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This chapter provides a cultural account of how and why international commercial arbitration has emerged as a form of global governance. After justifying its sociologically informed approach, it explains how a legal culture can emerge in a heterogeneous, transnational professional community such as that of international arbitration practitioners. Finally, it describes some aspects of international arbitration culture that are most relevant to international arbitration’s emergence as a form of global governance. In particular, it argues that arbitrators are driven to establish international arbitration as an autonomous, global system of governance due to a shared dedication to internationalism for its own sake and also to a belief that internationalism serves the interests of commercial parties.

This book examines the impact of digital technology on Japanese cinema from the 1990s to the present by focusing on the salient film genres or media networks: horror, documentary-style fiction, animation, transnational cinema, and ethnic cinema. Through analyses of the works by filmmakers such as Nakata Hideo and Sai Yoichi, as well as animation artists like Oshii Mamoru and Yamamura Koji, the book explores the ongoing contestations and negotiations between cinema and digital media, the national and the transnational, and global cinema and Japanese local culture. It also considers Japan's conflicting desires toward transnational culture, marketing, and viewership, as well as the strategic rationale behind the transnational cinema in both the film industry and recent critical paradigms, by drawing on Koichi Iwabuchi's work, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism.

This chapter studies Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent to illustrate the heterogeneity of the Pakistani population in Houston along the axis of sexuality. Though stigmatized, criminalized, marginalized, racialized, and homogenized, Pakistani Muslim American gay men narrate their lived experience in terms of invocations of South Asian epistemologies of same-sex sexual eroticism and relationships and narrative traditions, a religiously conceived transnationality, and appropriations of Western epistemologies of gay identity. Their narratives are a corrective to the heterosexual transnational Muslim population movements and community formations typically represented in scholarship on Muslim Americans. The complex intersections of race, religion, sexuality, and transnationalism in “transnational Muslim American sexual cultures” advance the exploration of heterogeneity of the Pakistani immigrant experience and guide the inquiry in this chapter.

This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.

This chapter introduces the book’s new conceptual and methodological understanding of postfeminism as performative and transnational cultural, including by way of critique of the broader literature on postfeminism for its predominant Eurocentricism, superficial attention to racial difference, and failure to attend to globalization. It reflects, too, on the intellectual politics and seeming ahistoricism of applying the concept of postfeminism to the global South, where the Western feminist histories upon which the concept is premised do not apply.

The chapter concerns how the women position themselves as simultaneously and authentically black, Nigerian and cosmopolitan subjects. The first part of the chapter addresses the racial politics of the women’s habitual consumption of, and deep attachments to, weaves and wigs. It proposes a new theoretical understanding of these beauty technologies as “unhappy” for black women but not, therefore, centered on whiteness. The second part of the chapter argues that Lagos and Nigeria are not merely backdrops to the women’s spectacularly feminine self-stylization but rather enter into its very fabric and logics.

Science fiction presents radically other socio-cultural contexts and bodily states of being as part of its generic horizon of expectations, yet visions of the future, and whom we imagine as agents of change in it, are circumscribed by past and present social history. This chapter examines the depictions of black femininity in the science fiction films Alien vs. Predator (dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004), Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), and Les Saignantes (dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005) to determine whether science fiction is better able to accommodate a wider range of roles for black women than genres that rely more on cultural verisimilitude. The respective universal, global and national upheavals depicted in these films are a unique opportunity to recast black femininity in new terms, to consider the black female characters in their shifting relationships to transnational cultures, whiteness, and the concept of Other within the genre.

Science fiction presents radically other socio-cultural contexts and bodily states of being as part of its generic horizon of expectations, yet visions of the future, and whom we imagine as agents of change in it, are circumscribed by past and present social history. This chapter examines the depictions of black femininity in the science fiction films Alien vs. Predator (dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004), Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), and Les Saignantes (dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005) to determine whether science fiction is better able to accommodate a wider range of roles for black women than genres that rely more on cultural verisimilitude. The respective universal, global and national upheavals depicted in these films are a unique opportunity to recast black femininity in new terms, to consider the black female characters in their shifting relationships to transnational cultures, whiteness, and the concept of Other within the genre.