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Addiction, Representation and the Experimental Novel, 1985–2015
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Across the past two centuries, the Western novel has propagated the narrow view of the addict as a toxic force bent on undermining the rationality, morality, and progressive spirit that have, since the Enlightenment, defined civilization in the West. Addiction, Representation undertakes an investigation into an alternative literary tradition within which the addict is neither doomed to a horrific death nor sacrificed to the Twelve Steps so that the “recovering addict” might survive. At the center of this investigation is a modest collection of contemporary novels, originally published in the thirty-year span between 1985 and 2015, that exhibits experimental narrative techniques and, in doing so, unsettles the limited portrayal of the addict that has dominated the Western realistic novel since the nineteenth century.
Examining the works of John O’Brien, Sara Gran, Paula Hawkins, Bret Easton Ellis, and Grace Krilanovich, the book argues that the ways in which readers occupy the narratives of contemporary experimental fiction can be instructive for how to live in an extra-diegetic world, where attitudes toward addicts often are as narrow, restrictive, and damaging as they historically have been expressed in the Western novel. The book concerns itself with the practices and politics of reading the experimental addiction novel, and outlines both a practice and an ethics of reading that advocates for a more compassionate response not only to fictional addicts, but also to the actual addicts whose lived experiences gave birth to the existing fiction.
A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00In this book, Hogue re-configures the history of modern America and re-represents the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, nature, the non-rational, the non-human, consumption, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, eventually highlighting that modern American history and literature are not singular. They are much more complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and richer because modern American history is a series of economic, social, anti-colonial, feminist, and political and social movements, levels, and conditions, with a whole interplay of differences. The book explains how, historically and institutionally, in the 1920s and 1930s modern American society and modern American literature have been represented singularly and monoculturally, with modernity breaking with the past/nature/the non-human—animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the non-rational, and/or indifferent forces of nature such as hurricanes.
This book focuses, first, on the transformation of modern American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The transformation created a new and different and unequal modern American society through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously, the United States in the early 20th century grew into an economic superpower. Second, the book examines the darker side of this unequal modern American society: the legal racial segregation of people of color and the deadly economic exploitation of the working class, women, people of color, colonized nations, incorporated territories and protectorates. Third, it focuses on how vulnerable and marginalized people of color, women, working-class European immigrants, colonized nations, incorporated territories, protectorates, and writers, who were denied justice, difference and equality, resisted, challenged, re-wrote, and transformed this modern America.
The reconfiguration of the history of modern America is explored using Althusser’s concepts of the Repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State apparatuses, and postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytical, deconstructive, cultural theories and Foucault/Deleuze’s notion of history, showing how the US in the 1920s and 1930s emerged as a rational, mechanical society with a business civilization, where mass production, consumerism and advertising contributed to the construction of the social and the subject. The book explains how progressives, labor unions, workers, the NAACP and the Garvey movement, socialists, communists, bohemians, Asian and Native American resistance movements, the Anti-Imperialist League, and the various sectors of the women’s movements—which co-existed and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, commingle in their becomings—challenged, contested, and, at times, transformed this economically, socially, and racially unequal, modern America.
The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias
Regular price $165.00 Save $-165.00The book is an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). The volume recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of the sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies.
It is a broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. As a learning process, sociologists develop this inheritance in new and stimulating ways by situating the most pressing changes and continuities facing human societies in long-term perspective.
Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.
Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Statistics and the use of numbers, in general, are becoming increasingly important in journalism, this to the point that it cannot be overemphasised. In the age of the so-called big data, journalists’ engagement with numbers is seen as the Holy Grail to save the news media from declining streams of revenues, hyper-fragmentation of audiences and the de-politicisation of society in general. Indeed, for some the interaction between journalists and numbers is the future. These voices often refer to the ‘datafication’ of news – and society in general – and vehemently call for the incorporation of statistics and data into journalism practice as a way of improving the quality of news. They see in the ‘data revolution’ a real possibility to revolutionise the way journalism is done, making news stories more comprehensive, relevant, accessible and engaging. It is a quest that pretends to use numbers to enhance journalism and provide better public service journalism. To be sure, many journalists are now expected to deal and examine big and small numbers almost on a daily basis at least in ways that they were not asked to do in the past. This against the pressure of time, declining resources and growing masses of quantitative information related to economic, political and social phenomena (including scientific and academic research reports, public opinion data, political polls, and official and non-official datasets, among others).
Therefore, it is impossible today to disassociate the discussion about quality in the news from the use of numbers. In this sense, there are important questions to ask: How do journalists use statistics to articulate news? What are the reasons and rationale behind incorporating numbers in the news? Are news stories really better because they present the audience particular numbers or data? Does the incorporation of statistics make news stories more comprehensive and accessible? The book is an attempt to answer this along other more fundamental questions such as: What do we understand by quality in the news? Is data really the future for journalism?
In this book, we aim at challenging some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. In doing so, it seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.
To start with, the notion of ‘quality’ in the news remains not only elusive but also contentious. On the one hand, as it is argued here, the notion of ‘quality news’ and ‘quality news providers’ has centred around the normative claims of journalism being a public service to society; something that, as we will argue, is questionable both factually and historically. On the other, there is ample evidence to suggest that contrary to the common assumptions statistics do not necessarily bring accessibility, reliability, validity nor credibility to the news stories. Indeed, based on extensive research and drawing from original data, the book explores the use of statistics within the practice of journalism through the lenses of five quality dimensions: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, interpretability and accessibility. According to the authors, by studying each dimension as a threshold that seeks to guarantee the quality of information in news it is possible to understand the whole journalistic workflow, from production to consumption, on how statistics are articulated throughout in order to substantiate quality news stories. The authors highlight the dichotomy between the normative and professional aspirations of journalism, whereby statistics help support the quality of news, and there is a desire to strengthen the ability of storytellers (journalists) through the use of numbers. The book tries to underpin the tensions and issues around journalism and statistics. The central point made is that while the concept of quality and its dimensions remains a theoretical aspiration among journalists, what they really aim to achieve is ultimately credibility and authority. Hence, drawing from this last dichotomy we argue that not only the use of statistics automatically translates into quality journalism but that in some occasions it even hinders the possibility of greater civic engagement with the news.
Patrick Olivelle
Language, Texts, and Society
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.
Y. V. Reddy
India and the Global Financial Crisis
Regular price $99.00 Save $-99.00‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ offers a collection of essays based on the speeches delivered by Reddy during his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2003 and September 2008, a period of rapid growth for the Indian economy as well as extraordinary challenges for the conduct of monetary policy. He has earned universal acclaim for his gubernatorial management of India’s calibrated financial integration with the global economy.
These essays provide informed critical insights into the making of public policies across a spectrum of areas during those years, while presenting an inside view of the dynamics that are played out behind the scenes. They respond to the interest in India's management of a financial sector that has facilitated growth while maintaining stability, markedly contrasting to the fragile financial climate of the USA. The volume describes India's financial situation, the Reserve Bank of India's perspective, and its policies. ‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ was selected as Financial Book of the Year 2010 by ‘China Business News’.
Early Buddhism as Philosophy of Existence
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Philosophical liberalism is the dominant view in the world today. Even those who reject liberalism philosophically, subscribe to its view of freedom, which is a negative view, common to liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism. The alternative is recognition of nature, thoroughly, applied fully to human beings. The Buddha set it out as a philosophy, and he lived it. It was a practice.
It brings death back into life. The common view is that death is the opposite of life. Yet death is part of life, from the beginning. We see this in many great writers, Dostoevsky, for example. His characters find human communion in suffering, despite their differences. Contradictions are inherent in life, but we find our way, not a single way. It brings realism back, which is truth.
It has been present in human societies throughout history. It has been banished because of a false view of truth, connected to a false view of freedom. It could be recognized as philosophy. The Buddha taught people simply. There was no dogma. He did not teach them to follow him but to be masters of their own salvation. Unless this view is recognized as Philosophy, as it should be, including truth, it will again become religion, rather than a way of life, an art of living.
Edited by Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan
Postliberalization Indian Novels in English
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Indian novels in English have generated a considerable amount of interest both in India and in English-speaking countries, particularly during India’s postliberalization period since 1991. For India, this period has seen unparalleled consumption of global goods and exposure to international media, and has resulted in Indian writers writing in English (including writers of Indian origin) catching the attention of the Western world like never before.
“Postliberalization Indian Novels in English: Politics of Global Reception and Awards” focuses on Indian writers writing in the English language, whose concerns are related to India in her immediacy, and who have come into literary prominence in the postliberalization period. Such writers have broached issues including nationalism, diaspora, identity, communalism, subaltern representation, modernism and the impact of globalization. Although the idea of this study is not to undermine the value of their novels, its aim is to consider the correlation of their novels’ themes with the workings of the organized, global market processes now present in postliberalized India.
As such, some large questions arise: What are the cultural and critical frameworks that define literary reception? Has there been a marked shift in the reception of Indian novelists writing in English postliberalization? To what extent are the works of these writers driven by the dictates of the market, and does a commercially/economically driven media influence critical/commercial perceptions? And are there certain thematic concerns and representations which are deemed “prize and attention worthy,” and do these factors influence the critical/commercial reception of the novels?
In investigating these questions, this critical handbook reveals the forces shaping the modern Indian novel in the postliberalization period, and provides a systematic approach to the study of Indian novelists in terms of their global reception.
Invention and Craft, Second Edition
Regular price $89.95 Save $-89.95This must-read college composition textbook leverages creativity theory to demystify practices associated with writing in various academic and public genres.
Few composition textbooks that explicitly invoke creativity theory exist, and those that do exist treat it in cursory fashion. What these textbooks recognise but do not pursue extensively enough is the fact that creativity theory is a natural, stimulating and elucidating complement to the knowledge base in composition studies. The connection is natural in that all writing is a creative act to the extent that it brings something into being or produces something. The connection is stimulating in that the drive to create, in whatever form, enlivens human experience. The connection is elucidating for ways that it extends understanding of composing processes and helps pinpoint features of written products that qualify them as ‘creative’. Indeed, creativity (i.e., the transformation of knowledge and its effective, often unique, expression) is the pinnacle of achievement in all fields. Invention and Craft: Exercising Creativity in College Composition and Research, Second Edition, capitalises on this complementary relationship between creativity theory and composition theory, melding knowledge about creative processes and products with best practices in college composition instruction.
To that point, while invoking the discourse of process throughout, the textbook consistently emphasises post-process considerations: the idea that writing is an inherently social act, the idea that no single process is applicable to every individual or every writing scenario and the idea that writing is recursive. Furthermore, all discussions of composing activities take place against a backdrop of established rhetorical principles (e.g., elements of the rhetorical situation, classical rhetorical appeals). In keeping with the focus on creativity, such discussions foreground the need for writers to assume an active role in managing rhetorical principles (through metacognition and reflection) so they can locate meaning and exigency for the text at hand.
The general objectives referenced above enable pedagogical benefits such as making unfamiliar composing tasks familiar by connecting writing to other intellectual, artistic and recreational pursuits; facilitating backward- and forward-reaching knowledge transfer; validating experimentation with writing practices through explicit reference to creativity and composition scholarship; energising students to become active problem-solvers; stressing insight as the hallmark of effective writing as facilitated by extended invention activity; and interrogating misconceptions about writing through ‘straight-talk’ backed by research on writers.
Structurally speaking, Invention and Craft is characterised by several features intended to support instruction. More specifically, it
- employs visuals to reinforce understanding of key concepts;
- includes in-chapter excerpts from example essays, annotated to pinpoint defining features of the focal genres, as well as model essays at the ends of all genre chapters;
- closes each genre chapter with a preliminary activity geared toward composing in the focal genre and underscoring the need for substantial invention effort;
- ends each genre chapter with a genre-specific formal writing assignment that allows plenty of freedom in topic generation so as to cultivate individual interest and allow students to capitalise on already developed expertise;
- executes similar internal scaffolding across chapters as an aid to reinforcing key concepts and transferring knowledge across genres.
Political Authority
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00This book compiles Peter Winch’s previously unpublished manuscripts on political philosophy, together with editorial notes and references to relevant literature.
