In 1944 the political philosopher and refugee, Hannah Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' Today's refugee 'crisis' has its origins in the political–and imaginative–history of the last century. Exiles from other places have often caused trouble for ideas about sovereignty, law and nationhood. But the meanings of exile changed dramatically in the twentieth century. This book shows just how profoundly the calamity of statelessness shaped modern literature and thought. For writers such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, among others, the outcasts of the twentieth century raised vital questions about sovereignty, humanism and the future of human rights. Placeless People argues that we urgently need to reconnect with the moral and political imagination of these first chroniclers of the placeless condition.
Exploring the work of Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil, among other, Placeless People argues that we urgently need to reconnect with the moral and political imagination of these writers to tackle today's refugee 'crisis'.
Lyndsey Stonebridge presents a new way to think about the relationship between literature and human rights that challenges the idea that empathy inspires action.
""What does it mean to be religious in the modern world?" This is the question posed by Yi-Fu Tuan, the esteemed humanist geographer. In this, his latest book in a long and distinguished career, Tuan turns to this specific challenge, which has been a uniting current in much of his previous work. To illustrate more fully the modern meaning of religion, Professor Tuan collaborates with photographer-artist Martha A. Strawn, who has devoted the last four decades making place-based photographs from around the world. Her stunning portfolio of photographs and short essays conclude the book." "Religion is a perennial human quest for safety, certainty, and spiritual elevation, Tuan argues, whose origins are oriented in place and particular cultural practices. In its highest reaches, religion moves toward universalism and placelessness. Drawing examples principally from Christian and Buddhist traditions, Tuan explores the ultimate placelessness of religious experience. Tuan's meditations, combined with the elegance and purpose of Strawn's photographs and essays, create a book that is both thought. provoking and quietly beautiful." --Book Jacket.
A Place to Belong is a profusely illustrated, intimate, contemporary portrait of Calvert, a three-hundred-year-old fishing village on Newfoundland's southern shore. Often using its residents' own words, Gerald Pocius describes in detail the continual creative encounters between past and present, between individual and community, that make up daily life in Calvert. By accepted standards of tradition, Calvert's culture is declining. Old structures are regularly torn down or renovated; antique household items are replaced with modern conveniences. Pocius argues, however, that the tangible expressions of a culture can be misleading. Calvert's essence is not in the things owned and used by its residents but in the spaces in which those things abide and in the attitudes, values, and obligations that delineate the order of those spaces. From woodlands, water, and fields to yards, gardens, and homes, Calvert's physical and social structure is governed by shared concerns about the community's livelihood and welfare. As a resident of Calvert puts it, "Where you're working in the same space with people you know ... it's just not practical to be falling out with everyone." The sense of community that pervades Calvert is best exemplified by its annual draw for fishing berths. Because productivity varies among offshore fishing grounds, there is no private ownership of fishing rights. Rather, a lottery instituted in 1919 ensures each family the same chances for periodic access to the best fishing berths. The draw continues until all the fishing berths are awarded, but it is common for a family to opt out once they have drawn enough good berths. There are also instances of the most successful fishing operations sharing their catches. From his observations of Calvert's people at work and leisure, Pocius provides evidence to confirm the viability and durability of their culture. He reveals that standard assumptions about culture are inadequate, particularly those based on the primacy of artefacts and on sharp dichotomies between tradition and modernity. Calvert, he shows, belies our notion that declining cultural values and social segmentation are unavoidable side-effects of modernisation and a rise in material well-being. A Place to Belong will promote a constructive scepticism about the ways we perceive and interpret cultures and, most important, will remind us of what it really means to belong to a place.
First published forty years ago and still widely referenced, Edward Relph′s Place and Placelessness has taken its place as a classic of the phenomenological approach to the study of place and has influenced a generation of scholars. For this reprint Professor Relph has written a new introduction setting his original work in its contemporary context. He shows how the concepts of place have been modified and yet continue to be of vital importance in interpreting a world which travel and commerce have made very different from that of 1976. In his words: "sense of place has the potential to serve as a pragmatic foundation for addressing the profound local and global challenges, such as climate change and economic disparity, that are emerging in the present century."
Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book! This book argues that the notion of ‘wild’ analysis, a term coined by Freud to denote the use of would-be psychoanalytic notions, diagnoses, and treatment by an individual who has not undergone psychoanalytic training, also provides us with a striking new way of exploring the limits of psychoanalysis. Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life proposes to reopen the question of so-called ‘wild’ analysis by exploring psychoanalytic ideas at their limits, arguing from a diverse range of perspectives that the thinking produced at these limits – where psychoanalysis strays into other disciplines, and vice versa, as well as moments of impasse in its own theoretical canon – points toward new futures for both psychoanalysis and the humanities. The book’s twelve essays pursue fault lines, dissonances and new resonances in established psychoanalytic theory, often by moving its insights radically further afield. These essays take on sensitive and difficult topics in twentieth-century cultural and political life, including representations of illness, forced migration and the experiences of refugees, and questions of racial identity and identification in post-war and post-apartheid periods, as well as contemporary debates surrounding the Enlightenment and its modern invocations, the practice of critique and ‘paranoid’ reading. Others explore more acute cases of ‘wilding’, such as models of education and research informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, or instances where psychoanalysis strays into taboo political and cultural territory, as in Freud’s references to cannibalism. This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and students working across the fields of psychoanalysis, history, literature, culture and politics, and to anyone with an interest in the political import of psychoanalytic thought today.
"Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the experiences and contested meanings of home for people whose lives are characterized by migration related to varying forms of violence. Taking seriously the political implications and exploitation of discourses of home in the transnational processes that connect, yet differently affect, the movement of people and capital, it challenges the sedentarist assumption that territoriality and nation are necessarily the primary determinants of identification. However, it does not replace this sedentarism with a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of actual experiences of displacement and emplacement, it investigates the power sedentarist discourses may have to provide or prohibit hope. In Struggles for Home the focus is turned onto hope, aspiration and a sense of worth as necessary building blocks in the reconstruction of the social, amidst the violence of political and economic transformation. Research conducted in Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zambia, Cyprus, the Palestinian West Bank, Guatemala, and amongst Romanians and Moroccans in Spain articulates a novel theoretical framework for the development of a critical political anthropology of one of the most controversial and fascinating issues of our time - the remaking of home in migration."--Jacket.
From post-truth politics to “no-platforming” on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell's observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.
Viewed as a destructive force or an inevitability of modern society, globalization is the focus of a multitude of disciplines. A clear understanding of its processes and terminology is imperative for anyone engaging with this ubiquitous topic. Globalization: the Key Concepts offers a comprehensive guide to this cross-disciplinary subject and covers concepts such as: homogenization neo-Liberalism risk knowledge society time-space compression reflexivity. With extensive cross-referencing and suggestions for further reading, this book is an essential resource for students and interested readers alike as they navigate the literature on globalization studies.
