In the wake of the rise of ‘Asian cool’, the desire to meet the image of a confident, self-assured British Asian identity is overwhelming. As the most ‘funny’ British Asian voice, best known for her roles in the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42, Meera Syal might be seen to play into this demand. This chapter, however, suggests the very opposite: Syal's comedy, rather than a mark of newfound confidence, is instead a device used to challenge the prevailing mood of optimism with a stark warning of the continued difficulties of being not only British Asian, but a British Asian woman especially. Marketing of both Syal's first novel, Anita and Me (1996), and its follow-up, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), identifies her with the ‘funny’ public image developed through her television work. Syal's use of comedy is more significant for its engagement with the broader conventions of this genre than for its evocation of humour.

With Illywhacker, Peter Carey's success achieved international dimensions. It was published first in the UK and the USA, something of an irony for a novel exposing cultural imperialism. The novel won three of the major Australian literary prizes and was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize. Illywhacker examines twentieth-century Australian history with the savage humour and fantasy of the earlier fiction now placed within an epic framework. Like Bliss, Illywhacker transgresses and undermines presumptions of formal continuity and genre coherence: it both entertains and indicts, as it investigates the construction of fundamental Australian mythologies, the visions, dreams and lies of the national psyche. Illywhacker depicts a particular phase of Australian culture and nationalism. With its hybrid mix of narrative forms, its post-modern playfulness and the savagery of its critique, Illywhacker is a remarkable and memorable work.

This chapter argues that despite the inevitable continuation of political and ideological conflict, globalisation discourse contained a core set of meanings; all actors which employed it, especially in a positive sense, to articulate their perspective necessarily imported these meanings into their ideologies. Moreover, these meanings were not dependent on any particular ideological tradition, including neoliberalism. Although the globalisation concept was, at least to some extent, novel and independent, it has meanings that by necessity favoured some policy positions on foreign economic policy in British politics over others. The chapter summarises the empirical chapters, before presenting in detail six major themes and analytical issues which arise from this study. They are: definitions of globalisation, the status of neoliberalism, images of the state, images of spatiality and the status of universalism, globalisation discourse across the left/right spectrum, and whether globalisation is itself an ideology.

As Professor Zimmermann did in the last part of his chapter, I would like to recount the beginning of my academic journey in Rome in 2005 at the University of Roma Tre. Like many Italian students, I was preparing for the oral exam in private law with a fellow student. It is common for Italian students to memorise entire books of thousands of pages without fully grasping their contents. I vividly remember the day we were discussing distance contracts, consumer sales of goods, and travel packages. At one point, my colleague interrupted me and said, ‘This European law stuff is never asked about by the professor. Let's skip it’.

This was my first contact with what I thought was European law. After graduation, in 2010, I spent a year in Munster, Germany, where I had the opportunity to meet Professor Reiner Schulze, one of the co-founders, together with Reinhard Zimmermann and Stefan Grundmann, of the German-European Private Law Journal Zeitschrift fur Europaisches Privatrecht. During a meeting of the doctoral students, Professor Schulze told us that we were lucky because we had very important times ahead of us: we would probably be doctoral students during the period in which the European Civil Code or a similar instrument would be enacted at the European level.

The epigraph Geoffrey Hill uses for the first poem in his sequence ‘Churchill's Funeral’ is from Edward Elgar's note on the ‘Cockaigne’ overture and contains the phrase ‘knowing well the history’. It is apparent that Hill's poetry has always known history very well indeed. Elgar's words point to the way in which music, like poetry, can transmute ‘history’ into its own currency.

Networks of personal connections were of critical importance to colonial governance in the early nineteenth century. The networks which had most influence in colonial governance transmitted information, position and power via well-developed links to high-profile individuals in Britain, and particularly London. Trans-colonial networks encouraged the transmission of ideas, and experience, through the empire. While there were important bonds between military veterans and personnel more broadly, the Peninsular network was particularly strong in the period 1815 to 1845. More than either the peninsular or the scientific networks, the broadly defined 'humanitarian' or 'philanthropic' network tended to operate outside metropolitan and colonial government. The bonds between members of the scientific network were relatively loose, except where they involved patronage. Imperial networks could not function without their colonial members, who provided information and local patronage; but their links to Britain were critical.

