Anthem Press

While Asia's growth record in recent decades is remarkable, it has been marred by rising inequality. Recognizing the potential negative economic, social and political consequences of rising inequality, more and more Asian countries are paying attention to the issue of equity and taking actions to make growth more inclusive. This book puts together papers arising from various studies on inclusive growth and its policy implications, as carried out at the Asian Development Bank. 'Poverty, Inequality, and Inclusive Growth in Asia' looks at recent trends of income and non-income inequalities in developing Asian countries; discusses their underlying driving forces; examines the concept of inclusive growth and its policy ingredients; proposes how inclusive growth can be measured and monitored; and provides in-depth analyses of the key policies of an inclusive growth strategy, including employment, public service delivery, social protection, gender equality, and governance and institutions. The book also presents a set of country studies with rich information on growth, poverty and inequality dynamics and the policy challenges that arise in marching toward inclusive growth in the People's Republic of China, Philippines, and Nepal.

‘National Systems of Innovation’ presents a new perspective on the dynamics of the national and the global economy. Its starting point is that the international competitiveness of nations is founded on innovation. Which role do different parts of the national system play in determining the long-term dynamics of the economy? What is happening to the coherence of national systems of innovation in an era characterised by far-reaching internationalisation and globalisation?

These and other issues are addressed in this volume. Available for the first time in paperback, the book is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy-makers.

Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th–21st Centuries by Richard and Margaret Braungart is a collection of 19 of their previously published research articles on youthful political activism, generational conflict, and social change, from the first student movement in Germany in 1815 to the worldwide surge in youth movement activity in the 21st century. Representing more than 50 years of research, youth movements and generational politics are explored from historical, generational and global perspectives. These articles are theoretically grounded, empirically based, interdisciplinary and comparative. Exploring youth movements at individual, group, societal and international levels, a variety of methodological approaches for studying youth activism are illustrated in their research. In a concluding chapter, the Braungarts update youth movement activity in the 21st century and discuss how their previous research informs the new global increase in youthful mobilization over politics. The trends and changes in youth unrest and generational politics are assessed now and into the future.

The focus in the anthology is on young people's development and generational relations as a fundamental force for societal and political change. Drawing from both theory and research in sociology, social psychology, human development and history, the articles were chosen to help readers better understand young people by identifying their political attitudes and behavior and the commonalities they share in their movements for change. Based on an extensive survey of youth movements from 1815 to the 21st century, a number of articles identify the patterns and dynamics of youthful political behavior over time in each world region. It is hoped that by understanding youth movements in history, readers are better prepared to make sense of and respond to the expected global rise in youthful political unrest. Youth movements have toppled governments and revolutionized societies, always bringing with them the potential for greater democracy and societal reforms as well as injury, death and destruction.

Despite the rise in youth movement activity over the past 200 years and considerable discussion, media attention and research, it is difficult to formulate an accurate and balanced perspective on why young people mobilize during certain eras but not others, and why youthful political activism is often characterized by generational conflict and violence. Although there are excellent empirical studies on specific youth movements, the research tends to be fragmented into different disciplines and widely scattered among countries. As a collection, the articles selected for this anthology are interdisciplinary, comparative and provide a systematic study of the issues over which young people have mobilized. Common patterns of youth movement activity are identified from 1815 , and youth activism is examined from moral, ideological, generational and life-course development perspectives. Taking a variety of methodological approaches, the articles in this anthology demonstrate that to understand youth movements and generational politics in modern societies, it is necessary to appreciate (1) young people's developmental characteristics, needs and relationship to adults; (2) the historical and societal context in which they are coming of age; and (3) the reasons why youth are drawn to social change. The articles in this anthology address these issues.

‘Iron Lazar’ is the first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalinist Russia’s leading deputies. With its focus on the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, this groundbreaking text offers a previously inaccessible insight into Kaganovich’s role in shaping policy during the Stalinist era.

The study begins by examining Kaganovich’s early political career and his ascent to power – a feat achieved via a distinguished role in the Civil War, which led to his elevation into the party Secretariat in Moscow. By 1930 he, Stalin and Molotov effectively constituted Russia’s ruling triumvirate, and for a period Kaganovich appeared to be the heir apparent to the Soviet Union. He played a crucial role in enforcing agricultural collectivization, in the reconstruction of Moscow, in railway and industrial administration and in carrying out the Great Terror. A very close associate of Stalin, and a major figure in promoting his cult of celebrity and establishing his dictatorship, Kaganovich subsequently fell out of favour.

Rees’s work strives to examine the personal and political dynamics shaping the Stalinist system. He notes that Kaganovich was a colourful figure – an orator as well as a forceful administrator – and that he was the most prominent Jewish figure in Soviet political life in this era. This unique biography charts the way in which these personal characteristics contributed to the development of the Stalinist system throughout Kaganovich’s career, how he was himself transformed by this experience, and the way in which he subsequently sought to rationalize his role.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the geopolitical interests and needs of the superpowers led to the configuration of the post-war international order. Taking a long-term approach to the evolution of the system of states, it describes how the United States and the Soviet Union deployed their hard and soft power resources to create the basis for the institutionalization of the international order in the aftermath of World War Two. The main idea advanced by this book is that the origins of the Cold War should not be seen from the perspective of a magnified spectrum of conflict but should be regarded as a process by which the superpowers attempted to forge a normative framework capable of sustaining their geopolitical needs and interests in the post-war scenario. This book examines how the use of ideology and the instrument of political intervention in the spheres of influence managed by the superpowers was conducive to the establishment of a stable international order.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the element of conflict present in the early period of the Cold War served to demarcate the scope of manoeuvring available to each of the superpowers. This state of affairs denotes the existence of diverging geopolitical interests, acknowledged through the presence of well-demarcated spheres of influence. The book examines the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were primarily interested in establishing the conditions for accomplishing their vital geostrategic interests, which required the implementation of social norms imposed in the respective spheres of influence, a factor that provided certainty to the spectrum of interstate relations after the period of turmoil that culminated in the outbreak of World War Two. Drawing on the example of the friction that affected Soviet-American relations at the end of World War Two, this book examines the circumstances that give rise to the construction of sound international orders and the functional values that sustain their existence.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ starts by examining the manner in which great power management has served as an instrument of the process of re-institutionalization, with special emphasis on the geopolitical elements that underpinned the intervention of the superpowers in their spheres of influence and how this state of affairs impacted on the stability of the system of states that emerged after World War Two ended. The book also examines the implications of the process of de-institutionalization that took place in the system of states since the emergence of a unified Germany and how it led to the disruption of interstate relations in the European political order. The settlement of the German Question provided the wartime allies with an opportunity to deal with the problems that stemmed from the process of de-institutionalization of the international order that the United States facilitated through the enforcement of its vital geopolitical interests in Western Europe. Emphasizing the central role of ideology in the deployment of American geopolitical power in the aftermath of World War Two the book examines the way in which the Soviet Union contributed to institutionalizing the international order by establishing the parameters of intervention that would regulate interstate relations. There will also be an emphasis on the role of ideology in the formulation of the Soviet foreign policy in the post-war era. The book also examines the special geopolitical culture of Russia and the concept of Eurasianism as the reasons behind the establishment of the spheres of influence system that operated during the Cold War. This book discusses how the process of institutionalization that took place following World War Two can teach us about the configuration of the geopolitical mechanisms needed for reconfiguring international and regional orders after a period of military conflict.

This study examines America's Middle East area specialists and their experience over three critical decades of foreign policy, aiming to understand how they were trained, what they learned, what was their foreign policy perspective, as well as to evaluate their influence.  The book examines the post-1946 group and their role in the formulation and implementation of Middle East policy, and how this has shaped events in the relationship between American and the Middle East.

The book examines the worldview of these modern “Arabists” or Middle East hands.  It also examines their interactions with the peoples of the region and with American presidents through a series of case studies spanning the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. The Middle East Area Program (MEAP) was established at Beirut to train US Foreign Service Officers to communicate in Arabic and to understand the region and all its peoples.  Middle East hands replaced the old East Coast elite who had staffed the interwar Near East Bureau. The program promised rapid advancement, but required them to invest two years at the American University of Beirut in order to immerse themselves in language training and area studies.

Over three decades, the program recruited, selected and trained a corps of approximately fifty-three diplomats, who were a much more diverse, middle-class group than their predecessors. They were ambitious careerists who sought the fast track to the top, ultimately serving throughout the Arab world and in Israel, staffing the State Department’s area desks and advising presidents. Many were skilled political reporting officers; and almost all of them became ambassadors as America expanded its presence in the region during the period of waning British influence. The program transformed the core of the State Department staff, replacing the old network of Orientalists with this small corps of highly-trained professionals. Ultimately, despite their expertise and a realistic view of American interests, their advice was often overridden by external political concerns.

Christine Jacobs, a law professor with a passion for Russian poetry and film she owes to her mom, teaches the law of AI at a law school in the US Midwest. Her former boyfriend, Paul Gantt, and his Dutch college buddy Bart are cofounders of Eidya, a technology company named after a Greek goddess of knowledge that aims to reach true transhumanism: allowing humans to transfer into humanoid robots that look like them using personal data, including data obtained via a subcutaneous chip Eidya invented,to transfer the personality of humans. The US military is interested in doing the same with its best soldiers just as the UN begins to work on a new international treaty on the use of robots in war. Dr. Jacobs is called upon to provide advice both to Eidya and to the military while teaching her classes, in which she discussed what it means to be human in the age of AI, humanoid robots, and cyborgs as her boyfriend prepares the world for what’s next. Are the Transfers persons? Will they behave like the humans they are replacing? How will they relate to humans, and to each other? How will governments react to their presence? What legal responses will their arrival trigger? The situation develops in unexpected ways on several continents.

Another distinguishing feature of the book is its use of poetry to build a triangular relationship between humans, robots, and death. The story ends with a nod to climate change activism and the recent trend in publishing dubbed “doomer lit.”

The main character is Christine Jacobs, a law professor who teaches Robot Law and loves Russian poetry and movies. The other main characters are Paul Gantt, founder and chief of Transhuman Technologist at Eidya and wine connoisseur, and his boss, Bart Van Dijk, a Dutch multibillionaire. The supporting cast includes Koharu Tanaka, Chief Biologist; Jeremy Sigall, Chief Engineer; Jane Armstrong, a US Army General in charge of robot warfare; and a number of law students.

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ presents Sara Coleridge’s religious writings to modern readers for the first time. It includes extracts from her important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings present a forthright and eloquent challenge to the patriarchal hegemonies of Victorian religion and society. They represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). The religious writings published by Sara Coleridge in the 1840s present the most original and systematic critique of the Tractarian theology developed by John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, John Keble and their colleagues. Sara Coleridge advances against a theology which she regards as repressive, authoritarian and conceptually flawed, a radical Protestant religion of inward experience and reason, underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The passages reveal Sara Coleridge’s concerns with the language of religious discourse, which drove her later developments in religious prose.

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ also consists of passages selected from Sara Coleridge’s unpublished masterpiece ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ (the equivalent of her father’s ‘Opus Maximum’), written in the last two years of her life. This collection of Socratic dialogues is quite remarkable, the most original and innovative religious work of the Tractarian era. Sara Coleridge recognized that the form and language of religious discourse was an essential consideration in determining the character of religious culture. In the period from 1833 to 1850, the monologic forms of treatise, sermon, tract and essay had fostered dogmatic and immoderate styles of expression, which had created conflict and division. Sara Coleridge therefore adopted and developed a form in which opposing views could be heard as well as stated, and which could facilitate dialectical progression towards new understanding: a medium in which division could be resolved. Sara Coleridge’s innovative use of Socratic dialogue is associated with a new ambiguity in her approach to Tractarianism. Through one of her women characters, she presents the devotional and aesthetic ethos of Tractarianism, and its practical, pastoral concerns, with sympathetic sensitivity. The passages from ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ reveal Sara Coleridge to be a religious writer and thinker of unique originality and range, profoundly sensitive to the pressing needs of her times.

Owing to the pioneering work of William Sale and Keith Maslen, which produced a catalogue of printer’s ornaments belonging exclusively to Samuel Richardson’s business, we now have an invaluable method for identifying the many publications issuing from the Salisbury Court shop. This study adds a number of new titles to the Maslen catalogue and also examines stylistic evidence in supporting attributions of anonymous texts. A number of books from Richardson’s press are found to be unacknowledged digests of works already in print, and in some cases manuscripts of letters were appropriated as raw material for an essay or pamphlet.

