Anthem Press

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.

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.

‘Regimes of Happiness’ is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’.

Presented in two parts, ‘Regimes of Happiness’ provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specific and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or 'happiness' in the first part. The second part explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. ‘Regimes of Happiness’ is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.

‘A “Treatise on Abundance” (1638) and Early Modern Views of Poverty and Famine’ is an edited English translation of Carlo Tapia’s ‘Trattato dell’abondanza’.

Tapia (1565–1643) lived and worked in Naples, at the time the largest city in Italy and in the Spanish global empire, one of the three largest cities in Europe and a major center of artistic, musical and intellectual life in Baroque Europe. Tapia had a very distinguished career in the Spanish administration of the Kingdom of Naples and of Spanish Italy, generally serving in many offices across the kingdom, in Naples itself and in Madrid where, in 1612–24, he was a member of the Consejo de Italia (Council on Italy), the Spanish monarchy’s pre-eminent body to govern its various Italian possessions. Tapia had deep classical and juridical knowledge, and also rich experience as an administrator, including at the local level, all of which he brought to bear in the ‘Trattato’.

In the ‘Trattato’, Tapia tackled the question of how to provision the city with essential foodstuffs, a central issue for all early modern governments, and more generally the issue of how to prevent or combat famine across the kingdom’s largely rural provinces. The treatise represents the earliest systematic attempt to develop and publicize the most effective tools available to governments to fight famine and poverty. In particular, Tapia moved the discussion of these issues away from traditional religious approaches and aimed instead to offer both a theoretical understanding of the issues (based in part on his study of both classical sources and contemporary legal theories) and practical advice that could help administrators both in the provinces and in the capital.

The pace of growth in the Philippines is slower than that of many neighbouring countries, and despite increasing growth in the period before the current global financial crisis, domestic investment remained weak, and had a declining share in gross domestic product. Understanding limits to growth in the Philippines’ economy and how they may be counteracted is crucial for policy makers seeking to encourage economic development.

‘Diagnosing the Philippine Economy’ investigates the binding constraints on economic development, by following a growth diagnostics approach. Articles within this collection cover the areas of macroeconomic management; trade, investments, and production; infrastructure, human capital; equity and the social sector; poverty reduction efforts; and governance and political institutions. The studies’ findings provide insight for politicians, academicians, and economists into the issues and their potential solutions.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had realized the power of revolutionary movements within history, and considered them an essential step towards the creation of a classless society. Nevertheless, the number of failed revolutions is as high as the dreams and hopes usually related to a revolutionary change. As a global phenomenon of modernity, the history of revolutions needs to be written comparatively, and for this, a comparative model is without any doubt a necessary tool.
Such a model, namely, a comparative ten-step model, will be provided in this book, to be then used to compare revolutionary case studies. Of course, the similarities among them are of special interest, while the diversity, related to regional or national preconditions, shall not be neglected. However, a comparison promises a better and critical insight into the historical developments of revolutionary processes as such.
The present book will therefore analyze the Atlantic Revolutions at the beginning of the “long” nineteenth century to show how revolutionary processes evolved. It will use the mentioned comparative ten-step model to emphasize similarities with regard to the revolutionary developments in different parts of the world. The book thereby aims at providing a general, but deeper, understanding of revolutions as a global phenomenon of modernity while explaining how revolutionary processes evolve and develop, and how they could and can be corrupted. The revolutionary case studies discussed include the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolution.

For so long Ante Dabro hasbeen called a sculptural dinosaur that he now rejoices in the title. So why does a highly skilled and highly trained sculptor, the master of every style and technique, insist on working in the style of the Italian Renaissance? The answer is that to Dabro, every sculpture must speak to humanity, which means that it must be an element of humanity. If it does not, the sculptor has failed. Working with female models throughout his long life, he has sought to portray an essence of femininity, and therefore an essence of humanity.

Dabro believes that the ability to see what other people don’t see is a real gift. He says, ‘It’s like a star wheeling round the earth, fertilising the imagination as it goes.’ This book explores the different ways he has tried to liberate an essence of humankind, releasing the soul of a human form from its imprisoning substance, whether it be from wood, marble, stone or plaster.

The forces that have driven women and men together for eons are reflected here in breathtaking diversity in many different sculptures, from a loving kiss in one to the moment of orgasm in another, from an exquisite sculpture of his daughter to an extraordinarily brutal depiction of sexual assault. The mysterious subtitle – to still the midnight sea in the blood – is reflected as a driving principle of his work. His art reveals that we humans, even those forming the form of the tight-knit crew of a battleship, are each one ultimately alone. Even those of the same family struggle towards a solitary and private goal. Never will they reach it. They perhaps never share it and may not even be aware of what it is. Yet the struggle must continue because that is the nature of our humanity. That is the complexity revealed in Dabro’s sculptures.The author, one of Australia’s best known historians and biographers, like Dabro, wants our imaginations to soar and rejoice in the creative spirit which has driven his sculptures for more than 60years. Read’s purpose is not so much to celebrate Dabro’s every work but to magnify the creative act, that leap into the abyss, that sustains Dabro’s vision and that of every artist since humans first walked upon the earth.

Bringing together the ideas of many philosophers, among others Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Derrida, the book aims to give a coherent synthesis of ideas about change and aims to see how one can take a process view of various features of humanity, such as knowledge, relations between people, language and morality, and how, vice versa, that might contribute to process philosophy. Beginning with evolution and moving on to consider knowledge in its dynamic aspect of learning, the book takes a process view of the individual and society.

Generalised Darwinism is discussed not only in terms of biology but also in economics, organisation, language and science in terms of interactors and replicators. The key processes of variety generation, selection and transmission are fundamentally different from those in biology. Therefore, a theory of knowledge and its change is presented that in some ways is similar to evolution but also different in important ways. This theory discusses neural Darwinism. It proposes how discovery might work, in a cycle of discovery, in an interchange of stability and change, and how differences in cognition work in the combination of different sources (cognitive distance). This theory is applied to knowledge, organisations and science. The discussion explains and applies the notions of entropy and organisational focus. Recognising that absolute, objective truth is problematic, it discusses the notion of warranted assertion. The notions of sense and reference are discussed in an explanation of meaning, and the notions of order and variety in terms of langue and parole, and the role of parole in poetry. The change of meaning is further developed in terms of the hermeneutic circle to deal with order and change of meaning. It uses the notion of a script and the hypothesis of an object bias.

Ethics and morality are explored by how the individual constructs their identity and develops in their tension between authenticity and conformity in society. Aristotle’s multiple causality of action is employed to discuss power and sources of dependence and ways to deal with them. Networks as a source of identity and the decentralisation of governance to communities are discussed along with the notion of restorative justice. The concluding chapter considers the historical development and the different forms of ethics and morality, in relation to institutions, and how in evolution an instinct for benevolence has developed and is related to the intrinsic next to extrinsic value of relationships.

This project centers on one of the material drivers of local democratic processes. Too often in public, scholarly, and policy debates, conversations about participatory democracy devolve into voting rights, formal governance procedures, and other relatively abstract processes. While important, this point of view can often obscure the very immediate and material concerns of citizens, urban residents, and others that are simultaneously “citizens” of communities of varying geographic scales when it comes to – for example – the roads they travel, the electricity they consume, the schools they attend, and the water they use. The intention of this book is to examine the daily urban infrastructure needs of citizens, especially under rapid growth contexts, as a window into the broader concern with participation in governance, development, and visioning the future. 

The central premise of the book, as well as the key lesson for readers, is that public works and infrastructure are the backbone of democratic processes, and that democratic processes begin at the very local level. Without it, the process of collective governance fades beyond the immediacy of daily life. The process of imagining, financing, building, using and demolishing large, material projects such as bridges, sanitation systems and water systems in particular places are, on the one hand, an important technological and design problem. On the other hand, they are the physical manifestations of social, political, and economic relationships reflected in society, as the famous urbanist Lewis Mumford once noted (1937). The extent to which communities build physical infrastructure and which types of it says a lot about how those communities organize themselves. At the same time, the formal and informal loyalties and relationships among a community influence the types of built environment and infrastructure they get. 

Using this premise, the book describes several case studies from Southeast Asia that illustrate the embeddedness of governance structures in the built infrastructure as a way to encourage readers to consider the material, built environment stakes involved with participatory democracy as well as the importance of democratic participation in the visioning, building, and management of large-scale urban projects.

As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.

In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women’s movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women’s voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing? 

Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. 

Julia Tanney’s Meaning, Mind, and Action mounts an overarching challenge to widely held presuppositions within the practice of philosophy in its classical ‘analytic’ forms as well as in its ‘naturalist’ and ‘cognitivist’ turns, expanding upon those introduced in Rules, Reason and Self-Knowledge (2013).

Influenced by arguments of Wittgenstein, Ryle, and others, Tanney confronts the ‘platitudes’ or unalterable starting points that implicitly or explicitly ground mainstream, philosophical theorising, beginning with the ideas first, that the meaning of a complex, natural language expression such as a sentence is determined by its structure and second, that the meaning of its constituents and that such content—which must remain stable across contexts—is needed to accommodate logical transformations (embeddings in, say, negational, conditional, or propositional attitude contexts) and inferential reasoning. Opposing the ideas that this semantic or propositional content is the bearer of truth or falsehood and that to grasp a concept is to be equipped with rules which fix the relation between an expression and its reference or extension, Tanney argues, by contrast, that our practices are logically prior to their codifications. Explanations, justifications, or the appeal to principles, rules, norms are not on the same logical footing as the moves they endorse; in particular, our successful linguistic practices are not causally explained by a prior grasp of ‘meanings’. Further, to appreciate the indefinite elasticity of most, if not all, natural language expressions is to accept that there may be nothing in common by which we call a thing by the same name. Not only does this subvert the idea that the essence of our concepts can be revealed by contextually transcendent application conditions; it undermines the idea that they function to signify facts, properties, events, or relations whose nature is to be revealed by metaphysical or philosophical-scientific speculation. Construing them so would destroy the saying and explanatory power of the expressions subsumed by these concept-nouns in natural language discourses.

The papers in this volume can be roughly divided between ‘the philosophy of mind’ and ‘the philosophy of language’. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard philosophical classification stands in the way of clear thinking about many of the core issues. With this, they are united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical discussion of issues in this area, and by an insistence on an inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of these issues. None of the papers is well described as ‘exegetical’, but most of them are, in one way or another, papers about Wittgenstein, and all of them are discussions of themes central to his later work and strongly influenced by it. While the debt to Wittgenstein is enormous, many of the papers involve significant criticisms of ideas widely drawn from him, and some of these criticisms may have application to Wittgenstein himself.

The discussions of ‘the philosophy of mind’ are marked by an emphasis on the individual’s relations with others and, with that, by a detailed attention given to the human bodily form. Within the bodily form, the face is, both visually and through the voice, the locus of expression of our thoughts and feelings, and so central to our recognition of each other as beings who have thoughts and feelings. With this, it is central to the ‘attitude towards a soul’ of which Wittgenstein speaks: a phrase that highlights the centrality of an ethical dimension to any adequate philosophical treatment of our understanding of others. My relation to other creatures – both human and non-human – is distorted by the idea of an underpinning of the kind proposed in ‘the argument from analogy’; but it is distorted, too, by the idea (that we may take from Wittgenstein) that our seeing similarities between we human beings and dogs or giant squids is a condition of our ability to ascribe pain or fear to such creatures. A ‘phenomenological’ treatment of our perception of faces may be helpful in breaking down pervasive philosophical prejudices here. The irreducible sense in which the smile that we see is a smile on this face is intimately connected with Wittgenstein’s insistence on the importance of context for an ascription of thoughts and feelings: an insistence that brings out a fundamental incoherence in dominant, ‘reductive’, treatments of the notion of a persisting individual. This incoherence is intimately tied to a failure to leave a place for the notion of a particular individual, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those whom we know and care for; and, with that, a failure to leave a place for anything recognisable as love. 

