Isaiah is resistance literature: The authors of this book knew the claims of different empires, and argued against them. Much of the first thirty-nine chapters of the book were written in the Assyrian period, when the Assyrian empire tried to force the elites of other Near Eastern kingdoms to accept the legitimacy of Assyrian domination. In a carefully-formulated program of subversive reading, passages in Isa 1–39 react against Assyrian claims of empire, arguing that Yhwh, rather than the king of Assyria, is the universal sovereign. “Isaiah and Empire” by Shawn Zelig Aster shows how passages in Isa 2, 10, and 37 react against Assyrian claims of empire. But just as these chapters react against Assyrian claims, so do Isa 40–45 react against the later imperial propaganda of Cyrus. These chapters claim that Yhwh, rather than the Babylonian god Marduk, sent Cyrus, and argue that Cyrus was sent to benefit Jerusalem, rather than Babylon.

In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

Spying in South Asia’s conclusion addresses the impact of the end of the Cold War, and the onset of a ‘war on terror’, on British and American intelligence relationships with India. It explores the rationale behind Indian governments’ softening of anti-CIA rhetoric from the mid-1980s, and the implications for New Delhi’s intelligence agencies of the precipitous collapse of the USSR, and the abrupt conclusion of the Cold War. It assesses factors underlying the post-Cold War recovery of Western secret services from the position of public pariahs in India to that of New Delhi’s principal partners in intelligence and security matters. In 1947, as the Cold War dawned and the newly independent subcontinent confronted formidable threats to its stability and security, New Delhi turned to London and Washington for covert support. Some half-a-century later, after decades of what might best be described as circumscribed cooperation compromised by conflict and conspiracism, the intelligence services of India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, once more found compelling reasons to put their differences aside, and work together as close partners in a new secret war.

It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.

In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

Hybrid warfare is a widely interpreted and highly contested concept and also a label for opponents and targets in conflict or competition in international relations. It is often projected as being something underhand undertaken by the other, however, this chapter examines the conceptual and operational history of Western hybrid warfare. This refers to creating suitable environmental conditions in the information and cognitive domain as a means to subvert a target government and bring about regime change.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

Molière is generally viewed as a comic author who mocks all aspects of society – aristocratic, bourgeois and peasant. However, he was himself part of this tripartite society and adopted points of view that, when we examine them, we see to be those of his caste – one of the people who dined at the King’s table. He was, in fact, at the intersection of two worlds, the court and the town (Paris), and in his works we meet individuals from different milieus, in the plays themselves but also making up the audiences that came to see them. He makes his characters ridiculous through exaggeration, thereby rendering less credible whatever they represent. When presenting different comic situations, Molière never comes down on one side or another. Instead, he offers suggestions, and leaves their appreciation up to the members of the public. They, according to their status or the circumstances in which they see the plays, receive them in one way or another, but always refuse to recognise themselves in any particular character. The focus of this article is, therefore, to determine whether Molière, whose criticism was so acerbic, really was this transgressive and subversive bourgeois author.

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.

Focusing on the anti-hegemonic discourses that developed over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century, Chapter 5 considers practises of memorialisation employed by Indian nationalist leaders to mark the rebellion. If the construction of monuments is an important technology of commemoration, then their alteration, subversion, and relocation are no less significant practices of memory. Focusing on how British sites of memory became the subject of a struggle for meaning, memory, and the right to narrate, this chapter charts the ways in which these mnemonic signifiers were co-opted by a range of groups and individuals to serve particular ideological purposes during the interwar years. Representing an as yet unconsolidated nationalist memory of the First War of Indian Independence, the debates that surrounded British built monuments help us better understand how the mutiny became a battleground, not only between Indian nationalists and the imperial administration but also between different nationalist thinkers who utilised these spaces of memory to negotiate and reimagine India’s past, present, and future with reference to the multiple forms resistance could take.

This chapter addresses the abuse of charitable religion. It begins with a brief history of the abuse of religious charities. This draws out the entrenched legal requirements for charities to guard against administrative and purposive abuse, and highlights the resourcing and remit issues that the Charity Commission has faced since its inception. It notes the general success of Muslim or Muslim-led charities to contextualise five pressing contemporary concerns: Charity Commission effectiveness, unregulated domestic fundraising, terrorist financing, foreign funding and extremist exploitation. Taking these in order of difficulty, it acknowledges the ‘faith factor’ where relevant and notes the need for theory when addressing unresolved policy questions about potentially dangerous foreign and non-state influence over important domestic institutions. The penultimate section models the two conventional theoretical interpretations of these issues and their attendant problems. The final section offers a pluralist response and details the most sensible reforms.

This essay outlines the semantic breadth and formal contours of Brecht’s early poetic experiments. For his Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary) collection (1927) Brecht pulled together those poems that he wrote between 1913 and 1925 as sharp protest against social tensions and frictions in the Weimar period. The title of his collection refers to Martin Luther’s “Postille” writings and their ritualized religious instructions. Brecht secularizes Luther’s religious agenda and poetic agitation when he categorizes his poems as Gebrauchslyrik (functional or everyday poetry). Their cynicism not only activates the reevaluation of classical literature and aesthetics, but more poignantly also the social norms, gender concepts, moral judgments and legal processes of bourgeois society. The essay argues that Brecht’s early poetic experiments model a cynical mindset that not only informs his anti-fascist satires in exile but also his later work as it set a standard for the twentieth-century modes of poetic and theatrical reflection in general.

This chapter explores a set of intracorpus echoes in Catullus that has gone largely unexamined, presumably because it unites three poems that appear to be so utterly mismatched as to seem that they cannot comment on one another. The author argues that a familiar comic routine featuring Roman comedy’s “clever slave” binds these three poems together and illustrates how Catullus engages in social competition with his peers and rivals among the Roman elite. This character provides Catullus a model for displaying what William Anderson has dubbed “Heroic Badness,” a distinctly Plautine virtue by which the underdogs of Roman comedy gain the upper hand over blocking figures who hinder them from achieving their goals, despite the fact that they suffer from social and situational impairments. This chapter argues that the Roman elite found value in identifying with Roman comedy’s servus callidus and explores implications this affinity has for Catullus’ depiction of himself and others in his poetry.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.