This chapter discusses the terms in which collective exile experienced by Constantinopolitan refugees was rendered in architecture, by analyzing how Nicaea was renovated into a new exilic capital, replacing Constantinople (New Rome). Extensive fortifications were built around Nicaea, Nymphaion, Heraclea Pontica, Prousa, Smyrna, Tripolis, and Philadelphia. In analyzing their architectural form and the dedicatory inscriptions embedded in their walls and towers, I describe how Nicaea and its surrounding landscape evoked a collective exilic experience for the refugees it protected. As attested by the built environment, these experiences at times align with but also contrast with literary tropes on exile written about by the period’s chronicler, Niketas Choniates. The era of exile is commemorated in the unusual appearance of Jewish exilic leaders and prophets in several dome mosaics of newly renovated works in Constantinople.

This chapter retraces the theoretical debates on autobiographical writing in Africa and proposes a pluralistic approach to the continuum of self-referential genres allowing for the writing of the self in postcolonial African contexts. Focusing on Francophone West Africa, firstly, the autobiographical imperative in the colonial French school system where writing on oneself was an imposed educational practice, is pointed out. Secondly, the function of autobiographical writing as a deconstruction of the condescending colonial ethnographical gaze on African cultures from the 1950s onwards is underlined. Using Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s set of memoirs as prominent examples, the chapter further elaborates on both the distress and richness of cultural hybridity in postcolonial life writing before venturing into the specificities of women writers’ contributions. Ken Bugul’s series of not less than five texts marked by their volatile autobiographical pact, oscillating between a referential and an autofictional mode, is analyzed in more detail. The chapter shows that African autobiographical writing in French has not produced a fixed genre that would imitate the colonizer’s canon, but rather that it is inventive in mixing and innovating established genres such as memoir, autoethnography, travelogue, childhood narrative, and autofiction.

First and Second Samuel narrate Israel’s transition from a tribal confederation to a dynastic monarchy, beginning with the leadership of the prophet Samuel. Saul is anointed Israel’s first king, and although eventually rejected, his reign functions to define kingship under Yahweh, including submission to Torah and to the authority of Yahweh’s prophets. David becomes Israel’s second king and eventually the “ideal” for all kings in the Old Testament. We will also observe during David’s leadership an emerging understanding of Yahweh as “God of Israel.”

Since early Israel was a theocracy under Yahweh, we will explore the issues surrounding Israel’s need for and the legitimacy of a human king, the person and role of a suitable king, and finally, the importance of the prophet in assessing the king. Although Israel’s transition to statehood is somewhat difficult to reconstruct historically (ca. 1050–970 bce), we will examine evidence for similar transitions in other cultures. Archaeological evidence from Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer suggests the notion of a state and its correlating centralized administration.

In May 1966, Agent 594 had just begun his third year as a HUMINT asset of the Cultural Protection Division of the municipal Public Security Bureau on one of Harbin‘s college campuses. An ambitious teacher in his mid-twenties from a non-proletarian family background and engaged but not yet married, Agent 594 started out hoping his overall career would benefit from serving as an agent, but the head of the Cultural Protection Division had not been particularly impressed and informed the officer who had recruited him that ‘from the looks of it, this guy is willing to do the job, but he has only limited skills’. Agent 594 met his case officer regularly once a month and, on the whole, had very little to report, but suddenly all that changed in early June 1966 when the CCP leadership in Beijing announced that regular teaching had been suspended and students on campuses all over China would be called upon to henceforth concentrate full time on conducting a Great Cultural Revolution.

The Introduction seeks to state the scope and nature of the study in more extended terms, and to establish the importance of historical ontology to Foucault’s complex view of history as necessary to constructing an ethics. After presenting a very schematic survey of complexity theory, it utilizes Alain Badiou’s approach to ethics to construct the contours of the approach that I intend to take with regard to Foucault. It concludes by stating the intention to utilize research in both the Continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions.

This chapter explores the nature of Cold War liberalism by comparing how French and American sociologists who collectively elaborated a theory of “industrial society” reacted differently to the politics of the Cold War between the late 1940s and the eruption of the student protest movements in the late 1960s. It argues that these differences were not rooted in sociological theory, but in whether or not particular sociologists embraced an anti-totalitarian politics of emergency that saw democratic societies as vulnerable to dangerous degrees of political mobilization. While theorists of industrial society in both France and the United States were all in some sense social democrats, those who embraced what is now identifiable as Cold War liberalism had a more pessimistic disposition, and fear of the demos at home drove them to embrace conservative arguments against programs for political change.

