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For Maria Edgeworth, women's exclusion from professional labour frees them from the requirement to tailor their knowledge to the demands of a single specialisation: it provides them with ‘leisure to be wise’. This chapter questions the social utility of the intellectual capital that this formulation allows women to accrue. It compares accounts of female readers with their male counterparts, asking how the issue of gender helps to distinguish leisured wisdom from unproductive indolence. Using the example of Edgeworth's Belinda, it revisits the idea of reading as symbolic labour, attending both to its positive agency and its limitations.

The materiality of print objects took on increased significance with the explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century, as artists from Henry James to the modernists sought to differentiate themselves from the mass of print culture. The pursuit of distance from commoditized print culture—whether it took the form of theories of aesthetic autonomy or the creation of specialized micro-markets—necessarily involved writers, editors, and other print professionals with the materiality of texts. This setting produced widely divergent attempts to gain symbolic capital through the creation of material print objects—from expensive editions de luxe to egalitarian political gestures such as Harold Monro’s poetic broadsides and cheap periodicals. This chapter surveys the field of material texts and the problems of literary value in the early twentieth century, which it elucidates using theories of cultural value ranging from Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein-Smith and cultural anthropologist David Graeber.

Chapter 8 considers the importance of the secular state, the development of the public sphere, and mass media, as well as the impact of these on Nioro as a social and religious space at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the question of the Hamawiyya and its absent shaykh, it discusses the development of a new incipient tradition of Islam that allows some to bypass some of the debates between Muslims in this religious center.

By tracing the trajectory of Chinese danmei fandom in the past two decades, this chapter explores the possibility of danmei as a model of grassroots globalization. The chapter focuses on three key aspects of Chinese danmei fandom: the establishment of online and offline infrastructures, the formation of different danmei circles, and the emergence of a women-dominated online public sphere. The authors seek to use the example of danmei fandom to challenge the masculinized, top-down model of thinking about transnational cultural flows that overemphasizes national origin, the industrial player, the official economy, and the competition for soft power at the expense of other glocalized, noninstitutionalized, nonprofit, noncompetitive ways of cultural exchange.

This Introduction offers a critical political and social context for Algeria 1988-2015. It makes the case for thinking about the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities and the need to do so through a range of methodological approaches that are attentive to the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. It argues for the need to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988–2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. Reviewing the chapters that compose the volume it makes the case for a form of enquiry that offers historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in our approach to understanding contemporary Algeria. In particular, it makes the case for the existence of a variety of cultural public spheres in Algeria and their importance to the country’s transition.

The first half of this chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s two-track model of democratic politics avoids the two charges Chantal Mouffe raises against his deliberative approach, namely, rationalism and individualism. Habermas’s account of an ‘anarchic’ public sphere of informal opinion-formation does not require the elimination of the passions, nor is it blind to collective actors. Quite the opposite. The second half argues that Mouffe’s agonism is beset by internal difficulties. First, her account of the affective dimension of collective identifications insufficiently theorises the role of the passions and fantasy in democratic life. Second, her claim that a universal ‘we’ is a conceptual impossibility is not sufficient defended. Third, there is a continual slip between a possible and a necessary antagonism that is no mere slip: rather, it reveals an unresolved dilemma at the heart of her project.

The concluding chapter returns to the question of changing ideas about and practices of Islam and some of the ongoing tensions around Islam and authority in Mali and particularly in Nioro as a profoundly transformed Islamic religious center.

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in relation to feminist periodicals of her time. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, it considers The Freewoman (edited by Dora Marsden) and Time and Tide (edited by Lady Margaret Rhondda) alongside Woolf’s imagined Outsiders’ Society. The chapter finds numerous shared concerns and strategies between these feminist periodicals and Woolf’s writings in and about Three Guineas, including questions of distribution, cost, allegiance to official movements, and relationship to readers. Critics have often interpreted Three Guineas as advocating a withdrawal from the public sphere; however, this chapter argues that implicit in Woolf’s discussion of women and the potential for political action is a model of feminist periodical publication, oriented towards rather than turning away from a Habermasian public sphere.

This chapter demonstrates how the introduction of large screens to contemporary public spaces function to assimilate diverse arts, commercial, and public forms into a conservative regime. On the one hand, the new opportunities that accompany the large public screens are subverted by the logic of capitalist accumulation, which informs a public address designed to achieve high volumes of individual engagement, rather than high quality public engagement. On the other hand, new opportunities to enhance public engagement are subjected to bureaucratic modes of governance, which pre-emptively censor content such that it extends and satisfies conservative regimes of early broadcast regulation. The authors argue that the confluence of capitalist and bureaucratic regimes governing big screens effectively balkanise audiences, valorise nondemocratic forms of participation, and privatise public spaces.

The prolegomenon depicts the relation between a therapist and his client, who was sexually abused by his mother from the age of six and one-half to fourteen, became one of Berlin’s leading pimps, and, after serving 8 years in prison, founded a charity devoted to sexually abused children. The anthropologist accompanies the two men as they do public readings of a book the therapist wrote about the client’s life and self-transformation. And he explores the basis for therapeutic empathy in their relations with mothers, fathers, and their own pasts. What kind of intervention was he, an American anthropologist, observing in this public reading of the personal reflections from someone’s therapy? What kind of treatment is this, where the private details of the patient’s life are discussed in public and justified as having positive therapeutic effects on his wellbeing? Does presenting the story of the client’s abuse by his mother in public constitute a form of atonement for his pimping, facilitating his goal of Wiedergutmachung: making amends for his past, modifying his hate of women, transforming his self, and protecting children from a fate such as his. And what are we to make of the alleged psychic change of this man?

Explores unusual – and often culturally problematic – models of masculinity and their relationship to food, taking into consideration male characters as nurturers and caretakers both in the private and the public sphere. The analysis considers how these films operate in seeming opposition to films that tend to use food unobtrusively to reinforce dominant models of masculinity. Under closer examination, movies such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallström, 1993), Heavy (James Mangold, 1995), Eat Your Heart Out (Percy Adlon, 1997), and later Spanglish (James L. Brooks, 2004) and Sideways (Alexander Payne 2004), reveal that these seemingly different and innovative images reiterate mainstream forms of manhood and thus reinforce gender hierarchies. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) provide the necessary background to the discussion about the relationship among men, cooking, and masculinity.

This chapter discusses the transformation of sectarianism from a channel for public participation in the political sphere into an obstacle to this participation. Identity politics, which includes sectarianism, means popular participation in service of political interests presented as the interests (in our case) of the ta’ifa. And although this sectarianism politicizes the masses and drives them into the public sphere, it nonetheless quickly becomes an obstacle to popular participation, and specifically to democratic transformation. It is no coincidence that there are no federations or confederations of ta’ifas. A federation in a modern state is either merely administrative or based on ethnic and cultural units. But collective rights are possible in a liberal democracy, assuming that they are based on citizens’ rights.

The last chapter of the book synthesises the discussions of the relation between constituent power, freedom, and institutional politics throughout the book. The chapter argues that it is one thing to counter the perceived groundlessness and formlessness of constituent power with the formalism of political institutions, but that it is a more ambitious task altogether to re-conceptualise the constituent power as encompassing the dual ambition of both constituting new political regime forms and a care for the stability and durability of those institutions. The council tradition, the chapter argues, provides an excellent vantage point for such re-conceptualisation of the constituent power. Moreover, the chapter argues that democracy have always been criticised for being anarchic, formless, and volatile – starting with Plato and Aristotle and reiterated by numerous political thinkers throughout history. The ambition of institutionalising the constituent power without exhausting it, which is the object of this chapter, is thus also an attempt to defend democracy against this critique, but without relinquishing its relation to radical transformation. Council democracy, in this interpretation, becomes a way of controlling the constituent power without completely exhausting it, thereby giving the citizenry continual access to the powers of self-transformation, co-creation and constituent freedom.

Considers instead the relationship between women and food, in professional and domestic environments. Cooking is presented as a way for women to assert themselves and their independence, while at the same time allowing unconventional negotiations of gender, class, and race with their environment. Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1999), No Reservations (Hicks, 2007) and its German predecessor Mostly Martha (Nettelbeck, 2001), Waitress (Shelly, 2007), The Ramen Girl (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2008), and Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009) present the lead (white) female characters as powerful and autonomous, but the films collectively work to undermine the characters’ political agency at the expense of their ability to function in the kitchen. As such, they tend to privilege a heterosexist perspective and elevate white characters over characters of color.

This chapter analyzes the extent to which the Egyptian public sphere, especially religious institutions were controlled by the ruling authoritarian regime. Eventually, both the state's dominance over institutions and society, along with the established religious institutions' discourse, became stagnant, which precipitated the development of new social movements that were able to mobilize people beyond the stagnant religious discourse. These developed a new discourse, based on human rights, freedoms and social equality. Through developing their new discourse, new secular social movements did not undermine Egyptian's religious consciousness, but rather developed new ideals, in harmony with the Egyptian political culture, but beyond the constraints of the main religious institutions.

A core message of the book is that authoritarian populism (Brexit nationalism) is a state of affairs where emotions are orchestrated by an increasingly demagogic subsection of the elite to polarise, mobilise and demonise, a reactive, illiberal and antagonist form of politics. It presents a threat in that although perhaps it has manifested itself in one of its most extreme forms in Britain through Brexit, it is in fact an endemic threat to all of Europe. In January 2019 a group of thirty lead European thinkers, writers, historians and nobel laureates, declared that Europe as an idea was “coming apart before our eyes” and the consequences would be “calamitous” if the rising tide of populism was not challenged. The final section of the book seeks to identify the panacea to the rise of authoritarian populism and forms of agonism, both in Britain and Europe. Britain’s future relationship with the EU will be a key determiner in Britain’s course as a nation, hence the book advocates Britain’s eventual re-entry into a reformed European Union grounded within the concept of Social Europe and a conception of identity that is inclusive and accommodated in a structural framework that is deliberative and egalitarian. The chapter also seeks to challenge ‘post-truth’ politics through a reformed public sphere and inclusive and bridging speech acts and rhetoric. Finally, the chapter reflects on the value of critical multiculturalism as a mechanism that might dispel monoculturalism and nativism.