The charismatic form of healing called qigong, based on meditative breathing exercises, has achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Qigong served a critical social organizational function, as practitioners formed new informal networks, sometimes on an international scale, at a time when China was shifting from state-subsidized medical care to for-profit market medicine. The emergence of new psychological states deemed to be deviant led the Chinese state to "medicalize" certain forms while championing scientific versions of qigong. By contrast, qigong continues to be...

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah...

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah...

Benedict Anderson is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Read both by social scientists and humanists, Anderson has thought anew such questions as why people love and die for nations, how religious faith became a territorial issue, the interrelation of capitalism and print, and how forms of nationalism have been adapted and transformed in different situations. This volume includes essays on Anderson's themes and ideas by such scholars as Andrew Parker, Lydia Liu, Doris Sommer, Harry Harootunian, Partha Chatterjee, David Hollinger...

Benedict Anderson is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Read both by social scientists and humanists, Anderson has thought anew such questions as why people love and die for nations, how religious faith became a territorial issue, the interrelation of capitalism and print, and how forms of nationalism have been adapted and transformed in different situations. as Andrew Parker, Lydia Liu, Doris Sommer, Harry Harootunian, Partha Chatterjee, David Hollinger, and Marc Redfield. Of particular interest is a substantial new essay by...

Globalization promises to bring people around the world together, to unite them as members of the human community. To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are transforming our understanding of humanity and its prerogatives. Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human that underwrite our understanding of globalization. Cheah asks whether the contemporary international division of...

The body of the law is an ambiguous phrase. Conventionally, it designates the law as a determinate corpus; legal codes, statutes, and the rulings of common law. But it can also refer to the subjected body that is produced by and is part of the law. This subjected body is necessary for the law's existence.

Thinking Through the Body of the Law reconceives the role of the body in the founding, maintaining, and regulation of our legal systems and social order and elaborates on its implications for issues of legal responsibility and justice. Taking into account and sometimes...

Eminent contributors look at the present and future of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism.

Nationalism and the nation-state have recently come under siege, their political dominance gradually eroding under the strain of such forces as ethnic strife, religious fundamentalism, homogenizing global capitalism, and the unprecedented movements of people and populations across cultures, countries, even cyberspace. A resurgent cosmopolitanism has emerged as a viable and alternative political project. In Cosmopolitics, a renowned group of scholars and political theorists offers the...

This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies. Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadt's "multiple modernities" which has triggered a host of conference papers and publications largely...

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah...