Analysing fascism in India has been rather unnecessarily polarized, both by Marxist approaches overemphasizing economic causality and by non-Marxist approaches overemphasizing ideology, politics, organizational aspects, and social psychology.1 This difference is important in the historical condition and context in which an analysis of the current regime in India is being made. Whereas Antonio Gramsci defined fascism on an international scale as ‘an attempt to resolve problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol shots’, in India, the rise of an authoritarian regime with fascist tendencies is certainly not a result of the nation being caught up in an international war. It could be more significant to examine the social reality that lends consent to the authoritarian model of politics and governance and how the forms in which it surfaces exhibit fascist tendencies (Gramsci 1984).2 The fascist regimes during the Second World War were different from the post-war ones, specifically with reference to the experience of developing nations like India. In this context, the distinction between fascist movements and fascist regimes is important, and there seems to have been a right-wing extremist movement pushing for the rise of a regime in India (Dimitrov 1984; Reich 1980; Koves and Mazumdar 2005). If Narendra Modi's regime cannot be characterized as a fascist regime, it certainly has been an authoritarian one with fascist tendencies, and what needs to be explained is how such a regime manages to manufacture popular consent.

This chapter examines how achievement books produced by Egyptian state institutions have narrated and re-narrated the 1952 revolution. These books were centrally published by the Information Department, a crucial yet seldom studied organ in the emerging Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, as well as public relations units across different ministries. After a brief institutional history of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as a whole, in which I demonstrate how ‘culture’ and ‘media’ were originally intertwined in administrative terms, I argue that the state’s achievements were narrated according to a changing conception of the revolution between 1954 and 1970. This rhetoric cemented a distinctive version of history among Egyptian bureaucrats, in which long lists of achievements came to articulate the bureaucratic corps’ contributions to the revolution. Moreover, it aimed to counter colonial propaganda via a systematic presentation of ‘the true Egypt’ in numerous European languages. In short, achievement books recorded, disseminated, and embodied the revolution’s accomplishments for a domestic and an international audience.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.