Kirjahaku

Indications of geographic origin for foodstuffs and manufactures have become an important source of brand value since the beginnings of globalization during the late nineteenth century. In this work, David M. Higgins explores the early nineteenth-century business campaigns to secure national and international protection of geographic brands. He shows how these efforts culminated in the introduction of legal protocols which protect such brands, including, 'Champagne', 'Sheffield', 'Swiss made' watches and 'Made in the USA'. Higgins explores the major themes surrounding these indications, tying in the history of global marketing and the relevant laws on intellectual property. He also questions the effectiveness of European Union policy to promote 'regional' and 'local' foods and why such initiatives brought the EU in conflict with North America, especially the US He extends the study with a reflection on contemporary issues affecting globalization, intellectual property, less developed countries, and supply chains.

This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.

Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England. They ask Western audiences to imagine what it’s like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. It has become popular among groups such as anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries to appropriate a sense of righteous, anti-imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment. Nothing could be timelier, as an armed far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the presidential election from being “stolen from them.” Higgins shows that this reverse colonization stance depends upon a science fictional logic that achieved dominance within imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since. By identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climatological devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-defense, and self-protection.