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The chapter discusses how important housing questions are for Asian cities and citizens in the contemporary era of neoliberalization. It highlights the importance of understanding the path-dependent nature of neoliberalization, especially in the context of Asia’s condensed development under the developmentalist states. It also shows how housing has been at the heart of urban contestations in Asian cities, especially given its significance for wealth generation and upward class mobility when the formation of middle classes would have been the state’s legitimacy project. The chapter concludes by providing a summary of each contributing chapter.

For much of the history of US foreign relations, Africa has been rather an overlooked entity and sometimes entirely ignored. In this chapter, Oyebade provides a lucid analysis of the historic connections and interactions between the USA and Africa. He focuses on the major historical themes in Africa–USA relations, such as the supposed pre-Colombian American interactions with West Africa, the Eurocentric perception of the continent as ‘dark;’ the Atlantic slave trade, and the establishment of Liberia. The chapter also discusses more contemporary history including: US interest in Africa during the Second World War; Africa in the Cold War era; the dynamics of post-Cold War relations; and US counter-terrorism policy which has led to a progressive militarization of Africa.

Whatever the concept of the International might refer to, it seems urgent to re-appropriate it, to interrogate and problematize it, in order to (possibly) re-orient and reconfigure the practices that have constituted the “international” as an abstract space distinct from the national space and supposedly governed by its own rules of functioning. For the most challenging phenomena of our contemporary era seem to establish transversally to the division between the “national” and the “international,” they demand a better diagnostic, which itself calls for more than just reproducing the International. Foucault’s concepts and methods might possibly help in this task even though Foucault himself never directly engaged with the International. In this chapter, the author presents the need for a critical and reflexive knowledge that would constitute the International as an object for thought, in addition to offering brief discussions of the genesis of the book, the problems it seeks to engage, and how the contributions to the volume offer to engage and (re)configure these problems.

Lin and Blanchard’s chapter introduces the original research and distilled reflections from the conference, “100 Years after the 1911 Chinese Revolution: Reflections and Forecasts,” which the editors organized under the auspices of the Association of Chinese Political Studies (ACPS) and the King’s China Institute, on June 17–19, 2011. It explains the historical approach adopted for examining common social, political and environmental challenges between the contemporary period and the Xinhai revolution in the volume, through identifying similarities in how reformers addressed governance shortcomings and specific ways contemporary social organizations and policy entrepreneurs contributed to the institutional and policy adaptive process initiated by the ruling party and state apparatus at different levels of the administrative hierarchy.

This chapter focuses on two important strategies which have been adopted by many countries in the Asian region to meet the challenges faced by the massification and diversification of their higher education systems. These two strategies that are commonly found are cooperation and partnership which involve the sharing of resources and innovative ideas among stakeholders in the higher education systems. More specifically, the focus is on public–private partnership which challenges the ideology of what is public and what is private, and on regional cooperation which examines higher education activities beyond national borders.

Balaisis maps the economic and political conditions that underscore film and media practice in late socialist Cuba. He draws attention to the specific temporality of the period, a period that is marked both by rapid change and transformation as well as stasis, stagnation, and nostalgia. He argues that aesthetic modes such as melodrama and irony, as well as stylistic elements such as direct address and the long take, communicate the temporal experience of late socialism in Cuba, where new global traffic and a globalizing economy co-exist with iconic socialist features of the Cuban revolution. Balaisis situates the contemporary period within a broader history of modernity—as a slow and asymmetrical global process—which has a similarly contradictory experience of time.

A prominent shift in the post-1967 Arab intellectual discourse was an intensive intellectual preoccupation with the issue of turath (historical heritage) by intellectuals in various secular, non-Islamist political streams. The theoretical assumption underlying the majority of these works was the need to produce an “authentic” Arab Islamic foundation for modernity to bypass what had been labeled “imported,” “superficial,” and “Western” ideologies. The intellectual discourse around turath pursued the creation of new frames of reference for questions of legitimacy in Arab thought, and it aimed to produce a genuine interpretation and understanding of the contemporary era (mu’asara), which was perceived as being in crisis (’azma).1

Werner Abelshauser once remarked, “German history since 1945 has been above all economic history.” According to Abelshauser, nothing “shaped the West German state more than its economic development.” The East German state, too, linked “its fate from the very beginning to the promise of economic success.” Prosperity became “one of the most important criteria of success in the East-West competition.” For the contemporary history of the two German states, economic prosperity played the role of a “vehicle” of national identification and of the state’s self-understanding. “The economic success of the early years,” following this interpretation, served as the “material basis for the rich consensus that made balancing the interests of social groups possible.”1

Images objectifying and fetishizing the external female body in mainstream media are so common that writers like Morrison, Mason, Atwood, and Erdrich can rely on readers’ familiarity with these images when engaging issues of visual representation in their texts. However, increasingly, writers can also assume that readers will be familiar with images of the interior female body as these have become ubiquitous in medicine as well as in advertising, television, and film. In the contemporary period, the development of visual technologies that promise to “transparently” represent the interior body has not only revolutionized the practice of medicine but also created new issues with which feminist scholars and writers have had to grapple about the ways women’s bodies become visible via these technologies and how medical images are deployed in medicine and the larger culture.1

