This chapter talks about survival, not death. For critical theory and critical theorists, then, death is everywhere. In Jacques Derrida's work, The Gift of Death, the gift is linked intimately with death in thinking the other, the secret and the question of responsibility. Derrida's idea of 'living on' is dissimilar in important ways to the kind of survival which for Jean Baudrillard results from the exclusion within political economy of the incessant play of symbolic exchange with death found in archaic societies. Baudrillard writes that responsibility has been dead a long time. By suggesting that the question of responsibility is irrelevant both regarding the present system and a future 'beyond' it, Baudrillard risks re-inscribing the political and ideological constraints surrounding the inert forms of survival he wishes to expose and critique.

This chapter discusses the unaddressed question of historians’ gendered personae. Because gender difference structured historians’ world views, it is necessary to analyse the bond between gender and scholarly personae. The chapter does this by taking two late-Victorian British historians, Edward Freeman and Edith Thompson, as examples and explores how gendered personae were constructed and maintained and how women adjusted to and possibly challenged the restrictions placed on them. Although women were not entirely excluded from history writing, they were not invited to produce new historical knowledge. Instead, they were assigned the task of popularizing the studies men had produced. Consequently, women were expected to emulate a persona that was specific to their gender and corresponded with the type of history they were required to produce. The chapter suggests that the boundaries between various practices and styles of history writing were fluid. Some women did not settle for popularizing, but conducted independent research and adopted the persona of a serious historian, a manifestly masculine position even if men considered such unconventional conduct as inappropriate. Indeed, just as gender was an essential organizing concept in Victorian society, it was implicit in the personae historians promoted.

This chapter introduces, and sets out the rationale for, the edited collection, which examines the extent to which UKAfrica policy has taken on a distinctive character since the end of the New Labour era (1997–2010). The central argument advanced is that there is a need for scholars to explore the connections between different domestic and international drivers of UK Africa policy if they are to better understand the relationships between Britain and Africa, as well as the successes and failures of efforts to influence policy in this area. The chapter outlines the main areas of focus for the collection, and reviews and synthesises existing literature on the UK–Africa relationship. The authors situate the collection within three areas of inquiry: change and continuity in UK interests in Africa (instrumentalisation), power dynamics within UK–Africa relationships (agency) and the place of Africa in domestic UK politics (identity).

The purpose of oratory had long been understood as moving the passions, a capacity that held special relevance for the culture of sensibility, which placed sympathy at the heart of communication. This chapter explores how lawyers used speech-making to make sympathetic engagements within the courtroom and to persuade listeners to their truth. Speech-making is a bodily practice and this chapter explores how lawyers’ bodies, voices and oratory skill became implicated in the making of manly character and so truth. As truth was produced through sympathetic exchange, emotion was placed at the heart of the legal system. Through the press, the model for manliness presented by lawyers was given public airing, making a claim to Irishness rooted in a polite education, the ability to speak well and to judge with sensibility.

This chapter begins with three of Sigmund Freud's 'case-histories': Dora, diagnosed as hysterical; Schreber, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the Wolf Man (a case of infantile neurosis), in order to approach Jacques Lacan on paranoia and psychosis. Commenting on Dora, who was neurotic, and non-psychotic, Lacan says that psychosis requires 'disturbances of language', which makes it exceed paranoia. Freud makes Schreber an instance of paranoia, using for evidence, virtually, only the Memoirs, which he reads as a text. He examines his hypochondria, and feelings of being persecuted by certain people including Flechsig, the 'soul-murderer', and his delusional ideas, including believing that he had direct contact with God. The difference between Freud and Michel Foucault becomes key to reading modern literature. It seems that madness becomes not a danger for the writer but a condition that attends writing, as though writing had become madness, a marker of alienation.

