Anthem Press

Jews had lived with us for a thousand years. Then they were killed. Why? Had the Shoah always been brewing in these lands, or could it only happen under the conditions of late capitalism rather than in the atmosphere of primitive pogroms, the violent expulsion of Jews from their Anatevkas? An important point of reference for the author’s reflections are the postulates of the representatives of the Frankfurt School – in particular of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – who were the first to draw attention to the potentially criminal character of instrumental reason, disavowing at the same time the tradition of the siècle des Lumières, the approach which the author is inclined towards. Yet they looked for the causes of the Shoah not where these could be found, either in the “authoritarian personality” or in the difficulties of living, in the so-called “social question.” However, in order to understand what happened to the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1940s, one must resort to a language completely different from psychological, social, economic, or police discourse. We must resort to the forgotten language – or better said, the language that is being forgotten – of theology, especially political theology. It is there, the author claims, that one can find the right interpretative tools. It does not belong to the realm of superstition but is our last chance to understand what happened to the world yesterday and what is happening to it today. “It was the devil!” writes Alain Besançon, a witness of those times, “He was the one who communicated his inhuman personality to his subjects.” We do not know this for sure – maybe yes, maybe no. We do know, however, that it is good that a theological category – the concept of the devil, Antichrist – is returning to the philosophical and, more broadly, social and political discourse. The devil, Antichrist is not just a metaphor or a creature with a limp in the left leg and charred wings; it is rather the atmosphere we live in, manifesting itself in turning traditional values inside out, in replacing respect with tolerance, charity with dubious philanthropy, love with sex, family with any social organization, religion with science, freedom with safety and so on. Examples abound.

The author proposes to renew the sense of such theological concepts as eternity, salvation, the idea of chosenness, apocalypse, radical hope, and others, only to better understand the condition of today’s world and its increasingly aggressive attitude towards people of strong faith, which may fill us with anxiety and make us think of the recurrence of the Shoah.

There are no more Jews in Poland. They had been murdered by the German Nazis, and those who survived were expelled by the Polish communists after the war. We live in a world “after Jews.” Now we must tell ourselves what it means to us. It is important for them and for us. Important for the world.

Following a short introduction, the book is arranged in seven chapters, each dealing with a specific genre and its main themes. The opening chapter considers how the village cricket story laid down the main tropes of cricket and fiction and established a defining relation between cricket, England’s green and pleasant land and national identity, especially in times of war and its aftermath. The second chapter develops the cricket, war and nation theme in the public school cricket novel, especially in the period of the South African (Boer) and First World Wars when cricket and war were frequently dramatised in similar terms. It also discusses the recurring treatment of homosexuality in the public school cricket novel and how the language of cricket was used to write about same-sex attraction. The next chapter breaks new ground in discussing how cricket has featured in murder mysteries. It demonstrates how well suited to each other the sport and the genre are – cricket providing a kind of open-air closed-room setting for a murder narrative – and explores the formal similarities between the shape and structure of a game of cricket and the procedures of the novel.
The following two chapters explore how amenable cricket fiction has proved as a medium for both comedy and tragedy. It discusses the inherent comic potential of cricket for fiction, the mishap and slapstick of a sport in which the box was introduced a century before the helmet. Cricket also has a long association with suicide as many observers of the game have noted. Fictional treatment of this tragic theme has focused on how a sport which is so time-consuming, both in the duration of a game and the extended career of those who play it, has made retirement difficult to manage and sometimes led to suicide.
As the English cricket story declined into insularity and nostalgia, and cricket ceased to be a subject for serious literary fiction, the post-colonial cricket novel emerged. The penultimate chapter considers how contemporary post-colonial novelists have revived and expanded the fictional possibilities of cricket by extending its global range and replenishing its traditional narratives to include previously unspoken issues of migration and race, thereby creating new kinds of stories. The concluding chapter looks at several apocalyptic end-of-the-world cricket stories and develops into a discussion of how cricket is both contributing to and threatened by global heating, raising the question of its sustainability as a sport and as a subject for fiction.

This study participates in the ongoing scholarly effort to re-appraise the penny dreadful phenomenon as a cornerstone of literary history and of popular culture, both within the nineteenth century and the development of Victorian popular fiction and beyond its specific context. The growing presence of these cheap entertaining Victorian texts in contemporary popular culture – through television series, musicals and literature – signals that it is high time to bestow more systematic and comprehensive attention to these publications. To do so, Penny Dreadfuls: The Circulation Patterns of a Victorian Popular Literature conceptualises the notion of circulation as a tool for analysis.
This book considers different aspects of circulation. The weaponisation of the penny dreadfuls’ successful circulation by its critics highlights tensions in the literary marketplace over the hegemonic discourse of what should and should not be read, which mirror the broader issue of contemporary changes on a social, cultural and political level. In addition, the penny dreadfuls’ consumption patterns and behaviour within the literary marketplace and within society are also marked by their circulation between different historically popular genres: within the network of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century literature and culture, they refuse to remain within clear boundaries and constantly reinvent themselves at the intersection of several trends that constituted the popular, such as oral storytelling, sensationalism and the Gothic. Beyond the nineteenth century, their patterns of circulation develop diachronically, too, in the open-ended circulation of the penny dreadfuls across time through neo-Victorianism and the gradual transformation of the penny dreadfuls into a cultural reference.
Through the lens of the concept of circulation which pervades the penny dreadfuls’ history and content, this book reassesses the impact of the penny dreadfuls on nineteenth-century print culture and entertainment, as well as on contemporary popular culture. This book demonstrates the importance of these publications to better understand broader notions of popular culture and to keep deconstructing such binaries as ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Further than sales numbers, circulation interweaves numerous aspects of popular culture and of this publishing phenomenon. An analysis of these patterns helps decode many aspects of the penny dreadfuls’ life and afterlife, as it reveals how their material aspect is intimately interwoven with their seriality, their cultural significance, the reactions they provoked and their actual content. The resulting picture informs us about the nineteenth century’s social history and culture, about class warfare and political change, and about the evolution of literature over the past two hundred and fifty years.

This book looks at contemporary Gothic cinema within a transnational approach. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study invokes its literary as well as filmic forebears, by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic: the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, or region, or culture. It was considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, and post-colonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the broader range of forces from a wider international perspective while at the same time also engaging with concepts of nationalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself. It also facilitated studies to focus on notions of hybridity where terms were not fixed but were constantly shifting and mobile.

The central idea of the book is that after horror/Gothic film was dragged into disrepute by the rise of torture porn and endless North American remakes, a set of international filmmakers are seeking to emphasize the aesthetic, artistic and philosophical potential of the Gothic. Such filmmakers include Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden, Stoker), Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), Wim Wenders (Only Lovers Left Alive), Ben Wheatley (A Field in England), Jane Campion (Top of the Lake), and Carol Morley (The Falling).

Although written in an accessible manner, the book incorporates theory and engages extensively into research to tap into key developments in Gothic studies – transnationalism, fandom and genre fiction, and transmedia exchanges – bringing these together along with popular culture and associated phenomena.

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

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

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

The prologue and chapter 1 situate the discussion in Climates of Migration in a broader context defined by a resurgence of attention on colonialism and postcolonial legacies, as evident in debates on restitution, reparation, historical accountability and responsibility. Colonial exploration and conquest are thereby connected with the environmental–migration nexus and accordingly chart the coordinates of the book as readers navigate the tentacular planetary reach of European colonial powers. This was of course an era when overseas travel was not even an option for the majority of people, yet one defined by sophisticated propagandist mechanisms that encouraged Europeans to travel through the imagination thanks to the immersive experiences offered at World’s Fairs and Colonial Exhibitions as well as in various board games and other ephemera that promoted the benefits of having colonies, glorified conquest and expansion, while molding young minds and bolstering patriotic fervor. The lessons to be learned were manifold, concerning as they did a recognition of the importance to the economy of—and dependency on—colonies, while implanting a deep familiarity with goods and products. These games capitalized upon the experiential realities of colonial assignments, and the design replicated the defining elements of the colonial enterprise, while also of course mobilizing support. Yet, as we know today, agricultural and extraction practices contributed to anthropogenic global warming, as communities were removed or driven off their lands, displaced and compelled to migrate elsewhere. As such, questions of mobility were therefore central to the production and visualization of Empire, and today, heated debates pertaining to border control and sovereignty can be traced back to this era.
The catalyst for chapter 2 is to be found in French philosopher Bruno Latour’s statement whereby “We can understand nothing about the politics of the last fifty years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center.” The focus thus shifts to the multiple ways in which climate change has bent the arc of politics in new directions, most notably in the conjunction between the eco-colonial dimension and migration itself given that “What makes the migratory crisis so difficult to conceptualize is that it is the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land.” Extensive recourse has been made to climate metaphors to amplify anti-immigration rhetoric, collectively delineating the parameters of an invasion narrative that alleges cultural, political and social saturation, submersion and replacement. Recourse to such terminology to describe migration exploits a simple tautology: climate change is a negative development, and therefore, conflating metaphors allows for a seamless twinning with the ills of immigration, grafting a pernicious meaning on the process (migration) and people concerned (migrants). In the associative context of climate change, this logic operates optimally since it coincides with a diagnosis of catastrophic global warming and the long-term projected impact, and has been present in European Union policy-making (“Green Deal” and “New Pact on Migration and Asylum of the EU”) and broader discussions pertaining to climate migrants and climate refugees.
Two strands intersect in chapter 3 and build on the conclusions of the previous chapters, simultaneously reappraising the coexistence of insular and open thinking and complex and simplistic reasoning and shifting the discussion toward an engagement with categories such as empathy and sympathy. This is achieved through a consideration of how cultural productions by artists and writers have enhanced modes of identification and relationality rather than detachment, and offered alternatives to racist and xenophobic media and political discourses. Chapter 4 subsequently provides an in-depth analysis of an emerging corpus of works by African writers for whom transhistorical violence motivates political commitment based on scrutiny and witnessing, documenting, recording and calls for accountability. The works considered have in common an adherence to an “environmental turn” that has culminated in a thematic “greening” of fiction (Cheryll Glotfelty) and a revitalization of writing. Writers have engaged with the longstanding consequences of environmental ecocide on the continent, while ultimately reflecting on the broader context of climate change and environmental derangement that accounts for shifting patterns of population mobility. The concluding chapter establishes a conjunction between new technologies of communication and extraction, more prominently in terms of the interplay between ecology and propaganda, and examines how the later has been used to further an anti-ecological agenda—denouncing warnings concerning global warming as fake news or promoting a lifestyle founded on the exponential use of industrial technologies—and pro-ecology positions centered on an unrelenting effort to prevent the systematic destruction of the environment and aimed at raising awareness and consciousness as well as encouraging behavior modification. The conclusion considers how new digital technologies have taken an age-old apparatus and amplified it, enabling information wars to run alongside physical ones, while discussing how disinformation and misinformation campaigns and algorithms now influence every facet of contemporary life, most prominently in terms of the climate change and migration nexus.