Somalia’s history of insecurity and underdevelopment, an increase in global discourse contributing to the contemporary period of pirate mania, and an ever-growing number of international naval forces and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions to combat piracy have all contributed to the intensifying demand for a holistic security-development approach to combating piracy off the coast of Somalia. The new security-development framework for combating piracy not only has material consequences for the people in Somalia, both pirates and non-pirates, but it also has material consequences for the sectors and agencies involved in counter piracy projects. The many opportunities and challenges associated with conducting security-development counter piracy projects on shore in Somalia are reshaping the time, location, and institutional structures of combating piracy. As more and more agencies compete for funding, institutions are reshaping their frameworks, mandates, and strategies to obtain their piece of the counter piracy pie.

Libya’s contemporary history has been dominated by the “perpetual dynamics” of religion, tribalism, regionalism, and oil. After 42 years in power, Muammar Qadhafi was killed at the hands of his own people. Despite receiving powerful support from NATO and certain Arab governments, the 2011 uprisings were authentically Libyan and were yet another reflection of the supremacy of these four “perpetual dynamics.” The purpose of this chapter is to analyze these dynamics and how they are echoed in post-Qadhafi Libya.

In recent decades, student mobility patterns have shifted from the previous elitist experience characterized by scholarship of the wealthy few to the current mass movement of average individuals and groups (Teichler and Jahr 2001). In the twenty-first century, a select number of students define themselves as members of elite groups enrolled in high-quality degree programs in popular host destinations; the majority, however, leave their home nations to obtain degrees at personal financial expense. Others are motivated to acquire international experiences that complement concurrent academic programs in their home nations. Traditionally, international students immigrated to study with world-renowned scholars or to further their disciplinary knowledge in nations such as the United States or Britain. In the contemporary era, university students are more likely to study in the global arena in newly established host destinations to obtain advanced degrees, diplomas, or professional certification (Williams 1981).

SPANNING SEVERAL DECADES, claiming tens of thousands of lives, displacing hundreds of thousands of individuals in its aftermath, and sparking a massive human rights crisis, Sri Lanka’s civil war—which Neil de Votta has called “one of the deadliest and most protracted ethnic conflicts of our time” (2)—has proven peculiar and paradigmatic, notable for its specific circumstances while reflecting nationalist rhetorics elsewhere in the postcolonial era. For this has also been a war of competing histories, as Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists advanced claims on the past to justify and fortify political claims on the present. In itself, this should not seem terribly unusual; nationalist movements worldwide have carefully amended “histories” to suit shifting political needs. “Any nationalism seeking to spread its influence,” A. Jeyaratnam Wilson notes, “needs to root itself in its own contemporary history, myths, symbols, heroes, legends and other collective experiences with bloodstained memories. The Tamil nationalist reservoir … overflows with these and other streams of gory events perpetuated by the Sinhala state” (158-9).

Medieval Jewish philosophers saw a commonality between Judaism and Christianity in terms of monotheism and the Biblical God as creator of heaven and earth. This chapter will look at the possibilities of commonality in the contemporary era. For almost two millennia, when Jews spoke of Christians, it was either to extenuate the difference between the two religions or it was to point out that Christianity was incomprehensible.

The twenty-first century has been described as the era of the global South. Christianity has experienced exponential growth in the southern hemisphere. African Christianity, in particular, has made significant strides and put a stamp on global Christianity. This is the result of the phenomenal rise in the number of Christians on the continent and also reflects the Christian churches’ unprecedented role in the political and social transformation of Africa since the end of the Cold War. The world has taken notice of African Christianity’s role in civil society and re-democratization efforts as well as its role in the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of African Christianity in the contemporary period is the shift I have described as the reverse mission phenomenon—African missionaries venturing to the cosmopolitan centers, especially in Europe and America, to reevangelize the West.

Every time I approach the immigration counter at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport, a similar scenario plays itself out. “Are you Latina?” I am asked cautiously.

The subject of this book is old and new. It is old in that the synergy of drama, theater, and urbanism, which this book considers during the contemporary period, reflects a shared genealogy in western literature. Marvin Carlson has defined something of this genealogy in Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture,1 an invaluable work about the interrelationship of the theater and the city. But here I examine the corollary to his work: what is written for the theater, regardless of where or how it will be staged, is often intricately linked with conditions of urbanism. While this link may be true during any period, it emerges most prominently during times of transition and transformation: when the ways that towns, cities, or metropolises are organized, legislated, and inhabited undergo profound changes. Finding examples of this corollary is easy enough: during the Great Depression in the United States, plays addressed the shift from city to metropolis by dramatizing the stratification of classes (Elmer Rice’s Street Scene 1929, Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End 1935, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 1949); as a response to the emergence of the merchant class in sixteenth-century London, City Comedies2 mirrored the increasing tensions among classes (Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour 1598, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday 1599, Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 1613); going all the way back to ancient Greece, plays were part of civic festivals that helped define the city-state (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex 429 b.c.e. and Antigone 442 b.c.e.).

