"Through a close scrutiny of Janet Frame's life and work, it is my intention in this essay to suggest that Buddhism proved an irresistible magnet for the author's inquisitive spirit and that it played an important part in the shaping of her poetics. In effect, we shall see under what circumstances Frame's encounter with the east took place and the extent to which notions such as the empirical mind or knowledge, the Great Death of the ego and the non-duality of the world permeate her oeuvre. The underlying concern in the second part of the essay will be to buttress the claim that Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, but not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards such alterity. Thus, against the grain of mainstream criticism which maintains that one cannot explore "beyond", a Buddhist navigation of Frame's texts leads one to the surprising notion that the unharnessed world (or the infinite) which human beings are unable to embrace is, so to speak, right under their nose, so that, between "this" world of limited perceptions and "that" world of the beyond, the boundary is as thick or as thin as the walls of a self-made conceptual prison."

"This paper defends several highly revisionary theses about human rights. Section 1 shows that the phrase 'human rights' refers to two distinct types of moral claims. Sections 2 and 3 argue that several longstanding problems in human rights theory and practice can be solved if, and only if, the concept of a 'human right' is replaced by two more exact concepts: International human rights: moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic and international social protection. Domestic human rights: moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic social protection but only non-coercive international action. Section 3 then argues that because coercion is central to both types of human rights, and coercion is a matter of justice, the traditional view of human rights - that they are normative entitlements prior to and independent of substantive theories of justice - is incorrect. Human rights must instead be seen as emerging from substantive theories of domestic and international justice. Finally, Section 4 uses this reconceptualization to show that only a few very minimal claims about international human rights are presently warranted. Because international human rights are rights of international justice, but theorists of international justice disagree widely about the demands of international justice, much more research on international justice is needed - and much greater agreement about international justice should be reached - before anything more than a very minimal list of international human rights can be justified."

"Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2010 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association; the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; the joint meeting of the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto and the Centre for Research in Ethics, the University of Montreal; and the international conference "Democracy Today," organized at the University of Minho. I would like to thank John Francis Burke, Daniel Weinstock, Melissa Williams, and Joe Heath for their insightful suggestions. Serdar Tekin, Leah Soroko, Alex Livingston, Amit Ron, Michael Cunningham, and Inder Marwah charitably commented on the article at various points in time. Alessandro Ferrara led me to some crucial insights for which I am particularly grateful. I would also like to warmly thank Mathias Thaler, who read several versions of the article and who provided constructive criticism and encouragement. Last but not least, the recommendations by Robert Goodin and the three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Political Philosophy helped improve the manuscript, and for this I thank them. Research for this article benefitted from the financial support of the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal; and the European Social Fund. The usual disclaimers apply."

"At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the "global South" are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement."

"In this article we attempt to "seize back the creative initiative" to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re-representing and interpreting data collected through in-depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas."

"During the last decade, European countries have declared a 'crisis' of multiculturalism. This crisis has gained significant political traction, despite the empirical absence of a failed experiment with multiculturalism. This introduction focuses on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that 'parallel societies' and 'intolerable subjects' and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies. Beyond particular contexts, the problem of intolerable subjects is seen as a shared European challenge, requiring disintegrated migrants and Muslim populations to display loyalty, adopt 'our' values, and prove the legitimacy of their belonging. This introduction critiques multicultural backlash, less as a rejection of piecemeal multicultural policies than as a denial of lived multiculture. This is developed through an examination of racism in a post-racial era, and by analysing the ways in which integrationist projects further embed culturalist ontology."

"This article explores Tamil diasporic engagement in Toronto, at the turn of the Sri Lankan struggle in 2009, to foreground the contested and transnational character of Canadian multiculturalism. It asks whether Canadian multicultural discourse provides a space for social and political identity-making within the Tamil-Canadian Diaspora. The article then sketches the way multiculturalism informed Tamil-Canadian identity-making amongst young and older Tamil-Canadians prior to these events. It explores how diasporic identity was then crystallized in 2009 through media and political responses within the mainstream and the Diaspora itself. The article argues that security discourses dramatically prefigured the terms of engagement for Tamil-Canadians during the final months of the civil war in Sri Lanka. It concludes by drawing attention to the transformative possibilities of multiculturalism and the way the diasporic lens that this case study uses may contribute to this discussion."

Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: "Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching." Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the "unborn"-those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "responsible for our rose"? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned-escaped, it may be-spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master. (Eiseley 1960: 123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now...

"This article documents the emergence of the Denotified Rights Action Group (DNG-RAG), a national social movement orchestrated to assert the citizenship rights of adivasi (indigenous) populations in India. It assesses the movement's efforts to engage the central Indian government in meaningful dialogue to accommodate the inclusion of marginalized adivasis in the democratic politics of the nation. In doing so, the DNT-RAG reasserts the primacy of the Indian state as the principal engine driving the project of nation building, and as such, the site that activists target to further an agenda of equitable development and democratic rights for those known as India's Denotified Tribes."