The notion of a human being links the discussions of mind and language through the relation between two themes in Wittgenstein: (i) the way in which the human enters into our thinking (‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’); (ii) the way in which our thinking is a reflection of our humanity. These relations are distorted by the emphasis on ‘rule following’ and the appeal to the idea of continuing an arithmetical series that has had a central place in discussions of language originating from Wittgenstein. Approaches from this perspective fail to do justice to the idea of speech as a form of interaction between people. Rush Rhees suggests that conversation provides a better model for thinking about language. To share a language with someone is to be able to speak with her. One aspect of Wittgenstein’s ‘attitude towards a soul’ is the demand to seek forms of contact with others: including, centrally, interaction in speech with others. Such interaction is crucially dependent on trust, and on the effort to sustain conversation in the face of the unlimited possibilities of its collapse: possibilities that find expression in philosophy in various forms of scepticism. Wittgenstein’s appeal to the idea that ‘justification comes to an end’ is potentially misleading in that it may obscure the possibilities of sustaining discussion in the face of such potential collapse. While much of what we say may run into the sand if pursued in certain directions, we may take one of the tasks of philosophy to be that of bringing out possibilities of a sense of forms we would not have anticipated: and so enhancing the links between us that are involved in conversation. We do well here to shift from the familiar question ‘What conditions must something satisfy in order to be a language?’ to the question ‘What is it seriously to think of – to acknowledge in practice - an individual or group as speaking?’ A focus on this question may cast in a clearer light the character and importance of questions about the language capacities of non-human creatures. The issues here are only well understood if we recognize the primacy of the ethical in our relations to such creatures: a point well illustrated by a remarkable study of the language capacities of bonobo.

This book provides a sociological examination of gender issues concerning the evolving place and role of women in the world of heavy metal. Grounded in feminist theories of gender difference and in close dialogue with relevant thematic studies from various perspectives, the study specifically analyzes how women are perceived to ‘do gender’ by members of the heavy metal community, which has traditionally been largely composed of men and is commonly known for its hypermasculine qualities.

Relying on semi-structured interviews with self-identified fans of heavy metal, this work reveals that the respondents describe their music subculture as traditionally dominated by men. Yet, they also note distinct signs of the progress women have made in entering into and participating within the heavy metal culture on terms aspiring to equality with the men of their music community. 

Despite the changes that are perceived as legitimately positive for women, both in the world of heavy metal and in terms of women’s broader standing in society, gendered conditions driven by masculinity continue to exist for women in heavy metal. Even as women are slowly yet steadily finding their way to develop what might one day become, but as of now not yet is, a realized and acknowledged identity and culture of heavy metal feminism, patterns of masculinity continue to hamper gender equity in this area of popular culture.

Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in today’s world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self.  It is a multidimensional struggle and aspiration in which knowledge – self, social and spiritual – can play a transformative role. ‘Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations’ undertakes such a journey of transformation, and seeks to rethink knowledge vis-à-vis the familiar themes of human interest, critical theory, enlightenment, ethnography, democracy, pluralism, rationality, secularism and cosmopolitanism.

Knowledge today is imprisoned not only in structures of domination but also in varieties of dualisms – expert and the lay, cognitive and emotional – and thus we are in need of a new art of cultivating non-duality and wholeness. The present book seeks to nurture the garden of liberatory and transformational knowledge by presenting alternative pathways gathered from many different global locations and traditions. Discussing diverse thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Jürgen Habermas, Erasmus, Kant, Tocqueville, Gandhi, Foucault, Daya Krishna, Ramachandra Gandhi and Martha Nussbaum, this text seeks to rethink some important themes in the contemporary discourse of knowledge, including: knowledge as power; knowledge as emancipatory interest; evolution; rationality; power; freedom; anthropology; history; law; compassion and confrontation; epistemology; ontology; political consumerism and responsible consumption; civil society and self-development; and rights.

Offering a groundbreaking and interdisciplinary exploration of ideas about social transformation, ‘Knowledge and Human Liberation’ bridges both Eastern and Western philosophy to create a definition of transformative knowledge that defies Eurocentric thinking. Via the discourses of sociology, philosophy, religion and spirituality, the text rethinks the relationship between knowledge production and ideas to offer a unique perspective on the issue of human liberation in today’s oppressive world. The volume also features a Foreword by John Clammer (United Nations University, Tokyo) and an Afterword by Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame).

This monograph is concerned with what it sees as two complementary phenomena: that of contemporary writers of fiction who seem to have turned their backs on the traditional novel in favour of what might be termed a radical realism, alongside a more general movement towards and interest in auto/biography and memoir in the post-truth era. By reviewing the work of four authors whose trajectory to date represents engagement with novelistic as well as auto/biographical forms, it reconsiders differences between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’, as they pertain to both production and reception, including issues of generic categorization, the prevalence or exclusion of specific textual markers, and readerly expectations in navigating diverse and shifting literary cultures.

The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp (My Struggle) series is considered in English translation in relation to its cross-cultural reception; it is also placed within the context of Knausgaard’s oeuvre as a whole. Some parallels between the work of Knausgaard and that of Rachel Cusk are drawn, though in the case of the latter the focus is not so much on the memoirs but on the Outline trilogy that followed the trilogy of memoirs and the extent to which it represents both a departure from and a continuation of some of the concerns expressed in previous non-fictional works with a specific focus on Aftermath. 

Comparison of Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, with her memoir entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? allows for close textual reading of scenes initially treated in novelistic form and revisited in the memoir permitting discussion of points of similarity and difference in their treatment in relation to the constraints and affordances of genre, where these apply. Discussion of Xiaolu Guo’s memoir, Once Upon A Time in the East, focusses both on its cross-cultural reception and on the place of the memoir within the Guo corpus.In some ways all four writers are less concerned with traditional aspects of story and more concerned to deploy a range of forms, including narrative, to serve their interest in broader questions of truth, agency and self-understanding. 

Social Ecology is an emerging concept situated in the field of critical social theory and new integrative sciences that addresses the complex and interrelated relationship between nature and society, offering a perspective on how environmental issues are embedded in a social context. Border landscapes are loosely defined as interstitial spaces between territories or societies, in conflict or in competition, with fixed or moving boundaries. Scholars involved in Critical Border Studies employ interdisciplinary approaches to the study of borders, often charting new territories (scapes) to analyze and intervene in the complex geography of border zones. Adding to the flourishing literature and rising interest in borders, this volume on the social ecology of border landscapes examines case studies and examples of projects that highlight such borders within a social-ecological framework. Social Ecology as a critical social theory was originally founded by Murray Bookchin as a critique of social, political and anti-ecological trends. Other proponents of a social-ecological approach (such as Samantha Stone-Jovicich, and Michael Fabinyi, Louisa Evans, and Simon J Foale) use a less idealistic approach to social ecology than that of Bookchin, urging us to consider the important role of space and its bio-geophysical characteristics that spur both ecological and social change. This attention to locally-defined spaces—be it along the Israeli wall, former Berlin wall or the Korean Demilitarized Zone— yields important human-environmental interactions and consequences that form the basis for a social ecological interpretation of environmental adaptation and change. Social ecology as a framework has expanded to include Social-Ecological Systems (SES), which emerged from critical social and resilience theories as a means of addressing the adaptive and complex structures and processes of the social and natural world.

This edited volume is a collection of essays from a wide range of disciplines that address social-ecological systems, namely in the marginal spaces, landscapes and territorial interfaces of border zones. From theoretical and conceptual presentations on social ecology and its related actions or agency, to case studies and concrete projects and initiatives, the book uncovers a thread of contemporary thought and action on the important emerging field of border ecologies within the larger realm of critical border studies. The authors are worldwide scholars and practitioners from the fields of politics, ecological and environmental sciences, social sciences, geography, and urban and landscape planning. The publication explores how social agency (i.e. social action) can activate ecological processes and systems, creating new sustainable landscapes across tangible and intangible territorial rifts. To overcome the negative impacts of border creation and/or behaviors, the tangible and territorial, as well as the intangible social and cognitive manifestations of the rift must be addressed.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019) was one of the most influential yet controversial sociologists of the past half-century, known for both his central theoretical contribution of the “world-system” perspective and his wide-ranging empirical investigations into world capitalism, modernity, globalization, nationalism, development, Eurocentrism, anti-systemic movements and social change, among many other topics. Given Wallerstein’s recent passing – as well as his abiding call to “unthink” or “open” the orthodox social sciences – the time is ripe to reflect upon the depth and breadth of his legacy, and to examine the enduring relevance and acuity of his life and writings. The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein offers an authoritative overview of Wallerstein’s contribution to political and historical sociology; critical and novel readings of central themes in Wallerstein’s work; and up-to-date assessments of debates regarding Wallerstein’s impact on the social sciences and humanities.

In the Companion, an international assembly of leading interpreters explore a wide range of Wallerstein’s work from a variety of sociological angles and situate his scholarly contributions in relation to contemporary world challenges. The contributions in this book place Wallerstein’s prolific output at the center of their analyses in order to elucidate both world-systems analysis as a theoretical and methodological approach, and the world-system itself as a complex sociological phenomenon. The chapters first explore the context and genesis of Wallerstein’s intellectual development, the central sociological, historical and political concepts Wallerstein devised and deployed to make sense of the modern world-system, and the key contributions he made to sociological analysis, before then taking up the question of how Wallerstein’s work can be critically utilized in light of new global challenges such as decolonization, gender inequality, climate change, pandemic capitalism, and the changing character of geopolitics in the 21st century world-system.

Overall, The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein provides the most convenient and accessible guide to Wallerstein currently available for students, teachers, and researchers across the social sciences and humanities.

Yoshio Kita’s hopelessness and lack of faith in his future as an ordinary and lonely company worker crystallizes into a decision to take his own life, in what he calls ‘execution by Death by Choice’. His only remaining problem is how to spend both his remaining self-allocated seven days on earth and all his worldly money, in this darkly comic exploration of the cult of suicide in Japan, a country with one of the world’s highest rates of suicide. From fine dining with a former porn actress to insuring his life, from pursuing his ex-girlfriend to an entanglement with an assassin, Yoshio’s last seven days on earth take on unexpected twists and turns as Shimada asks his readers what it means to have the freedom to end your own life, and what becomes truly important when your days are numbered – even if it is by free choice.

Sensitively translated by Meredith McKinney, this tale of a very modern Japan is now for the first time available to English readers.   Sensitively translated by Meredith McKinney, this tale of a very modern Japan is now for the first time available to English readers.  

This volume brings together articles written by experts in the literary history of Central and Eastern European literatures. The overarching topic is the export of Socialist Realism into Europe after WWII, but the authors are interested not so much in highlighting the generalised, top-down mechanism of the project, as in the particularities of each specific national and cultural context. Research shows that in practice the introduction of the Soviet cultural model was not quite the smooth endeavour that it was intended to be; rather, it was always a work in progress, often born out of a give-and-take with the local authorities, intellectuals and interest groups. Those in charge negotiated the precarious terrain of local cultural and political controversies, caught between tradition and innovation in some countries, or, in others, between a sincere interest in the new concept of art and a complete refusal to accept new rules. Paradoxically, among all the different experiences of introducing, importing imposing Socialist Realism in the specific national contexts, the one thing in common is that each case was a response to the local conditions, a process of working through the challenge of inscribing a staunch theory into the daily reality of an unfamiliar country, language and culture.

