Vichy on the Tigris
With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
article
interview
Tensions in Taiwan
Taiwanese artists, activists and intellectuals organize against the fanning of ethnic differences by DPP Greens and KMT Blues during the island’s 2004 election. Cultural identity and official ‘de-Sinicization’ in a fast-expanding East Asian context.
articles
Graphs, Maps, Trees - 3
After ‘graphs’ and ‘maps’, trees: can evolutionary theory help pattern the transformation of cultural forms and divergence of genres, through time and space? Franco Moretti’s final essay on abstract models for literary history.
The Turkish Bell Jar
Against a background of high unemployment and fragile economic recovery, the neo-Islamist AKP is submitting its supporters among the urban poor to the programmes of the IMF, Pentagon and Kemalist elite. Internal pressures on NATO’s Middle East bridgehead and EU candidate member.
In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel
After the literary revelations of ‘Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate’ (NLR 27), a new political reading of José Rizal’s astonishing last novel. Imperial power, anarchist bombings and anti-colonial insurrection in the gifted young Filipino’s vision of a 19th-century global landscape.
reviews
China’s Critical Intelligentsia
Arif Dirlik on Chaohua Wang, One China, Many Paths. A collective magnifying glass on the PRC’s complex social and political problems, as some of the country’s leading critical intellectuals debate its future.
'We Are Too Menny'
Rachel Malik on Alex Woloch, The One vs the Many. The creation of character-systems in the realist novel, in a bold account that proposes a new political economy of major and minor.
Exorcizing the Manifesto
Jacob Stevens on Gareth Stedman Jones, Introduction to The Communist Manifesto. Intellectual antecedents of the trumpet blast of 1848. Must today’s critics lower their political horizons?
