This article addresses cinematic remediations of literary works treating the Allied occupation of Naples: Liliana Cavani’s La pelle (1981) and Francesco Patierno’s Naples’44 (2016). Taking a memory studies approach, it surveys the corpus of cultural representations of the occupation and asks what the remediations studied contribute to the Italian cultural memory of the occupation. Analysis focuses on the diverse strategies deployed by the films to reshape the cultural memory of the occupation for their respective audiences. I argue that where Cavani’s remediation seeks to construct a feminist counter-memory of the Allied occupation, Patierno’s film betrays a contradictory impulse to both revive and lay the cultural memory to rest. I close by asking how successful the two films are in becoming meaningful ‘media of cultural memory’ (Erll 2010, 390) and what that may tell us about the place of the Allied occupation in Italian cultural memory at distinct historical junctures.

Both in Italy and abroad, the construction of memorial shrines to honour those who fell for the Fascist cause stemmed from Benito Mussolini’s desire to create symbolic spaces to celebrate Italian greatness. Moreover, their construction reinforced a specific vision of the nation – one rooted in the ideal of sacrifice, unquestioning loyalty to Mussolini’s commands, and the exaltation of violence as a legitimate tool of political struggle. This article analyses the tower-ossuary of the Italians in Zaragoza, a monument commemorating the legionaries of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie, who died fighting alongside Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces against Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War. Despite its limited recognition, this monument – the largest Italian shrine abroad after that in El Alamein – constitutes an object of significant scholarly interest, since it preserves the memory of Fascist Italy’s intervention on behalf of the Caudillo according to a particular narrative, which Mussolini’s regime sought to immortalise for posterity in stone and concrete. Meanwhile, the attempt to re-signify this shrine after the fall of the Fascist dictatorship makes it a compelling case study for reflecting on the processes through which a society can rethink its history and engage with the legacy of its authoritarian past.

In 1864, Umar Taal, one of the most consequential figures of nineteenth-century West Africa, perished in Maasina (Mali), a region he had conquered two years prior. Historians have studied the political and intellectual underpinnings of Taal’s last conquest, but not its ramifications inside families. Exploring colonial-era migrations and marriages in my own family in Mali, I suggest intimate history as mode of historical inquiry and writing to elucidate the afterlives of war. I provide a translocal and gendered microhistory of the aftermath of Taal’s jihad, showing how the ripples of past Islamic revolutions shaped the intimacies of twentieth-century family life.

Francesco Costabile’s Una femmina (2022) challenges traditional notions of masculinity and femininity embedded in the ’Ndrangheta and patriarchy at large. This analysis examines the construction of some of the key characters in Una femmina while reflecting on motherhood and female agency – two central topics in sociological research on gender and organised crime. The essay considers the power dynamics underlying these themes and explores the film’s aesthetic choices, which express a gynocentric perspective through a psychological exploration of its central female characters.

Stone-carved “wheels of Dhamma” (dhammacakkas) symbolizing the Buddha’s enduring teachings constitute an aesthetic corpus of objects once raised on columns set in ornate bases. These dhammacakkas were produced in central Thailand in the second half of the first millennium during the Dvāravatī period. Some carry Pali inscriptions which bear witness to the state of the Pali textual tradition in central Siam in the seventh to ninth centuries. Given that no Pali manuscripts from South or Southeast Asia from this early period survive, these epigraphic witnesses are extremely important. This research article presents inscriptions inscribed on a Dvāravatī-period dhammacakka and an octagonal pillar recovered in Thailand’s Chainat province. A closer examination of the epigraphs has allowed us to give improved readings of the available fragments. This has enabled us to present what may be described as the oldest extant recension of the core passages of the Pali Dhammacakkappavattana, Gotama the Buddha’s first teaching.

This article examines how “human affect” (renqing) – the interplay of affect, moral obligation and social legitimacy – operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of contestation in police mediation in contemporary China. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police stations in Zhejiang province, I conceptualize renqing as an affective grammar: a system of emotional expression and recognition that structures interaction across interpersonal and institutional settings. The party-state’s revival of the Fengqiao model has transformed renqing from a micro-political norm into an institutionalized instrument of affective governance. Mediation formalizes affect through contracts, scripted performances and service quotas, stratifying emotional legitimacy along lines of class, gender and migration. The article theorizes affective autonomy as participants’ resistance through silence, withdrawal or alternative alignments. It complicates portrayals of policing as purely coercive, highlighting the emotional labour and limits of grassroots governance.

This article provides a detailed description of an undocumented use of zaìshì 在勢 as a deontic adverb in Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese literature. This word commonly functions as a verb (“to hold power”) or a nominalized verb (“one who holds power”), but its use as a preposed deontic adverb, meaning “under these circumstances”, is not attested in earlier Chinese texts and has no cognates in other Sinitic languages. The author analyses the syntax and semantics of zaìshì in a large corpus of medieval Chinese texts and early Chinese translations of foreign literature. The article then suggests that the preposed deontic adverb zaìshì emerged as the result of the appropriation of linguistic elements present in classical literature but whose use had been restricted to classical forms of literary composition.