This chapter discusses the first wave of systemic contestation of the liberal imagery of ‘free flow of information’ and the early dual-sided framework. One major front of contestation was Third World countries, which put forward a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to de-monopolize, democratize, and decolonize the existing structure of international communication and develop their national information capacities as part of postcolonial nation-building. Another major front of contestation was within Western liberal countries struggling with domestic socio-economic crisis and resisting the US economic and technological supremacy. This chapter first revisits the NWICO movement and then discusses contestation of the liberal idea of ‘free flow of information’ from both the Global South and the Global North regarding regulation of the new information technologies of direct satellite broadcasting, satellite remote sensing, and informatics. It shows the complicated political, economic, cultural, ideological, and security dimensions of information, which fundamentally concern the organization of capitalist social relations.

Using the work of biologists from the turn of the century, this paper shows how time became part of human biology as an independent and measurable, rather than experiential or social, variable established by merging animal biology in labs with demography and statistics. Life forms were said to have an inherent vitality, or a fixed amount of living, to use Raymond Pearl’s words. At the same time, death was being understood not as an ontological necessity but as an evolutionary contingency, meaning that immortality as a concept and research object was established in terms of the non-necessity of death. Thus, biological infinitude and finitude moved coiled together in research in which death and life had gained new significance and produced new anxieties. Using the echo of these works in anthropology, I argue that secularization processes and anxieties of finitude provided a cultural backdrop that inflected many of these conceptions and experiments.

The Introduction sets out the question and the scope of this book, and its theoretical and methodological framework. Drawing on historical materialism, it explains the anti-fetishist understanding of information taken by this book, which treats information as embedded in and constitutive of social relations and implicated in the distribution of power and order-making. Based on this historical materialist understanding of information, the Introduction sets out the book’s critique on the liberal treatment of information and its main argument that human rights and free trade have jointly and dialectically formed a hegemonic conceptual framework for the governance of information under international law which obscures the crucial material dimension of information and its connection to power.

Two instances of artistic beefing frame African American literature in the 1940s. On the front side, titans Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright traded barbs from the 1937 publication of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through Wright’s 1940 breakthrough with Native Son. The middle of their dispute featured Wright claiming that Hurston employed a “minstrel technique” in her novel while she clapped back that his short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) contained “tone-deaf” dialect, a Communist Party-dictated “picture of the South,” and a hackneyed “kind of incident.” If this spicy exchange preambles 1940s African American literature, then an equally fiery indictment provides its benediction. Richard Wright and James Baldwin did not begin the 1940s as rivals. On the contrary, Wright actively mentored Baldwin, helping him secure fellowships, reading drafts of his work, and recommending him to publishers. This collegiality notwithstanding, when Baldwin composed “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), he leveled some of his ire regarding American literature’s duplicitous evasiveness at Wright. He concludes that though the “American protest novel,” including Native Son, aims “to bring greater freedom to the oppressed,” it fails because it denies humanity’s “beauty, dread, power” and insists that “categorization alone … is real.” Examining these moments of artistic friction that surround Black writing in the 1940s, a literary critic must decide whether the episodes are anomalies or epitomes.

The 2019 general elections in India, by granting a second term and a stronger mandate to the Narendra Modi government, became an imaginative test for the limits of parliamentary sanction that right-wing Hindu supremacism could enjoy. With a larger majority having balloted a definitive nod to the Bharatiya Janata Party's agendas of social polarization, the party realized that its sponsorship of mob violence and rioting action no longer needed shielding from the law as expressions of a fundamentalist ‘fringe’. Instead, such ‘expressions’ could now be the basis for law, and hate could officially become ideological fodder for law-making in the parliament. It did not matter if ethno-religious grounds for lawmaking were still deemed discriminatory by the Indian constitution; it was time that such laws be scrapped or amended. Three months into the second innings of Modi, the heavily militarized border state of Kashmir was stripped of its special constitutional protections in law, and an overnight gag operation sought to symbolically annex Kashmiri Muslims as the unreportable ‘subjects’ of a Hindu nation-state (The Wire 2019a; Noorani 2019; Varadarajan 2019; Mir 2021). Another three months went by in preventing news of the worst and longest-ever internet blockade (and accompanying military repression) in the Kashmir Valley1 from pouring out in the mainstream media, before the Indian parliament passed a law that invalidated Muslim migrants from making claims to national citizenship.

This time, protests erupted onto the streets. The Delhi Police, working under orders from the Home Ministry, swung into action by trying to make examples of student protestors (from Jamia Millia Islamia University) as ‘masterminding’ the upsurge.

