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"This article pieces together a complex genealogy of the multiple contexts that helped reshape women's international organizing and create a global women's human rights movement following the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women, 1975-85. It maps a multilayered history consisting of many different strands of women's activities around the globe that increasingly converged in the 1970s, although in unanticipated ways. Through its broad focus on women in distinct social, political, and intellectual arenas, it links the UN human rights system and its oversight committees and commissions with the first two UN Development Decades of the 1960s and 1970s. And it interconnects these global structures, discourses, and activities with old and new patterns of women's postwar organizing and with the emerging challenges to canons of knowledge and research methodologies from feminist theory and epistemology. Starting in the mid-1970s, four distinct yet overlapping endeavors converged: the work for international human rights, colonial and postcolonial expectations of economic development and well-being, women's rights and liberation movements, and women's studies in their global translations. This critical history, however, has all but been lost in the fraught contemporary debates about human rights as a vehicle for radical gender and social change."

This article draws on Edward Said's notion of 'imaginary geographies' to explore how representations of small island states enabled particular colonial interventions to take place in the Indian Ocean region and to show how these representations are currently being reworked to support development strategies. It examines how particular colonial imaginaries justified and legitimised spatially and temporally extended transactions before focusing on two examples of forced population movements: British colonial policy of forcibly exiling anti-colonial nationalists and political 'undesirables' from other parts of the empire to Seychelles; and the use of islands in the region as strategic military bases, requiring the compulsory relocation of populations. While a colonising legacy pervades contemporary representations of these societies, such depictions are not immutable but can be, and are being, appropriated and reworked through various forms of situated agency. Thus an 'island imaginary' has become an important cultural and economic resource for small island states, most notably in the development of a tourist industry. The key challenge for vulnerable peripheral states is to create new forms of representations that contest and replace tenacious colonialist depictions to provide greater opportunities for sustained development.

During the late Victorian period, British anarchist writers commented on Irish political affairs while the celebrated Irish author Oscar Wilde offered moral and practical support to them. Wilde's position was especially radical, since anarchism was associ

Ko Un is one of South Korea's most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the tr

This article examines the politics of the majoritarian binary, 'The West and the Rest', and more specifically, 'Western Theory, Asian Reality', as a politics of power that serves specific interests ranging from imperialism and nationalism to the suppression of heterogeneity in languages, ethnicities, and cultures. The Sinophone is posited here as a presence, literary and otherwise, that interrupts this majoritarian binary by challenging the chain of equivalence among ethnicity, language, and nationality.

What can an Asian theory be? Is the question a blatant oxymoron, or some intellectual anomaly? What is at stake in this enquiry is not the character of Asia at all. On the contrary, what makes the pairing of Asia and theory somewhat strange is our presumption that theory is something we normally expect of Europe or the West. (Europe and the West must be differentiated historically and geopolitically, but for reasons of space the two designations are treated almost interchangeably in this article.)

East Asian theory: around the corner or already arrived? It is precisely a growing awareness of these shortcomings that has sparked interest in 'hybrid', 'local', or what, for the sake of simplicity, I will call 'East Asian' theory, both in the region itself and across the Western academy over the last few years. This recognition that East Asian contexts act transformatively upon Western theory, that these sites are not just the destination but also the origin of pertinent theoretical thinking, and that the interventions they produce constitute a body of thought in their own right has-as it were-established itself as a kind of 'theory' within East Asian studies, a concept to which many either nominally or concretely subscribe. Up to a certain point, this 'theory' has made its way into praxis, a process to which I will return in due course. But my basic point in the pages that follow is that this praxis is at best still a fledgeling one, and that there is a great deal more to be done if East Asian theory is to become a redoubtable nexus of intellectual resources. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the fact that there is a subtle sense of deferral in some quarters about the 'when' of East Asian theory. Hauling East Asian studies out of the mire of geopolitically-driven area studies-replacing what we might call 'espionage empiricism' about our 'others in Asia' with more self-reflexive and less positivistic work-has been a job enough in itself. East Asian theory, by these lights, is on its way, just around the post-Cold War corner.