Winch is best known as the founder of post-war analytic philosophy of the social sciences, and as one of the rare post-war British philosophers who engaged with continental thought, in particular Simone Weil (on whom he wrote a book), Jürgen Habermas, and Karl-Otto Apel. Throughout his career, he also wrote on issues in political philosophy, with particular focus on questions to do with the legitimacy of the state and on the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Simone Weil. Materials toward a book on the topic have lain in the Peter Winch archives since then, accessible only to philosophers able to visit in person. In this volume these notes are published in full, supplemented by selections from Winch's late lectures on law and authority and cross-referenced with his published discussions of political philosophy and related topics (e.g., punishment, agency).
In these unpublished writings, Winch diagnoses problematic assumptions about agency and about the relationship between language and society as these shape the social contract tradition. Winch’s critique of misconceptions of individual agency in political philosophy focuses the attention away from reasons for action discourse and toward the complex and socially constituted relations between agency, justice, and force. Following Wittgenstein’s injunction that a philosopher should always avoid hasty generalisation, Winch’s approach to questions of the legitimacy of the state is marked out by sensitivity to contextual features, including the needs and interests which influence the form that such questions take, whether those be securing peace in civil war (Hobbes), defending a nation from fascism (Weil), or rationalizing the seizure of indigenous lands by conquest (Locke).
In addition to its interest as a Wittgensteinian treatment of key questions in political philosophy, this volume supplements Winch’s published work on Wittgenstein, ethics, the social sciences, and Spinoza. This volume, the second to come from research of the Peter Winch archives, fills in our understanding of Winch's philosophical oeuvre, drawing out the implications of his work for questions in political philosophy. In addition, the volume contributes to the emerging picture of some post-war British philosophers resisting the impoverishment of narrow logical analysis and the disengagement of philosophy from life and society.
The Unmaking of Arab Socialism
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both characterize many Arab countries, but this was not always so. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period was an age of hope and relative prosperity. But imperialism did not sleep while these countries developed, and it soon intervened to destroy these post-independence achievements.
The two principal defeats and losses of territory to Israel in 1967 and 1973, as well as the others that followed, left in their wake more than the destruction of assets and the loss of human lives: the Arab world lost its ideology of resistance. The reversal in economic and social performance between then and now requires an even-handed and theoretically coherent explanation that steers clear of the hallucinatory constructs of individual freedom and choice. Considering such choices is utterly superfluous in a situation where the important choice is often a single one—that is, no choice at all—imposed by the power of history on the unfree majority.
The Unmaking of Arab Socialism is an attempt to understand the perplexing reasons for the Arab world's developmental descent—its de-development—from the pinnacle of Arab socialism to its present desolate condition.Kadri focuses on the concept of Arab socialism in general and its application to Iraq, Syria and Egypt as he explores the deleterious effects of redundant labour expelled by dispossessions in the hinterland and the persistence of permanent war.
Irfan Habib
Essays in Indian History
Regular price $32.95 Save $-32.95This volume brings together, for the first time, several of Professor Habib's essays, representing three decades of scholarship and providing an insightful interpretation of the main currents in Indian history from the standpoint of Marxist historiography. The collection examines the role played by the peasantry and caste in Indian history; explores the forms of class struggle and the stage of Indian economic development in Mughal India; analyses the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy; and chronicles the changes in Marx's perception of India. These painstakingly researched and erudite essays form a volume that is indispensable for scholars and students of Indian history.
Ranabir Samaddar
The Materiality of Politics: Volume 2
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. The political subject of the study is the collective political actor poised against governmental rules for stabilizing order. Samaddar’s tour de force propels readers through an account of blood, violence, bodies, controls, laws and conflicts. Politics is examined not as an abstraction, but as a ‘real’ field of dynamic factors rooted in everyday life.
Volume 2, subtitled ‘Subject Positions in Politics’ focuses on the political subject emerging from post-colonial politics. The 1940s are closely examined in order to trace the genesis of the modern Indian political subject, his/her dreams of liberty and recognition of freedom’s qualifications. Contentious politics illuminates the dual tendency of the political subject to demand justice in court, and engage in rebellious street politics, clamouring for justice and equality. As the author demonstrates, the subject’s desire for the autonomy of politics manifests itself in various ways.
Reforming the Governance of the IMF and the World Bank
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Sixty years after their creation, the Bretton Woods institutions face a crisis of legitimacy that impairs their credibility and effectiveness. At the roots of this crisis lies the unrepresentative nature of their structure of governance, which places control of the institutions in the hands of a small group of industrial countries that do not use its resources. Developing countries and economies in transition are considered to be minor partners, despite accounting for half of the world’s output in real terms, most of the world’s population and encompassing the most dynamic economies and the largest holders of international reserves. The quota formulas should reflect the size of the economies of members, i.e. their GDP, their exposure to trade and capital movements as well as their ability to contribute to the Fund. If IMF quotas were based on objective measures, i.e. size of GDP, the volatility of receipts, the adjustment of European quotas for intra-trade and trade in a single currency in the euro area, the quota share of developing countries and economies in transition as a group should be no less than that of industrial countries. Reality has outpaced the evolution of thinking on the subject of governance. The growing breach between world economic and financial realities and the governance structure of the Bretton Woods institutions argues for reforms to increase the effectiveness and restore the legitimacy of these institutions. As debtors, the European countries had resisted conditionality during the first decades of the IMF and favoured increasing Fund resources, but as their situation changed, they no longer resorted to IMF support and they changed their position. Similar problems appear in the World Bank, giving rise to large negative flows of resources from the developing countries. The papers included in this book cover different aspects of the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions. They explore different options for reform and show that enhancing the participation of developing and emerging market countries in resolving the major monetary and financial problems confronting the world economy, would improve global economic performance and contribute to the elimination of world poverty.
Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 seeks to explore the extent to which Early British Gothic writing, c.1760–1830, took distinctive shape in the particular theological and theo-political climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project takes as its starting point the widely noted ‘anti-Catholicism’ of the Early British Gothic. While taking into account the existing work in this field, the thesis will move beyond a simplistic Protestant/Catholic binary found in works, such as Diane Long Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology (2014) and Maria Purves Gothic and Catholicism (2009), which investigate the Gothic as anti- or pro-Catholic respectively. The project also moves the almost exclusively Anglican focus of texts like Alison Millbank’s God and the Gothic (2018), instead placing the Gothic within the complex theo-political context of tolerance debates, focused not only on Anglican-Catholic relations but on the place and suppression of Protestant Dissent. Having established the contemporary context of a proliferation of Dissenting denominations, the lack of a unified Anglican positions, the rich field of theological debate in the period and the continuing importance of Christianity (in its various forms) as a lived religion in the period, the project seeks to investigate the way in which varied theologies underpin key tropes, aesthetics and debates within the Gothic.
Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 seeks to explore works throughout the period of the efflorescence and decline of the Early British Gothic, mapping changing currents and trends in the theo-aesthetics of the genre and its depiction and engagement with various supernatural phenomena. It seeks to investigate not only major writers of the period, such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but a selection of writers from different denominational backgrounds in order to investigate the ways in which contemporary theological debates can be traced across Gothic texts of the period and the ways in which different theological positions manifest in these texts.
Yellowstone’s Survival
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book focuses on Yellowstone: the park, the larger ecosystem, and even more so, the “idea” of Yellowstone. In presenting a case for a new conservation paradigm for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), including Yellowstone National Park, the book, at its heart, is about people and nature relationships. This new paradigm will be truly committed to a healthy, sustainable environment, rich in other life forms, and one that affords dignity for all: humans and nonhumans. The new story or paradigm must be about living such a commitment and future for GYE in real time.
To do something and understand about the present erosion of nature and growing unsustainability, particularly the GYE situation, the book offers a heuristic for problem solving, learning, and discovery. The heuristic in four general terms, People, Meaning, Society, Environment, takes into account both the content (biophysical substance such as wolves and bears) and process (people, social relations, and decision-making) of conservation and sustainability in our communities, society, and in our daily living. It calls for an explicit integrative approach to this relationship for GYE. It acknowledges that Yellowstone will be different in the future from what we have experienced in recent decades. It also asks how and why it will be different and whether we’re ready for it. To examine these and related questions, and deeper questions, it probes the future. As well, it reflects on the changing narratives, policies, and actions of different sets of residents and outside influences. The book presents a well-developed theory for interdisciplinary problem solving that is grounded in practice.
Edited by Ashwini Deshpande
Capital Without Borders
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00This book contains selected papers from the Annual Conference on Development and Change (ACDC) held at Sao Paulo in November 2006. Second in a series of three conferences, the 2006 ACDC showcased research by relatively younger scholars. While precise and rigorous alternatives to the neoliberal agenda are often overlooked in the huge volume of literature that addresses the larger issues, both aspects - the larger picture and the smaller nuts-and-bolts details - are very important, and this volume fills the gaps in the latter category. These papers were written before the global recession, and events subsequent to the conference and the writing of these papers have validated several of the concerns raised by their authors.
This volume focuses on a plethora of issues from the point of view of the South. It demonstrates, for example, that if capital inflows exceed a certain volume - no matter how they are absorbed - such openness will inevitably result in a crisis in the receiving country. The popular understanding of foreign portfolio investment as more benign than foreign direct investment (FDI) is also challenged. By contrasting contemporary capital flows as well as the international capital flows of the nineteenth century, this collection highlights the role of regulation and the role of the state, and ultimately emphasizes the need for recipient country governments to exercise policy options to control the volume of foreign capital inflows.
Edited by Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell
Homelands
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This new volume, by a team of international scholars, explores aspects of population displacement and statehood at a crucial juncture in modern European history, when the entire continent took on the aspect of a 'laboratory atop a mass graveyard' (Tomas Masaryk). The topic of state-building has acquired a new actuality in recent years, following the collapse of the USSR and the 'Soviet bloc' and in view of the complex, often violent, territorial and ethnic conflicts which have ensued. Many of the current dilemmas and tragedies of the region have their origins in the aftermath of World War I, when newly independent nation states, struggling to emerge from the rubble of the former Russian empire, first sought to define themselves in terms of population, territory and citizenship. 'Homelands' examines the interactions of forced migration, state construction and myriad emerging forms of social identity. It opens up a fresh perspective on twentieth-century history and throws new light on present-day political, humanitarian and scholarly issues of crucial concern to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, refugee welfare workers, policymakers and others.
Peter Nolan
Re-balancing China
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Re-balancing China’ addresses three key sets of issues in China’s political economy. Part One of the text provides an analysis of the profound impact of the global financial crisis on China’s economy – an economy deeply integrated in the global economic system through trade and foreign investment. It also examines the positive outcomes of the massive rescue package that constituted China’s policy response to the crisis. The rescue package stimulated Chinese growth and helped to stabilize the global economy as a whole.
Part Two focuses on the challenge of globalization for China’s industrial policy. Since the 1980s, China has pursued an industrial policy aimed at nurturing a substantial group of globally competitive firms, most of which have become superficially successful. However, China still has a negligible number of large firms that are competitive in global markets. China’s experience presents a fundamental challenge to traditional concepts of industrial policy and development.
Finally, Part Three examines China’s international relations, the focal point of which is its relationship with the United States. The US has made it clear that its principal challenge in international relations is the ‘rise of China’ and has announced a ‘tilt towards the Pacific’ in its military strategy. As a result, the core of this interaction spans the East and South China Seas and the countries that surround this area.
Essays on Philosophy, Praxis and Culture
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00This collection provides a panoramic view of practical philosophical insight, ranging across a spectrum of humanistic themes. These essays cast light on our perennially imperfect human condition. They are written from the complementary standpoints of a classical liberal scholar with one foot planted in the academy, and of a peripatetic pioneer whom The New York Times called "the world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling." These writings, therefore, span space in which theory and praxis are mutually informative and seamlessly collaborative.
The collection ranges from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics; Thomas Mann's prognosis for Western civilization; Hume's moral skepticism applied to globalization; Jungian synchronicity and encounters with Irvin Yalom; J.S. Mill's harm principle applied to cyberspace; Ayn Rand's prophetic apocalypse; philosophical practice as Dadaist activism; humanities-based therapies as remedies for culturally induced illnesses; biological roots of human conflict; deconstruction and critique of "sustainable development"; dangers and detriments of over-digitalized and hyper-virtualized lifestyles and learning methods; and calls for the re-emergence of philosophy from inactive academic entombment to pro-active modes of personal guidance, social influence, consumer advocacy, and political engagement. A unifying claim of this anthology is the cautionary tale that humanity's recurrent and conflict-ridden predicaments are only exacerbated by myopic analyses, toxic ideologies, and expedient prescriptions. While philosophy is scarcely a panacea for human afflictions, its proper exercise illuminates our understanding of them, thereby suggesting better as opposed to worse ways forward.
