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(Dis)connected Empires

Author: Zoltán Biedermann

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0198823398

(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.

Semi-Detached Empire

Author: Todd Kuchta

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2010-03-24

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0813929253

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In the first book to consider British suburban literature from the vantage point of imperial and postcolonial studies, Todd Kuchta argues that suburban identity is tied to the empire's rise and fall. Like the semi-detached house, which joins separate dwellings under one roof, suburbia and empire were geographically distinct but imaginatively linked. Yet just as the "semi" conceals two homes behind a single façade, suburbia's apparent uniformity masks its defining oppositions--between country and city, "civilization" and "savagery," master and slave.

Digital Disconnect

Author: Robert W. McChesney

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1595588914

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Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

Othering Islam: Proceedings of the International Conference on “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Islamophobia”—Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, France, June 2-3, 2006

Author: Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Publisher: Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press)

Published: 2006-09-01

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1888024623

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This Fall 2006 (V, 1) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge on “Othering Islam” presents the results of an international conference on “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Islamophobia” organized by Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris, France, on June 2- 3, 2006. Topics covered are: “Probing Islamophobia,” “The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction,” “Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix,” “How Washington’s ‘War on Terror’ Became Everyone’s: Islamophobia and the Impact of September 11 on the Political Terrain of South and Southeast Asia,” “Militarization, Globalization, and Islamist Social Movements: How Today’s Ideology of Islamophobia Fuels Militant Islam,” “Muslim Responses to Integration Demands in the Netherlands since 9/11,” “No Race to the Swift: Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe,” “Life in Samarkand: Caucasus and Central Asia vis-à-vis Russia, the West, and Islam.” Contributors include: Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Eric Mielants (also as journal issue guest editor), Walter D. Mignolo, Farish A. Noor, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Abdulkader Tayob, Manuela Boatcã, Madina Tlostanova, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

A Collection of Contributions in Honour of Jack van Lint

Author: P.J. Cameron

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2016-06-06

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1483294196

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This collection of contributions is offered to Jack van Lint on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday and appears simultaneously in the series Topics in Discrete Mathematics and as a special double volume of Discrete Mathematics (Volumes 106/107). It is hoped that the papers selected, all written by experts in their own fields, represent the many interesting areas that together constitute the discipline of Discrete Mathematics. It is in this sphere that van Lint has become the acknowledged master and this expansive volume serves to demonstrate the enormous significance he has had on the development of Discrete Mathematics during the last 30 years.

Investigating Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

Author: Isabelle Joyau

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1994-03-02

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 134923284X

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Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

Author: Paul Giles

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-02-14

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0192566210

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This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts. The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.

Reading the Other

Author: Carol de Dobay Rifelj

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780472103409

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Combines literature and philosophy to explore whether and to what extent we can know the thoughts and feelings of others

The Democratization Disconnect

Author: Brian K. Grodsky

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1442269359

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The most recent wave of democratic revolutions has convinced many in the West of the triumph of political rights. But in this provocative book, Brian Grodsky argues forcefully that nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s revolutionaries—both democratic and non-democratic—are much like those who preceded them throughout history. They’ve all come into power promising enhanced political, but especially economic, rights: higher wages, better living standards, more security. The difference between today’s pro-democracy leaders and yesterday’s non-democratic ones, the author demonstrates, rests on the perceived international legitimacy of the democratic template. Now, when even the most abusive regimes feel the need to label themselves democracies, opponents delegitimize rulers by calling them undemocratic. This sets the stage for what Grodsky calls the “democratization disconnect.” Leaders and followers fight for political change not as an end, but as the most acceptable means to attain economic rights. But by selling democracy as a panacea for the ills of the preceding regime, new elites simultaneously cheapen the notion of democracy and, by creating unrealistic popular expectations, set it up for failure. Putting a fresh new spin on hotly debated current events, this clear-eyed and informed book will be essential reading for all politically engaged readers.