This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of anexperience of teaching “postcolonial film.” It contains atemplate for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills andcritical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widestrespective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilmstudies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwiseusing text-based materials. An explication de texte is the mostbasic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured“text” and provides opportunities for sustained dialoguebetween the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative,meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experienceof beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the Frenchtradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writingat all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken frommy method of presenting and discussing a film, for instructors to modify fortheir purposes and, more specifically, to adapt film meaningfully into theircourses.1

This article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

The key question posed by this essay is why historians' interest in Britain's imperial past has increased rather than diminished in recent decades. It argues that this interest has been sustained in part by a preoccupation with certain contemporary social and political issues, and differences of opinion about these issues have helped fuel the “imperial history wars.” The nature of the debate has differed for American- and British-based historians. For the former, British imperial history has served as an analogy for thinking about America's racial politics and its role as a global power. For the latter, it has served as a focal point for contending claims about Britain's past and deepening anxieties about its future. The essay concludes by urging historians to be more self-reflexive about their own practices and more rigorous in exposing presentist claims about the past.

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral cognition has revealed that political liberals moralize mostly in terms of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives moralize in terms of those plus loyalty to Ingroup, respect for Authority, and Purity (or IAP). Some have concluded that the norms of morality encompass a wide variety of subject matters with no deep unity. To the contrary, I argue that the conservative position is partially debunked by its own lights. IAP norms’ moral relevance depends on their tendency to promote welfare (especially to prevent harm). I argue that all moral agents, including conservatives, are committed to that claim at least implicitly. I then argue that an evolutionary account of moral cognition partially debunks the view that welfare-irrelevant IAP norms have moral force. Haidt's own normative commitments are harmonized by this view: IAP norms are more important than liberals often realize, yet morality is at bottom all about promoting welfare.