Edited by two Chicana lesbian feminists and formed through commitment to coalitional Third World feminist analysis and practice, This Bridge Called My Back urges us to attend to the conflicts and pleasures that emerge from the radical transformation of the self in relation to others as we struggle for liberation. In the forty years since the anthology’s original publication, we continue to bear witness to the destructive outcomes of neoliberalism and to those who are still consigned to disproportionately bear the brunt of modernity’s violence. We are compelled to address the betrayals of those spaces of solidarity and the use of violence to reclaim difference as an amenity of traditional power. Making domination “make sense” often occurs by recruiting representatives of subordinated populations into normative locations of institutional power. The tokenized investment in women of color as fixed symbols of progressive politics illustrates how even the celebration of racial difference can function as a technology of racist power. I argue that bridge building is also about place making or the radical vision of a space for new social relations and terms of recognition. Radical methodologies for creating art participate in this process of gathering political will to oppose racial power.

This chapter offers a critical appraisal of two dominant approaches to pluralism, conflict, and difference in contemporary political theology, both of which draw on the thought of Augustine. Postliberal Augustinianism, represented by the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank, develops a highly sophisticated account of the metaphysics of human sociality, grounded in a creative reading of Trinitarian theology which construes political community in terms of harmonious difference. Augustinian civic liberalism, represented by Charles Mathewes and Eric Gregory, draws on Augustine’s understanding of love and difference in order to propose an ethics and ascetics of liberal citizenship. Both, however, thematize political community and difference in essentially oppositional terms, privileging one or the other, and reading conflict in decidedly negative terms. The limits of these political theological strategies reveal a need to reconceptualize the nature of political community and the place of conflict therein.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

The nature of power, both social and psychological, and the implications of power imbalances in modern societies.

The main CSFs used in the literature are reviewed and their basic properties are explored. Different CSFs yield different games and outcomes, so it is essential to understand the differences between what is embedded in each CSF. In some cases, a little extra effort wins the field, as in racing, while in others, no matter the expense, all contestants receive a positive probability of getting a positive share, as in voting with captive voters. In others, like soccer and some armed conflicts, the probability of winning is proportional to the relative expenses. This chapter also begins an analysis of the existence and properties of a Nash equilibrium in contest games, either with identical contestants or, in the context of a couple of CSFs, with two contestants.

In this concluding chapter, we identify two potent contributions of the concept of constitutional identity, underscoring and exploring its relationship with the associated ideas of disharmony and difference. We first discuss the relationship between constitutional identity and constitutional development, before turning to lessons that the concept of constitutional identity offers both scholars and practitioners. Against this background, we then identify three promising areas for future scholarly reflection and briefly sketch the first steps of a research agenda oriented towards carrying forward the project limned in this volume. Inspired by the analytic purpose underlying the concept of constitutional identity, our comments in this section are intended to be less prescriptive than interpretive. The scholarly futures we discuss emerge as much from the political world in which constitutional governance must now proceed as from the progress that scholars have made towards understanding the aspirations of that enterprise.

As an academic and writer in England, W. G. Sebald’s intellectual baggage was distinctly German with only a small minority of texts explicitly devoted to Anglophone literature. Yet, the atmosphere that permeated his essayistic narratives was distinctly English. In that sense, Sebald occupied a literary space in the in-between, oscillating between times past and times present. This article examines in three steps Sebald’s approach to this space in terms of thematic scope, style and perspectives that characterized his German wanderings in England. It assesses the interplay of memory and imagination in this creative process firmly located in this space of overlapping concerns, mainly rooted in the experience of exile, both real and, in his own case, simulated.

This chapter ranges together the oldest proverbial material – i.e. the previously oral maxims that form the bedrock of the ‘proverb’ genre. These are to be found in the main sayings collection in 10:1-22:16, also in 24:23-34 and in the many variants in 25-9 and in the miscellany of animal sayings and lists in Proverbs 30:7-33. The role of all these sections in ethical guidance, itself not monochrome but characterized by difference and contradiction, is explored.

