The artwork of Adrian Piper demands an encounter with language. Many viewers responded to Piper's textual address and produced enough inscriptions to fill seven notebooks. It is an early and significant articulation of the textual address animating art practices by women in the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper draws on Kant's work to explain how racism, sexism, and xenophobia function and then provides alternatives for encountering difference in less defensive ways. Piper's resistance to subjective revelation is evident throughout Concrete Documentation. The most compelling aspect of Concrete Documentation is the movement between Piper's written diary entries and her photographs. This chapter analyses three performances by Piper: Catalysis, Food for the Spirit, and Mythic Being. It traces how they align with the insights of Mama's Baby and underscoring how deeply Piper's artwork contributes to the project of rewriting the conditions in which black women are allowed to appear.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about local democracy, community and civic engagement in Britain. It looks at theoretical debates as to the meaning of local democracy, civic engagement and community together with a number of related concepts. The book also looks at the policy agenda around local democracy in the context of the developing nature of central/local relations since 1979. It includes the 'decline' in the role of political parties and falling voter turnout at local elections. The book concentrates on the developments beyond the realm of elections, political parties and formal political institutions. It focuses on local services and policy attempts to widen public participation in the shaping and delivery of the services. The book also focuses on the concept of sustainability and regeneration strategies to build sustainable communities, both physical and social.

In thematic terms, a sense of desire as a dangerously uncontrollable force can be seen to inform Terence Fisher's later films. In the horror work, the powerful and effective heroes tend to be celibate while those individuals who succumb to desire usually end badly. In the pre-horror work discussed in this chapter, one gains a sense that Fisher is more engaged in those scenarios which afford him the possibility of exploring or commenting upon the perils of desire. Possible traces of Fisher's input are minimal, as one might expect from a project in which Noel Coward was so obviously the leading light. Most of the films he directed at Highbury and Gainsborough were thoroughly conventional, both generically and in broader aesthetic terms, and rarely went beyond the norms and types that characterise British cinema at this time.

Northanger Abbey is interesting because it represents the endeavour of a particularly alert consciousness to reduce the Gothic to burlesque, to satire, to a univocal status. It attempts to rescue Ann Radcliffe from the 'horrids', reading her as a 'proto-novelist'. The dominant tone of Northanger Abbey is playful, deftly ironic, sounding serious issues with a light touch. As a work of anti-Gothic, Northanger Abbey has an unavoidable interest for the Gothic genealogist. As with Gothic works, Northanger Abbey has a tendency towards the carnivalesque. It retains a Gothic core when it keeps the conflict between General Tilney's devotion to the values of alliance, and his children's to those of romantic love. Northanger Abbey's narrative of personal development, its cult of 'personality', is ruffled by the disjunctive energies of the Gothic world it seeks to put by, as childish things; there are too many loose ends.

African medical culture adjusted and adapted to needs created by increasing mobility, particularly by migrant workers and carriers. Malawian migrants could take protective, curative and luck medicines, and resort to both African and Western practitioners, as well as Christian and Islamic prayers. The changing medical culture was gendered: while early migrant and Christian networks were largely dominated by men. Membership of Christian networks was, particularly for Protestant men, a precondition of Western medical education and for mobility far beyond colonial Malawi. Attention to networks and nexuses, which could both enable and restrict access to medicines, helps us to better understand how medicine and colonialism were entangled. The inequality of colonial mobility at the turn of the century was starkly evident in the use of the machila. Africans carried Europeans for the health, comfort and speedy travel of the latter, while the carriers were subjected to physical strain, jiggers and injuries.

The Malawian-British Protestant medical mission networks were at their most significant between the 1890s and the 1940s, a period that witnessed considerable growth in the agency of Protestant African intermediaries, particularly trained medical middles. The role of African mediators and middle figures in Malawian-British networks increased with the expansion of medical education. Mission networks offered, albeit on a limited scale, avenues through which some Africans could acquire medical knowledge, competence and recognition, new identities as medical middles and practitioners, and novel forms of mobility in the colonial world. Within these networks there were important interplays and tensions between spiritual and secular medicine. As Western medicine became more professionalised, specialised and hospital-based, the part-time medical practice available at most mission stations proved disappointing to many doctors. A spiritual dimension was also integral to the practice of 'herbalist' medicine: knowledge about medicines might come through dreams, from ancestors or through spirit possession.

This chapter explores some of the history that led to the belated breakthrough of Black and Asian British comedy, looking at the production of jokes about race and colour, and questioning what these jokes tell us about British multiculturalism. It questions the ways in which jokes about Black and Asian minorities functioned in a period of overwhelming white control. The chapter looks at one early attempt to give voice to Black British comedy, the production of London Weekend Television's (LWT) family comedy, The Fosters, in 1976-1977. By focusing on employment rather than the racial conflict, The Fosters attempted to speak to the primary challenges of the Black community as seen from within. The series also focuses on cross-generational conflict and, in particular, disagreements between first and second generation Black Britons, a theme which went on to dominate much Black and Asian-written television and theatre in Britain.

The conventional ghost-story attention to footsteps on the staircase is inverted and intensified; the legacy of Sheridan Le Fanu is adapted to the spiritual conditions of systematic bereavement and impersonalised killing. The horror of the blitz was the absence of weapons: people fell down dead, killed either by explosions of air or by the components of their dwellings. This chapter discusses the notion that, under the blitz, Londoners came together in an amalgamating way, people wishing to be a people in some tribal and bond-reinforcing way. The indefinite article attempts to inscribe this wish, but visibly relies on italic emphasis. Other images for the condition either reflect the earlier Wordsworthian allusion to earth's dense maintenance of the dead or repeat a feature of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway's earlier union.

This chapter focuses on two personae in the Victorian period as having particular relevance for Gothic fiction: the dandy and the cross-dressed or 'manly' woman. It explores the twentieth-century understanding of the relationship between dandies and freaks. Dandyism was an important influence on Gothic even when not directly represented within it, as its emphasis on the surface embodied in the charismatic, amoral male crystallises many of the genre's pre-existing characteristics. James I. Walpole's camp nostalgia, which led him to affect elaborate archaisms in his dress as well as collect kitsch antiquities, can be thought of as an antecedent of Aestheticism if not necessarily of dandyism proper. Dandyism and female cross-dressing, connected through their parallel negotiations with existing gender roles, constitute the specific fashion technologies through which the Gothic surface is articulated. Nevertheless, not only gender but also class and colonialism are implicated in the attendant narratives.