In her famous defence of Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison articulated succinctly the question with which all standard racial passing narratives wrestle: if blackness is not physically manifest, then what is it? A form of behaviour? A state of mind? A set of cultural affiliations? Conversely, if blackness is physically apparent but the behaviour/state of mind/cultural affiliations do not accompany this, is the subject still ‘black’? This chapter analyses Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), neither of which fits easily within the ‘standard racial pass’ (black-to-white) and ‘reverse racial pass’ (white-to-black) schema that Phillip Brian Harper elucidates: the first, because it features an African American protagonist who passes to become black(er); the second, because it foregrounds black-for-Jewish passing. Both Gunnar Kaufman from The White Boy Shuffle and Coleman Silk from The Human Stain grapple with the weight of their genealogy and ancestors. Both rely on their bodies as a key site of self-definition through their commitment to their respective sports (basketball; boxing). Both are, moreover, committed writers.

Dealing with the first of a series of E. coli O157 outbreaks in Scotland (which occurred in 1996), this chapter looks at the detective skills of a professor of bacteriology. Hugh Pennington's determination and independence rightly attracted public praise. Pennington wrote a book entitled When Food Kills (2003) about the E. coli outbreak he was asked to report on. His book was an exploration of what he called disaster science. He set out to compare the public response to a deadly episode of food poisoning with other disasters; his survey covered disasters in transportation, mineral extraction and waste disposal. The selective attention of press and officials, as well as disagreements within scientific communities, will, Pennington suggests, always make it difficult for even the most independent and determined of experts to ensure that what they have to say is acted upon.

This chapter focuses on Ireland's foreign relations especially its place and role in international affairs. It explains that involvement in the European Union had a considerable influence on both the formulation and conduct of Ireland's foreign policy and illustrates how an established policy area was fundamentally affected and shaped by Europeanisation. This chapter looks at the adaptation and change that occurred in institutional structures and policy over the period since membership and evaluates the sources and degree of policy learning and adaptation.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the impact of Europeanisation on the pattern of governance in Ireland. It describes the main institutional and policy changes which have arisen out of Europeanisation, while highlighting the limits of such change and stressing the importance of the pre-existing institutional and social structures. It concludes that Europeanisation has a limited explanatory value, which can only account some of the time for why and how change occurs at the domestic level.

This chapter notes that the grounds for seriously questioning the capacity of European governments to learn lessons from individual food crises have been strengthened rather than weakened by the British government's handling of the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak of 2001. Of all the European Union member states with reason to interrogate and overhaul procedures for dealing with agricultural and food-related crises, the British government might reasonably have been expected to be best equipped and best motivated to take the lead. Almost all of the evidence presented by Abigail Woods, in her A Manufactured Plague (2004a), suggests that the public authorities often display a deep reluctance to engage in root and branch reform of established practices.

This chapter examines agricultural issues, which have tended to dominate Ireland's involvement within the European Union. It describes how Ireland's agricultural policy developed and analyses the changes that have affected policy, politics and polity. This chapter traces the influence of policy changes and the significant financial transfers on Irish agricultural policy and practices as well as the social consequences of such change. It also explores the emergence of rural development policies as a feature of changing agricultural policy at both national and European levels.

This chapter investigates how Europeanisation has impacted on Ireland's economy and the implementation of economic policy. It considers the pre-existing policies and polity that existed prior to European Economic Community (EEC) membership with a view to understanding the underlying domestic political and economic arrangements, which shaped Ireland's economy. This chapter also considers Ireland's significant moves from protectionism to partnership and its adaptation to the strictures of the single market.

This chapter fleshes out the predominant strand and the current state of film theory and film studies. The strand is traced back to the notion of ‘political modernism’, a term denoting a particular period of film studies examined by D. N. Rodowick. Instead of criticizing political modernism, the chapter points out that much of what passes for film studies today has failed to go beyond the debates of political modernism. The logic of political modernism is based on a fundamental distinction between illusion and reality in the cinema. Film studies have predominantly been guided by a desire to forge clear distinctions between what can be considered real in the cinema and what can be considered illusory or non-real. The strategies of political modernism, which tried to dismantle the representational allure of orthodox cinema, were and are still clinging to a theory of representation. As Kibbey argues, the iconoclastic theory of the image is one predicated on a distinction between false and true images.

