This chapter examines the evolution of Middle East Studies (MES) in Italy and their complex relations with state powers, from the theological and missionary purposes of the Middle Ages to the monarchical and republican colonial enterprises. It also outlines the thematic patterns MES engaged with and explores their current status within academia and the public at large. We combine a knowledge production analysis with a critical literature review approach, also drawing upon a 2019 mapping project by the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMo). We argue that colonial-driven MES systematically sidelined a self-reflection on Italy’s colonial past and, by doing so, they have long been on the fringe of both academia and politics. Finally, we argue that MES are becoming more diversified and independent of government agendas, but still struggle to gain full recognition within the Italian academic system, already constrained by structural problems.

In contemporary scholarship the notion of biopolitics is typically associated with the late work of Michel Foucault. This chapter argues that Arendt provides resources for biopolitical analysis that are lacking in Foucault. It begins by mapping the overlaps and divergences between Foucault and Arendt’s views on biopolitics, linking these to their respective use of other key concepts (such as essence, telos, and power). It then highlights how Arendt’s attention to technological conditioning puts the production of technologised subjects at the heart of modern biopolitics. The chapter ends by stressing how such a view provides for a form of biopolitical analysis that concerns more than mere governmental management or administration.

This chapter shows that medieval English conduct texts exhort women to be invested in being hypervigilant against the possibility of shame, and that they function as guides for practising that shamefastness, advocating and describing ‘manipulations of body and mind’ that are intended to intensify and communicate a woman’s sense of shame. The chapter begins by situating conduct literature in relation to the education of girls and young women in medieval England, and in relation to the chaste ideals to which medieval women were expected to adhere. It then turns to the conduct texts themselves, focusing primarily on four examples of conduct literature in Middle English and Middle Scots: the Middle English translation of Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles, and the poems How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wife Would a Pilgrimage, and the Middle Scots Thewis of Good Women. The final section of the chapter demonstrates how the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry situates its advice regarding how to secure womanly ‘honoure and goodnesse’ within a recognizably literary frame, one that recasts the pursuit of female honour in heroic terms.

With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 following the Oslo Accords, support for the peace process with Israel, within the framework of the two-state solution, became the ‘new normal’. This ‘new normal’ was supposed to be reflected also in education. Donor countries, among them very prominently European actors, openly connected their support for Palestine’s education system with such an expectation. The Oslo Accords have put in motion a process of institutionalisation (that is, governmentalisation) of higher education programmes in Palestine. So far, such a process has not fully undermined the independence of universities in determining their programmes and curricula. Palestinian universities therefore continue to provide a different narrative, often critical of the status quo resulting from the Oslo Accords and its presupposed paradigm, the two-state solution. Within this context, this chapter assesses the manner in which Europe is taught at Palestinian universities. It conducts such an analysis within the larger context of how Palestinian higher education developed, and how Palestinian universities adapted to this ‘new normal’. The chapter thus uses the study object ‘Europe’ as a case study to problematise overall implications for present and future higher education programmes in Palestine.

This chapter scrutinises various aspects of the Japaneseness of Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. It touches upon the issue of ascribing Japanese qualities to Ishiguro's prose, whilst concentrating on thematic aspects of the novels. In particular, two specific Japanese motifs, in A Pale View of Hills (ghosts and suicide) shall be examined, as well as the absence of the atomic bomb in its narrative. Throughout, the chapter explores how the novel questions the concept of Japaneseness through its images and discourse, beginning with a general look at how Ishiguro represents Japan in his fictions. A Pale View of Hills has an extremely accomplished structure for a first novel. It tells two main stories, one of which is nested inside the other. The inner story is set in Nagasaki a few years after the war.

Chapter 5 evaluates the dynamics of the coalition government from the perspective of agenda control. With an emphasis on how the Liberal Democrats were marginalised the chapter will focus on (a) policy and (b) personnel. On policy, the chapter will identify how although the Liberal Democrats secured some concessions in terms of the NHS, education, pensioners and social care, the Conservatives protected their red lines in terms of the budget deficit; defence; immigration; Europe; crime; policing; immigration and justice. The chapter will then identify how whatever concessions the Liberal Democrats did secure were limited, because of the following: (a) tuition fees was a policy area with a real capacity to hurt them; and (b) the coalition agreement made it clear that the trajectory of social policy would be subordinated to deficit reduction. On personnel, the chapter will identify how the Liberal Democrats did well out of the coalition negotiations in terms of the number of ministerial positions secured, but that the Conservatives retained control of the departments that were central to their agenda and identify. Furthermore, the Liberal Democrats were marginalised by the Conservatives in terms of portfolio allocation, which would undermine their ability to influence the trajectory of policy.

Estelle Bories’s chapter investigates the re-emergence of Chinese contemporary art in the West, concentrating on the way in which artists and curators addressed the revolutionary past of China. It considers Cai Guoqiang’s famous restaging of Rent Collection Courtyard, presented during the forty-eighth Biennale of Venice in 1999. The appearance of Chinese art at the Biennale occurred with much fanfare. While, on the one hand, this could be read as a point of departure and a new expression of Chinese modernity, on the other hand it could also be read as a repackaging of some standard Maoist positions on art.

This chapter examines the politics, aspirations andantagonisms that grew out of the curatorial processunderlying the exhibition The Potosí Principle(Madrid 2010, Berlin 2011, La Paz 2011), andcompares them to other Andean exhibitions includingBolivian Worlds (London 1987) and Luminescence: TheSilver of Peru (Vancouver 2012, Toronto 2013). Thechapter questions the category of contemporary artand examines its avowed potential as radicalcritique and the claims that it and other exhibitionstrategies have marginalised Indigenousepistemologies and obfuscated historical agency. Theimplications of this conflict between Western andIndigenous curators and curatorial collectives onthe right of self-expression and the freedom ofinterpretation and critique; associated ethicalconundrums and the viability of epistemologicalpluralism will be clearly articulated as problemsrequiring serious museological attention.

Postcolonial literary analysis – that is, analysis directed towards the questions of race, empire and decolonisation that form the purview of this book – is applied typically to Black and Asian writers. Resisting such racial categorisation, this chapter focuses on Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning Last Orders (1996) and in particular the novel’s figuration of the Second World War and its aftermath in global and imperial terms. Swift uses this historical framing to examine the effects of decolonisation – the Fall of Aden/Eden – on the dynamics of race and class in postwar England. In this way, Swift takes his readers inside the lived experience of demythologisation, or the difficulties of ‘working through’ (in Paul Gilroy’s well-known formulation) tenacious imperial mythologies. By conveying the power of myth, alongside its painful contradictions and false promises, Swift’s fiction does not offer postcolonial subversion or critique but examines the breaking from and clinging to imperial ideas and desires in postwar England. As this analysis begins to demonstrate, postcolonial questions of race, empire and decolonisation cannot be ‘bracketed’ by authorial ethnicity; these questions are at stake whenever we are reading, teaching and writing about contemporary English literature.

This chapter explores the content of a role-playing game (RPG) by White Wolf Publishing, one of the games in their World of Darkness series, and examines the role and presentation of the female werewolf within this game. It suggests that the corebook for Werewolf: The Apocalypse integrates tropes of femininity and femaleness into a construction of lycanthropy in a uniquely sustained and complex way. Apocalypse offers a counterpoint to the assumption of male identity in the form of the Black Furies, a tribe 'composed almost entirely of female Garou'. Regardless of individual story and character creation, the narratives of this particular RPG posit an undeniable relationship between werewolves and femininity that both draws on and subverts the tropes of each category. The trope of lycanthropic transformation being determined by lunar influence is, largely, a creation of twentieth-century cinema, with few earlier literary narratives making this specific connection.