of the social sciences, and as one of the rare post-war British philosophers who engaged with continental thought, in particular Simone Weil (on whom he wrote a book), Jürgen Habermas, and Karl-Otto Apel. Throughout his career, he also wrote on issues in political philosophy, with particular focus on questions to do with the legitimacy of the state and on the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Simone Weil. Materials toward a book on the topic have lain in the Peter Winch archives since then, accessible only to philosophers able to visit in person. In this volume these notes are published in full, supplemented by selections from Winch's late lectures on law and authority and cross-referenced with his published discussions of political philosophy and related topics (e.g., punishment, agency).

In these unpublished writings, Winch diagnoses problematic assumptions about agency and about the relationship between language and society as these shape the social contract tradition. Winch’s critique of misconceptions of individual agency in political philosophy focuses the attention away from reasons for action discourse and toward the complex and socially constituted relations between agency, justice, and force. Following Wittgenstein’s injunction that a philosopher should always avoid hasty generalisation, Winch’s approach to questions of the legitimacy of the state is marked out by sensitivity to contextual features, including the needs and interests which influence the form that such questions take, whether those be securing peace in civil war (Hobbes), defending a nation from fascism (Weil), or rationalizing the seizure of indigenous lands by conquest (Locke).

In addition to its interest as a Wittgensteinian treatment of key questions in political philosophy, this volume supplements Winch’s published work on Wittgenstein, ethics, the social sciences, and Spinoza. This volume, the second to come from research of the Peter Winch archives, fills in our understanding of Winch's philosophical oeuvre, drawing out the implications of his work for questions in political philosophy. In addition, the volume contributes to the emerging picture of some post-war British philosophers resisting the impoverishment of narrow logical analysis and the disengagement of philosophy from life and society.

Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both characterize many Arab countries, but this was not always so. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period was an age of hope and relative prosperity. But imperialism did not sleep while these countries developed, and it soon intervened to destroy these post-independence achievements.

The two principal defeats and losses of territory to Israel in 1967 and 1973, as well as the others that followed, left in their wake more than the destruction of assets and the loss of human lives: the Arab world lost its ideology of resistance. The reversal in economic and social performance between then and now requires an even-handed and theoretically coherent explanation that steers clear of the hallucinatory constructs of individual freedom and choice. Considering such choices is utterly superfluous in a situation where the important choice is often a single one—that is, no choice at all—imposed by the power of history on the unfree majority.

The Unmaking of Arab Socialism is an attempt to understand the perplexing reasons for the Arab world's developmental descent—its de-development—from the pinnacle of Arab socialism to its present desolate condition.Kadri focuses on the concept of Arab socialism in general and its application to Iraq, Syria and Egypt as he explores the deleterious effects of redundant labour expelled by dispossessions in the hinterland and the persistence of permanent war.

‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. The political subject of the study is the collective political actor poised against governmental rules for stabilizing order. Samaddar’s tour de force propels readers through an account of blood, violence, bodies, controls, laws and conflicts. Politics is examined not as an abstraction, but as a ‘real’ field of dynamic factors rooted in everyday life.

Volume 2, subtitled ‘Subject Positions in Politics’ focuses on the political subject emerging from post-colonial politics. The 1940s are closely examined in order to trace the genesis of the modern Indian political subject, his/her dreams of liberty and recognition of freedom’s qualifications. Contentious politics illuminates the dual tendency of the political subject to demand justice in court, and engage in rebellious street politics, clamouring for justice and equality. As the author demonstrates, the subject’s desire for the autonomy of politics manifests itself in various ways.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 seeks to explore the extent to which Early British Gothic writing, c.1760–1830, took distinctive shape in the particular theological and theo-political climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project takes as its starting point the widely noted ‘anti-Catholicism’ of the Early British Gothic. While taking into account the existing work in this field, the thesis will move beyond a simplistic Protestant/Catholic binary found in works, such as Diane Long Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology (2014) and Maria Purves Gothic and Catholicism (2009), which investigate the Gothic as anti- or pro-Catholic respectively. The project also moves the almost exclusively Anglican focus of texts like Alison Millbank’s God and the Gothic (2018), instead placing the Gothic within the complex theo-political context of tolerance debates, focused not only on Anglican-Catholic relations but on the place and suppression of Protestant Dissent. Having established the contemporary context of a proliferation of Dissenting denominations, the lack of a unified Anglican positions, the rich field of theological debate in the period and the continuing importance of Christianity (in its various forms) as a lived religion in the period, the project seeks to investigate the way in which varied theologies underpin key tropes, aesthetics and debates within the Gothic.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 seeks to explore works throughout the period of the efflorescence and decline of the Early British Gothic, mapping changing currents and trends in the theo-aesthetics of the genre and its depiction and engagement with various supernatural phenomena. It seeks to investigate not only major writers of the period, such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but a selection of writers from different denominational backgrounds in order to investigate the ways in which contemporary theological debates can be traced across Gothic texts of the period and the ways in which different theological positions manifest in these texts. 

This book focuses on Yellowstone: the park, the larger ecosystem, and even more so, the “idea” of Yellowstone. In presenting a case for a new conservation paradigm for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), including Yellowstone National Park, the book, at its heart, is about people and nature relationships. This new paradigm will be truly committed to a healthy, sustainable environment, rich in other life forms, and one that affords dignity for all: humans and nonhumans. The new story or paradigm must be about living such a commitment and future for GYE in real time. 

To do something and understand about the present erosion of nature and growing unsustainability, particularly the GYE situation, the book offers a heuristic for problem solving, learning, and discovery. The heuristic in four general terms, People, Meaning, Society, Environment, takes into account both the content (biophysical substance such as wolves and bears) and process (people, social relations, and decision-making) of conservation and sustainability in our communities, society, and in our daily living. It calls for an explicit integrative approach to this relationship for GYE. It acknowledges that Yellowstone will be different in the future from what we have experienced in recent decades. It also asks how and why it will be different and whether we’re ready for it. To examine these and related questions, and deeper questions, it probes the future. As well, it reflects on the changing narratives, policies, and actions of different sets of residents and outside influences. The book presents a well-developed theory for interdisciplinary problem solving that is grounded in practice.

This new volume, by a team of international scholars, explores aspects of population displacement and statehood at a crucial juncture in modern European history, when the entire continent took on the aspect of a 'laboratory atop a mass graveyard' (Tomas Masaryk). The topic of state-building has acquired a new actuality in recent years, following the collapse of the USSR and the 'Soviet bloc' and in view of the complex, often violent, territorial and ethnic conflicts which have ensued. Many of the current dilemmas and tragedies of the region have their origins in the aftermath of World War I, when newly independent nation states, struggling to emerge from the rubble of the former Russian empire, first sought to define themselves in terms of population, territory and citizenship. 'Homelands' examines the interactions of forced migration, state construction and myriad emerging forms of social identity. It opens up a fresh perspective on twentieth-century history and throws new light on present-day political, humanitarian and scholarly issues of crucial concern to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, refugee welfare workers, policymakers and others.

Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, supplies 16 per cent of its energy consumption and approximately three quarters of its transport fuels with sugarcane-based ethanol. From ca. 2003 until 2014, the country under the Workers’ Party government aimed at creating a global market for ethanol. The time seemed right to steer foreign policy towards this goal due to a benevolent structural environment with global discussions about energy security, climate change, and South-South cooperation. 

Within a neoclassical realist framework, this study examines why Brazil did not fully succeed in its ethanol diplomacy to create a global market for ethanol. The analysis covers three analytical levels: the bilateral with Brazil in power deficit, the bilateral with Brazil in power surplus, and the multilateral, represented in three empirical chapters, Brazil-US, Brazil-Mozambique, and Brazil’s multilateral ethanol diplomacy, respectively. Each chapter finishes with a set of recommendations for political consideration.

This study also demonstrates how the theoretical approach of neoclassical realism can combine foreign policy output with international politics outcome research and is useful to analyse policy outside the hard security realm. It offers a basis for further research towards an understanding of Brazil’s overall foreign policy and the foreign policies of other emerging powers.

This book addresses an old and basic question: what is the moral order of the market? ‘Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation’ is an exploration of accusations of wrongdoing, and the revelations these accusations expose about the dark side of capitalism and modern corporations, and their relationships with suppliers, buyers, peers, investment banks and state regulators. The study explores data gathered from the past twenty years, including over a thousand accusations of economic wrongdoing in corporate America. The research traces exchange paths or structural routes; cultural recipes or ideas about wrongdoing; and interactions between the culture and structure of transgression in economic in markets.

Repertoires of accusation, and the three-way associations between accused, accuser and accusation, reveal the moral order of the market. The tools provided in this data collection and analysis provide a template for the study of the three-way relationship between the following: cultural items or types (i.e., accusation types), structural locations or paths (i.e., market interfaces) and time (i.e., temporal locations of types and paths, or recipes and routes). Repertoires unlock the moral order of the modern market and other institutions (family, politics, education, religion, science) as revealed in accusations of transgression.

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature. 

The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.”. In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin), generates different “worlds” through its signs.

Founding on Walter Benjamin’s conception of time and history, the book first focuses on time as a main category of fashion. Space is the other main category this book considers in relation to fashion.The book next focuses on the body to show how fashion is a system of images that communicates through stereotyped signs, cultural models and archetypes of imagination that produce and define sexual identities in society. Finally, the book focuses on fashion as a means of communication in the age of social networks.

Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 – it is now almost 100 years since his birth. His career in sociology almost spanned six decades and culminated in more than sixty published book titles not to mention the many book chapters and academic articles. In many ways Bauman’s work straddled the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, providing us with a multitude of insights into the main changes and transformations characterizing these two centuries – what he metaphorically defined as ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’. This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work.

Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Bauman’s life and work, the volume seeks to position Bauman’s within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance in this discipline.

As mentioned, Bauman’s ideas – his research topic, his extreme intellectual productivity and his imaginative approach to doing and writing sociology – – remain a source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing sociology.

The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press Companion to Sociology series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Bauman’s sociology. The chapters included in the book will explore different sides and dimensions of Goffman’s work, for instance, Bauman’s work, Bauman’s position and perspective within the social sciences (his combined Marxist and Weberian insights as well as inspiration from Sigmund Freud), his work on modernity and the Holocaust, the difference between the reception of his work respectively in Europe and the United States, Bauman’s writings on Western modernity, his work on death and immortality, his turn to the topic of nostalgia towards the end of his career, his many ‘conversational books’ written particularly throughout the final decade of his life and finally his engagement with ambivalence. Although it is impossible to ‘cover all angles’ of Bauman’s comprehensive work, it is nevertheless the overall aspiration behind the book that it will be found useful in teaching and research contexts alike, keeping the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman alive and kicking within sociology and related disciplines.

‘Rethinking Therapeutic Reading’ uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces in which to do personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles. 

The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.

At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era. 

Intrigue, betrayal, family secrets, forbidden passions – this tale of adventure and suspense links the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 and the Kobe earthquake of 1995 through the story of Akihiko Waki, who is living a quiet life as a think-tank director in Kobe, Japan, when he hears rumours that his father, presumed long dead, is in fact alive and in danger. Akihiko undertakes a dangerous journey to China, and in Shanghai learns that what he thought he knew about his father is in fact far from the truth. Here he meets the intriguingly secretive actress Li Xing, who as a pro-democracy activist is herself in danger, and as events gather pace Akihiko’s search for his father also becomes a desperate battle to save her from the brutal authorities…

This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read.  This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read. 

This book analyses the impact of the publications written by the economist, jurist, administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa, the future Viscount of Cairu, from 1821 to 1822, on the events that led to the independence of Brazil in 1822. It reassesses the many interpretations of his role throughout the period, repositioning him among those who are part of the broad reformist Catholic Enlightenment.

In an original account of his career and a new interpretation of his role in helping create an appropriate environment for ideas to be discussed during the post constitutional period that followed the Liberal Revolution in 1820 in Portugal, the book brings to light the extent to which his ideas were influenced by the Enlightenment, and how these ideas influenced public opinion in the transition away from the Reino Unido with Portugal, between 1815 and 1822, towards an independent Brazilian empire under Dom Pedro. 

