The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. This is the first full critical edition of James’s first major novel after his unhappy venture into commercial theatre. The Spoils of Poynton marks a shift towards the representation of complex psychological states characteristic of his later fiction, telling a dramatic story about the fate of the beautiful artefacts lovingly collected by the widow Adela Gereth and her late husband. Who do they, should they, belong to? The novel describes with extraordinary delicacy an intense family feud arising from the competing claims of those close to Mrs Gereth, and the ordeal endured by the young and intelligent Fleda Vetch as she tries to resolve it. This edition features a substantial introduction, explanatory notes, textual variants, bibliography and appendices.

“Generations of students who will not hear his voice should be able to see his face.” Thus was the articulated sentiment of a group of students at the Presidency College in their fervent insistence on having a bust of Professor Prafulla Chandra Ghosh established in the college building. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh (1883–1948), who taught at the Department of English, Presidency College, from 1904 to 1939 (with a brief break between 1904 and 1908), was a highly celebrated teacher. During his retirement in 1939, funds were gathered by a Farewell Committee, and a marble bust of Ghosh was placed on the second floor of the Presidency College's main building. The renowned professor of English literature Subodh Chandra Sengupta (1903–98), who was Ghosh's student and a member of the Farewell Committee, described how

[they] collected a handsome amount of money in order to hold a farewell meeting and to raise a memorial to Professor Ghosh's long and distinguished connection with the College. The first suggestion, which received his approbation, was the publication of a volume of essays written in his honour. But the majority of the donors would not agree. They wanted a statue or a bust…

Chapter 2 focuses on the dramatic monologues of Valerie Bloom, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and Amryl Johnson in the late 1980s and mid 1990s. In the aftermath of the radicalism of Black British feminist organizations in the 1970s, the politics of dissent remained an abiding force both in racialized feminism and in Black British women’s poetry. Bloom’s personae take on different postures towards Black feminist politics in Touch Mi! Tell Mi!. In Riddym Ravings, Breeze writes “meta-monologues” to take on the voice of marginalized, socially alienated, often psychically disturbed Black female figures. In contrast, Amryl Johnson composes a “multiple monologue” in Gorgons, which adapts the myth of Medusa in a contemporary context. While these authors certainly do not provide a blueprint for Black feminist praxis, their dramatic monologues voice dissent as constitutive of any racial politics of solidarity as an open-ended problem and unfinished process.

The Introduction delineates a core contradiction structuring British Black and Asian poetry over the past fifty years. This book tracks poetry’s increasing centrality in British culture even as poets and poems self-reflexively engage with deepening social inequality and racial violence. I situate my study in the context of post-1970s economic decline, in the field of Black British studies especially in the critical work of Stuart Hall, and in conversation with recent scholarship on poetry and race. Looking to T. W. Adorno’s concept of the “nonidentical,” I maintain that poems – as mediations of struggle, conflict, and contestation – stage crises of social inequality through crises of aesthetic representation. In particular, this book reads for poetic experimentations in persona as the key mechanism for inventing forms of racial politics, including resistance, dissent, recognition, progressive transformation, and abolition. The remainder of the Introduction provides an overview of the ensuing chapters, arguing that poetry remains a vital art form within an increasingly interconnected and deeply divided global Britain.

To anyone reading this volume or the Introduction penned by the editors, it will be obvious that this book does not aspire to provide either a teleological or a comprehensive history of the institution now known as the Presidency University, which, physically, has stood for more than two hundred years in the famed academic quarters, the College Street area, of the city of Calcutta, in close proximity to the Sanskrit University, the University of Calcutta, and the university's Medical College. An all-embracing treatment of the history of this institution might have included histories of its various buildings and a more thorough account of its built environment, of its leadership and staff, of friendships and other ties the institution fostered, and of the development of the various academic disciplines taught.

