In many ways this is a question Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) himself might have asked. Deleuze took nothing for granted and insisted that the power of life – all life and not just human life – was its power to develop problems. Life poses problems – not just to thinking beings, but to all life. Organisms, cells, machines and sound waves are all responses to the complication or ‘problematising’ force of life.
In Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign renowned Brecht scholar Antony Tatlow uses drama to investigate cultural crossings and to show how intercultural readings or performances question the settled assumptions we bring to interpretations of familiar texts. Through a “textual anthropology” Tatlow examines the interplay between interpretations of Shakespeare and readings of Brecht, whose work he rereads in the light of theories of the social subject from Nietzsche to Derrida and in relation to East Asian culture, as well as practices within Chinese and Japanese theater that shape their versions of Shakespearean drama.
In the spring of 1978 I gave a lecture at Columbia University, New York, to primarily West Indian students, on the manner in which resistance fashioned Caribbean literature. One of the students asked how V. S. Naipaul's work fitted into that pattern. I answered that although the work of some novelists may have been fashioned by the positive dimensions of that tradition (for example, George Lamming), others, such as V. S. Naipaul, had responded to its negative aspects. A fellow panelist commented that Naipaul was "just reactionary." This remark sent me in search of a fuller account of his work, convinced that a writer as important as V. S. Naipaul
African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures
This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference.
Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japanese
The present study is concerned with the study of politeness in the context of cross-cultural pragmatics. Specifically, the investigation reported here may contribute to cross-cultural pragmatics by applying and developing Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1978; 1987), notably with respect to requests and responses to off-record requests. Brown and Levinson have made a significant contribution to theory, but as they themselves acknowledge (Ibid.: 11), they have not provided an equally sound methodology, and in this study, I attempt to put their politeness theory on to a more secure methodological footing, to be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