From the beginning of his career as printer, Richardson consistently worked as an anonymous editor and compiler while manufacturing books from his press. While setting type for his many newspapers and journals, this major London printer was mainly concerned about generating a readership and thus invoked all the tricks of his trade to arouse interest in his readers. Without ever asserting himself as the author, Richardson produced many letters to the editor as a means of invoking a collective response without risking the responsibility of answering for the opinions expressed in his letters. It was a rhetorical strategy that worked very well for a printer who by profession had to publish many works that expressed opinions wholly in conflict with his own. His long experience as anonymous editor prepared him in launching fictional “histories” told through multiple voices that conceal or underplay a central author’s authority.

‘Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators’ argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.

This book provides an overview of concepts in the field of literary and cultural neo-cosmopolitanism, demonstrating their usefulness in re-interpreting notions of the spatial and the temporal to create a new cultural politics and ethics that speak to our challenging times. The neo-cosmopolitan debates have shown how we are more connected than ever and how groups and geo-political areas that were overlooked in the past need to be brought to the center of our cultural criticism so that we can engage more ethically and sustainably with global cultures and languages at risk. In her wide-ranging study of world writers, Gunew juxtaposes Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro and Kim Scott from Australia with Canadian writers such as Shani Mootoo, Anita Rau Badami and Tomson Highway, connecting them to other Europeans such as Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller. [NP] This book analyses diaspora texts within neo-imperial globalization where global English often functions as metonym for Western values. By introducing the acoustic ‘noise’ of multilingualism (accents within writing) in relation to the constitutive instability within monolingual English studies, Gunew shows that within global English diverse forms of ‘englishes’ provide routes to more robust recognition of the significance of other languages that create pluralized perspectives on our social relations in the world.

At the turn of the 21st century, Australia witnessed a shift in the public debates related to the history of European settlement of the continent and settler–Indigenous relations. This historical moment was a result of revisionist history which made the violent settlement of the land and Indigenous dispossession more visible to the public, as well as the culmination of Indigenous activism and testimonial accounts. Consequently, the Australian White settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, resulting in what some scholars call “setter anxiety” (Slater 2019).
  This book analyzes how settler (un)belonging is narrativized in a particular literary genre, that of memoir, written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000. I call these narratives memoirs of settler belonging. Becoming a popular genre in Australia, they have one thing in common: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a white settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis-à-vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians?
   The individual chapters examine various groups of memoirs produced by Australian public intellectuals who textualize their settler anxiety and their desire to belong ethically. The groups include historians’ memoirs, White women’s travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs. The book advances an argument that throughout almost two decades, a shift can be traced in representing settler (un)belonging textually. While in the earlier memoirs setter anxiety was visibly thematized and an active approach to resolving the impasse of (un)belonging was sought, the more recent memoirs, particularly those morphing into landscape- and eco-memoir, have moved away from the critical reflection on settler anxiety as being generated by the continuing Indigenous dispossession, and replaced this anxiety of settler belonging with a new perspective which brings forward the concept of settler belonging based on an intimate historical and environmental knowledge of local landscapes, and on affective engagement with the Country.

The Modern State and Its Enemies considers the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state, informed the key theoretical questions arising in the democratic context, and shaped the relationship between (state) sovereignty and (individual) liberty. The modern state as a nation-state is thus based on the relationship between its territory, its people and its sovereign authority. As a result, nationalism and minorities policy are issues that are key to the state’s self-conception. But historically, these have also been repeatedly used as weapons against the state, manifesting in separatism, irredentism and antidemocratic agitation. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism have always stood in opposition to the democratic state and continue to do so. Antisemitism in particular is antithetical to modernity as it fundamentally rejects equality and individual liberty. This book presents its arguments in theoretical, historical and sociological terms, with a particular focus on examples from the German context.

In the opening chapter of her 1866 novel 'Felix Holt', George Eliot tells her readers that the 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence'. 'George Eliot's Grammar of Being' is developed from the idea that George Eliot wanted to produce these vibrations within her novels, not just at the level of story and character, but also at the level of language. She was a novelist who wanted the public to read her sentences almost as carefully as she wrote them—to make her readers find and subconsciously respond to those places in the prose where the syntax itself delivers subtle shocks to the system 'beneath' context. Relying heavily on examination of original manuscripts and page proofs, this book shows how George Eliot’s is a carefully evolved grammar where the vibrations are purposefully created and then enhanced through active revision. Drawing on the influence of Victorian psychological and neuro-physiological theory, as well as study of the manuscripts and writing processes of other Victorian novelists, the book shows how the sentences within a novel can become a kind of nervous system to the narrative, thus highlighting the integral role that language plays in the inspiration of our sympathy as readers.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a technological breakthrough that will revolutionize human life. Advancements in the area of AI are happening all across the globe and this technology is not only reshaping business and government and also being applied in the daily lives of individuals. 

AI has been integrated in many industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail and consumer, technology, communication and entertainment, energy, transportation and logistics. The application of AI in these industries has helped in not only making processes more efficient but also reducing cost. There are many applications of Ai which are yet to be researched and put into practice. A lot needs to be done to capitalize the full potential of this technology. Companies are, therefore, investing a plenty of funds in R&D activities to harness its maximum benefit.

International Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence is an effort to engage the practitioners, researchers and users in a discussion on AI and also to provide snapshots of the status of AI in different parts of the world. 

By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city. Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions. From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time.

The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played women’s parts, until gaining great fame for his role as a Hindu saint. Two others, Narayan Prasad Betab and Radheshyam Kathavachak, wrote landmark dramas that ushered in the mythological genre, intertwining politics and religion with popular performance.

These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, offer an unparalleled window onto a vanished world, where India’s late-colonial vernacular culture and early cinema history come alive. From another perspective, these narratives are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.

This book includes four substantive chapters on the history of the Parsi theatre, debates over autobiography in the Indian context, strategies for reading autobiography in general, and responses to these specific texts. The apparatus, based on the translator’s extensive research, includes notes on personages, performances, texts, vernacular usage, and cultural institutions.

Mathew Carey’s long-neglected “The New Olive Branch” offers new insight into political economy as it really happened. This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Carey’s most important economic work. Like other volumes in Anthem’s “Economic Ideas that Built America” series, it gives the reader easy access to historical works that have been dropped from the modern economic canon because of their uncomfortable fit with contemporary conceptions of classical economics rooted in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.

In “The New Olive Branch,” Carey derided those so-called classical economists as visionary theorists with little grasp of real-world problems. Rejecting grand theories, Carey instead looked to historical examples and statistics to argue that government policy, and particularly the protection of manufacturers, was crucial to the development of a strong, independent American economy. In this volume, “The New Olive Branch” is accompanied by portions of Carey’s “Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry” (1822), which offer further insight into his rejection of classical economics.

While such views have long been out of fashion, overtaken by the popularity of classical economics, they were extremely influential in early America. Carey’s arguments illuminate how a large proportion of Americans thought about their economy while providing a corrective to the anachronistic overemphasis of the role of laissez-faire economics in early America.

Gevork Hartoonian presents a retrospective reading of the first edition of Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published in 1980. He provides novel insights into the significance of Frampton’s historiography of modern architecture and beyond. In exploring selected themes from Frampton’s ongoing criticism of contemporary architecture, this book leads us to a critical understanding of the past, the modernity of architecture’s contemporaneity. It unpacks classificatory modes governing the three-part organization of Frampton’s book, the constellation of which allowed him to hold on to an anteroom view of history amidst the flood of temporalities spanning the period 1980–2020. Contemplating Frampton’s book as an artifact stripped of temporality, this original work reads Frampton’s historiography in the intersection of selected epigraphs and three images illuminating the book’s classificatory mode. Hartoonian presents a valuable companion to Frampton’s A Critical History for readers interested in the successes and failures of contemporary architecture’s philosophical and theoretical aspirations.

This book is the product of an ongoing dialogue among 47 experts from a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds, including thought leaders from the ranks of policymakers, academics and civil society. These thought leaders and visionaries discuss the likely longer-range trajectories of South Asia’s future as a region, focusing particularly on current regional trends, possible futures and the key factors that will determine whether these trajectories are positive or negative for the region.

Will we even be talking about a “South Asian region” 50 years from now? And will the region still be seen as a threat to global stability? This future-oriented exploration tackles these questions whilst departing from a purely security-based analysis to include factors such as development and human well-being, seeking to shed light on a whole spectrum of current issues that will affect the region into the future.

The essays in this book organically inform the collection’s coherent and nuanced outlook on the region, which offers both an introspective and globally aware perspective of the outcomes of the region’s development. The volume fills the gap in studies on South Asia by exploring its regional identity, as well as the potential of present conditions to impact the future of South Asia and the rest of the world.

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human “being” to its limits. This project arises within the question, “Can an animal die?,” formulated in response to Martin Heidegger’s famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot “die” but can only “perish,” an assertion that sharply summarizes western “humanist” philosophical discourse – particularly as etched in the “modern turn” initiated by Descartes – in which the “human” emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently – most notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas – philosophers have interrogated the grounds of Heidegger’s formulation, putting into question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly on ethological revelations of animal “capacities,” and partly on ideas intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis. 

The book’s overarching thesis is that, taken together, texts – including Shakespeare’s King Lear; Eliot’s Middlemarch; Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Atwood’s Surfacing; and Desai’s Clear Light of Day – are both distinctive in their figurations of the human-animal relation and representative of a wide spectrum of literary instantiations of the “question of the animal” for post-Enlightenment western culture.

Ragnar Nurkse (1907-1959) was one of the most important pioneers of development economics, and although his writings have been neglected in recent decades, leading development economists and international organizations such as the United Nations are now turning to Nurkse in search for new inspiration, due to the failure of neoclassical economics to adequately explain the experience of poor and developing countries. Yet Nurkse’s contribution to the field has never before been analysed before at book length.

The present volume, ‘Ragnar Nurkse (1907-2007): Classical Development Economics and its Relevance for Today’, contains a selection of papers that cast new insight on Nurkse’s thought, and discuss his relevance for today. The volume also celebrates the 100th anniversary of this profoundly important thinker’s birth.

‘Psychoanalytic Mythologies’ presents a collection of essays on the theme of what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic imagery. The author disturbs the strongly-held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true, and this thesis forms the recurrent motif that binds these essays together. Instead he argues that psychoanalysis functions as something that is only ever locally true. These arguments are elaborated upon in a range of contexts, from night clubs, garages and trains to theme parks, magic circles and yoga, and the different strands are distilled into a cohesive thesis in the definitive final essay ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’.

The essays presented here were initially published in scattered newsletters and journals, and were written intermittently in a period stretching back over ten years. Ian Parker has written widely in this area, and these lively and innovative essays taken together form a searing manifesto against the accepted dogmas of psychoanalysis.

Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. The various sections of the book introduce the theoretical and historical foundations for analyzing humanness, and the role of the atypical body in determining membership, meaning and worth; examine embodied criteria of “humanness” and offending corporeal characteristics; describe and analyze how offenders are identified and depicted in diverse contexts; delve into how these bodies are met with praxis and axiological responses from revision through exclusion; and invoke contemporary post-postmodernist marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking disability within the textured fabric of humanness.

Adopting a long view that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century, Robert Neild investigates why in recent years the University of Cambridge has been cutting expenditure, appealing for money and losing its academic independence. Using the university’s financial records and other statistics, Neild reveals the nature and scale of the changes experienced by the university since 1850 – particularly those affecting the extent of its scientific research, the sources and size of the its income, the social origin of its students, and its relationship with the British government.

Having suffered hard times both before and after the First World War, Cambridge prospered during the post-war years up until the 1970s. During that period government grants burgeoned, and both parties backed rapid university expansion. By the end of the 1970s this golden age had faded – largely as a result of inflation, economic crises and the revival of market economics. Both political parties have since cut grants, pushed universities to behave more like businesses, and taken steps to reintroduce fees. The university itself has achieved great success in acquiring non-government research grants and contracts – particularly in the biomedical sciences. Yet it has not escaped a financial squeeze, caused by repeated cuts in government funding and has suffered increases in governmental intervention. Thus, Neild shows, Cambridge’s academic independence and its finances are under threat.

'South Asian Media Cultures' is a collection of essays that pulls together field-based audience and textual research in areas such as the politics of new media, contemporary television and film in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and their audiences. Through a careful analysis of the various media cultures and practices from across South Asia, this collection addresses pertinent issues such as how discourses on gender, nationalism, ethnicity and class are being expressed by mainstream media texts across South Asia, and how different groups within the public discern meanings from such discourses.

