The last chapter of Part II explores Rolla Selbak’s Three Veils (2011). The religious symbol of the veil is analysed as standing metonymically for the film’s three American Muslim protagonists. The chapter suggests the film depicts the women’s struggles with familial and societal expectations about their Muslim femininity, particularly regarding arranged marriages, rape, domestic violence, and homosexuality. It is argued that the film’s protagonists struggle with inherited ideas of what constitutes a ‘good Muslim’ and Arab girl, as they find themselves grappling with the competing ideologies of American liberalism and Muslim traditionalism. The three girls are constructed as the good, the deviant, and the bad Muslim. Although Selbak tackles controversial topics regarding the American Muslim community, it is argued she does so in an attempt at dealing with real issues assailing Muslim women, yet she depicts an American Muslim community that is gradually becoming more attune to the plights of women. Amira, the homosexual Muslim, and Nikki, the queer Muslim, do not end up together, and Amira becomes a hijab teacher in Jordan, which constitutes Selbak’s admission that allegiance to faith and community can still impede the free expression of homosexual desire.

Emigration from Cornwall outstripped all other counties in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century: it was at the top of the league table of per capita emigration. The international adjustment by the Cornish migrants was framed by the income differential which had decisively widened under the impact of the much more successful copper mining operations overseas. Cornish emigration showed that the effects of mining decline were written on top of the conventional processes of rural decline as the industrial economy of Britain expanded, sucking away much of the demographic revolution. Cornwall and Kent were two variants of the general responsiveness of rural England to the opportunities of emigration and the imperatives of population shifts. Kent was a more purely rural county, with little mining activity, but adjacent to London.

This chapter explores Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the Devil (2012), after a preliminary analysis of Muslim female homosexuality in her fictional short Henna Night (2009). The chapter suggests that, while focusing on the relationship between two British brothers of Egyptian heritage living in East London, El Hosaini’s narrative interrogates intersecting issues of ethnicity, religion, national identity, gender, and sexual orientation in a manner that disorganises Western expectations about British Muslim youth. The chapter illustrates how the older brother’s same-sex relationship with a French Arab challenges European ethnic absolutism. In the face of the central youth gang’s conjoining of masculinity, violence, and criminality, it is suggested Islam provides competing versions of Muslim masculinity that gradually relinquish violence and prize interpersonal empathy, while resisting Western views on Muslim women as invariably repressed and segregated. Finally, the film’s dealing with queerness, which rejects a Westernised ‘coming out’ narrative arc, is shown as challenging homonationalist models of sexuality prescribing cultural and sexual assimilation to the West’s constructed ‘Other’.

The Introductory chapter situates this ethnographic study within recent debates in sociology and anthropology on statecraft in the aftermath of neoliberalism, on the temporalities of the global political economy, and on bare life and ordinary life as conceptual lenses. The chapter carves out a conceptual space for recognising both politics and ethics that underpin the contemporary austerity state and introduces the post-Soviet Latvian case as particularly apt for pursuing such an analytical approach. It presents the two central arguments of the book, outlines the materials and methods used, and provides a summary of the chapters to follow.

This chapter focuses on the career and work of Merleau-Ponty. During the 1930s he worked with Gurwitsch and was also responsible for publicizing some of the late work of Husserl which, during the war, was held in archives in Louvain. He was involved, with Sartre, in attempting to conceptualize post-war social construction. He tried to integrate his phenomenological thinking with political engagement in a way which had not been done by either Schutz or Gurwitsch but, finally, commitment to philosophy prevailed. Consideration of the work of Merleau-Ponty provides a link between the a-political orientation of the productions in America of Schutz and Gurwitsch, and Bourdieu’s transposition of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking from the field of philosophy to that of sociology.

This chapter identifies seven types of ekphrasis in the writings of the artist Stanley Spencer. Selections of these writings have been published, and the chapter explores this particular type of ekphrastic encounter when such ‘an artist of the bizarre’ develops his own search for form, while expressing his philosophy of life at the same time as he is busy writing a ‘defence and illustration’ (to borrow one of Du Bellay’s titles) of his own works. Writing for art takes on a very particular interest for the reader when it means having access to the origins of creation; that is, when an artist is engaged in developing his reflections upon and theories of art. The chapter then argues that Spencer’s writings are hybrid texts much in the same way as novels that mingle narration and description. But here the artist mingles self-reflection (in the diaries and notebooks) together with an epistolary style of address (there is always a receiver at the other end), more or less ‘theoretical’ developments (in the essays), and personal reflection on his own motivations.

This chapter explores how the mobile camerawork of Z Cars (BBC, 1962–1978), compared to the conservative visuals and ideology of Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–1976), enabled the programme to uncover the emerging cracks in the postwar consensus. It argues that establishing the British police series as a permanent fixture of the television schedule was underscored by a new candid form of social realism devoted to the stresses of working-class men’s experiences.