In the last two decades, we have witnessed dramatic developments in the production of media cultures and their transnational circulation in non-Western regions. East Asia is one of the key regions in which these alternative cultural expressions flourish, in which cultural mixing and corporate collaboration intensify, and in which intra-regional consumption is set in motion. These developments have posed serious questions about the continuing plausibility of Euro-American cultural domination, and they necessitate the de-Westernization of the study of media and cultural globalization. Yet the degree to which the rise of East Asian media culture challenges West-centred power configurations remains a matter of debate-especially as new configurations of global governance in media culture have emerged which are subtly superseding the East-West binary, and permeating both Western and non-Western regions. This article analyses the rise of East Asian media cultures in terms of the governance of global media culture connectivity, with a particular focus on how the growing regional circulation of media products has promoted dialogic cross-border linkages.

It will be my purpose to show that the examples of alternative modernities we have before us today ultimately remained captive to the cycle of representation and to a logic of the same, despite their heroic efforts to break with both. Where all these alternative and multiple modernities-from the pre-war Japanese effort to 'overcome the modern' to more recent attempts to imagine a post-colonial condition-fail to offer a genuinely different conception free from the imposed constraints of a Western model founded on progressive development and achievement is in a reliance on timeless cultural residues. Thus, according to some, they are cultural, not structural, formations, which seek to differentiate received values, timeless and unchanging, from broader social, political and economic systems, which have substituted memory and nostalgia for the historical present. Because they are reflections of national cultures-fixed for all times, invariably derived from irreducible origins-they constitute styles of life identified with the nation-form that can have no universal applicability. In any case, this transmutation of qualitative into quantitative time as the privileged component in a comparative method permits the comprehensive 'treatment of human culture in all times and places'.

This article addresses a crucial dimension which has distinguished studies of colonialism in Malaysia from those of other formerly colonized lands: the lack of a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the colonized thought and wrote about their colonial experiences. Aljunied argues that Malay intellectuals in the postwar period have indeed contributed to the formulation of theories about colonialism in Malaysia in particular and the Malay world in general. In demonstrating such a claim, this article directs its analytical gaze to a seminal text entitled Perjuangan Kita written by a Malay intellectual and activist, Dr Burhanuddin Al-Helmy (1911-1969). By exploring a variety of influences that shaped Burhanuddin's ideas, the methods he applied to systematically explain the roots and persistence of colonialism in the Malay world, and his definition and discussion of the causes and impact of colonialism, the article attempts to place Burhanuddin's ideas within the ranks of established Third World theories of colonialism in his time.

Examining two published narrative accounts of the signing of Treaty 8 in northwest Canada at the close of the nineteenth century, this essay highlights how the administrative practices and spatial discourses inscribed in the accounts of Charles Mair and Dr O C Edwards are implicated in the geographical fashioning of the Canadian north. The Treaty 8 Commissions of 1899 and 1900 were empowered by the Dominion Government of Canada to extinguish Aboriginal title to the vast territory of the Athabasca District. What the written narrative accounts of the treaty signing reveal are how the administrative practices of treaty making were strongly marked by the physicalities of travel, by the visual economies of spatial and cultural encounter, and by the recoding of the social and historical geographies of Aboriginal occupancy by an emergent national order. The accounts examined in the essay underscore how the geographies of northern Canada have been particularly drawn around the misapprehending of the patterns of Aboriginal land use and economy within governmental frames of knowledge.

Amara Lakhous, born and raised in Algeria, has had a significant impact on the changing landscape of contemporary Italian letters and cultural production. He is the author of three novels, all of which he has written in both Arabic and Italian. His best known work is the much-acclaimed Scontro di civilt per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio (2006)/Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008), now translated into numerous languages, including French, German and Dutch. Lakhous draws on his position as cultural mediator to elucidate the importance of fiction in today's contentious debates over national identities. In the following interview, he speaks about his relationship to Arabic, Berber and Italian and the place these languages occupy in the conceptualization of his works. He also discusses the craft of writing, irony, politics, his views on Italy and Algeria today, and his latest novel, published in 2010.

