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"This article explores the ways in which social media was used by diasporic Iranians in the aftermath of the June 2009 Iranian presidential elections. With particular attention to global reactions to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the author considers how social networking sites such as Facebook create an "intimate public sphere," simultaneously facilitating and defanging collective activism through expressions of compassion for others."

"IR's dominant theoretical and methodological approaches are, to varying degrees, compliance oriented. IR needs a theory of resistance if it is to survive its current methodological and ethical crisis. Resistance, read from a broadly Foucaultian perspective, is a process in which hidden, small-scale and marginal agencies have an impact on power, on norms, civil society, the state and the 'international'. This may be in the form of individual or grass-roots critical agency not coordinated or mobilized on a large scale but still globally connected. Such agency is often discursive and aimed at peaceful change and transformation. Through such critical agency a post-colonial civil society has emerged, which is transversal, transnational, fragmented, but may be constitutive of new, hybrid and post-liberal forms of peace."

"This article explores the use of nonstandard English forms and intertextuality in two recent works by Nigerian writers in English living abroad. To date, Chris Abani's Graceland and Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation have attracted little critical commentary, far less any academic survey of their language, yet each book is in its own way representative of conflicting treatments of nonstandard varieties of Nigerian English by writers in the diaspora. Beasts of No Nation owes a considerable debt to the linguistic and stylistic experiments Ken Saro-Wiwa made in his novel Sozaboy and Iweala has drawn heavily on this work in his use of a first person narrator and his assignment of a limited, if forcefully expressive, language to his hero. According to Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy is written in a mixture of Nigerian Pidgin (NP), Standard English (SE) and other forms. Graceland, however, makes selective use of nonstandard forms for reasons closer to those of earlier writers and makes this clear through its author's insertion of intertextual elements. After providing an overview of the background to and characteristic features of NP and Nigerian English this article surveys their use in Nigerian literature and concludes by examining the language of Graceland and Beasts of No Nation through a linguistic comparison of shared episodes and a consideration of thematic similarities in order to place these two novels in a continuum of Nigerian writing in English through their use of language."

"Documents and maps describe settlement locations and objects possessed by the Carib, or Kalinago, in the Commonwealth of Dominica during the post-Columbian period. Archaeological testing at multiple sites in northern Dominica reveals that historical Carib settlements functioned as trading sites, observation posts, or refuges, but such testing has not recovered material culture described in the documents. Part of the explanation for the lack of correspondence between ethnohistory and archaeology is the inadequacy of the Carib ethnonym, which has been manipulated by the political and economic interests of European colonizers since 1492. Beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, the Carib were portrayed as warlike cannibals who raided the "peaceful" natives of the Greater Antilles. Carib-French contacts in the seventeenth century recorded origin myths and linguistic evidence that fit with the initial Spanish impressions of native Caribbean peoples. Archaeological findings reveal some of the heterogeneity that has been obscured by the Carib category recorded in the ethnohistoric sources."

"This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices."

One of the most intriguing questions in both stylistic and rhetorical analyses relates to determining textual effect on readers, aesthetic or otherwise. Whether the power of the text is directly associated with the role of the text producer and his or her intentions, the linguistic, paralinguistic, extralinguistic and situational context of the text, the background and socio-cognitive expectations of the reader, or a combination of some or all of these factors (or other factors) is a question that is still the subject of stylistic and rhetorical analysis today. This article is a further step in this direction. It attempts to investigate one dimension of textual effect, namely uniformity in reader reaction to an argumentative poem entitled Dinner with the Cannibal, by focusing on the roles that genre and metaphor play in ideologically positioning readers. It argues, on the one hand, that literature is the dominant genre in this hybrid literary-argumentative poem, channelling the readers' initial interpretations almost exclusively in the interest of more traditional literary interpretative approaches. On the other hand, and more importantly, it focuses on the role that metaphor, as a cognitive link between text producer and reader, plays in the construction of an extremely controlled, uniform interpretation of the argumentative dimension to the poem. The overall effect of the way genre and metaphor function in this argumentative poem, it is concluded, is highly ideological.

It is argued that what have usually been called 'slave narratives' sometimes more accurately describe 'freedom narratives', especially when individuals who had regained their freedom wrote or dictated such accounts. Most stories that are associated with slavery often focus on the quest for and achievement of freedom through escape, self-purchase or other means. Moreover, it is argued here that there is a distinction between narratives composed by individuals who had once been free in Africa and those who were born into slavery in the Americas. By focusing on the lives of four individuals, Venture Smith, Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano), Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu, this article assesses the importance of regaining lost freedom as a motive in compiling the narratives and life histories of these individuals. Smith, Vassa and Baquaqua left autobiographical accounts of their lives, while Kaba left a significant paper trail that allows a study of his life, moving from freedom in Africa to slavery and then emancipation in Jamaica. Mediated by the 'Middle Passage', these texts demonstrate a consciousness of lost freedom and the importance of re-achieving that status, however contested and understood.

Orientalism, as Edward Said used the term, can be defined as an ideology which promotes the 'West-and-Islam' dualism and the idea that 'Others are less human'. Since Said first published his ideas in 1978, however, the world seems to have become much more interdependent and political interrelations between the West and Islam have changed dramatically. Consequently this dualism, though more or less in place, has been influenced by escalating waves of globalisation and redistributed and reshaped in a different form. Some promising changes, as well as some additional dualistic tendencies, that can define neo-Orientalism are found in this new era. This paper attempts to analyse elements of change in traditional Orientalism. To portray a better future for our interdependent world some new approaches to identity, global ethics and global civil society are suggested. Eradicating the roots of Orientalism and Occidentalism alike and accepting, protecting and even promoting diversity are first steps towards countering the devastating threats that endanger humankind as a whole.