The debt we owe to the brilliant men who drafted their Constitution is incalculable. Recognizing that, with the passage of time, their document would likely require modifications, the Framers included provisions for amending the Constitution. The twenty-seven amendments that have been ratified to date have played a pivotal role in the continuing effort to perfect our Constitution. This book looks at U.S. history and the American experience through the lens of our Constitutional Amendments. It discusses why each Amendment was adopted, the importance of each Amendment, how the Amendments have been interpreted, and the impact they have had on American society. The Amendments are too important to be treated as afterthoughts, and this book seeks to rectify that by giving them the attention they deserve.
The Amendments have shaped and continue to shape the development of our nation. They guarantee the fundamental rights and liberties that Americans enjoy. They tell America’s story from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage, and to granting young men and women who are old enough to fight and even die for their country, the right to vote. The Amendments play a vital role in the quest for gender and racial equity, and the continuing struggle to achieve social justice. The story of the Amendments includes America’s dalliance with abstinence, the fourteen years of prohibition. They detail the changes in presidential elections, succession, and term limits; the direct election of senators; and the imposition of a federal income tax.
The Amendments are the result of the American people’s continuing efforts to perfect our Constitution, first through Acts of Congress, then through ratifications by State Legislatures, and finally by judicial review and interpretation.

This book introduces a new thrilling field–neurocomputional poetics, the scientific ‘marriage’ between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience. Its goal is to uncover the secrets of verbal art reception and to explain how readers come to understand and like literary texts. For centuries verbal art reception was considered too subjective for quantitative scientific studies and still nowadays many scholars in the humanities and neurosciences alike view literary reading as too complex for accurate computational prediction of the neuronal, experiential and behavioural aspects of reader responses to texts. This book sets out for changing this view. 

It offers state-of-the-art computational models and methods allowing to predict which crucial textual features of prose and poetry, such as syntactic and semantic complexity or emotion potential, interact with reader features, such as empathy or openness to experience, in shaping a literary reading act. It contains hands-on practical examples on how to do computational text analyses of books and poems that can answer questions like: 

• Which is Jane Austen’s most beautiful book?
• Which poet created the most fitting poetic metaphors? or
• Which author of plays of the nineteenth century was the most literary?

The book’s first chapter about ‘The Two Boons of an Unnatural Daily Activity’ discusses the neuronal bases and other relevant aspects of immersive and aesthetic processes evoked by reading prose and poetry. In the second chapter, the author introduces a comprehensive model of verbal art reception that can explain what makes texts comprehensible and likeable and how they affect our body and mind. The model makes explicit important differences between the reading of prose and poetry and clarifies which text features make prose more immersive and poetry more aesthetic. The next two chapters discuss state-of-the-art methods for quantitative text, reader and reading act analyses from cognitive poetics, data science, psychology and neuroscience and shows how they can be used to dissect the complex author-text-reader nexus that shapes verbal art reception.

Chapters 5 and 6 then present hands-on practical examples on how to do simple and sophisticated computational text analyses including sentiment and topic analyses, cutting-edge machine learning methods, and multivariate predictive modeling using neural nets. Chapters 7 and 8 of the book then present a representative sample of empirical studies in both computational and neurocognitive poetics the author and his collaborators have carried out during the last decade. The results of these studies provide comprehensive insights into the complex workings of the brain during verbal art reception from the processing of single words and sentences to the aesthetic evaluation of metaphors or entire poems and novels, including a qualitative-quantitative analysis of the reading of Shakespeare sonnets that will change the ways of scientific studies of literature. The book ends with a short chapter about conclusions and future developments.

The model and methods introduced in the book offer game-changing insights for both fundamental and applied science that will affect standard metrics of readability and the way text processing and verbal art reception are viewed in literary studies, education, psychology or the media sciences.

In Defense of Reason After Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, In Defense of Reason After Hegel shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art. The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. Thereupon the paradoxes that arise in thinking time are resolved by liberating thought of the formality of the principle of contradiction. The revolutionary character of Hegel’s conception of consciousness is next explored to make intelligible how animals and young children can be conscious and self-conscious, as well as how philosophical thought can overcome the epistemological limitations of the opposition of consciousness. On this basis, the book draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason. The book examines the structure of the institutions of freedom that talking animals can enact. It highlights the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamental shortcomings in the American constitution and American society and draws lessons from the author’s recent campaign to shed light on how the philosophy of right can be a guide to social reform. It also examines how the autonomy of fine art can be realized in sculpture, contrary to claims made by Hegel that would tie this individual art to the classical style.

Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries deals with courtships and marriages that transcended national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. It deals with the formation of transnational families and transnational spaces. And, finally, because the historical concept of transnational marriage provides a unique prism through which to view the interconnectedness of societies at their most intimate cultural intersections, it deals with the longstanding, complex cultural relations between France and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.

In an effort to address not only why Franco-American marriages occurred but also how and why the dynamics that produced them changed over time, this work examines and compares two transnational marriage patterns in different historical contexts: the first, when wealthy American heiresses married French aristocrats during the second half of the 19th century—a period marked by relatively free transatlantic circulation and mobility—and the second, when borders were far more solidified—during the world wars when French women entered into matrimonial contracts with American soldiers.

The purpose of this work is twofold. In an effort to provide new categories of analysis that place the human experience into broader, more global perspectives, the first is to show how concepts of transnational marriage and courtship allow the historian to move further beyond the analytical frameworks of national histories by forcing the researcher to reconsider the ways in which one thinks about family formation and the permeability of national borders during these different stages of the national project. The second is to challenge underlying assumptions in existing historiographical explanations that those who crossed national borders to couple or to marry did so for purely socio-economic reasons. Nicole Leopoldie contends that such rationalizations are simply too narrow and that at the intersection of cross-cultural encounter and transnational coupling stood a profoundly emotional experience. Therefore, greater analytical considerations need to include both cultural and emotional motivations that were always in the background.

Because the social practices of courtship and marriage became mechanisms through which borders were crossed and new cultural spaces were created, they represent important elements of transnational entanglements. Therefore, rather than examining marriage motivation from the perspective of one society or another, this work seeks to examine instead the ways in which patterns of transnational marriage emerged out of social spaces of cross-cultural encounter between the two societies. In order to identify, map and analyze the transnational spaces that produced marriage during the 19th and 20th centuries, this work draws on descriptions of social events found in the French and American press, travel literature, personal accounts and guest lists. By examining where and how couples met and courted one another, these sources provide an important glimpse into not only transnational social networks and cultural rituals but also the ways in which marriage participants perceived, experienced and interpreted these spaces. In this spatial examination, emotions are employed as a category of analysis rather than a narrative device in order to show how complex cultural meanings within transnational spaces were experienced on personal levels among transnational-marriage participants. Because a variety of emotions manifested in both encounter and representations of the “other,” Leopoldie proposes that othering be further considered as not simply a cultural process, but an emotional one. By drawing on French and American literary works, travel literature and personal accounts found in unpublished and published memoirs, letters and interviews collected by contemporary journalists and oral historians, she argues that even though marriage participants from each of the two patterns conceived of the national and cultural boundaries that separated them in very different ways, attraction to notions of difference provoked important emotional responses and largely remained the driving force of marriage and coupling processes in both historical contexts. By participating in a transnational marriage, participants bound themselves not only to their spouse but also to the culture of that spouse. Motivations for transnational marriage were, therefore, still strategic but were largely based on preconceived notions of what they believed the other culture to be.

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a diverse selection of essays that register the situated ness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. In recent polemics, postmortems or even celebrations, a number of prominent critics have suggested that “theory” is dead, that the heyday of literary or critical theory is past and its insights passé, and that other less speculative or abstract approaches to literature and literary criticism be embraced. At the same time, however, resistance to these trends in criticism has emphasized the degree to which modern critical theory remains essential for any proper analysis of the present condition. Today’s dynamic world-system, with its ever-shifting components in the age of globalization, presents new challenges to literary and cultural studies for which criticism and theory are ideally suited. That is because a fundamental virtue of critical and theoretical practice lies in its speculative vocation, as theory may offer novel vantages from which to view the past, present and future configurations, while disclosing fresh vistas of the world in which we are situated.

The Critical Situation emphasizes the need for, and the vibrancy of, theory today. The essays in this volume each address situations of critical theory and practice in various ways. Some are more methodological or analytical, others more historical, and still others more speculative, but all contribute to the argument in favor of theory as an essential part of literary studies in the present time. In the United States, the renewed resistance to theory has become somewhat tied to this or that conception of what have been labeled “method wars,” the battlelines of which indicate distinctive factions: those emphasizing historical investigations are then opposed by those insisting on the precedence of form or formalism, while others contest variations of both types of criticism in favor of some sense of unmediated or “surface” reading. These mostly parochial or academic debates have their counterparts in the broader culture, in which powerful forces determine the sense of what is worthy or not, what is real or what is fake or what is suitable for critical study or even attention. The reversal of the situation is, in a sense, built into the nature of the situation itself. At this point, theory enables the recognition that comes with the experience of peripety, an uncertain reversal of fortune which makes possible the suddenly novel perspective. 

The Critical Situation offers examples of situated criticism, which in turn are concerned with the ways in which literary and cultural criticism are and have been situated in relation to a variety of ideological and institutional structures, including those of world literature, American studies, spatial literary studies, cultural critique, globalization and postmodernity. These structures continue to influence the ways that criticism is practiced, and due recognition of their continuing effects seems to me to be crucial to the success of any meaningful critical practice in the twenty-first century.

This book explains how Louis XIV survived his bid for European hegemony unscathed while other aspiring hegemons in modern history suffered catastrophic defeats. It argues that Louis employed a powerful coalition-breaking strategy unique to him and lays out the implications of Louis XIV’s unique case for today’s security competitions.

