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Featuring an indirect chain of delegation and a reasonable correspondence to the singularity principle, the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg presents a number of characteristics that approximate the ideal type of parliamentary democracy. The country is a unitary parliamentary monarchy with a unicameral Parliament, and it has never used a referendum in the post-war period. Yet, a number of domestic institutions and policy-making procedures deviate from this ideal-typical picture, including collective decision-making within the cabinet and executive-legislative relations. Another constraint has been the country’s involvement in international organizations and arrangements that continuously reduce its sovereignty and thus the significance of the national chain of delegation and accountability.

While far from perfect, for much of the post-war period the Swedish chain of democratic delegation and accountability has not been affected by serious agency problems. Fierce electoral competition between two clearly defined blocs and two alternative visions of society allowed voters to be reasonably sure that elections would impact on the direction of national politics. At the same time, the minority status of most cabinets allowed for moderation in policy decisions. Since the late 1980s, however, Swedish politicians have increasingly been faced with distrust, lower electoral turnout, and a loss of party members. It is possible that the growing discrepancy between de facto power relations and the ideal-typical Constitution contributes to a declining popular trust in politicians and political parties.

By following out the argument that the classic social authority of the Symbolic function is waning in the neoliberal episteme, I argue that Althusserian interpellation fails to capture the kinds of subject formation underway in it. I then draw the connection directly to the Althusserian conceptualizations of social difference we inherit from early theorists of queer theory, specifically Judith Butler and Jose Esteban Muñoz. By tracing the Althusserian roots of these two theorists, I demonstrate how the dominant understandings of gender and race spawned by queer theory may be insufficient for thinking resistance in the neoliberal episteme.

Chapter 3 tackles the use (and abuse) of material tokens in tragic scenes of recognition, focusing primarily on Euripides’ Ionand Electra. The tokens reuniting Ion with his mother are replicas (mimêmata) that evoke the birth of Ericthonius, a mythical ancestor to the Athenian audience. It is argued that these tokens give a mythico-political cast to what might otherwise be characterized as a private reunion between a mother and her son. The recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra, usually read as a parody of the similar scene in the Choephoroi, more overtly politicizes the recognition of Orestes. Rejecting the familial tokens that had secured Orestes’ identity in the Choephoroi, Euripides’ re-staging has this scene instead hinge on the recognition of a bodily scar. The authentication, or recognition, of Orestes is thus made into a proto-exemplar for the audience of their own practice of scrutinizing citizens, known as the dokimasia.

This chapter argues that contemporary Asian American intellectuals, who prefer to see themselves and the objects of their inquiry as bad subjects, are haunted by the specter of the model minority. While model minority discourse allows for the inclusion of Asian Americans in American society at the cost of concessions to the legitimacy of American pluralism, the discourse of the bad subject allows for opposition to the hegemony of pluralism and capitalism, but at the cost of an inability to recognize meaningfully ideologically contradictory Asian Americans. The result of such a refusal is the failure of Asian American intellectuals to confront the transformation of Asian American identity into a commodity. The discourse of the bad subject also prevents Asian American intellectuals from seeing how they also practice interpellation, not only hailing those they identify as Asian Americans — who may think of themselves otherwise — but also hailing them to behave in particular ways as Asian Americans.

This chapter applies the concept of “the turn” in Louis Althusser’s theory of subject formation through interpellation by language to the musical turning points in medieval love lyrics that are tornadas, envois, and refrains. In most cases tornadas and envois are fragmentary half-stanzas that break the formal and thematic structure of the strophic canso and chanson with an abrupt change of voice and address, from the “timeless” idiomatic language of courtly love to a sudden rooting in the author’s present. Yet this moment of transparent subjectivity recycles rhymes, notes, and sometimes words in a way that resembles refrain procedures. Refrains in the context of dance songs are allegedly group responses, while in the context of chansons, motets, and narratives they often represent a quotation or reported song—a repetition of a different order. The familiar yet fresh musico-poetic turns of tornadas, envois, and refrains bring to the fore the paradox of agency and submission as well as ambiguities of subjectivity and expression inherent in medieval love songs; they formalize and thus authorize the disruption of the conventional voice, signaling the fissures between the self and the subject, as well as subjective and collective voices.

This chapter focuses on the multiplicity of possible black identities as improvised in various contexts where historical and geographical particularities play themselves out in different ways. Racial identifications and differences are shown to be a process of improvisation in which the other aspects of identity are clearly simultaneously at play. The chapter particularly explores the ways in which blackness articulates or possibly conflicts with gendered and national identities and traces some of the ways in which histories of oppression and the place of Africa in the social imaginary may be at work. Paradoxically, these multiplicities of identity are made apparent in moments of singularity, in which black identity is made the most prominent or most salient dimension of identity. These moments of singularity are empirically elaborated through the narratives of three black women in different contexts. The conferral of singularity by the Other has its roots in, and serves to entrench, racism. Conversely, the assertion of such singularity by individuals about and for themselves may serve strategic purposes of resistance and create connections across other forms of difference.

