Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades. "Old Women" te...

The Lectures on Poetics Series at the University of Frankfurt VI has hosted many illustrious speakers at its lectern, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Theodor Adorno, and Heinrich Boll. At the beginning of 2007, Urs Widmer – described by the "Independent...

During the week before Labor Day every year, 35,000 people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a 40-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revo...

To many outside India, Hinduism is envisioned as the foundation of an ideal, all-embracing society. Yet this is far from the truth. Though historically the practice of Hinduism does promote the idea of an inclusive and tolerant way of life, in the pa...

Part of an ongoing series published in cooperation with the "Index on Censorship" that deals with religion and free expression, "The Jewish Case" is distinctive in several ways. To begin with, even calling Judaism a religion is problematic. The bread...

During the cold-war years, Western Christians basked in a sense that they were living on the right side of the ideological divide, harboring humane values, freedom, democracy and the right to irrationality, belief and non-belief. The atheist Communis...

In recent years, countless politicians and commentators have been addressing the Quran in an attempt to understand the rise of Muslim extremist ideology. They have missed the point: the most significant factor in this phenomenon is to be found within...

"Of Matters Modern" analyses the experience of modernity in South Asia. Arguing that South Asia's experience of modernity has to be understood in a global context, the book explores a wide range of topics: the emergence of "Assam Fever" in colonial d...