The general approach shared by the authors is based on the premise of there having been a mutual influence between the various forces engaged in the process – be it between the ‘host cultures’ and ‘the centre’ (i.e., the Soviet authorities), traditional groups and advocates of artistic innovations, similar creative movements in different countries, or political rivals and various interest groups from the literary milieu. But the interrelationship between the texts in this collection is also dialogic: selected with a view of complementing each other, often offering different perspectives on the same issue. Thus, the socialist realist episode in the Yugoslav arts and letters can be regarded either as a short episode, a foundation of the national myth, or a chapter in the ongoing rivalry between competing parties in the creation of a national canon (Peruško, Norris, Ivić). The Czech case can be seen as exemplary strenghtening of traditional pre-war censorship mechanisms or as an awkward attempt to accommodate the Soviet version of a new positive hero (Janáček, Schmarc). The role of leftist intellectuals returning from exile, their interactions with Soviet representatives, as well as the framing of these interactions in the national cultural debate in East Germany and Hungary were both similar and distinctly different (Hartmann, Fehervary, Robinson, Skradol; Scheibner, Kalmár, Balázs). Even in the case of the loyal Soviet satellite Bulgaria, Soviet style institutions can be analysed differently, depending on whether one takes a synchronic view at the time of their imposition, or a diachronic view, observing their evolution over time (Volokitina, Doinov). At the same time, Soviet efforts directed at the creation of a unified socialist cultural sphere were quite versatile, and by no means limited to activites in specific countries (Zubok, Djagalov, Ponomarev). Finally, when it comes to the demise of Socialist Realism as a Pan-European project, having a country-specific perspective next to a more general, European picture is productive for an assessment of the true significance of the events in question (Dobrenko, Günther).

The texts are divided into sections which reflect the organising principle of the volume: an overview with a focus on specific case-studies and an analysis of distinct particularities with attention to what patterns of negotiation and adaptation were being developed in the process. Most of the contributions rely on archival resources, often previously unexplored, and all of them place the issue they are concerned with into a broader institutional, social and cultural context.

Artificial intelligence and robotics have defined and redefined work environments worldwide. Utilizing stories, news events, and academic research, the book highlights the new realities of business and leadership in the world of AI and provides meaningful insights to help executives and corporations manage and succeed.

The business and academic communities would find the book insights useful in understanding the basic notion of artificial intelligence and its impact on an organization’s success. The book discusses strategies that executives can use to best manage business in an AI environment. Written with an equally educational and fun approach, the book covers practical business strategies that will help managers succeed in an AI world.

The Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812, has an unbroken publishing history from 1814 to the present day. Since the Club’s edition of ‘Havelok the Dane’ appeared in 1828, the Roxburghe has gained a reputation as a producer of beautifully printed editions of manuscripts and reprinted early books. The founding period of the Club, however, has been viewed with less approval, often seen as a frivolous, unscholarly period of wasted years when little of value was produced by a membership composed of dilettante aristocrats.

This work offers a new narrative of the formative years of the Roxburghe Club, for the bibliomania of the Romantic period and for early nineteenth-century antiquarian culture and its relationship to the emergent popularity and status of English vernacular literature. It addresses what is shown to be a long-repeated myth: what the Club was and whether its scholarship and editing of early English literature merited respect or mockery. The book covers the make-up and membership of the Club including social and political affinities, literary and scholarly achievements and the substantial contribution made by the Club to widening awareness and understanding of earlier English writers and the establishment of a canon of English literature. This revised history offers an alternative narrative for the move between antiquarian and scholarly areas of influence in the study of English literature, and offers a plausible mechanism for the growing acceptance of vernacular English literature, both in academia and in a more general cultural sense.

This book presentsa comprehensive but succinct overview of the theoretical background, major concepts, perspectives, and contemporary application and debates in social stratification. It begins by considering what stratification means, discussing forms of social inequality as historical constructions. The book then moves into the theories that shape how people think about the division of a social order into different positions. It examines ear;uviews of social inequality by different thinkers. The book then examines how the sociological theories set frameworks for thinking about stratification and suggests an environmental approach as a way of unifying these theories. 

After a detailed consideration of the key concepts of stratification, the book focuses on contemporary stratification, using the United States as an example. A growing economic divide is one of the most notable features of the contemporary situation. The main features of this situation are globalization and the dominance of technology-finance as environmental features, an increase in immigration and demographic change, and a cultural divide linked to economic and demographic change. 

The book goes further into contemporary stratification with a discussion of the categorical inequalities of race and ethnicity, gender, social class, and intersectional combinations. It then considers possible causes of inequality, including discrimination, culture, education, and social networks. A concluding chapter considers questions of politics and power and possible policy responses to stratification. This chapter ends by encouraging readers to think about the redistribution of social, political, and economic resources.

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; the geography of biopolitics. 

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. A useful working definition of a national atlas is “a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.” This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The changing form of the national atlas provides an intriguing window into the connections between science, state, territory and power.

The primary material for this study is a close reading of thirty-seven of these national atlases from countries across the world. They represent a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive, and capitalist to communist. In total, these atlases provide a range of different state arrangements and national experiences. 

‘Hometown Hamburg’ explores the problem of social order in modern German urban history. It argues that institutionalized normative structures are the bedrock of temporal continuity in German history. In an era of various linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ historians have lost the theoretical and analytical ability to explain events over the long term. Their accounts and explanations of human activity and historical processes usually rest on an unexamined behaviourist psychological model where simple instrumental self-interest drives individual decision-making. As a result they reduce communal social action to individual preferences conditioned by external contingent events.

Such an epistemological viewpoint has prevented historians from taking seriously the notion and reality of a ‘bürgerliche’ social order, not in the sense of a bourgeois-dominated class system, but in terms of what the historian Mack Walker has defined as a “hometown” conception of communal solidarity. Belief in the value of a bürgerliche social order has provided the institutionalized basis for the remarkable continuity of German and Hamburg handicraft over time. Its norms and values have been shared by forces from all strata of society, who, like artisans, were committed to a ‘rooted’ notion of local community that in Walker’s terminology preserved the ‘webs and walls’ of occupational estate cohesion and parity in the face of ‘outsiders’ (Standeslose) or ‘disturbers’ (Störer).

The corporate politics of both occupational estate and the bürgerliche social order in which it was embedded played a key role in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, and may yet endanger democracy in Germany once again. The division of Hamburg and Germany into irreconcilable social and moral trenches, to use Jürgen Kocka’s trenchant phraseology, based on adversarial images of social good and social community, produced, in the words of the sociologists Rainer C. Baum and Frank J. Lechner, a society of extreme ‘value dissensus’, whose members were essentially ‘moral strangers’ to each other. It was in this anomic context that National Socialism became an acceptable political alternative. Nazi spokesmen intrinsically understood the meaning of Walker’s ‘webs and walls’ of local community and opposed those whom they defined as disturbers of domestic peace and social harmony. National Socialism was able to offer a cross-section of social and economic groups, stretching in a city-state like Hamburg from a free trading commercial elite through the artisan master in his workshop into the ranks of the craft-trained skilled worker in the shipyard and factory, complete and comfortable integration into a very familiar hometown social order – one that they grew up with, whose logic they could understand, whose morality they could trust and whose roots reflected the continuity of history.

Albert Aftalion’s exploration into the theory of periodic, general economic crises in an industrial economy outlines a conceptual framework based upon the distinction between the structural conditions that make a crisis possible and the historical triggers that give any particular crisis its specific character. This distinction is key to Aftalion’s theory and policy of the medium term and makes his contribution a forerunner of the principle of contextual emergence in complex dynamics.

This approach allows Aftalion to distinguish between different, but hierarchically related, causal layers: (i) the fundamental relationship between production and needs: capital formation is a necessary condition in order to achieve an equilibrium between production and needs compatible with increasing (or non-diminishing) per capita welfare; (ii) the more historically specific causal layer at which the lengthening of production processes as a result of the increasing utilization of fixed capital items becomes a central feature and makes it necessary to allow for adjustment periods during which the economic system is out of equilibrium and lack of time co-ordination between production and needs may generate crises; (iii) the most specific level of causation at which different institutional arrangements (e.g., private- versus social-ownership economy) determine the response patterns of individuals and groups to the mismatches characterizing out-of-equilibrium situations.

Aftalion’s approach highlights causal pluralism in economic dynamics while emphasizing that the different causal triggers are systematically related to one another in a hierarchical way. This intertwining of causal layers is especially relevant in the medium term, which makes the context of medium-term policy decisions the most difficult to detect and, at the same time, of critical importance to the success of policy measures.

The Unspoken Morality of Childhood: Family, Friendship, Self-Esteem and the Wisdom of the Everyday reflects the thoughts of a senior ethicist. Each essay begins with a homey essay about the kind of everyday event that happens to everyone and then proceeds to discuss the ethical issues raised by such an event. The manuscript is interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of ethics, political psychology, moral psychology, philosophy, and political science/political theory. It uses stories to teach ethics and falls in the virtue ethics approach to ethics, making it perfect as a supplementary text for introductory courses to philosophy, moral psychology and political theory.

The manuscript discusses complex ethical concepts such as identity, agency, self-esteem, forgiveness, relations with our parents, dealing with loss, the moral imagination, and a wide range of other issues that people confront every day.

One of the essays, “Walnut”, tells a story about the author’s visiting her grandparents in a small, Midwestern town. This is turned into a discussion of the need for roots, how children formulate their sense of self, and how politicians like Donald Trump can turn the love of family and nostalgia for the past into a vicious tool in politics in which clever politicians exploit fears of foreigners and people who are “not like us.” Another essay describes a tired mother reading a piece of science fiction late at night, given to her by one of her children. A story by Olivia Butler asks why a black woman should be interested in science fiction and shows the value of the moral imagination, as science fiction reveals how those who can imagine alternate realities can then alert us to new possibilities, and better worlds. As Robert Kennedy was wont to ask: Some see the world as it is, and ask why. I imagine the world as it could be, and ask why not? The essay uses this prompt to discuss the importance of the moral imagination and the ability some have to conceptualize their way out of a dilemma that can plague others.

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent has provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century. The book is underpinned by the provocative argument that due to its unique ‘antipodality’ (its antipodal relationship with Europe), Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination and makes meaningful conceptual and analytical contributions to the fields of utopian theory, Australian studies and intellectual history.

The aim of this book is to broaden our understanding of technological change by adopting the concept of technological retrogression. With reference to concrete cases of technological retrogression a new conceptual framework is developed. Extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka and Malaysia forms the empirical fundament. A new method of reconstructing technological change is furthermore developed. The book contains a detailed account of the work history method, which is designed to capture changes over time where there are no statistical data available. The book contains a thorough examination of central theories of socio-economic transitions in developing countries, searching for an explanation of instances where modernization reverses. 

The exposition aims at contrasting retrogressive economic dynamics of technological change to progressive dynamics as developed by Schumpeter. At one extreme in the dimension of technological change, capital-strong production units innovate their way out of the recession through technological progress, adopting more advanced production equipment that improves productivity. Following Schumpeterian progressive dynamics, virtuous spirals of growth result. At the other end we find the producers that resort to technological retrogression, which secures survival, but which result in low labour productivity, diminishing the possibility of capital accumulation and thus modernization that could form an escape from poverty. Vicious spirals of decline result, which is the book’s main object of analysis. The theory is, thus, a contribution to understanding the anatomy of recessions.

