Liberation and Authority: Plato's Gorgias, the First Book of the Republic, and Thucydides provides a comparative treatment of Plato’s Gorgias, the first book of the Republic, and Thucydides’ History, arguing that they share similarities not only in the oft-noted “natural justice” of Callicles, Thrasymachus, and the Melian Dialogue, but also in a development that runs through the whole of each work. Nicholas Thorne argues that all three works give an account of the collapse of the authority of an older ethical order, out of which a subjective spirit arises that strives to liberate itself from all limits on its own activity. The readings of Plato give a new account of each work that shows how the logic of the arguments is inextricably bound together with the literary detail, including each work’s structure. The account of Thucydides argues for certain new interpretive concepts, such as the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, while also providing a new look at a number of familiar theses, such as the three-step structure running through the whole. Taken together, these works provide complementary reflections on a development profoundly relevant to our own time.

Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.

How far are the real lives of millions of poor women really catered for in liberation and feminist theologies? Vuola argues here that traditional liberation theology's notion of praxis (as in L .Boff and E. Dussel) is limited by its essentialist notion of 'poor' and its neglect of the issue of poor women's reproductive rights. Classical feminist theologies, on the other hand, are fraught with their own essentialist notions ('women's experience'). Both discourses are inadequate to deal with poor women's suffering: widespread maternal mortality, high rates of botched, illegal abortions, and an overall lack of reproductive rights. As a response to this lack, Vuola nurtures a form of Latin American feminist liberation theology that addresses directly the suffering and death of these millions of women.