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This book is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, it argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. The book includes readings of the work of asylum seekers, postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a ‘step beyond’ postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.

At least 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy. This book seeks to understand the epileptic body as a literary or figurative device intelligible beyond a medical framework. The author argues that neurological discourse from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century is as much forged by the cultural conditions and representational politics of the times as it is by the science of western medicine. Along the way, she explores narratives of epilepsy depicting ideas of social disorder, tainted bloodlines, sexual deviance, spiritualism and criminality in works as diverse as David Copperfield and The X Files.

From concerns of an ‘autism epidemic’ to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. This book tackles this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. It analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

This book analyses three movements of communal living — the Kibbutz, the Bruderhof and the Integrierte Gemeinde — all of which can trace their origins to the German Youth Movement of the first part of the twentieth century. It looks at the alternative societies and economies the movements have created, their interactions with the wider world, and their redrawing of the boundaries of the public and private spheres of their members. The comparative approach taken allows a picture of dissimilarities and similarities to emerge that goes beyond merely obvious points of difference. The book places these movements in the context of intellectual trends in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and especially Germany, and enables the reader to evaluate their wider significance.