This chapter contextualizes Gwendolyn Brooks’ first publications in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse: the sonnets “gay chaps at the bar” and “still do I keep my look, my identity…” The magazine’s editorial framework becomes more inclusive in the late 1930s, creating space for Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, and Edward Bland to write poetry and criticism representative of Black experience that is previously absent from the magazine. Brooks riffs off their work to carve out an effective aesthetic from which she infuses classic poetic structure with a perspective unique to African American experience. As a native of Chicago and member of the South Side Writer’s Group, Brooks long desires to publish in Poetry, and reading her work in the magazine’s bibliographic code allows for new appreciations of Brooks’ work as both a continuation of African American modernism and a political commentary on marginalizing mid-century literary discourse.

The final chapter of this book considers external challenges – namely, discourses and regulatory moves driven by concerns about state sovereignty and, relatedly, security and development – to the dual-sided framework in the current digital era. It starts by discussing to what extent China provides a counter-model to the liberal conception of information freedom and the dual-sided framework and argues that there is not really a Chinese (counter-)model. It moves to consider other Global South countries, looking at firstly Brazil and India and then the peripheries of the periphery. It argues that placed in a chain of dependence, practices of Global South countries generally do not present fundamental challenges to the dual-sided framework despite their genuine normative contestations. The chapter finally moves to recent sovereignist policies and discourses from the Western liberal world and observes that the main challenge to the dual-sided framework comes from an increasingly fascist United States.

Luigi L. Pasinetti was one of the most significant figures in the history of post-Keynesian economics. In his final book, he reflects on the history and future of post-Keynesian economics, as well as a broad range of issues relating to his previous work. He argues that the economics profession has reached a critical impasse, unable to grasp the true nature of the unprecedented world we now inhabit. He examines how modern economic thought has diverged from addressing real-world challenges, challenging outdated frameworks to offer, instead, a path for reflection and reorientation. With a rigorous critique of prevailing paradigms, Pasinetti proposes an alternative framework of analysis extending an invitation for economists to rethink foundational assumptions. Providing his final statement on these issues, this book delivers a compelling critique of the current state of economics and political economy and offers a vital contribution for reimagining these disciplines in extraordinary times.

This section explores the dead body – its parts, its distillations, its residues, and traces – as synecdoche and catalyst, and as a medium of exchange and thus broker of reciprocity. By drawing together scholars working on different aspects and temporal registers of material-corporeal transformation, this selection of essays considers the different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) through which the corpse (or organ, bone, or ash) is produced, altered, acted upon, or signified, the larger social context in which the dead exist as generative material, and the relationship between processes of subjectification and objectification (Dziuban 2017). The emphasis on materiality and the “work of the dead” (Laqueur 2015), in whatever fragmentary or residual form, also illustrates how a more expansive anthropology of death includes not only canonical death studies’ considerations of the corpse as locus of social action – a thing to be overcome—(Durkheim [1912] 1995; Hertz [1907] 2009), or an agent of social transformation (Bloch and Parry 1982), but challenges to and movements beyond this expected theorizing. In tracing how anthropology has analyzed death’s materiality, we find disciplinary fissures and silos

In Chapter 4, we examine two empirical cases – Afghanistan and Mauritania – to show how our argument explains variation in the intractability of Islamist civil wars. Both countries were targets and recruitment grounds for transnational Islamist armed groups, yet their conflicts followed strikingly different paths. Afghanistan experienced a decades-long war that ended in 2021, while Mauritania’s conflict was brief and ended by 2011. The Afghanistan war featured significant international involvement, with both the Taliban and the Afghan government receiving external support, which heightened uncertainty around capabilities and resolve. Afghanistan illustrates how external interventions can deepen intractability. In contrast, Mauritania adopted a strategy of localization. By refusing foreign military presence and avoiding participation in regional interventions, the government prevented the conflict from becoming internationalized. Tighter border control also limited the ability of jihadist networks to exploit local tensions. This insulated Mauritania from the broader transnational battle, which helps explain why the conflict ended relatively quickly.

