This chapter is interested in the politics of publication and how it shapes what writers are likely to publish. But the chapter is also interested in the role publishers have in promoting a public culture and establishing a genealogy of writing – in this instance a genealogy of African writing in ways that the Heinemann African Writers series has done. tblished his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), under the editorship of the then series editor, Chinua Achebe, and would soon follow it with the publication of The River Between (1965). He was part of that inaugural moment and the consolidation of the African Writers Series, in 1962. Ngugi in his collection of essays, In the Name of the Mother, celebrates Heinemann African Writers series for its role in creating what is truly a ‘Pan-African common literary inheritance’ and for ‘enabling a dialogue among readers and writers from the three main colonial traditions: Portuguese, French and English’, and in addition, enabling dialogue between Africans of the continent and the diaspora.

The statuesque woman who improvised effortlessly at the piano was always known as “Madame Lasserre,” an authoritative but kindly presence in the classroom and in her many public demonstrations of Dalcroze teaching. As Dorothy de Val remembers, those of us studying with her in the 1960s were not aware of how distinguished our teacher was, or that she had been teaching in Toronto for nearly forty years. The classes were unlike any other, involving both physical movement and concentration as we struggled to coordinate our arms and legs. Madame let the music flowing from her fingers tell us what to do. The classes were held on Saturdays in a spacious, airy studio, with about a dozen students per class. All students were enrolled in a special program introduced at the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) designed for school children already having lessons at the RCM. Madame Lasserre ran the classes efficiently, moving smoothly from one activity to the next. For me, these classes were instructive and, more importantly, great fun. I particularly enjoyed her improvisations and strove to emulate them myself. As an advanced student in the RCM program, I had to discontinue the classes after one year, much to my regret, replacing them with keyboard harmony. It was the memory of those classes that drove me to pursue Dalcroze Eurhythmics later in life.

Elizabeth Harcourt was born Elizabeth Venables-Vernon at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire in 1746. In 1765 she married George Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham (1736–1809) who, on his father's death in 1777, became the second Earl Harcourt. Following a tour of the Continent in 1766, the couple spent much of their time between Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire and Harcourt House in London. In 1778 George Harcourt commissioned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to remodel the grounds and the house at Nuneham, planting trees, creating ‘Brown's Walk’ through woodland and enlarging the kitchen garden. From 1784 until 1817 Harcourt was Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. George Harcourt died in 1809, and the title and estate passed to his brother William. Harcourt herself died in 1826. Over the course of her married life, Harcourt wrote and collated a body of correspondence and documents relating to the management of her and her husband's estates as well as hundreds of manuscript poems. Many of these poems are copied from print or are the original work of members of the Harcourts’ social network but Harcourt herself was the author of over one hundred poems. Her verses take in an array of themes, people, events and genres; Harcourt experimented thoughtfully with form and style. Many of her poems demonstrate the love and affection in which she held her husband and her mother; many more are written to relatives and friends, including two to Elizabeth Montagu.

With the founding of the German Reich came initiatives to establish an annual national holiday and to raise funds for the erection of a suitable national monument. Much of this activity originated in the overlapping spheres of Culture Protestantism and National Liberalism. Already in September 1870 the liberal Bremen pastor Jacob Kradolfer proposed an annual popular festival—what he called a youth festival (Jugendfest)—to be celebrated in conjunction with a church service. Through such a celebration, he hoped, the feeling of national unity engendered by the recent Battle of Sedan might be inculcated in what remained a German society divided by many social differences. Kradolfer chose this day, not, as he stressed, out of a desire to exalt German military power, but rather because he understood the capitulation of the French emperor before the Prussian king on September 2 as “as an act of divine and human justice, as the shining finger of God in world history.” As such, he reasoned, it should be celebrated as a “day of joy over the salvation of our people.”

Kradolfer's proposal came to nothing, but the idea of establishing a festival by means of which to foster a sense of national identity was soon taken up again.

Even when they were produced within colonial systems or in the crucible of cultural nationalism, African literature and art in the twentieth century were inseparable from global cultural movements most notably modernism. Nevertheless, for reasons discussed in this chapter, the idea of a modern or contemporary art in Africa has often been resisted by Euro-American (and even African) critics and the institutions of art and literary criticism, which have historically located African creativity in a premodern realm. This chapter is a critique of this location of African art outside the epistemologies and forms of modernism. Originating as a comprehensive review of “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” a landmark exhibition of African art curated by Okui Enwezor in 2002, this chapter seeks to go beyond the denial of the modernism of African art and, through a close examination of Enwezor’s project, identifies the modernist aesthetic as a dynamic form that was indispensable to the African imagination in the twentieth century.

No Corpus Christi play text survives from the town of Beverley, but the extensive civic accounts of the town record an active tradition of such plays from at least 1377 until the early sixteenth century. The records especially concern the role of the civic authorities in governing the plays, but from them it is possible to discover a good deal about a theatrical tradition apparently similar to and contemporary with that of its betterknown neighbour, York. As well as the Governors’ ordinances and central oversight of the guild performances, the records offer evidence of the Banns, the route taken by the pageants, the maintenance of standards of performance by sanctions against individuals and guilds, and even the content of some of the plays.

The Governors of the Play

Governance of the town of Beverley from 1320 was principally determined by the election of twelve ‘Keepers’ whose role in governing the town was instituted by the Magna Carta Communitatis (‘The Great Charter of the Community’) in 1359. Before 1320, the town had been represented by an alderman and two chamberlains, a system that appears to have taken some forty years to reform. The Keepers (custodes) were also known as the Governors (gubernatores) and they were charged with duties of the kind that we might today recognise as those of a town council. Initially, the Magna Carta Communitatis stipulated that tota communitas (‘the whole community’) should name eighteen potential Keepers from whom twelve should be selected to represent the town for three years.

America’s Depression-era world’s fairs promised an optimistic future. Chicago, New York, and San Francisco fairs heralded technological and industrial innovation as keys to future prosperity. American imperialism was an unwavering tool of progress, and African Americans and women remained “invisible” except in marginalized entertainment zones. After World War II, another world’s fair did not occur until 1958. The Brussels Universal Exposition’s US pavilion met Cold War anxiety with cheerful consumerism. Following Brussels’ success, the United States resumed hosting world’s fairs. At Seattle’s Century-21 Exposition (1962), outer space was the new frontier and America the world leader of scientific and technological advancement. The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair replayed these themes, adding a bright future steeped in consumerism. Subsequent fairs, however, failed financially and convinced many that the form was obsolete.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.