Yet this book accomplishes something quite unique in the history of educational institutions in modern South Asia. True, it draws its unity from the fact that all contributions here focus on the various incarnations of what used to be called the Presidency College, an iconic and high-status institution of higher education in South Asia that made, for more than two hundred years, a “liberal” education available to students in a land colonized by the British. This somewhat mechanical fixing of the volume's focus has one critical advantage: the editors and the contributors do not have to claim any essence for the “spirit” of this institution.

As economies become more complicated with increasing interdependence tied to exchange and specialization, inequality appears as an outcome of dispersed versus concentrated flows and accumulations of value that affect differences in well-being, power, and institutional formations. We look at the complicated institutional arrangements that favor or limit inequality, perhaps the most important of which is the development of institutional property and how it allowed control over production and distribution. The theoretical and empirical breadth of inequality is vast. For this comparative effort, we formulate an approach that can analyze inequalities in wealth and property from widely different social formations, including the segmentary societies of Pare, Tanzania, and Zuni in the American Southwest, chiefdoms in the Scandinavian Bronze Age (BA), and advanced states and empires such as Rome and the Inca. Within this broad spectrum, differences in the control of wealth, prestige, ranking and/or ascribed rank are intertwined but not necessarily overlapping. Our approach focusses on how access to and control over material wealth is distributed in our sample.

The United Nations Operation in the Congo’s (ONUC) mandate was progressively expanded in the 1960s to include elements of international administration. In this case, like many others, a strict reading of the mandate fails to give a sense of the effective authority displayed by UN officials.The focus of this chapter will be on two specific aspects of the UN presence in the Congo in the early 1960s. First, I will focus on the role played by the UN Secretary-General in the Congo and the UN mission in general during a specific moment, generally referred to as ‘the Constitutional Crisis’. The collapse of the Congolese government enabled the UN to display assertiveness in the country, taking opportunity of this moment of exception. Second, I will analyse the Civilian Operations Programme, an unprecedented effort through which UN technicians controlled segments of the public administration of the country, which is truly interesting from the point of view of authority devoted to the UN. I argue here that the UN displayed sovereignty practices in the Congo, notably through the enterprising Hammarskjöld, who managed to position the UN in position of authority in the country, autonomising itself to a certain degree both from member states and from local Congolese elite.

This chapter explores three kinds of unsupervised task: clustering, density estimation and dimensionality reduction. Cluster analysis aims to group similar observations together. The K-means algorithm does this by repeatedly reassigning each point to the nearest cluster centre, reducing or maintaining the clustering inertia at each step. Density estimation involves learning a probabilistic model of a data-generating process. Gaussian mixture models represent the distribution as a weighted sum of multivariate normal components. The EM algorithm fits these models by alternating between assigning each component a responsibility for each point and updating component locations using responsibility-weighted averages. Cross-entropy measures how well an estimated density approximates the true one and is minimised when the two match. Dimensionality reduction compresses data into a lower-dimensional latent space via an encoder, with a decoder reconstructing the original data. Principal component analysis uses linear encoder–decoder pairs to minimise reconstruction error, offering a simple yet powerful form of dimensionality reduction.

The mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) doesn’t seem to hint at an international administration in Haiti, yet the setting up of the peace operation opened up a period where it is commonly understood that ‘the international community was no longer working behind the scenes in Haiti to impose a government but rather worked overtly to impose its will’. This chapter will highlight the complex sovereignty arrangement at play in Haiti, focusing on political authority claims by international actors with the repercussions this has for accountability claims from local actors. If public transcripts in Haiti generally focus on the legal trappings of sovereignty of Haiti, with theatrics such as pictures of the Haitian president with counterparts shaking hands in front of their flags in a seemingly egalitarian way, the unequal nature of power relations in Haiti is hardly difficult to detect. Through a combination of the analysis of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails as well as interviews with prominent actors in Haitian politics, I trace situations of exception in Haiti, discussing what this reveals for practices of sovereignty in Haiti. I will be focusing the analysis on the 2010-2011 elections and its aftermaths, especially the attempt to remove René Préval from the presidency following the first round of the presidential elections.

This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.