Alterities marks an advance to a new stage of critical theory. Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Badiou, Thomas Docherty intervenes in all the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practice a new criticism, whose theoretical foundations lie in a postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art. Bound together by the cohesive drive of Docherty's intelligence and the coerciveness of the arguments he enlarges about alterity and historicity, Alterities rehabilitates the question of why we bother about art, and proposes new modes of critical engagement with contemporary culture

Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in contemporary Anglophone novels – Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) – in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an introductory chapter which investigates Freud’s concept of the uncanny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities discusses the novels from different critical orientations (postcolonialism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), presenting ghostliness as intersecting with three major themes: the problem of the spectre’s visibility and “bodily” nature; the particular melancholic state of mind the ghost can trigger which brings about a very special kind of (g)hospitality; the spectral nature of history and its relationship with the characters’ personal memory.

This volume - of essays, poetry, and prose fiction - records various attempts to read the fracture zones created by the discursive strategy of a democratic imagination, where space and ideas are opened to new linguistic and literary insights. Pride of place is taken by essays on the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris which explore the implications of his awareness of a polyphony of coexistent voices that dislodges the hegemony of Cartesian dualism. This group of studies is rounded off with an interview with, and searching testimony by, Harris himself. The further contributions take up the implications of the encounter with 'alterity' (strangers, natives, barbarians) in order to underline not only wonder in the face of an unknown presence, or the 'shame' through which the subject discovers itself, but also the ressentiment involved in the creation of demonized Others. As the poet Charles Tomlinson states, "what we take to be otherness, alterity, can be readmitted into our literary consciousness and seen as part of the whole, causing us to readjust our awareness of the possibilities of English." These essays confirm that resistance is an interface of ambivalence between discursive worlds, encouraging us to read the "living network" of a text contrapuntally. Specific topics include Billy Bragg and New Labour, Schopenhauer in Britain, Objectivist poetry, gender and sexual identity (in Nancy Cunard; in Scottish fiction), multivocal discourse in South Africa, specific forms of alterity (in Jamaica Kincaid; in the poetry of Edwin Morgan; in allosemitism) and the deculturalizing perils of globalization.

This book investigates the politics of identity in Asia and explores how different groups of people inside and outside Asia have attempted to relate to the alterity of the places and cultures in the region through various modes (literary and filmic representation, scholarly knowledge, and so on) and at different points in time. Although coming from different perspectives like literary criticism, film studies, geography, cultural history, and political science, the contributors collectively argue that Asian otherness is more than the dialectical interplay between the Western self and one of its many others, and more than just the Orientalist discourse writ large. Rather, they demonstrate the existence of multiple levels of inter-Asian and intercultural contact and consciousness that both subvert as much as they consolidate the dominant ‘Western Core-Asian periphery’ framework that structures what the mainstream assumes to be knowledge of Asia. With chapters covering a wealth of topics from Korea and its Cold War history, to Australia's Asian identity crisis, this book will be of huge interest to anyone interested in critical Asian studies, Asian ethnicity, postcolonialism and Asia cultural studies. Leong Yew is an Assistant Professor in the University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Disjunctive Empire of International Relations (2003).

Reconsidering the dynamics of perception Using cinema to explore the visual aspects of alterity, Randall Halle analyzes how we become cognizant of each other and how we perceive and judge another person in a visual field. Halle draws on insights from philosophy and recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience to argue that there is no pure "natural" sight. We always see in a particular way, from a particular vantage point, and through a specific apparatus, and Halle shows how human beings have used cinema to experiment with the apparatus of seeing for over a century. Visual alterity goes beyond seeing difference to being conscious of how one sees difference. Investigating the process allows us to move from mere perception to apperception, or conscious perception. Innovative and insightful, Visual Alterity merges film theory with philosophy and cutting-edge science to propose new ways of perceiving and knowing.

This text develops a novel methodology for social investigation into the Flint (Michigan, USA) water crisis by using classical Husserlian phenomenology as its point of departure. To develop a proper method in a case like this, the author uses as primary data the experiences of the affected community. The text investigates philosophically how a water crisis happens as well as the structures of power responsible. This book grounds contemporary theories of power in a phenomenology of social experience. Key to that grounding is the careful elaboration of subject positions in power structures as partially constitutive of lifeworlds (lebensumwelten) for consciousness. The applied phenomenological tools unravel the central enigma of how a community’s concerns and the dictates of power can become so disastrously estranged. This text appeals to researchers and students working not just in phenomenology and philosophy but also to those working in the field of environmental humanities and on social justice issues.

»Resonant Alterities« bridges the gap between sound studies and literary criticism. A queer ghost story by Vernon Lee, an occultist novel of psychic adventure by Algernon Blackwood, a dystopian science fiction tale by J.G. Ballard and a post-traumatic short novel by Don DeLillo are its primary objects of analysis. Each is explored within the context of its contemporary cultural debates on sound. Meanwhile, all four theory-enriched readings focus on intersecting and desire-laden processes of meaning making, knowledge production and subject formation. Focal points are aurally/audio-visually structured phenomena expressive of both collective and individual anxieties.