The contention is, thus, that a choice of technology of production may lead to reduced productivity and economic decline. The concept of technological change should, therefore, not be equated solely with productivity improvements and economic development. Producers who experience technological retrogression may find themselves in the paradoxical situation of earning more by producing less, a paradox which is addressed in this book. Furthermore, where technological retrogression involves a return to organization of production of the past, this may affect the political leverage of labour, curbing social progress. Reversal of modernization, technological and organizational, is linked closely to marginalization of producers and increased social inequality. Lock-in of producers, both technologically and geographically, into activities characterised by diminishing returns, is considered a major precondition of technological retrogression. Therefore, the phenomenon is thought most likely to occur during periods of economic decline, recessions or during prolonged crises.

Almost all industrial countries have undergone strategies to maintain, or improve, competitiveness in order to improve the standard of living of their population, particularly during the last quarter-century or so. But how have they treated developing countries? ‘Competitiveness and Development’ explains how developing countries can attain competitiveness at a high level of development, examines the possibilities and constraints in achieving it, and proposes remedial measures at the national and international levels.

The author Mehdi Shafaeddin illustrates how developed countries impose restrictive policies on developing countries through international financial institutions and the WTO, as well as regional and bilateral agreements, thereby limiting their policy space for promoting dynamic comparative advantage in order to achieve competitiveness at a high level of development. Such policies, the author argues, lock developing countries that are at the early stages of development in specialization in primary commodities, or at best simple processing and assembly operations in accordance with their static comparative advantage.

To support this argument, the author critically examines the neoclassical theory of economics, which is the philosophy behind the principle of static comparative advantage as well as the policy stances of international financial institutions and the WTO. The author also reviews the historical experience of developed countries through industrialization, development and achieving competitiveness based on the principle of dynamic comparative advantage. In this context, he explains the importance of trade and industrial policies and the role of government in human resource development, innovation and technological development. To illustrate his case, the author compares the contrasting experiences of China and Mexico since the 1980s, during which time globalization has been intensified.

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) was one of the preeminent sociologists of his time. He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology, sociology of organizations, industrial sociology, sociology of law, and moral sociology. He was a Professor of Sociology (and later a Professor of Law and Sociology) at the University of California, Berkeley from 1952 until his (notional) retirement in 1984. He founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society (in 1961) and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (in 1978), both at UC Berkeley. The Law and Society Center and the JSP Program are still thriving. Over the years they have brought legions of students and scholars from all over the world to Berkeley, and then sent them in turn to many of the world’s great universities.

Selznick published his first book, TVA and the Grass Roots, in 1949; his last book, A Humanist Science, appeared in 2008. In between he wrote The Organizational Weapon (1952); Leadership in Administration (1957); Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (1969); Law and Society in Transition (1978, with Philippe Nonet); The Moral Commonwealth (1992), which he considered his magnum opus; and The Communitarian Persuasion (2002). These books, and the numerous contributions he published in edited volumes and academic journals, reflect the exceptionally broad scope of his interests. His intellectual strength also stands out in Sociology, the textbook he wrote together with Leonard Broom. This textbook came out in 1955 and went through seven editions, the last one published in 1981. For some thirty years, it was the best sold sociology textbook, not just in the United States but worldwide.

In the ten chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick, three recurrent themes stand out. First, in all chapters much attention is devoted to Selznick’s impressive professional and intellectual range and to his lasting influence in a number of major fields of sociology. Second, throughout these ten chapters, the question recurs whether Selznick markedly changed his sociological or political perspectives in the course of his career, or whether there is a basic continuity and coherence in his preoccupations and convictions throughout his life. Third, while in the first chapter Selznick’s intellectual predisposition is linked to the particular circumstances of his younger years and student days, and in the last chapter it is argued that Selznick’s distinctive intellectual perspective can best be ascribed to his “ecumenical sensibility,” all the chapters in between make substantive contributions to revealing the importance of the humanist impulse underlying Selznick’s sociology.

In order to capture the spirit of this towering sociologist, this man of all seasons, the book devotes one of the chapters to a historical symposium, in which Selznick himself responds to critics of his magnum opus, The Moral Commonwealth. The other nine chapters of this volume have a different background. They embody the legacy of Selznick’s humanist science. They come from different corners of the academic world: sociology, organization studies, law, political science, philosophy. But they all cross disciplinary boundaries, bridge disciplinary divides, and display an awareness of and respect for Selznick’s humanist sensibility. Selznick would have felt very comfortable in this company. In that sense, all the chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick are true companions to Selznick’s sociology.

This critical study examines the theme of interpersonal encounter in a range of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century travel writing written in French and Italian. Structured typologically, each chapter focuses on a typical activity that brings traveller-protagonists into contact with those they encounter: guiding and interpreting, hosting, staring and photography, challenging, and accompanying. Drawing on a wide variety of writing, the study offers a unique focus on this central but overlooked aspect of travel, demonstrating the key place that encounter occupies in the contemporary travel culture.

With reference to the literary critical study of travel writing, sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of tourism, as well as research in French and Italian area studies, the volume locates encounter firmly within the context of modern tourism. Elucidating the nature of encounter in unprecedented ways, the study demonstrates how the treatment of encounter determines the generic boundaries of travel writing and how narratives of encounter reveal the gap between ideals and practices in travel. The volume also analyses the dynamics between the traveller and ‘travellee’, as they are represented in narrative form, re-evaluating traditional notions of the traveller’s power and examining the potential for travellee agency, with particular reference to discourses of authenticity and ethics.

The core concern underlying the various problems in applied ethics is that of human rights. While most writings on human rights deal with its legal, political and socio-economic aspects, this collection instead addresses the philosophical aspect which has hitherto been neglected. Furthermore, the book explores the Indian counterpart of the idea of human rights which can be found in the notion of 'dharma'.

The text addresses issues of conceptual analysis as well as contextual applications of the idea of human rights and its fine nuances. It also contains papers which analyze the concept of 'dharma', raising questions on whether this concept can do 'double duty' for the notions of human rights as well as the notion of human duties. The collection offers papers on human rights issues of different categories of people, including ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, mentally ill people and prisoners. The papers in this volume also afford grounds for comparative study.

The expansion of Mumbai over the last four centuries has been documented in great detail by both contemporary writers and historians, yet this narrative stands out as an alternative, unique and authentic voice. Quite simply, it is a book about the city like no other. Govind Narayan’s ‘Mumbaiche Varnan’ was the first full account of Mumbai in any language, written just before the explosive growth and renovation of the city.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding identity, Narayan’s beguiling book offers descriptions of Mumbai’s daily life, its people and its institutions: the parts of the whole that come together to create this diverse and vivacious place. In addition to a detailed structural overview, the author provides a ground level account of the street life and market places rife with gambling and criminal activity. In every sense, this valuable text is a rare and enthralling glimpse into a fascinating period and place otherwise lost to time.

Translated into English for the first time, and fully illustrated and with a detailed glossary and biography of the author, this edition does full justice to this remarkable historical document.

In Kolkata’s traditional potter quarter of Kumartuli, a modern and a competitive market oriented approach to life is concealed behind tradition. Among the potters inhabiting the dirt-floored workshops of this caste-based neighbourhood, the history of a modern and economicly neoliberal-minded India unfolds. To these contemporary potters, caste is in their blood, caste is about being a creative and independent artist, and caste is about business as they engage in a competitive market to sell their artworks. This ethnographic study presents an analysis of these potters’ lives and the related commodification and instrumentalization of caste. An important insight is that Kumartuli consists of a group of artisans turned artists who do not display passive responses to colonial and capitalist encounters. On the contrary, this monograph unearths an ingenious and business-minded group that engages actively with the modern and economic developments of society at large, and, in the process, redefines the concept of caste identity. This study suggests a new academic direction for the study of modern India, and of caste in particular, through an empirically grounded portrayal of the synthesis of traditional categories and contemporary realities.

The use of smartphones displays many facets of contemporary mobility. Smartphones and those applications downloaded to the device enhance connectivity in regard to socialisation, entertainment, transactions, networking, activism, and mobilisation. While the device and applications help community building and boost a sense of belonging, they also generate alienation, exclusion and marginalisation. Such online mobility of capital, commodity, idea and emotion visualised on smartphones cannot take place without the parallel existence of technological, sociopolitical and economic infrastructure that is established in the physical world offline. In this light, this book argues that the use of smartphones, and the constant switch between online and offline, has meshed virtual, social and physical mobilities together. However, such inseparability is yet to break down the boundary that marks their distinctive and discrete existence. Put simply, the absence, loss, outage, switch-off, unaffordability, or confiscation of the device can easily obstruct this meshed mobility. Interrogating what causes these obstructions will highlight the indispensable role played by the material and social infrastructure in this meshed mobility as well as the embedded structural constraints. It is equally important to look at migration and mobility beyond the points of departure and destination and trace the process in between, as scholarship in migration studies has advocated. Thus, this book offers an insight into the compression and tension between online and offline and the interlaced modes of mobility. On the whole, the articles included in this book aim to answer two critical questions: (1) How does the use of smartphones by migrants and the people connected with them generate new modes of mobility? (2) How do online activities and offline infrastructure interact and result in this compression? 

In answering these two questions, the authors seek to understand how the online–offline divide and the shift between physical and virtual worlds affect East Asian migrants’ activities. They investigate how these migrants’ mobility patterns are changing through such compression and tension between online and offline. The book will show how smartphones and the associated applications facilitate the expression of emotions and search for intimate relationships, expedite the movement of capital and commodity, enable public communication and social action and solicit political allegiance to the state or political parties. This spontaneous mobility in the virtual space visualised on smartphones obscures the physical separation between origin and destination. It also generates the space in between for network making and mobilisation. On the other hand, physical and virtual mobilities continue to be constrained by the tangible and intangible infrastructure created and administered by the state and the market. That is, not only is the ability of people, capital, commodities and ideas to cross borders regulated by the state, but the transmission of data related to these movements, in the forms of text, sound, image, graphics, or video, is also at the mercy of the operation of the infrastructure built by the state and the market. In sum, opportunities and resources emerge from this parallel between online and offline. However, their constant compression also limits personal agency and generates new restrictions or reifies existing constraints.

Lockdown, a measure enforced by governments around the world to suppress the spread of Covid-19, has made the compression between online and offline a daily reality. Whilse contemporary mobility continues to be overshadowed by this ‘new normal’, this edited volume seeks to re-examine the mobility and migration in the increasingly overlapping virtual, social and physical spaces. To achieve this goal, this volume offers an interdisciplinary lens through which to grasp the symbiosis between migration and ICT and underlines how countries in East Asia, Europe and North America are connected via migrants’ use of smartphones. Owing to this compression between the virtual and physical worlds, migrants, with their various skills, class, gender, sexuality and age, perform their intimacy, entrepreneurship and activism in relation to their fellow migrants, family members, partners, clients and the state at the crossroads between online and offline spaces. The use of smartphones enables them to exert their agency, empower others and conduct businesses not only for financial gains but also to satisfy their sense of care and morality, and interact with their governments’ political agendas. Presenting these cutting-edge findings drawn from East Asian migrants’ everyday experiences and practices, this book will make a lasting contribution to an emerging migration scholarship intersecting transnationalism, virtuality and mobility. 

This first of three volumes focuses on the evolution of Bengal's economy and society over the entire pre-colonial period beginning from pre-historic days. There is no documented, authentic history of Bengal. Indeed, more of the early history of India can be learned from the writings of other nationals. Yet even this material is very much related to chronologies of regimes and local to urban settlements and centres of trade. There remains little or no information on the villages where the vast majority lived and still live. Furthermore, until this work, little or no consideration has been given to the hugely influential period between Vasco de Gama's journey to India in 1498 and the battle of Palashi in 1757, a period in which the Mughal Empire held political power while the English, Dutch, French and Danes and other European nations grasped and held on to economic power. Much has been written on the Mughal Empire, but little of the role of the European trading companies in the two and a half centuries preceding Clive's victory. This book addresses that void and seeks also to explore the political, social and historical context in Bengal that facilitated the transfer of power into European hands. Given such a lack of source information, the author examines oral history, carried from generation to generation, recognizing their fallibility, but using those histories to corroborate what is known from other sources – from archaeological findings (coins, inscriptions, copper plates) through (invariably biased or localized) accounts from travellers, to economic, agricultural and ecological factors – relating them to known chronological events to provide a well-rounded history and, indeed, a study that uncovers the roots of the many issues in the colonial and post-colonial eras.

