How do elected governments deal with the military in the long term after authoritarianism? Today democracies all over the world are experiencing the unavoidable clashes of power between public authorities and those holding the monopoly of force. The enduring problems of civil-military relations, from ending unaccountable corporate privileges to the militarisation of public security, mark past, present, and future governance relations in uneven and unique ways. By unpacking theoretical and empirical manifestations of modern-day governance, Governing the military sketches the ongoing attempts to legitimise civilian control in Chile since the demise of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. The book explores the challenges posed when strengthening subordination mechanisms and imposing control and effectiveness measures over traditional military roles and missions, but also militarised responses to natural catastrophes and pandemics. The collaborators to the volume present timely findings for the study of democracy, governance, and policymaking while also discussing new developmental demands, human rights, and the spread of populism. Collectively, these chapters argue that civilian-led military policies are constructed and managed through the interaction of many institutions. Making, leading, and reforming the governance of the military in times of peace is a networked and multi-faceted endeavour. Intended for a broad readership concerned with the politics and policies of the state and security, Governing the military provides a detailed analysis on pressing military issues, including inter-agency coordination, defence expenditure, transparency and corruption, and international policy engagements.
This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It examines works such as The Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, arguing that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone. Deploying diverse methodologies, the book asks how premodern whiteness as a representational trope both produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: courtly love and beauty, masculine subjectivity, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, labour and consumption, social ethics or racialised European identity. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment. If whiteness has hardened into an identity politics defined by skin tone alone, this book argues that it has not always been so. Operations of whiteness may genereate differences that fabricate, structure and connect the social world, but these operative differences of whiteness are never transparent, stable or permanent.
This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.
This book brings together a range of Indigenous perspectives, forming a global network of writers, thinkers, and scholars connected by common investments in Indigenous futures.
The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood. -- .
The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.
Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in C19th visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.
Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing. -- .
Turning the conventional Break-Up of Britain narrative inside-out, this book scans the horizon of overseas projections of British identities that unravelled during the decades of global decolonisation
In a world of deep political divisions and rising inequality, many of us feel the need for some form of collective resistance and transformative joint action. Calls for solidarity are heard everywhere. This book presents a critical proposal to guide our reflection on what solidarity is and why it matters. How is solidarity distinct from related ideas such as altruism, justice and fellow-feeling? What value does acting in solidarity with others have? In his lead essay, Andrea Sangiovanni offers compelling answers to these questions, arguing that solidarity is not just a fuzzy stand-in for feelings of togetherness but a distinctive social practice for an anxious age. His ideas are then put to the test in a series of responses from some of the world's foremost philosophers and political theorists.
Decorators and designers have long experimented with materials, objects and technologies to enhance sensory awareness and wellbeing. But existing histories of interior design rarely feature any discussion of the senses. This volume offers a corrective, exploring how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilized within various forms of interior. Grouped into three thematic clusters, exploring sensory politics, aesthetic entanglements and sensual economies, the chapters in this volume shed light on sensory expressions and experiences of interior design throughout history. They examine domestic and public interiors from the late-sixteenth century to the present day, giving back the body its central role in the understanding and use of interiors. Drawing from fields including design history, design studies and sensory studies, The senses in interior design explores fundamental questions about identities, social structures and politics that reveal the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration.
This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative as well as destructive capacities, which create and transform urban space and time. By looking at the different ways in which the spatial and temporal configuration of cities produce and shape violence, the authors contextualise the dynamics of urban violence and show how violence affects everyday urban spatial practices and rhythms. Violence may reconfigure spatialities and temporalities in cities in the long term, changing the physical and social space as well the rhythms of a city. Memories and imaginations of violence are also inscribed in city-space, often in several temporal layers, and can lead to new violence through politicised practices of commemoration. In The spatiality and temporality of urban violence, authors from a range of disciplines apply this spatiotemporal perspective to nine diverse case studies, based on original material collected during ethnographic and archival research. The chapters cover cities in different world regions and historical phases, offering translocal and transregional perspectives. This fresh new perspective challenges assumed binaries of cities in the global North and South, and contests the alleged difference between violence in the past and in the present.
This is the first scholarly collection to focus on the special importance of British cinema to folk horror. The chapters consider the artistic styles, historical contexts, cultural tensions and cinematic fears that distinguish folk horror from other forms of horror and from traditional ways of viewing the folk.
