The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.

This chapter discusses the social and professional contexts for the emergence of the Italian humanists as a new cultural “class,” and traces the classical and Christian antecedents of their formation of a substantive discourse on secular vocation.

This opening chapter outlines the main arguments of the book and introduces the histories of childbirth, domestic medicine and the family. It makes the case for seeing childbearing as a medical and social experience and shows that generation (the early modern term for childbearing) was of great personal, political and cultural significance in the period. The Introduction argues that childbirth was a family affair and shows that family paperwork – diaries, letters, almanacs, account books, commonplace books and other documents – were awash with descriptions of parts of the process of making babies. Generation was framed as being part of the domestic labour that had to be done by family members or by servants to run an orderly household, and was embedded within other everyday practices like healing, clothing and feeding individuals. The literate individuals who kept records in their paperwork were also the individuals who could afford to buy printed books on conduct and medicine that laid out ideal godly practice. By considering paperwork alongside this instructive material, this book uncovers the cultural and practical tensions between prescription and practice.

This chapter systematically teases out and reflects on the antinomies and aporias that characterize each of two broad sets of international human rights solidarity argumentation. These are the broadly shared discourses on the issue that emanate in each case from the Global North and Global South. Why do Global North States tend to accept and focus on binding international human rights obligations in the civil and political (CP) rights area, while demurring regarding similarly mandatory legal duties to express international solidarity in regard to economic and social (ES) rights? And why do Global South countries tend to argue in favor of such binding obligations with regard to ES rights but not nearly as much regarding CP rights? The chapter is mainly concerned with the rather ironic circulation and eclipsing of relevant antinomies and aporias in plain sight; their relationships to state sovereignty argumentation; and their connections to global power relations as ideationally constitutive forces. In the last respect, the key question is what the relative roles of values/norms in international human rights solidarity argumentation are, vis-à-vis global power relations. And these questions should highlight for scholars the imperative to track internationalist praxis over the longue durée.

This chapter explores the relevance of the Christian tradition to contemporary debates on solidarity in international law and human rights. It positions the genealogy of solidarity within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of suffering, love, and salvation are detailed. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as the West, the Global South, good neighborliness, and human rights are a part – the concept of solidarity is traced to a particularly Christian dynamic. As such, the promise of solidarity in international legal discourse, human rights discourse, and refugee discourse is considered as analogous to the way in which forms of messianism manifest themselves through a Christian logic of love, sacrifice, and debt.