The book argues that while a supporter of Brazilian autonomy, a fierce critic of the Cortes of Lisbon, and an important figure in the events that unfolded after the departure of Dom João VI from Rio de Janeiro in 1821, he did not openly embrace the independence from the United Kingdom with Portugal and would instead work towards a solution that would encompass Brazil’s autonomy within a Portuguese empire, which did not take place.

Oral traditions and creative oratures have been celebrated in African studies over the years, specifically from the 1950s, as the most important and viable correspondence, aside from material artifacts, between social “archeologists” attempting to penetrate the African preliterate past and the social-political and economic productions of that same past.

In the memoirs chosen for this book, oral traditions are braided with personal experiences in the formation of the self, providing the basis of some African literary outputs and championed as having the ability to engineer the African knowledge system in global academe. In this regard, this work stressesthe concept that most memoir writing scholars feel that the production and presentation of the autobiographical self aredependent on the categories of individualism and relationality.

The memoirists depict their own identities in their tales as not simply a part of their society but also one strongly impacted by prominent persons in their many lived settings. The bookdiscusses an approach that enables West African memoirists to review their cultural backgrounds in the light of living in other spaces and acquiring different experiences.

The Inner World of Research is a book about the misery and joy of life as a researcher. It deals with essential but rarely spoken of topics in the everyday life of a researcher, focussing in particular on the role of emotions and social relations in research. It stretches from the individual researcher, to the ‘micro-cosmos’ of the research team and to the broader policy environment in which research takes place.

The book is to a large extent based on autobiographical material from the author’s long career as a leading social scientist. But it also derives from extended interviews with researchers from a variety of disciplines, and with authors, artists and musicians. It delves into the mysteries of creativity; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the role of fear, anger, and boredom in the life of a researcher. It is driven by a quiet fury about how research as a practice is so little understood and so poorly administrated and communicated.

Neither a standard research monograph nor a typical memoir or autobiography, The Inner World of Research belongs to the academic essay genre. It is a book based on the author’s frustrations, experiences and curiosity but all through written in dialogue with colleagues supported by adequate scholarship. It is personal and self-reflexive yet authoritative and offers significant insights into the heaven and hell of contemporary academic life in general. And in contrast to many other contemporary books on ‘the decline of the university’, this book is not only critical but also self-critical and constructive.

This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.

Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.

Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.

The context of both the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring was the torturous process of communist regimes tentatively revising the history of the recent communist past that had been constructed and imposed during the Stalinist period. This process of remembering and forgetting had the power to shake the legitimacy and authority of communist party-states because their monopoly on the interpretation of the past was so central to their control of the present.

Once the elaborate histories of the show trials and subsequent propaganda were undermined, the whole credibility of the regimes that had propagated them was likewise weakened. In the Prague Spring, this long-delayed historiographical reckoning was joined by an equally problematic connection between meanings of the past and definitions of the present. Czechoslovakia’s communist allies insisted on understanding and seeking to influence the Czechoslovak reform process through varied and changeable references to and analogies from Hungary’s 1956 uprising. The purpose and nature of these loaded linkages between recent Hungarian past and Czechoslovak present changed according to circumstances and developments.

While the meanings of the 1956 uprising and the concomitant definitions of the 1968 Prague Spring also varied between Soviet and Hungarian analysts, they were alike resisted by Czechoslovak reformers seeking to chart a unique path to socialism. As they attempted to ground their policies in Czechoslovak history, they unsuccessfully rejected parallels with Hungary’s. Ultimately, however, the dependence on historical analogies to decisively explain the present was also a vulnerability for those who employed them, as the gap between a constructed past and an untidy reality irresistibly emerged.

The pursuit of collective happiness was considered a utopian ideal that structured many aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by numerous scholars in various disciplines ranging from cultural and literary studies to sociology and political science. Several groundbreaking studies in the literary and cultural history of the former Soviet Union have changed our understanding of the Soviet past. However, none of these studies has paid attention to an important theme in the cultural history of Soviet society – the pursuit of happiness. Although specialists in Soviet culture repeatedly invoke various manifestations of happiness in works of literature and film in their research, it has yet to be investigated as the subject of a full-fledged independent study.

‘Petrified Utopia’ redresses this inexplicable omission. This collection of essays introduces the Western reader to the most representative ideas of happiness, and the common practices of its pursuit that shaped Soviet everyday life and cultural discourse from the early post-revolutionary years to the later period of Stalinist and post-Stalinist culture. The collection presents different manifestations of happiness in literature and visual culture – from children’s literature to the official and high literary cannon, from architecture to fine arts, from postcards to cookbooks, and from the culture of consumerism to product-paradise in Soviet posters. ‘Petrified Utopia’ features articles by the leading specialists in the study of Soviet culture from the UK, the US, Germany and Italy, and addresses the perplexing lack of scholarship on this important issue.

Stephen Condit begins ‘Anarchism in Local Governance’ arguing that anarchism and anarchists must engage with the ruling order in a more inclusive manner than radical opposition, at least in the environment of a stable and cautious welfare society like Finland. This encounter may enlarge the purposes and values of municipal governance towards some of the fundamental values of anarchism, primarily individual and communal self-governance, and as well develop anarchist thought and praxis, not to renounce radical and non-conventional action, but to enlarge its scope and opportunities by strengthening the legitimacy of anarchist values and praxis, and their practical relevance to the social order.

The discussion entails three intertwined discourses: anarchist thought in philosophical and theoretical terms with an emphasis on the possibilities of its praxis; a descriptive examination of municipal governance through its organisations, strategies and policies; and a rather anecdotal account of Condit’s 30-year career in attempting to combine these dimensions of anarchism, municipal governance and citizen participation in civil society. The counterfactual ideal of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is a significant measure of evaluation.

Condit’s self-assessment is equivocal. He failed to instil much practical anarchism into the municipality and possibly diluted his own demonstration of anarchism beyond what most anarchists would accept. Nevertheless he considers his project justified because it has clarified potentialities for the municipality, citizen associations and anarchism, and because it may express in more coherent conceptual and ethical form significant emerging trends in Western society.

Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.

‘Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity’ is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia’s engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley’s life – the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars – but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’.

These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley’s photographic and filmic texts – which were often produced and presented by other people – and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley’s creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century’s rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.

The main sources for an understanding of classical Hindu law are the Sanskrit treatises on religious and legal duties, known as the Dharmaśāstras. In this collection of his major studies in the field, Ludo Rocher presents analytical and interpretive essays on a wide range of topics, from general themes such as the nature of Hindu law and Anglo-Hindu law to technical matters including word studies and text criticism. Rocher’s deep engagement with the language and worldview of the authors in the Dharmaśāstra tradition yields distinctive and corrective contributions to the field, which are informed by knowledge both of the Indian grammatical tradition and of Roman and civil law.

Davis’s introduction presents an interpretative account of Rocher’s many contributions to the field, organized around the themes that recur in his work, and examines his key advances, both methodological and substantive. Comparisons and contrasts between Rocher’s ideas and those of his Indological colleagues serve to place him in the context of a scholarly tradition, while Rocher’s fundamental view that the Dharmaśāstra is first and foremost a scholarly and scholastic tradition, rather than a practical legal one, is also explored.

This invaluable collection serves both as a summary review of the ideas of Rocher, a leading authority in the field, and as a critical evaluation of the impact of these ideas on the present study of law and Indology.

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.

Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.

'Income Poverty and Beyond' emphasizes the need to go beyond the conventional definition of poverty and look at the various human aspects of the problem. Eminent social scientists such as Suresh Tendulkar, Abusaleh Shariff, R. Radhakrishna, M. S. S. Meenakshisundaram, Seeta K. Prabhu, Ravi Srivastava and the editors, Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan, take a comprehensive view of poverty to include the concept of human poverty, seen as the 'the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development'. Special care has been taken to make the information and analysis accessible to the general reader.

Using the latest available data for India as well as edited versions of papers commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for a South-Asia poverty monitor, the broad conclusion that has emerged is that more public action is needed to counter the high prevalence of human poverty. Therefore, current measures to reduce income-poverty, including high rates of economic growth, are not sufficient.

The first two chapters dwell on the concept of income-poverty, interstate and intergroup disparities and poverty trends in India over the decade 1983–94. This is followed by an examination of human development in rural India, availability of food to the poor, various programmes aimed at removing poverty, the indices of human poverty and public financing of social services, human priority expenditures, and human expenditure ratios for the Indian states. The perceptions of the poor in assessing their own poverty and in developing policies to improve their status are discussed, and an epilogue appeals to the national and international community to take serious note of human poverty in the midst of which we all live.

After years of relative indifference, space exploration has caught the public’s imagination once again. However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing question: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth? The end of the world has indeed arrived, but in an unexpected way. It can be described thus: man’s potential on Earth has been exhausted. We have discovered every piece of land, tried all sorts of political regimes, experienced all the forms of the arts and committed ourselves to all kinds of religious beliefs. Yet if we admit that the thirst for exploration and novelty is at the heart of human nature, we then have to confront the resulting question: can humanity survive the finitude of our world? Will we hold out long in this cloistered and domesticated Earth that has become so devoid of all mystery and adventure? Or will we die of boredom when the Earth will have become the biggest open-air zoo in the universe?

The consequences of our planet’s finiteness can already be perceived in our day-to-day experience: humans’ physical obsolescence, the decline of Eros, the epidemic of depression sweeping across the Western world and self-destructive tendencies that reveal an actual wish for the Deluge to happen, as if we wanted to recreate the clean slate we so yearn for. We must therefore find a way to break free from this looming trap. Part of the solution may lie above us, but the day when our technology can catapult us to a planet orbiting another star is considerably far off. One could consider that it matters little whether we are capable of colonizing space or not, as long as we have our humdrum lives to attend to here on Earth. But our human nature will not let this happen. We are wanderers, explorers, pioneers in all fields of life. 

The human race will therefore not be driven off our planet to escape meteorites or the depletion of natural resources, but to prevent our own mental and physical imprisonment. Knowing the world has nothing more to offer us is not merely a piece of information; it is a shattering reality to which our bodies and minds will react wildly and the biggest existential challenge humankind will have to face in the near future. By shedding light on this pervading worldwide mental condition, The End of the World and the Last God tries to raise awareness that the obstacles to interstellar expansion do not essentially lie in any technological limitation but in the demons and flaws we host in ourselves.

Located at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria serves as a natural stepping stone to the Straits, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Its geo-strategic position has frequently attracted foreign powers – including Great Britain and the Soviet Union – with an array of regional and global interests. [NP] A succession of Great Power influences in the Balkans both shaped Bulgaria’s international place and marked its domestic policy. This book explores Britain’s involvement in Bulgaria between 1943 and 1949, providing a new understanding of the origins of the Cold War in the region.

Divided into three parts, the book examines the priorities of Britain during and after World War II, investigates the practical integration of strategic and ideological objectives in British foreign policy, and maps Britain’s diminishing interest in the country alongside the parallel consolidation of communist power and the increasing Soviet presence.

Using recently released sources from the Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties and foreign ministries, the author revisits the question of British attitudes towards Eastern Europe. This book offers a new approach to understanding the origins of the Cold War in Bulgaria and bridges significant gaps in the treatment of the country in English-language literature.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or billionaire philanthropy is like a Rorschach test – the same act can look very different depending on how we understand its intentions and its consequences. In this book the author examines the politics of CSR in India to assess its ability to advance inclusive and sustainable development. The focus is on how CSR is remaking the practices and agendas of civic organizations that are being encouraged to collaborate with business to advance equality and prosperity.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) and corporations have a history of hostility to each other. According to CSO workers, businesses selfishly exploit workers, despoil natural resources, and distort democracy to serve their own profit-making ends. According to business executives, CSOs are hopelessly naïve, inefficient, and interfere in the market in ways that reduce economic growth. And yet, in the past decade more and more CSOs and businesses are collaborating in new ways. Individuals from both sectors are setting up social impact enterprises, and social investing funds are increasing. The more traditional forms of corporate-CSO collaboration have expanded as more funds are flowing from business to the social sector. The divide between the corporate sector and civil society seems to be narrowing. Why is this happening and what are its consequences? This book examines these trends in India, where since 2013 the state has mandated co-operation between the largest firms and NGOs in pursuit of inclusive and sustainable development.

