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These chapters celebrate Mexico City as a centre of cultural creativity, diversity and dynamism; trace its history from the founding of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to the present day; and explore how the varied experiences of its inhabitants have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Looking at the pre-Columbian city, colonial city and modern city, chapters show how Mexico City has grown organically, largely developed by waves of immigrants with new ideas and aspirations. While they have often envisioned the city in new ways, they have been unable to escape totally its historical past, and indeed at times have positively embraced it to serve contemporary political ends. As the city has grown, what it symbolises to its inhabitants and how they experience the city has become fragmented by social class and ethnicity. There is not one Mexico City, but many. The volume explores how these varied experiences have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Drawing from the fields of archaeology, history, political sociology, literature, cinema and photography, this volume provides an insight into the history and culture of Mexico City.

This book is a companion volume to the author's The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal, but while The Economics of Ecstasy engages the theoretical issues of secrecy and concealment associated with the Kartābhajās — a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra, an Indian religious movement notorious for its alleged use of shocking sexual language and rituals, this book presents the first English translation of the sect's body of highly esoteric, mystical poetry and songs. The period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, during which these lyrics were written, was an era of change, experimentation, and transition from the older medieval styles to the new literary forms of “modern” Bengal. The original songs presented are an important part of this transitional period, reflecting the search for new literary forms and experimentation in new poetic styles. Long disparaged as an inferior, low‐class, or corrupt form of Bengali literature, these songs are concerned with contemporary social life in colonial Calcutta and with the real lives of common lower‐class men and women. With their vision of a universal “religion of humanity,” open to men and women of all classes, the Kartābhajā songs offer an alternative model of community, which made a special appeal to the working classes of colonial Calcutta. They delight in ridiculing and satirizing the foppish British rulers and pretentious upper classes, although at the same time, however, the satirical urban imagery is mingled with older Tantric connotations and employed in ingenious new ways to express profoundly esoteric and mystical religious ideas.

This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.

This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss issues such as how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, and how to design welfare policies that work better. The third section presents new ways of thinking about poverty such as the integration of psychology and economics, nonmarket institutions, and interconnections between race and economic inequality.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this book reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. The book shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, this book recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.

How much did the British Empire cost, and how did Britain pay for it? This volume explores a source of funds much neglected in research on the financial structure of the Empire, namely revenue raised in the colonies themselves. Requiring colonies to be financially self-sufficient was one of a range of strategies the British government used to lower the cost of imperial expansion to its own Treasury. Focusing on British colonies in Africa, the book examines how their efforts to balance their budgets influenced their relationships with local political stakeholders as well as the imperial government. It finds that efforts to balance the budget shaped colonial public policy at every level, and that compromises made in the face of financial constraints shaped the political and economic institutions that were established by colonial administrations and inherited by the former colonies at independence.Using both quantitative data on public revenue and expenditure as well as archival records from archives in both the UK and the former colonies, this book follows the development of fiscal policies in British Africa from the beginning of colonial rule through the first years of independence. During the formative years of colonial administration, both the structure of taxation and the allocation of public spending reflected the two central goals of colonial rule: maintaining order as cheaply as possible, and encouraging export production. The book examines how the fiscal systems established before 1914 coped with the upheavals of subsequent decades, including the two world wars, the Great Depression, and finally the transfer of power.

The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the ‘domiciled community’, which was made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.