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This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East today. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, making up around fifteen percent of the country’s population, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Historians have typically treated Kizilbashism/Alevism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of “heterodox folk Islam.” Several aspects of their history therefore remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order. Among other things, it argues for a readjustment in focus from pre-Islamic Central Asia to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of the Middle East when exploring genealogies of popular Islam in Anatolia, and of Kizilbashism-Alevism, in particular. While the Kizilbash constitute the focus of the book, its findings may open new avenues of research in the study of other “heterodox” communities in the Islamic world by alerting historians to the potential of Sufism to provide a basis for social order and give rise to distinct communities.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It proposes that still life can be understood not only as a genre of visual art but also as a mode of attentiveness and a way of being in the world. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Modernism and Still Life reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement. The still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm, an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

What gives us the right to speak of a Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy at first sight concerned solely with interpreting other philosophers and writers? And granted there is such an entity as ‘Deleuzian philosophy’, is this philosophy a practically and politically consequential one, as so many interpreters have hoped? This book begins from Deleuze’s method of ‘free indirect discourse’ to locate and explicate Deleuze’s philosophy. Through free indirect discourse Deleuze burrows under the texts of a thinker to attain the underlying question, which he inherits critically to expound his own philosophy of ‘transcendental empiricism’. This philosophy however was politically impotent, for its final practical conclusion was that one had to ‘wait for failure’, which is strictly impossible. This book goes on to argue that it is the self-recognition of this impasse that forced Deleuze into a veritable wager, the collaboration with Guattari. For Deleuze not only recognised the existence of this practical/political impasse, he also understood its source: the strong structuralist influence in his philosophy. And he had the intuition that in Guattari there were the germs of a way of thinking that could move beyond structuralism (more specifically its culmination in Lacanian psychoanalysis). Finally, this new Deleuzian practical philosophy is explicated through an examination of Deleuze’s ambiguous relation to Foucault: Deleuze would ultimately opt for ‘desire’, not Foucault’s ‘power’, as the elementary unit of political analysis, because it is the assemblage of desire that makes possible the specific constellation of power in a given society.

Charles Taylor is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers, arguably the most important living political philosopher writing in English. Taylor and Politics assesses Taylor’s thought and its relevance to contemporary political challenges, especially religion and secularity, multicultural diversity, political alienation and demands for greater democracy. This book outlines Taylor’s key concepts and highlights the substantive applications of his ideas. Taylor’s biography and education, and his forays into politics in Canada, is discussed, to provide context for the development of his ideas. Taylor’s interest in romanticism’s impact on our understanding of modernity is examined, as well as his contribution to how democracy is being understood in current times, especially against the backdrop of social groups seeking greater recognition in the political sphere. The book explores the substantial differences between Taylor’s conception of social imaginaries and that of Cornelius Castoriadis, and contrasts Taylor’s account of the political form of modernity with that of Claude Lefort. Furthermore, the book examines Taylor’s contribution to debates about religion and secularism, providing an explanation of Taylor’s important book on this subject, A Secular Age, and assessing the debates that the book has generated. Finally, the book explores Taylor’s work after ASecular Age, particularly his discussions on religious freedom, diversity and multiculturalism in Quebec, Canada, and the central role of language in social and political debate.