This chapter shows how the contemporary (re)turn to objects initially serves as a useful corrective to social or political theories that fail to properly engage with the object world. It presents a timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis. The mediating role played by aesthetics is of vital importance for understanding early critical theory's engagement with objects and affects. The chapter also shows how the thought of Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno contributes to the timely task. Kracauer's work retains a relatively marginal position within studies of critical theory. The chapter then suggests that 'object-oriented ontology' (OOO)/'speculative realism' (SR) goes much beyond a post-critical fantasy, which gleefully jettisons all relationality and criticality for the sake of concocting a 'new', non-human philosophy.

The British Association arrived in 1905 to a traumatised country poised uneasily between the experience of high-handed imperial domination and the beginnings of self-government and political renewal. The 1905 visit was intended to confer status on the newly constituted South African Association for the Advancement of Science (S2A3). For politicians like Jan Smuts and Jan Hofmeyr science was both a source of national pride in South Africa's achievements as well as visible proof of its claims to international status. The 1929 meeting provided an ideal opportunity to reflect on South Africa's achievements since the beginning of the century. In 1929, at the invitation of the South African Association, the British Association returned to South Africa. Thomas Holland's clear message was that South Africa was a valued member of the Commonwealth and that the gold mining industry was of pre-eminent significance from both a domestic and an international perspective.

This chapter presents close readings of works by the London-based Nigerian expatriate Yinka Shonibare, Delhi-based British expatriate Bharti Kher, and Vietnamese-born Danh Vo, who grew up in Denmark and then became a resident of Mexico City. It describes that Amelia Jones specifically refrains from devoting herself to interrogating the relationship of identity politics to developments in contemporary art. She reminds us that Art is always about identification. Identification evolves as a dynamic and reciprocal process that occurs between viewers, bodies, images and other kinds of visual representations and media. The chapter traces some of the ways in which the altered experience of subjectivity has begun to shape identifications differently, so that older ways of thinking about identity in terms of binary oppositions no longer resonate in quite the same way.

Resource conflict and environmental degradation are in reality two-sides of the same security challenge coin. Both address the issue of natural resource abundance and scarcity and how societies deal with these challenges and their implications, but from vastly different perspectives. While the first addresses access and control over existing natural resources in terms of resource competition, the second addresses the environmental impact of declining or the misuse of resources. Regardless of the perspective, however, both present a serious threat to African peace and stability through their ability to generate and sustain violent conflict, fuel corruption or undermine governance. Moreover, some of these types of conflicts are the most difficult to resolve given the life or death nature of the stakes involved for individuals and entire communities.

This chapter looks at the tensions surrounding agricultural statistics in the context of 'Progressive' and 'anti-Progressive' white politics. Livestock and crop enumeration could evoke strong sentiments in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. Statistics on livestock and crop production were at the centre of debates on livestock disease legislation, the development of the railway network and even the nature of political representation in the Cape. As farmers developed their understandings of agricultural practice based largely on their own observations, agriculture was an environment in which the opinions of scientific experts were particularly vulnerable to criticism. The prominence of rationality and expertise in the Progressivist ethos made the construction of public discourse of scientific knowledge on the colony an urgent project. The proponents of 'progressive' farming were as convinced of the 'ignorance' and 'backwardness' of many of the colony's farmers as they were of the 'benefits' of scientific agriculture.

This chapter analyses how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Bronte during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by the accounts of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, both of whom travelled to Yorkshire to find evidence of Charlotte Bronte's life and to assess her legacy as an author. Woolf 's career began with a journey to Charlotte Bronte's home, a literary pilgrimage described in an ironic register, a distinct break with the emotional and reverential accounts of her predecessors. While Bronte's literary legacy ostensibly provided the rationale for the 'Charlotte' cult, her texts did not actually seem to be sufficient for many of her devotees. Many Victorian pilgrims, like Harland, recorded feeling a thrill of presence and friendly connection to Charlotte Bronte in Haworth.

Clive Barker first came to international prominence with Books of Blood, a collection of thirty stories of which only one might be said to adhere to basic protocols of bourgeois realism. In breaking out of what threatened to become a comfort zone marked 'Horror Fiction', Barker displayed rare courage and integrity. Even as he became a dark imaginer, a practitioner of something wider than horror, Barker shut himself off more and more wilfully from other possibilities. The rise of the Whitehead pharmaceutical empire and the Kennedy-by-any-other-name Geary commercial empire, with all the capitalist thuggery enforced along the way, could have given Barker a brace of gripping realist premises. On an uncomfortable number of occasions, Barker distracts from his dearth of ideas by fetching up tedious action sequences, facile bio-metamorphics, and 'edge'-lending violent and sexual content.

This section presents an annotated critical edition of El mundo todo es máscaras. Todo el año es carnaval , one of the ‘artículos de costumbres’, a type of satirical sketch that was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37).