Sheep have been associated with humans for over 10,000 years, but are poorly represented in poetry and criticism. The animal turn has the potential to rectify this marginalisation of a species that has played an important part in the formation of both the landscape and the agro-pastoral culture. Concepts such as natureculture allow for the exchange across the species boundary to be acknowledged. New readings of poems about sheep can provoke new ways of interrogating the natural world. Sheep, in common with other ruminants, emit methane which, as a powerful greenhouse gas, is an important contributor to global heating. The animal turn recognises the sentience and agency of other species, but also brings with it a need to reconsider whether it is right to eat meat. There is no escaping the complexity of the moral implications which require a choice between the welfare of the individual animal or the extinction of the whole species. This book claims a place for sheep in the literary discussion of the animal turn and shows how this turn can complicate ecocritical discussion of the pastoral.

Scholars of economics and of political economy tend to read late 20th and early 21st century economic evolution very differently. From a political economy perspective, the Keynesian policies of the early post-World War II era gave way to neoliberal policies and a financialized economy after 1980. From an economics perspective, by contrast, Keynesian ideas became ever-more dominant among mainstream economists after the 1980s. This chapter elaborates a comparative case study research design to evaluate these readings. First, I outline these different interpretations and their implied portrayals of central bankers. Then, I select four critical cases where these baseline portrayals can be tested against the available record of central bank archives. Finally, I delineate a method for analyzing the Fed’s and the ECB’s internal deliberations in the 1980s and the 2010s.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This introduction presents the volume’s premise and structure. It details why it is crucial to examine and harmonize the two worlds of law and knowledge to understand and amplify Indigenous guidance and wisdom found in treaty commitments. This introduction introduces the volume’s five parts, each discussing different aspects of understanding and implementing the various international, multinational, and nation-to-nation treaties to advance sustainable development and affirm Indigenous knowledge and rights in the various legal systems that we will explore.

This chapter offers an immanent critique of empiricism within interpretivist sociolinguistics, traces of which can be noted in scholars’ tendencies to reproduce the epistemic fallacy, and to explain broader social mechanisms and phenomena including linguistic inequalities by drawing directly from empirical evidence found in texts. Of specific critical interest in this chapter are works in raciolinguistics, a recent strand of interpretivist sociolinguistics which critically unpacks the said co-naturalisation of language and race. Although revealing valuable insight into the colonialist heritage of academic research on language and society, works in raciolinguistics are critiqued in this chapter as (a) reducing discourses to their producers, (b) failing to account for the necessary relationship between discourse and non-discursive phenomena, (c) providing reductive views of conceptual abstractions in sociolinguistics, and finally (d) denying the importance of universalism as crucial to the broader project of social emancipation. The contribution of critical realism in strengthening sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary strand of the social sciences is also highlighted.

With this chapter, we arrive at five final books in our Old Testament collection. They have been brought together in the Jewish canon as the “five scrolls,” related to each other by their use in the Jewish liturgical calendar.

Our survey will begin with the Song of Songs, a collection of Israel’s love poetry. We have numerous ancient parallels, but we will note in these the particular imagery drawn from everyday life in Syria–Palestine. Second, Ruth is an exquisite narrative about ordinary Israelites. Their uncommonness is on display in their exemplary characters and their genealogical connection to Israel’s beloved King David. A third book, Lamentations, is a collection of five poems presented in acrostic form. Recounting the tragedies incurred in Jerusalem’s destruction, the poetry nevertheless exhibits some of the Old Testament’s most glorious expressions of Yahweh’s mercy. Ecclesiastes, another unique poetry collection with ancient Near Eastern parallels, offers reflections on the human experience. Finally, we will examine Esther. God is never mentioned in the book of Esther, yet this story merited inclusion in the canon, and we will note its subtle but important contribution to Old Testament theology.

This final discussion comments briefly on the main findings of each chapter. It offers some key ‘takeaway’ points summarising the central arguments made throughout the book.