With this collection, Banaji aims to reduce the reliance on commercial Hindi cinema ('Bollywood') for reference on the politics and history of South Asian Media. Instead, key current research and theoretical debate are presented in an accessible manner. They are organised around three clear themes: 'Audiences, meanings and social contexts', which focuses on the responses of particular social groups to specific media formats, ideas or genres; 'Media Discourse, Identity and Politics', which discusses the complex links between media representations and socio-political identities; and 'Alternative Producers: New Media, Politics and Civic Participation', which describes and assesses the various civic practices and possibilities opened up in South Asia by digital and mobile communications.

Unfinished Austen is a scholarly monograph which examines four texts left incomplete by Jane Austen: Catharine, or the Bower (1792–-3), Lady Susan (1795?), The Watsons (1803–-4?) and Sanditon (1817). None was published till well after her death. They have never received nearly as much attention as the six novels that appeared between 1811 and 1817, and this is the first study to examine them in detail, and in relation to each other.

These unfinished texts are fascinating for several reasons. Since very little in manuscript form survives from the six famous novels, these four manuscript texts offer insight into the novelist in the process of creation. All of them feature alterations that show Jane Austen refining her language and demonstrating the orientation of her thinking. The unfinished works also problematize the romance plot salient in the published novels by presenting this in a nebulous or incipient state that underlines its artificiality. In doing so, these texts sometimes draw attention to how the romance plot is inflected by the financial condition in which young marriageable women can find themselves. 

Notable as well is the four texts’ handling of place and setting, which become especially prominent in The Watsons and Sanditon. The Watsons creates superbly the life of a small-town family at the edges of gentility, while Sanditon portrays a small seaside town being developed into a tourist resort—a new trend in Austen’s day. Moreover, the stories (other than Catharine) have aroused the interest of many later writers—including writers for theatre and screen—who are eager to complete or to amplify them. Developments on screen include Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship (which is actually based on Austen’s Lady Susan), and Andrew Davies’s recent continuation of Sanditon. Completions may develop the stories to some kind of dénouement. Perhaps more intriguingly, however, these texts induce some writers to question the very enterprise of concluding an unfinished text.

There are many books on screenwriting that suggest to writers there are “secrets of Hollywood” and guaranteed formulas for success. The implication is that with the right recipe and a little luck any student can whip out the script that will provide that triumphant red carpet walk toward financial success and global appreciation. It is rare for a book to tell aspiring writers that they may already know the secret of great stories nestled in their own experience: the people they encounter in life, their observations of events, and their personal reactions to them. The intentions of this book is to provide for the creativity writers already have, to help them see the stories waiting to be recognized, recovered, and shaped into the scripts of visual narrative. While the emphasis of this book is on creating scripts intended for production of moving image media, the guide can be adapted to the creativity of various types of storytellers working in a variety of media. One of the needs for art is the mirror, a reflection of human existence and what is glorious, tragic, wonderful, and funny about life. In an age of “post-truth,” where derivative and grotesquely bogus stories are abundant, globally networked, and digitally streamed, this book examines what it means to both artists and audiences when the mirror is consistently distorted, inaccurate, and biased. The book offers a guide for finding authenticity in fictional narrative, regardless of genre or form. The book is intended as a compass for writers to better understand and confront the truths they want to reveal through narrative stories and how to find legitimacy in the fictional characters and situations they create. One element that sets this book apart from others is the use of storyboarding to explain ideas. There are many books that teach fundamentals of writing and producing for the screen, promising the reader great success through formula. This book is a guide for writers in finding their own creative voice.

The book is a full-length study of Indian celebrity culture, including fandom, celebrity philanthropy and celebrity activism, which are established features of life today and which constitute a major component of pop culture’s coverage of sports/film stars.

The collection of essays in the book moves from the largest domain of celebrity culture in India – Bollywood – through celebrity life writing and biopics and, finally, to the politics of and by celebrity culture. The book begins with an exploration of films made around women celebrity victims – Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwaliato – and moves on to show how the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood stars’ philanthropic and humanitarian work enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project wherein the Bollywood campaigner for women’s rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. Celebrity charisma and its role in the current era of ‘post-truth’ are studied to show how Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generates a sensuous fidelity in the audience, inducing a certain cultural ignorance.

The book goes on to show how star memoirs reinforce star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The hagiographic biopics around cricket stars M.S. Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Shobhraj and Neerja Bhanot, the air hostess killed by hijackers, make a case for an argument that the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers, and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Reading cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star’s body to the biosocial network. 

The final collection of essays are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics that starts with the examination of the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The River Narmada as a cultural icon and its iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity makes a case for her ‘insurgent celebrityhood’ created through her mobility into and across many public domains. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an ‘outcast’. Reading the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattnaik and Amish, demonstrates how a certain self-fashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within a scriptural-mythological narrative.

'The Hidden Form of Capital' presents evidence from several parts of the changing world about how the realm of the spirit affects the economy. The idea that societies have economic cultures as well as aesthetic, literary, and artistic cultures is well-embedded in a number of major studies attempting to identify the origins of national wealth and progress. This book provides an original contribution to the debate, by discussing the relationship between religion and the economy not via further theoretical speculation, but through the presentation of analytical evidence from real-life case studies in Europe, Asia, Africa, Russia, and the United States.

There is currently a major re-assessment of assumptions about the foundations of societal progress, as the market rationality model is exposed for its moral weaknesses. The emergence of socio-economics as a scholarly field, as well as the embracing of complexity theory and the societal effect in economic analysis, brings the question of cultural effects to the forefront. This collection of studies offers more practical and tangible evidence, especially unique and useful for its comparative aspect. The book skilfully combines this comparative and descriptive character with an accessible writing style intended for a wide audience.

‘Can We Live Forever?’ addresses the modern debate about the Life Extension Project that results from revolutions (actual and predicted) in bio-medicine, transplantation, cosmetic surgery, genetic counseling, stem cell research, cryonics, cloning and so forth that cumulatively promise to deliver eternal life or at least 'prolongevity'. In an engaging and thought-provoking work, the author traces the rise of the Life Extension Project and its claims against an intellectual background of recent analyses of 'waste', sustainable environments and complexity theory.

Although there has been much discussion of increasing life expectancy, this book looks at a range of additional issues: the religious implications of life extension; the psychological consequences, such as ennui; the negative global social and economic factors; the problems of intergenerational justice. The possible benefits and adverse consequences of living forever are fully explored in this illuminating text, offering substance to social scientists working on ageing and demographic change, philosophers interested in questions of continuity and identity, theologians concerned with secular changes in the life course, as well as the general reader.

Karl Mannheim is a classic of sociology. “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” helps us to accompany him in his open, experimental thinking, the generation of new questions, the recognition of thought experiments as well as the care for controlling evidence, and his negotiations with colleagues he encounters in his own searches. This is not simply to dismiss the elements brought together by earlier scholars into a challenging composite design, but there cannot be many authors recognized as classical who have characterized the work for which he/she is justly honored as a collection of experimental essays. Sociology of knowledge is a project, not a creed; and “Ideology and Utopia” is a documentation, not a scripture.

After a brief introductory overview of Karl Mannheim’s intellectual career, “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” offers fresh commentaries and explorations by an international and presently active group of scholars. As the institutionalized understanding of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge project was so long shaped by the synthetic reading by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton—a classic in his own right––the companion opens with a careful exposition and critique of that authoritative interpretation. It is followed by a close reading of the considerations that led Mannheim to move beyond the neo-Kantian epistemology of his earlier training to the project of a sociological understanding of critical knowledge. Next to come is a series of studies that marked by perspectives derived from intellectual strategies developed since the breakdown of consensus on the approaches examined in the previous section. In their variety, the studies capture a number of perspectives opened up or expanded by an understanding of Mannheim’s undertaking. The key terms are familiar: self-reflexivity, praxeological sociology, neo-realism, and dramatistic readings of world-views. The angles of vision differ, but they agree in projecting new and important light on Mannheim’s efforts. At the end, attention is focused on some unfamiliar links between Mannheim’s work and current interests: a study of Mannheim’s influence on Hannah Arendt, who knew him as teacher in Heidelberg and Frankfurt; an inquiry into Mannheim’s political thought from the standpoint of contemporary democratic political theory; and an examination of Mannheim’s attention to the status of women and of the work done on these matters under his tutelage by a group of talented women students.

The idea of “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” is by no means to dismiss the work for which Mannheim has been best known, but it is to put that work in its particular context, as a multisided agenda rather than as a finished doctrine, to be accepted or rejected. The aim is to learn from Karl Mannheim.

Williams fought a good fight for a better democracy and the collective equal rights of African Americans. He was not just a revolutionary voice and internationalist leader and voice in the Black Power movement, and should not be forgotten or dismissed because he maintained other reasons for raging his grievance towards the policies and practices of democracy in the United States. Robert F. Williams neither should be reduced to the status of a tool of Cold War politics or to a study about armed self-defense. Rather, in his contesting the government’s refusal to defend the human rights of 22 million African Americans, Williams’ actions and uncompromising stance directly and affirmatively addressed the promise and rights guaranteed US citizenship and the constitutional rights of the members of that society. Williams critically questioned numerous unjust acts and human rights violations, and waged (often a one-family man) war against America’s inability to practice principles of freedom and democracy, when these mistreatments were ignored. Robert F. Williams was an independent thinker, a compassionate and intelligent man. He was a common man, and despite his lofty intelligence, he was an American, claiming his right to his American citizenship. He was acutely aware of the broken promises of the United States. Yet, he nonetheless remained fully invested in assuming all of the rights, privileges, and responsibilities the Constitution guaranteed American citizens of African descent. He was always focused on making sure Americans took full advantage of the tools available in society and/or in government to bring them to bear in their situation. He believed in the redress of government, and the citizen’s right to do that. He believed that the US Constitution should be abided by, and that that was the right of every citizen.  Robert F. Williams collaborated with leaders of two foreign countries in order to communicate his grievances against the United States government and its citizens who remained complicit in practices of racial injustice. His exile in China from 1966 to 1969 led to his being expunged from the memory of Monroe, North Carolina’s trumped up charges of kidnapping. In the South and the Black Diaspora of the Midwest, he was a local civil rights leader, pragmatist, and internationalist in twentieth-century world history.

For many decades Japan enjoyed great success with its export-oriented economy and the outsourcing of its foreign policy to the United States under the US security umbrella. Its role in the world was simple, and times were good. But times have changed: With the end of the Cold War, a shrinking domestic population, global instabilities after 9-11, the financial crisis, and other seismic shifts, Japan now faces a more complicated world.

In this groundbreaking and provocative discussion, three foreigners who have lived and worked in Japan – a Canadian, a Frenchman and a Spaniard – argue that Japan has much to gain by pursuing a more engaged, outward-looking, multilateral posture in its region and globally. While the country will continue to enjoy good relations with the West, the time has come for Japan to embrace its Asian heritage and future, as well as its own potential contribution to world affairs. A globally engaged, more open Japan, the authors argue, is win-win-win: good for Japan, good for Asia, and good for the world. If Japan is truly to become a global citizen, however, it must not only reach out more to the world, it must also admit more of the world – new ideas, people, and capital from afar – on its own soil. But is Japan – the Japanese – prepared to do so?

For more information please see the book website: http://japansopenfuture.anthempressblog.com

How much, and under what conditions, can the European Union affect democratization and democratic consolidation in prospective member states? What mechanisms does the EU employ to influence reforms in countries emerging from authoritarian rule? Focusing on Albania and Macedonia, two postcommunist countries with a legacy of internal conflict, “Conditioning Democratization” analyzes the relationship between EU accession conditionality and institutional reforms. It focuses on four sectors of reform that are often overlooked in other studies: constitutions, asylum, local decentralization and the judiciary system.

The volume critically reviews the theory of “consociational democracy,” often considered the key to stabilizing deeply divided countries, and reapplies it to the supranational institution of the European Union. In articulate, accessible prose, Ridvan Peshkopia builds on examples from multiple sectors in multiple countries to reconceptualize this theory and show that the EU can indeed use membership conditions as a tool to encourage and direct reform.

This collection of eleven essays deals with Lenin’s life in western European emigration in the years before the First World War. The first five essays explore Lenin’s efforts to build a purely Bolshevik Party through the creation of a unique school for underground workers outside of Paris, his schismatic machinations in calling the 1912 Prague Conference, his problematic relations with the new Bolshevik daily ‘Pravda’, his unsuccessful attempt to call a party congress in 1914, and his defeat at the Brussels ‘Unity’ Conference summoned by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of the war. These essays are based on a detailed reading of Western and Soviet sources, and they question the common assumption that Lenin was unquestioned inside his own faction and that pre-war Bolshevism was a monolithic entity well-prepared to seize power.