This chapter explains why an analysis of Irish national security policy after 9/11 is both timely and worthwhile. It also presents a brief summary of terminology that will crop up throughout the study. The research design employed is intended to facilitate the examination of policy from the perspectives of historical behaviour and crisis decision-making. It then turns to a model of threat response evaluation which is used to support a strategic and operational critique of Irish policy after 9/11. It describes how a governmental politics model can assist with the investigation of ‘crisis’ decision-making after 9/11. The five criteria for evaluating threat/considering response are the specificity of its identity, its nearness in space and time, the probability of it occurring, the weight of its consequences and whether or not perceptions of the threat are amplified by historical circumstance. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is shown.

Progressivists questioned the usefulness of the ICC per se. According to them, we face a trade-off between the prosecution of offences against international humanitarian and human rights law on the one hand and the demand for democratisation on the other: if authoritarian leaders assume that they will face trial for their crimes, they will try to remain in power for as long as possible and even risk the continuation of armed conflict. Progressivists emphasise the framework of domestic politics as the appropriate venue for the enforcement of human rights. At the same time, they consider the international level as crucial for human rights issues. However, they perceive international society as an ‘invitation-only club’ access to which should depend on the domestic human rights record of states. For advocates of progressivism, international order and peace are mainly derivative of the domestic structure of states.

This chapter examines contemporary first-person fictions of adolescence in which the protagonists' adolescence, as an in-between stage that is not childhood and not adulthood, is inextricably bound up with other indeterminacies mapped upon their bodies, especially those of race and gender. Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002) invoke the alienating experience of adolescence as a lens through which to refract their protagonists' ‘othered’ bodies. Crucially, in both novels, the protagonists engage, with varying degrees of commitment and success, in the act of creative writing, which serves to reflect back inevitably upon the authorship of the novels themselves. In Caucasia, non-normative gender and sexual identities accompany the subject's racial in-betweenness, while in Middlesex, indeterminacy of sexual orientation and ethnicity go hand in hand with the protagonist's ambiguously gendered body. Caucasia is a contemporary novel of racial passing, while Middlesex is not ‘about’ gender passing in the strictest sense, for its protagonist is intersexed.

In his satirical response to the controversies involving J. T. LeRoy and James Frey, Tim Carvell makes explicit the connections between the acts of passing and writing. This is due in no small part to the fact that the visual economies of race and gender are transliterated onto the book jacket he describes in the form of an author photograph. This chapter examines three recent controversies of authorship in which the connection between the contemporary fascination with the theme of passing and authorial concealment, subterfuge and deception becomes glaringly evident. The first is the exposure of LeRoy as a ‘fake’; the second, the ‘embellishments’ Frey added to his memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2005); and the third, the passing of a middle-class white woman, Margaret Seltzer, as Margaret B. Jones, a working-class ‘mixedblood’, in authoring a ghetto memoir entitled Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival (2008). In producing embellished or ‘fake’ memoirs, itself a form of (auto)biography, the authors in question also engage in acts of racial and gender passing.

This chapter outlines the profile of the frontline agencies of Irish national security and their government overseers. The Departments of Foreign Affairs and Justice operate information gathering and analytical functions that more broadly inform security policy debate and action. There is a parallel in the Swedish and Irish rationales for cooperation with neighbouring military intelligence agencies. Cooperation is a key priority for Irish, Swedish and Danish agencies but there are important differences between Irish arrangements and those operating within the Scandinavian states. Considerable inefficiencies were apparent in how the Defence Forces played out its aid to the civil power role. A key characteristic of the National Security Committee is its civilian members' reliance on their frontline agency colleagues for all operational information and analysis coming before them. Irish commitments to international cooperation do not necessarily imply a flawless or even desirable Irish intelligence apparatus.

This chapter analyses Jacques Rancière's approach to cinema as a category of the aesthetic. For him, film is part of the historical bloc in which people live, which defines artworks by means of the category called ‘aesthetics’. People live in an era of what Rancière calls ‘the aesthetic regime’, a regime by means of which art has been defined for the last two hundred years or thereabouts. The cinema, according to him, is very good at telling stories which have a precise beginning, middle and end. Indeed, this is one aspect of art that the cinema almost completely borrows from the representative regime: the ability to tell great stories. The conjunction of the aesthetic and the representative regimes fully defines what film is and which contributes to making it such an important artform. Rancière's contribution is important because it disrupts the quest for ‘purity’ in theories of cinema.

This introductory chapter tries to form a set of themes and a broad body of literature which could be creatively used to study the alternative accounts of contemporary violence in the study of international relations. It examines the work of scholars concerned with meaning in international relations and shows how paramilitaries, international aid groups, human rights organisations, transnational media-corporations, militias and inter-governmental organisations are all involved in contemporary war. This chapter also studies a body of interpretive work that helps connect area studies and social networks with studies of narrative identity.