Bøger af Colin Wright

A collection of fun and challenging Sudoku puzzles.

A collection of fun and challenging Sudoku puzzles.

Recent military interventions in Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst others, have placed conflict again at the forefront of international debate. Yet the theoretical analysis of conflicts and of their social and psychological impacts has predictably lagged behind such tumultuous events. Moreover, while scholarship in the areas of strategic studies, international relations and peace studies has addressed the issues in terms of "conflict resolution" and "post-conflict reconstruction", little or no attention has been given to crucial interrelations between conflict and culture. Bringing together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, International Law, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Theory and Semiotics, Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation therefore employs an avowedly interdisciplinary approach in order to address what the editors perceive to be a significant omission. In five themed sections, this ambitious volume tackles many questions often excluded from discourses on conflict. How does a past conflict inform a community's vision for its future? How are conflicts represented in the media, in literature, in journalism, in all forms of cultural expression? How do representations of conflict compound but also confuse, and even reconfigure, cultural identities? What role do histories of conflicts play in the construction of national identities? Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation will be of direct interest to scholars and practitioners working in media and communications, international relations and international law, peace studies, human rights, cultural studies and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and gender studies, and comparative literature and literary theory.

This book foregrounds the centrality of political conflicts in the radical philosophy of Alain Badiou. It is divided into two halves. The first undertakes a reading of Badiou''s wider oeuvre (beyond Being and Event) and demonstrates that his political theory derives from analyses of key revolutionary sequences such as the Paris Commune, October ''17, May ''68 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From his evolving meditations on these sequences, and from his theoretical borrowings from Marxism, psychoanalysis and set-theory, Badiou has established a complex schema of the possible outcomes of conflict which constitutes a subtle and flexible theory of change. In the second half, the book applies this schema to a concrete ''situation'': colonial and post-colonial Jamaica. Against the backdrop of the history of conflict in Jamaica, the Morant Bay Revolt of 1865 is interpreted as an ''event'' in Badiou''s very precise sense. The Rastafari movement is then posited as a ''subject body'' faithful to this event, while roots reggae is explored as the ''subject language'' of this Rastafarian subject body. Through this example, it is suggested that the starkness of the account of the event in Being and Event, in its incompatibility with history or culture, must be qualified if Badiou''s contribution to a renewed philosophy of conflict is to be realized. To this end, the book builds on Badiou''s own Logics of Worlds in order to speculatively propose two new concepts: ''evental historiography'' and ''evental culture''. It is argued that conceptual elaborations like these might enable a productive rapprochement between Badiou and Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory - disciplines of which Badiou himself has been extremely critical, but which are certain to shape his reception in the English-speaking world. Conversely, both Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory, precisely in their increasingly enfeebled conceptions of social, cultural and political conflict, stand to gain a great deal from dialogue with the persistently Maoist dimensions of Badiou''s work.