"This paper examines intersections between ethnocentric and androcentric desire. To that end it employs a broadly postcolonial analysis of the medicalisation of birth and of women. The paper explores an ambivalence characterised by a simultaneous lust for and loathing of the other through engaging with postcolonial discourse analysis, and it ties those impulses to an imperative of control and to an administration of the other's affairs. That imperative and those impulses represent a point at which the logic of patriarchy and the logic of colonialism converge, and that point is one around which the social production of material disadvantage and negative outcomes can be explored. In the service of modern paradigms of progress and development, both colonial discourses and medical discourses underpin material relationships with the other. Whether that other is racialised or gendered, the manifest result of those relationships is the production of outcomes which are sub-optimal and pernicious in effect, and which result in a material insufficiency in the discursively produced other. The process of colonising childbirth reproduces the material effects of colonial subjectivity within a highly ambivalent and deeply imperialistic encounter. An exploration of that process demonstrates a link between power, paternalism and poor outcomes which highlights a space for self-determination in the optimisation of health and wellbeing amongst members of population groups which are vulnerable to the representations and interests of administrative power."

"This article draws on Agamben's concept of homo sacer (bare-life) and his examination of the Muselmänner - the most de-humanised inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camp - to illuminate the ways that the policy and system of immigration detention in Australia signifies a continuation of the biopolitical paradigm that both created and supported the atrocity of Auschwitz. The article argues that the notion of race occupies a paradoxical position in the concept and body of the refugee in Australia today because while racism brings about and justifies the refugee's incarceration in the camp, the biopolitical processes of the camp create a subject within whom race becomes inevitably subsumed within and transcended by the ontology of bare-life. In this scheme, the question of human rights becomes ever more relevant but even less applicable. The article concludes with a critique of Agamben's key ideas as well as my application of them in light of Foucauldian and other interpretations of his work."

"This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always or almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations - again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions."

"While the subjugation and abuse of Palestinians living within Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are well documented, what is less well known is how ingrained racism is in Israel, in that it not only extends to Palestinian Christians and Muslims, but also to Jews who come from ethnic minority backgrounds. This article documents how the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements."

"This article examines Malcolm X's affirmation at the Oxford Union of the proposition put forward by US Senator Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention in 1964: 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.' At Oxford, black nationalism, American conservatism and liberal conceptualisations of rights were all on display, as Malcolm X explored new potentialities in American and black political thought. The paper seeks to uncover some of the less explored dimensions of this moment of transition in US and UK racial politics, even as Malcolm extended his arguments into the broader context of decolonisation in Africa and the extension of rights to Africans and other marginalised groups throughout the world. With the 1964 elections in the US and UK serving as background, the author seeks to illuminate the ways in which the rhetoric and theories implicit in the debate represented both atavistic and new arguments for reconciling the impulse for both racial and civic recognition in modern society."

"The collections, exhibiting techniques and events offered at France's national museum of immigration history are explored through this critical review of Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (CNHI) at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris. The case study considers the extent to which one of the capital's newest museums has successfully and sensitively aligned the colonialist architecture of its building - originally constructed for the 1931 World's Fair - with twenty-first century, postcolonial perspectives on the decolonisation of cultural spaces, and pluralisation of curatorial narratives, to better reflect the histories and lived experiences of diverse audiences."

"The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums-through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers' perception-play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to 'intervene' into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge."

"White anti-racists are an influential social group within settler-colonial societies that often escape critical attention. This article explores one aspect of white anti-racist subjectivities as experienced by those who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. Although not usually discussed openly between colleagues, frustration, betrayal, and suffering physical discomfort without complaint are common experiences for whites working in remote Indigenous communities. To explain this suffering, I first develop the novel concept of white stigma. I argue that in progressive spaces where there is a concerted attempt to invert colonial power relations-what I call 'progressive spaces'-whiteness and the privilege it represents is something to be avoided, diminished, and counteracted. When white anti-racists are interpellated as white, this is generally experienced as a stigma. Recognizing whiteness as a stigmatized identity that white anti-racists continuously attempt to rehabilitate and make liveable makes the suffering of white anti-racists intelligible. Drawing on ethnographic research with white anti-racists, I show how suffering works to manage white stigma. This exploration of stigma, suffering and love furthers our understanding of white anti-racists' identities, and through this, liberal governance in settler societies."

"In Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora (1910) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), literary works which employ the fiction of nativity to examine a paradoxical moment of historical origin, the idea of the nation is subjected to intolerable strain. Fables of identity are constructed in both novels, yet instead of a 'hardening' of the metaphysical idea that sustains the allegorical parallel, what we witness is a radical dissolution or disintegration of the categories of nation and narrative at the very site of their inscription. I will argue that in both works, the symbolic equation of novel and nation opens up fissures in historical experience."

"The financial crisis that erupted in September 2008 seemed to confirm all the worst stereotypes about the United States held abroad: that Americans are bold, greedy, and selfish to excess; that they are hypocrites, staunch defenders of the free market ready to bail out their own companies; and that the US has long been the architect and primary beneficiary of the global economic system. So the crisis had an enormous potential for deteriorating further the global image of the United States, already at an all-time high during the George W. Bush era. Yet anti-American sentiments did not surge worldwide as a result of the crisis, neither at the level of public opinion, nor at the level of actions and policy responses by foreign policy-makers. This article explains why the dog did not bark and reawaken anti-Americanism in the process. The central argument is that this potential anti-Americanism has been mitigated by several factors, including the election of Obama, the new face of globalization, and the perception of the relative decline of US power coupled with the rise of China, which suggests that the 'post-American' world may be accompanied by a 'post anti-American' world, at least in Europe."

"This article seeks to address the concern that the language of human rights has become increasingly problematic and susceptible to distortion from its intended meaning. This is in part due to three problems which are identified and interrogated, these being the implicit reduction of human rights discourse to Western individualism, universalism, and legalism. It proceeds to present a sociological defence of human rights discourse as the articulation of general desires in the building of a 'good society', and specifies eight such general desires which form the basis of this discourse."