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Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures argues that ancient rabbis and Christians used death penalty discourse to invent themselves as figures of authority. This approach runs counter to much previous scholarship on the subject, which claims that ancient Jews opposed the death penalty and would have abolished it if not for its presence in the Bible. The book explores this scholarship and shows it to have been fueled by modern anti-Semitism, polemics with the the Jewish Enlightenment’s inheritance of anti-rabbinism, as well as controversy in the United States over capital punishment and its abolition. The book moves beyond this “humanitarianism” approach, inviting us instead to see the problem of building and maintaining authority as the crux around which ancient death penalty discourse developed. Drawing on ritual theory, postcolonial theory, and scholarship on criminal execution in other historical contexts, Execution and Invention asks new questions of the ancient texts: How and why do ancient western religions talk about killing criminals? What are the social consequences of this kind of violent talk? What kind of authority is imagined by these texts, and What strategies do the texts use to make this authority seem compelling? Combining the contemporary theory with classical source critical approaches, the book closely reads a variety of ancient texts describing criminal executions. It newly interprets these texts, showing that their descriptions of violent deaths have a complex social function. In the process, the book spins out the social implications of capital punishment and overturns enduring stereotypes of Judaism and Christianity.

This book explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where they are often seen as the enemy of the postcolonial state. This study, in turn, raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, particularly in their struggle for the control of performance space in territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. The book calls for the alliance of art and people power and freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern states. Art, it argues, needs to be active, engaged, insistent on being what it has always been, and the embodiment of dreams for a truly human world.

This book is an extended argument about the “coloniality” of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, this book points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. It explores the crucial notion of “colonial difference” in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which the book calls “border thinking.” Further, the book expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling on the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. The book's concept of “border gnosis,” or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. A new preface discusses this book as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History.

Drawing lessons from the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, television, dance-drama, and ethnography, this book presents a unique analysis of Indian activist thought spread over two centuries. It discusses two presuppositions of liberal individualism: personal autonomy and ethical autonomy. Besides, it argues that the ‘individual’ has been creatively indigenized in modern non-Western cultures: thinkers attentive to gender in postcolonial cultures embrace selected ethical premises of the Enlightenment and its human rights discourse while they refuse possessive individualism. Debating influential schools of postcolonial and transnational studies, the chapter provides radical argument through a rich tapestry of gender portrayals drawn from two moments of modern Indian thought: the rise of humanism in the colony and the growth of new individualism in contemporary liberalized India. From autobiographical texts by nineteenth century Bengali prostitutes, point-of-view photography, as well as women-centred dance-dramas and essays by Rabindranath Tagore to representation of Tagore's works on mainstream television, video, and stage; feminist cinema, choreography and performance by Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar respectively—the book makes use of such and much more to creatively engage with empire, media, and gender.

How can we respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? This book offers proposals on how to address the challenge of difference for constructive theological purposes. Toward this end, the objective of this book is three-fold: 1) to make the case for why ongoing attentiveness to differences of race and sexuality is needed in order to avoid the imposition of white racial privilege and heterosexual privilege; 2) to make creative use of poststructuralism principally (Judith Butler, Michel Foucault), but also postcolonial, queer, and other theoretical resources in order to complicate our understanding of embodied selfhood, moral agency, and empowerment; and 3) to make constructive proposals in light of those theories on methodological issues (e.g., appeals to women's experience, to the erotic, or to women's solidarity), on hermeneutical issues (e.g., white feminist uses of the literature of women of color or interpreting biblical texts that harbor patriarchal, imperialist, heteronormative, and other biases), and on doctrinal issues (e.g., sin, creation in the image of God, and christology). New theoretical resources are indispensable for analyzing divisive issues in feminist theology today, and for carving out new avenues for critical negotiation with a religious tradition that feminists see as both alienating and sustaining, repressive and empowering.