The latter essays discuss Lenin’s curious friendship during the pre-war period with Roman Malinovsky, who turned out to be a police spy, and Inessa Armand, a Bolshevik feminist with whom he had a romantic relationship. They also investigate such mundane but little-studied topics as what he liked to eat in emigration, his annual habit of taking bourgeois vacations and his obsession with athletic pursuits. The picture which emerges from these studies is not of a single-minded, perfect leader solely devoted to carrying out revolution, but rather of a ‘non-geometric’ Lenin with very human foibles and weaknesses.

The seminal edited collection examines histories of esotericism, mysticism and occultism in modern Asia, understood here as the period roughly stretching from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, and paving eventually the way for the so-called ‘New Age’. The idea of ‘histories’, in plural, has to do with the complexities of their lineages, the many pathways through which their affinities, encounters and entanglements flowed and/or developed during the period under review.
• Contributors to the anthology hail from different disciplines – history, literature, religious studies and so forth – and broach the subjects from the vantage points of their fields. Their studies bring to the forefront the need to transcend the neatly demarcated, and frequently overdrawn and binary, idioms of East–West, colonizer–colonized, or modernity–tradition. By drawing upon case studies of individuals (esotericists/mystics/scholars), movements and/or networks (including but not restricted to Theosophy/Sufism/Sufis, for instance), and institutionalized academia (epistemologies of religion contra esotericism contra mysticism contra occultism, Eastern/Western/or otherwise), contributors to the edited collection bring out the many facets of these categories and processes in modern Asia. They examine how at times far from being counter-modern/peripheral/fringe escapist, these processes came to mark a less-explored side of modernity. Thus, systems of knowledge and frameworks conventionally rejected in triumphalist Enlightenment narratives often came up with their own understanding of modernity, humanity. They frequently endeavoured, through their politics of spirituality and transcendence, to lend voice to their critical commentaries on wider socio-political problems of the times. This edited collection examines esoteric, occult and mystical traditions and their politics of spirituality and transcendence in modern Asia against the larger backdrop of intra-Asian and global flows from a truly multi-disciplinary perspective.
• The anthology will be useful for postgraduate students, research scholars and academics in general, working in the fields of religious studies and/or Asian religions, history and philosophy of Asian religions. In addition, even those broadly interested in encounters across cultures and religions will also find this collection to be of great value.

Transnational migration studies has produced a wealth of literature on migrants’ economic, cultural, social and political practices and relationships across national borders. At least until recently, the primary focus of this literature was on younger adults, especially unskilled labour migrants from the Global South. In contrast, the question of how old age and different degrees of mobility relate to transnational practices and orientations was rarely addressed. Similarly, scholars looking at processes of aging only sporadically approached the lives of older people from a transnational vantage point.

Thus far, chiefly transnational family scholars have studied older peoples’ cross-border involvement. Studies in this field emphasize the complexities and consequences of older peoples’ situations in transnational family arrangements. However, empirical evidence of the prevalence and structuring features of older peoples’ family-related transnational practices remains scarce. Similarly, little is known about the relationship between age and specific stages in the life-course and the type and scope of older family members’ transnational engagement. Also, research on the association between different migration regimes and transnational family arrangements is scarce.

By asking how, why and to what extent do older Peruvians engage in transnational family ties and practices ‘Aging within Transnational Families’ seeks to enhance our knowledge about aging across borders. Drawing on the care circulation framework and the capacity and desire approach, it explores the motivations of older Peruvians’ transnational involvement as well as the factors influencing the scope and propensity of their cross-border practices. From a life course perspective, the book asks how age relates to older Peruvian migrants’ integration into the host society and engagement in the sending of remittances and visits of family members in Peru. Using a situated approach, a particular analytic focus is on the political and institutional contexts surrounding the older Peruvians’ transnational involvement.

This book groups together three kinds of experience: the experience of the sublime, of 'epiphany' which is generally a profound experience of something ordinary, and the feeling of 'thrills' which can be a shiver down the spine or sudden tears. 

These 'strong experiences' have been extensively studied, but almost always separately from one another, and in a variety of disciplines, and so this is the first major attempt to bring them together under a relatively simple psychological account. The book reviews some of the work on the sublime and epiphanies, including life-changing epiphanies, in the literary critical, philosophical and psychological literature. It explores how we can feel that we know things which are deeply important without being able to put what we know into words, and it also offers an introduction to some basic psychological ideas about knowledge. The book focuses on the physical aspects of the experience, and their relation to emotions, and looks in detail at what the body actually does when we feel goosebumps and similar sensations. It continues to outline some of the simple psychological notions which support this account of strong experiences, including how surprise works, and other related notions such as curiosity, attention and empathy, and why ordinary things can sometimes be perceived as though they are sources of profound insight.

The final section briefly summarises various devices in literary texts which can be used to trigger strong experiences in a reader. It concludes by noting that our strong experiences of literary texts and other aesthetic objects are related to our more general aesthetic experience.

The book is meticulously researched, drawing mainly on archives in the United States and Britain and includes previously unpublished photographs. It is in three parts. Part I begins with a reminder of the early days of American independence and the formation of the new nation and is a useful backdrop to the rest of the book. This was a period of rapid growth which saw the creation and development of the State Department and the Consular Service. Accounts are given of the frequent legislative changes, the major weaknesses of the early Consular Service, the Spoils System which ensured that political allies or presidential fundraisers were appointed as consuls, the calls for reform, how the Consular Service lost its separate identity in 1924 when it merged with the Diplomatic Service to form the unified Foreign Service, and the amalgamation of the State Department and the Foreign Service in 1954.

Parts II and III form the major section of the book. Part II concentrates on the consulates and the people who served in them in Britain and pre-independence Ireland and is an overview of the American consular presence from 1790 to the present day. Topics covered include the wide-ranging extent of the consular network, British nationals who served as American consuls, consular families, office accommodation, furnishings and equipment of consulates, espionage activities conducted by the consuls in Britain during the American Civil War, how Texas and Hawaii had consulates in Britain before they became States of the Union, inspections of consulates, the dangers faced by consuls during the First and Second World War blitzes, and the lengthy attempts by women to become consuls and diplomats.

Part III consists of detailed histories of consulates in fifteen towns. These include the dates on which the offices were operational, short biographies of staff who served in them and an indication of their routine activities, including a few noteworthy incidents or highlights. The accounts are of varying length reflecting the duration of the consulates’ presence. The extent and scale of the former consular network can be appreciated from the list of locations and categories of consular offices shown in the Appendix. The book concludes with a review of how the consular function has evolved and kept pace with changing demands and needs. Although the Spoils System now exists for only one consular appointment, at a post which is not in the UK but is within the London embassy’s remit, it still thrives in those embassies where career consuls and diplomats report to an ambassador who may be a political appointee. This is particularly the case in a number of European posts.

Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change – but it is also a country that is capable of coping. Far from being a victim, Bangladesh has lessons for activists, scientists, government and donor officials and concerned citizens who want to know what climate change looks like and how to respond to it.

This densely populated country feeds itself because it is in a rich delta. But that comes at the price of a volatile environment – three huge rivers bring floodwaters from the Himalayas and massive cyclones sweep up the Bay of Bengal. Once accurately described as a ‘basket case’ of hunger and disaster, its scientists and engineers, working with local communities, have transformed the country. Strong cyclone shelters and early warning systems now protect at-risk coastal people. Improved rice varieties and irrigation feed the nation and rapidly cut child malnutrition. Women's education has curbed population growth. Along with these changes have come measures to cope with the volatile environment.

Climate change makes the problems worse, with higher temperatures and rising sea levels, heavier rain and bigger floods and stronger cyclones. Bangladeshis know what the damaged climate change will bring. The government, researchers and communities are already adapting, raising land levels to match the rise in sea level, strengthening dykes to protect against floods, producing more adaptable rice varieties and improving disaster preparation. Bangladesh is a model of climate change adaptation and a lesson for those who continue to ignore global warming.

Bangladeshis have taken a leading role in international campaigning and negotiating, helping to convince industrialized countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Because it cannot wait for help from rich countries, Bangladesh has shouldered most of its adaptation costs. Will industrialized countries make the task harder – or will they help Bangladesh by reducing emissions and paying for the damage already done?

A city is more than its buildings and streets. A city is the people who live, work, and play in it and make it their own. This book brings together original essays and interviews which trace the history of the peoples in the city of Calcutta. Those who came and stayed; why they did so; and how they contributed in building the city. Once celebrated as the second city of the British Empire after London and more recently derided as the dying city, Calcutta is simultaneously associated with intellectual creativity, processions and palaces and a unique way of claiming the outsider as its own. This collection brings together the stories of the Armenians, Chinese, Sikhs, ‘South Indians’, Bohra Muslims and other communities who have come and created this wondrous mosaic, the city of Calcutta.

This volume of essays combines new analyses of two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. Originally presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference 2010 in New Orleans, these collected papers have been expanded and extended from their original points of enquiry, and analyse films from the diverse cultural traditions of China, Germany, the United Kingdom, America, Northern Ireland and India. Subjects of examination include China’s ‘Shanghai Express’ and ‘The Goddess’, Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, and two films from the James Bond franchise, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and ‘Casino Royale’. Other areas of investigation include films focusing on Northern Ireland, the depiction of the Indian film industry through Indian writers, and Hong Kong and East Asian cinema.

The focus of the volume then switches to the visual arts, with an explanation of how the classificatory order for the visual arts and art history has long been rigorous in its demand for juxtapositions and comparisons, followed by an examination of modernist abstract art with a specific analysis of the importance of Gertrude Stein’s still-lifes in ‘Tender Buttons’. Manuel Rivas’ use of cross-cultural textualization in ‘Mujer en el baño’ is explored using the concepts of montage and Benjamin’s dialectical image. Lastly Kara Walker’s controversial art that highlights racial pictography and violent imagery from the antebellum American South comes under close scrutiny.

The essays in ‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling. [NP] Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts. Like late Victorian Walter Potter’s infamous taxidermied two-headed kitten, the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror (e.g., anxiety, hesitation, disgust) and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it.  Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy’s uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts, surprisingly overlooked in most criticism, is a driving force in generating fear. The core argument of the book is that taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being-there. Taxidermy often sits, presiding over characters in critical moments in Gothic texts, sometimes foreshadowing their own fate (as in the case of Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho, or the protagonist in Roald Dahl’s short story “The Landlady”), but most frequently taxidermy works to amplify the affect of horror, generating anxiety over what will be forever preserved and never escaped: the violence of life. Key texts examined in this book are nineteenth-century taxidermy manuals and specimens, including the anthropomorphic work by notorious taxidermists Walter Potter and Charles Waterton; contemporary artistic taxidermy, with a focus on the shocking work by Scott Bibus, and Kate Clark; literary works, by authors such as H.G. Wells, and Claudia Rankine; and horror film and tele-series, with a focus on Get Out (2017), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), and Tell Me Your Secrets (2021). In short, taxidermy’s imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit. This book will help carve new scholarly directions in the bodies of Gothic and horror studies, animal studies, and art history and visual culture.

Book Series:  Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature

The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money-tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1%’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite, rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?

‘Greedy Elites’ derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of the society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. ‘Greedy Elites’ also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the US, ‘Greedy Elites’ offers new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of frictions within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class elements in their power struggles, and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.

This book is an authoritative and radical manifesto for changes that are urgently required in development cooperation. The book predicts that, unless radical steps are taken by the World Bank, the first decade of the century will witness a ever-widening gulf between poor and rich countries.

Jo Ritzen presents a picture of a world at a crossroads. One road leads to substantial ('radical') reform in the rich countries, in combination with a substantial push towards better governance in developing countries. The other leads to further increases in inequality between rich and poor countries. 'Millennium development goals' – such as achieving universal primary education by 2015 or reducing child mortality by two-thirds in 2015 – have had widespread support. They will not be reached if the world follows this road; unfortunately, the signs suggest that it has already started to do so.

