The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism

Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

Towards a Rebel Parastate

This chapter discusses the rebel effort to construct a Palestinian state, a project that reached its height in 1938. It details the extent to which competing rebel commanders were able to set aside their differences and come together for the greater national good. In addition, the chapter discusses the proliferation of a rebel court system, which was integrated under a high court and operated throughout Palestine. These courts conducted their business in the stead of the mandatory courts, which the Arab Palestinian population had abandoned en masse. The chapter further discusses the tendency of scholars to gloss over this rebel state-building effort and also to underplay the British role in crushing the nascent Palestinian state.

On the Highways of Literature: Herbert Croft’s Unfinished Business

This essay explores the ways that Herbert Croft’s ultimately unsuccessful literary career epitomized the late eighteenth-century world of struggling authors, pursuing their fortune along whatever paths seemed to be the most promising or, failing that, most available, across a far broader range of genres than we normally acknowledge in our accounts of professional authorship in this period. It explores Croft’s failed plans to produce what theGentleman’s Magazinecalled the “Oxford Dictionary of the English Language,” but also on his considerable efforts to promote this and other literary projects. The second half of the essay focuses on Croft’sLetter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, which was printed in early March, 1788, at the end of a trip to London, and which was intended to generate support for his dictionary project. If theLetter to Pittwas remarkable for the dexterity with which Croft aligned his argument for the importance of a particular form literary professionalism with a set of related assumptions about the connections between public virtue and the national good, its many tensions foregrounded some of the paradoxes that were implicit in this process. Like many of the newspaper ads for his other works, theLetter to Pittoffers a compelling example of the extent to which Croft’s promotional efforts resulted in more intriguing literary texts than the works they were intended to promote.

Analogies of harm: excess, expression, and obscenity in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm and the Supreme Court of Canada decision R v Butler

Thinking through Margaret Atwood’s 1981 novel Bodily Harm and the 1992 Supreme Court of Canada case R v Butler, this article examines a Canadian discussion about the excessiveness of the freedom of expression to which obscenity has been key. For Atwood, expression is central to Bodily Harm’s narrative of personal, political revelation. Yet it is also at the root of a discourse of harm that Atwood elucidates throughout the novel as she incorporates pornography into an expansive analogic continuity of violence. In Butler, the Supreme Court curtails obscenity in the name of equality and collective well-being, even as it continues to view expression as a valuable individual freedom and a national good. In each text freedom of expression both is and is not safeguarded; in each, the freedom can be conceived of and celebrated, but its excessive possibilities must also be contained.