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Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural criticism. For strictly formalist critics, it might be the quality of a text or artwork that both preserves useful ambiguity and invites participation from respondents. For criticism that challenges the status quos of social and political life, it is often the interpretive condition that can unsettle existing patterns of recognition and judgment. What this essay finds in the work of Lisa Robertson is a more situated notion of indeterminacy, one that relates indeterminacies of speech, form, and affect to the destabilizing effects that postindustrial capitalism can have and has had on cities and their inhabitants. Following a brief overview of indeterminacy as a critical concept, from New Criticism to poststructuralist theory, the essay closely reads Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) as a multi-genre study in Vancouver becoming “money” and the effects of this process on work characterized as temporary or feminine. Indeterminacy becomes a double bind for the speakers of her “Office,” in that freedoms of expression, feeling, or movement fold into occasions for speculation and displacement. Finally, the essay relates Robertson's indeterminacies to recent debates about the character of avant-garde writing, arguing for a more socially and historically contingent notion of aesthetic experimentation.

In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: (1) Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international stage and (2) Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event.

Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis, by Suzanne Newcombe. Sheffield: Equinox, 2019. xiv + 309 pp., £75.00 / $100.00 (hb), £24.95 / $36.00 (pb). ISBN 978-1-78179-659-7 (hb), 978-1-78179-661-0 (pb).

The sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Catholic Church in recent decades has resulted in one major unintended casualty: creating a skeptical distance in the relationship between adult leaders and youth. This article provides a short history of the abuse scandal in the US and discusses the reforms and repercussions of the Dallas Charter, in conjunction with the relationships between adult leaders and youth. By incorporating the five aspects of the Developmental Relationships Framework into youth programs, ministers and volunteers will have the means to provide tangible action items for developing positive relationships with young people. These five items include expressing care, challenging growth, providing support, sharing power, and expanding possibilities.

This chapter analyzes the confluence of environmental politics, biopolitics, and the cultural role of yoga in India. It begins with an overview of India’s current economic development challenges and shows how the country’s current prime minister has subsumed both yoga bodies and water bodies into biopolitical discourse to support a neoliberal economic boom that will contribute to the proliferation of anthropogenic climate change. The chapter then argues that alternative forms of yoga aimed at nurturing intimacy between the human body and the natural world are helping to prevent unnecessary climate-change-producing development activities in India, including the river-linking project and other massive hydroelectric projects that threaten India’s riparian environments.

This chapter brings together Hindu and Muslim thought on climate change in specific local contexts in India and Mali. The dialogue uncovers deep themes of economic power, environmental epistemology, and power politics that emerge from the intersection of two essays. The power to flourish depends on politics as much as religion, it seems. We will see the roles played by government officials, bureaucrats, and spiritual leaders as both India and Mali negotiate the relationship between citizens and the natural environment. Government and bio-spiritual voices, potentially at odds, would do better to work together. The chapter ends with provocative and practical suggestions toward localizing environmental protection that might be achieved via the collaboration of these two voices.

While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question, less attention has been paid to how lyric poets employ the instabilities of figuration and reference to critical, and ultimately social, ends. Taking as a test case the most popular poet of a regionally authentic American lyric, Robert Frost, I argue that Frost uses techniques of lyric voicing to critique the very means by which persons appear as familiar individuals, of a sociality or place, and therefore worthy of certain liberties and property claims. I draw upon Frost’s early New England poems, his relationship with Edward Thomas, as well as his final public lecture, “On Extravagance” to show how he links “drifts” in reference and cumulative “shifts” in sound or sense to the lived experience of transience, particularly within the context of rural economies. Frost allies the vocation of poetry and lyric form not with a rugged isolationism but a more conditional notion of freedom, one that forms across a variety of egoisms, boundaries, and moral or ethical values.