'A Chance for the World Bank' provides an overview of the challenges faced by the World Bank, and explores how it has organized itself to accomplish its mission. This book proposes that the World Bank still has a chance to achieve its stated goals; in order to do so, it needs to take a number of radical steps: to create a level playing field in trade for the developing countries; to harmonize aid and save developing countries from the gigantic transaction costs of aid; and to promote governance in developing countries and to reduce rigorously induced corruption by multinationals.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of theory and methodology of finance and economics. It begins by discussing financial instruments, which form the basis of the theory of finance and are defined as legal documents recording monetary transactions. The text then goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail.

The text follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in nontechnical language. It also provides intuitive explanations of the mathematical results of questions concerning important issues such as risk aversion, uncertainty, prospect theory and the theory of stochastic dominance.

The text also covers two alternative approaches to portfolio analysis – namely the mean-variance and mean-Gini approaches – and features an analysis of the Modigliani–Miller theorem, which has played a major role in the development of business finance. It discusses the capital asset pricing model and the intricacies of the methods for determining prices of different types of options, which give the right to buy or sell an asset. Conditions for non-arbitrage that do not allow advantage of price discrimination between markets are also developed.

Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

‘The WTO and its Development Obligation: Prospects for Global Trade’ presents a sound argument in favour of the WTO adhering to its long-standing development obligation. Ezeani goes further than merely highlighting the problems of developing country integration, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the underlying factors that are preventing developing countries from making meaningful gains through participation in global trade. She assesses the effectiveness of current 'development-based' programmes of the WTO as well as the DSB, and stresses the importance for developing countries of recognising the potential benefits of global trade.

Through an account of the beginnings of organised global trade, Ezeani strengthens the case against treating developing countries differently by examining the fundamental constraints of applying early economic principles to the modern environment.

This compact volume is a practical guide for anyone interested in Trade Credit Insurance. The International Credit Insurance & Surety Association (ICISA) presents an approachable but detailed guide written collaboratively by carefully selected industry experts. The guide describes the ‘lifeline’ of the credit insurance product, from the initial application stage to the expiration phase of the policy, including practical use aspects for credit managers. The volume offers compact information on the history of trade, the need for protection against trade credit risks, and solutions offered by credit insurance providers. The focus is on short term credit, including whole turnover policies and single risk policies.

The memoir Academia, Chernobyl, Expeditions and The Greeks: A Research Psychologist on the Move recounts memorable experiences over the course of the author’s career as an academic psychologist engaged in research on stress and coping in extreme environments. Throughout the memoir, the author presents short summaries of her research methods and findings; however, the focus of the book is on her personal experiences – the events, people, and the environment with its natural beauty or devastation that she encountered while conducting this research.

There is an array of events, some quite unique, that are detailed in the book, starting with Academia – challenges of teaching a psychology course at an American army base in Orleans, France; completing a doctoral degree at the University of Maryland while raising a family; academic activities and a 1972 sex discrimination complaint against Rutgers University, one of the first cases in the country following the passage of the Federal Title IX civil rights law; initial research as an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, including studies of Holocaust survivors and their families, and Vietnam nurses; The Russian Drama – continuing research on stress and coping through four trips to the Soviet Union/Russia during a period when an entire country disappeared and a new one was formed (travel to Chernobyl only six years after the disaster, Magadan in Siberia where the major gulags were/are located) and her sometimes rather unbelievable experiences during that time; Expedition Adventures as an analog for long-duration planetary missions – studies of single and mixed gender national and international civilian and military polar expedition teams to simulate aspects of long-duration lunar and Mars missions, studied on-site in the Canadian Nunavut Territories and during three trips to Danish military stations in Greenland; Greece Disaster Connections – psychosocial training workshops for disaster response and research on the aftermath of disasters through collaboration with colleagues from Athens and Cairo. The author’s activities with the NASA Human Research Program over the years also is summarized.

‘Festivals, Affect and Identity’ offers an outline of areas of continental philosophy and critical theory, which involve high levels of abstractions, yet become more accessible when related to specific events and their detailed analysis. The case study material enables theories to become more understandable in relation to application, triangulation and comparison with different theoretical frameworks. It puts flesh on the ‘hard to get hold of’ nature of continental philosophy.

Maintaining continuity in the face of problems and ruptures and the interplay of fluidity and structure are central aspects explored and illustrated by ethnography focused on the affective dynamics of four festivals: the Palio in Siena and the Bravio in Montepulciano, both based on competitive territorial divisions; the Bruscello in Montepulciano and the Teatro Povero in Monticchiello, both theatres with links to sharecropping, a long established agrarian practice vanquished by modernity.  The detailed analysis applied to this selection of case studies offers a grounding of theoretical concepts and an example of how these may be applied to analyse different phenomena. This approach sees the imprint of environmental and historical conditions as generative of a dynamic process of ever evolving community identities for which festivals provide expression, while also providing a way of living with them.

Hermínio Martins was one of the key pioneers of the sociology of science and technology. He published extensively in Portuguese and was recognized for his academic contributions with an honorary doctorate at Lisbon (2006) and two Portuguese Medals of Honour. Following his retirement from the University of Oxford, he wrote prolifically in English on a wide range of topics that examined the ethical and societal consequences of the commoditization of the human body and mind. These essays are deep philosophical reflections on our contemporary world, and draw extensively and eclectically upon a wide range of theoretical influences including continental philosophy, history and psychology, to name but a few disciplines. ‘The Technocene’ is a selection of some of these insightful essays, made available to a global audience for the first time.

The proposed volume covers Christopher Winch’s work over a period of 37 years and illustrates four interconnected themes that have informed his thinking over that period. Writing from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Winch is primarily interested in applying Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophising to educational problems and puzzles of a variety of different kinds. Throughout the collection there is an emphasis on the complexity and subtlety of many of the philosophical problems associated with education, the importance of appreciating differences and the contestability of many educational judgements. Thus the volume starts with a section on rationality and argument and a discussion of some of the perplexities about the nature of literacy and whether it represents a cognitive ‘leap forward’ for the human race or whether it is more of an enabling technology. It is followed, in a reply to David Cooper, by an article that emphasises the importance of charitable interpretation in understanding reasoning and looks at some of the difficulties involved in understanding reasoning in informal contexts.

Winch’s interest in rule-following and concept formation is the theme of the next few articles. Winch has long been interested in philosophical aspects of professional action and judgement. The third section of this book focuses on that preoccupation. Gilbert Ryle’s ideas as well as Wittgenstein’s have been a significant influence on this. This section closes with a discussion of the sense we can make of the claim that theoretical knowledge can inform agency in professional contexts. The fourth section gathers together seven papers on learning and training that Winch has published over the last 25 years. The overarching theme of this section is the highly variegated nature of the phenomena of learning and the difficulty of constructing a ‘grand theory’ of learning. 

‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of readers’ interactions with the works of one of England’s most enduringly popular novelists. Employing an innovative approach made possible by new research in the field of the history of reading, the volume discusses Austen’s own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the relationship of her style to her readers’ responses. It considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers’ responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to readers who read Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.

Previous studies of Austen’s influence on her readers and literary successors have either presupposed a hypothetical reader, or focused on the texts of the critical tradition, ignoring the views, reactions and thoughts of the common reader. This volume discusses the responses of ordinary readers to Austen’s novels, responses that offer insights into both Jane Austen’s particular appeal, and the nature of the act of reading itself.

This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Son’s Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of ‘father memoirs’ in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.

Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosse’s Victorian masterpiece ‘Father and Son’, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosse’s influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’. Mansfield then offers five ‘case studies’ on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt’; Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; and Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’.

How do these authors ‘perform’ their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in ‘Australian Patriography’, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.

‘Before Einstein’ examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of ‘new’ ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of ‘Scientific Romances’, ranged surprisingly wide.

‘Before Einstein’ offers, for the first time, an extended examination of Hinton’s work and – crucially – the influence of his ideas on contemporary writers and thinkers. Increasingly over the past three decades, critical attention has been given to the relevance of pre-Einsteinian theories of the fourth dimension within the shifting aesthetic and cultural values at the turn of the twentieth century. For the first time in a full-length literary study, ‘Before Einstein’ addresses the cultural life of the fourth dimension at the turn of the century. ‘Before Einstein’ begins by tracing the development of spatial theories of the fourth dimension out of the ‘new’, non-Euclidean geometries of the mid-nineteenth century, and proceeds to analyse Hinton’s role as four-dimensional theorist and populariser of hyperspace philosophy. Hinton's ‘Scientific Romances’ are examined in detail, not simply as documents of interest for historians of science and ideas, but for their intrinsic literary value as well. Additionally, ‘Before Einstein’ captures the work of H. G. Wells, Henry James and William James through the lens of Hinton’s writing, identifying what can be described as a four-dimensional literary aesthetic. The book addresses the existing gap in literary studies of the fourth dimension, while also providing scholars of the James brothers and Wells with new ways of approaching their subject matter.

This fascinating book exposes the movie industry as a key protagonist in the US strategy debate, through the production of films on national security across many genres, from comedy to thriller, from sci-fi to war movies. This timely volume also explores prevailing ideas of the 'threat' to homeland USA that are put forward by the national security network, a threat that is seen as the justification for and legitimization of America's military operations and strategic choices. Valantin reveals how in the last 20 years there has been a consistent collaboration between the US Department of Defense and film studios and enormous contracts have been exchanged between the two industries. This book shows how Hollywood is completely penetrated by the ideological and political thinking of Washington, which in turn appears to be directly inspired by the productions of Hollywood.

“Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia” is a collection of essays that investigates and applies the method and principles of Classical political economy to current issues of economic theory and policy.

The contributors to the volume, like all classical economists in general, regard history as a useful tool of analysis rather than a specialist object of investigation. By denying that a single, all-encompassing mathematical model can explain everything we are interested in, Classical political economy necessarily requires a comparison and integration of several pieces of theory as the only way to discuss economics and economic policy. Economists inspired by the Classical approach believe that economic theory is historically conditioned: as social systems evolve, the appropriate theory to represent a certain phenomenon must evolve too. Therefore, plurality in methods, including the history of economic thought, must be a deliberate choice, as evidenced by the essays in “Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia.”

“Classical Economics Today” is a tribute to Alessandro Roncaglia, to his personality and his research interests. Roncaglia’s research is based on Schumpeter’s dictum that good economics must encompass history, economic theory and statistics, and therefore does not generally take the form of elegant formal models that are applicable to all and everything. In this direction, Roncaglia is inspired by the Classical economists of the past, and becomes a model for present-day Classical economists. A perceptible family air imbues the essays: all the contributors are friends of Roncaglia and see his personality and his interests as a common point of reference.

“Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” examines expert committees established to provide science advice to multilateral environmental agreements. By focusing on how these institutions are sites of coproduction of knowledge and policy, this work brings to light the politics of science advice and details how these committees are contributing to an emerging global environmental constitutionalism.

Grounded in participant observation, elite interviews and document analysis, “Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” uses the lenses of the body of experts, body of knowledge, and institutional body to focus on three features of design. Who are the experts being asked to provide advice? What types of knowledge are considered beyond the bounds of the committee and how is this determined? What rules and norms are developed to govern how the committee carries out its work?

The empirical chapters lay out three illustrations: controversy over the continued use of methyl bromide despite it being scheduled for a ban under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, a series of votes by the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Review Committee when determining whether the pesticide endosulfan should be banned under the Stockholm Convention on POPs and a decade of institutional innovation in an effort to revamp the provision of science advice to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

Advanced study in the humanities and social sciences discloses a deep ambivalence about Theory. Structurally, of course, the professionalization of young academics is approaching extinction. There are fewer and fewer secure jobs in academia, and thus fewer and fewer students embarking upon advanced study, and, in turn, fewer and fewer programs educating these students. What is offered the remaining students is instructive. Notably, students are expected by their future colleagues to be familiar with, maybe even conversant in Theory, but the structural logic of austerity prompts educators to wonder whether instruction in Theory is an efficient use of dwindling resources, especially now that academic publishing (with important exceptions) behaves as though this future, like the “last” wormhole, is collapsing. Given the Faustian articulation of publishing and promotion can advanced study in the humanities and social sciences even be justified today? Paradoxically, students are still expected to know what is less and less on offer. How is Theory to be “handled” (fingered, worked with, fashioned) under such circumstances?

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This argument is advanced through a series of readings that produce eccentric, sociographic accounts of important (some quite unusual) texts or performances of Theory. As such they enact an attention to reading that is advanced as an instance of “offering” as called for in the title.

In a time when mass joblessness and precarious employment are becoming issues of national concern, it is useful to reconsider the experiences of the unemployed in an earlier period of economic hardship, the Great Depression. How did they survive, and how did they fight against inhumane government policies? Americans are often thought to be a very conservative and individualistic people, but the collective struggles of the supposedly “meek” and “atomized” unemployed in the 1930s belie that stereotype. 

