As the waves of Occupy movements gradually recede, we soon forget the political hope and passions these events have offered. Instead, we are increasingly entrenched in the simplified dichotomies of Left and Right, us and them, hating others and victimizing oneself. Studying Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which might be the largest Occupy movement in recent years, The Appearing Demos urges us to re-commit to democracy at a time when democracy is failing on many fronts and in different parts of the world. The 79-day-long Hong Kong Umbrella Movement occupied major streets in the busiest parts of the city, creating tremendous inconvenience to this city famous for capitalist order and efficiency. It was also a peaceful collective effort of appearance, and it was as much a political event as a cultural one. The urge for expressing an independent cultural identity underlined both the Occupy movement and the remarkably rich cultural expressions it generated. While understanding the specificity of Hong Kong’s situations, The Appearing Demos also comments on some global predicaments we are facing in the midst of neoliberalism and populism. It directs our attention from state-based sovereignty to city-based democracy, and emphasizes the importance of participation and cohabitation. The book also examines how the ideas of Hannah Arendt are useful to those happenings much beyond the political circumstances that gave rise to her theorization. The book pays particular attention to the actual intersubjective experiences during the protest. These experiences are local, fragile, and sometimes inarticulable, therefore resisting rationality and debates, but they define the fullness of any individual, and they also make politics possible. Using the Umbrella Movement as an example, this book examines the “freed” political agents who constantly take others into consideration in order to guarantee the political realm as a place without coercion and discrimination. In doing so, Pang Laikwan demonstrates how politics means neither to rule nor to be ruled, and these movements should be defined by hope, not by goals.

This is a book for the age of resistance, for the occupiers of the squares, for the generation of Occupy Wall Street. The premier radical political philosopher of our time offers a devastating critique of the way neoliberalism has hollowed out democracy.

“Education is not an art of putting sight into the eye that can already see, but one of turning the eye towards the proper gaze of Being. That’s what must be managed!” Plato insists. This claim is the take-off point for Eduardo Duarte’s meditations on the metaphysics and ontology of teaching and learning. In Being and Learning he offers an account of learning as an attunement with Being’s dynamic presencing and unconcealment, which Duarte explores as the capacity to respond and attend to the matter that stands before us, or, in Arendtian terms, to love the world, and to be with others in this world. This book of ‘poetic thinking’ is a chronicle of Duarte’s ongoing exploration of the question of Being, a philosophical journey that has been guided primarily through a conversation with Heidegger, and which also includes the voices of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, as well Lao Tzu and the Buddha, among others. In Being and Learning, Duarte undertakes a ‘phenomenology of the original’: a writing that consciously and conspicuously interrupts the discursive field of work in philosophy of education. As the late Reiner Schurmann described this method: “it recalls the ancient beginnings and it anticipates a new beginning, the possible rise of a new economy among things, words and actions.” Being and Learning is a work of parrhesia: a composition of free thought that disrupts the conventional practice of philosophy of education, and thereby open up gaps and spaces of possibility in the arrangement of words, concepts, and ideas in the field. With this work Eduardo Duarte is initiating new pathways of thinking about education.

A definitive guide to Ajax, this text demonstrates how to build browser-based applications that function like desktop programs, using sophisticated server-aware approaches that give users information when they need it.

This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. Chapters by leading international scholars are grouped in thematic sections addressing key historical periods, film movements, genres, stars and auteurs, and the industrial and technological contexts of cinema in Greater China.

This volume investigates the cultural sites where the global Cold War played out. It brings to view unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals from or aligned with the Third World navigated the ideological and material constraints set by superpowers and emerging regional powers. Often these encounters generated communitas and solidarity, while at times they fed old and new conflicts. Pushing forward recent scholarship that tracks the Cold War in the Global South and draws on postcolonial approaches, our contributors use archival, secondary, and ethnographic sources to trace the afterlives and memories of key figures and to explore meetings that performed cultural diplomacy. Our focus on sites of encounter or exchange underscores the situated, interpersonal, and embodied dimensions through which much of the cultural Cold War was experienced. While the global conflict divided citizens along ideological fault lines, it also linked people through circulating media—novels, film, posters, journals, and theatre—and multinational conferences that brought artists, intellectuals, and political activists together. Such contacts introduced new axes of solidarity and hierarchies of exclusion. Examining these connections and disjunctures, this new and necessary mapping of the cultural Cold War highlights under-addressed locations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.