This chapter explores the performance practice and aesthetic of Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra. The chapter identifies the queer rasquache elements of Gómez-Peña’s performance pieces and texts, drawing on material from the 1980s to after 9/11. The chapter shows that Gómez-Peña creates an alternative North America by presenting figurative crossings of the US–Mexico border. This alternative nation is free from border concerns and founded on a radically new understanding of citizenship. In allowing his audience entry into this alternative nation state, Gómez-Peña brings together a collective (if temporary) challenge to and re-evaluation of the role of the citizen.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins by interrogating the relations between literature and theology as they are presented in contemporary theological thinking. Both feminist politics and post-structuralist theory have alerted us to the disruptive potential of the repressed feminine partner within the binary system which characterises Western culture. There is instability in the coupling of literature and theology, which reflects a changing social and symbolic order. The book highlights a number of issues that will characterise feminist religious reading. The most important of these is a re-evaluation of the significance of literary texts and their power to challenge theological thinking. The book serves as an open invitation for other women to bring many differing perspectives to their theological engagements with literature.

Equally important to the development of American law, as well as the Western’s imagination of gunslinging heroics, is the constitutional guarantee of gun possession, a guarantee explored in this chapter by examining key Supreme Court cases. This chapter argues that the modified conception of defense, from a collective duty to an individual right, enforces a rhetorical shift to normativity concomitant with the rise of modernity and the formation of dispersed, interrelated networks of power that create individuated subjects, what Michel Foucault has termed ‘biopower.’

During the early eighteenth century secret history was a broad category into which many texts, only some of them formally titled as 'secret memoirs' or 'secret histories', could fit. Self-consciously 'historical' secret histories reflected on their own status as illegitimate accounts of the past, questioning the conventional dramatization of history as a narrative of male heroic action. In the preface to his Secret History of One Year, Daniel Defoe opposed his own insider account to 'the many Histories of the Revolution' written by those 'not having Opportunity to see what was done within Doors'.

Chapter 5 discusses the implementation of waste management policy in Ireland. While waste management is a technical area of environmental management, Ireland’s compliance with EU rules has been fraught with political contestation and structural problems. Central to the discussion is the Landfill Directive 1999/31/EC which aims to divert biodegradable waste on a regional basis, and whether Ireland’s implementation of the directive and adherence to the earlier waste framework legislation has been influenced by structural shortcomings in the political-administrative system. In 2005 it was also a focal element of contention in the ECJ judgement against Ireland in Case C-494/01 which referred to Ireland’s failure to adhere to environmental laws and standards as ‘general and persistent in nature’. The case illustrates Ireland’s struggles to respond to environmental management approaches like incineration and increased recycling. Issues addressed in the waste management discussion are the dual roles of local authorities, as both regulators and competitors with the private sector in waste management, and a lingering ambiguity over the right to direct waste.

The second book runs from the political crisis of thewinter of 828/9 to Wala’s death in August 836, butwas written with emphatic hindsight. The generaldrift of the narrative is backward-looking: if therulers had heeded Wala’s advice in the early 830s,the empire would not lie in ruins in the 850s.Radbert had been abbot of Corbie since 843/4. Aboutseven years later he was forced to retire from thisillustrious office. The ex-abbot added a polemicalsecond book to his funeral oration to Wala, in whichhe attacked Wala’s main enemies: the Empress Judith(Justina), the chamberlain Bernard (Naso) and, to alesser extent, Emperor Louis the Pious (Justinian).The second book is set in an imaginary late antiqueChristian empire, and reflects deeply on the lostunity of the Carolingian polity. It is a treasuretrove of political terminology, which was derivedfrom classical and patristic writing but imbued withnew meaning in the turbulent mid-ninth century.

This chapter explores how Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980–1985), The Gentle Touch (ITV, 1980–1984), and The Bill (ITV, 1984–2010) use video cameras and the rhetoric of melodrama to negotiate the disconnect thought to exist between the British police force’s increasingly militaristic practices and the public’s favouring of community policing. The analysis considers how each series interacts with contemporary rational-actor models of criminology in relation to this socio-political disparity. Moreover, the chapter determines how each series intervenes in debates surrounding class identity and gender roles in relation to Thatcherism: the political philosophy committed to reasserting Victorian values and displacing the responsibilities of the State on to individuals to decrease Government spending.