Focusing on the bellwether city of Chicago, this book reevaluates those struggles, revealing the kernel of political radicalism and class resistance in practices that are usually thought of as apolitical and un-ideological. From communal sharing to “eviction riots,” from Unemployed Councils to the nationwide movement behind the remarkable Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, millions of people fought to end the reign of capitalist values and usher in a new, more socialistic society. While they failed in their maximal goal of abolishing economic insecurity and the disproportionate power of the rich, they did wrest an incipient welfare state from the ruling class. Today, their legacy is their resilience, their resourcefulness, and their proof that the unemployed can organize themselves to renew the struggle for a more just world.

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

‘Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin”’ is the first English language translation of the Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich’s 1903 account of his visit to tsarist Russia’s largest penal colony, Sakhalin, in the north Pacific. Despite the publication of Anton Chekhov’s account of his visit to Sakhalin in 1890, many Russians remained unaware of the brutality and savagery of the 'devil island'. In 1897 Doroshevich, Russia’s most popular journalist, travelled to Sakhalin and spent three months touring the island, interviewing numerous prisoners and officials, and recording his impressions. The feuilletons he wired back to his publishers were eventually collected and published in book form in 1903, under the title 'Sakhalin' (Katorga).

Doroshevich’s book was enormously popular when it first appeared, and it continues to be published in Russia, as a historical record of the striking barbarity of late nineteenth century penal practices. Despite this popularity, it has never before been translated into English, and Doroshevich remains largely unknown outside Russia. This translation introduces English-language readers to an important writer and original stylist who defined journalistic practice during the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, by way of a book which helps explain the causes for that revolution.

The book is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policy-makers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the theory of Afrocentricity, in its interrogation of the idea and processes of development in Africa. It also adopts an historical approach in its interrogation of the idea of African development as a by-product of political deliberations. This book is about how the discourse of development as a field of study needs to be re-oriented towards African-based epistemologies to dismantle coloniality, in opposition to the historical embeddedness of development discourse in Eurocentrism.

This book contests the limitation of the modern African understanding of Africa’s journey with development to the period of the aftermath of World War II, to be specific, to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Point Four programme. Instead, the book argues that, that journey should be understood holistically. By this, I mean that Africa’s engagement with development did not begin with the politics of the Euro-North American political bloc – the story of African development must take into consideration Africa’s classical civilization, namely, the Nile Valley civilization and its contributions to human civilization. Such an approach provides a more holistic interrogation and casts light on how Africa’s history of greatness continues to be an inspiration even in modern times. Such an approach rejects the many reductionist lies and half-truths that undergird the modernist paradigm which seeks to portray African people as dependent beneficiaries of the colonial Euro-modernity framework. This framework has undermined the humanity of non-Western people in general, and Africans in particular. The book pursues the tradition of decolonial epistemic reflections grounded on Afrocentricity as its theoretical thrust to oppose discourses that are riddled with a racist agenda towards those in the Global South, especially in Africa to enable endogeneity. In the spirit of the pursuit for cognitive justice in the 21st century, this book argues that the discourse of development must be decolonized from hegemonic Eurocentric propaganda and needs to be framed from the viewpoint of those who have been seen as being on the receiving end, those projected as “backwards” from a Eurocentric perspective.

In the midst of World War II, the Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings left Rio de Janeiro, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and arrived in London. The Exhibition resulted from a donation of 168 artworks by 70 of the most recognized Brazilian Modernist painters, including Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and Lasar Segall. The largest collection sent abroad until that time, and still today the most remarkable show of Brazilian art ever displayed in the United Kingdom, was held firstly at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in the end of 1944, and subsequently toured throughout other seven British galleries until September 1945. As a contribution to the Allied war effort, the funds from its sales were given to the Royal Air Force. It is noteworthy that the Olympic Games planned to be held in London during the 1944 summer were cancelled due to World War II, but a show of unknown paintings from Brazil reached the British capital and was hosted by its most traditional art institution. Notwithstanding its historical relevance and unmatched scale, this event had never been academically investigated. 

Even though it was publicized as private entrepreneurship, the dissertation proves that the Brazilian foreign service was the main propelling force of the Exhibition and addresses two fundamental questions regarding the episode. In the first place, why did the Brazilian government back a logistically complicated, politically delicate, and time-consuming idea of sending artworks to be displayed in the United Kingdom during the War? Second, how successful was the Exhibition in view of its original goals, specifically those set by Brazilian diplomacy? Conducted by a career diplomat who practices Public Diplomacy, the research pursued, by applying the hermeneutic method and theories of this field and its subset Cultural Diplomacy, to interpret the reconstructed and contextualized object. Based on its findings, the author argues that the initiative was part of a broader diplomatic program developed by Minister Oswaldo Aranha. Aiming at advancing bilateral ties with the United Kingdom, Aranha sought to foster closer relations between Brazilian and British societies. Furthermore, the Exhibition worked as a cultural component of the part in the War played by Brazil, the only Latin American nation to deploy an important contingent—25,000 troops—to fight on the European front. Both the military and artistic contributions must be understood as diplomatic attempts to amass international prestige and reposition Brazil in the postwar emerging order. Having consolidated its regional leadership, the nation aspired to be perceived as a global player that shared the prevailing Western values and aesthetics. The research further claims that the initiative was intended and managed to achieve a substantial impact on views about Brazil, by means of conveying a well-planned message of solidarity, modernization and artistic prowess, which was consistent with the country’s diplomatic goals and attuned to Britain’s wartime mindset. It focuses on the developments between the period in which Oswaldo Aranha was appointed as Brazilian minister of foreign affairs (1938–1944) and the end of World War II (1945), in order to situate the Public Diplomacy aspects of the Exhibition within Brazil’s foreign relations. It thus strives to demonstrate that decades before the coining of the concept—to this day discussed mostly between North American and European scholars—Brazilian diplomacy was able to conceive and execute an initiative in line with the twenty-first-century state-of-the-art Public Diplomacy. It achieved unprecedented press coverage; high attendance that included influential figures within local society; the entrance of at least 25 Brazilian paintings into important British collections; and the sale of around 80 artworks in benefit of the Royal Air Force. Despite these resounding short-term successes, the lasting effects on Brazil’s reputation were arguably mitigated by the diplomatic shift after the end of the War. The revision of the Brazilian foreign policy that followed the replacement of Oswaldo Aranha and President Getúlio Vargas impeded the sustaining of the Exhibition’s reputational impacts for a longer period, which is a most coveted goal of Public Diplomacy.

It is significant that no other show of Brazilian art in the United Kingdom would ever emulate the Exhibition magnitude, devised in the challenging context of War. The coherence between narrative and diplomatic objectives, the powerful and tailor-made message and its appeal to receptors, the involvement of non-official players as well as the high-level political support made the Exhibition, in the author’s evaluation, a role model for the cultural category of Public Diplomacy avant la lettre. First of all, the Brazilian government had clearly defined its foreign goals, with stepping up its political stature on the world stage being the first priority. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was able to develop a solid judgment of Brazil’s own international stance, of its reputation among British society, and of the United Kingdom’s cultural environment. Hence, it was accordingly defined a compelling narrative compatible with the emerging hegemonic values in the West. In this sense, the choice of the modern idiom and its cosmopolitanism to represent Brazilian art abroad suited the radical aesthetic rupture that would mark the victors’ new artistic patterns. In addition, the underlying message of the initiative, the solidarity with distant brothers-in-arms—well represented by the Royal Air Force, a symbol of British pride in those dramatic times of War—was extremely attractive and efficient. The combination of top-tier political backing, without which it would not have been possible to accomplish the feat of sending the artworks across the ocean, and the participation of nongovernmental cultural figures, lending credibility to the initiative, made the Exhibition a successful case of outreach. Finally, the engagement of key Brazilian and British individuals and institutions was the result of a two-way Public Diplomacy action, which involved listening to the receiver and conveying a world-class, coherent, and appropriate message, aligned with and serving diplomatic objectives. 

By uncovering and studying the Exhibition, the research will hopefully trigger interest in the identification of a Brazilian strain of Public Diplomacy—whose discussion is still very incipient among Brazilianists and researchers in general—with its own subjects and methods, thus contributing to further this field’s theoretical development. A desired indirect outcome of the dissertation is thus to foster an academic concern about a Brazilian distinctiveness in the field, with regard not only to themes and objects of study but also by developing new and useful analytical contributions to the theoretical debate and to the diplomatic praxis. The work sheds light on these Public Diplomacy aspects and contributes, through a relevant case study, to incorporate them into the studies of Brazilian diplomacy. The advantages for Brazil of valuing and perfecting its congenital aptitude for Public Diplomacy are many and evident. As a regional power with limited economic and military assets, its place on the international stage benefits greatly from its capacity to persuade and captivate foreign societies. By doing so, Brazil has better conditions to deal with more powerful nations, to function as a bridge between developed and developing countries, to add value to its products, to receive investments, students, and tourists, to participate in global forums, to shape and influence agendas, and to ensure better treatment of its citizens abroad. Brazil’s traditional social consensus around pacifism, embodied in its constitution, and its historic reliance on multilateralism reinforce the convenience of the country’s scholars and practitioners advancing Public Diplomacy theory and praxis. 

Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images argues that imagery of all kinds—from visual icons in social media, advertising, news broadcasting and political campaigns, in architecture and art through to more private realms such as dreams—has become a definitive force in the shaping of contemporary life. It has become a vital part, often a primary medium, in most of the many economies operative within contemporary societies, in commercial exchange, public politics, cultural contestation, and subject formation. They have become, substantially, iconomic. Yet this imagery is generated and flows, accretes, shifts, and swops, runs free or is managed, according to its inherent potentials and limits—that is, for all its immersion in wider economies, however much it saturates them, it is an economy of its own, an iconomy.

Part I traces conceptualizations of links between seeing and planning, images and economies, through Plato’s cave allegory, medieval iconoclasm, Marx’s theories of commodity, and Debord’s spectacle society, up to interpretations of the systemic saturation of contemporary imaginaries by images (mostly visual), ostensive performances, and exhibitionary exchanges deployed through widely shared yet intensely managed screen and surveillance technologies. 

The implicit politics of this economy become explicit in Part II, which explores the iconopolitics of (i) the (mis)management of imagery associated with SARS-CoV-19; (ii) the ubiquity, retreat and possible resurgence of the image regime centered on Donald J. Trump, along with the Biden response; (iii) the nature and impact of the video of the murder of George Floyd; (iv) the similarities and differences between the videos of the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the killing of George Floyd in 2020; (v) BLM ignition of imagery around intersectional struggle; (vi) the war of images within the current civil war in the United States; (vii) the potentialities for building community while image wars rage; and (viii) the recent rise of “black aesthetics” within predominantly white artworlds. The book concludes with a reflection on usefulness, and the limitations, of iconomic analyses of contemporary societies. Having arrived at the term “iconomy” in the years just prior to 9/11, and tracking its growing relevance since, Smith argues that its study does not require a discipline serving nation state and globalizing capitalism but, instead, a deconstructive interdiscipline that contributes to planetary world-making. 

This book will explore several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939. Drawing from primary source materials and various scholarship in the field (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studied, art history, cultural studies), it provides an analysis of the threads of white supremacy which run through early scholarship and understandings of Black African object within the United States and how scholars use the objects to reinforce narratives of “primitive” Black Africa and civilized, advanced white Europe and the United States.

To do this, the book (1) explores white Western aesthetic ideas and contrasts them with Black African aesthetic ideas, (2) explores the history of the use of Black African objects by white Western collectors, artists in and around the Harlem Renaissance, (3) explores the history of the influence of white Western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance, and (4) explores how Black African aesthetics as white mythology impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularization with Black Power moment, and today with films like Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.

This book seeks to bring together previous scholarship, white Western and Black African aesthetic theory, historical documents, and archival research for primary documents that highlight how white supremacy runs through Western scholarship and ideology and how this presents a distorted, degraded view of Black Africa and its people not only for white people but for Black people as well.

