Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

This chapter focuses on the different contexts of English teachers around the world. It begins with an important paradox that we face as teachers of English – the question of how we balance between the need to accommodate our learners’ multilingualism in our classes and the need to focus primarily on developing a limited part of this multilingualism: their English repertoire. It provides a critical historical background to the English-only and English-mainly approaches that dominated language teaching in the twentieth century. The chapter then looks at key aspects of education that are likely to influence translanguaging pedagogy. These include the different stages of education, from primary to secondary, tertiary and adult learning, as well as distinctions between commonly identified types of English teaching, including EFL and ESL, BANA and TESEP contexts, CLIL and EMI approaches. The chapter also explores the influence of language and education policy on the language classroom and closes with an opportunity for us to explore the influence of our own beliefs and values on what we do in our classrooms.

My prologue introduces the main arguments and arc of the book. As I explain, Revolutionary Ink traces two interrelated but ultimately opposing currents. Beginning in 1693, it shows how New York’s printing presses initially inspired fealty to the British Commonwealth. It then registers a seismic shift at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 when loyalty to the “ancient” liberties of all Freeborn Englishmen became paramount, a process of “Americanization” spurred by colonial presses up and down the Atlantic seaboard. I also point out that the work is neither a triumphant Whig narrative nor a teleologically inevitable one. More accurately, sheets printed in ink are transformative agents of change, with largely unforeseen consequences across changing historical and interpretive contexts. Drawing on a large body of scholarship across disciplines, Revolutionary Ink seeks to identify some of these changes in a distinct and crucial setting, unveiling a history of a city of divergent ideas, people, and institutions evolving over time, both influenced by print media and influencing it.

Chapter 2 explores contemporary racial inequity facing elderly Social Security beneficiaries. It includes an examination of structural discrimination in the labor market and in many other core aspects of American life (i.e., housing, education, credit/banking, health care), contributing to disparately lower levels of social security-based earnings upon which benefit levels are based and to greater financial precarity in retirement. It concludes by providing recommendations of potential remedies and mitigations for the disproportionately significantly lower and often below-poverty-line benefit levels received by elderly Black and Brown social security program beneficiaries and the major threats of additional inequities from regressive benefit cuts owing to impending social security trust fund insolvency in 2032–33.

Chapter 6 explores nineteenth-century novels written by women, focusing on three authors: Maria Firmina dos Reis, Julia Lopes de Almeida, and Maria Benedita Bormann. It analyzes Firmina dos Reis’s abolitionist novel Úrsula, published in 1859. From Lopes de Almeida, it examines A Família Medeiros (1892), Memórias de Marta (1899), and her most famous work, A Falência (1901). From Benedita Bormann, the chapter centers on Lésbia, published in 1890. These three novelists challenge stereotypes and literary conventions promoted by their male contemporaries – whether by giving an authentic voice to an enslaved woman, defying the usual punishments for female “adultery,” or portraying a female protagonist who leads an intellectually and erotically fulfilling life after leaving her husband. Through their writing, they boldly claimed the power to define themselves, contesting the portrayals of women found in male-authored fiction of the time.

This chapter interrogates the marginalization and recent resurgence of Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and Tamazight as legitimate literary languages in Morocco. Historically sidelined by Arabization policies and the dominance of the Franco–Arabic literary binary, these Indigenous languages have been mostly excluded from national literary historiography. This chapter traces how postindependence nationalist ideologies suppressed Morocco’s multilingual, literary heritage, privileging fuṣḥā and French while dismissing Darija and Tamazight as purely oral languages. Combining close readings of novels with institutional developments, the chapter highlights the emergence of a new literary consciousness that reclaims linguistic plurality as a pillar of Moroccan literature. It argues that despite institutional resistance, the rise of fiction written in Darija and Tamazight signals a transformative shift in Moroccan literature, challenging hegemonic narratives and redefining the language of the novelistic genre. It ultimately advocates for a reconfiguration of scholarly frameworks to reflect the multilingual realities of Moroccan cultural production.

Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (r. 1658–1707) was the last of the so-called great Mughal emperors. He remains a controversial historical figure, castigated for religious intolerance and placed at the centre of a narrative of Mughal decline by some, but considered a great Muslim hero by others. In this richly researched exploration of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir’s life and times, Munis D. Faruqui contests such simplistic understandings to unearth a more nuanced picture of the emperor and his reign. Drawing on a large and varied archive, Faruqui provides new insights into the emperor’s rise to power, his administrative and religious policies, and the role of the imperial eunuchate and harem. By unpicking the complex dynamics of a long reign, from Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir’s accession to the last weeks of his life and his eighteenth-century memorialisation, this remarkable new history cuts through the many myths that have obscured the extraordinary life story of Emperor Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir.