As one somewhat surprised reviewer noted, Maconchy’s The Sofa contained what was possibly the first explicit representation of copulation on the British stage. Given that the opera was composed during the period of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship rules, it seems surprising indeed that Maconchy and her librettists Ursula Vaughan Williams were able to include such a scene. This chapter explores how censorship affected the British theatre scene in the mid twentieth century, and how The Sofa managed to evade its very particular restrictions. The chapter also suggests that the source material for the opera had scandal and censorship baked into its very origin story.

[This chapter brings together a three-part essay published in the August, September and December 1939 issues of Tarjuman ul Quran. It was written in response to a question about Maulānā Ubaidullah Sindhī’s speech that a reader quoted, claiming it had been published in the June 1939 issue of Madina Bijnor. The reader asked if Western nationalism and Western dress were appropriate for Muslims now that prominent ulama such as Maulānā Mahmood ul Hasan and other elders of the Deoband school had also expressed support for nationalism.]

This survey chapter considers the public reception of female composers across the UK, USA, France, Germany and Austria at four points during Elizabeth Maconchy’s life, taking three or four examples from each period: 1904–10, 1932–9, 1959–60 and 1994–5. Composers at the end of their careers, such as Pauline Viardot and Irène Wieniawska (Poldowski) are considered alongside younger talents including Errollyn Wallen, Ruth Gipps and Margaret Bonds. Changing attitudes to class, race, ‘appropriate’ musical genres for women to engage with, and the very question of how intellectual and emotionally profound female composers could be, are considered – both in terms of prevailing narratives, and notable exceptions. Consideration is also given to the question of how these composers might be reincorporated into the historical narrative; and how much work remains to be done to raise awareness of their creative efforts.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s family moved to Dublin in 1917. The five years in which they remained in Ireland coincided with a period of remarkable change in the country: the aftermath of the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Above all, it saw Ireland gain its independence from the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ with the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. This chapter outlines the trajectory of the revolutionary years in their broad historical and political context. It considers the Irish revolution against the wider background of the Gaelic Revival, with which it was intricately bound, while also considering musical culture in Dublin at that time.

Sierra Leone is a centrepiece in the emergence of the Englishes and English-lexifier contact languages of West Africa. The movement of people of African origin from the Americas and other parts of West Africa to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, established the English language and the English-lexifier creole language Krio in Sierra Leone, and thereafter, in West Africa. Krios founded communities in major towns along the West African coast in British-occupied West Africa. Sierra Leone English and Early Krio assumed central roles as inputs to all other Englishes and English-lexifier contact languages in West Africa. The English-lexifier contact languages that arose from the interaction of Krio founder communities with local populations are today used by up to one hundred and twenty million people across West Africa in varying degrees of nativization. This chapter provides an overview of the history, structure and trajectory of Sierra Leone English and Krio, and the impact of these two ‘Englishes’ on the linguistic ecology of West Africa in the present and future.

In this chapter I argue that Cuba and Puerto Rico embraced racial projects based on the myth of a “racial democracy” that idealized the harmonious integration of whites, Blacks, and Mulattoes to combat colonialism and promote nationalism under Spanish and US hegemony. However, I propose that the ideology of white supremacy, rooted in colonial slavery, continues to prevail in contemporary Cuba and Puerto Rico – despite the numerous contrasts between the two countries. This renders the assertion of Blackness problematic and precarious in both places. Effacing Blackness as an integral part of national identity has been a recurrent theme in the colonial and postcolonial histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, together with the privileging of whiteness.

I was brought up in France and studied there until the age of eighteen. I then got a place at Clare College, Cambridge, where – and this is a very neat connection to Maconchy – I studied with Giles Swayne, who was the son of Maconchy’s cousin. He often talked of her, and her daughter Nicola LeFanu, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years later when I performed one of her pieces. Giles talked a lot of Maconchy’s encouragement of him; in turn, he is a huge part of why I’m a composer today. There is something very special about the legacy that composers leave behind them, and how we modern composers work within that legacy. And that’s what I am going to focus on here.

The focus of this chapter is the criminal use of submarines for smuggling, terrorism and other criminal offences. The chapter begins with an explanation of international law principles relevant for policing in varied maritime zones and over different persons and acts. Submarine involvement in maritime law enforcement is not common and the discussion recognises how submarines may be limited to information gathering and the commencement of hot pursuit. Instead, the deployment of submarines for smuggling has prompted closer consideration of laws addressing transnational crime and underlines the important role of domestic law. US legislation dealing with drug trafficking by submersibles is assessed in this regard. Potential terrorist use of submarines, extending to possible mutinies, are regulated through different international instruments. We highlight the need for States to participate in these treaty regimes, as well as ensuring their national laws are properly in place to deal with this increasing criminal activity.

‘I don’t like this term Woman Composer’, Maconchy wrote in 1975. She was hardly alone in expressing frustration about her gender being foregrounded. It was a recurring refrain among Maconchy’s contemporaries and their predecessors. Despite the efforts of women like Ethel Smyth and Rebecca Clarke, there was a remarkable continuity in the kinds of gender prejudice experienced by women composers in Britain throughout the twentieth century, and the conceptual frameworks that were used to understand their music. Stereotypes about ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ music proved difficult to change, as did deeply entrenched ideas about the limits of women’s compositional capacities. The careers of Maconchy’s British predecessors help to contextualise both her reception in the British press, and her own conception of what significance her gender had for her composing. This chapter discusses Smyth and Clarke, but also intersects with Maude Valérie White and Poldowski (the pseudonym of Régine Wieniawski),

This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).

This chapter discusses the origins of modern climate science in nineteenth-century projects of empire, and shows how literature both promoted and contested the imperial impulses of emerging climate science. The chapter examines, first, how imperialism – the enlargement of a single country’s jurisdiction across large tracts of land and sea – facilitated scientific methods and data. It then turns to literary justifications of imperial and scientific expansion, with accounts of the Arctic expeditions of John Franklin – Franklin’s narratives, the poetry of Eleanor Anne Porden (who became Franklin’s wife), elegies, and ballads – providing a case study. Staying with the mythologization of the explorer as a conqueror of climate, the chapter takes up the question of climate determinism (the idea of climate’s agency in shaping physiology and psychology, and the attendant myth of British colonizers’ resistance to such agency). Yet, from Richard Burton’s travels to Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, Victorian literature reveals, sometimes unwittingly, that the imperial explorer did not remain untouched by climate.

The avowed aim of this chapter is to provide suggestions for a critical approach when evaluating (and producing) social theory related to ethnicity, racism, and nationalism. The chapter explores the histories of the careers and thought of early ethnologists (including Fernando Ortiz, Arthur Ramos, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, and Jean Price-Mars) of the African diaspora in the Americas to call for critical reflexivity to understand theoretical production and the consumption thereof. This includes a call to the chapter’s readers to engage in critical reflexivity as they evaluate the theoretical production of others as well as their own position-taking. Critical reflexivity entails an understanding of the dialectics of historicity.