Overall, the thrust of this collection can be viewed as a realization of John Dewey's forthright vision, expressed in 1917: "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men." Indeed, these essays deal with problems of humanity writ large. They also constitute a compelling response to Mortimer Adler's clarion call in 1965, that philosophy "must cease to be an activity conducted by moles, each burrowing in its own hole, and become a public and cooperative enterprise." As these essays reveal, Marinoff has accomplished Adler's mission, transforming and returning philosophy to the agora, which in contemporary parlance amounts to the global village. That his popular books on philosophy for everyday life have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages has distracted some—perhaps too many—philosophers from exploring what he has written for a philosophical audience itself. This book helps remedy that distraction.
Wu Tingfang, with an Introduction by Jonathan Spence
America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat
Regular price $18.99 Save $-18.99A beguiling account of twentieth-century America through the eyes of an outsider, a remarkable inversion of the standard 'Westerner observing the exotic' travel writing formula. Wu Tingfang wrote this book at an intriguing juncture in history - aeroplanes and motion pictures had recently been invented (and his musings on both of these have proven correct) and while he did not know it, a tremendous cultural shift was about to take place in the West due to the First World War. The unassuming and inquisitive diplomat delves into topics such as: immigration; the Arms Race and changes in technology; religion and ethics in the classroom; women's equality; fashion; violence in the theatre; vegetarianism; and cruelty to animals. His observations are enlightening and remain as relevant today as the era in which they were written. In particular, the exploration of the 'American character' and the nation's attitude toward commerce and international relations have a powerful resonance.
Brazil’s International Ethanol Strategy
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, supplies 16 per cent of its energy consumption and approximately three quarters of its transport fuels with sugarcane-based ethanol. From ca. 2003 until 2014, the country under the Workers’ Party government aimed at creating a global market for ethanol. The time seemed right to steer foreign policy towards this goal due to a benevolent structural environment with global discussions about energy security, climate change, and South-South cooperation.
Within a neoclassical realist framework, this study examines why Brazil did not fully succeed in its ethanol diplomacy to create a global market for ethanol. The analysis covers three analytical levels: the bilateral with Brazil in power deficit, the bilateral with Brazil in power surplus, and the multilateral, represented in three empirical chapters, Brazil-US, Brazil-Mozambique, and Brazil’s multilateral ethanol diplomacy, respectively. Each chapter finishes with a set of recommendations for political consideration.
This study also demonstrates how the theoretical approach of neoclassical realism can combine foreign policy output with international politics outcome research and is useful to analyse policy outside the hard security realm. It offers a basis for further research towards an understanding of Brazil’s overall foreign policy and the foreign policies of other emerging powers.
'Report on the Agrarian Law' (1795) and Other Writings
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00"Report on the Agrarian Law" (1795) and Other Writings' is the first modern English translation of perhaps the greatest work of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' (1795). A major work of political economy and a beautifully crafted philosophical history of Spain’s political development until the eighteenth century, 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' is a classic work of the Spanish Enlightenment. Displaying the richness of Spanish Enlightenment writing on political economy emerging from a fecund conjugation of foreign writers (Smith, Ferguson, Condillac, Mirabeau, Genovesi) with Spanish writers (Ulloa, Olavide, Uztáriz, Campomanes), this masterpiece explores the lessons learned from the shortcomings of the Spanish Crown's economic policies in the eighteenth century.
Early Buddhism as Philosophy of Existence
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00Philosophical liberalism is the dominant view in the world today. Even those who reject liberalism philosophically, subscribe to its view of freedom, which is a negative view, common to liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism. The alternative is recognition of nature, thoroughly, applied fully to human beings. The Buddha set it out as a philosophy, and he lived it. It was a practice.
It brings death back into life. The common view is that death is the opposite of life. Yet death is part of life, from the beginning. We see this in many great writers, Dostoevsky, for example. His characters find human communion in suffering, despite their differences. Contradictions are inherent in life, but we find our way, not a single way. It brings realism back, which is truth.
It has been present in human societies throughout history. It has been banished because of a false view of truth, connected to a false view of freedom. It could be recognized as philosophy. The Buddha taught people simply. There was no dogma. He did not teach them to follow him but to be masters of their own salvation. Unless this view is recognized as Philosophy, as it should be, including truth, it will again become religion, rather than a way of life, an art of living.
Robert R. Faulkner
Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This book addresses an old and basic question: what is the moral order of the market? ‘Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation’ is an exploration of accusations of wrongdoing, and the revelations these accusations expose about the dark side of capitalism and modern corporations, and their relationships with suppliers, buyers, peers, investment banks and state regulators. The study explores data gathered from the past twenty years, including over a thousand accusations of economic wrongdoing in corporate America. The research traces exchange paths or structural routes; cultural recipes or ideas about wrongdoing; and interactions between the culture and structure of transgression in economic in markets.
Repertoires of accusation, and the three-way associations between accused, accuser and accusation, reveal the moral order of the market. The tools provided in this data collection and analysis provide a template for the study of the three-way relationship between the following: cultural items or types (i.e., accusation types), structural locations or paths (i.e., market interfaces) and time (i.e., temporal locations of types and paths, or recipes and routes). Repertoires unlock the moral order of the modern market and other institutions (family, politics, education, religion, science) as revealed in accusations of transgression.
Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature.
The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.
Fashion as Cultural Translation
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.”. In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin), generates different “worlds” through its signs.
Founding on Walter Benjamin’s conception of time and history, the book first focuses on time as a main category of fashion. Space is the other main category this book considers in relation to fashion.The book next focuses on the body to show how fashion is a system of images that communicates through stereotyped signs, cultural models and archetypes of imagination that produce and define sexual identities in society. Finally, the book focuses on fashion as a means of communication in the age of social networks.
The Anthem Companion to Zygmunt Bauman
Regular price $165.00 Save $-165.00Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 – it is now almost 100 years since his birth. His career in sociology almost spanned six decades and culminated in more than sixty published book titles not to mention the many book chapters and academic articles. In many ways Bauman’s work straddled the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, providing us with a multitude of insights into the main changes and transformations characterizing these two centuries – what he metaphorically defined as ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’. This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work.
Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Bauman’s life and work, the volume seeks to position Bauman’s within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance in this discipline.
As mentioned, Bauman’s ideas – his research topic, his extreme intellectual productivity and his imaginative approach to doing and writing sociology – – remain a source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing sociology.
The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press Companion to Sociology series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Bauman’s sociology. The chapters included in the book will explore different sides and dimensions of Goffman’s work, for instance, Bauman’s work, Bauman’s position and perspective within the social sciences (his combined Marxist and Weberian insights as well as inspiration from Sigmund Freud), his work on modernity and the Holocaust, the difference between the reception of his work respectively in Europe and the United States, Bauman’s writings on Western modernity, his work on death and immortality, his turn to the topic of nostalgia towards the end of his career, his many ‘conversational books’ written particularly throughout the final decade of his life and finally his engagement with ambivalence. Although it is impossible to ‘cover all angles’ of Bauman’s comprehensive work, it is nevertheless the overall aspiration behind the book that it will be found useful in teaching and research contexts alike, keeping the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman alive and kicking within sociology and related disciplines.
Rethinking Therapeutic Reading
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00‘Rethinking Therapeutic Reading’ uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces in which to do personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles.
Laura Fisher
Aboriginal Art and Australian Society
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.
At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era.
Valerie Purton
Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition’ is a timely study of the ‘sentimental’ in Dickens’s novels, which places them in the context of the tradition of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb. This study re-evaluates Dickens’s presentation of emotion – first within the eighteenth-century tradition and then within the dissimilar nineteenth-century tradition – as part of a complex literary heritage that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.
The book sheds light on the construction of feelings and of the ‘good heart’, ideas which resonate with current critical debates about literary ‘affect’. As the text argues, such an analysis reveals sentimentalism to be a crucial element in fully understanding the achievement of Dickens and his contemporaries.
The first chapter of the book outlines the sentimentalist tradition in English literature from the Middle Ages onwards. The second and third chapters then examine Dickens’s eighteenth-century inheritance in the works of Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith and Sheridan, whilst Chapter Four explores Dickens’s inheritance from Charles Lamb and his acting in sentimental plays by Bulwer Lytton and Wilkie Collins. Chapter Five analyses three early novels, including ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, revealing the extremism of post-Romantic sentimentalism. In Chapter Six, three later novels including ‘Dombey and Son’ are reread in terms of Dickens’s changing use of sentimentalist rhetoric to achieve remarkably subversive effects. The final chapter then looks at other examples of nineteenth-century sentimental writing, and at the ‘afterlife’ of the mode in the past two centuries.
Noboru Tsujihara
Jasmine
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Intrigue, betrayal, family secrets, forbidden passions – this tale of adventure and suspense links the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 and the Kobe earthquake of 1995 through the story of Akihiko Waki, who is living a quiet life as a think-tank director in Kobe, Japan, when he hears rumours that his father, presumed long dead, is in fact alive and in danger. Akihiko undertakes a dangerous journey to China, and in Shanghai learns that what he thought he knew about his father is in fact far from the truth. Here he meets the intriguingly secretive actress Li Xing, who as a pro-democracy activist is herself in danger, and as events gather pace Akihiko’s search for his father also becomes a desperate battle to save her from the brutal authorities…
This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read. This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read.
The Influence of José da Silva Lisboa’s Journalism on the Independence of Brazil (1821-1822)
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book analyses the impact of the publications written by the economist, jurist, administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa, the future Viscount of Cairu, from 1821 to 1822, on the events that led to the independence of Brazil in 1822. It reassesses the many interpretations of his role throughout the period, repositioning him among those who are part of the broad reformist Catholic Enlightenment.
In an original account of his career and a new interpretation of his role in helping create an appropriate environment for ideas to be discussed during the post constitutional period that followed the Liberal Revolution in 1820 in Portugal, the book brings to light the extent to which his ideas were influenced by the Enlightenment, and how these ideas influenced public opinion in the transition away from the Reino Unido with Portugal, between 1815 and 1822, towards an independent Brazilian empire under Dom Pedro.
The book argues that while a supporter of Brazilian autonomy, a fierce critic of the Cortes of Lisbon, and an important figure in the events that unfolded after the departure of Dom João VI from Rio de Janeiro in 1821, he did not openly embrace the independence from the United Kingdom with Portugal and would instead work towards a solution that would encompass Brazil’s autonomy within a Portuguese empire, which did not take place.
African Memoirs and Cultural Representations
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Oral traditions and creative oratures have been celebrated in African studies over the years, specifically from the 1950s, as the most important and viable correspondence, aside from material artifacts, between social “archeologists” attempting to penetrate the African preliterate past and the social-political and economic productions of that same past.
In the memoirs chosen for this book, oral traditions are braided with personal experiences in the formation of the self, providing the basis of some African literary outputs and championed as having the ability to engineer the African knowledge system in global academe. In this regard, this work stressesthe concept that most memoir writing scholars feel that the production and presentation of the autobiographical self aredependent on the categories of individualism and relationality.
The memoirists depict their own identities in their tales as not simply a part of their society but also one strongly impacted by prominent persons in their many lived settings. The bookdiscusses an approach that enables West African memoirists to review their cultural backgrounds in the light of living in other spaces and acquiring different experiences.
The Inner World of Research
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The Inner World of Research is a book about the misery and joy of life as a researcher. It deals with essential but rarely spoken of topics in the everyday life of a researcher, focussing in particular on the role of emotions and social relations in research. It stretches from the individual researcher, to the ‘micro-cosmos’ of the research team and to the broader policy environment in which research takes place.
The book is to a large extent based on autobiographical material from the author’s long career as a leading social scientist. But it also derives from extended interviews with researchers from a variety of disciplines, and with authors, artists and musicians. It delves into the mysteries of creativity; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the role of fear, anger, and boredom in the life of a researcher. It is driven by a quiet fury about how research as a practice is so little understood and so poorly administrated and communicated.
Neither a standard research monograph nor a typical memoir or autobiography, The Inner World of Research belongs to the academic essay genre. It is a book based on the author’s frustrations, experiences and curiosity but all through written in dialogue with colleagues supported by adequate scholarship. It is personal and self-reflexive yet authoritative and offers significant insights into the heaven and hell of contemporary academic life in general. And in contrast to many other contemporary books on ‘the decline of the university’, this book is not only critical but also self-critical and constructive.