The collected essays from noteworthy dramatists and scholars in this book represent new ways of understanding theater in the Middle East not as geographical but transcultural spaces of performance. What distinguishes this book from previous works is that it offers new analysis on a range of theatrical practices across a region, by and large, ignored for its history of traditions and cultures, and it does so by emphasizing diverse performances in changing contexts. Topics include Arab, Iranian, Israeli, diasporic theatres from pedagogical perspectives to reinvention of traditions, from translation practices to political resistance through various performances from the nineteenth century to the present. 

The book is, therefore, concerned with not just the theatrical content of specific or range of plays in a variety of mediums, from stage to the radio, but also political implications, changing imaginaries of home and exile, and practices of identity through a range of performances in both local and translocal settings. The book argues that there are indigenous performers, ranging from actors to producers and audiences, who (re)make theatre through the reinvention of traditions, pedagogy, media, and translation. The book also shows that while all theatre is performance what precisely “performance” means is contingent to the lived context of audiences and performers who make theatre in its diverse forms and also in response to conflict, war, occupation, patriarchy, home, and exile.

Sociologists and social theorists use the term ‘social’ frequently. We talk of social relations, social media, social networks, social factors, and so on, as well as ‘the social’. But do we always know what we mean or what we are invoking when we deploy the term ‘social’?

The concept of the ‘social’ has often been treated as almost self-explanatory, inherited from the works of the instigators of sociology and social theory who, it is assumed, all meant the same thing by the term. ‘Rethinking the Social’ argues that this is not the case, and that there are major differences between their approaches. This the first book to systematically analyse the different concepts of the social developed by Durkheim, Marx and Weber. It examines how the concept of the social became unproblematic for twentieth-century writers and suggests that debates surrounding this concept remain very much alive. Building on A. N. Whitehead’s work, Halewood develops a novel ‘philosophy of the social’.

Originally published in 1860, the formative Gothic novel ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921), one of nineteenth-century America’s most significant woman writers, relates the tale of a tormented British aristocrat who struggles to retain his sanity while suffering horrifying visitations from the spectre of his dead lover amid the agonies of an already fragile mind. Setting her tale in the enigmatic Sir Rohan’s beautiful-yet-decaying estate, Spofford immerses readers in a ghost story that marries lush imagery with an atmosphere of impending, mysterious doom.

Upon its initial publication, a reviewer writing for ‘The Baltimore Sun’ deemed ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ as ‘a strange, weird production, fascinating and exciting […] A work of genius and not without moral significance’. Dating from a time when women writers like Spofford were increasingly making their voices heard by reshaping the character of popular American literature, ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ remains to this day an engaging and important work of Gothic fiction.

Spofford was, in her time, one of the most popular writers in America, and her work garnered praise from such notable literary figures as Henry James, T. W. Higginson and Emily Dickinson (who admitted she found some of Spofford’s writing frightening). ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ is, then, a rare mid-nineteenth-century Gothic novel by an influential American woman author. It is also – simply put – a good read.

‘Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka’ examines the loss of citizenship and statelessness of Indian Tamil estate workers in Sri Lanka. The loss of citizenship this community suffered over 60 years ago continues to dominate and disrupt their lives, contributing to poor working conditions, impoverishment and general marginalisation. By analysing the context of the formal agreement between the Indian and Sri Lankan government that led to the loss of citizenship Kanapathipillai reveals the economic, electoral and ideological issues that influenced the decision, and introduces gendered notions of citizenship and the agency of the workers into the discussion of the phenomenon.

‘Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka’ approaches the issue from a Sri Lankan perspective, thereby bringing a distinct new voice to scholarship on this subject, which has previously focussed on the inter-governmental and foreign policy implications of the agreement. By breaking the 'view from above' approach, and listening to the 'voices from below' of the Indian Tamil workers who have suffered as a result of the agreement, Kanapathipillai successfully reframes the parameters of scholarship on this subject.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said’s Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists.’ 

By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences.

The subject range of this volume of essays on late Victorian Orientalism explores nineteenth-century modes of art which position themselves as instruments of knowledge of the Orient. The contributors deploy variegated tools derived from textual studies and visual culture research in order to explore the many ways in which the late Victorians envisioned the East. It is this combined approach which makes possible the reconsideration of Orientalist literature, art and cinema.

Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers takes the ideas of six well-known secular Jewish philosophers—Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ayn Rand, Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler—and views them through a wide range of Jewish lenses from the Talmudic tradition and prophetic Judaism to Kabbalist approaches, thereby understanding the 20th-century secular thinkers as on-going elements of a living Jewish intellectual tradition.

Jewish Studies as a field focuses on Judaism, but Jewishness is broader than Judaism, and as a result, a number of thinkers who come from Jewish backgrounds are excluded from the discourse in Jewish Studies. The goal of this volume is to act as a bridge between the religious and secular Jewish discourse communities, allowing a more inclusive and more comprehensive account of Jewish thought. 

While the philosophers who discussed may not have considered themselves to be Jewish philosophers. But, by reading them Judaically, they can be understood in terms of a more robust historical and intellectual context in which they partake of a tradition to which they are not often connected.

Hannah Arendt, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, argued that some parts of history need not just to be understood but to be confronted as well. The 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement between the two communities (nationalist and unionist) in Northern Ireland arranged power-sharing structures of governance between them. The Agreement was underwritten by the British and Irish governments. The signatories of the Agreement knew that its success required a cultural shift or conversion in each community.

To that end, the decisive and violent decade of recent Irish history, 1912–1923, needs to be confronted. In that decade, there were several conflicts: between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists, between nationalist insurrection and British forces, and between two nationalist groups. At the end of the decade, the country was partitioned: the south had become an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth, while the north continued as part of the United Kingdom.

The division was bitter and violent, with each community (nationalist and unionist) effectively rejecting the right of the other to exist. That remained unchanged until the violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. While the vast majority on both sides want peace and mutual recognition, the traditional construction of each community’s historical memories obstruct that. The goal of the book is to analyse the different elements required for each community in how to confront that history in the interests of affirming identity, giving recognition to the other community and building a shared political community.

This book is a wide-ranging collection of essays that makes the case for the humanities as central to our self-understanding, for theory as the latest incarnation of a perennial concern with the relation between words and things, and for the ancient as constitutive of the modern. Theory Does Not Exist: Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Rhetoric makes a strong argument for a comparative approach to what we term “theory” today. It argues that our disciplinary boundaries create artificial divisions between philosophy, rhetoric, and literature, which historically would not have been recognized and have come to function as conceptual straitjackets.

These essays contend that a concerted engagement with the crucial texts in these debates over the last 2500 years not only offers a better understanding of the issues involved but also provides the necessary political, ethical, and existential tools for fashioning a better and more inclusive life. They offer extended readings of Plato, Cicero, and Sophocles, as well as Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Žižek, and Lacan. Theory Does Not Exist offers a full-throated defense of the humanities and crucial counterarguments against the reduction of education to the vocational and the operational.

This course is designed to present and develop jazz arranging and compositional principles. In preparation for successful improvisation, composing and transcription, a wide range of theoretical topics are presented.
The stylistic considerations of jazz improvisation and composition require an extensive and working knowledge of jazz theory, and mastery of diatonic, bitonal, poly-tonal and atonal theoretical maximums and processes – including the refining of the [imitation] transcription process towards theoretical justification and conventional usage.

During the Romantic period, Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) achieved fame both as a playwright and a poet, composing popular comedies and, as Anna Matilda, amorous Della Cruscan verse. But despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in her works, her controversial comedy The World as It Goes has never been published.This edition of The World as It Goes is based on the Larpent licensing holograph manuscript held by the Huntington Library (LA 548). The transcription of the play is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts; contemporaneous reviews; and a note on the text.

The World as It Goes satirizes English tourists visiting a southern French resort and the scoundrels who prey on them. The play’s cast included some of the era’s most popular comic actors: John Edwin, John Quick, Charles Lee Lewes, William Thomas Lewis (aka “Gentleman Lewis”), Ralph Wewitzer (who specialized in stereotypical foreigners), Isabella Mattocks (who specialized in “vulgar” characters) and the famously rotund Lydia Webb. Elizabeth Younge, acclaimed for her portrayals of sentimental wives and daughters, played Lady Danvers, and the future novelist and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald appeared in the role of Sidney Grubb. 

Before the premiere of The World as It Goes at Covent Garden, Cowley’s comedies The Runaway (1776) and The Belle’s Stratagem (1780) and her farce Who’s the Dupe (1779) had been theatrical hits. But reviewers who admired her previous plays found The World as It Goes vulgar and morally offensive, and its sole performance on February 24, 1781, was disrupted by audience members who loudly objected to a ribald scene in a bedroom antechamber and repeatedly interrupted Younge as she attempted to deliver the epilogue, which contained a risqué reference to the transgender Chevalière D’Eon. Cowley heavily revised the play, but its second incarnation as Second Thoughts Are Best (performed March 24, 1781) was also a failure. The World as It Goes is Cowley’s most bawdy, multigeneric and socially subversive comedy and features a valet masquerading as his master and aspiring to take a seat at Westminster; French and German swindlers; a seductive countess; a lecherous, nouveau-riche London “Citizen”; an antiquarian bluestocking modeled after Lady Anna Miller; a fatuous aristocrat who neglects the wife he adores to be seen as fashionable; and a French monk who attempts to rape an Englishwoman. Among the contemporaneous issues and cultural products addressed in the play, its prologue and epilogue are English tourism on the continent; the pantomime Harlequin Free-Mason (1780); the January 1781 French raid on Jersey Island; the Chevalière d’Eon’s androgyny; the Gordon riots and Lord George Gordon’s acquittal in the ensuing treason trial; the recent performances by the French ballet dancer Gaëtano Appoline Balthazar Vestris at the King’s Theatre; anxieties about ambitious and oversexed male servants; bluestocking antiquarianism; the pretensions of the London merchant class; the pro-American revolution Bill of Rights Society and the London Association; James Graham’s Celestial Bed; and prison ships (“Hulks”). 

The comedy’s catastrophic failure influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent dramas and provides insights into late eighteenth-century anxieties and mores. Mortified by the damnation of The World as It Goes, she omitted it from her posthumous Works (1813), but she reworked some of its themes, situations and characters in her final play, The Town before You, which was staged in 1794. Although The Town before You, like The World as It Goes, portrays nefarious impostors, a philistine businessman, a spurious connoisseur and a wealthy female eccentric obsessed with classical art, it enjoyed a respectable run of nine nights.

This engaging two-volume study pursues a balance between theoretical and practical sociology. The authors are aware of the impasse often deliberately created by the self-conscious language of sociological theory. The primary concern of the applied sociologist is to adapt theoretical knowledge to actual human situations, using it to formulate social policy, investigate domestic and international social problems and create a pragmatic ‘sociology of possibility’.

Volume I, subtitled ‘Theoretical Perspectives’, focuses on the problems and prospects of applied sociology in an era of globalization. The essays emphasize the close association of applied sociology with altruism, identity formation, race and ethnicity. They evaluate the empirical ‘truths’ of sociological theories and examine their relevance for contemporary research, poverty, demographic issues and social policies. The authors agree that the ultimate test of theory is the extent to which it can produce knowledge that ‘works’.