Incongruity is the sine qua non for humour, as any good humour theory will suggest, conjuring up an appropriately inappropriate doubleness. But incongruity alone is never sufficient to explain humour. This chapter brings together consideration of humour theory with the interpretation of Feþegeorn (R.31) to ponder whether riddles can provide a key to understanding the humour of early medieval England. Pinpointing humour always requires an awareness of the multiple frames within which the comic stimulus works. For literary humour, this requires a sensitivity to register (with implicit questions of expectations of genre) as well as to meaning (attending to the doubleness of diction) and to context (since performance and social context plays a significant role). Interpreting humour also requires a fine-tuned sense of the timing of the revelation of doubleness, and here memory plays a significant role, since earlier tellings (of a riddle or of a joke) allow an audience to usefully anticipate the upcoming resolution.

The concept of war crimes, with trial and condemnation of those committing them, is not new. From the time of the 'classical' fathers until the end of the nineteenth century there is little to comment upon with regard to the law concerned with war crimes. This was until the promulgation of the Lieber Code in 1863 by US President Abraham Lincoln. While international law permits national tribunals to try war criminals, these tribunals are established under national law according to the jurisdictional limits and procedure established by that law, although the definition of war crimes is usually that prescribed by international law. Many of the crimes described in the London Charter as war crimes or crimes against humanity are synonymous with those named as grave breaches in the Geneva Conventions and Protocol I.

This chapter discusses the works of several historians who wrote on social history. W. H. Auden wrote serious historians care about coins and weapons. Arnold Toynbee described his own formation as a historian in a turn-of-the century, upper-class English childhood. Most mid-century commentators on the genesis of social history indicated the importance of G. H. Trevelyan's English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is the marker of social history's birth for many of these commentators. In the late twentieth-century West, the practice of social history was accompanied by the social historian's guilt and anguish at rescuing those who do not want to be rescued from the vast condescension of posterity.

This chapter discusses medical societies’ efforts to publish scientific journals. It discusses authors’ motivations for submitting articles, reviewers’ responses and ways of criticizing, editors’ decisions to reach new audiences, and publishers’ role in the financing and spreading of these journals. The chapter starts by tracing the origins of societies’ journals, placing their emergence against the cultural backdrop of a growing uneasiness with the practice of contrefaçon or reprinting (without authors’ permission). Central to societies’ unique position in the medical press was the reviewing of studies. This allowed medical societies to differentiate their journals from others by publishing original work. In the second half of the century, scientific publishing became more exclusive. Private practitioners succeeded less and less frequently in making it through the review process. The simultaneous appearance of new specialized medical journals meant that the ‘general’ journals published by medical societies became trapped in-between a specialized and an (equally emerging) popular medical press. By the end of the century, medical societies’ role as publishing houses seemed indeed played out.

Pragmatism as a philosophy has emphasised the significance of process, temporality and historicity in human organisms’ transactions with their environment. This chapter explores the significance of spatiality for human–environment transactions. This is closely associated with John Dewey’s idea of ‘situation’ as capturing both immediate experience and more enduring and extensive spatial/temporal resources. Through a pragmatist idea of spatiality, as well as temporality, we might start to bring together the more vitalist pragmatism concerned with an active environment of humans, non-human organisms and objects in assemblages, and the more rationalist pragmatism that emphasises the distinctiveness of human practices (especially in language use). The chapter concludes with some illustrations from Chicago ethnography and Hull House social activism to suggest the significance of this idea of time, space and situation in problem solving, including problem solving in social science.

Lance Comfort might have established himself more firmly in the field of British cinema production, if he had followed up his success with Hatter's Castle by several more films in a similar vein. There were six intervening films that include Those Kids from Town, Squadron Leader X, Old Mother Riley Detective, When We Are Married, Escape to Danger and Hotel Reserve. 'One of the best spy melodramas yet made.' This was the verdict of Lionel Collier on the first of Comfort's wartime thrillers, Squadron Leader X, made at Denham for RKO-Radio, from a story by Emeric Pressburger. Comfort had worked, at British National, as assistant director and/or technical superviser to John Baxter on three of the series: Old Mother Riley in Society, Old Mother Riley in Business and Old Mother Riley's Ghosts.

Drawing on songs, poetry and archival sources, this chapter provides a brief history of the “Taranchi” (Uighur) migration from Ghulja and the upper Ili valley into Semirech’e in 1882, their involvement in the 1916 revolt, and the experiences of those who were sent to European Russia to work as labourers. It then explores the links between these and a notorious massacre of Uighurs by Bolshevik cavalry in 1918. Portrayed in Soviet sources as the suppression of counterrevolution, this chapter instead argues that it shows continuities with the violence and land grabs of settlers against the local population in 1916.