Ali Usman Qasmi
The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015, ‘The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan’ traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835–1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group’s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.
Part I of this volume traces the development of the anti-Ahmadi movement from its origin in Punjab province, where an agitation movement was launched calling upon the central government to declare the Ahmadis officially non-Muslim. After the movement intensified, leading to proclamation of martial law in Lahore in 1953, the Punjab government held a court of inquiry, which released its report in 1954. The proceedings of the Munir-Kiyani inquiry commission has now become available to scholars, and is a key focus of analysis. Part II focuses on the developments in Pakistan’s politics that created a discursive space where legislative measures against the Ahmadis could be deliberated and adopted by the national assembly, and argues Pakistan’s first general elections in 1970 reflected the entrenchment of religious leaders in Pakistan’s power politics. The national assembly’s 1974 session saw Ahmadis unanimously declared as non-Muslims; the records of this session’s debates are extensively reviewed in this book.
A truly path-breaking study, this work goes beyond merely chronicling the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, to address wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship.
The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.
Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.
Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.
War, Genocide and Cultural Memory
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00This book presents the most comprehensive study of the Waffen-SS until this date. It draws on archival studies done in more than 20 archives in 13 different countries over a period of 5 years. The gathered material comprises a wide-ranging selection of data such as records from the SS, contemporary Allied documents, letters from soldiers, as well as diaries and memoirs. Other major groups of material derive from the investigations into war crimes, from intelligence services and other organisations with a stake in the SS soldiers’ post-war networks and veteran societies. All this diverse data has made it possible to study the Waffen-SS not merely as a hierarchical organisation but as a living organisation made up by human beings. Based on this extensive material the book covers the entire history of the Waffen-SS and follows the post-war fate of the SS-veterans as well. The evolution of the Waffen-SS is analysed with special emphasis on the role of Nazi ideology, war crimes and atrocities, as well as the unique multi-ethnic and transnational character of the organization. The book describes the haphazard, opportunistic and sometimes chaotic growth of the Waffen-SS but also analyses how a constant focus on ideology and a continuous brutalization through commitment of war crimes had a considerable integrative power. The SS managed to form a strong ethos with lasting power both among many of the former SS-soldiers and a greater public audience, documented in the book’s study of the post-war veterans’ culture and the popular cultural memory of the Waffen-SS.
Revising History in Communist Europe
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The context of both the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring was the torturous process of communist regimes tentatively revising the history of the recent communist past that had been constructed and imposed during the Stalinist period. This process of remembering and forgetting had the power to shake the legitimacy and authority of communist party-states because their monopoly on the interpretation of the past was so central to their control of the present.
Once the elaborate histories of the show trials and subsequent propaganda were undermined, the whole credibility of the regimes that had propagated them was likewise weakened. In the Prague Spring, this long-delayed historiographical reckoning was joined by an equally problematic connection between meanings of the past and definitions of the present. Czechoslovakia’s communist allies insisted on understanding and seeking to influence the Czechoslovak reform process through varied and changeable references to and analogies from Hungary’s 1956 uprising. The purpose and nature of these loaded linkages between recent Hungarian past and Czechoslovak present changed according to circumstances and developments.
While the meanings of the 1956 uprising and the concomitant definitions of the 1968 Prague Spring also varied between Soviet and Hungarian analysts, they were alike resisted by Czechoslovak reformers seeking to chart a unique path to socialism. As they attempted to ground their policies in Czechoslovak history, they unsuccessfully rejected parallels with Hungary’s. Ultimately, however, the dependence on historical analogies to decisively explain the present was also a vulnerability for those who employed them, as the gap between a constructed past and an untidy reality irresistibly emerged.
Edited by Kevin P. Gallagher and Daniel Chudnovsky, with a Foreword by José Antonio Ocampo
Rethinking Foreign Investment for Sustainable Development
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00After almost twenty-five years of experimenting with the neo-liberal economic reforms collectively known as ‘Washington Consensus’ policies, Latin Americans are starting to re-assess the merits of these policies – at the voting booth. Many newly elected governments are beginning to scrutinize the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in particular, and some nations have gone so far as to nationalize foreign firms. Without endorsing or condoning the actions taken by these governments, this volume demonstrates that it is quite rational for governments in the region to re-evaluate the role of FDI for their development paths.
The great promise of FDI by multinational corporations is that capital will flow into your country and be a source of dynamic growth. Beyond boosting income and employment, the hope was that manufacturing FDI would bring knowledge spillovers that would build the skill and technological capacities of local firms, catalyzing broad-based economic growth; and environmental spillovers that would mitigate the domestic ecological impacts of industrial transformation.
Consisting of country case studies and comparative analyses from Latin American and U.S.-based political economists, this volume finds that when FDI did materialize if often fell far short of generating the necessary linkages required to make FDI work for sustainable economic development.
Edited by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko
Petrified Utopia
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The pursuit of collective happiness was considered a utopian ideal that structured many aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by numerous scholars in various disciplines ranging from cultural and literary studies to sociology and political science. Several groundbreaking studies in the literary and cultural history of the former Soviet Union have changed our understanding of the Soviet past. However, none of these studies has paid attention to an important theme in the cultural history of Soviet society – the pursuit of happiness. Although specialists in Soviet culture repeatedly invoke various manifestations of happiness in works of literature and film in their research, it has yet to be investigated as the subject of a full-fledged independent study.
‘Petrified Utopia’ redresses this inexplicable omission. This collection of essays introduces the Western reader to the most representative ideas of happiness, and the common practices of its pursuit that shaped Soviet everyday life and cultural discourse from the early post-revolutionary years to the later period of Stalinist and post-Stalinist culture. The collection presents different manifestations of happiness in literature and visual culture – from children’s literature to the official and high literary cannon, from architecture to fine arts, from postcards to cookbooks, and from the culture of consumerism to product-paradise in Soviet posters. ‘Petrified Utopia’ features articles by the leading specialists in the study of Soviet culture from the UK, the US, Germany and Italy, and addresses the perplexing lack of scholarship on this important issue.
Edited by Ajay Gudavarthy
Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Civil Society as a conceptual category across different disciplines and ideological and theoretical frameworks has enjoyed an acceptability that no other concept has in the recent past. In response to what could, perhaps, be referred to as the post-euphoric versions of the civil society, scholars across theoretical dispositions began to look for the critical limits of posturing core issues of democracy through the prism of civil society. It is in this context that Partha Chatterjee has made one of the most important interventions by opposing the idea of civil society to that of political society.
‘Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society’ critically unpacks the concept of ‘political society’, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in a postcolonial context. The volume addresses the theoretical issues of political society through a number of detailed case studies from across India: Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Delhi and Maharashtra. These case studies, combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in democracy and its changing patterns in India with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit to highlight the limitations with different core concepts that Chatterjee has formulated. Centred around five themes – the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on mobility of the subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and its implications for subaltern agency; and finally the idea of moral claims and moral community – this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever before been published, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.
Anarchism in Local Governance
Regular price $200.00 Save $-200.00Stephen Condit begins ‘Anarchism in Local Governance’ arguing that anarchism and anarchists must engage with the ruling order in a more inclusive manner than radical opposition, at least in the environment of a stable and cautious welfare society like Finland. This encounter may enlarge the purposes and values of municipal governance towards some of the fundamental values of anarchism, primarily individual and communal self-governance, and as well develop anarchist thought and praxis, not to renounce radical and non-conventional action, but to enlarge its scope and opportunities by strengthening the legitimacy of anarchist values and praxis, and their practical relevance to the social order.
The discussion entails three intertwined discourses: anarchist thought in philosophical and theoretical terms with an emphasis on the possibilities of its praxis; a descriptive examination of municipal governance through its organisations, strategies and policies; and a rather anecdotal account of Condit’s 30-year career in attempting to combine these dimensions of anarchism, municipal governance and citizen participation in civil society. The counterfactual ideal of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is a significant measure of evaluation.
Condit’s self-assessment is equivocal. He failed to instil much practical anarchism into the municipality and possibly diluted his own demonstration of anarchism beyond what most anarchists would accept. Nevertheless he considers his project justified because it has clarified potentialities for the municipality, citizen associations and anarchism, and because it may express in more coherent conceptual and ethical form significant emerging trends in Western society.
Robert Dixon
Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.
‘Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity’ is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia’s engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley’s life – the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars – but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’.
These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley’s photographic and filmic texts – which were often produced and presented by other people – and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley’s creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century’s rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.
Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmaśāstra
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The main sources for an understanding of classical Hindu law are the Sanskrit treatises on religious and legal duties, known as the Dharmaśāstras. In this collection of his major studies in the field, Ludo Rocher presents analytical and interpretive essays on a wide range of topics, from general themes such as the nature of Hindu law and Anglo-Hindu law to technical matters including word studies and text criticism. Rocher’s deep engagement with the language and worldview of the authors in the Dharmaśāstra tradition yields distinctive and corrective contributions to the field, which are informed by knowledge both of the Indian grammatical tradition and of Roman and civil law.
Davis’s introduction presents an interpretative account of Rocher’s many contributions to the field, organized around the themes that recur in his work, and examines his key advances, both methodological and substantive. Comparisons and contrasts between Rocher’s ideas and those of his Indological colleagues serve to place him in the context of a scholarly tradition, while Rocher’s fundamental view that the Dharmaśāstra is first and foremost a scholarly and scholastic tradition, rather than a practical legal one, is also explored.
This invaluable collection serves both as a summary review of the ideas of Rocher, a leading authority in the field, and as a critical evaluation of the impact of these ideas on the present study of law and Indology.
Stratagem of the Corpse
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.
Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.
Top 10 Vaccine Objections
Regular price $12.95 Save $-12.95This work of narrative non-fiction deals with common questions and doubts people have about vaccines, using very accessible, conversational, non-technical language.
If you have ever thought any of the following, “Vaccines are not for me, I'm young and healthy and don't need them”; “I rather develop natural immunity to infections, without vaccination”; “Immunisation is a personal choice, it only affects me, so I'll take the risk” then this book is for you. You would also enjoy this book if you have ever heard people articulate these beliefs and you couldn't quite put your finger on why these are common misunderstandings. Throughout the book the author uses simple analogies, real-life examples and relatable stories, to explain common questions and objections people have about vaccines and vaccination. The text is wonderfully complemented by original and funny cartoons which bring home the main points, in a memorable and humorous way.
This book is a collection of honest conversations and discussions he's had over the years with people who have doubts and hesitations about the contents, purpose, and safety of vaccines.
Fashioning the Dandy
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.
Income-Poverty And Beyond
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00'Income Poverty and Beyond' emphasizes the need to go beyond the conventional definition of poverty and look at the various human aspects of the problem. Eminent social scientists such as Suresh Tendulkar, Abusaleh Shariff, R. Radhakrishna, M. S. S. Meenakshisundaram, Seeta K. Prabhu, Ravi Srivastava and the editors, Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan, take a comprehensive view of poverty to include the concept of human poverty, seen as the 'the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development'. Special care has been taken to make the information and analysis accessible to the general reader.
Using the latest available data for India as well as edited versions of papers commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for a South-Asia poverty monitor, the broad conclusion that has emerged is that more public action is needed to counter the high prevalence of human poverty. Therefore, current measures to reduce income-poverty, including high rates of economic growth, are not sufficient.
The first two chapters dwell on the concept of income-poverty, interstate and intergroup disparities and poverty trends in India over the decade 1983–94. This is followed by an examination of human development in rural India, availability of food to the poor, various programmes aimed at removing poverty, the indices of human poverty and public financing of social services, human priority expenditures, and human expenditure ratios for the Indian states. The perceptions of the poor in assessing their own poverty and in developing policies to improve their status are discussed, and an epilogue appeals to the national and international community to take serious note of human poverty in the midst of which we all live.
Edited by Ajay Gehlawat
The “Slumdog” Phenomenon
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Winner of numerous awards and the epicenter of multiple controversies, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire” has fueled a series of debates regarding its depictions of India and the slum, its references to Bollywood, its global circulation and success, and its reception by critics and audiences. “The ‘Slumdog’ Phenomenon” is an edited collection that seeks to address all of these topics and, in the process, provide new and innovative ways of looking at this controversial film. Each of the book’s four sections considers a particular aspect of the film – such as its relation to the nation, to the slum and to Bollywood – along with its reception and theorization.