‘Tokyo Seven Roses’ is set in Japan during the waning months of WWII and the beginning of the Occupation. It is written as a diary kept from April 1945 to April 1946 by Shinsuke Yamanaka, a fifty-three-year-old fan-maker living in Nezu, part of Tokyo's shitamachi (old-town) district. After the war, Shinsuke learns by chance that the Occupation forces are plotting a nefarious scheme: in order to cut Japan off from its dreadful past, they intend to see that the language is written henceforth using the alphabet. To fight off this unheard-of threat to the integrity of Japanese culture, seven beautiful women – the Seven Roses – take a stand. They include Tomoe, whose husband perished in a B29 raid and whose stepfather has gone mad; Fumiko and Takeko, whose elder sister died in an air raid; Sen, another war widow; Tokiko, who lost her parents and older brother; and Kyoko and Fumiko, whose entire families were wiped out.

The seven, while resentful of Japan's leaders for having lured the country down the path to war and, painfully aware of their own responsibility in being so gullible, hate the United States. They set their sights on three powerful members of the education delegation who have come to finalize official policy regarding the Japanese language. The year portrayed was a bleak and painful time for Japan. Shinsuke's diary, however, is surprisingly cheerful, filled with a wealth of details of ordinary people's openhearted lives. The author draws a lively portrait of Japanese who, despite privation, find relief in laughter.

This new study looks at the crucial role played by audiovisual media in Hindu cultural nationalism. The application of new media technology in the context of the construction of 'Indianness' by Hindutva's main political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People, BJP), is a fascinating example of in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization that demands critical attention. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist, movements, 'Empowering Visions' argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audiovisual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

'Men and Masculinities in South India' aims to increase understanding of gender within South Asia and especially South Asian masculinities, a topic whose analysis and ethnographising in the region has had a very sketchy beginning and is ripe for more thorough examination. This is, in short, an almost empty field dominated so far by short articles and collections and the time is right for the first full-length ethnographic study of masculinities. This ground-breaking monograph covers a range of areas including work, cross-sex relationships, sexuality, men's friendships, religious practices and leisure. This book is especially concerned with issues arising from debates which broadly argue over the differences and merits of approaches to gender and identity - rooted in essentialism versus performativity. Questions about the tensions between essentialist and performative theories of self and gender are therefore highlighted throughout the book and explored in relation to various bodies of theory and to South Asian understandings of personhood.

Over the past decade, the impending environmental crisis has given birth to an international consensus on the need to address climate change, accompanied by a renewed interest in carbon emissions, energy consumption and energy production. Many Western countries are now set to transition towards a low-carbon economic structure. Energy choices have become, now and more than ever, highly critical questions due to their fundamentally political, strategic, geopolitical, economic, social and cultural impacts.

Since the mid-2000s, the British government has been actively involved in reforming the country’s energy strategy by encouraging the development of renewables and promoting the revival of the national nuclear industry, which had laid almost dormant until then. Seeing the UK government take back control of its energy strategy represented a rather bold and surprising political move, given the neoliberal dynamics which had spread in the energy sector during the privatisation era of the 1980s and1990s. There are currently about seventy reactors under construction in the world; yet, the British programme is the only one building nuclear reactors (Hinkley Point C) in a liberalised energy market. Consequently, many doubts were raised on the ability of the government to reshape the country’s energy mix through the revival of nuclear power, an industry historically blighted by financial difficulties and its controversial legacy. 

Nuclear Power Policies in Britain analyses the UK state’s capacity to shape energy decision-making using a diverse toolbox of political instruments ranging from legislative, regulatory and communication levers to financial incentives. This case study determines how the current UK public policy on nuclear energy has been debated, legitimised, negotiated and implemented within the constraints of a neoliberal environment. By taking a holistic approach to the nuclear venture, it offers valuable insight on the British approach to energy policy-making and contributes to redefining the country’s ‘technopolitical regime’ in this day and age.

Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent – even as the definition of what it means to be ‘European’ remains unclear. This book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how ‘being European’ is considered a fundamental component of ‘being Polish’ while participants are simultaneously ‘becoming European’.

Close attention to the individual lives of Poles allows the author to identify cultural patterns and grasp the impact of the EU on its member states, paying particular attention to how the EU has affected the life experiences of Poles who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations. In exploring what it means to be Polish by tracking these parallel processes of change, the author traces Poland’s path from state socialism to European integration and Polish identities as they are reinscribed, revised and reinvented in the face of historic, political and economic processes.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

The book explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations. 

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics. 

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

Russia Washed in Blood, first published in full in 1932, is the longest and best-known work by Nikolai Kochkurov (1899–1938), who wrote under the pen-name Artyom Vesyoly. The novel, more a series of extended episodes than a connected narrative with a plot and a hero, is a vivid fictionalised account of the events from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier. The title of the novel came to symbolise the tragic history of Russia in the 20th century.

The novel’s main theme is the relation between freedom and dictatorship, reflecting a view that the cruelty which comes with elemental freedom destroys that freedom and prepares the ground for dictatorship. Vesyoly’s writings belong to the literature of moral resistance to Stalinism. For his failure to recognise the ‘leading organisational role’ of the Communist Party he would be executed in Stalin’s Great Purge. 

Born in Samara, on the banks of the Volga, the son of a waterside worker, Artyom Vesyoly was the first member of his family to learn to read and write. He took part in the Civil War of 1918–1921 on the Red side, and at its conclusion, began a prolific literary career. Vesyoly took as his main theme the horrific events he had witnessed and participated in during the fierce fighting in Southern Russia between the contending forces – Red, White, Cossack, anarchist and others – and the effects of these on the participants and unfortunate civilians caught between them.

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. ‘Religion, Law and Power’ should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, designers, managers, artists, scientists, innovators, inventors, farmers and all other professions and walks of life have the immense possibilities of making it big. And such immense possibilities represent in terms of scale, value, excellence, and tremendous impact upon the larger society. However, quite often, it is observed that the efforts and impact of making it big fail to live up to the expectations of self and others and do not take off the way envisaged. 

Everyone has desires. Spiritual leaders too give up the mundane life. However, they carry the deeply rooted desire to attain insights and enlightenment, eventually. Irrespective of what life one leads, one core but common desire is to enjoy the autonomy to make decisions. However, life introduces one to several ups and downs resulting in both successes and failures. Nonetheless, one desires to be happy throughout and enjoy whatever is in possession. Also, one aspires to achieve all that one feels capable of achieving, thus driving oneself to take risks against the opportunities identified. 

In the backdrop, the present book is for every individual who is either an aspiring entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, irrespective of the domain expertise or industry one represents. The book attempts to focus and address a pressing pain point of entrepreneurs: the pain point happens to be one of the major gaps towards successful and sustainable entrepreneurship in one’s life. 

A strong but subtle factor impacting in this context is the failure to achieve entrepreneurial success through great deals in all stages, at all levels of entrepreneurial journey. The present book attempts to bridge the gap through the power (soft) skill – ‘negotiation’ for entrepreneurs!

Unlike many partisan accounts of the nineteen sixties this book aims to give a considered explanation of the context in which the sixties radical movements arose and, also, their significance from the standpoint of various nations' actors, often ignored by North American and West European standpoints. Secondly, it examines how the radical decade sowed the seeds of various liberation or 'rights movements' – initially in the West but also globally as movements became increasingly diffused. Contributors' varied international backgrounds and specialities provide expertise in examining the international context. Thirdly, many nineteen sixties' radicals' values and strategies recur in contemporary social movements; albeit in different technological and, post 9/11, political and cultural environments. Unravelling similarities and differences is a key theme. Fourthly, many participants in sixties radicalism saw it as 'cultural' as well as 'political' and in some historical treatments as primarily or 'only' cultural. Detailed examinations of this perspective involve critical discussion – particularly in the light of the allegedly 'mere' (i.e. apolitical) cultural hedonism and escapism of youth in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Contrarily, the contributions here assess resonances between the radical/libertarian emphasis on civil society 'freedoms' in sixties' cultural radicalism and, arguably, today’s more self-consciously political global human rights movement. The conclusion suggests that, in some senses, the sixties live on today in discursive and political themes.

‘Politics, Media and Campaign Language’ is an original, groundbreaking analysis of the story of Australian identity, told through Australian election campaign language. It argues that the story of Australian identity is characterised by recurring cycles of anxiety and reassurance, which betray a deep underlying feeling of insecurity. Introducing the concept of identity security, it takes electoral language as its focus, and demonstrates that election campaigns provide a valuable window into an overlooked part of Australia’s political and cultural history.

This book reclaims Australian campaign speech and electoral history to tell the story of changing national values and priorities, and traces the contours of our collective conversations about national identity. Rare in Australian politics, this approach is more common in the United States where campaign language is seen as providing a valuable insight into the continuing cultural negotiation of the collective values, priorities and concerns of the national community. In this conception, political leaders have significant influence but must function within and respond to the complex and shifting dynamics of public and media dialogue, and to changing social, political and economic conditions.

In this way, the book uses elections to provide a fresh perspective on both Australian political history and the development of Australian identity, bringing together, for the first time, a wide range of primary sources from across Australian electoral history: campaign speeches, interviews, press conferences and leaders’ debates. The book grounds analysis of campaign communication in a range of textual examples and detailed case studies. These vivid case studies bring the narrative journey to life, drawing on those leaders who have successfully aligned themselves with the nation’s values, priorities and plans for the future. The book also reintroduces readers to the alternative visions of those who were not successful at the ballot box, tracing campaign battles between competing narratives of what it means to be Australian.

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes taking place in China and the dynamics behind the process, resulting in a rich research literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China’s recent social transformations. However, most of the literature has largely focused on either the political, ideological and policy issues at the macro level or the various forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level. What has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary Chinese people has reacted to and influenced the many changes in society over a long time period. This analytical partiality has given an impression that China consists of only two opposing types of people: the oppressing ruling class and the angry oppressed adversaries, restricting our thinking and understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their adversaries.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and based on the evidence recorded in numerous recently published personal memories and other published accounts, as well as the evidence collected through in-depth interviews, this book seeks to re-analyse the ever-changing, but still under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when Mao Zedong publicly put forward and propagated his ‘Five-Requirements’ for selecting heirs to the Chinese communist cause, to 2000 when Jiang Zemin formulated his ‘Three-Represents’ theory to modify the ideological political thinking and practices of China’s ruling elites. Of course, Chinese society has not been evolving exactly in the way that Mao and Jiang anticipated. Instead, China has been driven by a high proportion of its aspirational citizens who have kept repositioning themselves in China’s shifting distribution patterns of social resources and changing social structure. This book analyses what had been driving the changes in the attitudes and behaviours of many everyday Chinese over time in recent decades, what characteristics of their preferences and choices were at different stages, and how their choices had resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

The fact that Luc Boltanski is widely regarded as one of the most influential French sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should be reason enough for putting together a collection of essays concerned with the major intellectual contributions that he has made to the humanities and social sciences. Boltanski has emerged as the most prominent, and also most innovative, French sociologist since the death of Pierre Bourdieu in 2002. It is ironic that, despite both the magnitude and the originality of Boltanski’s oeuvre, one finds only few systematic commentaries, let alone edited books, on his work in the vast industry of contemporary sociological enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to fill this gap in the literature by creating opportunities for debate capable of representing the wide range of discussions that Boltanski’s writings have sparked amongst researchers in the humanities and social sciences over the past decades.

Have neoliberal policies truly yielded beneficial effects for India? ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ presents a collection of essays that challenge the conventional wisdom of Indian market reforms, examining the effects of neoliberal policies enacted by the Indian government and exploding the myths that surround them.

The volume addresses three key areas. Firstly, it investigates how the high growth rate of the Indian economy has made it uneven, vulnerable and liable to poor employment generation and agrarian crises. The text refutes the hypothesis that growth in India has been driven by domestic factors, and argues against the notion that the Indian economy has remained unaffected by the global economic meltdown. The volume also investigates the reduced demand for food grain during the reform period, questioning whether it was indeed a result of increased income, as suggested by the government, or rather a consequence of increasing poverty and agrarian crisis. [NP]Secondly, the text counters the neoliberal myth that a fiscal deficit is essentially bad, and examines how the government’s focus on preventing a deficit caused a large-scale decline in development expenditures, which in turn had a negative impact on the well-being of the poor. Finally, the volume also argues that there is no evidence that supports denationalization as an effective way to reduce fiscal deficit, as the public sector, it argues, is not necessarily less efficient than the private sector.

Striving to hold India’s market reforms – and those responsible for their implementation – to account, ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ bravely shines a light on the true implications of India’s neoliberal governmental policies. With its rich and insightful analysis, it provides a revealing indication of how policy reform since 1991 has, at times, detrimentally affected the Indian populace, and will serve as an invaluable resource for students, professionals, activists and policymakers interested in the socioeconomic future of the country. 

‘Frank Norris and American Naturalism’ brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of Frank Norris’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in ‘The Octopus’ to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.