'Bringing Capital Back In' is the title I have chosen for my article. The reference to a quite famous and successful book edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol in 1985 is justified in my eyes by some formal similarities between their research project and the one I would like to outline here. As Theda Skocpol wrote in her introduction to that book (Bringing the State Back In), 'society-centered theories' in comparative social sciences and history were giving way in the early 1980s to a 'new interest for the state' (Evans et al. 1985: 4f). The 'new theoretical understanding of states in relation to social structures' she and her co-editors were looking for could not nevertheless emerge from a step back with regard to 'society-centered theories' (Evans et al. 1985: 4f).

Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' emerged in and helped shape a specific moment in the development of literary theory in the US, and it continues to challenge Native American studies in significant ways. Spivak captures in Gramscian terms the dilemma that scholars and intellectuals from the colonized world face in positing their work as engaging in meaningful change of the conditions of colonization. Her reflexive approach becomes most meaningful for Native studies when the indigenous world is understood as featuring two forms of subalternity, one focused on economic depravation, the other more focused on the maintenance of the social and cultural forms of traditional cultural practitioners. The conclusion focuses on one place where intellectuals meet up with both these forms of subalternity, an Osage dance society. This is an example of one setting where subalterns and intellectuals can, in fact, meet each other and communicate.

This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance - the governance of the prior - that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.

Until recently, northern Vietnam was believed to be a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional diffusion and migration from the advanced Chinese civilization. By the early 1980s, a new prehistory of northern Vietnam was becoming increasingly apparent. Yet, new discoveries by both Vietnamese and Western scholars possess existing biases. Interestingly, as a response to the above, today's Western scholars are attempting to "rescue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. However, it is not clear whether this new schema would only carve out a topic of expertise for Western historians or only further marginalize particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that did not necessarily constrain "independent histories".

When speaking of the Caribbean, one often finds it difficult to reconcile the singular term used to refer to it and its linguistic, social, historical and aesthetic plurality. Even if the archipelago has shared similar experiences of traumatic transportation and indentureship, the specificities of each island have hindered the emergence of a shared Caribbean identity. Emphasis has been put on the extinction of the indigenous Amerindian peoples, but Amerindian resilience has not been granted sufficient scope. Only a few writers have chosen to imaginatively return to that Amerindian past that precedes the trauma of forced transportation - a past that has almost receded out of collective memory, dominated as it has been by the African dimension. In the wake of Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville is one of the writers who have been trying to gain access to a collective identity that might be termed ante-colonial. With reference to the work of Melville, Jan Carew and Cyril Dabydeen, this article reads the presence of Amerindian culture in Caribbean literature as a renewed symbol of resistance to domination and a symbol of a shared identity, providing a stronger bond between the land and the people. It argues that this dtour through Amerindian culture finds its meaning in the desire to override colonial dispossession, thus providing a possible focal point of connection for the Caribbean at large.

"The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which 'reconciliation' needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments' apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology's commentary."

In the 1980s a group of mostly younger historians, coalescing around Ranajit Guha, launched Subaltern Studies. Originally conceived as a project to be sustained over three volumes, it outgrew its original ambitions, and recently published its twelfth volume. The early volumes of Subaltern Studies made a big splash in Indian historical circles, but their influence beyond these circles was limited; as Dipesh Chakrabarty was later to observe, while any historian of India was obliged to be conversant with aspects of the history of Europe, and was almost certain to have read Hobsbawm, Rude, Furet, Ginzburg and others, the reverse was not true. However, partly due to the publication of a selection of essays from the first five volumes, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, and with a Preface by Edward Said, the readership and influence of this intervention in Indian historiography expanded greatly. This accelerated the process of members of the Subaltern Studies collective using their Indian material not only to ask questions of Indian history, but also to engage with questions of wider, and often philosophical, import.

"This essay brings into dialectical consideration the relationship between postsocialism and posthumanism in China through the life story of Marxist humanism from the global 1960s to the present across Eastern Europe, France, and the United States. It especially foregrounds the American counterpart to the irruption of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe and the humanist controversy in France during the 1950s in the now marginalized work of Raya Dunayeskaya, which brought Marxist humanism, feminism, and antiracism into a powerful interarticulation. The essay argues that postsocialism is not a discreet formation affecting only previously or actually socialist countries and that, when seen through the lens of Marxist humanism, to which American ethnic studies can be considered heir, the condition today in China and globally is resoundingly not posthumanist."