The contributions gathered in this volume bear witness to the fact that belonging is a multi-faceted concept that necessitates different and shifting idioms of expression. It continually requires reconsideration and redefinition of our affiliations in response to the rapid social, cultural, and political changes of our world. The literary paradigms, linguistic practices, and cultural formations of belonging testify to the impossibility of confining it to conventional and established structures of knowledge. The different reflections on belonging introduced in this book are instrumental in reassessing and remodelling the general assumptions that have informed its definition and representation. The current global reality and the self-other encounter make inevitable the continuous search for new forms of belonging that are in tune with one’s evolving and changing sense of self. Theoretically informed by and substantially grounded in lively and heated debates on cultural identity and belonging, this book proposes new critical directions in understanding national and transnational belonging.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology is a ground-breaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. The structure of the Handbook is animated by an overarching collective narrative about how law and anthropology have and should relate to each other as intersecting domains of inquiry that address such fundamental questions as dispute resolution, normative ordering, social organization, and legal, political, and social identity. The need for such a comprehensive project has become even more pressing as lawyers and anthropologists work together in an ever-increasing number of areas, including immigration and asylum processes, international justice forums, cultural heritage certification and monitoring, and the writing of new national constitutions, among many others. The Handbook takes critical stock of these various points of intersection in order to identify and conceptualize the most promising areas of innovation and sociolegal relevance, as well as to acknowledge the points of tension, open questions, and areas for future development.

In Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War, Matthew Leep develops a cosmopolitan account of war that blends sharp inquiry into interspecies politics with original poetry on animals, loss, and war. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, this book is not only a somber and sobering exploration of the loss of animal lives during the Iraq War—from the initial US invasion to later struggles with ISIS—but also an imaginative tracing of animal experiences in "spectral-poetic moments." By emphasizing elegies, poetic space, and multispecies belonging, Leep envisions the cosmopolitan text as a hybrid form of critical and poetic engagement with animal others. An insightful mix of cosmopolitan poetics, poetry, and analysis of the Iraq War in its multispecies entanglements, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War connects contemporary concerns with political violence, memory, and interspecies politics to imagine a more spectral, posthumanist, and poetic cosmopolitanism. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will engage scholars of international relations, political theory, US foreign policy, animal studies, poetry, and Derrida, as well as those interested in human-animal relations in perilous times.

"What is contained in a state has become ever more plural while the boundaries of a state have become ever more fluid. In a world of migration and shifting allegiances - caused by cultural, economic, military and climatic change - the state is a more provisional place and its inhabitants more stateless. This spirited and engaging conversation, between two of America's foremost critics and two of the most influential theorists of the last decade, ranges widely across what Enlightenment and key contemporary philosophers have to say about the state, who exercises power in today's world, whether we can have a right to rights, the past, present, and future of the state in a time of globalization, and even what the singing of the 'Star Spangled Banner' in Spanish says about the complex world we live in today"--P. [4] of cover.

The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis. It offers insights into timely crisis-ridden impacts and imaginings, migration processes and social understandings and practices. Through its attention to how people engage with crisis temporally and affectively, the book presents the crisis not simply as an isolated and distressing event but as a spectre embodied in time through ongoing anticipation.

"A wave of reconciliation hit Australia during the 1990s, seeing significant marches, speeches and policies carried out across the country. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians began imagining race relations in new ways, and articulations of place, belonging, and being together were informing literature of a unique genre. This book explores the political and poetic paradigms of reconciliation represented in Australian writing. The author brings together textual evidence of themes and a vernacular contributing to the emergent genre of 'reconciliatory literature'. The concourse of resistance and reconciliation is explored as a complex process to understanding sovereignty, colonial history, and the future of society. But moreover, this book argues it is creative writing that is most necessary for a deeper understanding of each other, and of place, because it is writing that calls one to witness, to feel, and to imagine all at the same time. The effect of polemical writing is powerful and it is measured in this debut collection of scholarly work"--