Immersed in a hyperconnected world, millennials are pressured by a lingering feeling that no matter their achievements, they can always do more. Conventional wisdom suggests that millennials must create and maintain personal brands while striving to achieve their potential. But this mentality, while initially appealing for many, breeds anxiety and insecurity. In "The Plight of Potential", Emerson Csorba shows how millennials can live deeper and more enriching lives by reflecting on the self, placing value on solitude and resisting the feeling that they must constantly connect and share. Drawing on case studies of millennials from networks such as the Global Shapers Community, Csorba offers suggestions on how millennials can thrive in a world that favours immediacy and superficiality.

Millennials live in a world of opportunity, characterized by the constant pursuit of personal growth and a belief that to hit the pause button would be catastrophic to a career. Within this context, Csorba explores ideas such as the ruthlessness of comparison amongst millennials and outlines guidelines for overcoming these pressures. Advocating for a long view of work and life, Csorba builds on hundreds of interviews with millennials across the world as well as research at the University of Cambridge.

The themes that Csorba explores in "The Plight of Potential" are not unique – they have existed for centuries, and do not pertain exclusively to millennials – but in a society that glamourizes the individual while paradoxically discouraging solitude and self-reflection, they are radical. Both practical and critical, this book is timely and refreshing for millennials looking to overcome the social pressures around them and advance their work and lives, while also cultivating the skills and qualities required to better know themselves in the process.

“Textuality, Culture and Scripture,” a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, puts forward three main arguments. The first is that Western modernity retained the necessary role of texts and textuality in culture well into the twentieth century, although decreasingly so, until their role was increasingly displaced by materialist assumptions and theories. Taking as its starting point the so-called textual turn in cultural theory, the first argument is for the necessary role of textuality in understandings of culture.

The second argument is that textuaity is necessary in and for cultural, group and personal identities and that the texts of primary importance for identity can be related to what is generally thought of as “scripture.” It moves on to posit “scripture,” so understood, as a necessary category in an adequate textual theory and relates textuality and “scripture” to identity, primarily in terms of the potentials of texts for relating constancy and change to one another. 

The third argument is that the Bible has been and continues to be for so many people their “scripture” because it provides what people, groups and, at times, also cultures need to have as identity or an adequate worldview, especially the relation created by biblical texts between stability or constancy and change or disruption. The book concludes with the proposal that textual locations or identities can be evaluated for whether or not they provide ways by which past and future, tradition and innovation, or constancy and change are related to one another.

‘Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions’ in English traces the development of Indian English literary and textual practice over a period of seven decades, focussing on classic texts which have fallen beyond the scope of the established canon. Central to this volume is an inquiry into the nature of Indian modernity. Through careful and path-breaking readings of such important writers as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, M. Ananthanarayanan, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, U. R. Anantha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Vikram Seth, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, the author constructs what may be called ‘another canon,’ shedding new light on literary and critical practice in post-colonial India.

Useful both to specialists and general readers, these engaging and insightful interpretations of key Indian texts enhance our understanding of the making of modern Indian consciousness and culture. In addition, the book also offers crucial theoretical insights into the distinguishing features of the novel in India, especially of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

Written by a practising poet and novelist who has close experience of the subject matter and has published creative work in the areas being examined, Sexual Violence and Literary Art is a wide-ranging study, covering carefully selected works from Ovid through Shakespeare, to Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov and beyond. It addresses the necessary complicity of any representation in what is represented, by examining ways in which canonical male writers have attempted to evoke and address representations of sexual violence in poetry, prose fiction, and poetic drama. Representation has to involve itself with what is represented, and, in this sense, it is not possible to address in literature sexual violence without taking on the complicity of the representation with what is represented. The chosen works of literary art are understood not only as locations in which the showing of pain and cruelty inflicted through sexually acts occurs, but also as occasions to activate means at these writings’ disposal to work upon those representations of pain and cruelty towards possible readerly benefits. The book draws substantially upon recent criticism and theory written by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and literary critics including Martha Nussbaum, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Susan J. Brison, Mary D. Garrard, Nancy J. Vickers, and Coppélia Kahn. Writers may very well wish to determine the cultural meaning and ideological implications of their work, but for many reasons, including the necessary role of reader response and interpretation in the literary process, the meaning of a work cannot be entirely or finally fixed. Among the consequences of this is the fact that interpretations of literary works are always transactional negotiations with circumscribed perspectives. In light of these convictions, Sexual Violence and Literary Art subjects the literary artworks it addresses to close scrutiny derived from various generations of women’s writing on rape and upon the critical vicissitudes of the works studied. While recognising only too well the continuing presence of male violence in sexual relationships, this book’s aims include the identification of what roles literary art may play in its understanding, amelioration, and transformation. In these ways it offers a response to historical problems incurred through the inheritance of damage caused by the exercise of unequal power relations, and it offers an account of how literary art may work to overcome them.

A Marxist scholar and historian, Irfan Habib has been a towering presence in the Indian intellectual scene for over four decades. His formidable intellectual reputation, established in the sixties with the publication of 'The Agrarian System of Mughal India', broadened as he became an authority in the entire area of Indian history from ancient to modern. Professor Habib's undiminished commitment to the cause of socialism is reflected in these highly original and bold analyses of Marxist historiography and theories of socialist construction.

This volume comprises essays from scholars around the world representing the wide variety of Habib's interests and contributions. Ranging from history to politics and economics, the essays cover both the medieval period and modern India, as well as theories for the future of this emerging superpower. This special edition also features an essay by Irfan Habib, originally published as 'The Economic History of Medieval India: A Survey', covering the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara economy and the economy of Mughal India.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts – including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O’Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw – ‘Modern European Tragedy’ draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time. Along the way, the book engages with some of the prominent currents of twentieth-century thought and philosophy that can still be found in the varied map of contemporary thought today: the ideas of modern Christianity, psychoanalysis, the theory of the Absurd, nihilism, Marxism and the acceptance of the limit. Together, analyses of these currents serve to support the book’s key avenues of investigation: its explorations of what inspired these key authors to engage with the idea of the tragic; and its explanation of why the contemporary tragic no longer bears the form of classic tragedy.

Spanning a decade of Michael Marder’s contributions as a public intellectual, Senses of Upheavals documents a period of exceptional global turmoil. Thrown into mayhem by right-wing populisms and a pandemic, combined with skyrocketing economic inequalities and worsening environmental crises, the world is on the verge of collapse. Could revolutionary practical-intellectual proposals to learn how to coexist from plants or to rethink the very meaning of energy chart the way to a better, more livable, and, perhaps, calmer world? Nonetheless, such proposals themselves constitute nothing short of an upheaval in philosophy, plant sciences, and environmental studies. We are doomed to upheavals, it seems; the point is not to deflect, but to choose judiciously among them.

The book is a firsthand account of Dr. Hannah Jaicks’ journey through western Montana's ranching landscapes to showcase the stories of ranchers and affiliated groups who are pioneering strategies for reducing conflicts with wildlife, while also stewarding the landscape. Americans depend on these people who live by working on the land. Ranchers have the power to shape the future of our lands, waterways, and wildlife communities, but enduring perceptions frame ranching as a unilaterally destructive force to the environment. Perception is slippery ground to base an argument on, however, and reality is far more complicated. Often seen as antithetical to one another, American ranchers and wildlife have long been entangled with another. The book is about producers and partner organizations who are forging new paths in conservation and addressing these seemingly intractable entanglements to sustain working ranch operations alongside healthy wildlife populations. It elevates the voices of these people striving daily to achieve wild and working landscapes in the West and serves as a model for how others can begin to do the same.

The author takes readers on a journey up western Montana to a different valley in each chapter and showcases the place-based stories of everyday conservation heroes who practice regenerative ranching, provide consciously raised agricultural products, advance strategies for collaborative conservation and protect vital habitat for endemic wildlife that would otherwise be developed and subdivided beyond repair. Ethnographic storytelling is interwoven with psychological theories to inform readers about progressive ways to make the world we share – with people and animals – a better place to live. Illustrations by Katie Christiansen of wildlife and conflict-reduction tools accompany the text, helping to underscore the vivid realities of shared landscapes and how they are achieved. 

There is no doubt the history of ranching is laden with problematic examples, and public and private rangelands are not universally in good condition today. This book aims to capture the increasing recognition that strong ranching practices coincide with good land and wildlife stewardship measures, but ranchers need help. If we want to see more of this remarkable work happening, environmentalists and concerned citizens need to step up and ensure these practices are not only possible but also become the norm. Everyone must be willing to come to the table and navigate discussions about how to work together more effectively and collaboratively. This book is a roadmap for how people can begin to do so.

‘The Constitution of Shelley’s Poetry’ is a close philosophical reading of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ from the perspective of the argument or drama of language played out in its pages. At its heart a four-chapter reading of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, the book is punctuated with readings of other Shelley works and prefaced with two earlier chapters: one on 'Mont Blanc' and 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', the companion poems inaugurating Shelley’s poetic maturity; the other on 'Ode to the West Wind' originally published with ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and here represented as 'signature' Shelley. The book’s one most distinguishing feature, from which several others derive, is its bringing the power and pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s thought to Shelley’s poetry and to his explicitly articulated philosophical interest in language.

The book urges and practises close reading, but it provides philosophical grounds for this ostensibly old-fashioned approach, and it implicitly proposes an understanding of language very different from those now most generally assumed in literary studies. The book’s bringing of Cavell’s thought to Shelley’s poetry would make two related but distinguishable contributions. There is, first of all, the reading of Shelley’s poetry, which is new and persuasive both in many of its local moments and in its overall thrust. Second, there is the practical demonstration of the relevance and yield of Cavell’s thought for literary studies.

As an ancient Indian poet-dramatist, Kālidāsa cannot be absorbed into the homogenizing tendencies of Hindu hagiography, as has often been attempted, especially in the period after independence. From being projected as a Brahmin by birth in legends, a Vedāntist and Vaishnavite in darsana (theology), and more recently, owing to Western theoretical perspectives being applied to texts separated in time and contexts, Kalidasa is critiqued for a patriarchal and casteist outlook. These various readings have privileged personal theories and validated them by reading literary texts in certain ways. ‘Memory, Metaphor and Mysticism in Kalidasa’s ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’’ brings together scholars from both sides of the globe who offer possibilities for reviewing this text, not as an Oriental discovery or a cultural property, but as an ancient literary text that can be read in multiple philosophical contexts. Further, the translations of ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’ into South Asian languages like Urdu and Nepali and a classical language like Persian are also included for detailed study for understanding the impact of this text in the respective literary traditions of these languages, and to assess the actual cross-literary dialogue that this text made, without hyperboles and generalizations, given the fact that many of these translation happened just before and after independence when literary historiography and nation writing project went hand in hand in India.

Why do climate and financial crises pose such extreme risks? And what does it take to respond effectively to those risks? Extreme weather events – storms and sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts and floods – seem ever more common and extreme, while scientists warn of even greater climate risks ahead. Financial failures on the scale of 2008 make a mockery of the supposed efficiency of the market economy. None of this would be possible in the world as imagined by conventional economics – an imaginary land of gradualism, equilibrium, well-informed rationality and the win-win solutions dealt by the invisible hand.

The erratic rhythm of boom and bust in financial markets could be explained either by the patterns of crowd-following behaviour among investors, or by the unequal distribution of wealth (and the impact of the largest investors on the markets). Climate crises reflect the fact that natural systems can reach tipping points or critical transitions, where gradual change gives way to large-scale discontinuous changes. The economics of climate change has lagged behind the science, understating the severity of the problem and the likelihood of a crash.