Islamism is often associated with oppositional social movements. However, increasingly, Muslim states too have served as agents of Islamism. They have adopted Islamization strategies, and realigned state ideology and policy‐making to reflect Islamist ideals and to fulfill demands of Islamic ideology. They have done so not only as a reaction to Islamist challenges from below but also to harness the energies of Islamism to expand state power and capacity. By co‐opting Islamism, they have strengthened the postcolonial state. Pakistan during the Zia ul‐Haq period, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohammad have been at the forefront of this trend, devising Islamization from above strategies that allowed these weak states to effectively alleviate limitations before exercise of state power and to pursue goals such as economic growth. The Islamization of the postcolonial state underscores the importance of religion and culture to state power and capacity.

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents.

This is a guide-book that brings forth the art and architecture of Macao and the baroque treasures that make the territory of Macao so attractive. The book aims to help with an understanding of the complex history and layout of the city as a Portuguese ex-colony founded in the sixteenth century, as a postcolonial city, and as a modern Chinese city. As the chapters consider the special nature of Macao's baroque, they discuss whether its Chinese architecture—its temples, gardens and houses—is also baroque; and what is the importance of the new casino architecture, much of which imitates “the baroque” in its postmodern character. They weave discussion of Camões' epic poem, The Lusiads, about Portuguese imperialism, and Chinnery's paintings into the exploration of Macao's present buildings. To create this new way of looking at Macao, the chapters draw on critical, cultural, and “postmodern” theory inspired by the baroque, discussing in particular what the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze can bring to our understanding of Macao and the baroque. The book gives light to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and theory about cities, and helps with the understanding of this through the detailed reading it gives of the streets of Macao. It examines Macao's heritage, and asks as much about the cultural memories stored up in the city as it does about its new and exciting architecture.

This is a literary history that examines British writing about the East—centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific—in the colonial and postcolonial period. It takes as its subject “the East” that was real to the British imagination, largely the creation of writers who described and told stories about it, descriptions and stories coloured by the experience of empire and its aftermath. The book discusses the work of writers such as Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covers less-well-known literary authors, including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O'Hanlon in Borneo. It produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of “figures” or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it—tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself. The book raises issues of identity and representation; power and knowledge; and, centrally, the question of how to represent other people.

Afro‐Greeks explores dialogues between anglophone Caribbean literature and the complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, from the 1920s to the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Classics still bears the negative associations of the colonial educational curriculum that was thrust upon the British West Indies with the Victorian triad of the three Cs (Cricket, Classics, and Christianity). In a study that embraces Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, John Figueroa, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Eric Williams, the author traces a distinctive regional tradition of engaging with Classics in the English‐speaking Caribbean. She argues that, following on from C. L. R. James's revisionist approach to the history of ancient Greece, there has been a practice of reading the Classics for oneself in anglophone Caribbean literature, a practice that has contributed to the larger project of the articulation of the Caribbean self. The writers examined offered a strenuous critique of an exclusive, Western conception of Graeco‐Roman antiquity, often conducting this critique through literary subterfuge, playing on the colonial prejudice that Classics did not belong to them. Afro‐Greeks examines both the terms of this critique, and the way in which these writers have made Classics theirs.

The literature of Malaysia and Singapore, the multicultural epicentre of Asia, offers a rich body of source material for appreciating the intellectual heritage of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Focusing on themes of home and belonging, this book illuminates many aspects of identity anxiety experienced in the region, and helps construct a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the Anglophone literatures of Singapore and Malaysia. A chronologically ordered selection of texts is examined including Swettenham, Bird, Maugham, Burgess, and Thumboo. This genealogy of works includes colonial travel writings and sketches as well as contemporary diasporic novels by Malaysian and Singapore-born authors based outside their countries of origin. The premise is that home is a physical space as well as a symbolic terrain invested with social, political, and cultural meanings.

