Items

• Shadow Play: Information Politics in Urban Indonesia
  Anthropologist Sheri Lynn Gibbings shows that information politics are the principal avenues through which the municipal government of Yogyakarta city seeks to implement its urban projects. Information politics are also the primary means through which street vendors, activists, and NGOs can challenge these plans. Through extensive interviews and lengthy participant observation in Yogyakarta, Gibbings shows that both state and non-state actors engage in transparency, rumours, conspiracies, and surveillance practices.
• Fostering Pluralism through Solidarity Activism in Europe Everyday Encounters with Newcomers
  Xenophobic and anti-immigrant movements have grown across Europe and North America, rejecting the value of cultural, ethnic and religious plurality. Yet, at the same time, civil society initiatives have proliferated with the aim of welcoming migrant and refugee newcomers. This edited collection brings together academics, artists, and members of civil society organizations to reflect on what it means to live together and to share the practices and projects they have found for opening up their communities to newcomers.
• Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice
  Women war criminals are far more common than we think. From the Holocaust to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, women have perpetrated heinous crimes. Few have been punished. These women go unnoticed because their very existence challenges our assumptions about war and about women. Biases about women as peaceful and innocent prevent us from "seeing" women as war criminals—and prevent postconflict justice systems from assigning women blame.
• Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering
  Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties.
• Asian Philosophies and The Idea of Religion: Beyond Faith and Reason
  With a focus on Asian traditions, this book examines a variety of thoughts and self-transformative practices that do not fit neatly on one side or another of the standard Western division between philosophy and religion.
• Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze
  Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze examines a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the catabasis, the heroic journey to the underworld.
• Beyond the Finish-Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-Finish
  In the 1880s photographers and sports enthusiasts confidently declared the end of dead heats in sporting competition. Reflecting a broader social belief in technology, proponents of the camera stressed that the device could provide definitive proof of who won and who lost. Yet despite this remedy for the inadequate human eye, competitive races between horses, boats, and bicycles ended too close to call a sole champion. More than a century later, when cameras can subdivide the second into ten-thousandths and beyond, athletes continue to cross the finish line in ties.
• Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty In Governing
  Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty in Governing addresses the ways in which camera-produced images are used to support governmental authority. The text begins by examining some of the basic levels at which the body interacts with media, and then expands the scope of the analysis to consider the use of CCTV in urban environments and how that affects the experience of space. This shows how the determination of the subject and the observer is affected by interaction with and exposure to images produced by cameras.
• Rumble and Crash: Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film
  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein.
• Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America. Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration
  The first decades of the new millennium have been marked by major political changes. Although The West has wished to revisit politics concerning migration policies, refugee status, integration, secularism, and the dismantling of communitarianism, events like the Syrian refugee crisis, terrorist attacks in France in 2015-16, and the 2008 economic crisis have resurrected concepts such as national identity, integration, citizenship and re-shaping state policies in many developed countries. Analyzing the cultural and political tensions between minority groups and the state in light of political events that question ideas of citizenship and belonging to a multicultural nation, the chapters in this volume serve as a testimonial to the multiple views on the political and public perception of multicultural practices and their national and international applicability to our current geopolitical context.
• Deleuze in Children's Literature
  Jane Newland explores how Deleuzian concepts can enhance and invigorate our readings of children's literature, whose implied readership masks much paradox. She focuses on children’s texts by some of the authors who fascinate Deleuze, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, André Dhôtel, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and Michel Tournier.
• Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited
  Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers and proposes new directions for the study of films produced by American motion picture studios between 1917 and 1960.
• Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare
  Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of both physical disability and "madness" in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare’s works.
• Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film
  Criminalization/Assimilation traces how Classical Hollywood films constructed America’s image of Chinese Americans from their criminalization as unwanted immigrants to their eventual acceptance when assimilated citizens.
• Ghost Geographies: Fictions
  Fleeing communist Budapest by air balloon, a wrestler tries to reinvent himself in Canada. On a formal invitation from the Party's General Secretary, a Belgian bureaucrat “defects” to communist Hungary, chasing the dream of a better world. Meanwhile, a provocateur filmmaker drinks and blasts his way to a final, celluloid confrontation with fascism, while an enfant terrible philosopher works on his prophetic, posthumously panned masterpiece, Dyschrony. These are among the decadent and absurd characters who hover around the promise and failure of utopia across the pages of Ghost Geographies.
• W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator
  W. G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator considers the possibility of redemption in the work of one of the twentieth century’s most significant authors.