While the causes of climate and financial extremes are distinct, the implications for public policy have much in common. The frequency of extreme events, of varying sizes, means that there is no way to predict the likely size of future crises. The traditional approach to risk aversion cannot account for longstanding patterns in financial markets. Better theories of risk call for more precautionary approaches to both financial and climate policy. In the frequent cases in which potential outcomes have unknown probabilities, the best policy is based on the worst-case credible scenario. When a single catastrophic risk commands everyone’s attention, a World War II-style, costs-be-damned mobilization is the right response. There is no formula for perfect responses to extreme risks, but there are important guideposts that point toward better answers.

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ focuses on the dynamic interaction between suburbs and suburbia as this emerges in a century-long series of Australian novels – in works by Christina Stead, George Johnston, Elizabeth Harrower, Patrick White, Christos Tsiolkas and many other twentieth-century and contemporary writers. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric found in these novels in dialogue with their evocative rendering of suburban place and time.

In the process, ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ rethinks perennial literary and cultural debates about suburbia – in Australia and elsewhere. It does so by putting fictional ‘suburbs’ (their multitude of imagined interiors, homes, streets, forms and lives over time) into dialogue with cosmopolitan resistance towards the very idea of ‘suburbia’ as an amnesic and conformist cultural wasteland. ‘Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity’ explores the generative collision produced in novels between the sensory remembered terrain of the primal suburb and wider cultural critiques of suburbia. It is through such contradictions that novels create resonant mental maps of suburban place and time. Australian novels, in other words, serve as a prism through which suburbs – real and imagined, remembered and utterly transformed – can be glimpsed sidelong.

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ is a coinage that highlights both the persistence and the renovation of literary forms by means of the suburb. The suburbs prompt writers to experiment with the forms of the novel. The very scale of the suburb is productive, enabling narratives to slide readily from microcosm to macrocosm, from the domestic interior to the globe. Like suburbia, the novel is a form that is both generic and specific, circulating transnationally yet taking root locally. 'Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ enacts a retrospective of Australian literary suburbia that reorients understanding of the political, cultural and literary significance of the suburbs. Novels about suburbs often play with time, looking into the past in order to summon what is lost. ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ enacts a retrospective of Australian literary suburbia that reorients understanding of the political, cultural and literary significance of the suburbs.

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages in Bulgaria.

Since the opening of borders after the end of socialism (1989) and Bulgaria’s EU accession (2007), rural communities have been drawn into new transnational connections and global ‘shortcuts’ that transcend the framework of the (formerly socialist) nation-state. The case studies of this volume demonstrate that apart from cities, villages and towns are also increasingly exposed to global flows and economic inequalities, resulting in the remaking of rural places. As a result of increased mobility and growing transnational and global connections, boundaries are fading between cities and the countryside and between Bulgaria and Europe. Some Bulgarian villages are winners while others are losers as a result of this development, leading to a situation of extreme rural diversity.

This book aims to challenge undifferentiated notions of ‘the countryside’, calling for a greater awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. It also focuses on how the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have been reconfigured in Bulgaria following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The volume is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop that took place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies on 29 and 30 May 2008. 

The book provides an assessment of the first 12 years of BRICS cooperation, from 2008 to 2020, focusing on international financial governance issues and especially on the new financing mechanisms created by the BRICS, the BRICS monetary fund and the development bank. It is shown that Brazil, Russia, India and China, joined later by South Africa, share common traits that led them to cooperate in the reform of the existing international financial architecture, especially the G20 and the IMF. After 2012, in light of the difficulty of having the USA, the European and other advanced countries agreed to move from “tinkering at the margins” to fundamental reform of the Bretton Woods institutions. The BRICS took the momentous decision to establish their own monetary fund, named the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), and their own development bank, named the New Development Bank (NDB). The book goes on to describe the difficult negotiations among the BRICS between 2012 and 2014. Some of these difficulties revealed the weaknesses that would lead the CRA and the NDB to make slow progress in the first five years of their existence, from 2015 to 2010. The book provides an overview of the strong points and weaknesses of the initial phase of these financing mechanisms. While they still hold promise, much remains to be done to make the BRICS financing mechanisms fulfill their founders’ plans and intentions. The book ends with a brief discussion of the future of the BRICS as a cooperation mechanism, highlighting that, despite inevitable and foreseeable obstacles, joint action by the five countries is likely to remain an important feature of the international landscape in the decades to come.

The book may be of interest to multiple audiences as it lies at the intersection of economics, international relations and geopolitics. Written in accessible language, avoiding jargon, the book is targeted not only at specialists but also at non-specialists interested in these areas of knowledge and changes in the international economic and financial landscape at the outset of the twenty-first century. 

This book brings together the leading contemporary currents of thought from a galaxy of established scholars and intellectuals of Pakistan. It is a monumental contribution to the national debate on a series of crises and lingering issues that need attention of the stakeholders all around.  

The book covers three major areas of investigation into public life in the country. One, it delves into the historical, sociological and cultural causes of various political conflicts, ranging from the negative role of the educational curricula for national harmony to cultural violence and persistent militarism to the curse of enforced disappearances. There are highly analytical contributions that define the conflict-resolution nexus. Two, the book is a source of inspiration on the liberal agenda of creating a scientific frame of mind, setting the feminist debate in a global context, challenging the shrinking space for media and focussing on the largely forgotten area of industrial relations. Readers will find ample issue orientation in the analysis and policy orientation in the deliberations. Three, the book enters a domain of hope, planning for a bright future and focussing on some longer-term issues couched in comprehensive new approaches to development, environment, energy, foreign policy and feminism.

The scope of the book is amazingly wide, the analysis is rich with conceptual references and empirical finding, and the scholarly idiom is comprehensible for both the articulate section of the population and the scholarly community. 

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ argues that both ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have become fragmented. The book concentrates  on the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ mediated in part through the processes of ‘embodiment’.

The first section provides the main theoretical context for the book, with the first chapter outlining the new ‘sociology of the body’ and the second outlining the emergence of new ageing and its ‘re-orientation’ toward the body. The second section explores the relationship between new ageing and key aspects of embodied identity, namely gender, race, disability and sexuality. In each of these sections, the authors provide a brief historical perspective on the emergence of these embodied identities as social movements during the cultural ferment of the 1960s, and explore their subsequent confrontation, or avoidance of confrontation with, the issue of ageing.

The third section covers embodied practices, from sexual practice and its re-orientation toward age and ageing, to the embodied practices of ‘appearance management’, particularly those associated with cosmetics, clothing and fashion. Finally, the book considers ‘new enhancement technologies’ of the body, such as plastic surgery, with relation to ideas of ‘rejuvenation’. By focusing upon those embodied practices that are oriented toward age and ageing, and their place in expressing, maintaining or recreating other ‘pre-performed’ identities, the work allows a more embodied understanding of ageing and its diverse engagements within society to be realised.

This book works at the intersection of two related yet different fields. One is the heterogeneous feminist effort to question universal forms of knowing. The expression 'embodiment of knowledge' deploys the notions of time (as history), space (as location) and politics (as partiality of perspective or standpoint) to interrogate the purported universality of knowing. Embodiment is one important concept through which feminist philosophies try to perceive the attempt of questioning the universal. The second field follows from mind/body dichotomy. Embodiment is traditionally understood to involve an act of simple inversion – valorizing the (material) body in place of the mind. However, if meanings are seen to produce the body as 'a system of signification', embodiment gets reduced to another form of the significatory mechanism. The book explored the dynamics of the production of the 'body' with a focus on the 'others' (death, sexual and colonial differences) that fracture and define the notion of the body. An ethical responsibility to the 'others' consonant with this ontologically differentiated body distinguishes this notion of embodiment from standard versions of 'third world feminism'. The development of this notion requires an elaboration of the ways in which power and scientific rationality work (epistemically) in a postcolonial setting. Finally, the book presents the notion of embodied knowledges as inseparable from a deconstructive politics of the (im)possible.

Examining today’s global politics by linking it to the meditations of a classical Greek philosopher may be counterintuitive to understanding a world in crisis. But for political analysts, policymakers, social media, bloggers, journalists, engaged students, the new influencers, and inquisitive citizens, Thucydides’ ancient wisdom may offer critical insights into detecting the endemic of political fear spreading across global borders. With his help and by applying his framework to six case studies, this book unearths the different facets of fear that define a world in crisis.

Fear is a pervasive term used to describe a group’s or individual’s sense of insecurity, threat, and angst. It identifies other subtle dimensions comprising suspicion, scepticism, wariness, dread, horror, stupefication, and moral panic. These events may arise in the very near future or affect society at some later point, as Thucydides discovered in his analysis. Disaggregating political fear makes us aware of its complexities as the classical Greek writer set out twenty-five centuries ago. Framing his study to today’s fears results in significant ramifications for democracy and rivalries between states. 

Thucydides’ meditations on fear is about six intriguing case studies structuring political fear: national fear which caused the Brexit outcome in the UK; a regional kind fomenting fear of foreigners in Germany’s Saxony state; an ethnic dimension emerging in a Russia fearful of too much in-migration; an individual case of a Japanese artist experiencing angst when caught between adversaries in World War II; fear of interstate relations shaping Australia’s troubled connections to China; and the precariousness of identity as the U.S. began to embrace tribal politics. In all this, can a rejuvenated liberal theory unpacking a heavy dose of tolerance overcome symbolic liberalism and slam the door on ever-mounting political fear?

Professor Das provides a fascinating study of the issue of ethnic politics in multi-ethnic Third World countries and discusses the non-convergence of state and nation in the context of Kashmir and Sindh. The artificial de-colonization process in the South Asian sub-continent resulted in the construction of national frontiers for its two successor states that did not rest on a synchronization of ethnic and state boundaries. Consequently, cross-border loyalties amongst significant sections of the population survived the boundaries imposed between the two successor states. In the context of centralizing nation-building strategies, when ethnic political assertions occur in outlying or frontier areas of these nation-states, the distinction between domestic and external affairs or between home and foreign politics tends to lose its significance in the traditional sense. Political actors from across the borders of neighbouring states can then deny the marks of their different objective nationalities and treat themselves as members of a single 'loyalty group'.

Thus, ethnic politics transcends its domestic contours and helps foment regional tensions. In such circumstances, ethnic assertions tend to constitute vital local or domestic ingredients that define the national security priorities within a particular region. The current insurrection in Kashmir and turmoil in Sindh superbly demonstrate this pattern.

Part I of this book gives particular attention to freedom as an “aesthetic idea” that informs certain philosophical discussions of freedom in Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and Isaiah Berlin. The critical concept of “positive freedom” is discussed in the first chapter and continues to inform the entire book. In Part II, the more “practical” application of these ideas with respect to certain “zones” of freedom such as academia (“academic freedom”), religion (“religious freedom”), art (“artistic freedom”), “free speech,” and “political freedom” are discussed Finally, in the Epilogue, the surprising relationship of “friendship” to “freedom” that begins with their close etymological relationship is discussed.

This book gives the first no-nonsense, hands-on account of the financing principles and perspectives for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), the new kid on the block in the battle against climate change. NAMAs are finding their own identity, and most importantly, finding a new financial basis without relying on a carbon market and carbon credit. While the NAMA model may be the right instrument at the right time, it is spawned from the climate change negotiation sphere that continues to suffer from its lack of interaction with the other spheres involved in its actual deployment. Despite 20 years of negotiations, a barrier remains between concept and action. The disconnect is first and foremost between the political sphere and the private-sector sphere, and is particularly rooted in the understanding – or misunderstanding – of finance. This book bridges the gap by addressing policymaking and private sector financing in one volume. It disarms myths, hides nothing behind political correctness and applies a good measure of common sense to advance guidance for the financing of actions that will allow developing countries, having become the prime source of greenhouse gas emissions, to contribute to the global battle against climate change.