This book offers evidence that CSR is unlikely to contribute to inclusive and sustainable development. By claiming to be “helpers” corporations are able to silence their critics and thus avoid making the deeper shifts in business models needed in order to create a more just and sustainable society.

In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Melvin Kohn reexamines his 60-year inquiry––conducted across distinct cultures under radically different conditions––into the relationship between people’s location in the social order and their personality. The result of this reexamination is an important refinement of Kohn’s highly regarded theory on the relationship between social class, work and personality, adding key insights about the role of political intervention on personality to his scholarship.

Over the course of his career, Kohn and his collaborators––in the United States, Norway, East and West Germany, Japan, Poland, Ukraine and China––used groundbreaking empirical methodologies to understand the effect of social structure on personality. Beginning in mid-twentieth century America, Kohn established that for employed men and women, the most important aspect of social structure for personality was social status. Kohn confirmed and refined this insight over time and across distinct cultural, economic and changing political conditions. Whether in postwar America, East and West Germany, industrial Japan, Communist Poland or post-Soviet Ukraine, study after study demonstrated the primacy of social class and social stratification in determining people’s values and orientations.

This research also revealed interesting cross-national inconsistencies in people’s reactions to similar social conditions. These inconsistencies did not change the essential relationship of social class and stratification to personality, and repeatedly confirmed Kohn’s findings about the importance of occupational self-direction and substantive complexity on all aspects of personality. In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Kohn focuses on these inconsistencies. Based on insights derived from research conducted during the transition to privatization of urban China, Kohn identifies political intervention as the force that modifies, for better or for worse, but does not eliminate the dominant effect of class stratification and the opportunities they provide for self-direction at work on personality.

The book is divided into four sections: The first section focuses on how certain environmental problems can only be solved through active government efforts to implement policies that effectively take science and politics into account. This section introduces readers to foundational concepts, including the steps in the US federal environmental policy-making process, and offers an action-oriented analysis of how environmental policy gets implemented and how practitioners can use comparative analysis of public policy in environmental problem-solving. It concludes with questions about the possibility of a unified theory of environmental policy making. The section empowers readers to develop, through carefully designed assignments, a framework to shape an action plan to solve specific environmental problems.

The next section focuses on formulating a sound philosophical basis for taking action in environmental problem-solving situations. This includes a discussion of several ethical frameworks that practitioners can use to underpin the actions they propose. This section begins with a general overview of environmental ethics, and then moves to a discussion of utilitarianism versus intrinsic value, deep green approaches to environmental problem-solving, the debate over sustainability versus economic growth, and how science and indigenous knowledge can be applied in a wide range of environmental problem-solving situations. The section empowers readers to take a stand on these debates, drawing on practical cases with worked examples.

The penultimate section helps environmental practitioners understand how to use various analytical tools. It includes a quick survey of traditional and non-traditional evaluation techniques, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each, focusing on environmental impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, ecosystem services analysis, risk assessment, simulation and modeling, and scenario planning. This section prepares readers to practice multi-party environmental problem-solving, and to identify the power of each tool to enhance environmental problem-solving, developing the judgment to enumerate strengths and weaknesses as they see them playing out in practice.

The concluding section is a survey of the theory and practice behind mobilizing support for particular problem-solving efforts. It includes discussions of democratic decision-making and environmental problem solving, how the public can be brought in as a partner, methods of collaborative decision-making, the idea of consensus building, and how politics and power sway collective action efforts.

‘Re-balancing China’ addresses three key sets of issues in China’s political economy. Part One of the text provides an analysis of the profound impact of the global financial crisis on China’s economy – an economy deeply integrated in the global economic system through trade and foreign investment. It also examines the positive outcomes of the massive rescue package that constituted China’s policy response to the crisis. The rescue package stimulated Chinese growth and helped to stabilize the global economy as a whole.

Part Two focuses on the challenge of globalization for China’s industrial policy. Since the 1980s, China has pursued an industrial policy aimed at nurturing a substantial group of globally competitive firms, most of which have become superficially successful. However, China still has a negligible number of large firms that are competitive in global markets. China’s experience presents a fundamental challenge to traditional concepts of industrial policy and development.

Finally, Part Three examines China’s international relations, the focal point of which is its relationship with the United States. The US has made it clear that its principal challenge in international relations is the ‘rise of China’ and has announced a ‘tilt towards the Pacific’ in its military strategy. As a result, the core of this interaction spans the East and South China Seas and the countries that surround this area.

‘Sisters and the English Household’ revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenth-century English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Engaging scholarly histories of the family, and providing a detailed account of the 70-year Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister controversy, Wallace traces an alternative domesticity anchored by adult sibling relations through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals; William Wordsworth’s poetry; Mary Lamb’s essay ‘On Needle-Work‘; and novels by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and George Eliot. Recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative rather than contingent and dependent, and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, ‘Sisters and the English Household’ resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England.

In the twenty-first century, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we name, plot and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre-twentieth-century writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting, driving continuing tendencies to define ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal relations that reinscribe those stabilizing concepts, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in ‘family’.

‘Sisters and the English Household’ works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize ‘family’ as a further historicizing of ‘domesticity’ that renders it multiple and fluid rather than monolithic; and a turn towards the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. The book traces two distinct nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings' lives (corporate domesticity), while the other expected the domestic, material and, to some extent, emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth-homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, although counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, sibling-anchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labour was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth-century’s protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household and domestic ideals. The sister's autonomy also drove a gradually increasing imperative to exclude adult unmarried siblings from the households of their married siblings, an imperative figured as expatriation from the homely and national ‘domestic’ space.

Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to travel abroad and tread wheat alongside this stranger when he becomes an adult. But first, Cat must grow up in the small port town where he lives with his timpanist grandfather and a father irrevocably obsessed with an unsolved mathematical proof, and which, as part of the series of increasingly surreal events that characterize his life, Cat rescues from a plague of rats by his imitating the yowls of his namesake, the cat. The ‘rat-a-tap, tap’ of Kutze’s steps echoes through Cat’s life as he matures, moves away from the town to become a musician in the big city and, eventually, journeys abroad.

A truly unique coming-of-age tale, ‘Stepp’n on Wheat’ traces the unsettling events and characters encountered by Cat as he grows up, from the mysterious travelling salesman who cheats his town and ruins his father to a colourblind girl named Green.

'ICTs and Development in India' provides a critical account of the impact of the use of Information Technology in development projects in India, focusing particularly on E-governance and Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) development programs initiated by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Sreekumar challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the potential of ICT to provide unprecedented social and economic opportunities for vulnerable groups such as women and marginalized communities by highlighting its failure to bridge social divides. He argues that in addition to reinforcing existing social divides, the patterns of ICT deployment and control have in certain cases created new divides. Given such tensions and contradictions, this book questions whether it is appropriate to consider civil society as an independent realm of social action separated from State and Market.

Sreekumar offers a fresh perspective and added depth to the discussions on the social impacts of new technologies in rural areas, especially in terms of methods, analytics and approach. The recognition of the shortcomings of CSO initiatives plays an important part in redefining the role of civil society and understanding its fractured relations with the State and Market. Sreekumar therefore creates a powerful critique on the interpretation of agency and the structure of rural transformation as mediated by new technologies in the particular context of India's social and economic transition.

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ offers a new reading of Morris’s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that Morris’s work demonstrates an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories to the late propaganda poems and political romances.

Hanson examines Morris’s imagination of violence as a way of understanding the world and the self. The interactions of combat, work and play, of self-sacrifice and hope, class war and prowess in his writings draw together conflicting cultural narratives about individual and political identity in a way that complicates or reframes their meanings.

Moving chronologically through his works, the book discusses the philosophy and phenomenology of violence by which Morris delineates his ethical and aesthetic positions, as well as examining the ways in which they intersect with those of his contemporaries. It combines close readings of his work with historical and contextual analysis to suggest that Morris’s paradoxical commitment to violence as a means to wholeness shapes the form and style of his works as well as their content and reception.

Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.

Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations. 

"Report on the Agrarian Law" (1795) and Other Writings' is the first modern English translation of perhaps the greatest work of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' (1795). A major work of political economy and a beautifully crafted philosophical history of Spain’s political development until the eighteenth century, 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' is a classic work of the Spanish Enlightenment. Displaying the richness of Spanish Enlightenment writing on political economy emerging from a fecund conjugation of foreign writers (Smith, Ferguson, Condillac, Mirabeau, Genovesi) with Spanish writers (Ulloa, Olavide, Uztáriz, Campomanes), this masterpiece explores the lessons learned from the shortcomings of the Spanish Crown's economic policies in the eighteenth century.

This book proposes a radical new way of thinking about our democratic future, our ecological survival, and our ways to keep economies fair. It shows that adopting upper limits to wealth and income; replacing elections with local direct democracy and legal duty involving randomly selected citizens; and replacing welfare and redistribution policies with pre-distribution and reparations promises new solutions to political apathy, discontent, manipulation, economic inequality, unfairness, unequal opportunities, and looming ecological disaster.

Most public debates today focus on the poor, on minorities, and on immigrants when discussing the problems of our democracies. The poor, minorities and immigrants, however, are not our problem. They had no say in designing the kinds of systems that threaten our planet, our wellbeing, and our social and communal lives. They consume very little and thus have a minimal ecological footprint. It is the super-rich who threaten justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and ecological sustainability.

We often hear that creative and intellectual innovation is the key to western economic renewal, that cognitive capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mental-manual division of labour, and that old work – blue-collar, repetitive, de-skilled – is now consigned to the factories of the developing world. At the other end of the long production chains, the West relies increasingly on immaterial labour. From this perspective no rustbelt city can hope to regenerate, no developing nation can ascend to first-world status, without the ‘new oil’ of intellectual property. Workers in general are told to adapt to this transition, to remake themselves for the new economy. Rapid shifts in patterns of consumption, taste and technology can render jobs and skills obsolete in ways that defy the planning and foreclosures of Fordism.

Vocational fortunes depend not only on intellect and creativity but also on entrepreneurial acumen and vocational agility. New capitalism seeks to make a virtue of transience. It has taken up the counter-culture’s critique of the Fordist job-for-life, in order to persuade young people in particular that working life is (and should be) episodic and project-based. The precariat (Standing 2009) must embrace the idea of the improvised post-modern career - a wild vocational ride that unfolds like the levels of a video game. They must become labile labour: opportunistic, excitable, flexible, mobile and ready to flow without protest or friction into the spaces opened up by Post-Fordism. Those who resist or ignore this turbulence and cling to the goal of security are in effect sleepwalking towards redundancy.

‘The Creativity Hoax’ argues that creativity, the leitmotif of new capitalism, has become a key neo-liberal idiom for reorganizing work and working life in ways that erode communal bonds, loyalties and values and blur the boundaries between work and play, public and private. However, the creative economy remains a largely unrealized project, a fantasy of regeneration. Despite the inflated rhetoric of vocational fulfilment, much work performed in the West remains low-skilled and low-paid. Very few make a living exclusively from creative labour whether as employees, freelancers, or entrepreneurs. For the most part it is transnational cultural corporations that reap the patentable or copyrightable bounty, belying the egalitarian myths of the new economy. [NP] The challenge for capital has been to habituate the precariat to the condition of abeyance. In order to tolerate un/underemployment or jobs where skills and talents are underutilized (retail, hospitality or on the edges of creative industries), young workers need to be persuaded that vocational fulfilment and financial security are attainable. ‘The Creativity Hoax’ draws on extensive interview and observation research with creative aspirants – from technical, production and performance fields – who wrestle with the prospect and reality of poverty and unfulfilled ambition.

Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in Russian in 1839. In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire.

