...Anthony Bogues Duke University Press 2006 Imagination, Politics, and Utopia: Confronting the Present The relationships between the imagination, ways of life, and desire are central to any consideration of the political. In thinking about these re- lationships and their links to...

...Harry Harootunian Duke University Press 2007 Interventions The Imperial Present and the Second Coming of Fascism Despite the noisy rhetoric promising to free Iraq, America’s imperial war is being pursued not for the...

...Matthew Suazo By expanding the frame of Paul Gilroy's post-9/11 intervention in Postcolonial Melancholia to include post–Hurricane Katrina discourse, this essay aims to more specifically elaborate the present moment—Gilroy's “postcolonial present”—as a space and time in which to combat the...

...Eli Friedlander The present essay sketches in broad outlines the philosophical armature of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project by analyzing the central theoretical notion in that incomplete manuscript of his: the dialectical image. So as to bring out the uniqueness of Benjamin's use of image, I...

... modern Chinese vernacular, offer important insights into the mission-encumbered language of China's present-day intellectual elite. As the critical exemplar of choice in intellectual China, Lu Xun's evocative formulations, together with his aspiration to transform hearts and minds through baihua , have...

... history, especially his interrogations of human temporality in the 1930s. Miki's idea of the binary of genzai (the present) and gendai (the modern) that he developed during wartime resembles the duality of everyday experience in the postearthquake nuclear crisis of the current century. Simultaneously...

... qualifies this by stressing the limited number of persons with unmitigatedly sincere intention. He ultimately takes China's scholar-gentry to task for having a far greater degree of moral culpability in the present situation than they are willing to admit, rather than blaming it all on the corruption of the...

... objective conditions are met; and called for a thorough diagnosis of the present's particularity. In doing so, the essay seeks to complicate retrospective sketches of Arab Marxists, such as Susan Buck-Morss's, that depict them as elitist and vanguardist modernizers and oppose them to immanent Islamist...

... educated persons to conduct themselves as moral exemplars. In this essay, the divergent ramifications of this Confucian dictum are explored via several Chinese thinkers including Huang Zongxi, Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Mao Zedong. Their intellectual legacies are considered in relation to present-day uses...

...Brian Reed This review essay takes the occasion of the publication of the Fourth Edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics to ask what it might mean, in the digital present, to use print as a medium for trying to speak comprehensively and authoritatively about the history of...

... “postsocialist” here marks modes of personhood and locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the post-1989 order. Deriving from the socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident cultures, these modes persist in the present and disable...

... constructions that cannot be contained within a uniform conceptual frame, such as Islamic “authenticity.” The past is shared, and the present is as well. The Arab Spring demonstrates that modernity confronts political actors with similar problems, whatever their background. The essay addresses successive...

... counterpart in its desire to move beyond the legacies of the Enlightenment. David Scott initiated this critique by arguing that seemingly endless debates between contesting versions of national historiography demonstrate the limits of using the past to find justice in the present. Qadri Ismail builds on...

... at the present moment. Is China's substantially marketized economy sufficient evidence of its abandonment of socialism? Is it a socialist market economy or marketized socialism? Is it a socialist state with “Chinese characteristics” or one without socialism? Would the continuation of economic reform...

...Rajeswari Sunder Rajan That the escalating Hindu violence against minorities has produced a crisis for secularism in present-day India—but not for Hinduism—is an intriguing fact that calls for further analysis. This essay attempts a reexamination of the split between Hinduism and Hindutva...

... full goodwill and generosity of mind. They spoke to one another a little about the past, but much more about the present, pondering the necessary factors for securing and protecting the agenda of the revolution, and of a new Tunisia, predicated on defending the rights of all its citizens. The...

... revolution and the emergence of world literature, and situates a number of studies in the dossier as concerned with this link. Finally, it presents Erich Auerbach and Edward Said as contributors to a potential radicalization of the philology of world literature, replacing its organicist-nationalist...

... two opposing systems of values and cultural production. One was dominant, while the other was repressed but survived in various forms and in uneven ways. The present essay is, in part, the story of that survival and eventual victory. I draw on printed material, extensive fieldwork, and personal...

... decadence and philology, demonstrating how the past might erupt in the present through language that forges ambivalent links to a lived relation with the past. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. French Decadence, Arab Awakenings...

... wayward paths of Greek modernity. It therefore presents a rare opportunity for a series of reconsiderations of the tension between the poetic and the political, whether the co-incidence between Philhellenism and Orientalism that makes possible the colonization of the Hellenic ideal or the incapacity of...