Chapter 6 argues that in interpreting the right to legal capacity ‘on an equal basis with others’, a substantive notion of inclusive equality must be applied. In doing so, it applies but also critiques General Comment No 6: On Equality and Non-Discrimination, published by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Inclusive equality demands recognition of the difference of impairment and associated disadvantages. Once difference is acknowledged, either supported decision-making or decision-making by substitutes may be required to recognise an adult’s legal capacity ‘on an equal basis with others’ and to promote inclusion. This chapter draws on existing commentary explaining the ‘hybrid’ nature of the right to equality in bridging both socio-economic and civil and political rights and driving the principle of indivisibility.

We can read Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s story The Story of Babar as a fable illustrating the contours of French imperial rule at a particular time in its history. Political scientists define empire simply—a polity based on asymmetrical contracting that preserves politically significant difference. If this definition provides a constant, the explanations behind it constitute the variables. The French had many explanations of just why they had an empire. This book recounts the history of those explanations, and of the contours of imperial rule that resulted from them. Resistance profoundly shaped imperial rule.

We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent in the process of drawing social boundaries. This essay suggests thinking about the nature of those boundaries in three ways, to show how each can reframe our relationships. First, ‘notation’ is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. This is the usual way we think about boundaries, but it also contains important limitations. Second, ‘ritual’ includes those acts that are formalized by social convention and repeated regularly. Ritual crosses boundaries of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Third, we can bracket away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment, which we will call ‘shared experience’. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action, eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models are not mutually exclusive. Using ethnographic examples primarily from China, we argue that all three are necessary, but they intermix in different ways, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

This chapter introduces the basic patterns of Chinese comparison sentences, emphasizing that there are no comparative adjectives in Chinese. Attention is drawn to the features of the special constructions of 比 bǐ and 跟 gēn constructions and their negation forms.

The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.

Diversifying experiences, defined as “unusual and unexpected events or situations that push people outside the realm of normality”, include a wide range of experiences, both negative and positive, which reflect difference and uncertainty. We argue that successfully managing diversifying experiences at the individual level may foster creativity. Thus, we will use the diversifying experiences and creativity framework to present empirical evidence and theoretical arguments that illustrate the link between managing uncertainty/difference and creativity. First, we will present empirical evidence for the link between four broad categories of diversifying experiences and creativity: psychopathology, adversity, enrichment, and diversity. Second, we will discuss the possible mechanism of managing such experiences (at the individual level) in a way that fosters creativity. Third, we will discuss future directions.

Disability of varying kinds permeates Wallace’s writing, which persistently displayed varying degrees of emotional, cognitive, physical or metaphysical disability. Although having no discernible interest in disabilities studies as an academic discipline, Wallace’s writing evidences a persistent conception that persons are definitionally disabled by the motor, volitional and agentive impediments posed by the simple but universal fact of embodiment, with which, he argues, we all “crave” to be “reconciled.” Employing various approaches from phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl) to disabilities studies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis), this chapter offers illustrative examples of the three primary forms of atypicality in Wallace’s works: anomalous bodies, cognitive disability, and textual malformation. Through these, this chapter provides a context of disability within which Wallace’s works are situated and which enables insights into his wider literary and humanistic concerns.

Wallace’s reputation as an author naturally outstrips his renown as a philosopher, but Wallace himself wrote that he saw philosophy and fiction as different arms of a single gesture. Among the strains of philosophy with which he dealt directly was determinism. Indeed, his undergraduate philosophy thesis on this subject was published as a stand-alone text in 2010, under the title Fate, Time and Language. This chapter introduces the concepts with which Wallace grapples in this work, as well as tracing the structural persistence of the theme of determinism through his writing. The chapter also argues that Wallace was an accomplished technical philosopher in his own right, but that the strict form of philosophical writing did not lend itself to his tendency toward literal illustrations of complex concepts. In this respect, the chapter argues for Wallace as a literary philosopher in the vein of Wallace Stevens, seeing the creative work as a form of philosophy in itself.