A decade before official 'ping-pong diplomacy', leaders in the People's Republic of China (PRC) used sports delegation visits to cultivate diplomatic relations with recently decolonised nations. In the early 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split, the rise of various Afro-Asian movements and decolonisation in Africa led to intense Sino-Soviet competition for socialist influence in the Third World. Officially presented to the Chinese public as ‘friendly’ sports exchanges, PRC leaders sought to expand their influence and prove Chinese socialism under Mao as an alternative (and superior) model to that of the Soviet Union. The chapter, based primarily on declassified official reports from Chinese archives, begins with the first major PRC sports delegation sent to Africa in 1962, a contingent of well-known ping-pong athletes. The visit helped Chinese leaders gather knowledge on new allies, officially express shared historical and political solidarities against colonialism and imperialism, and, through sport, demonstrate China's achievements through socialism. These visits sought to build diplomatic ties while promoting and shoring up support – foreign as well as domestic – for a Chinese brand of socialism that professed an alternative, non-Soviet path to socialist modernity.

Across much of Europe in the late nineteenth century there was a fundamental problem, notably in those zones where industrialisation had had little impact and where the agricultural sector confronted declining returns to labour. Population growth was evidently occurring in a transforming context of agrarian and industrial change, which carried the ultimate causes of mass migration. The absorbent capacity of European cities and towns was the critical factor in the long run. The scale of intra-European migration was extraordinary: Europe's industrial cities attracted foreigners in vast numbers. The Canadian historian Norman Macdonald declared that the great diasporic European phenomenon was a migration with 'many roots, chiefly the adverse conditions in the Old World and the appeal of the New'. By the late nineteenth century, emigrants were streaming out of most parts of Europe.

This chapter introduces the main focus of the book, and discusses a range of current work exploring debates on migration, citizenship, and rights focused on sub-national spatial scales, including the urban, the neighbourhood, and the spaces of everyday life. The introduction thus examines some of the ways in which migration is experienced, politicised, and policed when framed as a concern for cities, communities, and everyday life, rather than purely for the policies, rhetoric, and imaginaries of the nation-state. The chapter works through three key bodies of work to explore this rescaling process and to set the framework for the rest of the collection: first, the increasing devolution of mechanisms of security and border enforcement to local levels, and to cities in particular, suggesting a growing governance of migration at the urban level; second, the growth of sanctuary movements across the Global North, from social movements and campaigns to the legal establishment of sanctuary cities; and third, the connections between cities and forms of irregular migrant activism that seek to contest the boundaries and nature of citizenship. In exploring these areas of recent debate, the introduction establishes the context for the collection’s two main parts – sanctuary cities and urban struggles.

The conclusion demonstrates how this study’s research aims have been achieved, and discerns to what extent television programmes can be considered evidence of social change. It concludes by stating that the biggest change the genre has undergone is the loss of its social-realist desire to use police characters as an incidental means of learning about people’s lives and wider British society.

Political cartoons are unique in that they are one of the few depictions of current events whose meaning is neither derived nor dependent on written text. Cartoon analysis may also prove useful for studying public opinion in countries hostile to foreign coverage or that stifle free speech. By embracing the exaggerated fears, paranoia, suspicion of a community, cartoons offer insight into the ideational and emotional foundations of conflict. Few conflicts enjoy the media and scholarly attention paid to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Changes in conflict were equally visible in the way both sides depicted each other, as negotiators quickly collapsed into enemy imagery once fighting began, degenerating towards greater immorality and irrationality as violence grew. The fact that Israeli and Palestinian cartoons shifted attention, enemy images hardened and mood improved when violence broke out, however, does not support the notion that political cartoons predict violence.

This chapter examines how different models of performance have begun to shift conceptions of our understanding of a real or authentic identity. It addresses the concept and practice of adaptation through the lens of Jacques Derrida's citational theory. The chapter also examines how citational aesthetics can be employed to support Hal Foster's account of a resistant politics. It argues that the contemporary understanding of poststructuralist identity is reflected in a number of related shifts in the characterisation of the performer regardless of whether or not the performer is playing 'self ' or an explicitly fictional character. The quotation marks which the Wooster Group place around character are widened out in the work of Katie Mitchell's adaptations to incorporate discrete scenes of dramatic action in which psychologically rounded portrayals of character and detailed observations of scenic location are played out.