Postcolonial feminist criticism is extensive and variable. This chapter locates the various kinds of patriarchal authority to which women from countries with a history of colonialism may be subjected, and addresses the concept of 'double colonisation'. It looks at postcolonial critiques of 'First World' feminism in thinking about the problems and possibilities when using 'First World' feminism in postcolonial contexts. This involves examining some important and challenging essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The chapter also discusses Spivak's essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' which is a complex critique of the representation of human subjectivity in a variety of contexts, but with particular reference to the work of the Subaltern Studiesscholars. Finally, the authors apply some of the ideas and concepts introduced in the chapter when reading Sally Morgan's autobiographical text, My Place.

This chapter examines Jean Cocteau's six major films in groups of two, each group constituting a specific set of problematics. The films include: L'Eternel retour, La Belle et la bête, L'Aigle à deux têtes, Les Parents terribles, La Villa Santo-Sospir, and Le Testament d'Orphée. The first film of each cluster represents the extreme of a formal tendency, the second functions as its virtual resolution, albeit provisional. La Belle et la bête may be said to operate meta-cinematically as a statement on the nature of film and its dual capacity for reality and fantasy whereby the filmic reel is always nothing less than a vehicle of the real. The ultimate proof of the real in Le Testament lies in the film's recording and projection of acts. For Cocteau, time and space were really one and the same, and it is only our human laws that separate them.

Viewed from the middle-class perspective, relative deprivation, aided and abetted by the mass media, fuels working-class crime. J. G. Bagot's Liverpool study of 1935-36 goes some way to supporting Stephen Humphries' contention that teenage crimes are generally minor and opportunist. This chapter concluded that poverty was not a factor in juvenile crime, their argument being that the proportion of offenders coming from homes where the weekly income was at least £1 per head increased from 2 per cent before the war to 13.2 per cent during the war. This contrasts with studies made in Glasgow and London, which showed adolescent criminals coming from crowded homes and larger families. The social problems of the day, including the increase in crime, are ascribed to the war, which prevented youngsters from becoming properly socialised. The Blue Lamp was released at a time when juvenile crime was a topical issue.

For many years now, historians have engaged in fierce debates over the extent and efficacy of censorship during the 1640s. Such debates have a distinguished history, as scholars over the last century have taken up various, sometimes widely divergent positions on the topic of censorship in Civil-War England. This chapter focuses on the impact of press controls during the Civil Wars, and analyzes the ways in which the twin issues of censorship and press freedom imbued the discourse of the 1640s. Prynne was scarcely alone in bringing instances of censorship to the public eye. Edward Terry's remarks indicate once again the public perception of the Levellers as an existential threat even as they demonstrate the scope of the Levellers' cultural influence. It is significant that Terry's sermon was printed with the title Lawless Liberty.

Chapter 1 conducts an in-depth discussion of the ways in which Islamic State (IS) murder propaganda was produced and distributed in the UK, in the years 2014–2015. By focussing on the careful construction of personas by both Islamic State and the UK government, my aim is to demonstrate the ways in which emergencies may be packaged and deployed in order to inspire specific responses in targeted audiences. On the one hand, IS used their technological fluency to ventriloquise their victims in order to demonstrate absolute mastery and justification for their military incursions, inspiring potential converts around the world. On the other, the British press carefully packaged ‘Jihadi John’ as a monster, in order to stoke public anxiety about IS and draw support for military reprisals. In this chapter I begin a discussion of the image, and the ways in which the disconnect between the image and its subject may be exploited in order to produce affective responses within the spectator.

Daring to imagine Wordsworth’s Prelude published ‘not long after he first finished it’ in May 1805 – rather than posthumously in 1850 – this chapter speculates on the effects on younger writers of the poem’s radical ‘self-creation mode’. The chapter explores what Wordsworth’s contemporaries were denied by the poet’s decision not to publish his autobiographical epic at the point of first completion. Counterfactually exploring the impactfulness of The Prelude’s models on Byron – and emphasising how challenging and unsympathetic certain aspects of the poem might at first have been for him – the chapter brings into play an uncannily ‘Romantic’ (rather than Victorian) Prelude and a defamiliarised Byron, with each becoming the other’s uncanny avatar.

In analysing ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’ meticulously, with special attention to the animal imagery, Conor Carville in this chapter links Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth with Eric Santner’s recent idea of ‘creaturely life’ – the life that is exposed to biopolitical power at moments of trauma. Trauma is here considered as constitutive of the subject, not an exceptional phenomenon, and also as providing the raw material for biopolitical power. In the process of Carville’s analyses emerge hitherto uncharted networks concerning Beckett’s fixation on the trauma of birth and the contemporary biopolitical concerns with birth, reproduction and population in Ireland and Britain. Carville’s article not only provides original close readings of those difficult poems in the light of Rank but also illustrates how a highly personal unease about sexual identity caused by birth trauma can be connected to the biopolitical discourses by the use of Santner’s idea of ‘creaturely life’ that itself draws on the ideas of Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben and other theorists.

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated, urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013), especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalised urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as ‘not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire’ (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of the ‘right to the city’ is operationalised as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to: (a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space); and (b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.

This chapter deals with migration and diaspora primarily in the context of decolonisation. It focuses on the theme of identity, and defines some conceptual tools, such as 'hybridity', 'borders', 'new ethnicities' and 'cultural diversity', that have been pursued in postcolonial studies. The chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness which deals in the main with the ancestors of the African slaves in the Caribbean, the US and Britain. It analyzes Hanif Kureishi's articulation of his identity crisis and the perilous intermediate position that both migrants and their children are deemed to occupy: living 'in-between' different nations. The chapter critically examines conceptual tools and uses them to help us read Beryl Gilroy's novel of diaspora identities, Boy-Sandwich. STOP and THINK sections in the chapter pose questions concerning diaspora identities to assist the reader in making judgements on his own about the ideas raised within postcolonialism.