This article examines the changing nature of public health services and their relationship with the public in post-war Britain by an analysis of the exhibitions mounted by Medical Officers of Health (MOsH) in London. Focusing on the period 1948–71, the article explores a time when public health practice, and the problems it faced, were in flux. A decline in infectious disease and an increase in chronic conditions linked to lifestyle required a new role for public health services. Exhibitions were one of several methods that MOsH used to inform the public about dangers to their health, but also to persuade them to change their behaviour. The exhibition, though, offers a unique insight into the relationship between public health authorities and the public, as exhibitions brought MOsH into direct contact with people. It is suggested that in the MOsH exhibitions we can find signs of a new relationship between public health practitioners and the public. Whilst elements of the pre-war, often moralistic ideology of public health services could still be detected, there is also evidence of a more nuanced, responsive dynamic between practitioners and the people. By the end of the 1960s, ‘the public’ was increasingly being thought of as a collection of ‘publics’, including individuals, target groups and vocal respondents.

This article examines the development of Hammarby Lake City in southern Stockholm on a former industrial, waterfront site during the 1990s. The setting may resemble recent global redevelopments of urban waterfronts and docks; however, in it Stockholm needs to be viewed against longer cultural, aesthetic and historical influences. This includes early twentieth-century precedents rooted in civic and residential engagement with the modern and industrial shoreline. In addition, an informal human interaction with the abandoned southern Hammarby harbour evolved during the 1950s through reoccupation by an itinerant community of workers. Such forerunners have often been overlooked in accounts of a late twentieth-century dramatic transformation of industrial waterfronts. The article concludes that there is scope to align the theme of waterfront development more closely to the longer history of the twentieth-century city. This perspective provides a useful counterpoint to the leading view of such spaces as an expression of late capitalism.

Bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses are rare and their existence has been recently called into question (Newlin-Łukowicz 2012). The present paper reports an acoustic study of secondary stress in Ukrainian based on polysyllabic words with lexical stress located at or near the right edge of the word. The results indicate that Ukrainian has an iteration of secondary stresses from the left edge towards the lexical stress, rather than in the opposite direction. This characteristic makes it metrically related to bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses (e.g. Polish), which invalidates the argument against such systems and proves the empirical adequacy of the metrical theories designed to account for these stress patterns.

This paper will evaluate the obstacles faced by victim-survivors of historical abuse, particularly victim-survivors of forced labour in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and the stolen wages of Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, in a post-colonial transitional justice framework. First, the paper identifies challenges in contextualising comparative interdisciplinary historical research in terms of transitional justice. Second, the paper considers the economic contribution of unpaid labour in the Australian and Irish contexts and, third, goes on to examine the historical denial of rights and redress in both settings. The paper then evaluates the different challenges in responding to legacies of historical abuse, especially unpaid wages in both states. A final section concludes with the argument that redress provided in both instances represents a form of paternalism perpetuating the colonial approach to governance, rather than the provision of the legal rights of citizens, and that this paternalism has specific implications for women who continue to be marginalised by contemporary regimes.

This paper uses legal consciousness to discuss the influence of Portuguese culture on women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence. It is based on an in-depth small-scale study of Portuguese women living in England, and proposes that culture is central in shaping their behaviour, regardless of whether they experienced violence or not. The cultural characteristics that influence women the most are analysed here under the themes of ‘familism’, ‘shame and community pressure’ and ‘acculturation’. These do not operate all at the same level and their influence can change according to structural and individual circumstances. As such, the paper suggests that immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence can only be fully understood by articulating national culture with other structural and individual variables; this will enable a multilayered and situated understanding of women's legality that avoids a simplistic attribution of their behaviour to national or ethnic provenance.

This paper combines an empirical analysis of national and international attempts to deal with the problem of poverty in China with a normative analysis of capability theory, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In this way, it attempts to highlight the centrality of normative approaches to poverty and its elimination. The paper is in five parts. Section I analyses the history, development and effectiveness of social assistance under the Minimum Living Standards Scheme (MLSS) in China; Section II provides an outline of capability theory; Section III analyses the history, development and effectiveness of the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Millennium Development Goals, with a focus on the elimination of poverty in China; Section IV emphasises the importance of a capability approach to the measurement of poverty and outlines what needs to be done to reduce poverty in China; while Section V discusses what still needs to be done to promote an effective anti-poverty strategy in China.

Four recent books, taken together, offer a wealth of important insights on how we might effectively tackle corruption. All of the books’ authors agree that there is something akin to a universal understanding of what corruption is, and all dispute the idea that corruption may simply be in the eye of the beholder. However, there are also sharp disagreements—for example over whether corruption is best eliminated from the top down, or whether bottom-up approaches are more effective. If the books share one weakness, it is that they do not sufficiently emphasize the importance of getting people to believe and feel that they have fair opportunities for good lives, even after institutional and legal reforms are made. Tackling corruption involves taking seriously the substantive link between actual fair treatment and the belief that fair treatment prevails. This will require further research examining how to shift and update people’s deeply held sentiments.

This article explores the racialisation of women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy at the intersection between the national imagination and transnational cultural and commodity flows. Starting from the experience of a young Italian woman whose work centres on the commodification of her sexual desirability and who is recurrently classified as ‘foreign’, it discusses the roots as well as effects of the racialised male gaze under which she negotiates her agency. In so doing, it examines the meanings of her failure to be recognised as an Italian citizen as she navigates between contempt and desire, stigma and praise, alienation and pleasure. On the one hand, the article traces the thread between her experience and the othering processes underpinning the construction of Italy as a nation state and an empire, and whose legacies persist in the country’s postcolonial present. On the other hand, the article explores women’s racialisation as a process which can magnify the social and economic value of their desirability in a context increasingly characterised by the sexualisation of culture and trade. Based on ethnographic research undertaken in 2012–2013, this article contributes to the emerging body of postcolonial scholarship and intersectional studies on women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy.

A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.

This essay responds to Bryan Cheyette’s “Against Supercessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora.”1 It argues that Cheyette fails to evade certain forms of binary thinking, in particular those that polarize thought and action, theory and praxis. We see this persistence of binary logic in his discussion of my book Multidirectional Memory and in his engagement with the critic Aamir Mufti on the topic of Israel/Palestine and the legacies of Edward Said.

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.

This paper is about the critical debates surrounding contemporary novels with a global reach, especially those written by non-Western authors, but highly successful on the Western literary market, such as Haruki Murakami’s and Orhan Pamuk’s works. A close analysis of the evaluative terms used in these debates, epitomized by Tim Park’s coinage “the dull new global novel,” reveals that they conflate two distinct lines of argument. Fashioned as a materialist narrative about cultural hegemony in the globalized world, these critiques turn out to be motivated by a much older concern to preserve a literary elite. “The global” and its opposite, “the local,” start to sound like code words for “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” and, seen in this light, the whole critical debate about the new global novel appears as an attempt to sidestep a direct engagement with the ever-elusive question of literary value.