Collecting, for the first time ever, a wide range of critical essays exploring this film from a rich variety of disciplinary perspectives, “The Slumdog Phenomenon” will be of interest to readers across the academic spectrum. Rather than offering a book-length study of the film from one point of view, this collection presents a variety of shorter pieces that consider “Slumdog Millionaire” from several different angles. Featuring a dynamic combination of landmark essays by leading critics and theorists, as well as newer pieces by emerging scholars, this collection will provide readers with an assortment of critical perspectives on a film that continues to generate fascination, curiosity and controversy around the world.
The Theatre of Fake News
Regular price $19.99 Save $-19.99This book begins by defining the term ‘fake news’, a term which has come to great public prominence since the start of our current millennium. Fake news, broadly defined, is used to describe ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. By giving some high-profile examples, this volume shows how the concept differs from lying and propaganda on one side and then from postmodern arguments about the relativism of all knowledge on the other. The book outlines the way that various national governments have become concerned with the concept in recent years, and points to contemporary worries about the behaviours of social media, about manipulation by both state and non-state actors, and about the developing technological capacity that allows almost any individual to produce ‘deep fakes’ that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine photographs or film footage.
The volume explains why fake news can be productively examined through the lens of theatre and performance. We see how various forms of theatre have shared the epistemic function of the news: that is, to furnish the public with reliable factual information, and the book includes discussion of theatre-makers who have attempted to use theatre in this way.
This book also traces the way that the concerns of our own historical moment about fake news echo the repeated worries expressed throughout theatrical history. The examples selected in this section of the book are therefore taken from the canonical high-road of Western theatrical texts, by figures such as Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Joan Littlewood, and Sarah Kane.
The End of the World and the Last God
Regular price $25.00 Save $-25.00After years of relative indifference, space exploration has caught the public’s imagination once again. However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing question: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth? The end of the world has indeed arrived, but in an unexpected way. It can be described thus: man’s potential on Earth has been exhausted. We have discovered every piece of land, tried all sorts of political regimes, experienced all the forms of the arts and committed ourselves to all kinds of religious beliefs. Yet if we admit that the thirst for exploration and novelty is at the heart of human nature, we then have to confront the resulting question: can humanity survive the finitude of our world? Will we hold out long in this cloistered and domesticated Earth that has become so devoid of all mystery and adventure? Or will we die of boredom when the Earth will have become the biggest open-air zoo in the universe?
The consequences of our planet’s finiteness can already be perceived in our day-to-day experience: humans’ physical obsolescence, the decline of Eros, the epidemic of depression sweeping across the Western world and self-destructive tendencies that reveal an actual wish for the Deluge to happen, as if we wanted to recreate the clean slate we so yearn for. We must therefore find a way to break free from this looming trap. Part of the solution may lie above us, but the day when our technology can catapult us to a planet orbiting another star is considerably far off. One could consider that it matters little whether we are capable of colonizing space or not, as long as we have our humdrum lives to attend to here on Earth. But our human nature will not let this happen. We are wanderers, explorers, pioneers in all fields of life.
The human race will therefore not be driven off our planet to escape meteorites or the depletion of natural resources, but to prevent our own mental and physical imprisonment. Knowing the world has nothing more to offer us is not merely a piece of information; it is a shattering reality to which our bodies and minds will react wildly and the biggest existential challenge humankind will have to face in the near future. By shedding light on this pervading worldwide mental condition, The End of the World and the Last God tries to raise awareness that the obstacles to interstellar expansion do not essentially lie in any technological limitation but in the demons and flaws we host in ourselves.
Marietta Stankova
Bulgaria in British Foreign Policy, 1943–1949
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Located at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria serves as a natural stepping stone to the Straits, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Its geo-strategic position has frequently attracted foreign powers – including Great Britain and the Soviet Union – with an array of regional and global interests. [NP] A succession of Great Power influences in the Balkans both shaped Bulgaria’s international place and marked its domestic policy. This book explores Britain’s involvement in Bulgaria between 1943 and 1949, providing a new understanding of the origins of the Cold War in the region.
Divided into three parts, the book examines the priorities of Britain during and after World War II, investigates the practical integration of strategic and ideological objectives in British foreign policy, and maps Britain’s diminishing interest in the country alongside the parallel consolidation of communist power and the increasing Soviet presence.
Using recently released sources from the Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties and foreign ministries, the author revisits the question of British attitudes towards Eastern Europe. This book offers a new approach to understanding the origins of the Cold War in Bulgaria and bridges significant gaps in the treatment of the country in English-language literature.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Civil Society in India
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or billionaire philanthropy is like a Rorschach test – the same act can look very different depending on how we understand its intentions and its consequences. In this book the author examines the politics of CSR in India to assess its ability to advance inclusive and sustainable development. The focus is on how CSR is remaking the practices and agendas of civic organizations that are being encouraged to collaborate with business to advance equality and prosperity.
Civil society organizations (CSOs) and corporations have a history of hostility to each other. According to CSO workers, businesses selfishly exploit workers, despoil natural resources, and distort democracy to serve their own profit-making ends. According to business executives, CSOs are hopelessly naïve, inefficient, and interfere in the market in ways that reduce economic growth. And yet, in the past decade more and more CSOs and businesses are collaborating in new ways. Individuals from both sectors are setting up social impact enterprises, and social investing funds are increasing. The more traditional forms of corporate-CSO collaboration have expanded as more funds are flowing from business to the social sector. The divide between the corporate sector and civil society seems to be narrowing. Why is this happening and what are its consequences? This book examines these trends in India, where since 2013 the state has mandated co-operation between the largest firms and NGOs in pursuit of inclusive and sustainable development.
This book offers evidence that CSR is unlikely to contribute to inclusive and sustainable development. By claiming to be “helpers” corporations are able to silence their critics and thus avoid making the deeper shifts in business models needed in order to create a more just and sustainable society.
Judicial Dispute Resolution
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95We are concerned about the role of the courts, particularly judges, in guaranteeing justice. We are impressed with the success of the courts in Canada that are using what is called judicial dispute resolution (JDR). We also describe similar efforts in other parts of the world wherethe court helps parties resolve their differences in a timely way, not by deciding who is right and wrong, but by assisting the parties in resolving their differences and mendingtheir relationships.The judges who do this mediate, rather than adjudicate.
All judges, worldwide, have responsibility for and authority over the procedures that are used in their courtrooms. This book describes the ways in which a judge can facilitate problem-solving between litigants. JDR is similar to mediation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR),as it is sometimes called, but it is provided by a judge, not a private mediator (as in the United States). This increases the chances of success. A judge, unlike a private mediator, can give the parties a definitive forecast of the likely legal outcome they can expect if their case proceeds to trial. JDR also affords the parties substantial assistance in working out the terms of a mutually agreeable outcome, in the setting of the courthouse (not a lawyer’s office),and in the form of a court order signed by the judge. From what we have seen, such outcomes are very likely to be viewed as fair by all parties. There is no downside, because if JDR fails, the matter proceeds to trial with a different judge who knows nothing of the parties’ earlier efforts to settle. Additionally, what has happened in Canada is that the mediating parties, who like the help the judge is providing, can ask to turn their voluntary JDR process into a binding procedure, where if they cannot reach a complete agreement, they can ask their JDR judge to impose a final decision– which they can help to craft.
This book describes how JDR has worked for several decades in multiple provinces in Canada. We review the role of the Chief Justice in setting up JDRs for complicated (multi-party or other complex) cases. Very little has been written about JDR because all the records have remained confidential. We can tell this story now because we have been given exclusive access to the parties (including the JDR judges) and the records in nine carefully selected cases.
Our book looks at the role judges play in ensuring justice – how that role has changed and could continue to evolve in North America and worldwide. The JDR process described in this book has resulted in agreement in 80% or more of all JDR cases in Canadian courts.
Clearly, judges need to be trained as mediators to make JDR work. In some cases (such as those in which harm to children and jurisdictional challenges are at stake), there needs to be a trial. But in most other cases, including criminal matters and those where restorative justice is the goal, litigants are best served by JDR rather than formal court proceedings. JDR has the official imprimatur of the court, as well as the judges’ direct involvement, turning informally negotiated agreements into enforceable court orders. This book explains exactly how this happens. With the help of our Harvard Law School students, we provide a Teaching Appendix that summarizes our nine case studies in detail. While we present the general lessons of the cases in the main text, the Appendix analyzes each case from the standpoint of a variety of legal specialties and highlights the differences between JDR and ADR.
We believe that the courts will be better able to deliver justice if they equip judges to use JDR.
Edited by Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell
Homelands
Regular price $27.50 Save $-27.50This new volume, by a team of international scholars, explores aspects of population displacement and statehood at a crucial juncture in modern European history, when the entire continent took on the aspect of a 'laboratory atop a mass graveyard' (Tomas Masaryk). The topic of state-building has acquired a new actuality in recent years, following the collapse of the USSR and the 'Soviet bloc' and in view of the complex, often violent, territorial and ethnic conflicts which have ensued. Many of the current dilemmas and tragedies of the region have their origins in the aftermath of World War I, when newly independent nation states, struggling to emerge from the rubble of the former Russian empire, first sought to define themselves in terms of population, territory and citizenship. 'Homelands' examines the interactions of forced migration, state construction and myriad emerging forms of social identity. It opens up a fresh perspective on twentieth-century history and throws new light on present-day political, humanitarian and scholarly issues of crucial concern to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, refugee welfare workers, policymakers and others.
Vyāsa Redux
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Vyāsa is the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and 'Vyāsa Redux' examines the many paradoxical dimensions of his narrative virtuosity in the poem where the poet is both the creator of the work and a character within it. The book also studies elements in the poem which have been received by the late Bronze Age poets who composed the figure of Vyāsa, elements that reflect kinship, polity and modes of mnemonic inspiration. Three paired concepts function within the poem’s narrative process: first, the central approach of the book is founded upon the distinction between plot and story, that is, the causal relation of events as opposed to the temporal relation of events. Second, much of the argument then engages with how this distinction relates to the difference between the preliterate and literate phases of our present text. Third, the nature of how inspiration functions and how edition operates becomes another vital component in our analytic process explaining how Vyāsa becomes a dramatic, causal and at times prophetic character in the poem’s narration as well as its originator.
IB Music Revision Guide 2nd Edition
Regular price $25.95 Save $-25.95The ‘IB Music Revision Guide 2nd Edition’ includes analyses of all the prescribed works of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme music course through 2019. It also includes a comprehensive overview of all the musical styles and cultures that are examined during the course, practice questions and answers that allow students to check their knowledge, as well as a glossary to help ensure key terms are understood. There are also revision tips and advice on exam technique that will help students prepare for the IB listening exam with confidence. Suitable for Standard and Higher Level.
The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
Regular price $79.95 Save $-79.95In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Melvin Kohn reexamines his 60-year inquiry––conducted across distinct cultures under radically different conditions––into the relationship between people’s location in the social order and their personality. The result of this reexamination is an important refinement of Kohn’s highly regarded theory on the relationship between social class, work and personality, adding key insights about the role of political intervention on personality to his scholarship.
Over the course of his career, Kohn and his collaborators––in the United States, Norway, East and West Germany, Japan, Poland, Ukraine and China––used groundbreaking empirical methodologies to understand the effect of social structure on personality. Beginning in mid-twentieth century America, Kohn established that for employed men and women, the most important aspect of social structure for personality was social status. Kohn confirmed and refined this insight over time and across distinct cultural, economic and changing political conditions. Whether in postwar America, East and West Germany, industrial Japan, Communist Poland or post-Soviet Ukraine, study after study demonstrated the primacy of social class and social stratification in determining people’s values and orientations.
This research also revealed interesting cross-national inconsistencies in people’s reactions to similar social conditions. These inconsistencies did not change the essential relationship of social class and stratification to personality, and repeatedly confirmed Kohn’s findings about the importance of occupational self-direction and substantive complexity on all aspects of personality. In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Kohn focuses on these inconsistencies. Based on insights derived from research conducted during the transition to privatization of urban China, Kohn identifies political intervention as the force that modifies, for better or for worse, but does not eliminate the dominant effect of class stratification and the opportunities they provide for self-direction at work on personality.