Northeast Asia, a major region in Asia covering China, Korea (South and North Korea), Japan, Mongolia, and the Southeast corner of Russia, is economically one of the most vibrant areas in the world, with a rich array of economic opportunities. Yet, it is simultaneously one of the world’s most politically and militarily unstable regions, creating a global security risk. This risk was made apparent by North Korea’s nuclear crisis, which was followed by a series of its nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches from 2016 to 2017. Although the worst-case scenario may have been avoided by a summit meeting between the heads of South and North Korea on April 27, 2018, and another summit between the United States and North Korea on June 12, 2018, substantial uncertainty and the risk of a major military conflict remains.

Although less dramatic and visible to the outside world, other political and military tensions among constituent countries in Northeast Asia, with their deep historical origins dating back centuries, are also significant. These tensions have been demonstrated by persistent territorial disputes, lack of reconciliation on the question of war crimes during World War II, increasing disparities in political influence and military power among Northeast Asian countries as a result of China's ascension, and increasing uncertainty in the region due to the potential instability of North Korea. These problems create a risk of destabilizing Northeast Asia with a substantial global impact.

Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia examines the causes of these complex tensions in Northeast Asia and their underlying political, historic, military, and economic developments. It further discusses their political-economic implications for the world and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace in the region. This book offers a unique approach to these important issues by examining the perspectives of each constituent country in Northeast Asia: China, South and North Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, and their respective roles in the region. Major global powers, such as the United States and Russia, have also closely engaged in the political and economic affairs of the region through a network of alliances, diplomacy, trade, and investment. The book discusses the influence of these external powers, their political and economic objectives in the region, their strategies, and the dynamics that their engagement has brought to the region. Both South Korea and North Korea have sought reunification of the Korean peninsula, which will have a substantial impact on the region. The book examines its justification, feasibility and effects for the region. The book also discusses the role of Mongolia in the context of the power dynamics in Northeast Asia. A relatively small country, in terms of its population, Mongolia has rarely been examined in this context; Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia makes a fresh assessment on its potential role.

This book explores the strategic role of Liberty University, church planting networks, and grassroots mobilization in shaping U.S. policy toward Israel. It examines how Dr. Jerry Falwell, through his leadership at Liberty University and the Moral Majority, built a powerful evangelical coalition that effectively influenced Congress and the White House. By analyzing the intersection of faith, politics, and diplomacy, the book uncovers how Christian Zionism became a central force in conservative American politics, fostering a deep alliance between evangelicals and the Israeli government. Falwell’s relationship with Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Menachem Begin, marked a turning point in evangelical engagement with U.S.-Israel relations.
Drawing on archival research, policy analysis, and historical case studies, this study reveals how church planting initiatives were not just religious efforts but also political mobilization tools. Through Liberty University’s extensive alumni network, pastors and church leaders across the United States incorporated pro-Israel advocacy into their congregations, fostering a committed base that actively lobbied for policies such as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, foreign aid to Israel, and support for settlement expansion. The book highlights how evangelical activism extended beyond sermons and theological discourse, transforming into a well-organized political force with direct influence on U.S. foreign policy.
By tracing the historical evolution of evangelical political engagement, this book provides critical insights into the mechanisms by which grassroots activism, theological imperatives, and institutional influence shaped American diplomacy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It situates evangelical support for Israel within the broader conservative movement, illustrating how religious convictions translated into political action. As debates over faith-based politics and foreign policy continue to shape America’s global role, this book offers a timely and essential contribution to understanding the enduring impact of Christian Zionism on U.S.-Israel relations.

Drawing on archival sources, this book provides an anthropological exploration of the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, tracing its evolution from the Mayo School of Arts established in 1875. As a counterpart to London’s South Kensington School of Design (now the Royal College of Art), the Mayo School emerged as a crucial site for the dissemination of colonial art education in British India, alongside similar institutions in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Named to honor Lord Earl of Mayo, the only Viceroy of India assassinated in office, it was founded by Lockwood Kipling and featured a distinguished roster of educators including Ram Singh, Percy Brown, Lionel Heath, S.N. Gupta, B.C. Sanyal, and A.R. Chughtai. The Mayo School also initiated the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, a seminal publication utilizing cutting-edge chromolithography techniques.

The book employs theoretical analysis to understand how the NCA, functioning as a bureaucratic entity, has shaped the landscape of design education, museums, and artistic practices in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. From its roots in British art education, derived from South Kensington, the institution's trajectory reflects its adaptation through American reforms in the early years of Pakistani independence. This analysis critically examines how frameworks of art history and anthropology have been mobilized to construct and objectify Pakistani art and artists.

Furthermore, the book explores the contributions of colonial anthropologists such as Richard Temple, Denzil Ibbetson, and Baden Powell, who were instrumental in the establishment and administration of the Mayo School. Their work in ethnographic reconstruction provided a cultural framework that influenced the education of artisan castes, situating them within a “primitive” Punjabi context. This colonial subtext profoundly impacted the pedagogical approaches of the Mayo School, which also nurtured the emergence of the Indo-Saracenic architectural style and supported traditional Punjabi painting.

Despite its industrial art orientation, the Mayo School was pivotal in the development of a modern Punjab painting tradition recognized at the British Indian Empire Exhibition of 1924. Under the guidance of Lionel Heath, the school began to embrace modern art, with printmaking, graphic design, and sculpture taking root in the 1930s through the efforts of B.C. Sanyal and M.M. Hussain. The Mayo School’s printing press produced a diverse array of materials, reflecting major Western art movements from Arts and Crafts to Art Deco and Bauhaus.

In the formative years of Pakistan, the Mayo School transitioned into the National College of Arts in 1958, modeled after the Bauhaus with departments in Fine Art, Design, and Architecture. Influential figures such as poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, painter Shakir Ali, art patron Ghulam Mueenuddin, and American sculptor Mark Sponenburgh were pivotal in shaping the NCA as Pakistan’s premier institution for art and design. Through a critical examination of art history and anthropological frameworks, this book elucidates how imperial and nationalist discourses have intersected to shape and redefine artistic and cultural identities within Pakistan.

Before Alessandro Michele took the creative helm at Gucci in 2015, the brand was mostly known for its sleek sophistication and sexy hedonism. Despite having worked at the Italian fashion house for over twelve years as the accessories and jewellery designer, Michele was relatively unknown in the fashion industry and the public sphere. All of that was to change when he sent his models down the runway for the 2015 Fall ready-to-wear collection in an eclectic mix of pussy-bow blouses, chiffon dresses, wallpaper prints and a motley collection of accessories, including fur-lined loafers, berets and granny-style horn-rimmed glasses. Michele’s stylistic design approach created an aesthetic reminiscent of the fashion eccentric who wears flea market finds with high-end designer and heirloom pieces – imperfect, nostalgic and maximalist. The new Gucci woman (and man) were intellectual and sensual misfits who are perfectly at home in the glamourous rag-tag aesthetic of a Wes Anderson film.
With his inaugurate collection, Michele tapped into the zeitgeist that was yearning for a more colourful and playful design, and a disregard of traditional gender divisions: while Gucci has hitherto showcased its men’s and women’s collections separately, as well as favoured traditional masculine and feminine looks respectively, Michele broke with the idea of a gender binary, ushering in gender fluidity and a new fantastical vision of masculinity.
Although his collections were spectacular in their scope (the Fall/Winter 2017 consists of roughly 120 looks), the designs are also a testimony to his ability to scramble signifiers of gender, pop culture, history and time. Referencing and borrowing from philosophical concepts and ideas, such as the infamous Cyborg collection (Gucci Fall/Winter 2019) that envisioned subjectivities beyond the confines of the human body with replica heads or extra eyes on their hands; the Fall/Winter 2016 collection titled ‘Rhizomatic Scores’, referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concept; or the Fall/Winter 2020 menswear collection titled ‘Masculine, Plural’ that referenced Butler’s notion of gender performativity, Michele exemplifies a fashion auteur who knows how to play not only with gender signifiers but also with signifiers of time, culture and species.

Musicians on Twitch: Creativity, Challenges, and the Reality Behind Live Streaming unpacks the untold stories of musicians who have turned to Twitch as a platform to share their art, engage with audiences and seek financial stability. While on the surface Twitch appears as a hub for creativity and innovation, this book reveals a dichotomous reality where opportunities and challenges are in constant tension.
Through interviews with this new breed of ‘musician-streamers’ and extensive observation of their mediated, online lives, this book explores what it takes to succeed – or simply survive – on a platform originally built for gaming but now home to a vibrant music community.
The journey begins by examining Twitch’s evolution from a gaming-centric site to a space where live music performances have gained traction. Whether driven by creative freedom, financial aspirations or a desire to connect with global audiences, this book examines who these musicians are and what draws them to the platform. Throughout this chapter, key concepts and terms are introduced to provide readers with a clear and accessible framework for understanding and analysing the evolving landscape of online live music.
Building on the exploration of Twitch as a platform for creativity and opportunity, this book also sheds light on the difficult realities faced by musicians on the platform. Beneath Twitch’s innovative and appealing surface lies a stark and often challenging environment. From the ‘happy-few-take-all’ dynamic, where only a small elite garners the majority of audience attention and earnings, to the gamified, attention-driven ecosystem that creates relentless pressure to remain ‘always on’, many musicians are flirting with their breaking point. These challenges are even more pronounced for female streamers and those from minority groups, who often contend with persistent harassment, amplifying the psychological toll in an already demanding, high-pressure environment.
Musicians on Twitch provides a nuanced, unfiltered, at times brutal, exploration of Twitch’s promises and pitfalls for musicians. It is an important read for anyone curious about the intersection of music, technology and creative labour, and what it really means to be a musician today.