By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information were a recurring feature in conceptualist artworks. Charting space offers a rich study of conceptualisms' mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representations. Departing from the perspective that artists were merely recording and communicating information, this book explores the philosophical and political imperatives within their artistic practices. The volume brings together twelve in-depth case studies that address artists' deep engagement with space at a time when concepts of space were garnering new significance in art, theory and culture. It covers a diverse range of subjects, such as London's socio-spatial sphere in the 1970s, geopolitics and decoloniality in Brazil, the global networking strategies of the Psychophysiology Research Institute in Japan, the subjective body in relation to cosmological space from the Great Basin Desert in the United States and notions of identity and race in the urban itinerant practices of transnational artists. The chapters shed light on an evident 'spatial turn' from the postwar period into the contemporary and the influence of larger historical, social and cultural contexts on it. The contributors illustrate how conceptualism's cartographies were critical sites to formulate artists' politics, graph heterogenous spaces and upset prevailing systems. It is a resourceful tool for scholars, students, curators and readers interested in postwar and contemporary art.
Situating religion and medicine in Asia illuminates how Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation were mobilised in their originary times and places. Although many such practices have survived today, they circulate in new forms - within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives and as subjects of neurological study. Labels such as 'alternative', 'complementary' and 'wellness'- privilege medical authority and a detachment from religion writ large, implying a distance between 'medicine' and 'religion' that is not reflective of the originary contexts of these practices. This volume makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on medical and religious practices in East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas, inviting a new comparative frame outside the history of science and religion in Europe. It illustrates how practices from divination and demonography to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of the medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of 'medicine' and 'religion'. The book assembles empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, and enables comparison across the geographic, temporal and conceptual range, providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.
This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century. -- .
As the pursuit of profit becomes increasingly surreal, virtual, and exotic by the day, the symbiosis between libidinal and financial flows demands to be reframed and rethought. Clickbait capitalism offers a stimulating and game-changing introduction to how the current confluence of economy and desire pre-empts our behaviour, structures our identity, influences our decisions, and tugs at our wallets.>Lie back on the couch with this book and let it analyse your triggers and traumas about student debt and intergenerational inequity. Ramble down the royal road of the unconscious, interpreting the collective delirium from Cryptokitties to cryogenics, Squid Game to GameStop. These bracing chapters, invoking theorists from Adorno to Zizek, fuse psychology and economics to diagnose the neuroses of our moment. The results are electric!>Desire plays a crucial yet poorly understood role within economic life. This is increasingly untenable as potent new cultures of desire take shape around the intersection of digital technology and finance. Clickbait capitalism stages an encounter between psychoanalysis, political economy, and the calling cards of twenty-first-century capitalism. Drawing on a theoretical tradition known as 'libidinal economy', the book engages digital-economic life as a site of ongoing psychological capture and release. The result is a unique survey of the moods and structures of feeling that underwrite capitalism today, from online paranoia and the ecstatic mania of the crypto-boom to the escape and revenge fantasies of the indebted young. Adopting a pluralistic approach, the book offers a range of new perspectives on the psychological foundations and ongoing viability of capitalism as a social formation and economic system.
A city burns, and a queen burns for love: Dido, Queen of Carthage re-imagines one of the great legendary stories. The encounter between a wandering hero and an African queen engenders love and loss, eroticism and absurdity, childish simplicity and compelling eloquence. This Revels Plays volume is the first single-text scholarly edition of Dido in English. It is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners. Dido's time has come, with accelerating interest, critical and theatrical, in the play. The edition features an accessible text, lightly punctuated for ease in reading and speaking, with spelling more consistently modernised. The introduction gives the first comprehensive account of the play since M.E. Smith's 1977 monograph, locating Dido within its theatrical, pedagogical, literary, political, and cultural contexts. Dido is here considered on its own terms, as a 1580s play intended for children to perform, but also as a play of multiple possibilities that speaks to the present. The edition incorporates new research into authorship (which indicates that Marlowe wrote the play), as well as a detailed analysis of Dido's sources. It includes a survey of criticism and considers the implications of writing for performance; it assesses the evidence for early performances and provides extensive information about modern productions. Dido is a remarkable play. In its own time, it was revolutionary, featuring a dominant female role, experimental blank verse, and a refusal to moralise. And soon thereafter, as Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith propose, Dido became 'the play Shakespeare could not forget'.
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