Gretsch had been asked to travel into Western Europe to examine the educational systems and report his findings to the Russian government. However, he was more than just a functionary. He was a journalist, novelist, and philologist. For nearly three decades, he published a journal called Son of the Fatherland, and he was able to convince many influential Russian thinkers of the time to contribute to the periodical. Later, he would publish The Reader’s Library and then The Northern Bee. The former was a short-lived magazine, but the latter was a newspaper that remained in circulation for almost three decades. As these accomplishments suggest, Gretsch was an intellectual—a person who looked beyond the surface-level of his existence to seek deeper meaning.

In consequence, as he travelled through England, France, and Germany, his sharp mind absorbed far more than just the details of the educational systems he had been sent to investigate. He noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met. When he returned to Russia, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the three-volume edition that was published in St. Petersburg in 1839 — not long after Napoleon’s final defeat. His astute observations provide a rich contemporary resource for information about the countries he visited. The observations are all the more relevant since they come from the viewpoint of an outsider. Additionally, as a result of his government position, Gretsch was able to move in social circles that would have been closed to many other people. In England, he once found himself in the same room with the future Queen Victoria, for example, and in France, he had lunch with Victor Hugo. Given the new historicist slant of modern literary and cultural studies, Gretsch’s observations offer a treasure-trove of contextual information that will be valuable to history and literature scholars as well as to general readers interested in cultural interactions during the nineteenth century. This narrative has never before been translated into English in its entirety. 

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC’s many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.

“Unhomely Cinema” explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today’s global societies. Drawing from Freud’s concept of the uncanny – that frightful and inexplicable experience of the home as foreign and strange – the unhomely speaks to the spatial dislocation, transience, homelessness and disempowerment symptomatic of contemporary global societies.

While uncanny homes are traditionally associated with the science fiction and horror genres, “Unhomely Cinema” shows how an array of film genres – from Michel Gondry’s comedy “Be Kind Rewind” to Laurent Cantet’s eerie suspense thriller “Time Out” – use the figure of the precarious home to engage with some of the most pertinent social and cultural issues involved in the question of “making home.”

Encounters with the unhomely often result in the painful loss of home, but the unhomely can also offer an ethics of dwelling, whereby the impossibility of narrative closure represents new and more hopeful ways of dwelling in the world.

‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ provides a much needed re-evaluation of this charismatic prime minister’s wartime leadership. Calling on a wide range of primary sources and focussing on Lloyd George’s role in the war cabinet, Cassar compellingly argues that George’s reputation as the “man who won the war” was wholly unmerited. Instead Cassar shows that Lloyd George’s heavy handed leadership was often detrimental to the Allied cause. From his wholehearted support for the disastrous Nivelle offensive, to his pursuit of a peripheral strategy that diverted troops away from the critical theatre of war on the Western Front, Cassar shows that Lloyd George consistently bucked the advice of his generals in preference for ineffectual and dangerous military strategies. Cassar’s approach also differs from that of other studies of Lloyd George by adopting a thematic approach in preference to a chronological narrative, thereby allowing a closer evaluation of Lloyd George’s handling of complex issues.

The first book-length study of Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, the largest and most dynamic Australian pulp publisher to emerge after World War II. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged, softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been so far recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback from the late 1950s onwards. 

Horwitz was adept at seeking out and exploiting the porous spaces that existed, sometimes only temporarily, between pulp and mainstream publishing: where mainstream literary forms were reconfigured to suit more sensational tastes, authorial reputation was fluid, and government regulation failed to keep pace with shifting reading tastes and social mores. Its dealings were aggressively transnational in scope, moving beyond London, to directly encompass the United States and other overseas fiction markets. And Horwitz continually mined international literary and publishing fashions and successes to create local analogues of popular pulp and mass-market publishing genres, giving them a makeover to align them with Australian cultural sensibilities, tastes and legislative environments. 

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback examines the authorship, production, marketing and distribution of Horwitz pulp paperbacks. It includes ground-breaking material on the conditions of creative labour: the writers, artists and editors involved in the production of Horwitz pulp. The book also explores how Horwitz pulp paperbacks acted as a local conduit for the global modern: the ideas, sensations, fascinations, technologies, and people that came crashing into the Australia consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. This is part of the larger story of Australian pulp fiction’s role as an unofficial archive of changing tastes, ideas, controversies and debates about gender, race, class, youth, and economic and social mobility that occurred in 1950s and 1960s Australia.

Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015, ‘The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan’ traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835–1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group’s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.

Part I of this volume traces the development of the anti-Ahmadi movement from its origin in Punjab province, where an agitation movement was launched calling upon the central government to declare the Ahmadis officially non-Muslim. After the movement intensified, leading to proclamation of martial law in Lahore in 1953, the Punjab government held a court of inquiry, which released its report in 1954. The proceedings of the Munir-Kiyani inquiry commission has now become available to scholars, and is a key focus of analysis. Part II focuses on the developments in Pakistan’s politics that created a discursive space where legislative measures against the Ahmadis could be deliberated and adopted by the national assembly, and argues Pakistan’s first general elections in 1970 reflected the entrenchment of religious leaders in Pakistan’s power politics. The national assembly’s 1974 session saw Ahmadis unanimously declared as non-Muslims; the records of this session’s debates are extensively reviewed in this book.

A truly path-breaking study, this work goes beyond merely chronicling the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, to address wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship.

'Churchill, Eden and Indo-China, 1951-1955' provides a greater historical awareness of the broad international context of decolonized Indo-China, focussing on the administrations of Churchill and Eden. Nông Dân takes a systematic approach to pertinent international politics, providing a historiography and assessing the effects of events such as the Cold War and the Second World War, paying special attention to the impact of the Second World War on the British version of the domino theory. Nông Dân focuses particularly on South East Asia, and applies a thorough analysis of the pitched Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which took place during the last year of Churchill's office. Churchill's wartime helmsmanship is revisited in order to gain pertinent and further light on his post-war administration. Lastly, this study is a firm contribution to understanding the history of globalization in Eastern Asia and the Far East.

The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.

Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude. 

A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.

Edited by Professor Neera Chandhoke, 'Mapping Histories' is a fitting tribute to renowned historian Ravinder Kumar, well known for his pioneering work on the social consequences of colonial rule in India, and for founding the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Here, Fellows of the centre present a collection of historical and contemporary studies on India, which deal with diverse themes from religion to the environment, cultural studies to feminism. Together, these lively and challenging essays offer readings on how we understand India's history and, conversely, how we can use this comprehension of the past to interpret India's complex present.

After almost twenty-five years of experimenting with the neo-liberal economic reforms collectively known as ‘Washington Consensus’ policies, Latin Americans are starting to re-assess the merits of these policies – at the voting booth. Many newly elected governments are beginning to scrutinize the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in particular, and some nations have gone so far as to nationalize foreign firms. Without endorsing or condoning the actions taken by these governments, this volume demonstrates that it is quite rational for governments in the region to re-evaluate the role of FDI for their development paths.

The great promise of FDI by multinational corporations is that capital will flow into your country and be a source of dynamic growth. Beyond boosting income and employment, the hope was that manufacturing FDI would bring knowledge spillovers that would build the skill and technological capacities of local firms, catalyzing broad-based economic growth; and environmental spillovers that would mitigate the domestic ecological impacts of industrial transformation.

Consisting of country case studies and comparative analyses from Latin American and U.S.-based political economists, this volume finds that when FDI did materialize if often fell far short of generating the necessary linkages required to make FDI work for sustainable economic development.

‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire.

Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

In Victorian India technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in ‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ nineteenth-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a twentieth-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood – thanks to the projected Panama Canal – and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.

Defining Hybrid Heroes: The Leadership Spectrum from Scoundrel to Saint defines the hero (and his or her journey) from a hybrid perspective, exploring the spectrum from scoundrel to saint. It utilizes a more dynamic and situational outlook, regarding heroism not only as a personal characteristic, but also as a series of heroic acts within a given situation.

The book examines the hybrid hero from several distinctive points of view, e.g. through lenses dominated by fiction, business, politics and psychology, and paints a new, more complex portrait that takes full advantage of the authors’ varied backgrounds. Inge Brokerhof has an academic background in psychology and has studied the impact of narrative fiction on workplace variables, such as career identity, employability and moral leadership. Stephan Sonnenburg has studied Joseph Campbell and the impact of the hero’s journey on creativity and innovation management. Greg Stone is a communications consultant who teaches executives and professors how to explain their work in clear and compelling language.

Yoko teaches piano during the day, works at a bar at night and dreams of her disappeared lover every single minute. “Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I swear I will find you again”, he promised, and Yoko never stopped believing he would return. Her ten-year-old daughter Soko, born out of this brief passionate affair that marked her mother for ever, has had her life shaped by Yoko’s constant yearning, as the desperate search for the elusive man of her dreams means moving house more times than either of them can remember. The two travel through life on what Yoko calls “God’s boat”, moving from town to town, and for Soko from school to school, just as the narrative too shifts between the perspectives of the daughter and her mother, tracing them through the years as little by little the story of Yoko’s past emerges, and Soko tries to somehow build herself a future.

This haunting and sensitive novel combines the everyday patterns of the lives of mother and daughter, their rituals, their conversations, while always beyond these ordinary daily events lies what is hidden by Yoko’s seemingly unshakeable certainty: the spectre of madness and the indescribable pain of loss, so inextricably linked to the dazzling joy that only love can bring.

‘Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ examines the applicability of the concept of social exclusion in contemporary India, and addresses the following questions: How does an increasingly liberalised Indian economy contribute to processes of social inclusion and exclusion and to the reproduction of poverty and inequality? To what extent does the deepening of Indian democracy offer hitherto marginalised social groups new opportunities for pursuing strategies of inclusion? And how does ‘development’ alter the social terrain on which inequalities are negotiated? These and related discussions form the focal points of the volume. Importantly, the contributors deal explicitly with the simultaneity of processes of exclusion and inclusion, and with their entangled manifestation in social life. By applying the concept of social exclusion to concrete empirical case studies, the contributors expand conceptual horizons by keeping in mind that neither exclusion nor inclusion can be considered without its ‘alter ego’. The volume also challenges narrow conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion in terms of singular factors such as caste, policy or the economy. This collaborative endeavour and cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together younger and more established scholars, facilitates a deeper understanding of complex social and political processes in contemporary India.

This book chiefly approaches Irish nationalist references to “Iran” as a conceptual lens for probing a broad array of developments in Irish nationalist formulations of Irish history (from ancient times to post-Norman conquests), as well as formulations of Irish identities and modes of “collective” nationalist recollection. Key thematic examples in the book range from the late eighteenth-century antiquarian debates on Irish origins to the “Iran/Erin” interchange in Irish nationalist poetry of the likes of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan in the first half of the nineteenth century, the coverage of the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–1857 in the Irish nationalist press, studies on Irish folklore by the likes of Lady Jane Wilde in the second half of the century, the emergent Aryanist discourse in some Irish nationalist circles after the mid-nineteenth century, Irish nationalist responses to the Iranian “Great Famine” of 1870–1872, references to Iran in the context of Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, Irish nationalist advocacy of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, and cross-territorial expressions of solidarity during and after the First World War. The only exception to the general timeline covered in the book is the section on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which serves as a means of interrogating the post-1922 shrinking world horizon of nationalist historiography and politics in the Irish Free State.

• In its specifically “Iran”-themed approach, this book highlights both the greater centrality of Iran in Irish nationalist antiquarianism after the late eighteenth century and in subsequent Irish nationalist folklore studies than hitherto acknowledged. At the same time, this book goes beyond explorations of Irish nationalist appropriations of “Iran” (past and contemporary) as reflected in a wide spectrum of debates ranging from antiquarian theories of Irish origins to studies on Irish folklore and mythology, as well as the manifold utilizations of Iran in Irish nationalist literature. Additionally, this book examines sporadic Irish nationalist interest in contemporary developments in Iran after the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably in the form of the protracted and multivalent Irish nationalist advocacy of Iranian sovereignty from 1907 to 1921. In the process, this book also highlights the persistently “worlded" framework of Irish-nationalist self- imaginations.