Although Norris died at 32, his literary output during his brief career has played an important role in efforts to interpret the nature of American naturalism. He was one of the few naturalists to write literary criticism, a body of writing which casts much light on his self-conception as a naturalist, and his novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’ rely on two of the most distinctive forms of naturalistic fiction—the sensationalistic novel of violence and the panoramic novel of social protest. Furthermore, though he was deeply indebted to Zola’s fiction, he broke free of Zolaesque themes in ways which are significant for most later American naturalists. Thus, despite the brevity of his career, Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), a prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, and translator, has an extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history as the work of a female author. Based upon word counts, Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn chronicles Behn’s obsession with the mystery and power of love and early modern passions through her entire oeuvre. Love, for Behn, is an external power, sometimes figured as the boy god Cupid or an abstraction, that enters the body with pain and pleasure and leaves the victim searching for understanding. The book follows two threads of argument: one using quantitative measures to indicate passages for significant close reading of preferred language and the other focused upon her use of small words like thou, sir, or said. Situating her writings in the conflicts of Early Modern discourses on the passions, the book demonstrates that Behn’s language reveals generic patterns for representing love that include a warning about its potential to destroy the body and condemn the soul. Taken as a whole, Behn’s literary production is an extraordinary examination of the early modern concept of love at a moment of change in the language and meaning of the passions.

Each chapter focuses on one type of writing: poetry, drama, and prose. Her poetry conjures love as an extremely powerful, disabling force, conveyed through the eyes, ears and hands, and acting on the heart and soul. The recipient of love’s force is essentially passive except for the need to reflect and decide if the love is worthy or to regret the passion after abandonment. Language from the pastoral mode structures her love poetry; the shady greenery and responsive nature provide a context of ideal love in a golden age with the everlasting fulfilment of mutual desires or a suitably moody place to die. The physical progression of love remains the same in her drama: an external force entering the body with pain and sweet desire stimulating the power of reason to preserve honor and determine the quality of desire. The trail of betrayed lovers and broken vows in her comedies testifies to the prevailing force of love. In the dramatic context, love is unsurprisingly comic and active. Operating in the same way on the body, Behn’s stage version of love is overblown, farcical and stagey. In her prose, the genre of writing most noted for her amatory style, Behn once again adopts the configuration of love as a powerful and mysterious external force operating on passive victims who respond in conversations with their hearts. Opposite to the succinct style of Behn’s love poetry, love in her prose is characterized by amplitude and repetition. It shares with poetry, however, love’s contradictory nature, and her love aphorisms have the balanced antithesis of her verse.

Each chapter also features a unique comparative study that illustrates Behn in a specific context. The poetry chapter compares Behn's Poems Upon Several Occasions to a corpus of six contemporary poetry collections by Ephelia (1679), the Earl of Rochester (1680), Nahum Tate (1684), Anne Killigrew (1684), Edmund Waller, fifth edition, 1686, and Philomela or Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1696). The Drama comparison includes plays by Thomas Killigrew, William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, George Etherege, Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Durfey, Thomas Otway, Thomas Southerne, and Mary Pix. Behn's Fiction corpus is compared to Aretina by George McKenzie (1660), The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish (1668), Five Love-Letters to a Cavalier translated by Roger L'Estrange (1678), John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette (1679), Don Tomazo by Thomas Dangerfield (1680), The Royal Loves, by Mademoiselle (Anne) Roche-Guihen (1680), The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus by Roger Boyle (1687), Incognita by William Congreve (1692) and The Inhumane Cardinal by Mary Pix (1696).

‘Tokyo Seven Roses’ is set in Japan during the waning months of WWII and the beginning of the Occupation. It is written as a diary kept from April 1945 to April 1946 by Shinsuke Yamanaka, a fifty-three-year-old fan-maker living in Nezu, part of Tokyo's shitamachi (old-town) district. After the war, Shinsuke learns by chance that the Occupation forces are plotting a nefarious scheme: in order to cut Japan off from its dreadful past, they intend to see that the language is written henceforth using the alphabet. To fight off this unheard-of threat to the integrity of Japanese culture, seven beautiful women – the Seven Roses – take a stand. They include Tomoe, whose husband perished in a B29 raid and whose stepfather has gone mad; Fumiko and Takeko, whose elder sister died in an air raid; Sen, another war widow; Tokiko, who lost her parents and older brother; and Kyoko and Fumiko, whose entire families were wiped out.

The seven, while resentful of Japan's leaders for having lured the country down the path to war and, painfully aware of their own responsibility in being so gullible, hate the United States. They set their sights on three powerful members of the education delegation who have come to finalize official policy regarding the Japanese language. The year portrayed was a bleak and painful time for Japan. Shinsuke's diary, however, is surprisingly cheerful, filled with a wealth of details of ordinary people's openhearted lives. The author draws a lively portrait of Japanese who, despite privation, find relief in laughter.

This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian themes that appeared between 1996 and 2019. It is divided into three parts, with a common trajectory laid out in a substantial introduction. The first part links meaning, necessity and normativity. It defends and modifies Wittgenstein’s claim that the idea of a ‘grammatical rule’ holds the key to understanding linguistic meaning and its connection to necessary propositions. The second part elucidates the connections between meaning, concepts and thought in Wittgenstein and beyond. It shows how he laid the grounds for a sound understanding of four contested issues—radical interpretation, concepts, nonsense and the scope and limits of animal thought. The third part provides a qualified defence of Wittgenstein’s influential yet extremely controversial idea that philosophical problems are conceptual, and thereby rooted in confusions concerning the meanings of and semantic relations between linguistic expressions. Against irrationalist interpretations, Glock demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s method is argumentative rather than therapeutic.

The essays reconstruct Wittgenstein’s writings in a way that identifies the often cryptic problems and arguments in his work. This sets them apart from a currently popular trend of therapeutic interpretations, as in the ‘New Wittgenstein’ school. By contrast to other critics of such interpretations, Glock acknowledges that they are to a limited extent warranted by some aspects of Wittgenstein’s work, e.g. concerning the notion of nonsense or what he calls ‘the myth of mere method’. At the same time the essays convincingly criticize these aspects and show that they are not presupposed by the more important lessons that Wittgenstein still has to teach. 

The collection brings out the abiding relevance of Wittgenstein’s reflections to contemporary debates on central themes such as the importance of normativity, the foundations of meaning and necessity, the nature of concepts, the possibility of animal thought and the proper method of philosophy. 

Contemporary understandings of inter-generational relations assume that the balance of power has shifted from adults towards children in recent years. The rise of children’s rights, the trend towards more child centred pedagogies and practices within schools and the incorporation of children within a global free market as consumers have all been interpreted as the loss of adult power and the consequent growth of kid power. 

This book critically examines these ideas and reframes the zero-sum conceptions of power implicit within these assumptions. It draws on Lukes’ three dimensions of power and Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge in advancing the view that kid power is inter-generational, multi-dimensional and distributed variably across the child population. The book illustrates this theory through selected themes, including children’s political activism with respect to climate change, the varied roles that children play within their families as mediators, the involvement of children in research and the rise of digital kid power. 

In a post-script, the theory of kid power within the current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic is examined. This final part of the book questions what the impact of the virus will be on the different manifestations of kid power and considers the implications of lockdowns and potential long-term social distancing measures for inequalities, inter-generational relations and our interpretation of kid power.

Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries: the theory of comparative advantage leaves out a number of factors which make economic activities qualitatively different as carriers of economic growth. Based on a long intellectual tradition – started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) and later used in virtually all presently industrialised countries – Reinert shows that the country which exports increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which exports diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.

This collection of essays incorporates the insight of an international group of experts to explore the impact of neoliberal ideology upon political, social and economic domains, as well as institutions such as the prison, healthcare and education systems and the voluntary sector. Examining the effects of the emergence of late-modern capitalism in the 1970s, the articles look at how the reaction against post-war Keynesian ideology manifested itself in each of these areas. This neoliberal resurgence has been characterised by competition and free markets, individual and family responsibility, and socioeconomic policies that engender social insecurity, resulting in economic freedom for the few and a strong law-and-order state for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Abandoning the all-encompassing, supportive attitude deemed necessary in the immediate aftermath of wartime instability, the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility has resulted in numerous social and moral dislocations, including harsher attitudes toward crime and punishment. The essays included in ‘Organising Neoliberalism: Markets, Privatisation and Justice’ explore how neoliberal ideology permeates nearly all aspects of modern life, and produce strong arguments for resistance against it.

Transition in international relations means moving from war to peace, dealing with an economic crisis or changing from one system of government to another. One of the key means by which this occurs is the diplomatic process of bargaining, compromising, settlement or trading. There is, however, a danger that in order to secure political objectives or preferences, negotiators or decision-makers may ‘trade away’ the interests of vulnerable or emerging social forces, sometimes knowingly, more often without due appreciation of the interests at threat.

Trading Women's Rights in Transitions is about how women’s rights are traded away by negotiators directly in exchange for immediate political or other settlements, and indirectly in terms of being left off the international agenda with long-term consequences.

The book provides a heterodox and critical view of the gender politics of transitions, focused on conflict-affected states. Susan Rimmer examines the link between negotiation processes around the globe and outcomes for social groups who struggle to gain access to power, focussing on the rights of women and girls. The struggle between actors in reformist groups can also trade away women’s rights before the agenda with international actors is agreed. The aim of this book is to assess ideas and discourse about the ‘tradeability’ of a group’s rights in states experiencing a seismic transition, such as in Afghanistan or Myanmar. What does diplomacy look like ‘from below’ in these situations?

Attention to the ‘security-development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policy-making, and yet the exact nature of the term remains undefined. This study approaches the subjects of development and security from a variety of different perspectives, offering an array of interpretations of the nexus along with an analysis of its potentially related issues. Particular attention is paid to studies of conflict and peace, with a focus upon the linkage between these subjects and the topic of the nexus itself.

Specific areas of investigation include the role of diasporas in peace building, the relationship between the nexus and challenges to liberal state-building, and the part played by external parties in the peace processes of the Aceh and Sri Lankan conflicts. The inclusion of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe provides the text with a strong geographical focus, and constructs a panoramic view of the nexus that encompasses the globe. Further country-based chapters – focusing on China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa – underline this worldwide perspective.

The volume’s collected essays thus provide a detailed and comprehensive view of this fluid, contemporaneous topic, both theoretically and empirically. ‘The Security-Development Nexus’ is a vital appraisal of both the present issues and current thought concerning conflict, security and development.

The book consists of a volume of essays in honor of the outstanding sociologist, Edward A. Tiryakian; whose work has spanned a considerable number of countries, regions and topics. He has been highly influential, particularly in American and French sociology.

The contributors include such luminaries as Alan Sica, Bryan Turner, George Ritzer, John Simpson, Piotr Sztompka, Hans Joas, Roland Robertson and John Torpey.

The contributions range across the numerous works of Tiryakian. These include his relationship with the great scholar Pitirim Sorokin, his existentialist sociology, metasociology, his contribution to modernization theory, his important work on civilizations, and his mediation between European and American sociology. Other contributions include chapters on global studies, Max Weber, multiple modernities and the axial age and the work of Robert Bellah on human evolution.

The book’s importance rests firmly on two strong contributions: Its content and its approach. Its content – delivered in the Judge’s own words – provides audiences with a unique view of many seminal moments in American twentieth-century legal history, including the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, the Watergate controversy, the growth of the Big Law firms, First Amendment litigation, and the Cameras in the Courtroom movement. It closely details the significant changes in law firm culture and the legal profession since the 1960s. It uniquely provides a rare behind-the-scenes account of the Senate Confirmation process for a Federal judicial nominee, at the process of judging on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, what life is like for a Federal judge, and how the court manages its docket. Taken individually, each of one of these insights is worthy of attention – but together in the same book, it is a one-of-a-kind volume.

Employing an innovative approach, the book sits at the crest of a brand new wave of US legal research, which focuses on the role of lower federal courts in shaping the “life” of US law. Biographies of Supreme Court Justices abound and regularly find large audiences for obvious and very good reasons. The personalities and decisions reached by that great institution have a clear impact on the functioning and structure of the United States. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, legal historians have begun to turn away from the Supreme Court as the exclusive focus of their attention. The latest trends in legal history point to rapidly growing interest in lower court histories, their judges, and the process by which they adjudicate individual cases. While various biographies of lower court judges exist, few meet the breadth and importance of Dyk’s experiences, and none is delivered in the judge’s own words.