Conditional dependence often provides an interpretable way of formalising the relatedness between variables. Moreover, it may indicate a type of causal link, so it is of great interest to detect conditional dependencies from data. Conditional independencies can be conveniently represented through undirected graphs, while their directed analogues can additionally be used to indicate causal relationships. We present the PC algorithm for causal structure learning, as well as several approaches for testing conditional independence, both under a Gaussianity assumption and in a more general nonparametric context.

This chapter approaches the anthropology of death through the example of the lasting sociopolitical and material effects of what the Vietnamese know as the “American War” and the US as the “Vietnam War.” Specifically, we examine the conjoined legacies of missing war dead and the chronic ecological-physiological systems of damage so firmly fixed in the two countries’ often clashing but unavoidably tethered narratives of reparation and normalization. Death in this case tells two stories: one about formerly warring states and how they use the dead – namely, their respective and mutually exclusive sets of missing combatant dead – to advance postwar geopolitical interests on the global stage, and a second, about the necropolitical “drift” of toxins, mutations, and irreparably harmed bodies and psyches that unfolds in the shadow of state-centered narratives. Juxtaposing ethnographic insights from our respective fieldwork, we illustrate how destruction endures, vivifying the past – not just figuratively through postwar geopolitical narratives and memories of the absent but also within the physical bodies of the survivors and the tainted ecologies that surface in war’s wake.

This chapter examines what judges can do inside the courtroom to promote democratic norms amid authoritarian pressure. It proposes a two-step adjudicative framework – that of “Sustainable Democratic Adjudication,” which allows judges to systematically incorporate both constitutional legal principles and judicial strategies. Under step one, judges need to form an initial view on what the law requires under the democracy-orienting approach proposed in Chapter 4. During this step, they must apply a presumption of “institutional blindfold,” ignoring the possible influence of prudential considerations. This book terms the tentative conclusion reached at this stage the “formal legal position.” The second step involves judges lifting the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by strategic considerations. These are questions determined by the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position. The chapter also examines the strategies in relation to outcome, reasoning, language, and timing that judges can deploy during the adjudicative process.

The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation…. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness…. [T]he Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from almost all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949: 259–261)

In Orwell's Oceania – imagined in the aftermath of the Second World War – it was ordained that Newspeak will conquer whatever remained of ‘Oldspeak’ (or ‘Standard English’) by the year 2050. Since the intention of Big Brother and his Ministry of Truth was to make speech – and particularly political speech – ‘independent of consciousness’ and free from the ‘temptation to take thought’, language itself had to occupy the limit of the permissible. In other words, what the totalitarian Oceanic state outlawed as ‘crimethink’ (or ‘thought-crime’) should not even require recourse to law.

Our final part of the volume addresses what we have loosely framed as reflections on an anthropology of death “beyond death.” It opens with Aja M. Lans’s powerful critique of the ways in which the material afterlife of death in the form of human skeletal collections has historically worked to erased life – specifically Black lives and the biographies of living people whose remains have become objects of display or tools of bioarchaeological pedagogy. In exploring her own encounters with the violence inherent in producing and maintaining those collections, she invites us to consider the “corporeality of the body and its exploitation both during life and after death.” Her chapter sets the scene for the chapters to follow, each in its own way wrestling with questions that extend from the phenomenon and experiences of death. The framing of “beyond death” that binds these particular chapters urges reflection not only on death’s afterlife of mourning and memory but also some of the radical innovations and ruptures introduced by the pandemic that have both methodological and theoretical consequences for the field going forward.

This chapter argues that courts should play a role in protecting and promoting democratic values in a hybrid regime and lays out how that can be done. The chapter opens with the argument that the counter-majoritarian objection is singificantly less relevant in a hybrid regime context, contending that its reduced relevance permits the constitutional court greater latitude in its support of democratic ideals in a hybrid regime. Five different democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court are then proposed, alongside tools that would help facilitate the realization of these roles. The five democratic roles include: (1) The referee role, (2) the interpretative role, (3) the participatory role, (4) the quasi-representative role, and (5) the educative role. The chapter then addresses how competency concerns impact the democratic roles proposed. It argues that the democratic roles are justifiable because there is a lack of better alternatives in a hybrid regime. Courts are a second-best solution: They may not normally be the best institution to tackle certain political failures, but the inadequacies of the political process in a hybrid regime offer reasons for a constitutional court to act.

This chapter investigates how the African American autobiography is in itself a unique subgenre within the genre of nonfiction. It explores how the African American autobiography intricately weaves together intensely personal elements of the authors’ lives with the larger forces of historical changes. The specific autobiographies that I discuss were works that were published between the 1940s and 1960s, a time bookended by World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. These texts are Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks, and Ezra Bells’ American Daughter. This essay explores how these writers’ lives, dreams, and dreams deferred are largely defined by their identities as Americans of color in a racially stratified America.