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Over the past ten to fifteen years, feminism in China has been marked by three closely related characteristics. The first is the introduction of "Western" feminism with "gender" as the core of theory import. The second is the articulation of the "trouble" this import of Western theory has caused. Chinese feminist texts abound with terms such as trouble, difficulty, and clash, which are used to express worries about the consequences of this new orientation of feminism in China. They prove that the import of Western theory and the transition to "gender" as the basic category of analysis are not the logical and unquestionable developments some authors claim them to be. A third characteristic is the search for an identity for Chinese feminism in a global context. Chinese scholars, under the impact of Western theory, turn to spatial definitions of Chinese feminism vis-à-vis international feminism and adopt the notion of the "local" to define their place in the world. This essay highlights the "troubling" effects the import of "gender" has on feminist theory building in China and delineates the various and sometimes conflicting efforts Chinese feminists have made to restabilize feminist theory and identity. These include different translations and definitions of "gender," diverging outlines of the history of Chinese feminism in a global context, various definitions of the "local," differing visions of a regional "Asian" feminism, and more complex models that try to integrate conflicting perspectives. These responses demonstrate that contrary to its universalist claims, "gender" is a specific concept that finds support among particular groups of feminists only. This essay also tries to explain why Chinese feminists insist on the "local" as a site of theory building and identity formation even where they have acquired global horizons.

Walt Whitman never saw most of the myriad places he name-checks in "Salut au Monde," in fact never traveled beyond North America. 3 That minor technicality does not stop him from envisioning them-"seeing" them, as it were-through the lens of his own mystical, abstracted vision of an America at once generalized

The present world population is 7.1 billions, which is growing at the rate of 97 millions people per year will touch 8.5 billion by the year 2025. About 95 per cent of the population growth will be in the developing countries.

"Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, I surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various commentaries in academic publications, including MLA Profession, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. What I discovered was illuminating but somewhat appalling. It seems that the perennial (and perhaps self-perpetuating) perception (especially in MLA presidential addresses) is that-whether the commentator is coming from the right or left of the political spectrum-literary studies are in decline, that the public has little understanding or regard for the value of literary analysis or literature in general, and that scholars of literature are toiling in the service of something that is vaguely important but almost impossible to effectively define or articulate, even to ourselves. 1"

This essay contextualizes the Special Issue on Asian African Literatures by first discussing the terminology of "Asian" in the context of African identities. It then presents a brief genealogy of Asian African literary production in East and South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. While a number of scholars have increasingly paid attention to Asian writing in Africa since the 1960s, less is known about such literary activities in earlier decades. I present in this article some possible avenues for such research and highlight the theatrical and poetic engagements of Indians in those decades. The final part of the essay contextualizes the individual contributions to the volume and serves as a reading map for the volume.

Anime fan subtitling and online distribution offer rare insights into the relationship between fan creativity and industry conceptualizations of piracy. This article attempts to de-polarize this debate (wherein fans are presented as invaluable amateur producers or, alternatively, as overt pirates) in order to examine the roles played by these liminally situated fan producers in relation to the wider anime fan and industrial communities. These active fans are now represented as good or bad dependent on other groups' investments in their practices, and unpacking these conceptualizations provides a better view of how anime fandom may be indicative of larger changes in online fan community construction.

This article draws on the insights/questions that emerged while putting together a set of stories for children published in a series named Different Tales. These stories, set in Dalit and other minority communities, problematize the normative grids through which we view 'childhood' as they depict the complex ways in which children negotiate and cope with the material conditions of their marginality, often drawing upon the resources and relationships within the community. What follows is a resistance to representing culture as a marker of essentialized difference.

This paper addresses the question of character by thinking through how willfulness becomes a moral attribute, a way of making certain characters into problems. Reflecting on how an education in virtue became an education of the will, the paper explores how some characters become "willful parts" when they do not align their wills with the moral and general will. Drawing on readings of willfulness in novels by George Eliot, including Daniel Deronda, Mill on the Floss and Romola, the paper explores how feminist histories might involve the willful claiming of the attribite of willfulness. The paper suggests that when willfulness is reclaimed, it exceeds the very system of characterization, even when it appears to fulfill a set of expectations of what is behind an action.

"The concept of face, as it is developed by Goffman, has strong conceptual links with the notion of a 'looking-glass' self outlined by Adam Smith and developed sociologically by Cooley. It also has links with the Chinese concept of face, which relates to the transfer of social science concepts from one cultural setting to another. By discussing the specificity and universality of face the article indicates the significance of the Chinese concept of face in a global sociology. The article goes on to examine aspects of the treatment of the Chinese concept of face and in doing so presents a more comprehensive account of a sociological conceptualization of face. The article then considers the relationship between face and emotions in indicating the mechanisms that underlie face. Finally, a distinction is made between face as an embedded social process and as an object of social contestation"

This essay elaborates upon some of the feminist legacies underwriting the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly the 2006 book, Convergence Culture, to develop a set of priorities for media and Cultural Studies research following in its wake. Focusing on critical uses of the term 'subculture', and its convenient fit with Internet scholarship to date, and moving to an analysis of the notion of 'participatory culture', we question how easily the practices of online media consumption can be separated from the wider structuring conditions of everyday life. Our recent research on fan communities and information workers highlights the labour and leisure conditions contributing to the experience of online community, fan-based or otherwise. These contrasting examples show the many non-voluntary dimensions that accompany participation in 'convergence culture', and how these are experienced in specific ways. The gendered intimacy of fan fiction communities and the coercive nature of technologically mediated white collar employment each reveal the stakes involved in allowing the practices of a minority to stand as the optimistic vision of the imminent media landscape.