1. Aim of the chapter – As alluded to in the introduction, the aim of the first part of this book – consisting of its first four chapters – is to set the stage and outline the broader research framework against which the book's central research issue is to be understood. This will be done, first, by determining the premises upon which this study on mandatory home state regulation of potentially harmful business activities in or pertaining to illegally occupied territories is based, and, secondly, by justifying why these premises – rather than others – are taken as a starting point. One of these premises or “building blocks” pertains to the notion of “illegal occupation” and to what extent this subcategory of “military occupation” constitutes a situation created or maintained in serious breach of jus cogens, making it subject to the aggravated responsibility regime for non-directly affected states under Articles 40–41 ARSIWA and international organisations under Draft Articles 41–42 DARIOWA.

This chapter studies More Pricks Than Kicks and the available parodies of and allusions to Dante's lines, which reflect certain passages in Dream and in many other Beckett poems of the time. It also studies the complex web of internal references to Dante, which is one of the ways where Beckett texts are interconnected and comprise themselves into the Beckett oeuvre.

The experience of being Muslim in Scotland is not directly comparable to being a Muslim in England. In comparison with discussions around British or English identity, there is a relative lack of commentary on racism in Scotland. Suhayl Saadi's fiction embodies a ‘Scottishness’ representative of how assumptions of a universal British Asian identity are not just problematic, but radically problematic. His texts are set in Britain, yet they clearly identify not with this broader category of the nation-state, but rather with Britain's constituent nations. Adding Scottish identity to the already problematic relationship between Islam and Britishness, Saadi's fiction exemplifies the diversity within British Asian cultures, and the need to define these in relation to specifics of time and place. That the notion of ‘Asian cool’ is an intensely limited one is taken up in Saadi's novel, Psychoraag. Saadi's nationalism speaks to the importance of geographical affiliation, even as it denies race as a basis for this.

This chapter discusses the unity and spatial relationsfound in the Love Medicine tetralogy and the Talesof Burning Love, identifying the metaphors used inthe novels and explaining how the specificpost-contact condition of Native – especially mixedblood – life in the United States is addressed. Italso examines the deconstructive work of Erdrich'stexts during the early stages of Love Medicine;Leslie Silko's review of Erdrich's prose style; theimagery of culture, syncretism and Catholicism inthe novels; the fluidity of Erdrich's prose; and thefundamental themes of her early work.

The Shetland landscape is populated by individuals whose experiences have come to signify and embody the myth of Shetland womanhood. The stories narrated by women in Shetland continue to be relevant in what is today a modern society struggling to cope with the complexities of the global economy. In most respects women's experience in twenty-first century Shetland mirrors that of women elsewhere in modern western societies, but in Shetland the past continues to serve as a referent of identity. At a time when Shetland is searching for home-made survival solutions, women's narratives are used to engage in a political dialogue about Shetland identity and social change. The woman's world exposed by Shetland women reveals to the feminist scholar a different way of viewing the world and women's place within it. The woman's world was constructed on the interaction of myth and materiality.

This chapter reviews the arguments addressed in this study and the issues that were raised about their relationship with critical traditions in Television Studies and in Beckett scholarship. It then suggests how some of the limits of this study might be opened in future work. Finally, this chapter determines this book's contribution to the historiography of Beckett's work as part of the historiography of television.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore Chagossians' recollections of forced displacement, their reformulations of the homeland, their challenging lives in exile, their experiences of onward migration, and their attempts to make home in successive locations. It then details the Chagossians' forced displacement from the Chagos Archipelago and the onward migration to the UK. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Horror arises when boundaries are crossed and the secure relation of inside and outside is disturbed: ‘there is suddenly, no inside and no outside. There is an emptying out of the object. It is the moment, a horrifying moment of the birth of a new space which ruins habitual space’. Rather than filling the new space with recognisable aesthetic images, the gaping hole comes shockingly to the fore: ‘an unfillable gap opens at the moment that the face is lifted’. Against the aestheticisation of horror and abjection stand more pervasive and persistent horrors of social, political and economic existence. Unbearable horror finds an object that turns it into terror. As Gothic images pervade a contemporary culture composed of rapidly oscillating and disturbing flows of anxious expenditures, a culture in which they are as much the norm as images of sex and violence, they manifest the generalisation of horror accompanying the vast economic and technological expansion into – and, phantasmatically, beyond – the black hole of post-modernity.