This chapter focuses on the history of English speaking in Wales and on the character of Welsh English and its varieties. After a short examination of the terms ‘English in Wales’ and ‘Welsh English’, the chapter proceeds with an outline historical account of anglicisation in Wales considered in relation to topography and geology, and charting the geographical spread of English speaking and the growth of speaker numbers. This is followed by a brief survey of academic research on dialects of Welsh English from the earliest work at the end of the seventeenth century to the present day, and from shorter works on specific localities and features to national surveys. The chapter ends with a descriptive synopsis containing overviews of the phonology, grammar and lexis of Welsh Englis with a concise discussion of a selection of features from each level. Also included are previously unpublished linguistic maps from the archives of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, prepared by the Survey’s director, David Parry.

Black disfranchisement in the American South constitutes the most severe instance of democratic backsliding in American history. But Black disfranchisement was not a single instance of anything – rather, each of the ex-Confederate states took its own unique path to disfranchisement. In much of the Border South, as I discuss in the previous chapter, disfranchisement occurred in the midst of relatively competitive two-party systems and reflected an effort to secure Democratic Party control of these states. In some Deep South states, especially Alabama and Louisiana, which I explore in Chapter 6, disfranchisement was inseparable from the “Populist Moment” in the South. In this chapter, I focus on two Deep South states – Mississippi and South Carolina – in which disfranchisement occurred in the midst of nearly pure one-party politics.

This chapter explores the role of Human Impact Units (Hu) and regenerative authentication credits in transforming environmental, social, and governance (ESG) governance into a more transparent and equitable knowledge commons. The authors argue that current ESG valuation models, particularly those rooted in carbon-centric methodologies, fail to capture the full spectrum of ESG impacts and often lead to “greenwashing.” By shifting the focus to noncarbon-based valuation mechanisms, such as the Hu and RACs frameworks, the chapter demonstrates how ESG efforts can be more accurately monetized, fostering greater trust and transparency in ESG claims. The authors build the theoretical foundation by proposing the concept of “ESG as knowledge commons” for managing environmental commons, and suggest that “truth” serves as the shared resource, documented through blockchain. Specifically, RACs utilize a blockchain-based framework to ensure data permanence and immutability while allowing for controlled transparency. This research underscores the permanence of truth, enabled by the network’s immutability. Overall, RACs offer an alternative governance model to traditional ESG approaches, leveraging the polycentric nature of blockchain networks to effectively address the uncertainty inherent in the ESG industry.

Rap has long enjoyed a generative relationship with spoken-word poetry, one that can be traced back to the politicized orientations and aesthetic preferences that distinguished the Black Arts poetry and early spoken word of the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, this chapter argues that differences between rap and spoken-word poetry are as salient as similarities. Rap’s relationship to the spoken word only starts to acquire political and strategic importance at the point at which gangsta rap – with its hyper-profanity and alleged nihilism – comes to prominence. Amid the antiblack racism and structural dislocation of Reagan’s America, rap in the spoken word can be seen as emblematic of hip-hop’s intra-cultural politics of uplift versus negativity. Yet, despite such claims, this does not suffice to settle the matter of the elevated and profane within rap. For in rap, carnality, irreverence, and high-mindedness are the alternating currents and tensions that make hip-hop penumbral, the goad to its intra-politics.

In this chapter we provide a description – phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical – of contemporary East Anglian English, accounting for its historical evolution, drawing from empirical analyses of a range of corpora of informal spoken English from across the region, and supported by vowel plots from speakers in four different urban centres in East Anglia: Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and Wisbech. For the purposes of this chapter, we define present-day East Anglia as including the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk as well as northern and eastern Cambridgeshire and north Essex, a definition established on linguistic grounds by Trudgill (2001). Following a sociolinguistic history of East Anglia, our description of the local variety highlights diachronic change and contemporary variability within the region, the advent of innovation from outside, as well as geographical evidence of dialect levelling within.

Looking to politically committed artists, this chapter asks how hip-hop has been shaped in both its form and its substance by a revolutionary critique of racial capitalism. After setting out the antinomies of Black capitalism and Black Marxism via listening to a song by Kendrick Lamar, the chapter demonstrates how hip-hop codifies its own forms of racialized and proletarian radicalism. To so do, and moving in roughly chronological order, it listens to a handful of songs by Public Enemy, The Coup, and Noname, reading their lyrical content and describing their musical form as a response to the interlock of race and class under capitalism.

