A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Review of THE CHENWEI RIDDLE: TIME, STARS, AND HEROES IN THE APOCRYPHA. By Licia Di Giacinto. (Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 13). Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2013. Pp. xi + 332. 25 Figures, 40 Tables, 4 Appendices, List of Illustrations, Bibliography.

A multilingual podcast, recorded in August 2005 by native speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese, found proverbs with a similar meaning in each culture. The author arranged this podcast during a Translation class between Japanese and English with fourth year students at Shinonome University in Matsuyama, on Shikoku island in Western Japan.

This paper deals with the political ideology of late pre-imperial and early imperial China as documented by remnants of an under-explored genre known in English as weft (wei 緯) writings or “Confucian Apocrypha”. It focuses on the transcendence of hierarchy and sovereignty, the transfer of dynastic legitimacy, and the pragmatic vehicle of “tang…[Read more]

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]

Few of Arendt’s writings have drawn more criticism from her own supporters than “Reflections on LIttle Rock,” in which she opposes the federally mandated desegregation of schools. I take Arendt’s comments as a way of opening up problems in her conception of the relationship among political storytelling, plurality and judgment. I do this through a…[Read more]

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts…[Read more]

The prints featured in this exhibition are all products of the Meiji period (1868–1912), a time of massive cultural and institutional transformation in Japanese culture. The era is characterized by rapid westernization brought about after the opening of Japanese ports in 1854 and the subsequent restoration of the Meiji Emperor in 1868. The p…[Read more]

The British State has been terraformed over recent decades through the changing spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation in the world-system entailed in financialisation, neoliberalsiation, and the emergence of global cities. A new post-industrial constellation of political domination has thus emerged in that state that requires urgent…[Read more]

In recent years social scientists have been interested in the growth and transformation of global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial…[Read more]

The twentieth-century debate between modernist and postcolonial scholars around the figure of W.B. Yeats should move beyond purely modern or postcolonial frameworks. Yeats’s poems can be read as meditations through which the Irish poet both anticipates the promise of a postcolonial, modern world, and yet remains attached to the lasting structures…[Read more]

The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in
the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding
housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In
contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty thr…[Read more]

Given the transformation in the government of academic life over recent decades, the
article attempts to derive a political critique of the changing psychosocial conditions of academic
life via a historical juxtaposition with the nomos of the labour camp in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago. The aim is to address the need to think beyond n…[Read more]

This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and…[Read more]

The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]