The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

This chapter deconstructs the history of erotic art from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Instead of holding as self-evident the meanings of “art” and “eroticism,” it traces a history of how and why some forms of representation have been deemed erotic and the ambiguities of “art” versus “pornography.” Four related phenomena are used as anchors to explore erotic art’s long history: script, sustained long-distance contact, print, and the use of lenses and photography. These relate in turn to three important dimensions of world history: networks, or physical and informational connections between different regions of the world; technologies, mainly the means for creating and circulating visual representations but also including the pivotal technology of contraceptives; and ideologies, or how sex, eroticism, and art are defined and regarded. Contemporary conceptions of erotic art are in many ways directly traceable to key paradigm shifts in sexuality that originated in cultural, intellectual, and material interactions since the early modern period (approximately the sixteenth century). Like human history generally, the history of erotic art has been riven by hierarchies – including gendered ones usually privileging the perspectives of men – exploitation, and violence. But artistic representations of sex have also challenged long-defended hegemonies.

This chapter presents a history of directorial practice in the post-war British theatre to argue that directors have been able to assert their authority over the sector thanks to their operation at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity. This analysis of the work of directing owes a great deal to Ric Knowles’s development of ‘materialist semiotics’, and to Stuart Hall’s readings of the politics of cultural production and reception. The chapter extends Knowles’s and Hall’s insights into theatre production through three parallel accounts of theatre directing in the post-war period. These focus on the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples include Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, Paulette Randall); ‘auteur’ directors who create theatrical ‘performance texts’ (Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice), and directors whose artistry is to be found in social production, the shaping of relations between people in public space (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey, Lois Weaver). Through this analysis of a wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to concretise the multiple forces and interests that govern the theatre sector, and thereby expose the social relations that shape its creative practices, and the political interests that govern them.

America expanded trade and cultural relations as it faced foreign competition from the entrenched powers in Iran, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company maintained its strong economic control over Iran. Despite these limitations, the Pahlavi state centralized and engaged in nation-building. However, it imposed political restrictions and censorship that privately concerned American diplomats. Iran embarked on an immense project to build a national railway system, which it inaugurated just before another global war. The repression of political dissent, particularly religious or socialist viewpoints, raised concerns about Reza Shah’s style of leadership. Some Iranian intellectuals gravitated toward intolerant ideologies that clashed with the country’s legacy of religious and ethnic accommodation.

Chapter 2 introduces the case study at the heart of this book, the Theater an der Ruhr, and traces its institutional formation in the post-industrial Ruhr valley. This chapter builds on archival material and fieldwork in the archives of the Theater an der Ruhr in the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn in Cologne, suggesting new ways for combining ethnographic and historiographic methods for studying the institutionalisation of theatres. Documenting how its founders negotiated federal patrons and municipal funding, this chapter explores the political economy of public theatres and how they articulate their own forms of ‘artistic critique’ against the economisation of cultural production (Boltanski and Chiapello[1999]). It also describes, on the basis of a series of interviews and founding contracts and critical reception at the time, how and why the founders of the Theater an der Ruhr created an institutional structure that facilitates long phases of rehearsals, analysing its underpinning by an avant-garde understanding of ‘autonomous artistic creation’ irreducible to profit.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” published in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, argued for the profound generativity of the concept of difference in cultural politics. By instead characterizing Asian American racial formation and its cultures through the terms heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, Lowe challenged the orientalist binaries that had for so long constricted considerations of Asian American culture. Because difference could generate affiliation and expansion, rather than unity, closure, and finitude, it would become a new starting point for apprehending minority cultures outside of the dominant frameworks of national inclusion and normative citizenship. This essay uses the frameworks of “recovery,” “reckoning,” and “remediation” to structure a discussion of the impact of Lisa Lowe’s work, and particularly the insights offered by her 1991 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity” essay, on the field of Asian American studies.

Where contemporary thinkers well disposed towards Rorty tend to emphasize the significance of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, more skeptical voices are apt to impugn his relevance to ongoing debates in philosophy on the grounds that that work’s attempt to dispose of the traditional conception of the discipline in the name of a nebulous “literary criticism” is little more than an exercise in self-therapy. The contention of this chapter, then, is that the antagonism this emphasis generates is both unfruitful and ill-conceived. Taking as its starting point reactions to criticism of his early (eliminativist) materialism, it argues that Rorty’s work in the 1970s offers a vindication of the activity of traditional philosophy, albeit within the broader conception of intellectual inquiry we’ve come to call neopragmatism and – latterly – “cultural politics.” From this perspective, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is just one (perhaps self-revealing) prophetic-theoretical proposal amongst many that neopragmatism/philosophy-as-cultural-politics makes possible. But that in turn shows how important this period of Rorty’s work is, not only to understanding his later output but also to elucidating the options available to contemporary philosophy.

In this introduction, I offer a sketch and overview of some major themes in Rorty’s thought (antirepresentationalism, liberalism, irony, anti-authoritarianism) and try to indicate how they hang together in a coherent (albeit controversial) whole. While Rorty’s work might appear disjointed and occasional given the immense range of this interests, I argue that his philosophy is unified on the whole. I also show how a broadly Darwinian world picture is at the center of Rorty’s philosophy and how this profoundly shapes all of his thinking.

Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary, this chapter focuses particularly on the philosopher’s key concept of “redemption.” A fascinating yet significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates to the power of the literary imagination and becomes increasingly important in his consideration of solidarity and social justice. We will explore the development of this concept in Rorty’s oeuvre with particular reference to John Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Uniting the work of Rorty and Boyne, we will argue, is a critique of standard religious practice and an affirmation of the human as ultimately redemptive.

While the story of Caribbean literature in English generally focuses on its emergence in relation to Great Britain, Caribbean writers also urgently explored the Caribbean’s relationship to the United States. US imperialism in the region was most explicit with the US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, in the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1910s to 1930s, and in its post-World War II involvement in various territories. Caribbean migration into the US fuelled the alliances that Brent Hayes Edwards describes as ‘the practice of diaspora’. In the 1920s, Caribbean activists and writers such as Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Eric Walrond helped shape the Harlem Renaissance. That movement’s aesthetic experiments and pan-African identifications inspired the development of literature within the region. The United States was also a hub from which some writers travelled to other parts of the world (Russia, France, the UK) and became part of a network of mutual influences. US writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston travelled to the Caribbean. Later, the ranks of the predominantly male writers in the United States were expanded with the emergence of women writers such as Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, and growing Caribbean immigration to the US coupled with the rise of US cultural institutions meant that the US location continued to influence Caribbean writing.