I begin my empirical exploration by studying three states whose disfranchisement-era politics are characterized by relatively meaningful levels of inter-party competition. States that I study in subsequent chapters were politically dominated by the Democratic Party even before disfranchisement – usually on the back of violence and fraud. While historians argue that African Americans continued to vote and exert political power in those states (e.g., Kousser 1999, 20), it is quantitatively almost impossible in those states to distinguish between voter suppression and voter apathy, and between an engaged Black electorate and stolen Black votes. But perhaps the most concrete, indisputable evidence of African Americans’ continued political influence after the Redemption period is the sustained relevance of the Republican Party in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee up until institutional disfranchisement. In these states, Republicans were sufficiently strong to resist until the complete abrogation of Black voting rights.

This chapter explores the influence of Jamaican music and culture on the origin and development of hip-hop in the US. With roots reaching back to Jamaican sound systems and Nyabinghi drumming, hip-hop inspires a new flowering of Afrofuturism as Black resistance to colonial authority. The example of Jamaica’s Maroons, Afro-Caribbean freedom fighters, clarifies its strategy of cultural resistance: to seize and secure space for a Black future of living free. As hip-hop’s early innovators – DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Rammellzee, among others – adapt the Jamaican sound system to new colonial territories, they use music, dance, raps, and tags as weapons to create spaces of freedom in the oppressive world of the Bronx in the mid 1970s. This legacy of Afrofuturism informs the ensuing history of hip-hop, half a century of Black musical creativity that extends from Brother D and the Sugar Hill Gang through X Clan, Public Enemy, and NWA to Dr. Octogon, Deltron 3030, Janelle Monáe, Ras G, and beyond.

In the four previous chapters, I document Black disfranchisement’s significant effects on state legislative politics in the American South. In Chapter 4, I illustrate how in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee, disfranchisement eliminated the Republicans as a meaningful political force, dramatically shifted the ideological behavior of representatives of more-Black legislative districts toward the Democrats, and entrenched Democrats as the main political power in the legislature. In Chapter 5, I described how disfranchisement changed roll call voting in states dominated by Democrats by shifting representatives of more-Black areas toward the roll call behavior of their more agrarian, reform-oriented colleagues; I also, however, showed that disfranchisement may have empowered different groups depending on the distribution of influence in state legislatures. In Chapter 6, I extended this exploration to two other Deep South states, Alabama and Louisiana, where unique political cleavages, political economies, and the timing of disfranchisement produced consequences of disfranchisement with distinctive features. Across all of these states, disfranchisement was associated with meaningful changes in legislative politics.

The word griot has been linked with hip-hop since its early days in the 1980s, but it is a fragile connection. Initially used by French travelers to West Africa who thought they were using a local term, it refers to hereditary praise singers, instrumentalists, and oral historians. Although there is some overlap between what modern-day rappers and griots do, there are also some significant differences, especially in their social status and roles in society. If rap has distant origins in Africa, dispersed via the transatlantic slave trade, and come back transformed, then how can we think about the highly specialized skills and roles of griots in Africa, their inspirations in the diaspora, and their intersections with rappers? Tracing the institution of griots in western Africa and charting how the term took root and expanded in the US will help us appreciate their congruencies and incompatibilities with hip-hop.

The concluding Chapter 8 gives a summary of the language disputes covered in the previous seven chapters. It then tries to answer the general question about why these disputes have arisen in American courts among people who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. Four reasons are given. First, in cases of ambiguity and multiple interpretations one side in the dispute paid insufficient attention to, or chose to ignore, the disambiguating role of context. Second, at the heart of the dispute there was often a subtle and complex aspect of linguistic meaning and comprehension that the theories and empirical methods of the language sciences are designed to explain. Their findings can provide relevant linguistic information to the triers of fact for legal decision-making, and these subtleties and complexities would often not have been appreciated without linguistic expertise. Third, there were regularly legal and financial advantages and benefits that were motivating each of the parties in the dispute. And fourth, some of the opinions delivered by language consultants were unhelpful because these “experts” had little expertise in relevant areas of the language sciences.