This book provides a new island archaeology and island history of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Cyprus, set in its eastern Mediterranean context. By drawing out tensions between different ways of thinking about theoretical issues such as insularity and connectivity, ethnicity, migration, and hybridization, it addresses a dynamic new field of archaeological enquiry — the social identity of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean islanders. The archaeological record of Cyprus during the centuries between about 2700–1000 BC — including architecture, the mortuary record, pottery, figurines, seals and sealings, ivories, metalwork, and the broader Cypriot landscape — is presented. Using this material evidence, the book re‐evaluates from the postcolonial perspective of hybridization long‐standing notions about ethnicity, migration, and colonization on the island at the beginning and end of the Bronze Age, and concludes that the Cypriotes themselves provided the main impetus for social development and change on the island. By addressing directly the theoretical underpinnings of various interpretations of the material record, and by comparing and contrasting that record with all relevant documentary evidence, this book considers how a more contextualized, nuanced treatment of the motivations and practices involved in demographic movement, individual or group identification, cultural entanglement, and social change can help us to re‐present several complex aspects of the Cypriot past, and in turn bring them to bear upon Mediterranean archaeologies.

This unique interdisciplinary collective project is the culmination of research and translation work conducted by AUC students of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds who continue to witness Egypt's ongoing revolution. This historic event has produced an unprecedented proliferation of political and cultural documents and materials, whether written, oral, or visual. Given their range, different linguistic registers, and referential worlds, these documents present a great challenge to any translator. The contributors to this volume have selectively translated chants, banners, jokes, poems, and interviews, as well as presidential speeches and military communiqués. Their practical translation work is informed by the cultural turn in translation studies and the nuanced role of the translator as negotiator between texts and cultures. The chapters focus on the relationship between translation and semiotics, issues of fidelity and equivalence, creative transformation and rewriting, and the issue of target readership. This mature collective project is in many ways a reenactment of the new infectious revolutionary spirit in Egypt today.

As even a cursory look at global politics today reveals, a large number of countries, including China, Mexico, Russia, India, Hungary, the Philippines, and Haiti, are actively involved in institutionalizing their relationships among groups constituted as their diasporas. Introducing the concept of the “domestic abroad,” this book argues that despite the existence of informal, and in some cases formal, links between diasporas and their homelands in the past, we are now witnessing a far more widespread and qualitatively different phenomenon. The production of the domestic abroad rests, first, on the constitution of diasporas as subjects of an expanded, territorially diffused nation and the proliferation of institutional links connecting this “global” nation. But the domestic abroad is also a product of the economic transformation of the state, a transformation broadly categorized as neoliberal restructuring. This book argues that these two processes—political and economic, affecting nation and state—far from being distinct, are in fact intimately related and that it is only by unraveling their mutually constitutive relationship that we can make sense of the domestic abroad phenomenon. Empirically, this argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the production of the Indian domestic abroad. The latter half of the book focuses on the structuring and restructuring of postcolonial India to reveal the manner in which the boundaries of the Indian nation and the extent of the authority of the Indian state are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist social relations on both global and national scales.

This book opens up a new direction for postcolonial studies by creating concepts of agency, resistance and transformation that allow positive roles for desire and difference in the development of social forms. It argues that non-imperial concepts of selfhood, relationship and material transformation are embedded within the minor tradition of Western philosophy described by the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza and Deleuze. The book is comprised of two sections. The first deals mainly with the task of critique and targets the reading of dialectical desire and negativity given by Kojève in his seminar on Hegel in the 1930s and assimilated by thinkers including Lacan, Sartre and Fanon in the mid-twentieth century. This view of self and process generated a hugely influential concept of agency, which has shaped the concepts and models of transformation widely assumed by postcolonial theory. Part 1 criticises the implicit imperialism of the style of agency and attitude towards difference implied by the dominant Western understanding of desire, subjectivity and history-making, and to suggest that, in the postcolonial world, there is a need for alternative conceptualisations of constructive practice. Part 2 shifts focus from the task of critique to the labour of construction. It provides a concept of postcolonial agency, which in turn enables the conceptualisation of postcolonial practices of sociability. Because it is grounded in a positive conceptualisation of desire informed by the Spinozan notion of joyful mutuality, Deleuze's philosophy supports non-imperial concepts of agency and relationship, informing new thinking about postcolonial transformation.

Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day to day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898–1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state. Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources—including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as colonial documents and photographs—it examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, the book has broad comparative appeal. The author shows that colonial legacies—such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures—have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.