Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans, and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World

Edited by André Dodeman, University of Grenoble Alpes, France and Nancy Pedri, Memorial University of Newfoundland

July 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-758-1
Availability: In stock
212pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

This book examines how seas, oceans, and passageways have shaped and reshaped cultural identities, spurred stories of reunion and separation, and redefined entire nations. It explores how entire communities have crossed seas and oceans, voluntarily or not, to settle in foreign lands and undergone identity, cultural and literary transformations. It also explores how these crossings are represented. The book thus contributes to oceanic studies, a field of study that asks how the seas and oceans have and continue to affect political (narratives of exploration, cartography), international (maritime law), identity (insularity), and literary issues (survival narratives, fishing stories). Divided into three sections, Negotiating Waters explores the management, the crossings, and the re-imaginings of the seas and oceans that played such an important role in the configuration of the colonial and postcolonial world and imagination. In their careful considerations of how water figures prominently in maps, travel journals, diaries, letters, and literary narratives from the 17th century onwards, the three thematic sections come together to shed light on how water, in all of its shapes and forms, has marked lands, nations, and identities. They thus offer readers from different disciplines and with different colonial and postcolonial interests the possibility to investigate and discover new approaches to maritime spaces. By advancing views on how seas and oceans exert power through representation, Negotiating Waters engages in important critical work in an age of rising concern about maritime environments.

Love is Green: Compassion as responsibility in the ecological emergency

Lucy Weir

July 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-372-9
Availability: In stock
244pp. ¦ $61 £46 €52

This book links three themes, non-dualistic agency, ‘the good’ of systems, and compassionate attunement, and relates them to the ecological emergency. The author begins by examining how we currently understand our ability to choose what we do, our agency and conclude that this is dualistic: we think of an action to do, and then we physically act. Yet an understanding that we are enmeshed in context means our capacity to act freely dissolves in the mesh. We evolved capacities for consciousness and awareness, capacities that allow us to realise that we are here, now but that do not inevitably imply choice. Our capacity for ‘realisation’ gives us the ability to elicit an emotional response. When we understand our enmeshment, we can attune to a deep compassion for ourselves and indeed for all systems unfolding through time. Compassionate attunement allows a different set of options for action to become available to us. This then shifts how we respond to ourselves, our human relationships and to the ecological emergency we are currently embroiled in. This work is inspired by the great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen. The book’s contribution is to extend and link the notion of practice-realisation with the literature on evolutionary biology and entropy maximisation which allows us to speak of ‘the good’ of systems. Systems unfold as ‘good’ for us when biodiversity maximisation occurs. By considering the ecological emergency in light of compassionate attunement, we open ourselves to a new array of possibilities for action. Some of these the author outlines in the conclusion, relating them to existing literature on compassionate achievement and compassionate communication, to show how our this practice shifts our relationship to ourselves, to one another, and to the ecological emergency, thus changing the course of human history.

Reason, causation and compatibility with the phenomena

Basil Evangelidis

June 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-755-0
Availability: In stock
207pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

'Reason, Causation and Compatibility with the Phenomena' strives to give answers to the philosophical problem of the interplay between realism, explanation and experience. This book is a compilation of essays that recollect significant conceptions of rival terms such as determinism and freedom, reason and appearance, power and knowledge. This title discusses the progress made in epistemology and natural philosophy, especially the steps that led from the ancient theory of atomism to the modern quantum theory, and from mathematization to analytic philosophy. Moreover, it provides possible gateways from modern deadlocks of theory either through approaches to consciousness or through historical critique of intellectual authorities. This work will be of interest to those either researching or studying in colleges and universities, especially in the departments of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, history of ideas and culture. Greek and Latin Literature students and instructors may also find this book to be both a fascinating and valuable point of reference.

The Spaces and Places of Horror

Edited by Francesco Pascuzzi, Rutgers University and Sandra Waters, Rutgers University

September 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-742-0
Availability: In stock
299pp. ¦ $64 £48 €55

This volume explores the complex horizon of landscapes in horror film culture to better understand the use that the genre makes of settings, locations, spaces, and places, be they physical, imagined, or altogether imaginary. In The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll discusses the “geography” of horror as often situating the filmic genre in liminal spaces as a means to displace the narrative away from commonly accepted social structures: this use of space is meant to trigger the audience’s innate fear of the unknown. This notion recalls Freud’s theorization of the uncanny, as it is centered on recognizable locations outside of the Lacanian symbolic order. In some instances, a location may act as one of the describing characteristics of evil itself: In A Nightmare on Elm Street teenagers fall asleep only to be dragged from their bedrooms into Freddy Krueger’s labyrinthine lair, an inescapable boiler room that enhances Freddie’s powers and makes him invincible. In other scenarios, the action may take place in a distant, little-known country to isolate characters (Roth’s Hostel films), or as a way to mythicize the very origin of evil (Bava’s Black Sunday). Finally, anxieties related to the encroaching presence of technology in our lives may give rise to postmodern narratives of loneliness and disconnect at the crossing between virtual and real places: in Kurosawa’s Pulse, the internet acts as a gateway between the living and spirit worlds, creating an oneiric realm where the living vanish and ghosts move to replace them. This suggestive topic begs to be further investigated; this volume represents a crucial addition to the scholarship on horror film culture by adopting a transnational, comparative approach to the analysis of formal and narrative concerns specific to the genre by considering some of the most popular titles in horror film culture alongside lesser-known works for which this anthology represents the first piece of relevant scholarship.

Post-Industrial Precarity: New Ethnographies of Urban Lives in Uncertain Times

Edited by Gillian Evans, University of Manchester

November 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-871-7
Availability: In stock
240pp. [Color] ¦ $89 £66 €75

The United Nations predicts that by the year 2050 almost 70% of the planet’s population will be living in cities. The onus on social scientists is to explain the contemporary challenges posed by the urbanization of the world. A growing body of literature raises the alarm about the precarity of human existence in the uncertain conditions of rapidly transforming contemporary cities. This volume brings together a diverse collection of new ethnographies of precarious lives in various cities of the world. The specific focus on post-industrial cities in the UK allows for a wider consideration of the urban conditions and the political and economic climates which combine to produce extremely precarious living conditions for urban populations elsewhere in the world.The productive consequence of the comparisons and contrasts of various urban contexts, made possible by the volume, is an analytical focus on what it means for humans to live and occupy different subject positions under the advancing conditions of contemporary global capitalism. The volume’s chapters are also united by the shared commitment of early career social science scholars to ethnography as a research method. This gives a common methodological focus to diverse topics of substantive concern located in various cities of the world from Manchester, Newcastle and Salford in the north of England, to Detroit in the USA, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Turin in Italy and Beirut in Lebanon. Ethnography, relying as it does on long-term participant observation and in-depth open-ended interviewing, is uniquely valuable as a resource for bringing to life the unpredictable ways in which humans survive and develop forms of resilience among, for example, the ruins of dying cities. Ethnography also enables social scientists to understand and add depth to the surprising stories and apparent contradictions of everyday protest in the face of the increasing privatization of the public good and extreme inequalities of wealth. Ethnographically grounded analyses of urban life are therefore uniquely positioned to explain and critically analyse the new politics of popular resistance as the people who feel ‘left behind’ by society, or expelled from what might be described as the ‘exclusification’ of urban environments, push back against an economy and politics that appears to exist only for the private benefit of an indifferent elite population.