Disappearing Cities is a collection of over fifty short stories of invented cities, set in the not too distant future, destroyed by varied climate change impacts and linked natural disasters. The stories bring into question the relation between the natural and unnatural forces of change and expose responses to, and lessons learnt, from different disaster crises situations. Stories also focus on how means to adapt are sought. The projected fictions are created from projected current climate facts; trends; and the author’s experience of population displacement, relocation and design-based climate change responsive action. Central to the book is the recognition that to be able to respond and adapt to the scale of coming changes in the climate requires going beyond existing practical action and embracing a new way of imagining futures. Disappearing Cities aims to stimulate ways of meeting this need.
The book opens with a Prologue that establishes the contextual frame of empirical foundation out of which the fictions are created. It recognises that we all live in a world in which the conditions that will result in huge numbers of cities disappearing are underway. From the human perspective, the process appears to be very slow, whereas in historico-geological time, it is happening exceptionally quickly. The number of the loss of cities is going to be huge, yet the recognition that this will occur is not arriving, In part, this is because of a lack of knowledge, but equally, it reflects a lack of imagination. Transposing what is known about climate change by a significant percentage of the societies of many nations to actual environments in which they live is just not arriving. What appears so solid and established fails to be seen and imagined as a risk and vulnerable. From establishing this opening perspective, the first part of the book presents stories of cities already disappearing as a result of the forces of nature changed by anthropogenically created global warming. Part two discusses the impacts of natural disasters being made unnaturally. For example, by the way industrial societies are damaging and changing natural systems, including the climatic. The final part goes to cities destroyed by completely un-natural means, including war.
Disappearing Cities aims to contribute to meeting the need for a better understanding of, and ability to imagine, the risks to which vast numbers of cities are, and will be, exposed to forces of disappearance. To do this, the narratives are a hybrid of fact and fiction. The work was inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities and is intended to be a salient contemporary companion to this text. It mirrors its form but differs in style and content. Invisible Cities attained diverse readership, Disappearing Cities aspires to do likewise.

The gramophone was thought to be perverse because it allowed people to listen to music on their own. Rock ‘n’ Roll was the devil’s music. Home taping supposedly killed music. Copyright piracy is not a victimless crime. Downloading music is stealing. Spotify doesn’t adequately pay artists. YouTube remuneration creates a value gap for artists. Mp3s make music sound flat. TikTok shortens songs. AI steals ideas.
With each new music distribution technology, the powerful corporate interests of the moment try to make people afraid to use it. In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok, Dr. David Arditi examines how the major record labels single-out new technologies as if they will bring an end to recorded music. They use what he calls the “piracy panic narrative”—a narrative in which new technologies threaten the very existence of recorded music. The piracy panic narrative is a rhetorical construct that helps to hide the material reality of the recording industry by positioning major record labels and their recording artists as the victims of widespread crime in the form of piracy.
Now, divorced from piracy, the recording industry continues to use the panic narrative to dissuade fans from specific practices and to lobby the government for particular policies. Each time, they use the narrative to change public sentiment, the law, and policy to strengthen their profits. It works because fans feel a connection with their favorite artists. Fans want their artists to be paid a fair wage. But at every moment what gets ignored is labels are the primary exploiter of musicians. Asking why YouTube underpays artists is the wrong question because streaming platforms pay labels. The question that never gets asked: why don’t labels pay artists a livable wage?

This textbook is designed to introduce the reader to important and emerging issues in contemporary environmental law, policy, economics, and science. It explains the roles and interactions of Congress, federal agencies, state governments, and the courts in protecting the environment and public health from pollution. Topics include common law; administrative law; the role of environmental impact assessments and endangered species protection; and the principal legislation and court decisions dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, conventional and toxic air pollution, water pollution, the control of toxic chemicals and hazardous waste, pollution prevention and primary accident prevention, and community right-to-know. The text also explores various alternatives to regulation and concludes with a brief treatise on sustainability.
The evolving role of science and economics in legislative, regulatory, and judicial decision making is explored. The text analyzes pollution as an economic problem and a failure of markets, discusses the role of technological innovation and the concept of “dynamic” economic equilibrium, and evaluates economic incentives as an alternative or supplement to regulation. The book also provides an introduction to basic legal skills: how to read and understand judicial opinions, regulations, and statutes; how to discover the current state of the law in a specific area; and how to take action toward resolution of environmental problems. Throughout, the role of national and local politics in shaping and implementing environmental policy is acknowledged and evaluated.

Analyzes the international drug control regime, examining its legal foundations, emerging tensions, and the existing calls for reform in response to evolving challenges like synthetic drugs, cannabis legalization, and new trafficking methods

The international drug control regime, anchored in three international conventions (1961, 1971, and 1988), bans non-medical drug production and use while ensuring access for medical purposes. Despite near-universal ratification and political commitments focusing on demand and supply reduction as well as judicial cooperation, the illegal drug market has expanded significantly. Over the past decade, drug use rose by 20%, problematic use by 45%, and seizures of drugs like cocaine and amphetamines by more than 40%. These trends expose the regime’s inability to fulfil its objectives, alongside escalating challenges like drug-related violence, overdose crises, and human rights abuses.
This book critically examines the international drug control framework, analyzing its legal instruments, historical context, and implementation mechanisms. It explores emerging tensions, such as the limited access to pain medicines, the legalization of non-medical cannabis in some regions, and synthetic drug crises affecting public health and law enforcement. By addressing these issues, the book sheds light on how countries navigate the conflicts between their international obligations and pressing domestic challenges, particularly in adapting to new trafficking modes.
Building on these analyses, the book discusses whether the current regime is fit for purpose or requires reform. It explores potential pathways for change and evaluates the risks and benefits of maintaining the status quo and of reforming. Ultimately, the work aims to inform policymakers, students, and communities about the complexities of drug control laws and the existing paths to modernization to address contemporary challenges effectively.

There is little doubt that urban planning has historically failed women. To liberate the profession from patriarchal influences, it is necessary to revisit the preconceptions that shaped early efforts to design new cities or improve existing ones. This book critiques the work of twenty male planning luminaries who proposed urban models, interventions, and approaches on both sides of the North Atlantic during the Second Industrial Revolution. These early visions, often presented as emancipatory or utopian, set European and North American cities (as well as their colonial counterparts) on an inexorable masculinist path. The grand urban plans and projects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were largely bankrolled by wealth extracted from colonial enterprises in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
A reverence for geometry, order, and standardization, alongside a monumental scale, reflected a hegemonic and monolithic vision of the city, with little tolerance for cultural or physical difference. Limitless urban growth and the rapid, effortless movement of people were valorised, and for the first time in history, roads became more important than homes. Many of these same planners, indifferent to cultural and physical differences, readily accepted the continuation of class divisions in cities. Comprehensive plans for both small and large settlements were hierarchical, with the wealthiest or most powerful occupying central positions of power. Functional segregation, later institutionalized as “zoning,” enforced spatial divisions between the public (male) and private (female) spheres. Even as the planning agenda prioritized “men’s issues” related to industry and commerce, domestic ideology was promoted during this period.
The book also highlights the work of several female activists and reformers from the same era. Although these women rarely envisioned full-blown urban utopias or produced extensive writings on planning, they worked to improve built environments for all. Female reformers were more attuned to the lived experiences of city dwellers than male planners, architects, and engineers. While men focused on structures and infrastructure, women were concerned with the human condition. Rather than expanding or clearing out the existing urban fabric, women sought to restore it. Practically, women extended their reproductive duties from the home to the entire city, envisioning it as a collective living space where everyone shared responsibility for one another’s daily welfare. This book calls for a return to that planning philosophy, at a time when numerous techno utopias are being imagined and built, often backed by major private corporations or individual male billionaires.

Hands, Wrists, Fingers invites musicians to explore a new way of thinking about good health. The physical dimensions of hands are certainly important and merit close study, encompassing coordination, relaxation, dexterity, speed, accuracy, and freedom from pain. While acknowledging these dimensions, Hands, Wrists, Fingers focuses on a broader perspective that includes cultural dimensions both conscious and unconscious, involving language, symbol, ritual, curiosity, playfulness, and mindfulness. Through a wealth of original insights, anecdotes, exercises, and games, musicians will be able to transform their hands into sensitive and intelligent agents of joyful creativity, in which the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of hands become inseparable from their physical and material existence.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is organized in four parts: Culture, The Language of Hands, Sensitivity and Creativity, and Knowledge and Mystery. Behind the physical gestures and movements of your daily life and your music-making, there are the stories that you tell about your own hands—thoughts and feelings, memories, experiences, judgments, hopes, and fears. Hands, Wrists, Fingers argues that the way you use your hands is inseparable from these stories, in which you tell yourself “what you can and cannot do, what you should and should not do, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re prevented from doing.” If your inner stories aren’t healthy in themselves, it’s very difficult for your hands to behave in a healthy manner.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is a practical book brimming with exercises and suggestions. Every chapter is supported by video clips illustrating and demonstrating its exercises. Among other things, you’ll explore the skills of rotation and of spiral movements, the mastery of textures and gradations, the playful manipulation of objects, and the use of your hands as agents of expressive language. Your hands will become creative, intelligent, and sensitive, and you’ll develop a new understanding of the true meaning of good health.

The long-awaited convergence of climate, economic, political, intellectual, faith and social failures gives many reasons for despair. The authors of this volume have spent their lives around the trauma of race and poverty in South Africa and the United States working with Nobel prize winners and those in townships and tenements. We have learned that hope is not delusional and accountability not naïve. But one must think clearly and deeply, untethered from the inadequate simplicities and false choices. We must be here now, with eyes wide open for when systems break down, as so many are today, knowing that they also break open new space for creative action.
The authors lead the global web of thinker-doers through the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and national networks in Africa, Europe and the United States. They find coherence among profound thinking from fields never brought into alignment before drawn from by economists, mycelial researchers, anthropologists and health sciences working in the Artic to South Africa, and the tough neighbourhoods in between. This includes a consideration of the human capacities that allow us to act in and transform the world we inhabit, of the radical nature of joy in the face of despair, of the judgement of Nemesis on hubris and privilege, of the ‘value of everything’ contra price as definitive, of the idea of involution as distinguished from evolution, of the concept of ‘meshworks’ in our entanglement with others, and, finally, of the ‘theatre of the soul’ as the unity of the physical, the psychological, the political and the spiritual.
Sharply sensitive to the urgency of careful thought and wise action, the authors help us see that life does find a way towards deep accountability for the life of complex human ecosystems. They ask us to take responsibility for this as a key to human flourishing and well-being.