The twentieth century has witnessed a tremendous reinforcement of the concept of democracy. In a period of about one hundred years, the virtues of democracy have been greatly extolled and the world has witnessed a process of democratization. In the sixty years since its inception, Indian democracy too has developed indigenous roots and is emerging as a unique example of parliamentary democracy. The important question today is not the survival of Indian democracy, but the nature of India’s democratic politics.

The present volume is an attempt to understand the development of democratic polity in India. It covers a wide range of issues – theoretical concepts, political institutions, federalism, electoral process, individual and group rights and mass media – drawing attention to the significant broadening of Indian democracy. But the benefits of political democracy are yet to reach the masses – political institutions are dominated by the elite, civil society has been politicized and the interventionist state has become an arm of the elite. The solution to these problems lies in further democratization of the political process.

McCarron approaches the work of Alfred Hitchcock in a way that is unique in the world of film critique. Rather, than provide a biographical overview, or consider Hitchcock’s work in the context of conventional film criticism, McCarron uses Hitchcock’s films to illustrate ideas at play in the social sciences and philosophy even as he uses those same ideas to illustrate central aspects of Hitchcock’s films. In short, while McCarron focuses on many of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, his broader concern is with a series of ideas crucial to Hitchcock’s work as an innovative artist of the cinema. For example, McCarron interrogates the idea of the MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s famous term for the motivating issue in a film’s narrative. However, there is far more to the idea of the MacGuffin than is found in Hitchcock’s description, as McCarron shows how political theorist Ernesto Laclau’s theory of equivalential substitution effectively explains how the MacGuffin functions as a device to bridge the divide between the film’s exegesis and the audience’s emotional engagement in the story. In a similar vein, McCarron undertakes a close reading of Hitchcock’s theory of ‘pure cinema,’ indicating that while the concept is widely embraced by Hitchcock scholars, rarely do those scholars agree on what Hitchcock ultimately intended by the phrase. Tracing the development of the concept across the years, McCarron shows how Hitchcock’s theory of pure cinema resonates with anthropological concepts of purity and even finds a place in current debates regarding so-called hybrid media. McCarron further explores Hitchcock’s alleged moralism, showing how the problem of moral agency was often treated in Hitchcock’s films as a highly complex and decidedly ambiguous condition. McCarron indicates the importance of re-viewing Hitchcock’s films from points of view that plainly show that Hitchcock is not properly understood when simply described as ‘the master of suspense,’ as his films are of enduring interest for a range of reasons that go well beyond their relevance for traditional film studies. Interpretations of his films gain in power and scope when we extend our analyses to the intricate interpretations of his work as it touches on subjects as diverse as politics, feminism, rhetoric, and philosophy. McCarron treats these larger intellectual constellations in considerable detail, bringing a fresh perspective to the study of the famed director’s work.

“The Domains of Identity” defines sixteen simple and comprehensive categories of transactions which cause personally identifiable information to be stored in databases. This research, which builds on the synthesis of over 900 academic articles, addresses the challenges of identity management that involve interactions of almost all people in almost all institutional/organizational contexts. Enumerating the sixteen domains and describing the characteristics of each domain clarifies which problems can arise and how they can be solved within each domain.

Discussions of identity management are often confusing because they mix issues from multiple domains, or because they try unsuccessfully to apply solutions from one domain to problems in another. This book is an attempt to eliminate the confusion and enable clearer conversations about identity management problems and solutions.

Who owns our digital identity? Is ownership even a relevant concept here? Who controls our digital identity (or pieces of it)? What is the correct relationship between the individual, the state, and private actors and organizations, with respect to one’s identity? What do emerging technical architectures do to potentially create alignment? What identity is required to get identity documents? Kaliya Young guides us through these and other questions we need to be asking to solve our society’s complex identity challenges.

This volume addresses a central problem of contemporary states, namely how to manage the eruption of public religions. While the liberal framework formerly regarded religion as simply a matter of private practice and conscience, in modern states religion has often come to challenge the so-called Westphalian model of church-state relations, and has brought into question many liberal notions of secularism and tolerance. There is much discussion about post-secular society in which religion has to be taken seriously in public affairs. This collection of case studies – looking at Turkey, Singapore, India, China, Britain, Europe and the United States – explores a number of examples in which the state exercises some degree of management of religion, thereby bringing into question the traditional separation of religion and state. This study also attempts to refine the notion of secularization by examining this process in terms of political arrangements (church-state relations) and the role of religion in everyday life. Ultimately, this study reveals that there is no uniform or standard pattern of secularization in modern societies.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on colour have been accorded little critical examination, the sole exception being the explanation in the Tractatus of the logical impossibility of a point in the visual field having two colours simultaneously, a gap the present work is primarily meant to fill. Remarks on Colour, a compilation of writings on the subject drafted in the last fifteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, is subjected to sustained critical scrutiny and is shown that it does not deserve to languish in the limbo to which it has been mostly consigned, but it indeed is deeper and more illuminating than other more studied writings, to say nothing of peripheral writings on ethics, aesthetics and religion.

The Remarks would warrant a careful look if only because it is, as it has been billed, ‘one of the few documents which shows [Wittgenstein] concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue’. But it also deserves special consideration and is worth grappling with since it shows Wittgenstein thinking through a problem from scratch and, what is still less common, without knowing where he will end up. In particular no other extended stretch of writing so clearly shows him as engaged in an unconstrained investigation of a topic of huge general interest and setting the agenda for philosophers, indeed as pioneering a still insufficiently investigated subject. And following in his footsteps pays since it brings to light a great deal about how he approaches philosophy and proves to be a good way into the philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s once said: ‘Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo’, and the present work takes him at his word and accords him the courtesy of treating his own sentences as ‘all to be read slowly’. His remarks are examined one by one in the order he wrote them rather than the order they appear in the published text with close attention to his toing-and-froing and changes of tack. The result is a picture of a serious philosopher at work, one grappling with rare scrupulousness to a series of problems. Just as importantly one sees that the thrust of his deliberations is routinely misidentified, that there are significant similarities as well as significant differences between his late and early thinking about colour, and that much folklore, both laudatory and disparaging, that has sprung up regarding the thinness of his reasoning and the thickness of his conclusions is substantially off-base.

Population is a dangerous political category. It is not separable from the racist and class-based valorisation and devaluation of different lives. From contraceptive implant programmes for the Global South to right wing anti-immigration discourses, demographic interpretations of multiple global and local crises legitimise the states' grip on childbearing and mobility. The results are various dimensions of reproductive racism and restrictive border regimes. Meanwhile, global social inequalities and racial capitalist extractivism stay out of the game. 

The book explores how demographic knowledge production and states’ grip to the variable of population intertwine. It introduces the concept of a Malthusian matrix in order to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies within population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies and behaviours. Another chapter unfolds the invisible assumptions underlying demographic projections, as these future narratives support powerful strategies of domination in the presence. 

Through the book various current dimensions of reproductive racism are demonstrated, distinguishing between the birth of desirable and undesirable people: an upward redistributive family policy in Germany is promoting births within the privileged middle classes. And international population programs revive targets in order to increase the use of long-acting contraceptives in the Global South, within a market-oriented setting of Big Pharma promotion. Reproductive racism is also effective in migration policy strategies: narratives about "migrant birth rates" circulate in ultra-right forces as well as among seemingly apolitical demographic policy consultancy. 

Finally, the book also reflects on the role of statehood in contested demographic politics and what theoretical instruments are needed in order to attack the demographic power-knowledge complex. The epilogue refers to the intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice as an important tool and framework for anti-Malthusian resistance and alliances.

El cambio climático y la crisis de extinción entrelazados se prestan a la economía política. Joseph Henry Vogel ha construido un argumento a favor de llevar a los países ricos en carbono, pero pobres económicamente, a través del cuello de botella de la economía de vaquero y hacia el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” de los países Anexo I del Protocolo de Kioto. Ecuador sirve como el modelo. “La economía de la Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT” es un contrapunto a muchos niveles a “El Informe Stern” por Sir Nicholas Stern. En el nivel más básico, Vogel sostiene que Stern se equivoca por su falta de reconocimiento de la naturaleza del cambio climático como termodinámica, con lo cual pierde de vista la apropiación del Norte del sumidero atmosférico. El cambio a la termodinámica pone de relieve la legitimidad de una “deuda de carbono”, que comienza a hacer tictac con el primer informe del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre Cambio Climático ((IPCC) por sus siglas en inglés) en 1990. A través del lente de la teoría económica, la intransigencia comprensible de los países pobres para asumir el “tope” en el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” es una distorsión del sistema económico. No obstante, acorde con esa misma economía, una distorsión puede justificar otra. Esa otra distorsión es el pago que Ecuador busca por no perforar en la Reserva de la Biosfera Yasuní. Haciendo caso de la llamada de Deirdre (antes Donald) McCloskey de que la economía necesita más humor, Vogel ha escrito una crítica penetrante sobre la economía convencional que a su vez entretiene.

‘Stephen Wall, “Trollope and Character” (1988) and Other Essays on Victorian Literature’, with an introduction by Nicholas Shrimpton, gathers together the principal publications of the distinguished scholar-critic Stephen Wall. Wall was widely regarded for his writings on the Victorian novel, and this book contains all his major writings about Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, including the full text of his book-length study ‘Trollope and Character’ (1988) and a history of Dickens's reception. Alongside these texts are included Wall's reflections on Jane Austen and George Eliot and on other aspects of nineteenth-century fiction, as well as his influential essay on the ways in which English novels should be edited. Together, the essays communicate the mixture of learning, human sympathy, critical intelligence and dry wit that made Wall's voice so distinctive and trusted.

A young Tokyoite doctor accepts a post on a remote island south of Okinawa. When a highly contagious fatal disease breaks out, he has to choose between saving himself or saving others.

A hormone-ridden teenage youth left alone with his young stepmother following his father’s death is consumed with jealousy as her affections turn to another man.

A journalist in search of answers travels from the metropolis to a bleak shore on the Japan Sea and eventually the furthest extreme of ice-bound Hokkaido, as he investigates the suicide of a young man.

In a backstreet of the metropolis, a wily old detective follows his hunches to nail the murderer of a young prostitute.

A conflict arises between two detectives investigating the shocking suicide of a 6-year-old child, the son of a young actress famed for her immoral behavior. Can it really be suicide, or is it murder?

In this early collection of five short stories, Kyotaro Nishimura explores the criminal mind and what makes people do the unthinkable.

Schutz, then, being a philosopher with extensive experience with social scientists, economists, theorists of law—whom he encountered in his studies at the University of Vienna in the early twentieth century, worked in two areas: philosophical and social scientific theory. His investigations can be studied and more deeply appreciated in their own right, and also for the contributions they might make to an analysis of social problems (e.g. intercultural, interracial understanding) or of problems in the social sciences, including how social science itself can proceed in its different areas, such as sociology of knowledge, sociology in general, or the theory of society.

The contributors to this volume will examine topics in Schutz’s philosophical-phenomenological theory of the social world, such as the second person, the face-to-face relationship, the meaning of human action, signs, symbols, and relevance (or interests). Since Schutz sought to provide philosophical foundations for the social sciences, his work opens up a series of epistemological questions, such as those about traditional knowledge and the opacity of knowledge and theory, that is, the neglected or unseen questions that accompany any knowing or theorizing. Also, authors from within the Schutzian framework will address issues IN the social sciences, such as the Durkheimian aspects of Schutz’s thought, the sociology of knowledge, and the theory of sociology. The book will also explore how Schutzian theory, which is often viewed as a micro-sociology, can be extended to give an account of a macro-sociological reality like modern society.