Books

Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face of it, it meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of the faith and its community. But, by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fled and hence survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time. Bishops in Flight examines the various ways these episcopal leaders both appealed to and altered the discourse of Christian flight to defend their status as purveyors of Christian truth even when their exiles appeared to condemn them. It illuminates how profoundly Christian authors deployed theological discourse and the rhetoric of heresy to respond to the phenomenal political instability of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations. 
“Milena Belloni’s engrossing ethnography—carried out across time, space, and place— is particularly commendable because of her scholarly commitment to ‘getting things right.’ The Eritrean women and men whose lives provided its empirical ground will see their pain, joy, and contradictions reflected back at them. This is scholar activism at its finest.” LAURA BISAILLON, Professor of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough 
“The Big Gamble is a study of a migrant group that has received very little scholarly attention. Its focus on the Eritrea to Europe corridor is a novel approach, and Milena Belloni has produced a compelling and courageous account.” PETER KIVISTO, Augustana College and University of Helsinki 
“A monumental and perceptive story of migration, taking the reader on a journey not just from Africa to Europe but through reflections on moralities, risk, and trust that are central to contemporary mobility and immobility. Belloni’s account of Eritrean migration experiences is powered by formidable fieldwork and written with warmth and wisdom.” JØRGEN CARLING, Peace Research Institute Oslo 
MILENA BELLONI is a sociologist at the University of Trento. Her doctoral research on Eritrean migration received the 2016 IMISCOE Award. Belloni has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This is a new approach to one of the greatest political theorists, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are one of the most popular Marxist texts available and continue to inspire readers across the world. Here, Michele Filippini proposes a new approach based on the analysis of previously ignored concepts in his works, creating a book which stands apart.Including chapters on ideology, the individual, collective organisms, society, crisis and temporality, Using Gramsci offers a new pattern in Gramscian studies aimed to speak to the broader audience of social sciences scholars beyond the field of political theory and Marxism, while remaining firmly rooted in his writings. Working from the original Italian texts, Filippini also examines the more traditional areas of Gramsci’s thought, including hegemony, organic intellectuals and civil society.This book will be perfect for all scholars and students of Gramsci’s thought.

This is a volume of 12 studies on specific topics of theatre and drama history in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. The scientific interest in the culture of this area during the unification process of Europe is increasing. Five of these studies are of comparative nature, seven focus on Greece and its European connections in the field of theatre and drama. Comparative studies in South Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, especially in theatre and drama history, are very rare. Some of these studies are ground-breaking in specific subjects. Exhaustive registers will bring these studies together thematically, studies which in sum, together with the ones of the second volume, will give an idea of a future handbook on Southeatersn Europe theatre and drama from the Midde Ages up to the 20th century.

The Russian Revolution was an explosion of mass democracy from below. It transformed the people who took part and inspired tens of millions across the world. Its global impact shook the capitalist system to its foundations and came close to bringing it down. But in the end, the revolutionary movement was destroyed by the most murderous counter-revolutionary terror in history. And because the real history of the revolution is so subversive of class rule everywhere— East, West, and South— it has been buried under a mountain of lies, distortions, and denials. This book sets out to nail every bogus argument about the Russian Revolution— from Tories, Stalinists, and sectarians— and to present the living reality of a mass movement of millions, organised in participatory assemblies, mobilised for militant action.

The major principles and systems of C. S. Peirce’s ground-breaking theory of signs and signification are now generally well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that Peirce initially conceived these systems within a ‘Philosophy of Representation’, his latter-day version of the traditional grammar, logic and rhetoric trivium. In this book, Tony Jappy traces the evolution of Peirce’s Philosophy of Representation project and examines the sign systems which came to supersede it. Exploring the potential of the later sign-systems that Peirce scholars have hitherto been reluctant to engage with and extending Peirce’s semiotic theory beyond the much canvassed systems of his Philosophy of Representation, this book will be essential reading for everyone working in the field of semiotics.

Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material.This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focusing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension.McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources— the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

Only a few people foresaw the sudden and momentous events of 1989: within weeks the seemingly unshakable communist regimes of Eastern Europe were washed away and with them the postwar international order. This book gives an overview over the national revolutions and external reactions. It contains chapters on the revolutions in all major countries of the former communist bloc as well as on the responses of all major international players. The first part examines the revolutionary events – from above and from below – in Eastern Europe as well as China and their backgrounds. The second part deals with Soviet and Western perceptions and responses. The third part focuses on the aftermath of the revolutions, on societal transformations, the acceptance of the new Central European democracies to NATO and the EU, and on the memory of 1989.