This book is the first biographical account of Sebastian Masuda written in English. Sebastian Masuda is a Japanese creator and artist who is globally known as the king of Japanese “Kawaii” (cute) subculture which originated in Harajuku. His continuous pursuit of the concept of kawaii is his lifetime passion and mission, and his work is always characterized by bright neon colors that led to the emergence of Decora fashion. He wears several hats in the field of fashion, art, and entertainment and uses colorful and kawaii elements as his creative foundation. He treats kawaii styles as explicit, non-violent forms of rebellion and resistance like many other youth subcultures in Japan that express themselves in unconventional fashion. One needs courage to walk down the street wearing bright, flashy clothes and accessories from head to toe.
As an artist, Masuda has created prominent art pieces, such as a giant Hello Kitty sculpture in New York and a giant Doraemon statue made out of fluffy yarn in Singapore. As a designer, he has designed the décor of Kawaii Monster Café in Harajuku and Sushidelic, a sushi restaurant, in New York. He also runs a store, 6%DokiDoki, which has its own clothing line. As an entertainment producer, he has collaborated with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, a Japanese singer and pop culture icon, and produced her first music video.
This book traces a strong impact of Masudaʼs difficult and lonely childhood and upbringing and complex family background on his creative endeavors that attract millions of youngsters that are also going through personal hardships. Masuda went through his teenage years spending time alone in the library reading books which made him observant and perceptive. This book also delves into his deep understanding of kawaii with intricate layers of interpretations which are often misunderstood and misconstrued as simply being cute, girlie, and infantile. Kawaii is not just an adjective but a lifestyle, philosophy, and ideology.

Neoliberalism has transformed work, welfare and democracy. However, its impacts, and its future, are more complex than we often imagine. Alongside growing inequality, social spending has been rising. Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation asks how we understand this contradictory politics and what opportunities exist to create a more equal society. It argues an older welfare state politics, driven by the power of industrial labour, is giving way to political contests led by workers within the welfare state itself. Advancing more equal social policy, though, requires new forms of statecraft, or ways of doing policy, as well as new models of organising.

 Drawing on examples of social policy change since the 1980s, the book explores how seemingly similar reforms reflect distinct political dynamics and facilitate different social outcomes. The examples reflect the main aspects of liberalisation – conditionality of benefits, marketisation of services and financialisation of the life course. Across each domain, it identifies examples that fit the ‘neoliberal’ frame and alternatives that appear to subvert it. From family payments to Medicare, social protection advanced using remarkably similar policy tools to those associated with liberalisation. The book identifies two competing welfare state projects. A ‘dual welfare state’ of hidden subsidies to privatised welfare alongside increasingly residualised public systems that stigmatise recipients, and a 'hybrid’ model of marketised universalism that uses novel forms of statecraft to socialise risk while advancing competition.

 Rather than explaining how Australia fell prey to neoliberalism, the book identifies an ongoing struggle between competing visions of liberalisation. Dual welfare deepens inequality by concealing the distributional effects of state policy, building a sizeable coalition of largely older voters, insulated from the insecurities of precarious work and benefiting from rising house prices. Hybrid policies, it argues, emerged at the intersection of sympathetic bureaucracies and strong social pressure. Central to both are workers within the welfare state and the unions that represent them. The analysis recasts divides based on generation and education as reflecting the increasingly central role of social reproduction within the paid economy, and the strategies of care workers to have their skills and value recognised. The analysis opens opportunities for new models of solidarity based on an ethic of care.

Explores the possibilities and ethical dilemmas of radical life extension through biotechnology, examining the impact of potentially treating aging and living indefinitely on humanity, society, and individual identity

What if you could live not just longer, but healthier—and possibly forever? In his groundbreaking exploration of biotechnology, ethics, and the philosophy of very long lives, Thomas Ramge takes readers on a thought-provoking journey through the possibilities and consequences of radical life extension. Drawing on cutting-edge research in molecular biology, genetics, and AI-driven medicine, the book examines how humanity is on the brink of a revolution—one where aging may soon become a treatable condition. Through engaging thought experiments, such as choosing between three pills that extend life to 100, 200, or eternity, the book challenges our assumptions about mortality, identity, and purpose. Would centuries of life bring wisdom or existential despair? Could societies sustain themselves in a world where death is optional? And who would have access to these medical breakthroughs—everyone, or only the wealthy elite? Combining scientific rigor with philosophical depth, this book is a must-read for those fascinated by the intersection of technology, ethics, and the human condition. If the future of life itself is at stake, what will we choose?

The enduring influence of Saint Laurent’s designs in modern fashion is undeniable. Concepts introduced by Saint Laurent, like the tuxedo jacket for women and the sheer blouse and dress, have become staples in contemporary fashion, transcending their origins to become symbols of power, elegance and sexuality. His ability to anticipate and articulate the needs and desires of the modern woman has left a lasting blueprint for how fashion interacts with social change and individual identity. Moreover, even after his death at 71 in 2008, Saint Laurent’s integration of art and fashion continues to inspire current designers, seen in the ongoing collaborations between high fashion and contemporary artists.
Saint Laurent was above all an artist of synthesis, of agglomeration and reshaping, of conglomeration and adaptation. His work is a fusion of the tactile and aesthetic with fancy and supposition – for his interiors are not what were but could have been, a projection of imagination and personality. It is a straddling of two separate worlds, which is crucial to fashion. His significance is in making this explicit.

Cultural Processes of Inequality: A Sociological Perspective shows how systematic inequality is produced and reproduced through mundane, often taken-for-granted practices of offering someone the benefit of the doubt and treating them in good faith or, alternatively, of withholding the benefit of the doubt and treating them in bad faith. This straightforward way of thinking about value and devaluation, privilege and discrimination, works across multiple forms of inequality and at social levels ranging from interpersonal interactions to large-scale institutions, while showcasing the importance of different levels and types of social power (decision-making power, cultural power and individual power).

Good-faith and bad-faith assumptions and practices intersect with moral inclusion and exclusion, processes by which certain people or groups of people are defined as deserving or undeserving of moral treatment, often with tragic consequences. Cultural Processes of Inequality covers ways in which good-faith and bad-faith assumptions and practices play out through moral alchemy, false equivalencies, self-fulfilling prophecies, positive and negative visibility and invisibility and the linking of social groups to definitions of social problems, providing contemporary U.S. examples of how these often-underutilized sociological concepts make sense of racism, sexism and heterosexism. The role of members of devalued groups in reproducing or struggling against their devaluation is also considered.

Cultural Processes of Inequality concludes with concrete actions individuals and groups can take to build a good-faith society and includes an appendix discussing key sociological concepts to make the book more useful to undergraduate students who have not previously taken a sociology course as well as discussion questions for students. Written for students in sociology classes and accessible to generally educated readers, Cultural Processes of Inequality sheds light on components of systematic inequality that too often go undiscussed even as they play a daily role in the injustice and the many harms of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of inequality.

The twentieth century holds many titles that emphasize the extraordinary. It was a century of totalitarianism, but also one of betrayal, an age of extremes and the incomprehensible. Betrayed, that is, at the mercy of unrestrained violence, were not only the people themselves, but also, as it were, the idea of the human being. For up to a certain point, one could weigh oneself in an unfounded security of an inner connection between people. As is well known, such certainties were knocked out of hand in that century. Many situations, many images, motifs and sources can be named for this experience of unbounded violence, which now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, requires new forms of transmission. In an era flooded with images, however, attention is more difficult. One has to embark on a search for traces; not because the sources are lacking, but because the form of inscription in history is problematic. This search for clues leads directly to the present monograph.

All is not well with the law on rape. It is rarely reported and even when it is, it is rarely prosecuted. Victims are deterred for a range of reasons, but these include a fear that it will never be possible to prove the rape has occurred and that the trial will be traumatic. Even when the case proceeds to trial, victims perceive that it is they, rather than the perpetrator, who is the one on trial. The past sexual behaviour of the victim,; the clothes she was wearing,; the people she socialised with and the places she visited are all used as tools to claim that in fact the victim consented to the rape. Reforms are needed.
In this book, we explore how changing the definition of rape will help tackle some of these problems. We argue there needs to be a shift in the focus of the rape trial: away from asking whether the victim consented, to focus on whether the defendant. Rather than focusing on the way the victim dresses, behaviour in response to the rape, the focus will be on what the defendant believed justified him engaging in a sexual behaviour.
At the heart of our proposal is the claim that having sex comes with responsibilities. In particular, a responsibility to ensure you have reasonable grounds to believe the other consents. Without that consent, a very serious wrong is being done. The central legal focus should therefore be on whether the defendant had sufficiently good reasons to proceed with having sex.

Explores the rise of the “gig public” in the age of performative publicness, highlighting challenges in sustaining meaningful discourse, the impact of new technologies and AI on public engagement, and the emergence of the will to visibility within the context of capitalism and algorithmic governmentality.

This monograph explores the evolving nature of publicness in the era of digital communication and social media saturation, arguing that the rise of the “gig public” represents a new paradigm that challenges the traditional conceptualization of the public in shaping social and political change. The gig public departs from traditional notions of publicness and the public, characterized by individuals’ spontaneous and less-structured engagement in public discourse. This engagement is often hampered by challenges in fostering sustained interaction and depth of discussion, due to the ephemeral nature of online interactions.
In particular, this monograph highlights the importance of customs, negotiations, and contracts that complement the normatively privileged public reasoning in public domains. It examines the transformations in the multifaceted nature of the public and its interrelationship with other social structures amid the shifting boundaries between public and private domains. In addition, it explores the evolution of conceptualizations of publicness and related concepts within critical theory, illustrating how contemporary shifts are redefining civic engagement and the essence of public life in a rapidly changing world. From these perspectives, the study is structured around three primary focal points: First, it analyzes how new information technologies and AI have altered human interactions within the public sphere. Second, it examines the impact of capitalist economic dynamics and governmentality strategies on reshaping the public realm, fundamentally altering the essence of the public and its democratic potential. Third, it explores how habitual and routine practices traditionally associated with the private sphere are now influencing the ongoing evolution of publicness.
The monograph aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the challenges posed by the fragmentation of contemporary public discourse and the emergence of gig publics. It also considers strategies to invigorate publicness through AI technology that enables users to transform plain language into automated actions on their computers, potentially reshaping civic engagement in the digital age.

This is the first republication of Rheta Childe Dorr’s book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917), accompanied by the editor’s research introduction and comments. Dorr (1866–1948) was a leading suffragette from Nebraska, studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to New York as a journalist and first editor of The Suffragette. Living on the lower East Side, she became a socialist. She visited Russia during the first Russian revolution (1905–1907) and later covered the February Revolution of 1917 for the New York Evening Mail.
Her book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) depicts the overthrow of the tsar as a positive, democratic move with hope of a Russia following the American path to constitutional democracy. The evolution of revolutionary Russia from February to October changed not only Dorr’s perception of the Russian revolution as a phenomenon but her vision of socialism as well. In this sense, she was among the American radicals who contributed to American phenomenology of the 1917 Russian revolution but were not satisfied with its results. Being a prominent figure in the U.S. political and social life of her time, Rheta Dorr expanded the horizons of the Americans’ identity.
Dorr is also known for other publications. In 1922, she assisted Anna Vyrubova, a lady-in-waiting, the best friend and the confidante of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, with the writing of Vyrubova’s memoir, My Memories of the Russian Court. Thereafter, Dorr wrote her own memoir, A Woman of Fifty, published in 1924. Dorr moved from her autobiography to a biography of Susan B. Anthony, published in 1928, and completed her publishing activity in 1929 with a tome on the question of prohibition.

