In this volume of sixteen essays, D. R. Nagaraj, the foremost non-Brahmin intellectual to emerge from India's non-English-speaking world, presents his vision of the Indian caste system in relation to Dalit politics – the Dalit being a self-designatio...

"Who Sings the Nation-State" brings together two of America's foremost critics and two of the most influential theorists of the last decade. Together, they explore the past, present and future of the state in a time of globalization. What is contai...

In Imagining the Urban, Shonaleeka Kaul turns to Sanskrit literature to discover the characteristics – both physical and social – of ancient Indian cities. Kaul examines nearly a thousand years of Sanskrit kavyas to see what India's early historic ci...

In 1965 Indonesia had the largest communist movement in the world outside of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Indonesian President Sukarno supported the movement and was edging Indonesia towards socialism, when a mutiny coordinate...

"Guilty Males and Proud Females" is the first complete study on the Bengali gajan festival dedicated to Dharmaraj, a village god in the Rarh region of Bengal. The gajan is the dramatic representation of an hierogamy – the marriage of a god and goddes...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger has mastered poetry, novels, and the intricate balance between history and fiction, but he's never done anything quite like this before. For the writing of "Unlikely Progeny", Enzensberger developed a persona – Linda Quilt -c...

In "The Immaterial", French social philosopher Andre Gorz (1923-2007) argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consum...

"Letters to Madeleine" collects for the first time in English the remarkable letters and poems sent by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to his fiancee Madeleine Pages during World War I. Stationed in the trenches of Champagne, this man of letters wh...

Tzvetan Todorov, one of Europe's leading intellectuals, explores the complex relations between art, politics, and ethics in the essays that make up "The Limits of Art". In one essay, "Artists and Dictators", Todorov traces the intimate relationship b...

According to political philosopher Frederic Gros, traditional notions of war and peace are currently being replaced by ideas of intervention and security. But while we may be able to speak of an end to war, this does not imply an end to violence. On...