Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

Unsolicited demand helps explain the origins of papal penitential jurisdiction.

Before daybreak on March 1966, in a lush small town called Dunkwa-on-Offin, women traders of the Ghana National Trading Corporation, the United African Company, and the Ghana Fishing Corporation adorned their bodies with white clay and calico. Calico represented “victory.” Dunkwa-on-Offin sits halfway between Kumasi – the capital city of the formerly powerful Asante Kingdom to its north – and Cape Coast – the former colonial capital of the British Gold Coast. The women were celebrating the events from the previous month. On February 24, Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah was en route to Hanoi, Vietnam, to visit Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh via China when the National Liberation Council (NLC) instigated a military coup d’état. Nkrumah’s government collapsed. His statues and edifices followed suit. The Chinese embassy was ransacked; some of its personnel were attacked. Violence continued on the streets of Ghana, “anyone who resisted them (NLC) was brutally shot…. Even young children were hit with rifle butts.” The NLC burned any literature on socialism, communism, or Nkrumah. The women were not alone in celebrating the downfall of Nkrumah’s government. Pass-book traders, wide-eyed and impressionable high school students, and Christian and Muslim congregationalists flanked them. Unlike Nkrumah’s return to Colonial Ghana from the United Kingdom (UK) in January 1957, a few months before independence (March 6), where he was greeted by his supporters dressed in calico and dancing and singing to drums, the women traders in Dunkwa-on-Offin sang in support of the NLC.

Scholarly writing on modern European urban history has broadly endorsed modernisation theory’s contention that European modernity was both urban and secular, most notably by ignoring religion altogether as a meaningful factor in European cities, especially after 1900. This chapter suggests that instead of excluding religion from our analyses, it needs to be integrated into our histories of urban Europe. Urbanisation not only expanded the number and size of cities, but also made for larger and more diverse urban religious environments. In both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, religious culture flourished in Europe’s cities, even if the nature of that culture and those who participated in it shifted considerably over time. Finally, religious actors made important contributions to many of the developments that are associated with urban modernity, from associational life and political mobilisation to social assistance and the development of mass communication. Finally, at the same time that integrating religion into urban history enriches our understandings of urban social, cultural and political life, it sheds light on how faith communities and their members profited from urban modernity.

This chapter reflects on a few crucial terms such as locality and exteriority, arguing from the standpoint that the force of African literature lies in its call to interrogate the very idea of the global and local. Commenting briefly on the early works of two African writers, Chinua Achebe and Assia Djebar, it shows how African literature poses questions about the type of world-making that is underway, namely, who are the beneficiaries and losers in the making and remaking of conceptions of “worldliness”? The essay also speculates on conceptual and theoretical flashpoints that emerge from the encounter between notions of African literature and world literature taken as separate entities. In attempting to recharacterize the theoretical assumptions of “worldliness,” it highlights African writing’s inherent universality, its generalized orientation toward the philosophical, as well as the intersections of terms like locality and universality within African literary criticism.

This chapter explores the relationship of social class and the nature of the urban place with its elements of size, density and variety. Social class and status groups shared common values and experience. European towns demonstrated hierarchies of dominance and conflict. Despite the importance of the market, regulations enforced by bureaucracy were essential to manage the externalities generated by the complexity of the town. Towns provided places where citizens learnt the nature of class. The factory and the department store are presented as examples.

The town was a place where change was driven by ethnic and nationalist contest as well as class conflict dominated by labour and capital. Among the multiple directions of social contest, varied degrees of stability were created by the great land empires of Europe.

Towns provided the mass and variety which generated associations, clubs, societies and lodges which mediated between the individual and the State and the contests of class, ethnicity and nationalities. Associations were also a source of instability as they became a source of ethnic, language and national identity. The unstable triangle of empire, class and ethnicity failed, leaving the towns of the twentieth century in the shadow of the old multi-ethnic empires.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

European urbanism in the Americas cannot be extricated from the diverse processes of conquest and colonisation that agents of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and French imperial expansion executed over land, water, peoples and natural and mineral resources. European urbanisms in the New World were neither manifested uniformly across the entire continent nor a product of a social consensus among Europeans of what a city was and what it was supposed to look like. Desire and ability to direct urban settlement were also unequally distributed; best endowed with both were the Spanish monarchs. Among both Hispanics and Indians, they deployed the municipality as an ‘instrument of colonisation’. Sometimes subsuming indigenous urban centers, new towns and cities were laid out with straight streets arranged in orthogonal patterns around preferably symmetrical main squares where secular, ecclesiastical and commercial functions were housed and exercised. Urban geometry and hierarchy assisted in the systematisation of rule.

European and North American cities and city-dwellers maintained intense connections over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often linkages reveal themselves biographically or architecturally, and occasionally through congruent developments in urban policy. Even the most hackneyed contrasts between the archetypal ‘European’ versus ‘North American’ city belie a strong set of mutual influences born of the many enduring, influential transatlantic conversations. This chapter will explore three major clusters of common concern and agitation: class, gender and race. An aestheticised approach to the imposition of order on the volatile industrial cityscape was picked up from Second Empire Paris and transposed to North American cities, above all the US capital in Washington DC, by the turn of the twentieth century. Activist urban women formed networks and borrowed strategies between the great port cities of the United States and the United Kingdom, with particular intensity from the 1880s to the 1930s. Finally, as patterns of segregation proliferated in cities across the Atlantic world in the twentieth century, Germany and the United States provide comparisons of mutual influence: rooted in discrimination at the bottom of often brutal economic systems, rationalised by Darwinian social ‘scientific’ thinkers, and reinforced by policies from the top of evolving political orders.