This chapter explores how the Twa’s space of nature is created in Rwanda by the encounter between global narratives of indigeneity and conservationism with global capitalism and national social norms. These are refracted through the state’s nationalisation agenda and through policies that condition the access of Twa to resources such as land and together form an important element of the space in which they can negotiate their place in Rwandan society. The response of Twa to questions about nature suggests that they have no special connection to nature or to the forests more particularly. Instead, their responses locate them as ordinary villagers focused on subsistence farming and on survival, but draw also upon national cultural norms of success and status. Whereas traditional land is a key part of articulating indigenous identity in global discourse, the Twa’s desire for land cultivation is non-traditional and instead symbolises the aspiration to inclusion and belonging in the mainstream.

This chapter delves into the dual and interrelated forces shaping industrial societies: capital accumulation and technical change. It begins by highlighting these as the most conspicuous features of modern, i.e. industrial, economies and examines capital accumulation as a critical condition for equilibrium economic growth. The chapter explores various quantitative notions of capital and introduces essential distinctions for dynamic analysis.

Ambiguities in concepts such as capital intensity and degree of mechanization are clarified, emphasizing their roles in shaping production processes across time and economic systems.

After clarifying that the two concepts refer to different aspects of technical change, the chapter sheds light on the so-called Leontief paradox, and offers a classification of technical progress accompanied by alternative criteria for neutrality and their implications for economic analysis.

The discussion concludes by revisiting the asymmetry between profit and wage rates, linking it to the deeper asymmetry between capital and labour, while emphasizing the centrality of these dynamics in understanding economic growth.

This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 6 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The travelers have finally arrived in the city of Augsburg, showing up at the home of old Schwaning, Heinrich’s maternal grandfather, during a festival. Heinrich meets Klingsohr, the master poet, and his daughter, Mathilde. The first part of this chapter examines how Heinrich’s falling in love with Mathilde marks the beginning of his poetic awakening. The second part then analyzes the foreboding dream Heinrich has that evening, where he sees Mathilde drown. The chapter closes by analyzing this dream sequence as a prefiguration of Heinrich’s coming journey.

Chapter 4 explores the negotiation of free speech within Tunisia’s public schools following the 2014 constitution’s guarantee of expression rights. It focuses on high school teachers who initiate classroom dialogues aimed at reforming civic education. These discussions address the limits of free speech and acceptable dissent, reflecting broader societal debates about who belongs to the demos and how democratic citizens should communicate and act publicly. The chapter introduces two key concepts: the democratic grotesque, a mode of communication that disrupts the ideal of rational deliberation through irony, excess, and emotion; and dissensus, from Jacques Rancière, describing enduring disagreement that unsettles social hierarchies and renews democratic engagement. Together, these ideas challenge traditional understandings of the demos and highlight democracy’s liminal nature – an an ongoing, contested process of political expression and identity formation.

Seven billion bodies must be disposed of in the next century as the world enters a period of “peak-death.” Conventional techniques, burial and cremation, are economically and environmentally costly, and their future viability is questioned. In this chapter we examine emerging technologies such as human composting, water cremation, and natural burial that cater to individual and community desires and global environmental concerns. Developing new techniques requires shifting ideas about personhood, relationality, cosmos, and futures, and is challenging, as dead human bodies are more than waste. Anthropologists have long examined body disposal as a stage in a death ritual cycle that provides order and continuity. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been paid to techniques of disposal themselves. Here we consider ways of engaging with new disposal techniques through a celebration and critique of Mauss’s “Les techniques du corps.” His analysis of how bodies move through life from childbirth to adulthood stops short of death. However, by framing disposal in terms of bodily actions that are “effective and traditional,” where “education is superimposed on prestigious imitation,” we consider how new technologies are drawn forward by new effective and affective requirements, while they tend to gravitate to the traditional.

This chapter explores locality and empowerment in Mallorca (Balearic Islands) during the eighth-fifth centuries BCE, a period marked by low-intensity colonial contacts in the archipelago. It examines the late Talaiotic and early Balearic periods, focusing on Indigenous traditions and social change through Mallorca-based case studies and drawing on archaeological evidence and existing scholarship. The study discusses the development of Talaiotic settlements, including the emergence of habitation sites with tower-like structures, the so-called talaiots, and the later development of walled villages. It also examines the role of ritual sites, such as the Son Real cemetery, in reflecting social status and evolving traditions.