This paper analyses the impact of cultural diversity on cultural policies through an international overview of case studies and reflections. Cultural diversity is generally perceived as a threat toward national cultures. However, this paper argues that (1) there exist substantial national differences in the way in which diversity is perceived and integrated as a policy paradigm; and (2) cultural diversity can be used as an instrument for reconfiguring cultural policies, regardless of the governmental level in question. The authors discuss whether cultural policies of diversity exist and what they are. They also examine the practical consequences of the emergence of a new paradigm concerning the redefinition and implementation of cultural policies within a triple context: the plurality of the territorial configurations of diversity, the simultaneous coexistence of several levels of understanding this issue, and the economic dimensions of cultural diversity.

This article investigates the extent to which arts audiences' behaviour conforms to the predictions of consumer behaviour theory. The discussion focuses on three established empirical 'laws' of consumer behaviour: repertoire buying, double jeopardy and duplication of purchase. Although these laws are well established, they have not previously been applied to arts audiences. All three of these patterns emerge from a national survey of arts participation in the UK; audiences do indeed behave like consumers. The results suggest that the arts audience is less segmented than might be expected and that every art form competes with every other art form for audiences.

In this essay, we examine the core narratives and rhetorical techniques that extremist groups use to explain their worldview. We show that extremists in North America as well as throughout the world, regardless of their political or religious background, demonstrate great similarities in their construction and deployment of narratives. We also identify key features of what we call "the root war metaphor" that characterizes extremist narratives and apply a schema for analyzing "narrative trajectories" to suggest a relationship between these extremist narratives and acts of violence. What we can learn from shared narrative elements among extremist groups may help answer questions about the relationship of words to violence as well as speculate about how core narratives may be used to construct more compelling stories to promote social justice.

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child's Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author's Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but "mixed blood" from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true-more metaphorical and allegorical than factual-story about the desire on the part of displaced "new" world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of "passing," racial identification and transformation.

This article aims to analyse the strategic choices made by left-wing telenovela writers during the military regime in Brazil, their complex relationships with their employer, Globo Network, and the regime's various forms of censorship. The arrival of many critical cultural producers in the television industry during the authoritarian period in Brazil (1964-85) and the alleged close links between Globo Network and the military regime stirred an intense debate among the Brazilian intelligentsia. The participation of these cultural producers in the small-screen arena during the authoritarian period has been almost invariably considered by their detractors in terms of cooption/domination, or as a form of resistance by their defenders. The recent opening of the Censor Division Archives and the deluge of biographies, autobiographies and testimonials of key television figures during the authoritarian regime, have opened up new perspectives for examining Brazilian television history. Instead of the seemingly almost perfect harmony between the military regime and the television industry, as represented by Brazilian communication giant Globo Network, the present analysis focuses on some of the tensions, subtle struggles and spaces of relative autonomy within the telenovela field during the period of authoritarian rule in Brazil.

"This article examines news reports of the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period (1968-82) in British and American newspapers, and specifically focuses on the ways postfeminist discourses were constructed and deployed. While most accounts of postfeminism relate to American cultural texts from the 1990s to the present day, they ignore (or are unaware of) the ways such discourses were constructed before this, or in different cultural contexts. In this article, I argue that postfeminist discourses are evident throughout the 1970s, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, and that many of these discourses differed between the countries as a result of unique socio-cultural contexts, and the ways the women's movements evolved. That postfeminist discourses emerged early on indicates the extent to which patriarchal and capitalist ideologies contested feminist critiques from an early stage, demonstrating that notions of feminism's eventual illegitimacy and hence its redundancy were not constructed overnight, but took years to achieve hegemony."

"Habermas' universal pragmatics continues to draw significant attention from sociologists seeking a viable balance between poststructuralism and traditional critical theory, while at the same time becoming increasingly recognised within formal political circles worldwide. A number of social theorists and philosophers, however, have taken Habermas to task with respect to how much his 'theory of communicative rationality', the driving force behind universal pragmatics, in fact actually steps away from epistemological foundationalism as Habermas intends it to do. This paper explores parallels between Habermas' particular notion of human reason and rationality (i.e., communicative rationality) and that expressed within connectionism, today's dominant paradigm in the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI), created as an alternative to the classical AI view of 'mind as computer'. Given the homology, I argue, the practical shortcomings of connectionism may indeed lend unique and compelling weight to those claims that Habermas' system of thought is foundationalist, despite Habermas' efforts."