In a little over twenty years, New York–-based fashion designer Thome Browne has decisively and permanently changed the fashion industry. Through his clothes that are rooted in America’s distinctive preppie style, he has challenged age-old conventions of tailoring by altering proportions and blurring gender boundaries. The cropped trouser, which has become a staple of people’s wardrobes around the world, owes much to Browne’s pioneering reinterpretation of the suit. Through highly choreographed catwalk shows, he has enlivened the presentation of fashion, creating soulful spectacles that variously critique and cherish common themes in human lives.
Browne’s influence within the fashion industry has been recognised through various awards. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has named him ‘Menswear Designer of the Year’ on three occasions, in 2006, 2013, and 2016. Since 2023, Browne has served as the CFDA’s Chair. In May 2023, Browne dressed nine celebrities to honour Karl Lagerfeld at the annual gala hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This book considers Browne’s position as a fashion auteur by focusing on four collections that enable detailed consideration of his innovative clothing designs and catwalk presentations, situating them within their historical and social context and drawing out what makes them distinctive and influential.

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre’s Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. 

In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial.

This study’s restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the “French Films of Sensation,” Canadian “body horror,” and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

This book presents a new theater play, For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, along with a thorough introduction that provides historical context and theoretical framing. The play with the enigmatic title tells the poignant and forgotten stories of international child adoptions from Greece in the 1950s and the 1960s. It offers an in-depth exploration of the first postwar mass international adoption movement, unveiling the emotional and even existential challenges faced by those involved. Based on an authentic playscript, the book creates awareness about what has not been said, should be said, but still cannot be said about the losses involved in the permanent uprooting of children and teenagers. It tackles the primal questions of “Where do I come from?” and “What happened to the child I relinquished for adoption abroad?” And why did nobody foresee that adopted children become adopted adults who ask critical questions about origins, procedures, and aftercare?
Thus, the book boldly reflects on the complexities and profound losses associated with displacing children and perpetuating taboos. Also, it reveals multiple connections to similar adoption movements worldwide, which include countries (and histories) of origin such as Ireland, South Korea, Vietnam, and several states in Central and South America. This thought-provoking book poses critical questions about identity and belonging that far exceed the Greek setting and continue to be relevant today.

The book argues that these plays show us a society haunted by the unquiet burials of Anglo-Saxon saints and kings and the destruction of shrines and churches during the English Reformation, and peopled by crossover figures who inhabit both the spiritual and the secular realms. [Author Query: The sentence beginning ‘The book argues that unquiet burials, particularly . . . ’ seems incomplete. Please check and edit as needed.]It begins with an introduction which sets out the distinction between spiritual and temporal overlordship of lands, glances at the ways in which sacred and secular spheres of influence could be brought into conflict in plays from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and explains that the book is interested not only in the extent to which those spheres of influence map onto actual territory but also in the ways in which land is perceived as retaining memories of uses to which it has been previously put. This was particularly the case when royal or saintly bodies had been buried in it, even if the actual burials had been disturbed or lost completely, but other kinds of spaces and places could also carry with them a sense of an ineradicable past (often a specifically pre-Reformation past). When plays claim to represent such richly suggestive sites as holy wells, abbeys built before the Norman Conquest, or places where martyrdoms or miracles have occurred, they simultaneously suggest the power and appeal of such memories and yet also acknowledge their loss and inaccessibility, not least because what the audience sees is not the place represented but bare boards of the stage standing in for it.
Four chapters then follow. The first is on the anonymous Thorney Abbey, which offers an origin story for the Anglo-Saxon foundation which preceded the Norman Westminster Abbey during the reign of an unnamed king of England who has a brother (and heir) called Edmund. The Anglo-Saxon St Edmund was well remembered in the early modern period and was particularly important to English Catholic exiles; the unnamed brother can be identified as Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, who was king of England from 925 to 939 but never married (probably because he was illegitimate), making Thorney Abbey part of a group of early modern plays which found Athelstan a flexible, suggestive and culturally resonant figure who could be used to discuss a range of important issues, including succession, the status of the monarch, and the benefits and logic of celibacy. Thorney Abbey presents the foundation of the abbey as a neat and simple process, but the subsequent history of Westminster Abbey was not in fact quite so trouble-free and that leaches into the play, which also has strong similarities to Macbeth in ways which put pressure on Shakespeare’s play, particularly on its use of Edward the Confessor, helping us to see that Macbeth treads a nervous line between implying the superiority of a king who collapses the distinction between spiritual and temporal and refusing to actually show him. The second chapter is on another anonymous play, A Knack to Know a Knave, which features Edgar, king of Mercia and Northumbria (c. 944–975), and Saint Dunstan, two figures who carried considerable cultural heft. Dunstan was a complex and controversial figure whose association with miracles that savoured of trickery meant that to early Reformers, he was even more suspect than most saints. Edgar’s main achievement was the revival of Benedictine monasticism, which he funded by large grants of land and by enforcing the payment of the ecclesiastical tax known as Peter’s Pence, making him almost the perfect test case for considering the relationship between temporal and spiritual power. The third chapter focuses on William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman, which tells the story of the shoemaker saint Crispin and his brother Crispian and the early English and Welsh martyrs St Hugh, St Winifred, St Alban and St Amphiabel in ways which evoke the long and difficult history of debates about the extent of British Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope. Last comes a chapter on Anthony Brewer’s The Lovesick King, which uses the memory of a local benefactor to comment on the relationship between civic and ecclesiastical constructions.
The final section of the book is a coda which argues that if some of these plays engage with Hamlet and Macbeth, then King Lear in turn engages with some of them. Although the supposedly historical figure of King Lear belonged to a time before the Romans, the play points at the Anglo-Saxon past in a number of respects: its use of the names Edmund, Oswald and Edgar (who apparently succeeds as King Edgar); its representation of an England being divided into different constituent realms; and its interest in female succession and in the question of whether illegitimacy was a bar to inheriting the throne. The blinding of Gloucester might recall the use of mutilation to disqualify possible successors, as when Edward the Confessor’s elder brother Alfred Aetheling was blinded by Earl Godwin, and Lear’s discovery that he cannot stop rain perhaps recalls Canute’s supposed failure to turn back the tide. Lost battles too were a feature of Anglo-Saxon England, both Essendon and Hastings being perceived as disastrous and era-ending. Above all, the play seems to show us a world which is both pre-Christian yet at the same time post-Catholic, being troubled by the memory of Rome in something of the same way as the great Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin; but although there may be ruins, there are no sacred spaces in King Lear. The play can thus be read as a warning of what happens if there are no abbeys; on its desolate heath, we find the ultimate expression of the nightmare landscape feared in all these plays.

This book illustrates how different forces shape ideas, knowledge traditions, policies, processes, institutions and everyday lives to domesticate both people and the planet in pursuit of profit. It examines the myriad ways in which contemporary ruling and non-ruling elites influence politics, culture, economy and religion and shape our daily interactions, emphasising their impact on individuals, families, communities, democratic praxis, societal structures and nature. The book portrays power structures that are skewed in a manner that marginalises many while upholding the interests of a few. It depicts numerous contradictions inherent in capitalism and the state, while also presenting alternative ideas drawn from the everyday experiences of working people.
State and capitalism territorialise and deterritorialise lives and livelihoods. It destabilises social, cultural and economic relationships. Everyday crises are manufactured, and conflicts are designed to divert the masses from exploring alternatives to capitalism. This strategy aims to maintain the status quo by ensuring that attention and resources are consistently focused on the accumulation of wealth and prosperity for a few, thereby preventing widespread consideration of alternative and egalitarian systems and processes for mass welfare.

This book will provide an exploration of how popular songs have been analysed in the past, before detailing how an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to appreciate the multimodal format of the medium. Beginning by examining what we can gain from staying ‘inside’ the song, it will explore the role the listener has in determining meaning within a song, before moving on to how, through their lyrics, songwriters can persuade their audience to react in the desired ways. Lyrical storytelling will also be analysed, in terms of the narratives we find within individual songs, but also through ‘song sequences’ where the story spans multiple songs across different projects, and also the ‘concept album’ format. As we move ‘outside’ the song, we see what can be offered in terms of cultural significance, the difference between real events and their lyrical representations, how the format we listen to music in influences our readings, and to what extent visual materials affect our relationships with songs.

What remains of the idea of liquid modernity? Is Bauman’s thought still relevant? This volume aims to answer these questions, without forgetting the vastness and complexity of his work, where the idea of liquidity remains fundamental, before and after the central turning point of the year 2000, when he published Liquid Modernity.
Bauman’s legacy is multiform and complex, subdivided into partial legacies, not all of which are homogeneous and acceptable without benefit of inventory. The first difficulty consists in its complete lack of systematicity: Bauman-thought is by no means a single whole, nor can it be used as a key instrument to be applied to every condition, given that it explicitly concerns a precise fraction of our present. This is not to be understood as an oversight, but a conscious, strongly intended choice to eschew any systematic, systematising formulation of society. He prefers to understand the sociologist’s task as an acute observer, capable of enabling social agents – that is, all human beings – to make the right choices with awareness of its risks, as well as its effects.
Bauman’s legacy leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, because in its very concluding phase it reveals pessimistic implications that seem to contradict his previous positions, so full of hope and confidence in the opportunities for improvement of the humans. The very theorisation of liquidity itself seemed to suggest, in the peaceful understanding of a phase of disorientation, the possibility of rediscovering momentarily forgotten human values, first and foremost social solidarity.

When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with “the entire visual world,” he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw. Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture; Albers therefore developed assignments using examples of typographic design and printed imagery drawn from popular publications of the day. In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects, but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. Although the visual workings of mass imagery have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians and critics, culture’s simultaneous engagement with design and art objects has a long and significant history. My book would be among the first to examine a moment of that history through an exploration of the critical intersection between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972.