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were a turning point in contemporary history which have changed the complexion of the global security landscape. The terrorists, with their mistaken and distorted beliefs and ideology, have sown the seeds of suspicion and hate among different peoples of the world. This state of affairs was compounded by the ill-planned response of the West, which has created conditions of instability and strife all over the world.

Before analyzing the stances of the Indonesian Islamic political parties on women and minorities, it is important to examine, briefly, Indonesia’s contemporary history. The country became independent shortly after the end of World War II. The first Indonesian president, Soekarno, organized the first free parliamentary elections in 1955. After this event, the decline of Indonesian democracy began.1 Soekarno started to limit political freedom and kept doing so until his successor, Soeharto, came to power in the mid-1960s. Soeharto, as shown in this chapter, was even more merciless in this respect.

Economic growth has been at the top of the agenda of governments from the immediate post-independence period to the contemporary era, and will continue as a dominant issue for the foreseeable future. This is the rationale behind the attention that this chapter gives to Nigeria’s development planning and management experience over the past 45 years. Proceeding from the position taken in the preceding chapter, the chapter notes that the discovery of petroleum in commercial quantities was a fortuitous event, but one that policy missteps eventually turned into a curse.

Islam in the Horn of Africa, mainly Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, represents cultural and political issues. The contemporary history of political Islam in the Horn is similar to that of other sub-Saharan African countries. The attitude vis-a-vis political Islam of postcolonial governments in this region has been ruthless. Therefore, in the Horn of Africa, Islam has found other ways to manifest politically. That is, their transformation into movements and their penetration of society throughout organizations providing services and support.

In the storied tradition of Chinese literature, poetry occupies a hallowed position. The scholarship on traditional Chinese poetry fills entire archives. But while modern Chinese literature has now established itself as a thriving field of inquiry, most of the critical writing on it is directed toward narrative. What has happened to poetry in the contemporary period? The development of modern Chinese poetry and contemporary Chinese poetry has had an uneasy history. In addition to the upheavals that have affected all Chinese over the past 150 years, the pressures put on Chinese poetry and poets have been especially heavy. The political tumult in China has often made it difficult to create. But this alone cannot account for the attitude toward modern poetry. Poetry in the modern era has undergone a vast transformation and now bears little resemblance to its illustrious forebears. For the sake of convenience, this volume refers to “contemporary” Chinese poetry. By that we simply mean poetry written after the mid-century war period. All the papers except Michelle Yeh’s, which sets the stage for the rest, focus on the postwar period. But even in the poetry of the postwar period, the development in writing Chinese poetry cannot be understood in neat rubrics.

This verse, written by the British poet Rudyard Kipling, was published at the time of the Philippine-American War (1899-1913). “The White Man’s Burden” justified an imperialist project, and supported the position that the United States should join forces with British imperialism and share the “white man’s burden” of “extending civilization to peoples considered inca-pable of governing themselves” (Zwick 1992: xviii). In other words, the United States should join in the “civilizing mission.” More than a century has passed since this poem was published, but it is still cited in many contemporary works to suggest the continuing relevance of the idea of the “civilizing mission” over time (Bowden 2004a; Foster et al. 2004; Pyenson 1985, 1993; Sines 2002).

While extensive attention has been given to the early Chishti Sufis, and even to their Mughal and colonial successors, the same cannot be said for the contemporary period. The latest period is not only treated as last, but also as least important. It is most often summarized as a “revival,” following a “decline” from the original greatness of a “classical” or “formative” period. Our own approach questions the threefold model of classicism, decline, and revival. Those who speak of a Chishti revival or resurgence too often imply that renewed attention to religious learning and the mediation of spiritual exemplars marks a new beginning, but it is a new beginning with limited horizons; at best it can imitate—it can never equal—the glory of past historical epochs.1 Hope, in this view, is limited, for while every movement must coalesce around a set of symbols and leaders, it remains reactive, a diminished response to outside, often colonial, forces. Success, too, is limited, for it depends on institution building and networking, yet rivals limit their long-range potential.

This chapter focuses on notions of masculinity and resistance among Quichua-speaking indigenous villagers, or Runa, in Pangor, a parish in Chimborazo province in the central highlands of Ecuador. Indigenous Pangorenos’ notions of masculinity have been intertwined with authority and resistance in class, ethnic, and age-based hierarchies. This essay deals primarily with the early to mid-twentieth century, when haciendas dominated the area, but also examines the contemporary period of indigenous ethnic mobilization.

The Four Zoas marks a crucial point in Blake’s development. Begun in 1796–97 and continued over the next decade, though never put into finished form, this epic-prophecy cast as a dream-vision in nine nights is a universal history that also comes to grips with a key aspect of contemporary history: the failures of the French Revolution and the English radical reform movement from the 1770s through the 1790s. Through salient events involving Orc, Blake amends his initial scheme of human renewal through elemental rebellion and unfettered desire. In political terms, he recognizes the need for a social movement based on historical-prophetic awareness and contemporary fraternity. The resulting perspective does not repudiate social rebellion but accepts the need for enlarged understanding and eventually, in Jerusalem, mutuality and love to guide the people.