This chapter shows disorientation and leverage in the university by exploring the problematic doubleness of economics as indeterminately both inside and outside contemporary cultural theory. It presents the question of the interdisciplinary nature of cultural analysis, particularly in relation to the complex interchange between the economy of criticism, and the location and deployment of the field of economics itself within the intellectual and discursive economy. To account for the problematic yet productive interaction between cultural criticism's own economy and the field of economics, the chapter presents the question of gift-exchange that has so interested theorists across the various disciplines of anthropology, sociology, economics, semiotics and philosophy. The chapter focuses specifically on the implications for cultural criticism of the close relationship between the concept of the gift and that of culture itself arising from Jacques Derrida's discussion.

Fear and memory are connected to ideas that are essential to riddles: to what initially appears unknown, shadowy and uncertain, as well as to the experience of recognition and the relief stemming from it. This chapter argues that, because of the nature of the poetic riddle and of Old English riddles in particular, memory and fear are their intrinsic sine qua non. It begins by discussing the ways in which memory and fear are related to the riddle on structural, narrative and meta-textually affective levels, before offering a broad overview of the ways in which fear was understood in medieval Christian thought. Finally, it discusses transformative fear in three Exeter Book riddles: XII Hund Heafda (R.86), solved as ‘One-Eyed Seller of Garlic’; Gryrelic Hleahtor (R.33), solved as ‘Iceberg’; and Nama Min is Mære (R.26), solved as ‘Bible’. Ultimately, the types of fear operating within the Old English riddles lend them a particular capacity to corroborate the early Christian view of seemingly negative experiences that must be understood as positively transformative. Thus at least some of the Old English riddles may be read as miniature lessons and parables of Christian thinking.

Thomas A. Prendergast re-examines the fifteenth-century ‘Beryn’ manuscript, one of numerous continuations of and additions to the Canterbury Tales. Prendergast’s foremost concern is to identify the logic guiding the Beryn-scribe’s addition of this text to the Tales. He argues that the scribe was compelled by an irresistible desire to complete the text of the Canterbury Tales, thus attributing agency to the text itself.

Problems have arisen since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). If it is suggested that UNCLOS constitutes lex generalis it must be indicated that it cannot invalidate any rights arising under lex specialis such as the law of armed conflict, unless there is incontrovertible evidence in the text that it was intended to override such lex specialis. When deciding whether a ship was trading with an enemy port, or whether its cargo was intended for an adverse party, Prize Courts developed the doctrines of continuous voyage and ultimate destination. In maritime warfare only properly authorised combatants are permitted to participate in warlike activities. By Hague Convention VI enemy merchant ships in ports of the adverse party at the outbreak of hostilities were allowed to depart and were granted a period of grace for the purpose.

This short section draws together the three main sections of the book to consolidate the arguments about the significance of the lollards in the English Reformation. This memory was indelibly imprinted on the English Reformation because the lollards were immortalised in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as spiritually enlightened forbears. Rather than mould their beliefs to fit the Elizabethan religious settlement of his own day, Foxe’s textual tolerance meant that the ‘Book of Martyrs’ acted as a vector for radical religious ideologies. These ideologies, conveyed and seemingly authorised by the revered John Foxe, acted as historical exemplars for later Protestant nonconformists, thus establishing the lollards as an inherently subversive element in the English Reformation.

This chapter brings together the arguments which are core to the book. It argues that the sick poor became the totemic group of paupers in the last decades of the Old Poor Law and that medical welfare became the most insistent part of poor law spending. By 1834, the Old Poor Law was well on the way to becoming a proto-medical service. This, and the fact that the poor and officials expected the sick to negotiate their relief, had fundamental consequences for the stability and purpose of the post-1834 New Poor Law.

Chapter 1 examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi physically surrounds China’s first communist meeting site of 1921, today memorialized as a museum. The complex was designed with reference to the vernacular homes of its formerly foreign occupied French Concession setting, and it is officially celebrated for its “East-meets-West” and “Old-meets-New” architecture, even while the construction demolished most of the site’s existing homes and dislocated thousands of working-class residents. This chapter analyzes how Xintiandi’s seemingly benign East-meets-West façades mask collusions between the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic state power and capitalist development while romanticizing Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan legacy. The chapter analyzes examples of Xintiandi’s repressed cultural histories, including the revolutionary art and design experiments of Pang Xunqin, founder of the 1930s avant-garde collective The Storm Society; leftist writings and art promoted by Lu Xun; and the major Cultural Revolution–era debate sparked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary Chung Kuo Cina. The chapter argues that the official admonishment of Shanghai-based cultural projects by Pang and Antonioni speak to collisions between Shanghai’s semi-colonial past, Maoist socialism, and Cultural Revolution–era totalitarianism that still resonate in Shanghai today.