Y. V. Reddy
India and the Global Financial Crisis
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ offers a collection of essays based on the speeches delivered by Reddy during his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2003 and September 2008, a period of rapid growth for the Indian economy as well as extraordinary challenges for the conduct of monetary policy. He has earned universal acclaim for his gubernatorial management of India’s calibrated financial integration with the global economy.
These essays provide informed critical insights into the making of public policies across a spectrum of areas during those years, while presenting an inside view of the dynamics that are played out behind the scenes. They respond to the interest in India's management of a financial sector that has facilitated growth while maintaining stability, markedly contrasting to the fragile financial climate of the USA. The volume describes India's financial situation, the Reserve Bank of India's perspective, and its policies. ‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ was selected as Financial Book of the Year 2010 by ‘China Business News’.
Environmental Problem-Solving: Balancing Science and Politics Using Consensus Building Tools
Regular price $150.00 Save $-150.00The book is divided into four sections: The first section focuses on how certain environmental problems can only be solved through active government efforts to implement policies that effectively take science and politics into account. This section introduces readers to foundational concepts, including the steps in the US federal environmental policy-making process, and offers an action-oriented analysis of how environmental policy gets implemented and how practitioners can use comparative analysis of public policy in environmental problem-solving. It concludes with questions about the possibility of a unified theory of environmental policy making. The section empowers readers to develop, through carefully designed assignments, a framework to shape an action plan to solve specific environmental problems.
The next section focuses on formulating a sound philosophical basis for taking action in environmental problem-solving situations. This includes a discussion of several ethical frameworks that practitioners can use to underpin the actions they propose. This section begins with a general overview of environmental ethics, and then moves to a discussion of utilitarianism versus intrinsic value, deep green approaches to environmental problem-solving, the debate over sustainability versus economic growth, and how science and indigenous knowledge can be applied in a wide range of environmental problem-solving situations. The section empowers readers to take a stand on these debates, drawing on practical cases with worked examples.
The penultimate section helps environmental practitioners understand how to use various analytical tools. It includes a quick survey of traditional and non-traditional evaluation techniques, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each, focusing on environmental impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, ecosystem services analysis, risk assessment, simulation and modeling, and scenario planning. This section prepares readers to practice multi-party environmental problem-solving, and to identify the power of each tool to enhance environmental problem-solving, developing the judgment to enumerate strengths and weaknesses as they see them playing out in practice.
The concluding section is a survey of the theory and practice behind mobilizing support for particular problem-solving efforts. It includes discussions of democratic decision-making and environmental problem solving, how the public can be brought in as a partner, methods of collaborative decision-making, the idea of consensus building, and how politics and power sway collective action efforts.
The Reading Figure in Irish Art in the Long Nineteenth Century
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.
Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude.
A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.
Peter Nolan
Re-balancing China
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Re-balancing China’ addresses three key sets of issues in China’s political economy. Part One of the text provides an analysis of the profound impact of the global financial crisis on China’s economy – an economy deeply integrated in the global economic system through trade and foreign investment. It also examines the positive outcomes of the massive rescue package that constituted China’s policy response to the crisis. The rescue package stimulated Chinese growth and helped to stabilize the global economy as a whole.
Part Two focuses on the challenge of globalization for China’s industrial policy. Since the 1980s, China has pursued an industrial policy aimed at nurturing a substantial group of globally competitive firms, most of which have become superficially successful. However, China still has a negligible number of large firms that are competitive in global markets. China’s experience presents a fundamental challenge to traditional concepts of industrial policy and development.
Finally, Part Three examines China’s international relations, the focal point of which is its relationship with the United States. The US has made it clear that its principal challenge in international relations is the ‘rise of China’ and has announced a ‘tilt towards the Pacific’ in its military strategy. As a result, the core of this interaction spans the East and South China Seas and the countries that surround this area.
Sisters and the English Household
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Sisters and the English Household’ revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenth-century English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Engaging scholarly histories of the family, and providing a detailed account of the 70-year Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister controversy, Wallace traces an alternative domesticity anchored by adult sibling relations through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals; William Wordsworth’s poetry; Mary Lamb’s essay ‘On Needle-Work‘; and novels by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and George Eliot. Recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative rather than contingent and dependent, and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, ‘Sisters and the English Household’ resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England.
In the twenty-first century, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we name, plot and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre-twentieth-century writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting, driving continuing tendencies to define ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal relations that reinscribe those stabilizing concepts, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in ‘family’.
‘Sisters and the English Household’ works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize ‘family’ as a further historicizing of ‘domesticity’ that renders it multiple and fluid rather than monolithic; and a turn towards the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. The book traces two distinct nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings' lives (corporate domesticity), while the other expected the domestic, material and, to some extent, emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth-homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, although counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, sibling-anchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labour was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth-century’s protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household and domestic ideals. The sister's autonomy also drove a gradually increasing imperative to exclude adult unmarried siblings from the households of their married siblings, an imperative figured as expatriation from the homely and national ‘domestic’ space.
The Unmaking of Arab Socialism
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both characterize many Arab countries, but this was not always so. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period was an age of hope and relative prosperity. But imperialism did not sleep while these countries developed, and it soon intervened to destroy these post-independence achievements.
The two principal defeats and losses of territory to Israel in 1967 and 1973, as well as the others that followed, left in their wake more than the destruction of assets and the loss of human lives: the Arab world lost its ideology of resistance. The reversal in economic and social performance between then and now requires an even-handed and theoretically coherent explanation that steers clear of the hallucinatory constructs of individual freedom and choice. Considering such choices is utterly superfluous in a situation where the important choice is often a single one—that is, no choice at all—imposed by the power of history on the unfree majority.
The Unmaking of Arab Socialism is an attempt to understand the perplexing reasons for the Arab world's developmental descent—its de-development—from the pinnacle of Arab socialism to its present desolate condition.Kadri focuses on the concept of Arab socialism in general and its application to Iraq, Syria and Egypt as he explores the deleterious effects of redundant labour expelled by dispossessions in the hinterland and the persistence of permanent war.
Shinji Ishii, translated by David Karashima
Kutze, Stepp'n on Wheat
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to travel abroad and tread wheat alongside this stranger when he becomes an adult. But first, Cat must grow up in the small port town where he lives with his timpanist grandfather and a father irrevocably obsessed with an unsolved mathematical proof, and which, as part of the series of increasingly surreal events that characterize his life, Cat rescues from a plague of rats by his imitating the yowls of his namesake, the cat. The ‘rat-a-tap, tap’ of Kutze’s steps echoes through Cat’s life as he matures, moves away from the town to become a musician in the big city and, eventually, journeys abroad.
A truly unique coming-of-age tale, ‘Stepp’n on Wheat’ traces the unsettling events and characters encountered by Cat as he grows up, from the mysterious travelling salesman who cheats his town and ruins his father to a colourblind girl named Green.
T. T. Sreekumar
ICTs and Development in India
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00'ICTs and Development in India' provides a critical account of the impact of the use of Information Technology in development projects in India, focusing particularly on E-governance and Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) development programs initiated by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Sreekumar challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the potential of ICT to provide unprecedented social and economic opportunities for vulnerable groups such as women and marginalized communities by highlighting its failure to bridge social divides. He argues that in addition to reinforcing existing social divides, the patterns of ICT deployment and control have in certain cases created new divides. Given such tensions and contradictions, this book questions whether it is appropriate to consider civil society as an independent realm of social action separated from State and Market.
Sreekumar offers a fresh perspective and added depth to the discussions on the social impacts of new technologies in rural areas, especially in terms of methods, analytics and approach. The recognition of the shortcomings of CSO initiatives plays an important part in redefining the role of civil society and understanding its fractured relations with the State and Market. Sreekumar therefore creates a powerful critique on the interpretation of agency and the structure of rural transformation as mediated by new technologies in the particular context of India's social and economic transition.
Ingrid Hanson
William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ offers a new reading of Morris’s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that Morris’s work demonstrates an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories to the late propaganda poems and political romances.
Hanson examines Morris’s imagination of violence as a way of understanding the world and the self. The interactions of combat, work and play, of self-sacrifice and hope, class war and prowess in his writings draw together conflicting cultural narratives about individual and political identity in a way that complicates or reframes their meanings.
Moving chronologically through his works, the book discusses the philosophy and phenomenology of violence by which Morris delineates his ethical and aesthetic positions, as well as examining the ways in which they intersect with those of his contemporaries. It combines close readings of his work with historical and contextual analysis to suggest that Morris’s paradoxical commitment to violence as a means to wholeness shapes the form and style of his works as well as their content and reception.
Jyotsna Kapur
The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.
Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations.
'Report on the Agrarian Law' (1795) and Other Writings
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00"Report on the Agrarian Law" (1795) and Other Writings' is the first modern English translation of perhaps the greatest work of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' (1795). A major work of political economy and a beautifully crafted philosophical history of Spain’s political development until the eighteenth century, 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' is a classic work of the Spanish Enlightenment. Displaying the richness of Spanish Enlightenment writing on political economy emerging from a fecund conjugation of foreign writers (Smith, Ferguson, Condillac, Mirabeau, Genovesi) with Spanish writers (Ulloa, Olavide, Uztáriz, Campomanes), this masterpiece explores the lessons learned from the shortcomings of the Spanish Crown's economic policies in the eighteenth century.
Edited by Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan
Income-Poverty And Beyond
Regular price $27.50 Save $-27.50'Income Poverty and Beyond' emphasizes the need to go beyond the conventional definition of poverty and look at the various human aspects of the problem. Eminent social scientists such as Suresh Tendulkar, Abusaleh Shariff, R. Radhakrishna, M. S. S. Meenakshisundaram, Seeta K. Prabhu, Ravi Srivastava and the editors, Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan, take a comprehensive view of poverty to include the concept of human poverty, seen as the 'the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development'. Special care has been taken to make the information and analysis accessible to the general reader.
Using the latest available data for India as well as edited versions of papers commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for a South-Asia poverty monitor, the broad conclusion that has emerged is that more public action is needed to counter the high prevalence of human poverty. Therefore, current measures to reduce income-poverty, including high rates of economic growth, are not sufficient.
The first two chapters dwell on the concept of income-poverty, interstate and intergroup disparities and poverty trends in India over the decade 1983–94. This is followed by an examination of human development in rural India, availability of food to the poor, various programmes aimed at removing poverty, the indices of human poverty and public financing of social services, human priority expenditures, and human expenditure ratios for the Indian states. The perceptions of the poor in assessing their own poverty and in developing policies to improve their status are discussed, and an epilogue appeals to the national and international community to take serious note of human poverty in the midst of which we all live.
Legal Duty and Upper Limits
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book proposes a radical new way of thinking about our democratic future, our ecological survival, and our ways to keep economies fair. It shows that adopting upper limits to wealth and income; replacing elections with local direct democracy and legal duty involving randomly selected citizens; and replacing welfare and redistribution policies with pre-distribution and reparations promises new solutions to political apathy, discontent, manipulation, economic inequality, unfairness, unequal opportunities, and looming ecological disaster.
Most public debates today focus on the poor, on minorities, and on immigrants when discussing the problems of our democracies. The poor, minorities and immigrants, however, are not our problem. They had no say in designing the kinds of systems that threaten our planet, our wellbeing, and our social and communal lives. They consume very little and thus have a minimal ecological footprint. It is the super-rich who threaten justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and ecological sustainability.
The Creativity Hoax
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00We often hear that creative and intellectual innovation is the key to western economic renewal, that cognitive capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mental-manual division of labour, and that old work – blue-collar, repetitive, de-skilled – is now consigned to the factories of the developing world. At the other end of the long production chains, the West relies increasingly on immaterial labour. From this perspective no rustbelt city can hope to regenerate, no developing nation can ascend to first-world status, without the ‘new oil’ of intellectual property. Workers in general are told to adapt to this transition, to remake themselves for the new economy. Rapid shifts in patterns of consumption, taste and technology can render jobs and skills obsolete in ways that defy the planning and foreclosures of Fordism.
Vocational fortunes depend not only on intellect and creativity but also on entrepreneurial acumen and vocational agility. New capitalism seeks to make a virtue of transience. It has taken up the counter-culture’s critique of the Fordist job-for-life, in order to persuade young people in particular that working life is (and should be) episodic and project-based. The precariat (Standing 2009) must embrace the idea of the improvised post-modern career - a wild vocational ride that unfolds like the levels of a video game. They must become labile labour: opportunistic, excitable, flexible, mobile and ready to flow without protest or friction into the spaces opened up by Post-Fordism. Those who resist or ignore this turbulence and cling to the goal of security are in effect sleepwalking towards redundancy.
