Rewriting Modernity

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Examines the tendency of post-World War II writers to rewrite earlier narratives by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and others.

Original Scholarly Monograph

This is the first collection focusing on knowledge socialism, a particularly apt term used to describe a Chinese socialist mode of production and socialist approach to development and modernity based around the rise of peer production, new forms of collaboration and collective intelligence. Making the case for knowledge socialism, the book is intended for students, teacher, scholars and policy theorists in the field of knowledge economy.

The end of the Cold War revitalised continental philosophy and, more particularly, interest in it from outside philosophy. "After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations" analyses the main developments in continental philosophy between 1980-1995, a time of great upheaval and profound social change. The volume ranges across the birth of postmodernism, the differing traditions of France, Germany and Italy, third generation critical theory, radical democracy, postcolonial philosophy, the turn to ethics, feminist philosophies, the increasing engagement with religion, and the rise of performativity and post-analytic philosophy. Analyses of the major figures are integrated within the discussion. After Poststructuralism reveals how continental philosophy - fuelled by an intense ethical and political desire to reflect changing social and political conditions - responded to the changing world and to the key issues of the time, notably globalisation, technology and ethnicity.

From The War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks!, Mission to Mars and Independence Day; Neil Badmington explores our relationship with aliens and how thinkers such as Descartes, Barthes, Freud, Lyotard and Derrida have conceptualised what it means to be human (and post-human).

Virtual Geographies is the first detailed study to offer a working definition of cyberpunk within the postmodern force field. Cyberpunk emerges as a new generic cluster within science fiction, one that has spawned many offspring in such domains as film, music, and feminism. Its central features are its adherence to a version of virtual space and a deconstructivist, punk attitude towards (high) culture, modernity, the human body and technology, from computers to prosthetics.The main proponents of cyberpunk are analyzed in depth along with the virtual landscapes they have created - William Gibson’s Cyberspace, Pat Cadigan’s Mindscapes and Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse. Virtual reality is examined closely in all its aspects, from the characteristic narrative constructions employed to the esthetic implications of the ‘virtual sublime’ and its postmodern potential as a discursive mode.With its interdisciplinary approach Virtual Geographies opens up fresh perspectives for scholars interested in the interaction between popular culture and mainstream literature. At the same time, the science fiction fan will be taken beyond the conventional boundaries of the genre into such revitalizing domains as postmodern architecture and literature, and into cutting-edge aspects of science and social thought.

This book proposes that Nietzsche should be viewed as an economic thinker to rank alongside Marx. Peter Sedgwick shows how Nietzsche views economy as the basic condition under which the 'human animal' developed. Economy, Nietzsche argues, endowed us with futurity, and is a defining aspect of human behaviour.