The chapter introduces the stakes of studying cool as exemplifying the dehistoricizing, formalizing effects of neoliberal social rationalities. It then explains key terms in the manuscript: social cathexis, interpellation, neoliberalism as an episteme, and the occlusion of both race and ethics. The chpater locates the book in several scholarly debates (about neoliberalism, race, gender, sexuality, intersectionality, and ethics).

This chapter constitutes a genealogy of the American nation-state and its vocation. It traces the origins of the American capitalist nation-state to the Puritan notion of “the calling”: the call from a Higher Cause that, in giving an identity to the called, renders him/her Its obedient servant, or, in Louis Althusser's language, an interpellated—subjected—subject.

This chapter draws from a social movements perspective to examine how 1990s-era probation privatization contests reshaped the penal field in ways that led CBOs and FBOs to become more deeply incorporated in criminal justice reform efforts. As neoliberal think tanks aggressively promoted transferring probation activities to for-profit firms, the American Probation and Parole Association (APPA)—a CSG-related organization representing probation officers—fended off such threats by building public-private partnerships with CBOs and FBOs. The CSG and APPA still sought to preserve the influence of elite civic organizations in criminal justice reform. However, once seated at the table of criminal justice reform, faith leaders participated in both pastoral and insurgent displays of prophetic redemption. The efforts of CRS/FORCE and LA Voice/the Homeboys LOC trace their origins to these evolving contests over criminal justice reform.

By considering recent writings on sectarianism, chapter five investigates why sect, in particular, becomes a relevant category (when it does). In the Syrian case, this means explicating the extent to which sectarian fears about existential survival came to work in tension with fantasies of multisectarian accommodation. Centered on a pair of rumors that both stimulated and exploited a sense of vulnerability justifying regime intervention, the chapter explores what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling,” the affective residual and emergent socialities that operate implicitly beneath the radar, often organizing ordinary experiences of atmosphere and situation before they are recognized explicitly. This chapter offers an account of what happens when this form of “residual sociality,” to borrow again from Williams, percolates to the surface. Eschewing the now tired debates between primordialism and social constructivism, the chapter uses Williams to advance the understanding of how interpellation works to produce attachments beyond the economic—forms of fantasy investment that, in the case of Syria, illustrate the affective gnarl and conundrums for judgment that result when the (relatively) impersonal claims of national identification chafe against sectarian communalism’s ordinary intimacies.

This book has examined specific dimensions of what modernising social work involves, some of which have attracted little attention to date. These dimensions are located within neo-liberalism; modernisation is, at base, a strategy for installing forms of policy and practice that are aligned with neo-liberalism's tenets, and stems from New Labour's ‘neo-liberal hard edge’. Modernisation has required ever-more detailed stipulations concerning the content and process of social workers' practice through performance management. Both the ends and the means of modernisation promote a vision of social work that seeks to massage away the tensions and dilemmas raised in day-to-day social work by difficult political and ethical questions with the balm of ‘technical’, ‘objective’, ‘neutral’ managerialism. Given the likely staying power of neo-liberalism as a political ideology for the foreseeable future, this chapter draws out themes from the preceding chapters that are likely to signify the terrain on which ongoing issues in the modernisation of social work will be played out. These are the intensification of work, individualisation of service users, inconvenience of discretion, and inscription or interpellation.

The first, post-1945 phase of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa, as in other colonised regions, was distinguished by literal belief structures: a strong, teleological faith in the actual existence of the nation as ‘people’, and the sense that history essentially unfolded as a process of that nation's coming-into-being. There was a belief, too, in Africa as in South Asia, as in the Caribbean, that the distinctive forms of modernity, in this case in particular the sovereign state, could be incorporated, indigenised, repatriated. These may seem at face value rather obvious statements to make about nationalism, which broadly demands some form of belief in the national entity and acts of loyalty expressed towards it. This chapter investigates the self-interpellation and self-inscription of second-generation male writers as indifferently national subjects. The Zimbabwean writers Chenjerai Hove and Dambudzo Marechera, and the British-resident Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri, experiment with metaphor, nightmare and fetish as the signifiers of a national reality, as opposed to viewing the nation as literal truth. The post-colony here becomes phantasmagoria and malaise.

Altdorfer's painting takes the place of memory. Just as the logic of memory is disturbed here, so the logic of Sebald's poem moves, not ungrammatically but also not exactly logically, from “Nürnberg in flames” to the painting by Altdorfer. As Huyssen's and numerous other accounts suggest, it is hard to resist Kiefer's paintings' intense interpellation of the spectator. That interpellation requires attention to the perspectival tradition in which he works and to the specificities of painting's placement of the spectator. Lot's wife is the original witness of a great massacre, but only a wholly secular and resistant reading of the Bible can rescue her as a figure analogous to the “witness” to the Holocaust. In both Genesis and Exodus, the theological register defines the power of the commandment: the Bilderverbot is divine and absolute.

