Arrival to the Camps

These words echoed throughout the camp one morning in early September 2017. It was just after dawn – the sand had muddied from the torrential monsoon rains the night before, the yellow-orange hue of the sun shining over the soggy terrain. In the distant horizon beyond the sandy expanse and just over the rice paddies, crowds of people emerged out of nowhere – first in tens, then in thousands, until their presence carpeted the entire landscape. Their sunken faces revealed the exhaustion of a prolonged journey, escaping unspeakable calamity only to be faced with an uncertain future. The refugees were hungry and drained, pacing through the scorching heat – some carrying the weight of their children, while others their elderly family members. Some were able to gather a few belongings and bare necessities from their homes in Myanmar at the last minute, which they wrapped inside larger knotted shawls that they carried on their shoulders, the knots clinging for dear life to stay secure. Many others brought nothing with them except the clothes on their backs. Many Rohingya women later recounted to me that they did not know their exact destination, but they ran nonetheless, out of necessity, following one another across dense forest lands until they had reached the camps in search of refuge.

As time passed and days trickled into weeks and then months, the camps became the only place of residence for nearly a million Rohingya refugees. Within this context, Rohingya women have had to negotiate and re-forge community ties as well as renew their understandings of ‘self ‘ (Bhabha 1994; Abusharaf 2005, 2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014). Though estranged from their native homeland of Myanmar, a sense of ‘home’ has begun to emerge in the camps from the shared experiences of displacement, the social and cultural interactions that constitute the camps, and the routine activities that provide meaning in their everyday life. This chapter explores the narratives of Rohingya women after being uprooted from Myanmar and forced into refugee camps in Bangladesh. While having lost their homes in Myanmar, Rohingya women have been able to re-establish ‘community’ and traditions in the refugee camps, thereby creating a sense of home and belonging despite their predicaments.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

This chapter argues that power is not only a product of capital control and movement but also of the strategic placement and narrative construct of brands. Brands that successfully become navigational beacons in the cultural landscape do so by establishing a narrative structure that resonates with consumers, thus gaining a form of power and becoming landmarks in the cultural landscape. Here, brands wield significant power in the cultural landscape by crafting identities and spaces that consumers navigate. However, this power is not absolute; it fluctuates with the consumer’s perception, community acceptance, and the brand’s ability to adapt and resonate on a local level while maintaining a wider presence. The real power of a brand lies in its ability to harmonise its institutional power with the cultural and individual identities of its consumers.

In light of recent scholarship, the Mughal age appears as a new and strikingly modern era of the prolix self. First, there is Babur's memoir, the Baburnama, penned in the early sixteenth century, which is recognized as an exceptional text in the Islamic and Indic worlds. This first-person narrative conveys a sense of individuality through emotional intensity, interiority, and acute observations of people and places around him. The memoir is characterized by both sincere self-disclosure and artful self-representation. Other men and women among Babur's descendants followed suit. Yet others began to compose first-person memoirs and travelogues in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In contrast, the practice of individuality described here extends beyond self-centered narrativization within texts. In fact, leaving legacies complicates each of the three characteristics typically associated with fashioning selfhood and individuality: textuality, narrativization, and self-centeredness. First, this practice spills out of texts and into epigraphy and architecture. Even in book manuscripts, it is often worked out on their margins and flyleaves. Together, this demands that the materiality of artifacts be taken seriously. It also requires close attention to the way these artifacts speak to and with each other in representing an individual across time and space. Second, legacies do not narrativize the self as autobiography, nor do they necessarily disclose interiority. Instead, they put forward a picture of an ethical self. Lastly, legacies deflect self-centeredness, choosing instead to be in service of others. The self appears on the margins of such works, obliquely, diffidently, but knowingly calling attention to itself without direct self-aggrandizement.

The legacy under review in this chapter is an epigraphical intervention by a Mughal noble upon a royal monument commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Babur (d. 1530). Locally known as the Chihilzina (Forty Steps), the monument is an arched grotto carved into the side of a mountain near Kandahar. Its inscriptional programs announce the direct involvement of four named individuals. Aside from Babur, this includes his second and third sons, Mirza Kamran (d. 1557) and Mirza Askari (d. 1558), who ruled Kandahar intermittently between 1530 and 1545. It also includes Mir Muhammad Masum (1528–1606), a Mughal noble from Sindh active in the late sixteenth century, who served Babur's grandson, Emperor Akbar.

Chapter 2 is a gentle introduction to the many-body physics of polyacetylene. Band theory for electrons hopping along a one-dimensional lattice is explained. The continuum limit is taken. An example of a quantum critical point with its emergent symmetries is given. The Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model for polyacetylene is defined and solved at the mean-field level.

Neurath’s interest in international languages led to him developing an alternative to verbal language, the pictorial technique of Isotype. This chapter documents significant wartime projects using this method, including animated sections for documentary films and charts for publications produced by pioneering ‘book packager’ Adprint. The Isotype Institute contributed to the book on Lancelot Hogben’s own invented language Interglossa. Neurath also explored the establishment of a research centre for visual education in consultation with Hogben, Julian Huxley, and US ambassador J. G. Winant. His last book project titled ‘Visual Education’ was written for Karl Mannheim’s ‘International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction’, although it remained unpublished until long after his death. It was a wide-ranging reflection on the acquisition of knowledge and its social determinacy.

As he rose to leadership of the Spencean Philanthropists in 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote and published six issues of Axe Laid to the Root, an inexpensive weekly periodical for working-class readers. Axe Laid to the Root instructed its white audience about the radical potential of African-Jamaican land and food-based liberation. The provision grounds, plots set apart from the plantation for enslaved people to grow their own food, were a source of resistance to plantation capitalism, providing food sovereignty and communal identity. The ecological knowledge of the Jamaican Maroons was another source of resistance to plantation economies. Finally, Wedderburn’s writing in “cheap” periodicals aspired to cultivate a transatlantic alliance between the English lower classes, the colonized Irish, and free and enslaved people in Jamaica. The chapter concludes by discussing George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, which features Wedderburn as a central figure within abolitionist circles.

The classification of natural spaces and cultural practices as ‘heritage’ profoundly alters their form and function. Individuals and communities responsible for maintaining the space or practice are often subjected to the dictates of governments, non-governmental institutions and tourists’ tastes, whilst the symbols of heritage themselves are projected as emblematic of how the state wishes itself to be perceived. The condition of statelessness magnifies the vulnerability of communities to these processes of heritagization, with the state co-opting cultural attributes into icons of heritage without any prospect of redress and exacerbating the invisibility and relative lack of agency that characterize many stateless communities. This chapter explores these issues in the context of mobile maritime communities that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar have introduced restrictions on everyday livelihood practices through the imposition of marine protected areas and transformed other aspects of these communities’ lives, such as their houseboats, into objects of touristic consumption under the aegis of natural, cultural and intangible ‘heritage’ that serve to benefit the state yet further degrade the human rights of individuals in the affected communities.

This chapter introduces the key metaphysical concepts that are integral to understanding the nature of time. It also critically assesses the leading arguments in this intellectual landscape, arguing that there are compelling metaphysical reasons to endorse a B-theory or C-theory and reject all A-theories (particularly presentism, the growing block, and the moving spotlight).

How do people choose between risky prospects? I discuss the model of random expected utility and its axiomatic characterization. Other models are discussed too, including models of nonexpected utility and models with additive shocks.