“By far the best collective work on this topic … This book will be unique, and is much needed – at a time when social scientists continue to strive to understand the ‘Arab revolutions’.” Pierre Grosser

“We get in-depth analysis and diversity of the assessments.” Pierre Grosser

Since the 1970s, highly educated families in Austria have employed Au-pairs for taking care of their children. Why have these families preferred Au-pairs to kindergartens with qualified teachers? Were Au-pairs just a flexible substitute or did they have additional functions in the family? Which social and political climate has favoured this private form of childcare? The empirical basis of the work was the documentation of one of the major Austrian Au-pair agencies for the period 1978 – 2000, particularly 298 self-descriptions from guest families and the agency´s annual reports. The material was supplemented by interviews with ten guest families and by interviews with two experts. Thus is possible to analyze the socio-demographic characteristics of guest-families in Vienna and its suburbs, their motivations for taking Au-pairs, and their expectations. The findings indicate that Au-pairs usually serve several roles within the families: for instance, one very important role is to “double” mothers in order to free their minds to continue their social and work life. The pair system is also discussed in view of its two historic threads: one is a long European “education abroad” tradition for rather upper class children. The other thread is a “work-migration” tradition for lower class childs that had to go to cities to work as domestic servants. Which of the two traditions dominates the Au-pair market depends on the economic situation of the countries from which the Au-pairs come. Consequently, the economic and political changes around 1989 in Eastern Europe have had major impacts on the characteristics of Au-pair jobs in Austria.

The experience of the South African War sharpened the desire to commemorate for a number of reasons. An increasingly literate public, a burgeoning populist press, an army reinforced by waves of volunteers and, to contemporaries at least, a shockingly high death toll embedded the war firmly in the national consciousness. In addition, with the fallen buried far from home those left behind required other forms of commemoration. For these reasons, the South African War was an important moment of transition in commemorative practice and foreshadowed the rituals of remembrance that engulfed Britain in the aftermath of the Great War. This work provides the first comprehensive survey of the memorialisation process in Britain in the aftermath of the South African War. By uncovering the themes and myths that underpinned these interpretations of the war, shifting patterns in how the war was represented and conceived are revealed.

This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the work of Marie NDiaye, born in central France in 1967, winner of the Prix Femina (2001), the Prix Goncourt (2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2013), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiaye’s world lurks an indefinable blankness which makes it impossible for the reader to decode narrative at the level of psychology or event. Considering each of NDiaye’s works (including her novels, theatre, short fiction and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiaye’s portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides an original and provocative framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hybrid and hyper-French cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern and reluctantly postcolonial blank arts.

The consequences of Englishes spread have become increasingly clear to its diverse speakers. Sometimes associated with a standardization leading to homogenization, often also with imperialism, English is increasingly understood to have no necessary connection with any country or group of countries. The willingness to accept that English has become Englishes might be less evident among so-called native speakers, but their authority is weaker than it seemed. This book puts examples from World Englishes into dialogue with postcolonial studies. The dialogue will correct misconceptions and misapprehensions in postcolonial studies, with World Englishes offering renewal for postcolonial studies. At the same time, the dialogue will also apply postcolonial studies’ political and philosophical ideas to World Englishes, resulting in a postcolonial perspective on English today.

Creolizing Europe critically interrogates creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the cultural and social transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. Exploring the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking post/coloniality, raciality and othering not only as historical legacies but as immanent to and constitutive of European societies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities. While not all the contributions in this volume explicitly address Edouard Glissant’s approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking. All of the chapters explore the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization to the European context. As such, this edited collection offers a significant contribution and intervention in the fields of European Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies on two levels.

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines and new urban centres for Europeans. Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy and the social history of colonialism. It demonstrates that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. The book shows that the critical aspect of the enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy and international medical research.

In Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan, “ecotourism” promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise centers on how Okinawans’ sense of place is transforming rapidly, along with language, landscapes, cultural traditions, and wildlife: from marginalized and exoticized island phenomena into global heritage resources worth cherishing by insiders and outsiders. Footprints in Paradise is intended for readers interested in the anthropology of US-Japan-Okinawa relations, tourism and island environments, the politics of ecological sustainability, and the shifting ethics of human-animal relationships in the early twenty-first century.

On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. This book recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.