This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

On May 18, 1918, fourteen thousand high school students from St. Louis, Missouri, public schools, accompanied by fourteen drum corps and seven professional bands, paraded through the city’s Forest Park. Each school marched behind the US flag and its banners. Boys were dressed like soldiers and girls like nurses, in white uniforms bearing a tiny red cross. Battalions of young drummers, followed by legions of adult nurses, closed the parade. As the young people passed by, spectators applauded the inspiring sight. They could feel their hearts burn with new patriotism and new reverence. As the parade ended at Art Hill, eight thousand children in red caps and capes stood at attention on the slope, saluted the onlookers, and began to form a living cross. Below them, the remaining six thousand young people fell into place to form the word Red Cross. For the occasion – the Inaugural Junior Red Cross Parade – the youth had been rallied to demonstrate their patriotism and participation in the war effort. One journalist noted that “the present generation of children are learning that Service means sympathy as well as sacrifice, a desire and willingness to help others as well as a feeling that it is one’s duty and obligation to do so.”

Reforming Politics and Reform as Politics

The commissioner of excise asked his subordinates to gather information about the liquor Indians preferred most in the Presidency of Fort St George in 1905. He also wrote to laboratories to clarify whether toddy was indeed ‘a completely innocuous liquor containing a large proportion of food material’. Major Charles H. Bedford's report concluded that most of the toddy being consumed in the province was at an advanced fermentation stage. Samples sent for laboratory testing had revealed a high proportion of fusel oil – a known cause of indigestion, dysentery and rheumatism. With the hydrometer's use in testing the proof strength of alcoholic drinks in mid-eighteenth-century England, utilising technology to regulate alcohol had become an exercise in building public trust. The hydrometer's subsequent use to test and establish the proof strengths of different country liquors in India was comparable but much more significant in its impact. It demonstrates the colonial state's determination to penetrate an indigenous industry in order to bring it into alignment with Western scientific technologies, processes and practices. Remarkably, the Congress leadership would similarly show interest in ascertaining toddy's nutritional properties. As the president of the Prohibition League of India (PLI), Rajaji wrote to the heads of the Tropical School of Medicine in Calcutta and the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor in 1931. He sought to verify that ‘to drink beer in order to ensure efficient enzyme action in the body (was) as unnecessary as to drink toddy in order to ensure a sufficient supply of Vitamin B’.

On 27 April 2015, Jamie Maynard and Courtney Penix met in a strip mall parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, a city in the Midwestern United States (US). Earlier that day, Courtney had sent Jamie a series of text messages asking if she could get her $150 worth of heroin. Jamie said that she could, plus two ‘rigs’ (equipment to inject the drug), for $175 total. They arranged to meet that evening to make the trade before Jamie headed to work at a local casino. Jamie and Courtney, both White women in their mid twenties, met earlier that spring through a friend-of-a-friend. They initially connected to exchange drugs: heroin, to which both had developed habits, and the pharmaceuticals Suboxone, used to ease painful opioid withdrawal symptoms, and Xanax, used to ease anxiety and sometimes used in combination with opioids to amplify the effects of the drugs. They quickly developed a casual friendship, communicating regularly by text messages and phone calls. They vented about their jobs, shared stories about their struggles to maintain their drug habits, and offered drugs to one another to keep each other ‘well’ (i.e., to stave off withdrawal) (Williams, 2020).

Chapter 3 first elaborates on the view of context-sensitivity as a nontrivial context-shift-dependence. Drawing on Chapter 2, it makes explicit the fibration of semantic contents over contexts of utterance. The latter makes it natural to introduce a generic context and to identify linguistic meanings with the semantic contents attached to that context. The correspondence established between linguistic items and mathematical ones leads to the hypothesis that the fibration of contents over contexts constitutes a “stack” (with respect to a natural Grothendieck topology). This correspondence is the final reconsideration, proposed in the book, of Russell’s logical analysis. The rest of Chapter 3 distinguishes two different concepts of meaning (as obtained by collation or as transposable to more specific contexts) and thereby supports a constructive conciliation of minimalism, indexicalism, and contextualism. It also puts forward a new picture of the demarcation between semantic and pragmatic components, as well as a more flexible notion of compositionality. It finally develops various applications to philosophy of language and to cognitive linguistics.

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.