‘The Creativity Hoax’ argues that creativity, the leitmotif of new capitalism, has become a key neo-liberal idiom for reorganizing work and working life in ways that erode communal bonds, loyalties and values and blur the boundaries between work and play, public and private. However, the creative economy remains a largely unrealized project, a fantasy of regeneration. Despite the inflated rhetoric of vocational fulfilment, much work performed in the West remains low-skilled and low-paid. Very few make a living exclusively from creative labour whether as employees, freelancers, or entrepreneurs. For the most part it is transnational cultural corporations that reap the patentable or copyrightable bounty, belying the egalitarian myths of the new economy. [NP] The challenge for capital has been to habituate the precariat to the condition of abeyance. In order to tolerate un/underemployment or jobs where skills and talents are underutilized (retail, hospitality or on the edges of creative industries), young workers need to be persuaded that vocational fulfilment and financial security are attainable. ‘The Creativity Hoax’ draws on extensive interview and observation research with creative aspirants – from technical, production and performance fields – who wrestle with the prospect and reality of poverty and unfulfilled ambition.
Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters: Volume 2 - Letters from France
Regular price $140.00 Save $-140.00Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in Russian in 1839. In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire.
Gretsch had been asked to travel into Western Europe to examine the educational systems and report his findings to the Russian government. However, he was more than just a functionary. He was a journalist, novelist, and philologist. For nearly three decades, he published a journal called Son of the Fatherland, and he was able to convince many influential Russian thinkers of the time to contribute to the periodical. Later, he would publish The Reader’s Library and then The Northern Bee. The former was a short-lived magazine, but the latter was a newspaper that remained in circulation for almost three decades. As these accomplishments suggest, Gretsch was an intellectual—a person who looked beyond the surface-level of his existence to seek deeper meaning.
In consequence, as he travelled through England, France, and Germany, his sharp mind absorbed far more than just the details of the educational systems he had been sent to investigate. He noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met. When he returned to Russia, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the three-volume edition that was published in St. Petersburg in 1839 — not long after Napoleon’s final defeat. His astute observations provide a rich contemporary resource for information about the countries he visited. The observations are all the more relevant since they come from the viewpoint of an outsider. Additionally, as a result of his government position, Gretsch was able to move in social circles that would have been closed to many other people. In England, he once found himself in the same room with the future Queen Victoria, for example, and in France, he had lunch with Victor Hugo. Given the new historicist slant of modern literary and cultural studies, Gretsch’s observations offer a treasure-trove of contextual information that will be valuable to history and literature scholars as well as to general readers interested in cultural interactions during the nineteenth century. This narrative has never before been translated into English in its entirety.
Jyotsna Kapur
The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.
Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations.
Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945–1975
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC’s many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.
Water Security in the Middle East
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Water Security in the Middle East explores the extent and nature of water security problems in transboundary water systems in the Middle East. This collection of essays discusses the political and scientific contexts and the limitations of cooperation in water security.
The contributors argue that while conflicts over transboundary water systems in the Middle East do occur, they tend not to be violent nor have they ever been the primary cause of a war in this region. The authors place water disputes in larger political, historical and scientific contexts and discuss how the humanities and social sciences could contribute more towards this understanding. They also contend that international sharing of scientific and technological advances can significantly increase access to water and improve water quality. While scientific advances can and should increase adaptability to changing environmental conditions, especially climate change, national institutional reform and the strengthening of joint commissions are vital. The contributors indicate ways in which transboundary cooperation may move from simple and intermittent coordination to sophisticated, adaptive and equitable modes of water management.
Authoritarian Collectivism and ‘Real Socialism’
Regular price $24.95 Save $-24.95The book discusses so-called real socialism and offers an alternative conceptualization of it as authoritarian collectivism, making use of an analytical and developmental methodology, that is, presenting it in categorical terms as well dwelling on its genesis, development and demise. The political dimension stands out in the conceptual articulation, with ‘democratic centralism’ and the prominence of the Communist Party, working from the top down. The book concentrates on the principles of ‘real socialism’, particularly in the Soviet Union but also globally, analysing also its present embrace of capitalism, particularly in China, but also elsewhere, taking account of how those political principles remain however in place today. A new civilization was intended, which was supposed to be the first step in the journey towards communism, leading however to an oppressive sort of state/society articulation and to new forms of hierarchy and appropriation of material benefits by the political upper layers.
The historical genesis of Soviet ‘socialism’, through Stalinism and to post-Stalinism, furnished the model to be analysed, but its global spread in China, Vietnam, Africa, Cuba and elsewhere enriched the original experience, but at its core the political system and the state structure that allowed for the prominence of a powerful and exclusivist political bureaucracy was always reinstated. The failure of the system – economically and politically – to withstand the competition which the liberal and capitalist world sustained led to its disappearance in the Soviet Union and other countries or to a transformation that brought back capitalism, which is now combined with the former political structure. China is the foremost example of this new reality, which is however reproduced elsewhere.
The book closes with a discussion of the motivation of revolutionary actors, including communism, anti-colonialism and nationalism, the role of unintended consequences in history and what emancipation and socialism might mean today.
Resurgent Africa
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Though African economies have recorded significant growth in output, the increase has not been big enough to lift its teeming population out of poverty, stem rising unemployment and bridge the significant income divide within cities and between rural and urban areas. Jobless growth has resulted in a poor standard of living even in the face of relatively impressive GDP growth. To understand the dynamics of recent development in Africa, ‘Resurgent Africa: Structural Transformation in Sustainable Development’ draws on Arthur Lewis’s ‘dual’ thesis as well as on recent scholarship on structural change which posits that where modern and traditional sectors coexis,t as is the case in African countries, there is potential for capital and labour to move from low productivity sectors to high productivity sectors through the process of structural change that fuels economic growth and raises productivity.
In a resurgent Africa economic growth is inclusive, driven by sustainable urbanization, undergirded by industrial manufacturing that generates widespread employment, resulting in rising living standards through structural transformation. A resurgent Africa is therefore concerned with understanding structural change dynamics and how it affects job creation, living standards and the efficiency of productive cities through manufacturing productivity growth that benefit the majority.
‘Resurgent Africa: Structural Transformation in Sustainable Development’ attempts to connect key drivers of economic development with outcomes of economic growth. It provides in-depth analysis and knowledge of Africa’s diversified economies, including Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia, by establishing relationships between industrialization trends; rates of urbanization; and urban living standards, income growth and employment in Africa. Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka’s findings reveal unconventional pathways of structural change, patterns of jobless growth which suggests economic growth that does not necessarily lead to employment, the dominance of services at the expense of manufacturing industry explaining the regress in Africa’s industrial sector, and occurrence of structural transformation without improvement in labour productivity. These are important concerns for Africa’s long-term development leading to the conclusion that sustainable urbanization and industrialization are not just closely connected, but are key drivers of economic change. The book includes recommendations for policymakers to adopt a new approach to development for a resurgent Africa.
Dwayne Avery
Unhomely Cinema
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00“Unhomely Cinema” explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today’s global societies. Drawing from Freud’s concept of the uncanny – that frightful and inexplicable experience of the home as foreign and strange – the unhomely speaks to the spatial dislocation, transience, homelessness and disempowerment symptomatic of contemporary global societies.
While uncanny homes are traditionally associated with the science fiction and horror genres, “Unhomely Cinema” shows how an array of film genres – from Michel Gondry’s comedy “Be Kind Rewind” to Laurent Cantet’s eerie suspense thriller “Time Out” – use the figure of the precarious home to engage with some of the most pertinent social and cultural issues involved in the question of “making home.”
Encounters with the unhomely often result in the painful loss of home, but the unhomely can also offer an ethics of dwelling, whereby the impossibility of narrative closure represents new and more hopeful ways of dwelling in the world.
George H. Cassar
Lloyd George at War, 1916-1918
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ provides a much needed re-evaluation of this charismatic prime minister’s wartime leadership. Calling on a wide range of primary sources and focussing on Lloyd George’s role in the war cabinet, Cassar compellingly argues that George’s reputation as the “man who won the war” was wholly unmerited. Instead Cassar shows that Lloyd George’s heavy handed leadership was often detrimental to the Allied cause. From his wholehearted support for the disastrous Nivelle offensive, to his pursuit of a peripheral strategy that diverted troops away from the critical theatre of war on the Western Front, Cassar shows that Lloyd George consistently bucked the advice of his generals in preference for ineffectual and dangerous military strategies. Cassar’s approach also differs from that of other studies of Lloyd George by adopting a thematic approach in preference to a chronological narrative, thereby allowing a closer evaluation of Lloyd George’s handling of complex issues.
Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The first book-length study of Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, the largest and most dynamic Australian pulp publisher to emerge after World War II. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged, softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been so far recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback from the late 1950s onwards.
Horwitz was adept at seeking out and exploiting the porous spaces that existed, sometimes only temporarily, between pulp and mainstream publishing: where mainstream literary forms were reconfigured to suit more sensational tastes, authorial reputation was fluid, and government regulation failed to keep pace with shifting reading tastes and social mores. Its dealings were aggressively transnational in scope, moving beyond London, to directly encompass the United States and other overseas fiction markets. And Horwitz continually mined international literary and publishing fashions and successes to create local analogues of popular pulp and mass-market publishing genres, giving them a makeover to align them with Australian cultural sensibilities, tastes and legislative environments.
Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback examines the authorship, production, marketing and distribution of Horwitz pulp paperbacks. It includes ground-breaking material on the conditions of creative labour: the writers, artists and editors involved in the production of Horwitz pulp. The book also explores how Horwitz pulp paperbacks acted as a local conduit for the global modern: the ideas, sensations, fascinations, technologies, and people that came crashing into the Australia consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. This is part of the larger story of Australian pulp fiction’s role as an unofficial archive of changing tastes, ideas, controversies and debates about gender, race, class, youth, and economic and social mobility that occurred in 1950s and 1960s Australia.
Robert R. Faulkner
Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation
Regular price $32.95 Save $-32.95This book addresses an old and basic question: what is the moral order of the market? ‘Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation’ is an exploration of accusations of wrongdoing, and the revelations these accusations expose about the dark side of capitalism and modern corporations, and their relationships with suppliers, buyers, peers, investment banks and state regulators. The study explores data gathered from the past twenty years, including over a thousand accusations of economic wrongdoing in corporate America. The research traces exchange paths or structural routes; cultural recipes or ideas about wrongdoing; and interactions between the culture and structure of transgression in economic in markets.
Repertoires of accusation, and the three-way associations between accused, accuser and accusation, reveal the moral order of the market. The tools provided in this data collection and analysis provide a template for the study of the three-way relationship between the following: cultural items or types (i.e., accusation types), structural locations or paths (i.e., market interfaces) and time (i.e., temporal locations of types and paths, or recipes and routes). Repertoires unlock the moral order of the modern market and other institutions (family, politics, education, religion, science) as revealed in accusations of transgression.
Ali Usman Qasmi
The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015, ‘The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan’ traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835–1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group’s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.
Part I of this volume traces the development of the anti-Ahmadi movement from its origin in Punjab province, where an agitation movement was launched calling upon the central government to declare the Ahmadis officially non-Muslim. After the movement intensified, leading to proclamation of martial law in Lahore in 1953, the Punjab government held a court of inquiry, which released its report in 1954. The proceedings of the Munir-Kiyani inquiry commission has now become available to scholars, and is a key focus of analysis. Part II focuses on the developments in Pakistan’s politics that created a discursive space where legislative measures against the Ahmadis could be deliberated and adopted by the national assembly, and argues Pakistan’s first general elections in 1970 reflected the entrenchment of religious leaders in Pakistan’s power politics. The national assembly’s 1974 session saw Ahmadis unanimously declared as non-Muslims; the records of this session’s debates are extensively reviewed in this book.
A truly path-breaking study, this work goes beyond merely chronicling the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, to address wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship.