It may seem most expedient to discuss the connection between art and design through formal congruences, but this strategy can limit the deeper investigation of the mutual influence shared by these two areas of production. Indeed, the presumption that there exists simply – and only – a visual connection between design and art has driven most of the art history that has taken up the subject. This methodology, however, assumes that the influence of popular imagery on fine art works only in one direction, and that movements such as Pop art borrow motifs from mass culture and then “elevate” them into high art. This ignores any influence that art might have on design and designers, an influence that has considerable impact on our visual world. In addition, it serves to place mass imagery consistently in the lesser, negative position because it always presupposes design’s complicity in the culture industry. Yet I show that not all design is made for commercial purposes. Design with civic intentions – that developed for signage, street furniture, and subway maps – has had no place in such a formulation, and therefore has never been seriously included in art historical discussions, even those that take design into account.

Given the limitations of a formalist approach, I go beyond the visual similarities of art and design to uncover the logic systems shared between artists and designers as well as their processes. I assume a family resemblance between design

and art and therefore use such resemblances to expose the syntax they hold in common. I employ, therefore, a more inclusive look at the “visual world” of 1960s New York and examine design and art side-by-side to explore how their relationship manifested itself in deeper ways than have been previously realized. The isolated, frontal, mechanically-reproduced image, for example, is shared by both Doyle Dane Bernbach’s late-1950s advertising campaign for Volkswagen as well as Andy Warhol’s screen print imagery. The mid-century anti-billboard movement provides an opportunity to investigate Robert Rauschenberg’s awareness of the visual culture that existed outside his downtown New York studio by way of his use of street signs in his urban combines, but also opens a path to exploring designers such as Peter Chermayeff and Milton Glaser’s own discomfort with outdoor advertising. The logic behind the placement of signage – in which designers follow unwitting pedestrians to see where signs fail them – is echoed in Vito Acconci’s performance Following Piece, in which the artist followed his targets until they entered a private place. The design firm Unimark International carried out such following in the New York City subway system at the very same moment that Acconci’s performance occurred. In each of these examples, I reveal the correspondence between artists and designers to be their practices and their decision making; the objects that result permit us to examine these relationships in fresh ways.

  The figurative “body” of public opinion presents challenges to readers of the nineteenth-century British fiction insofar as it lacks the markers of an autonomous subject. It replaces direct address with intimations of surveillance and interpellation, reading characters and their actions as we read it for our situationally within it. In the novels of Anthony Trollope who continually refers to a vox populi, public opinion has an economy, as a kind of “currency” in which reputation is priced and marketed while itself seeming inconclusive and undeveloped, even among its self-appointed spokesmen.

It takes its place among a number of institutions that knit the country together as a network of conveyances with different points of entry: roads, railroads, ports and canals and the post office in which Trollope served as a civil servant for over 30 years. One such institution is the expanding bureaucracy which mediates between the people and those who regulate human activity and its exposure to government regulation. The ex-posure (literally to be placed outside oneself) is one of the ways in which public opinion, lacking a responsible subjectivity that can be held to account, removes individual subjectivity, threatening (or enabling) a rebirth in accountability. Yet, for all of its potentially subversive qualities, public opinion is a collective narrative—disguising itself as a unitary voice—that often misreads character and, in the Parliamentary Novels, ideology. As it is vulnerable to being misread by politicians, public opinion also misreads, especially the arrivistes attempting to enter the social and economic life of the country. Because of its resistance to inscriptive genres, the vox populi may well represent the lost orality of the epic to which critics like Georg Lukaks have called our attention. 

According to Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Śambūka, whose transgression is said to be the cause of a young Brahmin’s death. The gods rejoice upon the Śūdra’s execution and they restore the life of the Brahmin. The developmental history of the Śambūka narrative begins with the appearance of this story as a late addition to the core of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa in the first few centuries of the common era, a period of immense revision to and consolidation of an idealistic political Brahminism. The Śambūka story, with its hardline depiction of varṇa-dharma, fit quite well within this project of widely asserting Brahmanical dominance. Subsequent Rāmāyaṇa poets almost instantly recognized the incident of Śambūka’s execution as a blemish on Rāma’s character and they began problematizing this earliest version of the story by adjusting the story to suit the expectations of their audiences. Such adjustments included a more sympathetic view of Śambūka that exhibited a concern for his afterlife in the form of Rāma granting Śambūka salvation, albeit through their deadly contact. This particular narrative took hold especially in medieval India when Rāma became the object of fervent religious devotion. More pointed departures from Vālmīki’s Śambūka narrative developed within Jain Rāma texts and involved a complete overhaul in its exposition whereby Śambūka’s death occurs accidentally and at the hands of Rāma’s brother, Lakṣmaṇa. As a figure who embodies Jain ideals, Rāma could not participate in any act of violence, so Jain poets removed him from any involvement in Śambūka’s execution. In a display of intercommunal exchange, this motif of Śambūka’s accidental death is also found in some Hindu Rāmāyaṇas of the medieval period. 

In the modern era, author-activists find that the story of Śambūka as known in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa leaves out some critical details—that Śambūka was a revolutionary leader who peacefully advocated for equal access to education for India’s oppressed populations and the abolishment of the caste system. Creators of new works on Śambūka seek to enter these details into the record of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, thus correcting what they see as centuries of misrepresentation.

‘Turkey’s Water Diplomacy’ first delineates the institutional and legal foundations of transboundary water policy-making in Turkey. In doing so, major actors of water diplomacy at national, regional and international levels are identified and scrutinized. Specific attention is paid to the evolution of transboundary water politics in the Euphrates–Tigris river basin since Turkish water diplomacy and its basic principles have been largely shaped through practices in this strategically important river basin. Situated at the crossroads of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Europe as the country is, Turkey’s transboundary water policy has also been shaped by geographical determinants. Interestingly, Turkey has reflected her experience in one region (i.e., Europe) on practices in other regions. ‘Turkey’s Water Diplomacy’ analyses how Turkey’s harmonization with the European Union has impacted the transboundary water policy discourses and practices, and how these changes have been reflected in its relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours. A historical account of transboundary water relations in the ET basin is enriched with the analysis of the current state of affairs in the region, such as the Syrian civil war and its repercussions on water issues.

It is striking that Turkey was one of the three countries that rejected the UN Watercourses Convention in 1997. The book elaborates on the reasons why Turkey voted against the UN Watercourses Convention. Yet, since the voting of the convention in 1997, there have been changes in Turkey’s stance vis-à-vis international water law, which the book examines and focuses on.

Turkey’s water diplomacy embodies complex water management problems, which can be best understood as a product of competition, feedback and interconnection among natural and societal variables in a political context. Hence, the book adopts the Water Diplomacy Framework with its key elements in making policy-relevant recommendations specifically for Turkey’s water diplomacy.

When one organizes events over periods of years and gives them an appellation such as “Modernism,” the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods, comparable facts sufficient to call it an “era,” or an “epoch,” or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years, regardless of differences seen as well over the span considered. One can call such an effort a “metahistory,” in that what is tracked is not merely human events that are political, economic, ideological, sociological, or other disciplinary descriptors, but an overview that critically links all the years under consideration. Even more, to have a “metahistory” is to discern how the people of eras, epochs, or the other organizational labels, thought. Human history is generated by choices, choices informed by intuitions and more intentional understandings. One of the aspects the book dwells upon in this “metahistory” of Modernism is the presence of “perspective,” how one sees in a time what is there to be addressed and dealt with. Perspectives can be poorly informed or in their very nature not adequate for a sufficient knowledge of what is addressed, even as one must as a human judge what faces one. To discern from evidence how one’s perspective configures an event is the “meta” of “metahistory”. Modernism, the epoch from 1648 to the Present, can be described among its tenets as a period where the notion of “objectivity” has been developed. This has occurred in every field of the emergent arts and sciences in these years. Post-modernism, as will be addressed, is a more critical modernism that has brought to light the idea of multiple perspectives of objectivity as a univocal perspective of ‘objectivity’. Other modernist ideas have expanded in all fields and the ideas of what is human consciousness, epistemologies of both a reflective and a pre-reflective consciousness (called by some the ‘unconscious’) have emerged in art, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, the social sciences, as well as the neurosciences To have “meta” knowledge is this comprehension of the scope and benefits, yet limitations, of one’s “perspective” and that of others of a time. Only a historian interested in such perspectives can be called a “metahistorian.”

The book uses the concept of the “metaparadigm,” taken from Thomas Kuhn, to track the evolution of how in a period of time the problems of the existing disciplines of knowledge are articulated, and how inquiry methods are used to flesh out a solvable problem and effectively resolve it. The book details four phases that constitute the period of time in which a metaparadigm develops. The first phase is a new set of concepts that challenge the existing approach to knowledge in each discipline. The second phase is a systematic theory that will guide inquiry. The third phase is the actual practice of the discipline in solving problems, a phase that can conflict with the older approach or be congruent with it. The fourth phase integrates the older approaches in the new one, and thus expands in an augmented manner the discipline.

The four phases of each metaparadigm have certain durations. The initial three phases usually endure for about 30–40 years, and the fourth phase for over 50 years. These phases each recur in the next period of time; that is the next metaparadigmatic period. Four evolving metaparadigms are shown in Western thought in this book, tracking one or more disciplines in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences through each of the four phases of a metaparadigm, and the four metaparadigms that occur between 1648 and the present. 

Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgement (or MRTJ) marked a crucial turning point in the lives of two great twentieth-century thinkers. But it was also a watershed moment within the history of analytic philosophy itself. The critique led Russell to abandon his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript and left a significant breach within his epistemology. It represented an important milestone within Wittgenstein’s philosophical development and marked the point at which he emerged on the scene as an independent philosophical force. It inaugurated the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy which would dominate the course of analytic philosophy throughout the early and middle part of that century. For these and other reasons, it is worthy of careful study and deep understanding.

Yet scholarly consensus around a satisfactory interpretation of the nature of the critique, the extent of and reasons for its impact on Russell, along with the role it played within Wittgenstein’s developmental trajectory have remained elusive. This partly reflects the fact that a correct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s critique depends upon a satisfactory resolution of several other, related exegetical controversies within the interpretation of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s respective philosophies.

With these facts in mind, this book aims to accomplish four interrelated goals. The first is to develop a compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s MRTJ. For reasons which will become clear over the course of the book, this reading is called the ‘logical interpretation’ (or LI). The second main objective of the book is to defend LI against its most prominent competitors in the scholarly literature. These include interpretations of Wittgenstein’s objection offered by Nicholas Griffin and Steven Sommerville, Gregory Landini, Graham Stevens, Peter Hanks, Christopher Pincock, Rosalind Carey, Fraser MacBride and Samuel Lebens. Third, the book aims to situate Wittgenstein’s critique of the MRTJ and Russell’s reaction to it, within the broader context of each of Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s respective philosophical developments. While much scholarship has focused on probing the role played by the objection within the evolution of Russell’s thought, much less has been done to explore the impact on Wittgenstein’s development. Still less, if any scholarship has been devoted to highlighting the significant traces of Wittgenstein’s critique which can be found latent within his later philosophical viewpoint. This book seeks to fill these lacunae in the scholarship on Wittgenstein while also adding to the high-quality work on Russell which has already been done in this area. Fourth and finally, the book aims to introduce students and scholars of early analytic philosophy to and familiarize them with the historical events, textual evidence, scholarly controversies, letters, notes and diagrams, consideration of which is integral to constructing a plausible reading of Wittgenstein’s objection. To that end, it brings together a broad selection of relevant materials and information in a clear, accessible and organized way into one, relatively concise source.

‘The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile’ presents the rationale for the existence of social security systems and provides a historical discussion of its origins and evolution before turning to the four-decade-old Chilean experience with a privatised pension system. This experience is examined in historical and comparative perspective from the twentieth century up to the present.

The book presents various hypotheses on the resilience of the privatised system in spite of the low level of pensions delivered to the population at large, underscoring the ability of the powerful fund managing companies lobby to veto reform proposals geared towards a return to a public-private system. The book also underscores the fiscal costs of the system, the high earnings of private pension managing companies and the macroeconomic role of the system in providing financial resources for investment and growth in a pattern driven by the large corporate sector.

The book discusses the experience of Chile as a counter-current to the reversal of pension privatisation in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe as also the scope for de-privatisation of social security in the country.

Although single fathers as primary carers are on the rise, most single-parent households in the United States are headed by women. These women are a lucrative market for parenting books and most of such books are aimed at single mothers raising sons. This intersectional study analyses a broad range of material: books written by female and male authors, African-American and white, health professionals as well as lay people, outspokenly feminist or traditionally conservative, addressing a middle-class or a working-class readership. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of normative attitudes towards parenting, showing how class and ethnicity interact with traditional assumptions of gender and biology to produce a genre of literature that is quite restrictive, perpetuating ideas of ‘intensive mothering’.

Situating these advice books within the context of parenting experts, the US fatherhood movement, the so-called ‘boy crisis’, cultural prejudice towards single mothers and what has been termed ‘neurosexism’ and ‘neuroparenting’, this study analyses the way in which the books draw on mother-blame language, misconceptions of neuropsychological research and traditional conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity to convince the mother readers that they are unable to raise a son to be a man. Using prescriptive and often alarmist language, the authors privilege traditional assumptions of gender, hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative family structures over single parent families, same-sex parenting and single mothers by choice (via adoption or ART). In doing so, the books afford very narrow parenting roles, for fathers as well as mothers, as well as a very limited range of masculine identities for young boys. Presented as common sense advice, these books are widely read by women seeking support and it is thus vital that they be interrogated for the way they continue to construct, shape and influence expectations on parenting, as well as the identities of young boys.

Portuguese and Amsterdam Sephardic Merchants in the Tobacco Trade is a history of the role of Portuguese and Sephardic merchants in the tobacco industry and trade of Amsterdam. It focuses on the contraband trade with Tierra Firme and Hispaniola in the early seventeenth century as documented in the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection. 

The Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection is a unique archival collection for the purpose of research on the territorial conflict between the Spanish Habsburg Empire and the Dutch Republic in the context of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648). Sluiter collected documents from archives around the world with a focus on trade and fiscal records which document the rise to commercial prominence of the Dutch Republic, the intricacies of Spanish and Portuguese trade and navigation, and the Contaduria which report revenues and expenditures of the Spanish Crown along with import and export duties. The documents in the collection relate mainly to Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese trade affairs in Europe and Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories but include references to English and French accounts of payments to Spain as well. The majority of the documents are in Spanish, transcribed, translated in English, and provided with notes by Engel Sluiter himself. The Caribbean Collection, including Tierra Firme and Hispaniola, contains documents on Dutch mercantile trade practices – mostly smuggling as Spain and the Dutch Republic were at war with each other – and Spanish trade regulations and efforts to block foreign access to trade goods. We thus learn a great deal about foreigners involved in illegal trade in which capture, corruption and bribery played an important role in particular with respect to the tobacco trade which was highly regulated under Spanish rule. 

Sometimes, when foreign vessels were captured and hauled into port, mariners or merchant smugglers were reported by name and port of origin and voyage details were recorded. We thus gain insight into the specifics of the merchants and their trading networks as well as the goods being smuggled. Concern about tobacco smuggling is referred to in several of the reports and resulted in plans to prohibit tobacco cultivation or allow cultivation with royal permission only. In several instances recommendations were made to undermine smuggling activities in specific coastal regions where tobacco cultivation occurred and where frequent contacts were made between Dutch mariners and merchants and coastal populations including Amerindians, Creoles, runaway Blacks and "Portuguese" present in coastal areas. Spanish documents display a concern about "Portuguese" in coastal areas as they were associated with Conversos, New Christians who often served as go-between in trade and finance in the Spanish Habsburg Empire. The same group was often thought to be in contact with English, French and Dutch smugglers, and the records suggest that Portuguese merchants were engaged in trade with Bayonne, London and Amsterdam through merchant networks that had been expanded and extended throughout the Atlantic world. 

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.

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

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

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

This monograph explores the relationship between philosophy and painting, showing how thinkers such as Hegel and Merleau-Ponty developed their key concepts through direct engagement with specific artworks. Unlike traditional surveys that often treat philosophical ideas as abstract, Colors of the Concepts: Philosophers on Paintings emphasises how these ideas were shaped by concrete encounters with visual art. Each chapter discusses how the philosophical frameworks of these thinkers were influenced by their experiences with paintings, uncovering the often-overlooked link between visual art and philosophical thought.

By examining the work of eight major philosophers, the book traces how visual experiences contributed to the development of their ideas, offering new insights into the history of philosophy. The approach taken in this monograph bridges aesthetics with other branches of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, demonstrating how visual art has influenced the course of intellectual history. This method not only highlights the importance of painting in philosophical discourse but also shows how visual art has shaped abstract reasoning.

Colors of the Concepts provides a fresh perspective on familiar philosophical ideas by revealing the significant role that painting has played in their development. The book offers both scholars and general readers a chance to explore the deep connection between visual art and philosophical thought, underscoring the ongoing relevance of these engagements with art in contemporary discussions of aesthetics and the broader history of ideas.

Good Trouble will show the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
Award winning author Julieann Campbell (On Bloody Sunday) wrote the introduction for Good Trouble, looking back at her times growing up in Derry, in the heart of the Catholic Civil Rights Movement. Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann (he took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969; he was the John Lewis of Northern Ireland).
Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.

Chapter One, “Extracting the Essence: Toward Machine Translation of Literature,” rashly inquires whether artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) may eventually be applied to literary translation. Such translation strives to somehow preserve the essence of a work while carrying it over to a different language and culture and giving it rebirth there. To recognize that essence, the translator must accurately capture the meaning of the original; appreciate its metaphors, connotations, register, references, and other abstract or associative factors; and choose among available target language expressions by exercising aesthetic judgments. Computers, however, presently remain incapable of such accuracy, abstraction, and judgment. We revisit these shortfalls in light of developments in MT and AI. We tease apart several separable aspects of literary translation – literal meaning, meter, rhyme, and the abovementioned associative elements – with reference to arguments about Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperliteral translation of Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin. We accordingly propose analysis of translation as an optimization problem: because it will often prove impossible to perfectly convey all aspects or essences of a text in a single translation, the translator must search for some optimal compromise. Then, we discuss several avenues for improvement in MT which may help to extract these aspects of a text’s essence – first, those which may enhance textually grounded MT (i.e., MT trained on text only), leading to delivery of high-quality literal translations; and second, those related to future perceptually grounded MT (i.e., MT trained on simulated perception, e.g. of audiovisual input, as well as text), which might extract more abstract or associative elements of a text. We suggest that recognition of perceptually grounded categories will prove central to the essence extraction sought by translators. As this categorization improves, MT should increasingly support literary, and thus cultural, preservation. However, artificial aesthetic judgments will await artificial emotion.
• Chapter Two, going beyond Chapter One’s lookahead toward artificial translation of literature, asks whether an AI might eventually gain the ability to actually create works of literary art. We again take as exemplar the hyperconscious art of Vladimir Nabokov. To be sure, the suggestion that artworks combining Nabokov’s superhuman intricacy and wholly human depth could be authored by a collection of switches would horrify this transcendent author and does seem to fly in the face of everything that is most human. But while we are concerned with what machines might do, our more fundamental concern is to understand the human thoughts and feelings to which machines might aspire, and this understanding, promising to bridge the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, is finally coming within reach. In our literary context, Nabokov scholarship provides many specific examples – in Ada: Or Ardor, Pale Fire, and other works – of the author’s hyperconscious artistic techniques: glorying in memory; repetition to establish themes and motifs; allusion to wide-ranging works and facts; intricate puzzle posing; and relentlessly careful structuring at multiple levels of the text. Here, we consider several such techniques, speculating about the extent to which current or coming AI capabilities could approach them. In Section One, to clarify assumptions, I set forth my own current conceptions of computation, consciousness, feeling, language, and thinking, providing in the process a somewhat prejudiced AI primer for the computer-shy humanist. In Section Two, I apply to Nabokov’s prodigious work my understanding of these aspects of mind. Subsections focus on self-awareness, perception, memory, and puzzles.
• In Chapter Three, focus is upon the recent successes of generative AI – of large language models (LLMs) for text and diffusion models for images and videos. These are yielding an explosion in AI capabilities, many of them “emergent,” meaning “largely unexplained.” I speculate about the underlying knowledge and procedures acquired through the current methods and their likely successors, with focus on linguistic skills and the implications for artificial translation and literary composition. The chapter proposes original definitions of intelligence, language, and other crucial elements of cognition and culminates in an assortment of striking demos.