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The New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today. The book is divided into three sections. This first section , 'Frontiers', contains essays on issues and phenomena that may be considered, if not new, then newly and sometimes uneasily prominent in the public eye: transfeminism, the sexual violence highlighted by #MeToo, Black motherhood, migration, sex worker rights, and celebrity feminism. Essays in the second section, 'Fields', specifically intervene into long-constituted or relatively new academic fields and areas of theory: disability studies, eco-theory, queer studies, and Marxist feminism. Finally, the third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry. Together these essays provide new interventions into the thinking and theorising of contemporary feminism.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal New Formations and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:89/90.09.2016. ; This article questions the assumption that empathy is a positive, politically beneficial emotion through two examples of poetry about deaths with sensitive political dimensions. I begin by returning to the origins of 'empathy' in English, as written about by Vernon Lee in the earlytwentieth-century, to show how far the word has drifted from Lee's sense of it as an embodied aesthetic response to an artwork. Rob Halpern's book of poems Common Room refuses imaginative empathy with its subject, a dead Guantanamo Bay detainee, and yet, I show, surprisingly aligns with Lee's sense of empathy through the author's erotic and imaginative response to the man's autopsy report. What results in this revivification of Lee's empathy is a violation of the religious beliefs of the detainee. In contrast, Andrea Brady's poem 'Song for Florida 2' takes up a more contemporary sense of empathy in its focus upon the killing of the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Brady's poem presents several possibilities for empathising with Martin's mother - by imagining being her, or imagining similarly losing a son - but eventually draws back from this as a limit. Empathy here risks erasing the specificity of the racialized context which led to Martin's unjust death. The white poet's son cannot 'replace', even imaginatively, the black mother's son without effacing the difference which saw Martin targeted in the first place. Brady's poem, I argue, marks how empathy can violate through supplanting the grief and political context for that grief of the person to whom empathy is extended. What is needed instead of empathy is a commitment to political change.

The Obama administration needs to persuade a potentially skeptical Congress and public that Africa warrants investment; that the gains of the past decade should not be put at risk. …

Les administrations de Bill Clinton et de George W. Bush ont sensiblement développé l'engagement américain en Afrique : redéfinition des intérêts stratégiques, développement d'importants programmes humanitaires, sanitaires, investissement économique et militaire. La première administration Obama a déçu les attentes, semblant quelque peu négliger le continent africain. Le deuxième mandat de Barack Obama renouvellera-t-il l'engagement américain, au double niveau humanitaire et économique ?

The Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations significantly expanded U.S. engagement in Africa through redefinition of strategic interests, development of major humanitarian and health programs, and sizable economic and military investments. The first Obama administration did not live up to expectations, seeming to largely neglect the African continent. Will Obama take advantage of his second term to renew the U.S.'s commitments on both humanitarian and economic levels?. (Politique étrangère (Paris) / SWP)

Africa's changing economic landscape is prompting a shift in how U.S. policymakers view the continent. High growth rates, new technologies, and a rapidly expanding consumer class are driving greater global competition for investment and access to potential export markets, and the United States is recognizing that it will need to step up its game to remain relevant and influential in an increasingly crowded and competitive environment.