This book aims to increase our knowledge and deepen the understanding of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust by examining personal circumstances and characteristics of Jewish resistance members and the formation of small Jewish resistance groups during the Second World War. It is a carefully researched, fully annotated and referenced case study that examines primary and secondary sources, including evidence from oral history interviews with resistance members and documentary evidence, which have been conducted and was collected by the author during almost 40 years of research on the subject but were previously unavailable in English. It uses a qualitative analysis to investigate individual and small group manifestations of Jewish resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. This study contributes to historiography, but its focus enables a different interpretation and displays a new view of history. It is a scholarly work, but it is also easily accessible for students and general readers interested in this subject.

Leaders are persons generally expected to excel at inspiration, persuasion and management. Few leaders, however, excel at all three equally. ‘Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership’ examines one leader – Dwight Eisenhower – who was particularly adept at management. Rising through the ranks of the interwar US Army, Eisenhower became a valued staff officer who went on to lead the Allies to victory in Europe in the Second World War. From there, after becoming NATO’s first supreme allied commander, Europe, he served two terms as president of the United States.

Eisenhower’s leadership skills were sophisticated in their outward simplicity. He led not by force of personality alone but also by careful and deliberate mastery of team-building; by empathy for friends as well as foes; and by an uncommon respect for, and sometimes even deference to, the positions and interests of the members of his team. It was also remarkable that Eisenhower did all that less by the informal manipulation of relationships than through the formal structures of command and of government, which he crafted to produce the decisions and actions that he sought in the national interest.

‘Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership’ examines Eisenhower’s unique art of collaborative leadership by tracing its roots in his family and education, and then by measuring it against the standards of some classic texts by scholars of leadership and the presidency. It is a concise portrait of one of America’s most important and talented leaders, and a case study in sound leadership.

Although modern tourism did not begin in Ireland, it developed there rapidly after 1750, making the island one of the first counties in which tourism became a driving economic and cultural factor. Based on the accounts of British and Anglo-Irish travelers, this book charts the development of tourism in Ireland from its origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the country's emergence as a major European tourist destination a century later. Ireland presents an example of how modern tourism developed as a self-organizing system. There were no tourist boards, no planning commissions, no government grants and no consultants.  Apart from some basic infrastructure, such as roads and hostelry, most of the elements needed to support tourism in Ireland emerged without over-arching planning, and coordination largely through the generally uncoordinated actions of landlords, entrepreneurs, and the peasantry.

Given its scenic attractions and proximity to Great Britain, Ireland’s position as a tourism Mecca might seem inevitable. Yet tourism in Ireland, as anywhere else in the eighteenth century, had to be invented. Mountains and lakes had to be reconfigured in the public imagination as tourist sites. Through the descriptive accounts of travel writers the sites had to be identified and defined in ways that made them attractive and meaningful to potential visitors. Landlords often opened and organized the sites for visitors. However, the actual activities on the ground - what the tourists viewed and experienced - evolved out of the interaction between the visitors and the veritable army of peasant guides, jarvies, vendors, porters, and beggars who greeted and served them. These contacts combined with British stereotypes regarding the Irish to create distinctly 'Irish' tourist experiences.

In addition to period travel writing, this work draws upon recent scholarship in the fields of tourism and travel studies to produce the first investigation of the history of the initial century of Irish tourism.

Drawing on the work of Hegel, this book proposes a framework for understanding modernity in the Muslim world and analyzes the discourse of prominent Muslim thinkers and political leaders with reference to some of the most significant markers of modernity.

This study closely examines the works of nine major Islamic thinkers in twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Mohammad Iqbal, Abul Ala Maududi , Sayyid Qutb , Fatima Mernissi, Mehdi Haeri Yazdi, Mohammad Mojtaehd Shabestari, Mohammad Khatami, Seyyed Hussein Nasr and Mohamad Arkoun.

By discussing these thinkers, the book traces the genealogy of major strands of consciousness in some crucial parts of the contemporary Islamic world and their relations to significant features of the modernity, such as human and individual subjectivity and agency, freedom, domination, culture of mass democracy, human rights, women’s rights, political activism and participation, economic ethos and views on forms of property ownership, as well as social and cultural pluralism.

This book is about changing social relationships. The authors focus on the question of what social relations make for successful science and technology policies. In particular, the various chapters illustrate what happens at different social interfaces, such as between policy makers and researchers, and between the users and producers of knowledge. In other words, they are interested in the knowledge networks that are emerging between the many different actors involved in the development of science and technology.' Science and Technology Policy for Development' is the outcome of a workshop that brought together scholars and policy makers from the global South and the North, from private and public organizations, to review their experiences. What unites the authors is a common concern for research–policy linkages. In this context, research was taken to mean any systematic effort to increase the stock of knowledge, and 'policy' as any purposive course of action followed by an actor or set of actors. Linkages are seen as the communication and patterns of interaction among the actors involved. Such patterns may consolidate into knowledge networks in which information is evaluated or prioritized. A number of authors stress the communication aspect of such patterns, especially in the form of dialogue between actors or, through them, between institutions like ministries, universities or companies. The subtitle of this book reflects this orientation: 'Dialogues at the Interface' refers to communication between these different institutions. A must read for students of development economics, professionals in the sector and policy-makers alike.

Vyāsa is the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and 'Vyāsa Redux' examines the many paradoxical dimensions of his narrative virtuosity in the poem where the poet is both the creator of the work and a character within it. The book also studies elements in the poem which have been received by the late Bronze Age poets who composed the figure of Vyāsa, elements that reflect kinship, polity and modes of mnemonic inspiration. Three paired concepts function within the poem’s narrative process: first, the central approach of the book is founded upon the distinction between plot and story, that is, the causal relation of events as opposed to the temporal relation of events. Second, much of the argument then engages with how this distinction relates to the difference between the preliterate and literate phases of our present text. Third, the nature of how inspiration functions and how edition operates becomes another vital component in our analytic process explaining how Vyāsa becomes a dramatic, causal and at times prophetic character in the poem’s narration as well as its originator.

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. It begins with an introduction summarizing the work that has already been done in this area and demonstrating the author’s own method. While many of the devices the book highlights have been discussed before and while there has been some scholarship on the poetic line as a unit, how lines end has not received much critical attention, and particularly not in the critical work on Renaissance poetry.

The main part of the book is divided into three chapters: one on rhyme; one on enjambment; and one on the sestina. Rhyme is perhaps the most obvious kind of line ending; it was a contentious subject in the English Renaissance. Scholars then debated whether rhyme was necessary or even advisable. Enjambment, in which the end of a line occurs part of the way through a phrase, was especially common in dramatic poetry. In lyric poetry as well, however, it was an important tool for poets. The sestina is a complex form in which matters are the (usually unrhymed) end words, which vary according to a set scheme. There are other technically demanding forms in the Renaissance that focus on end words, but the sestina is the most extreme.

These are the most significant kinds of line endings used by English Renaissance poets. Each chapter provides one or two main poetic examples, but the book considers a range of poems from the period. The book ends with a brief afterword, wherein the author’s findings are summarized.

This book has a double agenda. First, it is a series of free-standing essays dealing with the fraught question of regulation in its multiples guises: economic, social, political, cultural and psychological. At the same time, it serves as a companion volume to the re-edition of Kaplan’s landmark ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV’, which first appeared in 1976. The chapters that unfold reveal how Kaplan’s thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and sociopolitical environment, and to some of the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. This study is conceived as a commentary on and a dialogue with ‘Bread, Politics’ and with researchers who have written in and around the concerns of that book.

Kaplan treats themes with which readers of his first book are conversant: the matrix motif of regulation; agriculture; markets; collective action and the moral economy; the people; order and disorder; the parlements in the age of the Economic Enlightenment; the king and kingship; the monarch and his ministers in the elaboration and execution of public policy; the new historiography of political economy; and the old, persistent tragedy of famine, understood as the problem of food insecurity in its less virulent incarnations.

Kaplan engages them all with keen interest, and his discussion is “problem”-oriented. The author focuses largely on the questions that he considered, or failed to raise or resolve, in his inaugural work. The unity of outlook derives from the triangulation between the ‘Bread, Politics’ of 1976, a dense selection of the scholarship of the past four decades, and the critical gaze that Kaplan directs toward both. Kaplan remains faithful to the premise of ‘Bread, Politics’: that the subsistence question, broadly construed, is at the core of eighteenth-century history, and that the issues joined by the struggle over liberalization have marked French (and European/Atlantic) history ever since. These issues continue to shape our destiny today through the bristling tension between liberty and equality, and the debate over the necessity, legitimacy and character of regulation.

The word “occupation” is not heard in classrooms on the Hebrew University campus, at the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem. The “war outside” is not spoken of. Israeli and Palestinian students unsettle this denial for the first time in a practice-led course on human rights in the reality around them. 

Readers join the students for a walking tour of the Palestinian neighborhoods surrounding the Mt. Scopus campus to explore the complex relations between education, civil engagement, and the occupation. A short walk from the campus of the best university in Israel and one that is outstanding by global standards takes us to the neighboring village of Issawiyye. Here readers learn with the students about the poor education in East Jerusalem, where most youth have no access to higher education. The tour continues to Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood bordering the campus, where, after four decades of legal procedures, the Israeli courts authorized the police to evict Palestinian families from their homes so that Jewish settlers could occupy them. The tour then takes the students and readers to the abandoned village of Lifta. Here, in the magnificent historical village, Israeli and Palestinian students debate the 1948 Nakba and their own denial.

Back into the classroom on campus, when the past and present are discussed and the pain of others is acknowledged, Palestinian and Israeli students who engage with one another for the first time can share hope.

This important study investigates how Austen worked with, and played upon, the cracks and faultlines which time had uncovered in the ideals of polite conversation. In a wide-ranging argument combining intellectual history and literary stylistics, Bharat Tandon explores such activities as flirtation and ventriloquism, in order to show how a form of conversational morality is what Austen's novels both describe and set out to achieve. At the same time, he surveys readers' reactions to Austen, from the nineteenth century to the present day, in order to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 'ethical' criticism. Written in a lively and accessible style, 'Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation' offers a re-evaluation of Austen's career that will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

We are concerned about the role of the courts, particularly judges, in guaranteeing justice. We are impressed with the success of the courts in Canada that are using what is called judicial dispute resolution (JDR). We also describe similar efforts in other parts of the world wherethe court helps parties resolve their differences in a timely way, not by deciding who is right and wrong, but by assisting the parties in resolving their differences and mendingtheir relationships.The judges who do this mediate, rather than adjudicate. 

All judges, worldwide, have responsibility for and authority over the procedures that are used in their courtrooms. This book describes the ways in which a judge can facilitate problem-solving between litigants. JDR is similar to mediation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR),as it is sometimes called, but it is provided by a judge, not a private mediator (as in the United States). This increases the chances of success. A judge, unlike a private mediator, can give the parties a definitive forecast of the likely legal outcome they can expect if their case proceeds to trial. JDR also affords the parties substantial assistance in working out the terms of a mutually agreeable outcome, in the setting of the courthouse (not a lawyer’s office),and in the form of a court order signed by the judge. From what we have seen, such outcomes are very likely to be viewed as fair by all parties. There is no downside, because if JDR fails, the matter proceeds to trial with a different judge who knows nothing of the parties’ earlier efforts to settle. Additionally, what has happened in Canada is that the mediating parties, who like the help the judge is providing, can ask to turn their voluntary JDR process into a binding procedure, where if they cannot reach a complete agreement, they can ask their JDR judge to impose a final decision– which they can help to craft.

This book describes how JDR has worked for several decades in multiple provinces in Canada. We review the role of the Chief Justice in setting up JDRs for complicated (multi-party or other complex) cases. Very little has been written about JDR because all the records have remained confidential. We can tell this story now because we have been given exclusive access to the parties (including the JDR judges) and the records in nine carefully selected cases. 

Our book looks at the role judges play in ensuring justice – how that role has changed and could continue to evolve in North America and worldwide. The JDR process described in this book has resulted in agreement in 80% or more of all JDR cases in Canadian courts.

Clearly, judges need to be trained as mediators to make JDR work. In some cases (such as those in which harm to children and jurisdictional challenges are at stake), there needs to be a trial. But in most other cases, including criminal matters and those where restorative justice is the goal, litigants are best served by JDR rather than formal court proceedings. JDR has the official imprimatur of the court, as well as the judges’ direct involvement, turning informally negotiated agreements into enforceable court orders. This book explains exactly how this happens. With the help of our Harvard Law School students, we provide a Teaching Appendix that summarizes our nine case studies in detail. While we present the general lessons of the cases in the main text, the Appendix analyzes each case from the standpoint of a variety of legal specialties and highlights the differences between JDR and ADR.

We believe that the courts will be better able to deliver justice if they equip judges to use JDR. 

The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the principles of multicriteria analysis (MCA), and a series of case studies that illustrate its application to a variety of environmental decision-making problems, ranging from the siting of facilities with critical environmental effects to Natural Park planning, and from the prioritisation of environmental restoration interventions to the assessment of the impact of tourism infrastructures.

Chapter 1 introduces the principles of MCA and describes the main stages of a generalized MCA process, by providing details and references to support the implementation of each stage. Chapter 2 reviews the application of MCA for a specific field of environmental decision-making: nature conservation. The objective is twofold: to take stock of past experiences by investigating how key stages of the MCA process have been performed, and to compare findings with best practices in order to provide recommendations for successful applications.

In Chapter 3, a case study about landfill site selection is presented. The method is based on the combination of stakeholder analysis and spatial MCA to first design possible sites for a landfill, and then rank them according to their suitability. Chapter 4 presents an application of MCA to support protected area planning. The case study illustrates the process of proposing a zoning scheme for a natural park, by combining MCA and multiobjective evaluation. Chapter 5 addresses the problem of forest landscapes restoration. In this case study, spatial and non-spatial MCA are applied to first identify forest reforestation priority areas, and then design landscape-scale reforestation options aimed at improving both ecosystem quality and human living conditions. [NP] The last case study, described in Chapter 6, shows how MCA can be combined with GIS-based indicators to assess and compare the environmental impacts of proposed ski areas in a mountain watershed. Finally, Chapter 7 provides some conclusions about the potential of MCA to support environmental decision-making, and about the set of skills required for successful MCA applications.

This work is guided by the idea that Wittgenstein’s thought opens the door to a more profound break with the philosophical tradition than has been generally recognized. It brings this insight to bear on some basic problems of philosophy. 

Wittgenstein’s work has been assimilated to the analytic tradition in such a way that its radical character has been made nearly invisible. In fact, Wittgenstein formulates a basic critique of a predominant conception in contemporary analytic philosophy, according to which language can be seen as a formal structure describable in general terms. This conception neglects the profound context-dependence of the way things said are to be understood, thus imposing a schematic view of the connections between words and life. By distancing us from the life we live with language, it makes the problems of philosophy come to appear intractable. In this work, the attempt is made to show how philosophical confusions are to be overcome through attending to the actual use of words in conversation. The questions discussed belong to what would commonly be called the philosophy of language and of logic, ethics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. 

The formal view of language is connected with a tendency, deeply entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition, to view human life in terms of dichotomies such as that between thought and behaviour, between the intentional and the non-intentional, between the mental and the corporeal, dichotomies which have given rise to philosophical bewilderment. The road to liberation from that bewilderment goes through the dissolution of those dichotomies by taking note of the variety of ways in which human thought and speech are bound up with human action and reaction.

Several of the essays will contain attempts at interpreting key passages from Wittgenstein’s work, but they will also contain some criticisms of Wittgenstein as well as of certain common ways of reading him; however, their main purpose is not to interpret Wittgenstein but to address the problems raised in their own right. 

Like many of the world’s iconic coastal cities, Boston faces potentially severe impacts from climate change. Depending on global emissions, Boston could face several feet of sea level rise this century, which would leave many parts of the city subject to tidal and storm flooding. Precipitation events could become more frequent and extreme, and its already-humid summers could become dangerously hot, with most days over 90 degrees. Today, Boston is a booming city with a growing population, a glittering new waterfront neighborhood, world-class universities and a strong economy. Its future risks and opportunities related to climate change are shaped by the 400-year environmental, social and economic history of the city’s development.

As part of Anthem’s series, Climate Change and the Future of Boston describes how Boston’s history and current context shape future climate impacts and examines the mitigation and adaptation strategies the city has taken. Boston is a leader in acknowledging the problem of climate change; it has set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, among other climate-related goals. It has also developed science-based climate models and undertaken a robust planning process to identify strategies to protect its waterfront from flooding and increase its resilience to other climate-related impacts. Its mayor has embraced a progressive Green New Deal for Boston emphasizing the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. But the city also faces structural challenges, such as aging infrastructure, historic racial inequities, rising gentrification and income inequality and ongoing political and regulatory obstacles that hinder efforts to adapt in an efficient and just manner. The book concludes with a set of forward-looking scenarios about what the future may have in store for the city and the lessons it holds for other coastal cities struggling with these challenges.

Water Security in the Middle East explores the extent and nature of water security problems in transboundary water systems in the Middle East. This collection of essays discusses the political and scientific contexts and the limitations of cooperation in water security.

The contributors argue that while conflicts over transboundary water systems in the Middle East do occur, they tend not to be violent nor have they ever been the primary cause of a war in this region. The authors place water disputes in larger political, historical and scientific contexts and discuss how the humanities and social sciences could contribute more towards this understanding. They also contend that international sharing of scientific and technological advances can significantly increase access to water and improve water quality. While scientific advances can and should increase adaptability to changing environmental conditions, especially climate change, national institutional reform and the strengthening of joint commissions are vital. The contributors indicate ways in which transboundary cooperation may move from simple and intermittent coordination to sophisticated, adaptive and equitable modes of water management.

'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' is a unique study of rural development in South India, concluded over a twenty-year period. Set against the context of international, national and state policies, the book focuses on a wide number of themes, including the stagnation of the ‘green revolution’, growing differentiation and inequality, the ecological crisis, resistance to reform, corruption and the enduring need for state intervention in rural development. Written by an international team of young scholars under the direction of Dr Harris-White, 'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' draws together a profound analysis of a broad range of issues to provide a masterly overview of overall rural development. Its highly original methodology and findings will be of considerable interest for development policy.

International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. Adopting a qualitative methodology through interviews and ethnographic observations with cohorts of international student workers from sub-Saharan Africa, the study presents a holistic picture of the lived experiences, through employment practices, of this group of student-migrant-workers. The study aims to offer contributions to the existing body of literature in two principal ways. First, it accounts for the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. The study highlights that these students are forced to contend with intersecting forms of insecurities in their labour market encounters. This reifies their dependence on certain forms of employment and relationships, and renders them increasingly susceptible to unfavourable work conditions including low pay, exploitation, discrimination and abuse. This aspect of the study is concluded by advancing an argument that higher education institutions, as the primary sponsors of these students, must do more to forearm them with candid insights on what to expect of the temporary employment market and furnish them with a comprehensive knowledge of their accruable employment rights. 

For the second contribution, adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and interrogates their agency in their efforts to derogate from these rules. These derogations are conceptualised as ‘semi-legality’, an analytical construct that marks an indeterminate halfway point between utter illegality and compliance, as it applies to labour. The study highlights that there are two discernible plots towards enabling semi-legal employment and evading detection thereof. The first involves the students undertaking work with different employers simultaneously; meanwhile, the second entails students contracting for work through the use of private limited companies as a trading structure. The study argues that the specifics of the student’s violation of visa rules has profound distinctive implications for their legal consciousness’ disposition and more so the manner in which they simultaneously resist and make recourse to the law and its institutions towards resolving workplace grievances. 

Featuring short stories “Shadow Wife,” the tale of the vengeful swordsman prodigy Hisama Sakakibara, and “The Crawler,” the story of stubborn treasury official Genbei Chitsugi, this masterpiece collection of historical ghost stories depicts the pathos of lower-class samurai who live for and are held captive by the sword.

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the leading figures of Pan-African thought and activism in the twentieth century. As a sociologist, Du Bois wrote much about the historical and social circumstances of African Americans while often acknowledging the African historical background driving much of African American, or Negro, culture. In 1946, Du Bois published The World and Africa, which was a culmination of previous attempts at penning a narrative of African history beginning with his 1915 publication The Negro, in which he included the social-historical experience of African Americans within the continuity of African history. This book delivers for the first time a comprehensive Afrocentric investigation and critique of Du Bois’s writings on African history. The book argues that while Du Bois presented at the time a strong critique of the Eurocentric construction of African history, many of Du Bois’s descriptions and arguments about African people and history were likewise flawed with interpretations that projected the cultural subjectivities of Europe. Further, while Du Bois rightfully presents the historical relationship between African Americans and Africa as a justification for Pan-African activism, this book contends that Du Bois’s failure to center African culture instead of race leads to superficial justifications for Pan-African unity. Due to the history of slavery and colonialism, African Americans and other African diasporic people face unique challenges regarding identity. This book posits that the reconstruction of an African cultural-historical matrix would have served Du Bois in better ways than the use of the racial paradigm. Therefore, Adé offers his own African World Antecedent Methodology (AWAM) as a tool for scholars to assist in piecing together the African cultural-historical matrix of diasporic African people. There are three approaches in the AWAM methodology: Kanna (sameness), Fanna (similarity), and Naani (uniqueness), which applied together functions in providing a framework for reconstructing the past lifeways of African people transgenerationally and transcontinentally, as well as reaffirming the cosmological rationale for various aspects of African cultural continuity and cultural unity extant among the African diaspora.

International efforts to ensure that armed forces meet the requirements of IHL so that the protection of civilians and detainees in armed conflict is increased continue to face implementation challenges that compromise their effectiveness. This includes, for example, the operations of the International Criminal Court, or the nascent norm of Responsibility to Protect. Relying on initiatives such as these also means that before pressure can be brought to bear on those who violate IHL, irreparable damage is done to victims’ lives and dignity. 

At the same time, the ICRC has grown to recognize that its traditional approach of informing militaries about IHL and emphasizing the incorporation of IHL principles into military policies, doctrines, and educational and training curricula, while healthy measures, are not by themselves sufficient to keep soldiers from not complying with IHL and injuring or killing civilians and detainees. Importantly, this recognition has been driven by empirical data on IHL training effectiveness, and it has been coupled with an understanding that soldiers need to internalize IHL principles to ensure they comply with them. The ICRC has realized that the role played by military leaders, both officers and NCOs, in establishing a sense of positive military identity and professionalism can lead to the development of a values-oriented culture that includes IHL compliance.

Using case studies of empirical assessment in IHL and IHL-related training, as they have occurred over the last 20 years, this book illustrates for military leaders and both civilian and military IHL instructors the many different ways empirical assessment can be used to measure training effectiveness long before troops take to the field. The results of these assessments can also be used to support the deliberate creation of better IHL training curricula and programs, especially ones that emphasize the importance of relying on multidisciplinary teams supporting military leaders as they directly engage with their troops on the ethical and moral issues as well as the legal issues raised by armed conflict. This book also looks to the future and considers the potential of war video games to serve as an effective training platform for young soldiers.

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on key processes of gendered change by exploring how macro-structural processes of social transformation interface with everyday life-worlds to generate new contestations and contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and on the relations between genders.

Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change are portrayed. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

The chapters take the reader inside the university classroom as well as the NGO, the urban slum and the rural health clinic; they visit the Pentecostal church, the call centre and the beaches of Goa; they venture into the men’s rights group, the court room and the anti-land acquisition rally; they engage with Maoist writings and the ideology of neoliberal governance and they analyse the use of grinders, mixers, make-up, smart phones and solar photovoltaic mini-grids – to name but a few.

The book examines the impact of aid to the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip from the 1993 Oslo Agreement up to 2013. It attempts to go beyond the general notion that the Israeli occupation is the main instrument of control and de-development and rather tries to investigate these aspects and the dynamics that have surrounded foreign aid delivery in the Territory. At the socio-economic level, the book explores how donors’ definition of partner for peace has exacerbated socio-economic inequalities within the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. The book also looks at how foreign aid has been used as an instrument for particular groups to advance politically, and through this socially and economically. Hence, the book attempts to investigate the resultant socio-economic imbalances within Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.

The book employs the concept of trusteeship. According to this concept, the book argues how aid agencies use development assistance to impose forms of control and governance over underdeveloped people. The book also investigates how trusteeship works under the general assumption that development intervention is designed to a) assist underdeveloped people overcome their socio-economic problem; b) protect developed people from the surplus people (underdeveloped) who are perceived as a threat to the developed world, thus required development intervention. 

The book also explores the extension of control over the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip by examining foreign aid delivery through the Palestinian Authority, the NGO sector, and UNRWA. It proposes that the ‘partner for peace’ paradigm essentially used to govern the relationship between Western doors and the Palestinian Authority demonstrates that the Palestinian Authority had to fulfil security interests that best serve the interests of Israel rather than the Palestinians.

If governments and policymakers agree on the principles of responsibility to protect (R2P), then why do they continue to ignore them and deal with violations of human rights ineffectively? ‘Responsibility to Protect and Prevent: Principles, Promises and Practicalities’ explores the evolution of R2P, a principle which – according to its supporters – has evolved into a new type of responsive norm for how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. Arguing that the R2P ethos has been misunderstood and used ineffectively, this work defends the validity of R2P and urges for a more practical understanding that moves beyond theory.

The progression of R2P from an initial concept to formal ratification has been a very difficult one, with a great deal of disagreement over its validity as a substantive norm in international affairs. The disagreement is not that protection or prevention are unimportant, nor that the international community does not have at least some responsibility to try to stop extreme human rights violations. Rather, it is primarily about how the fine-sounding R2P principles are supposed to work in practice, and the utility of such principles when governments and policymakers continue to ignore the basic premise of protection.

This volume presents a number of important arguments that are directly related to the state vs. human security debate, with a critical analysis of the nexus between the protection verses prevention theses Through the case study of the Libyan Crisis, Janzekovic and Silander offer an example of the discrepancy and confusion regarding how R2P should be applied in practice, and support the claim that prevention should be more than an adjunct to protection.

Narrative medicine is a growing field of research and teaching. It arises from an interdisciplinary interest in person-centered medicine and is regarded as a major innovation in the medical humanities. 

This anthology is the first of its kind which integrates chapters on legitimizing narrative medicine in education, practice and research on analyzing types of patient narratives and on studying interventions applying vulnerable or shared reading, creative writing, or Socratic dialogue as a means of rehabilitation and mental care. In her foreword, Rita Charon, who originally coined the term ‘narrative medicine’ recognizes this expansion of the field and name it ‘system narrative medicine’. 

The anthology is made up of four parts. The first describes narrative medicine as a diverse field. The second presents narrative medicine in the teaching of healthcare professionals. The third part provides examples of the application of narrative medicine in clinical practice, and the final part deals with narrative medicine in intervention research.

Underscoring the unique and multifaceted interactions between ancient India and ancient China, ‘India and China: Interactions through Buddhism and Diplomacy’ collates the classic works of the preeminent Indian scholar of Chinese history and Buddhism Professor Prabodh Chandra Bagchi (1898–1956). The collected essays of this volume range from those that examine the ancient names for India in Chinese sources, to those that investigate Indian influences on Chinese thought, analyze the beginnings of Buddhism in China, and explore the letters exchanged between the Chinese monk Xuanzang (Hiuan-Tsang) and his Indian friends. Also included are a variety of Bagchi’s short articles, as well as English translations of a number of his Bengali essays.

Further insight into Bagchi’s work is provided by the renowned scholars Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Akira Yuyama, who discuss respectively Bagchi’s contribution to Chinese studies in India and to the wider understanding of India-China interactions. With its wide-ranging and thorough investigation of both Sino-Indian Buddhism and cultural relations between the two ancient civilizations, ‘India and China: Interactions through Buddhism and Diplomacy’ will be an invaluable text for anyone interested in cross-cultural exchanges between India and China, Buddhism, or Asian history.

“The Old World, the New World, and the Creation of the Modern World, 1400–1650: An Interpretive History” provides a unique look at the early years of discovery and colonization of the Americas, and at the impact of this period on the historical development of both the New and Old Worlds. Through innovative use of visual evidence and original source material, Aaron M. Shatzman examines both the physical (economic and social) and the psychological impact of voyages of discovery and exploration on Europeans, discussing the ways in which Europeans “used” the New World both as a place to get rich and as a place to create ideal societies and expand God’s kingdom on Earth.

Providing the essential facts in conjunction with expert analysis, the volume invites readers to tackle a number of important questions so as to construct their own analysis of the evidence presented. A number of important historical issues are broached, including: the origins of slavery and racial prejudice; the significance of the wilderness (frontier) in shaping the future of the Americas; and the importance of the discovery and settlement of the Americas in the transition from a pre-modern to a modern world. Uniquely, the volume goes beyond the standard textbook formula of “what, when and where” to delve more deeply into the specific (as well as the wider) significance of historical developments, thereby providing the platform for a textured, interpretive understanding of the history of the Atlantic world.

Bestselling author Agatha Christie’s crime and mystery novels have been translated into over 100 languages. E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has been translated into 52 languages. Australian author Richard Flanagan’s Booker award-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North has been published in 42 territories, a term which captures both languages and national places of publication. Why do some novels circulate internationally, or ‘travel’—as the publishing industry describes the global trade in publishing rights to books—more than others? Why do some not ‘travel’ at all?
In Conditions of Access new data is gathered and analysed and theories about international circulation are tested, leading to a new and illuminating picture of the complex factors that contribute to a book’s value inthe global publishing trade. Publishing rights to novels are rarely sold, but instead are conditionally exchanged in a space introduced as the ‘global literary marketspace’. To measure, map and understand the processes that facilitate the exchange of rights and, therefore, international circulation into and within this space – ‘conditions of access’ – the book takes a three-fold approach. Firstly, it draws on the constellation of information associated with these licences to gather comprehensive empirical data hosted in a new type of bibliographic database– a transaction database. Secondly, it employs cutting edge digital cartographic techniques to map and analyse this data. Thirdly, it introduces an innovative interpretive frame developed to capture the interplay of power, prestige and networks revealed by the data, and to accommodate a country’s unique geographic, cultural and linguistic position.
Using this ground-breaking approach, Conditions of Access identifies the way in which the rights trade works from a structural perspective, introduces a model by which to trade rights and assess threats, and using Australia as a case study, provides a new account of one nation’s literature on the international stage. Via this data-driven, sociological account of circulation, exploring the different ‘routes’ to access in the early twenty-first century, this book uncovers an international literary narrative that runs counter to the Australian domestic narrative, in which male authors receive more critical attention, literary novels are in decline, and prestige is not associated with commerce or genre.By measuring and mapping the circulation of international rights to Australian novels, Conditions of Access finds concrete, measurable and often surprising answers to the question: What is the international value of contemporary Australian literature? It tells a new story of how and why literature doesn’t just circulate but is able to circulate, globally.

This book investigates the practice of writing and self - translating phenomenon within the context of mobility, through the analysis of a corpus of narratives written by authors who were born in Italy and then moved to English-speaking countries. Emphasizing Writing and self-translating as practices, which exist in conjunction with a process of redefinition of identity, the book illustrates how these authors use language to negotiate and voice their identity in (trans)migratory contexts.
(Trans)migration refers to a process through which mobile subjects are “firmly rooted in their new country,” but at the same time maintain “multiple linkages to their homeland” (Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1995: 48). The (trans)migrant experience is at the core of the writing and self-translating performances of the authors. It constitutes the reason behind their writing and self-translating. The need to express their voice in both languages leads them to produce a double text. Indeed, they attempt to achieve a simultaneous existential embeddedness, by means of a simultaneous linguistic embeddedness. On the other hand, the (trans)migrant experience constitutes the object of their activity. It is recreated in the text, on both the level of content and language. From a thematic perspective, it appears in the rethinking of a number of traditional tropes. From a linguistic perspective, it emerges through code-switching, as well as through a specific form of self-translation, which is located at the juncture between writing and translating.
The book investigates the experience of transmigration in relation to what Yildiz calls “the monolingual paradigm” (2012). According to this paradigm, individuals possess one exclusive mother tongue—the language we learn from our parents and grow up with. The mother tongue ties individuals to specific linguistic, cultural, and physical spaces, defining their identity within precise borders and boundaries. Nonetheless, transmigration challenges the monolingual paradigm, as transmigrants forge associations with multiple spaces. Experiencing the “impossibility of the monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz 2012), the authors resort to writing and Self-translating to recreate their transmigrant experience on the page and challenge monolingual assumptions about language and identity. Indeed, their literary productions express and exploit the creative and existential possibilities of a life at the crossroads.

The essays presented in this volume constitute a progression from general considerations related to the ‘etic’ (in the geertzian sense of the word) approach to South Asian cultural productions, to peculiar and detailed investigations of them. Such a sequence is meant to develop a renovated and systemic approach, through which these specific cultural materials should be interpreted: materials not to be read in isolation, nor with an overemphasised concern for cultural relativity. Rather, they should be viewed as meaningful examples of sophisticated intellectual and cultural procedures to be included into a broader comparative discussion, also in order to increase the quality and the depth of such debate. The studies gathered in this volume are therefore arranged to fit specific South Asian materials into larger analytical frameworks.

In self, society, religion and politics we are used to the language and discourse of Kingdom of God. But in this God is presented as an omnipotent king who is also angry at slight deviation. We get glimpses of such powerful and angry God in Old Testament as well as in many other religious traditions of the world. In such a discourse and portrayal of God, we fail to realize that God is mercy, rahim, karuna and compassion. God is our ever-awakened nurturer and He and She is continuously walking and meditating with us with mercy as well as firm challenges for self-development, mutual realizations and responsible cosmic engagement and participation.
The vision and discourse of Kingdom of God have many a time been confinedwithin a logic of power where we are prone to valorize God’s power in order to valorize our own power on Earth, especially the logic of sovereignty at the level of self and society, rather than realize God’s mercy. This has led to varieties of discourses of political theology in which we are much more preoccupied with power of God rather than God’s mercy. God here is also a powerful patriarch. Political theology from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmidt has been linked to violence in religion and politics as well. In this book, we explore the challenges of rethinking and transforming the existing and conventional discourse of Kingdom of God to Gardens of God.

This book examines and re-imagines the turbulent and intertwined lives of Akiko Yosano (1878–1942) and Tekkan Yosano (1873–1935), two poets who sparked a revolution in the world of Japanese ‘tanka’ (short-verse classical poetry).

Born in provincial Sakai, in the Osaka prefecture, the young Akiko defied expectation to become a female poet, a calling through which she met Tekkan Yosano, the figurehead poet of the iconic literary journal 'Myojo' and who would eventually become her husband. The author explores the effect of their passionate and at times tormented relationship on their hugely influential work, as well as describing each of their childhoods, as she uses documentary sources along with her storytelling abilities in order to evoke the intimate details of their lives, together and apart. The story of these two poets is interwoven with those of the other poets and family who surrounded them, while these personal stories are also situated within their wider historical context.

Sensitively and beautifully translated by Meredith McKinney, this is an intimate and personal exploration of the compelling lives of these two Japanese poets, in what the author calls 'a love letter' to their memories.

‘Fighting Scholars’ brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the editors introduce the field, providing a typology of existing literature. The second section contains the contributions of the authors, discussing their respective approaches to embodied ethnography, their use of the concept of ‘habitus’, and ethnographic findings. The third section contains a conclusion by the editors – reflecting on existing conceptions of ‘habitus’ and interdisciplinary possibilities for rethinking the concept – and an epilogue by Loïc Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume.

