Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

Chapter 1 opens with the question of how to achieve normative legitimacy of the state (legitimation). How does the state become accepted and expected by a population to be the arbitrator of their collective life? The chapter reviews legitimation crises in Iraq at four key historical junctures: the foundational moment in 1921, the 1958 revolutionary coup d’etat, and the 1990s in the lead-up to the post-2003 state. Drawing on the work of Iraqi sociologist and public intellectual Ali al-Wardi, this chapter argues that legitimation of a state’s ruling principles (normative legitimation) is linked to a state’s ability to address social injustice. Furthermore, social injustice is intrinsic to any state order. A robust democracy is the only reliable mechanism through which to uncover the nature of injustice – and ways of addressing it – at any given time and space, and thereby avoid a legitimation crisis.

Despite being a generation apart and thus unlikely to have ever met, both Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1654) and Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), frequented, and were celebrated by, a close-knit network of Venetian poets, librettists, musicians, artists, collectors, and patrons closely linked to the infamous Accademia degli Incogniti. The Incogniti valued wit, improvisation, performance, and ribald humor, and were particularly fascinated with in the so-called “questione della donna,” which examined, often irreverently, the status of women in ancient and modern society. This chapter explores what can be gleaned about the interactions between artists, musicians, collectors and painters in little-studied years that Gentileschi spent in Venice (1626-1629?), such as the lawyer, letterato, and collector and Giacomo Pighetti, the writer Giovan Francesco Loredan, and the painter Alessandro Varorari, known as Il Padovanino. These connections, I propose, help elucidate the works Artemisia painted in these years, even if many of them are lost or unidentified.

This chapter examines the nature of tone sandhi and various other tonal mutations in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). Each base tone in this language corresponds to a specific sandhi tone, with sandhi resulting from two sets of tonal shifts: smooth tone chain shifts and checked tone chain shifts. Each shift modifies either register or pitch, but not both simultaneously.

Some experimental studies have reported low rates of sandhi application, suggesting limited productivity. However, evidence from both experiments using real words and corpus analysis reveals high rates of appropriate tonal alternations, indicating that productivity is the primary mechanism. Theoretical works have further elaborated the tonal alternations as systematic chain shifts, lending support to this productivity-based view. The evidence suggests that future models of TSM tone sandhi should primarily incorporate productive phonological processes, supplemented by selective lexical storage mechanisms for certain exceptional or high-frequency cases.

In diminutive suffixation, the tone of the pre-á syllable undergoes modification through dextrosinistral spreading of register and/or pitch from the -á suffix, whereby the derived [35] ([Lr, h][Hr, h]) tonal output emerges as a distinctive tone cluster. Conversely, in neutral tone operations, sinistrodextral tone spreading applies to a subsequent function word, which may alternatively acquire a low tone by default in the absence of such spreading.

This chapter examines the tenure of British Consul William Dougal Christie who sought to settle territorial disputes over the Mosquito Shore with rival Central American republics and attempted to establish unchallenged British authority over the Nicaragua Canal route by shifting the capital of the Mosquito Kingdom to the harbor of San Juan del Norte (renamed Greytown). Nicaraguan officials challenged the British position by arguing that the Mosquito Kingdom was a fiction erected by the British. As the possibility of a Nicaraguan Canal loomed ahead, competing sovereign powers of Britain and Nicaragua converged on the authenticity of the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Kingdom as the linchpin around which to settle their territorial dispute over the San Juan delta.

Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of political belonging and the making of political communities by looking at how validation but also contestation are framed at the local and regional levels. By tracing the competing definitions of the notion of ‘seniority’ across time and actors in chieftaincy disputes, I evidence that seniority is used as a central notion on which power depends. The competing criteria to establish seniority have been used to construct new political communities with alternative allegiances. The most recurring and enduring principles across time and scales to construct political communities appear to be those related to indigeneity, oral tradition and genealogy. In order to emphasize the scalar logic at play, the chapter emphasizes the similarities in the narratives appearing at the regional level (Ewe-speaking southeast Ghana) and the local level (in the dukɔ of Dzodze), and will trace this logic from the 1910s to the 2010s, based on the Commission of Enquiry chaired by Sir Francis G. Crowther in 1912. This chapter will therefore look at power dynamics and disputes between Anloga, Dzodze and other dukɔwo in southeast Ghana in the first half of the twentieth century.

Barbara Strozzi dedicated two of her music prints, Cantate, ariette, e duetti (Opus 2, 1651) and Sacri musicali affetti (Opus 5, 1655), to the Austrian Habsburgs, which raises questions about the nature of her relationship to the powerful imperial family. This essay places her prints into the context of the Habsburg courts and examines textual and paratextual elements of the prints to suggest reasons why she may have chosen to dedicate them to the Habsburgs. It argues that the dedications served different purposes but that both of them ultimately served as publicity for the composer herself, in that she used a connection to the Habsburgs to help shape her public image.

This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

Early modern Venice and its lagoon had a complex religious landscape, with two bishops, nearly eighty parishes, fifty nunneries, thirty-six male monasteries, more than 300 confraternities, and four ospedali grandi, all performing religious services as often as eight times a day or just once a year. Venetians and visitors could attend masses, vespers, devotional services, displays of relics, and processions, following published calendars, often indicating when musical performances could be expected. Venetian printers issued a constant stream of religious and devotional texts and images, facilitating private worship in the home, and those with the means could also purchase religious paintings. While Roman Catholics naturally dominated the city, there were also members of other religions, including Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and Jews, and even some clandestine Protestants.

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha-machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.

How is the Gulf understood in the global political economy, and how can we avoid the way in which this region is sometimes subject to exceptional treatment? This book lays out a framework that shows the importance of food to the Gulf states and how we can theorise this significance. This includes works on food regimes, resources, and technopolitics.

A certain mystique has evolved surrounding Barbara Strozzi and her compositions. The popularity of her work beyond the field of musicology and music history classrooms is evidenced by the many performances that occur worldwide, nearly every week. (Anyone who subscribes to Google Alerts can receive notifications of upcoming performances.) Her provocative music and persona have also inspired novelists: Russell Hoban featured her in his My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007) and she is also the protagonist of a new verse novel for young adults, The Star and the Siren, by Colby Cesar Smith.