Practical lessons in world hegemony, as Japan’s attempt to strike an independent course is cut down by the Obama Administration. For the islanders of Okinawa, another chapter in a centuries-old tale of military occupation.

The slums of Cairo find their homology in a new genre of narrative fiction, argues Sabry Hafez. Striking formal innovations of a generation raised under the asphyxiating rule of the Mubarak dictatorship.

Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.

As the Eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis deepens, Slavoj Žižek calls for an internationalist response that would transcend the defence of a failing status quo, to invent new transitional strategies.

China’s largest firms remain small fry by comparison to Western MNCs. As the tectonic plates of the world economy shift, a sober assessment of its persistent asymmetries.

Opera has been globalized, and big-bang productions of Wagner’s music-dramas now outnumber those of all other works. How to frame an aesthetics for this cultural-historical phenomenon—allegorical ideogram strings, or Gesamtkunstwerk as vaudeville?