‘The Meetings Handbook: Formal Rules and Informal Processes’ is a comprehensive manual to the rules and issues of meetings, as well as a useful guide to understanding the informal processes that underlie the successful conduct of the business of meetings. The handbook gives the formal issues of meeting processes, including setting agendas and putting forward formal motions. It also canvasses informal aspects of meetings work, such as preparation, reading the non-verbal messages of participants, and insights into how to chair meetings and deal with those who seek to subvert the formal rules.

This handbook is a unique accompaniment to the more conventional legal books that are good formal guides. ‘The Meetings Handbook’ also includes examples of an ethical code, constitutions, agendas, and minutes. It features a reference list as well as the usual scholarly references. In order to make the work readily useable by the busy professional, the book is divided into sections that may act as ‘stand-alone’ guides to specific meetings issues and strategies.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Wildlife Corridors charts some best practices and makes some new theoretical contributions related to the design and creation of wildlife corridors in Anthropocene times. The book not only provides much of the knowledge necessary for a general and credible understanding of connectivity projects, but also makes a unique theoretical contribution to current knowledge about wildlife corridors by arguing that theories about compassion, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge should inform wildlife corridor projects.

Wildlife corridors, or connectivity projects, are necessary, because when land is set aside or used for human activities, habitats that were once contiguous become fragmented. If species are unable to move between these fragmented areas, they become at risk for inbreeding or extinction. Wildlife corridors attempt to remediate such fragmentation by restoring connectivity and creating expanses of habitat that can provide species with important bridges and points of connection between other habitats. Providing such linkages between habitats reduces these risks and helps maintain genetic diversity and a population’s health.

The book argues for a holistic approach to wildlife corridors that attempts to account for a broad and varied range of stakeholder voices, including those of the vulnerable nonhuman species that underpin the need for corridor projects in the first place. This book should appeal to general audiences and practitioners alike.

The bulk of the world’s tobacco is produced in low- and middle-income countries. In order to dissuade these countries from implementing policies aimed at curbing tobacco consumption (such as increased taxes, health warnings, advertising bans and smoke-free environments), the tobacco industry claims that tobacco farmers will be negatively affected and that no viable, sustainable alternatives exist. This book, based on original research from three continents, exposes the myths behind these claims.

Since there will be no major reduction in global demand for tobacco leaf in the short to medium term, manipulations of the tobacco industry are what really effect demand for tobacco leaf at the national level. Moreover, tobacco is not the most lucrative crop for small-scale farmers and it imposes serious negative socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts, and economically sustainable alternatives to tobacco exist.

This book counters the myths perpetuated by the industry by identifying the true drivers of demand for tobacco leaf, the sources of farmer vulnerability and dependency on tobacco production and the conditions needed for an economically sustainable transition.

Reaganism is a discourse of devotion and disqualification, combining a neoliberal negative theology of the market with a neoconservative demonization of opponents. By representing the market as a moralistic standard of perfection, a representation of goodness and freedom, Reagan’s personality cult organizes a social fantasy that shelters from inquiry the aggressivity of the market as a war of all against all. In literary theory and criticism, a homologous valuative system centered itself on the canon, which covers for exclusionary social systems by representing them as devoted agents of culture, defined as the Arnoldian study of perfection. Paul de Man argued for the displacement of this positive moralism, critiquing its referential structure for its failure to account for the arbitrariness of signification. But de Man’s proposals ultimately replace the system of culture and canon with a negative moralism, centered on literariness defined as a negative referent, a representation of the impossibility of desire to achieve its aims. 

De Man’s premises have been perpetuated in subsequent theory by persistent misrecognitions of dialectic as suspicious hermeneutics, of materialism as reference to materiality, and of demands for democratic equity as identity politics. The book traces this motivated reasoning through misreadings of Eve Sedgwick’s critique of conspiracy theory and Edward Said’s “secular criticism,” we are led back to the unexamined premises of Paul de Man’s negative moralism and the opportunistic competition of academic careerism. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus cite Sedgwick to propose “surface reading” as an alternative or supplement to the hermeneutics of suspicion. But in failing to acknowledge that Ricoeur’s definition of a method common to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in terms of suspicion is a form of “defining the opposition,” which constructs the other as a negative image of the self. Their theoretical blind spots are thus linked to political or historical blind spots, and their willingness to accept bad faith objectifications of opponents is linked to the interpretive structure of privilege, in which narcissism organizes and sanctions aggressivity.

Like Sedgwick, Edward Said interrogates the homologies among interpretive, political, and historical patterns of behaviour, discerning the implication of literary studies in the rise of Reaganism. His secular criticism proposes an alternative to Reagan’s devotion to markets as well as the humanities’ devotion to canon, but it is attacked by J. Hillis Miller and Stanley Fish as a form of referential moralism. This line of attack is predicated on de Man’s arguments for the impossibility of reference, read as an alibi for competition and opportunism. A new explanation for the connections between de Man’s literary theory and his opportunist collaboration with Belgium’s Nazi occupiers is suggested by his use of arbitrary signification to obviate solidarity and cooperation in many forms—whether it be truth as intersubjective verifiability, justice as coincidence of interests, or aesthetic harmony as the compatibility of diverse preferences. His arguments to replace logic with aesthetics as the primary criterion of judgment are homologous with the replacement of the rule of law with personal rule, an unprincipled opportunism demonstrated by both supremacist politics and market competition.

American Paraliterature examines the generative encounters of post-1968 French theory with the postwar American avant-garde. The book begins with an account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference that was organized by Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University. The conference was an attempt to directly connect the American avant-garde with French theory. At the event, John Cage shared the stage with Deleuze and Foucault introduced William S. Burroughs. This schizo-connection presents a way to read the experimental methods of the American avant-garde (Burroughs, Cage, and Kathy Acker), and how their writing creates a counterprogram to the power that Foucault and Deleuze started to articulate in the 1970s. 

While the year of the Schizo-Culture event also saw the publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, his lecture at the conference anticipated his interest in a new form of governance: biopolitics. In the lecture, Foucault argued against the “repressive hypothesis,” which he saw as an invalid theory since there was such an obvious incitement to speak about sex. One discusses sexuality so that governments can “manage” and “administer” populations. Delezue later noted on this “incitement to discourse” in his comments to Antonio Negri. Deleuze saw Foucault (along with Burroughs) as one of the earliest theorists on the control society. This new society, he argues, requires a different set of weapons than those directed against disciplinary institutions. Strikes in factories are no longer effective in an era where the production of information replaces the industrial economy. As Deleuze explained to Negri, weapons against the control society will need to “hijack” speech and “create vacuoles of non-communication.” 

The two American artists-writers at Schizo-Culture developed weapons of non-communication in their art. John Cage emptied the words in Thoreau when he applied his chance operations to literature. William Burroughs attempted to cut-up “the Word.” Yet by the mid-1980s, Kathy Acker would write how “ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language with language.” For Acker, “nonsense” does not break the institutional semiotic code of control per se. For Acker, it requires a writer to “speak precisely” in a language these codes forbid. This book considers another theory to hijack communication. Acker’s “plagiarism” appropriates canonical literature and then grafts semi-autobiographical and pornographic writing onto them. Samuel R. Delany similarly writes about how his experience in Times Square pornographic theaters creates a different discourse network, one that relies on “contact” instead of “networking.” The book concludes by moving outside the academic setting of the Schizo-Culture conference to find alternatives to capitalism's monolingual control of communication and information.

Can ethics be hacked? Can new and unexpected meaning be found in or behind established traditions of moral discourse? Does not the digital transformation challenge us to develop a digital ethics that is just as disruptive and transformative as the technologies it proposes to regulate? Would ethical hacking be the same as hacking ethics? This book attempts to answer these questions. The occasion for this attempt is the digital transformation, the advent of a global network society, the big data revolution, datafication, and whatever other terms come to mind to describe our present historical moment. In the face of this changing reality, ethics has attempted to become digital ethics. No area of personal or social life is not conditioned by the digital and everything that it stands for and everything it brings with it. Marx would probably have been overjoyed to learn that very soon there will be no more workers since robots will do the work, that everyone will own the means of production, that is, their own creativity and skills, and that a sharing economy will largely replace capitalism. But would he be happy about the prospects of a posthuman or even transhuman world in which not only intelligence but also agency and identity are distributed among heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhumans? Would he be happy at the prospect of a data-driven society in which decisions are made based on evidence and not intuition, gut feelings, cognitive bias, prejudice, experience, and inherited assumptions? Indeed, not only Marx but practically no theory or world view that has arisen within the modern period, including ethics, finds itself able to cope with the new digital world order. Instead, we are experiencing in all areas the defensive reaction of Western industrial society to the disruptive influences of digital technologies. The world is changing. The digital transformation disrupts traditional forms of order, whether it be the order of knowledge, the order of cooperative action in social organizations, or the self-understanding of human existence.

The world of Western modernity is disappearing and a new world, let us call it a global network society, is emerging in its stead. For established institutions and habits of thought, this is a threatening and highly uncertain situation. Facing up to this situation does indeed have an ethical dimension; it does call for ethics. But an adequate moral response to this situation is not and cannot be merely applying traditional values and norms to digital technologies. Nonetheless, the current discourse of digital ethics consists almost entirely of attempts to apply traditional normative ethics to the development and deployment of new technologies. The thesis of this book is that no amounts of rights and duties, of moral norms and ethical imperatives, no list of ethical guidelines or principles of good AI or ethical big data are going to have the slightest effect if they do not leave the presuppositions, convictions, and traditions of Western industrial society behind and embark upon exploring a new world with new values and new forms of responsibility and accountability. This is the challenge of hacking digital ethics. The hack, from this point of view, consists of breaking into the codes of traditional moral discourse and redesigning things so that something like digital ethics can appear unconcealed from the outworn and concealing veil of modernity. 

Perhaps, despite all the publicity and attention, the hasty founding of institutes, centers, and departments for digital ethics, the activism of non-profit organizations, and the flood of guidelines, declarations, and programs supporting ethical design, development, and deployment of technology there currently is no such thing as digital ethics. There is only modern Western ethics, that is, ethics that arose within modern Western society, that is, within a no longer viable social order and a passing historical moment. It could be that a uniquely digital ethics is waiting for the hack to come into view for the first time. One could even go so far as to claim that ethics today is fundamentally dependent upon the hack and not the other way around. It is not hacking that needs ethics; it is ethics that needs hacking. Could such an endeavor be judged by the standards it leaves behind? Can the global network society be judged by the standards of Western industrial society? What new norms take the place of the old ones? And what does ethics become, when it no longer answers to the questions of the world in which it was formed, which defined what it was, and which, whether we like it or not, no longer exists? This book is an attempt to answer these questions and open up the possibility of a digital ethics capable of addressing the problems of the global network society.

This book describes the astonishing policy failures of populist politicians in Japan. Focussing on popular tax cuts in Japan as a salutary case study over a quarter of a century since the collapse of the bubble economy, the book details their serious side effects: government debt, cuts to social security expenditure, inadequate public services and even the potential for a national default. Japan's government debt is approaching two and half times GDP, but most prime ministers have not shown concern as they do not expect to be in power at the time of financial collapse. Most voters feel the same because the timing of any future collapse is uncertain. However, if a default comes, people will experience hard times beyond their imagination. Even now, the huge level of government debt has forced cuts to social security and education expenditures, and led to reduced government services. Consequently, we need a policy reversal from tax cuts to tax increases, and the purpose of this book is to convince readers of this unpalatable truth. Tax increases can make a society more equal and can bring higher economic growth through increased social expenditure, which is the reward for increased taxation.

The book then examines the role of the workforce to economic growth. Due to the dominance of conservative political forces over a long period, workers' protections in Japan are limited, and deregulation of the workforce has led to a decline in wages since 1997. Declining wages and a reduction in social security expenditure have inevitably led to lower consumption and lower economic growth. This examination leads to the conclusion that the way forward is to restore taxation to a sustainable level. This which is necessary in order to reduce government debt, to increase expenditure on social security, education, and other essential services, and to combat growing inequality. Only by redistributing income to those who need it and will spend it, consumption will increase, and the economy will grow.