Post-colonial states in the Asian region have frequently been subject to political tensions derived from their multi-ethnic make-up and, what some have argued to be, the failure of states to adequately represent the interests of their ethnic minorities. This article will look at examples of where states in Asia have failed to adequately represent or otherwise incorporate their ethnic minorities as full and equal citizens. It also considers the range of responses to such perceived or actual state failure in adequately incorporating all citizens, including inter-ethnic and racial violence and separatist conflict. The article will conclude by considering conceptual and actual models of state organization intended to resolve racial and ethnic tensions in the Asian region.

In the foreword to his 1938 novel Kanthapura, about the growing participation of village women in the Gandhian movement, Raja Rao explains the experimental method of the tale as a combination of colonial hybridity and cultural difference in language, style, and narrative form: The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.… I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Persian was before-but not of our emotional make-up.… After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly.… There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us-we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.

The re-election of Luiz Inácio da Silva in October 2006 allows us to decipher the ways in which Brazil's political landscape has been reconstituted under the Workers Party government. The whirlwind of deregulation, privatization and restructuring under Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s-and with it, the dissolution of the industrial working class created during the developmentalist era-had torn up all established relations between economy and politics, classes and representation. The result was a period of indeterminacy, the context of Lula's first presidential victory in 2002. Since then, a novel combination of neo-populism and party statification, shored up by social-liberal handouts, on the one hand, and government graft, on the other, has helped to forge a new form of class rule in Brazil that could be characterized as 'hegemony in reverse'.

The platypus sports an unbeatable combination for strangeness: first, an odd habitat with curiously adapted form to match; second, the real reason for its special place in zoological history-its enigmatic mélange of reptilian (or birdlike) with obvious mammalian characteristics. Ironically, the feature that first suggested pre-mammalian affinity-the 'duckbill' itself-supports no such meaning. The platypus's muzzle is a purely mammalian adaptation to feeding in fresh waters, not a throwback to ancestral form.

Indigenous peoples have been used and imagined as guardians of the Brazilian frontier since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This association was central to the foundation of the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI) during the early 1900s and culminated with the Amazonian Vigilance System (Sistema de Vigelância da Amazônia, or SIVAM) at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the period, the abiding desire to establish defensive dominion over disputed national territory subjected individuals and groups identified as "Indians" to the power of overlapping discourses of scientific progress, national security, and economic development. A trinity of Brazilian modernity, these goals interpellated native peoples primarily through the practice and rhetoric of education, which grounds their historical relationship with dominant national society. Drawing on SPI records, government documents, journalism, personal testimonies, and visual media, this article traces the impact of this modernist trinity on indigenist policy and in the lives of those who have been affected by its tutelary power. By transforming private indigenous spaces into public domain, Brazil's politics of anti-imperialist imperialism propagated a colonialist, metonymic relationship between "our Indians" and "our America" into the twenty-first century.

Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo stands out among today's many talented and prominent African women writers for her widely acclaimed novels depicting the role of African women in a changing world. Like many people of her generation Aidoo witnessed Ghana's 1957 transition from British colony to independent state, as well as the conflicting interests and competing power bases that emerged in its post-independence years. Specifically, in the 1980s Ghana went through changes of governments, military coups, and economic downturns that affected not only the rural but also the urban populations. In an era of growing globalization and a new world order such turmoil brought about a new set of changes. This paper analyzes the various social, economic, and cultural conflicts and challenges Ama Ata Aidoo's female characters experience in her 1991 novel Changes: A Love Story, which takes place mainly in urban environments in West Africa and Europe in the 1980s. It has been praised by many literary critics for its thought-provoking portrayal of African women's redefined roles in their post-independence urban environment, and in 1993 it won the

Both of Chimananda Adichie's novels name their relation to Achebe's Things Fall Apart. More important, they form part of a longer tradition of writing by African women, while at the same time, they extend that tradition. Like novels by Nwapa, Emecheta, Bâ, and others, Adichie's novels represent a politics of the family while quietly but clearly telling stories of the nation; this is especially the case with her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. Adichie also tells more explicit tales of the Nigerian national imaginary, especially in her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. By appropriating some of the structural elements of Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, as she did of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Adichie advances her storytelling in Purple Hibiscus by telling a domestic tale with yet stronger national overtones. By illustrating a crosscontinental set of inspirations and intertexts in Purple Hibiscus I reveal Adichie's exploration of the contemporary Nigerian political crisis.

The critical fortunes of "the transnational" have swelled in recent years, as it has made its way from disciplinary buzzword to become the banner for a genuinely rigorous and self-reflexive kind of geopolitical criticism. Along that path to widespread recognition and application, transnationalism has confronted its own procedural hurdles as an interpretive and epistemological framework, conceding potential frictions within its contentions-frictions implicit in decisions about which identifications and experiences might legitimately be celebrated or resisted. It's a state of affairs neatly summarized by Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea, who point out that we have "[o]n the one hand the continuing importance of the nation and the emotional attachments invested in it, and on the other hand those processes such as cross-border migration which are transnational in form."

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.

"The paper reflects on the tension that the process of sensing a nation brings to the formation of a post-colony in Southeast Asia. The "aesthetic" in this context creates forms of sensibility of the "national," rendering it present in the world and endowing it with certain identity-effects. On the other hand, it also posits an exceptional singularity, at once discriminating against subjectivities that resist to be contained within the national project and achieving the distinction of autonomy. This process foregrounds moments of finitude, improvisation, and intimacy, aspects of the aesthetic that are central to the crafting of the national and its art."