Julie Assouly & Esther Heboyan (eds.) “Elsewhere” in American Cinema. How Hollywood Represents the World, Bloomsbury, 2026

Description
The foreign ‘elsewhere’ has long been depicted in American cinema as a site of fascination and fantasy, shaping how Western audiences view the world. ‘Elsewhere’ in American Cinema explores how these portrayals have also created enduring stereotypes and reinforced troubling power dynamics, models and counter-models.

Bringing together a diverse group of international contributors, the volume explores depictions of the ‘elsewhere’ across various genres including musicals, westerns, war films, and romantic comedies. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Michel Foucault’s heterotopias, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of in-betweenness, the eleven chapters offer fresh perspectives on films spanning from the silent era to contemporary Hollywood. Through close readings of films such as The Fugitive (1947), America America (1963), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), they analyse Hollywood’s emphasis on patriotism and its problematic portrayal of conflict zones, the role of music in exoticising foreign lands, and the evolution of stereotypes into counter-models.

As a result, the cinematic ‘elsewhere’ emerges as a complex space that is simultaneously real and constructed, familiar and alien, onto which American filmmakers project cultural anxieties, fantasies, and ideologies, revealing the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

Ian Hunter, The Kantian Religion, Princeton University Press, 2026.
A historical inquiry into Kantian philosophy as a form of philosophical religion

Kantian philosophy is typically viewed as providing a universal theory of knowledge and morality based on timeless principles retrieved from the human mind. In The Kantian Religion, Ian Hunter offers a starkly different account. Hunter contends that Kant’s arguments were assembled from purely historical sources and served as ascetic devices for crafting the towering self of the Kantian philosopher; they were exercises in intellectual self-clarification and moral transformation undertaken by a cohort of the philosophically educated in search of spiritual clarity and moral purity. These “solemn rites of the mind” were seen as heir and rival to the regenerative resources and cultural importance of the Christian religion, and Kantianism was characterized as a philosophical religion.

Hunter describes the ways that elite spiritual athletes performed a series of philosophically strenuous “acts of the self on the self” through Kant’s intellectual exercises. When Kantianism emerged as an insurgent cultural movement in the 1780s, it offered young academics training to be clergy and teachers a philosophy that was powerful enough to supplant Christian spirituality and to subordinate humanist scholarship and the natural sciences to philosophical self-reflection. For Kant and his followers, the religious disposition of Kantian philosophy came solely from the immanent practice of the philosophy itself. As a rival to conventional religion and as an academic interloper, Kantian philosophy unleashed a wave of conflicts in Germany’s ecclesiastical and scholarly cultures. Although recent Kant commentary typically views Kantianism as intrinsically secular and scientific, Hunter argues provocatively that Kant’s contemporaries viewed his philosophy as an extra-ecclesiastical path to spiritual refinement and moral regeneration.

Maurizio Meloni, Coloniality and Structural Othering in European Thought A Racialized Canon, Routledge 2026

This book provides a historical and conceptual analysis of patterns of racialized otherness in European thought, traversing primary sources, historical periods, and national archives, to show that the longue durée of structural othering beyond individual disciplinary canons is essential to making sense of epistemic violence and structural coloniality in the European canon.

Through the analysis of published texts and personal letters, the book brings to light racializing tropes and patterns of othering in four canonical authors each representing a different Western European country: Italian father of humanism Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Charles Darwin, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. The chapters on Italian humanism begin by highlighting how one of the founding myths of European modernity was shaped by a protocolonial mentality and the violent excision of Arabic sources, whilst the chapter on Darwin analyses the importance of shooting and frontier wars in the Beagle voyage and the vicissitudes of the term ‘extermination’ in Darwin’s thought. Elias’s civilizing narrative is unpacked to highlight his omission of colonial violence in parallel to the development of court etiquette in the metropoles. Finally, Foucault’s belief in the uniqueness of the Greek experience goes in parallel with his deletion of Islamic presence in the genealogy of modern governmentality. The initial and final chapters offer an ethnography of forgotten ethnic violence and racialized monuments in Italy linked with the distinctive history of Italian colonialism and ‘eternal fascism’.

It will appeal to scholars, researchers and students with interests in social theory, sociology, political theory, cultural studies, history, history of science, and postcolonial and ethnic studies.

Maurizio Meloni is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. He works at the interface of social theory and the history of biology, racism, and the body. His authored books include: Political Biology (2016), and Impressionable Biologies (Routledge, 2019).