Michel Foucault’s seminal realization that security is a species concept opens a new path for understanding how genocide is fundamentally related to aesthetic ideology. Fueled by the settler colonial imaginary, the logic of “speciation” inevitably acquires a fictional aspect that is an enduring site of potentially catastrophic instability for transitional modernity. The genealogical source of this catastrophic instability is nothing other than the West, the template for the apparatus of ar...

First published in 1880, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ became a best-seller. The popular novel spawned an 1899 stage adaptation, reaching audiences of over 10 million, and two highly successful film adaptations. For over a century, it has become a ubiquitous pop cultural presence, representing a deeply powerful story and monumental experience for some and a defining work of bad taste and false piety for others. The first and only collection of essays on this pivotal cultural icon,...

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some ...

This book critically analyzes the global hegemony of the United States – a hegemony whose innovative aspect consists in articulating postcoloniality to imperial control – in relation to knowledge and knowledge production.Through targeted case studies on the historical relationship between regional areas and the United States, the authors explore possibilities and obstacles to epistemic decolonization. By highlighting the connection between the control of work and the control of com...