Modernist historiography has long bracketed Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) and Okinawa as internal colonies, conventionally dismissing them from discussions of Japan’s imperial project. This historical perspective rationalizes and codifies the narrative that Hokkaido especially is an inherent, inalienable part of Japanese territory. However, this version of history begins to fall apart when we take account of the interrelations between Ainu women and ethnic Japanese men (wajin). The interpellation of Ainu women as objects of sexual desire established the intimate frontiers of Japan’s modernist recasting of Ezo as a distinctly Japanese imperial zone long before its political and administrative incorporation into the Japanese nation-state. The sexual subjectivity of these women in turn provides a different perspective revealing how Japan’s territorial expansion and its nascent imperialism was charted through the terrain of Ainu women’s bodies, and demonstrating how sexual intimacy and sexual violence are corollaries of political and physical power.

Chapter 4 examines the didactic message promoted by Hong Kong’s left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers (including the Union, Xinlian, Overseas Chinese and Hualian) through their lunlipian (Family melodrama or social ethics films). In particular, I argue that the pedagogical work of lunlipian was not merely through narratives of a reconfigured Confucian family, but also through the audience-hailing effect of marketing, which constructed cinemagoers as members of a collective family in Hong Kong’s postwar community. The critical intervention of this chapter is to unpack the usage and function of lunlipian from contextual, critical, and textual perspectives, and to theorize the social function of lunlipian as a didactic familial address that contributed to the postwar process of screening community. In theorizing the lunli mode of storytelling, this chapter suggests a new periodization of Cantonese golden age cinema that presents an alternative narrative, from one of aesthetic rupture and commercial decline, to one of moral and didactic continuity and industrial adaptation. Screening community during the 1960s therefore is constituted as a negotiated site of spectatorship as well as a strategy of audience address.

The way in which Dada aggression was refined in the textual form of the manifesto writings – in particular, the manifestos of Tristan Tzara and of Walter Serner – is the subject of this chapter, which takes twentieth-century philosophical detours in developing its argument for the works as ideology critique. What is argued here is the centrality of subjective destitution (detouring to contemporary readings of Fight Club and The Usual Suspects) as a position that the Dadaists entered via the manifesto texts, and from which a renewed and unconstrained cultural engagement became viable.

Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical, historical, and political dimensions of the term Chineseness as it relates to Chinese artists and global exhibitions. The question of artistic authenticity and what constitutes ‘Chinese contemporary art’ compels new approaches to addressing the identification of artists from China and diasporic elsewheres. The chapter tracks the development of the discourse of Chineseness, articulated by Rey Chow in 1998 as a theoretical problem derived from Orientalism’s systematic exclusivism separating the West from the non-West throughout the twentieth century. Contributions to the discursive shift in the twenty-first century were led by film theorists, including Chow, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, and Shu-mei Shih, who used the term Chineseness to theorize the diasporic differences among sinophonic film scripts in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese-America. In contrast, the bodily-oriented video works explored in this book update Chineseness as a performative identity. The subjects of film are connected to performance video through the concept of interpellation, traced to the influence of Mao on Althusser’s On Contradiction and the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’ Chineseness ultimately represents the fluid, unstable, unfixable meaning of ‘Chinese’ within historical and contemporary discourses for the staging of art and culture.

Chapter 2 focuses on Martel’s second feature, La niña santa, a film which depicts the anxious construction of hard-and-fast boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and horror, whilst revelling in the strangeness of a world in which everything – including its saintly-demonic heroine, and the moral and affective situations she negotiates, confounds these distinctions. In La niña santa, it is in particular the ideological conditions established by Catholicism – and their close relationship with constructions of femininity – which are subject to the scrutiny of Martel’s investigative gaze. The girls in this film suggest the possibility of resisting dominant narratives, a possibility with which the film is thematically and aesthetically engaged in multiple ways. The chapter explores the film’s aesthetic experiments alongside its foregrounding of the productive capacity of desire, arguing that both function to suggest ideological fissure and the glimpsing of alternative realities. Through its figuring of desire, and the female adolescent as agent of her desire, the film suggests the possibility of resistance to the subjective and identitarian roles and models into which she is socially summoned.

This epilogue offers a brief synopsis of each previous chapter and the overall arguments of the book. It also ponders how subaltern subjects, before the democratization of who can record and disseminate their worldview, refused or in some way manipulated the interpellating, imperial gaze. Though most of the book is concerned with how Dominican subjects negotiate being ghosted from various Western imaginaries, the epilogue considers the power of not being legible and not being recorded for posterity. It considers a short film and a photograph to muse on the difference between being recognized as a full human and as a citizen subject with full rights and being surveilled and quantified. I argue that the short film—which advertises a designer brand— and a rare 1904 photograph of a young Dominican girl, show a third space in which subaltern subjects were recorded as they refused the label of Otherness.