"Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror"

The article discusses the evolutionary development of horror and fear in animals and humans, including in regard to cognition and physiological aspects of the brain. An overview of the social aspects of emotions, including the role that emotions play in interpersonal relations and the role that empathy plays in humans' ethics, is provided. An overview of the psychological aspects of monsters, including humans' simultaneous repulsion and interest in horror films that depict monsters, is also provided

The Universal Alliance of All Peoples : Romantic Socialists, the Human Family, and the Defense of Empire during the July Monarchy, 1830-1848

This article documents the procolonial rhetoric among romantic socialists in France during the July Monarchy (1830-48), demonstrating its pervasiveness. It argues that these years must be highlighted as key to the transition from eighteenth-century universalist ideas of humanity toward taxonomies of national, racial, and sexual difference that underpinned the rationale of empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. It explores the views on colonialism espoused by socialists such as Etienne Cabet, Pierre Leroux, Constantin Pecqueur, and Jean Reynaud; situates them in the broad socialist consensus on empire; and demonstrates the relationship between these men\u27s socialism and their colonialism. Further, it contextualizes their advocacy for colonialism in relation to contemporary debates about the abolition of slavery and free trade. Finally, it demonstrates the coexistence of universalist and particularist language in romantic socialist discourse on colonial expansion and its importance to the developing logic of the mission civilisatrice

Ambivalence Beyond Modernity. Rationalization and Morality in Bauman's Social Theory

none1noopenE. SuscaSusca, E

Failures that Connect; or, Colonial Friendships in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

This article reexamines the role of friendship in A Passage to India that previous scholarship has analyzed as an event in terms of function, teleology, and political efficacy. Examining friendship in terms of its continuing flows and affects, this essay explores the moments and spaces in which friendship, in bringing together bodies and social worlds, fails to adhere itself to recognition and representation. What is the point of being friends with someone in a colonial outpost like Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in Forster’s novel? What happens—or does not happen—when Dr. Aziz and Adela Quested are having afternoon tea together or venturing into the unknowns of the Marabar Cave? These questions, among others, serve as the starting point from which to trace the potentiality of colonial friendship, as well as its relation to structures of power and knowledge.  This article, in short, offers friendship as an analytic tool and subject matter to situate A Passage to India away from an identitarian logic that often takes the study of colonial relations to a host of ideological impasses.

Dale Collins, media man: Australian interwar print culture and the technologies of production, distribution, and reception before and after ‘Australian literature’

This article explores Dale Collins as an intriguing gap in the Australian literary record. A prolific writer and a creature of the transnational and Australian interwar periodical press who was subsequently reviled and forgotten, Dale Collins is worthy of attention because of his output alone. But the vicissitudes of Collins’ fame and repute position him as a particularly thought-provoking and revealing case study in relation to new understandings of the literary past. They also potentially open up ways to consider the technologies of the self through which Australian Literature has become coherent to itself in ways that need to be continually reconceptualised, expanded, or worked through

Being, Thinking, Writing 'With'

Once upon a time there were three women: they were known as ‘the woman in black’, ‘the grey-haired woman with the well-developed sense of humor’ and ‘the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock’. These women, who had known each other for quite some time, were all physicists. They were also friends. As physicists, the woman in black, the grey-haired woman with the well-developed sense of humour and the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock had learned, and now shared, ‘a specific vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric’. They knew what could count as a scientific observation, ‘what standards of accuracy in determining observations [were] possible, how the words of common language [were] restricted and refined for use in [their particular] scientific discipline’. They knew how to tell the ‘truth’. Rational knowledge and empirical evidence were no strangers to these women who were well versed in what could count as an argument. Consequently, it was said by some that these women constituted a microcosmic rational community

Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

Money makes the world go round: Shakespeare, commerce and community

In early modern England money was of central importance to areas of social life that are in the modern world separate from the study of economics. The demand for liquid capital and the practical problems associated with the devising of a monetary system that was reliable exercised the minds of philosophers, social commentators, and dramatists. The template for discussion was laid down by Aristotle, who perceived financial activity as part of the larger community and its various modes of social interaction. Copernicus wrote a treatise on money, as had Nicholas of Oresme before him. But in the sixteenth century dramatists turned their attention to what we would call “economics” and its impact on social life. Writers such as Thomas Lupton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare all dealt with related issues of material greed, usury, hospitality and friendship and the ways in which they transformed, and were transformed by particular kinds of social and economic practice. These concerns fed into the investigation of different kinds of society, particularly turning their attention to their strengths and weaknesses, and in the case of dramatists providing imaginative accounts of the kinds of life that these innovations produced