Nông Văn Dân
Churchill, Eden and Indo-China, 1951-1955
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00'Churchill, Eden and Indo-China, 1951-1955' provides a greater historical awareness of the broad international context of decolonized Indo-China, focussing on the administrations of Churchill and Eden. Nông Dân takes a systematic approach to pertinent international politics, providing a historiography and assessing the effects of events such as the Cold War and the Second World War, paying special attention to the impact of the Second World War on the British version of the domino theory. Nông Dân focuses particularly on South East Asia, and applies a thorough analysis of the pitched Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which took place during the last year of Churchill's office. Churchill's wartime helmsmanship is revisited in order to gain pertinent and further light on his post-war administration. Lastly, this study is a firm contribution to understanding the history of globalization in Eastern Asia and the Far East.
The Reading Figure in Irish Art in the Long Nineteenth Century
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.
Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude.
A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.
Edited by Neera Chandhoke
Mapping Histories
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Edited by Professor Neera Chandhoke, 'Mapping Histories' is a fitting tribute to renowned historian Ravinder Kumar, well known for his pioneering work on the social consequences of colonial rule in India, and for founding the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Here, Fellows of the centre present a collection of historical and contemporary studies on India, which deal with diverse themes from religion to the environment, cultural studies to feminism. Together, these lively and challenging essays offer readings on how we understand India's history and, conversely, how we can use this comprehension of the past to interpret India's complex present.
Laura Fisher
Aboriginal Art and Australian Society
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.
At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era.
Edited by Kevin P. Gallagher and Daniel Chudnovsky, with a Foreword by José Antonio Ocampo
Rethinking Foreign Investment for Sustainable Development
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00After almost twenty-five years of experimenting with the neo-liberal economic reforms collectively known as ‘Washington Consensus’ policies, Latin Americans are starting to re-assess the merits of these policies – at the voting booth. Many newly elected governments are beginning to scrutinize the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in particular, and some nations have gone so far as to nationalize foreign firms. Without endorsing or condoning the actions taken by these governments, this volume demonstrates that it is quite rational for governments in the region to re-evaluate the role of FDI for their development paths.
The great promise of FDI by multinational corporations is that capital will flow into your country and be a source of dynamic growth. Beyond boosting income and employment, the hope was that manufacturing FDI would bring knowledge spillovers that would build the skill and technological capacities of local firms, catalyzing broad-based economic growth; and environmental spillovers that would mitigate the domestic ecological impacts of industrial transformation.
Consisting of country case studies and comparative analyses from Latin American and U.S.-based political economists, this volume finds that when FDI did materialize if often fell far short of generating the necessary linkages required to make FDI work for sustainable economic development.
Edited
Fighting Scholars
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Fighting Scholars’ brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.
The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the editors introduce the field, providing a typology of existing literature. The second section contains the contributions of the authors, discussing their respective approaches to embodied ethnography, their use of the concept of ‘habitus’, and ethnographic findings. The third section contains a conclusion by the editors – reflecting on existing conceptions of ‘habitus’ and interdisciplinary possibilities for rethinking the concept – and an epilogue by Loïc Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume.
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire.
Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.
In Victorian India technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in ‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ nineteenth-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a twentieth-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood – thanks to the projected Panama Canal – and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.
Ludo Rocher, edited by Donald R. Davis, Jr and with a Foreword by Richard W. Lariviere
Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmaśāstra
Regular price $49.50 Save $-49.50The main sources for an understanding of classical Hindu law are the Sanskrit treatises on religious and legal duties, known as the Dharmaśāstras. In this collection of his major studies in the field, Ludo Rocher presents analytical and interpretive essays on a wide range of topics, from general themes such as the nature of Hindu law and Anglo-Hindu law to technical matters including word studies and text criticism. Rocher’s deep engagement with the language and worldview of the authors in the Dharmaśāstra tradition yields distinctive and corrective contributions to the field, which are informed by knowledge both of the Indian grammatical tradition and of Roman and civil law.
Davis’s introduction presents an interpretative account of Rocher’s many contributions to the field, organized around the themes that recur in his work, and examines his key advances, both methodological and substantive. Comparisons and contrasts between Rocher’s ideas and those of his Indological colleagues serve to place him in the context of a scholarly tradition, while Rocher’s fundamental view that the Dharmaśāstra is first and foremost a scholarly and scholastic tradition, rather than a practical legal one, is also explored.
This invaluable collection serves both as a summary review of the ideas of Rocher, a leading authority in the field, and as a critical evaluation of the impact of these ideas on the present study of law and Indology.
Defining Hybrid Heroes
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Defining Hybrid Heroes: The Leadership Spectrum from Scoundrel to Saint defines the hero (and his or her journey) from a hybrid perspective, exploring the spectrum from scoundrel to saint. It utilizes a more dynamic and situational outlook, regarding heroism not only as a personal characteristic, but also as a series of heroic acts within a given situation.
The book examines the hybrid hero from several distinctive points of view, e.g. through lenses dominated by fiction, business, politics and psychology, and paints a new, more complex portrait that takes full advantage of the authors’ varied backgrounds. Inge Brokerhof has an academic background in psychology and has studied the impact of narrative fiction on workplace variables, such as career identity, employability and moral leadership. Stephan Sonnenburg has studied Joseph Campbell and the impact of the hero’s journey on creativity and innovation management. Greg Stone is a communications consultant who teaches executives and professors how to explain their work in clear and compelling language.
Kaori Ekuni
God's Boat
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Yoko teaches piano during the day, works at a bar at night and dreams of her disappeared lover every single minute. “Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I swear I will find you again”, he promised, and Yoko never stopped believing he would return. Her ten-year-old daughter Soko, born out of this brief passionate affair that marked her mother for ever, has had her life shaped by Yoko’s constant yearning, as the desperate search for the elusive man of her dreams means moving house more times than either of them can remember. The two travel through life on what Yoko calls “God’s boat”, moving from town to town, and for Soko from school to school, just as the narrative too shifts between the perspectives of the daughter and her mother, tracing them through the years as little by little the story of Yoko’s past emerges, and Soko tries to somehow build herself a future.
This haunting and sensitive novel combines the everyday patterns of the lives of mother and daughter, their rituals, their conversations, while always beyond these ordinary daily events lies what is hidden by Yoko’s seemingly unshakeable certainty: the spectre of madness and the indescribable pain of loss, so inextricably linked to the dazzling joy that only love can bring.
Edited by Uwe Skoda, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger
Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ examines the applicability of the concept of social exclusion in contemporary India, and addresses the following questions: How does an increasingly liberalised Indian economy contribute to processes of social inclusion and exclusion and to the reproduction of poverty and inequality? To what extent does the deepening of Indian democracy offer hitherto marginalised social groups new opportunities for pursuing strategies of inclusion? And how does ‘development’ alter the social terrain on which inequalities are negotiated? These and related discussions form the focal points of the volume. Importantly, the contributors deal explicitly with the simultaneity of processes of exclusion and inclusion, and with their entangled manifestation in social life. By applying the concept of social exclusion to concrete empirical case studies, the contributors expand conceptual horizons by keeping in mind that neither exclusion nor inclusion can be considered without its ‘alter ego’. The volume also challenges narrow conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion in terms of singular factors such as caste, policy or the economy. This collaborative endeavour and cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together younger and more established scholars, facilitates a deeper understanding of complex social and political processes in contemporary India.
Marietta Stankova
Bulgaria in British Foreign Policy, 1943–1949
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Located at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria serves as a natural stepping stone to the Straits, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Its geo-strategic position has frequently attracted foreign powers – including Great Britain and the Soviet Union – with an array of regional and global interests. [NP] A succession of Great Power influences in the Balkans both shaped Bulgaria’s international place and marked its domestic policy. This book explores Britain’s involvement in Bulgaria between 1943 and 1949, providing a new understanding of the origins of the Cold War in the region.
Divided into three parts, the book examines the priorities of Britain during and after World War II, investigates the practical integration of strategic and ideological objectives in British foreign policy, and maps Britain’s diminishing interest in the country alongside the parallel consolidation of communist power and the increasing Soviet presence.
Using recently released sources from the Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties and foreign ministries, the author revisits the question of British attitudes towards Eastern Europe. This book offers a new approach to understanding the origins of the Cold War in Bulgaria and bridges significant gaps in the treatment of the country in English-language literature.
Ronald D. Francis and Anona F. Armstrong
The Meetings Handbook
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘The Meetings Handbook: Formal Rules and Informal Processes’ is a comprehensive manual to the rules and issues of meetings, as well as a useful guide to understanding the informal processes that underlie the successful conduct of the business of meetings. The handbook gives the formal issues of meeting processes, including setting agendas and putting forward formal motions. It also canvasses informal aspects of meetings work, such as preparation, reading the non-verbal messages of participants, and insights into how to chair meetings and deal with those who seek to subvert the formal rules.
This handbook is a unique accompaniment to the more conventional legal books that are good formal guides. ‘The Meetings Handbook’ also includes examples of an ethical code, constitutions, agendas, and minutes. It features a reference list as well as the usual scholarly references. In order to make the work readily useable by the busy professional, the book is divided into sections that may act as ‘stand-alone’ guides to specific meetings issues and strategies.
Edited by Uwe Skoda, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger
Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ examines the applicability of the concept of social exclusion in contemporary India, and addresses the following questions: How does an increasingly liberalised Indian economy contribute to processes of social inclusion and exclusion and to the reproduction of poverty and inequality? To what extent does the deepening of Indian democracy offer hitherto marginalised social groups new opportunities for pursuing strategies of inclusion? And how does ‘development’ alter the social terrain on which inequalities are negotiated? These and related discussions form the focal points of the volume. Importantly, the contributors deal explicitly with the simultaneity of processes of exclusion and inclusion, and with their entangled manifestation in social life. By applying the concept of social exclusion to concrete empirical case studies, the contributors expand conceptual horizons by keeping in mind that neither exclusion nor inclusion can be considered without its ‘alter ego’. The volume also challenges narrow conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion in terms of singular factors such as caste, policy or the economy. This collaborative endeavour and cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together younger and more established scholars, facilitates a deeper understanding of complex social and political processes in contemporary India.
Éirinn & Iran go Brách
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00This book chiefly approaches Irish nationalist references to “Iran” as a conceptual lens for probing a broad array of developments in Irish nationalist formulations of Irish history (from ancient times to post-Norman conquests), as well as formulations of Irish identities and modes of “collective” nationalist recollection. Key thematic examples in the book range from the late eighteenth-century antiquarian debates on Irish origins to the “Iran/Erin” interchange in Irish nationalist poetry of the likes of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan in the first half of the nineteenth century, the coverage of the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–1857 in the Irish nationalist press, studies on Irish folklore by the likes of Lady Jane Wilde in the second half of the century, the emergent Aryanist discourse in some Irish nationalist circles after the mid-nineteenth century, Irish nationalist responses to the Iranian “Great Famine” of 1870–1872, references to Iran in the context of Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, Irish nationalist advocacy of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, and cross-territorial expressions of solidarity during and after the First World War. The only exception to the general timeline covered in the book is the section on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which serves as a means of interrogating the post-1922 shrinking world horizon of nationalist historiography and politics in the Irish Free State.
- In its specifically “Iran”-themed approach, this book highlights both the greater centrality of Iran in Irish nationalist antiquarianism after the late eighteenth century and in subsequent Irish nationalist folklore studies than hitherto acknowledged. At the same time, this book goes beyond explorations of Irish nationalist appropriations of “Iran” (past and contemporary) as reflected in a wide spectrum of debates ranging from antiquarian theories of Irish origins to studies on Irish folklore and mythology, as well as the manifold utilizations of Iran in Irish nationalist literature. Additionally, this book examines sporadic Irish nationalist interest in contemporary developments in Iran after the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably in the form of the protracted and multivalent Irish nationalist advocacy of Iranian sovereignty from 1907 to 1921. In the process, this book also highlights the persistently “worlded" framework of Irish-nationalist self- imaginations.
Individuals and Small Groups in Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book aims to increase our knowledge and deepen the understanding of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust by examining personal circumstances and characteristics of Jewish resistance members and the formation of small Jewish resistance groups during the Second World War. It is a carefully researched, fully annotated and referenced case study that examines primary and secondary sources, including evidence from oral history interviews with resistance members and documentary evidence, which have been conducted and was collected by the author during almost 40 years of research on the subject but were previously unavailable in English. It uses a qualitative analysis to investigate individual and small group manifestations of Jewish resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. This study contributes to historiography, but its focus enables a different interpretation and displays a new view of history. It is a scholarly work, but it is also easily accessible for students and general readers interested in this subject.