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The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman--who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.
This book offers a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morris’s utopian writing, alongside his journalism and public lectures, constituted part of a sustained counter-hegemonic project that intervened both into the life-world of the fin de siècle socialist movement, as well as the dominant literary cultures of his day. Owen Holland demonstrates this by placing Morris in conversation with writers of first-wave feminism, nineteenth-century pastoralists, as well as the romance revivalists and imperialists of the 1880s. In doing so, he revises E.P. Thompson’s and Miguel Abensour’s argument that Morris’s utopian writing should be conceived as anti-political and heuristic, concerned with the pedagogic education of desire, rather than with the more mundane work of propaganda. He shows how Morris’s utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompson’s and Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.
Research study conducted in Kalutara District, Sri Lanka.
This is a collection of essays and articles written and mostly published from time to time covering various issues of constitution making in Sri Lanka. The focus of all of them is ethnic reconciliation. The timing of this publication is the ongoing efforts in Parliament in consultation with the public and various stakeholders in drafting a new constitution and adopting it in Parliament subsequently endorsed by a referendum, according to the constitutional provisions of the present Constitution (1978). Referendum for a new constitution is an important constitutional requirement. Therefore, it should be said at the outset that no 'constitutional revolution' is anticipated in this effort like in 1972. The rationale or the felt need for a new constitution is long standing although this is going to be the fourth constitution of Sri Lanka, if it is successful, since independence in 1948. Admittedly, therefore, there has been some continuous disequilibrium in constitutional matters in the country. The first constitution or popularly called the Soulbury constitution was primarily a document drafted by the colonial state makers, Lord Soulbury and Sir Ivor Jennings, of course in consultation with the elected representatives of the country. However this constitution lasted for 25 years from 1947 to 1972 without much upheaval. In contrast, the first indigenous and the first republican constitution of 1972 survived only for six years. The second republican constitution of 1978 is still in operation for 38 years but largely due to its rigidity than any inherent quality of popular acceptance. Since 1994, there have been several fervent efforts to overhaul it but without any success. In August 2000, the effort to inaugurate a new constitution came very close, but failed, the opposition members of parliament burning the draft agreed by the leaders during by-partisan negotiations. One advantage of constitution making process today is the existence of a 'national unity' government of the two main political parties, the UNP and the SLFP, also with the connivance of the official opposition, the TNA, representing the Northern Tamil constituency. Therefore, at least on appearance, there seems to be some broad consensus for the need for a new constitution. This could however be illusory, considering the rifts within the 'national unity government' itself on some of the key constitutional issues, and the stance of the almost breakaway Joint Opposition (JO) from the SLFP/UPFA led by the former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, among other factors. In a recently held 'foot-march' (Pada Yathra) of the JO (28 July - 1 August), one of the main slogans was the claim that 'a new constitution is a death trap.' In addition, on the issue of passing the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) Bill, the behavior of the Joint Opposition has heralded what they might do during the inauguration of a new constitution. There is no single theme or discourse underlying the present publication, except the need for a new constitution reforming many of the institutional and legal anomalies of the present constitutional system, and creating a balance between divergent political views in order that a workable 'constitutional equilibrium' is created for a foreseeable future. This is by no means an easy task. There is no apparent readymade agreement between the main political parties, the UNP, the SLFP, the TNA or the JVP, except the need for a new constitution. What elements could create a sustainable 'constitutional equilibrium' is also not a self-evident matter.
This study develops the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept. Stressing the similarites between East/West the book examines extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.
In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe. Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.
What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives.
"Published in cooperation with NATO Emerging Security Challenges Division"--T.p.