This chapter examines the tenure of British Consul William Dougal Christie who sought to settle territorial disputes over the Mosquito Shore with rival Central American republics and attempted to establish unchallenged British authority over the Nicaragua Canal route by shifting the capital of the Mosquito Kingdom to the harbor of San Juan del Norte (renamed Greytown). Nicaraguan officials challenged the British position by arguing that the Mosquito Kingdom was a fiction erected by the British. As the possibility of a Nicaraguan Canal loomed ahead, competing sovereign powers of Britain and Nicaragua converged on the authenticity of the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Kingdom as the linchpin around which to settle their territorial dispute over the San Juan delta.

Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of political belonging and the making of political communities by looking at how validation but also contestation are framed at the local and regional levels. By tracing the competing definitions of the notion of ‘seniority’ across time and actors in chieftaincy disputes, I evidence that seniority is used as a central notion on which power depends. The competing criteria to establish seniority have been used to construct new political communities with alternative allegiances. The most recurring and enduring principles across time and scales to construct political communities appear to be those related to indigeneity, oral tradition and genealogy. In order to emphasize the scalar logic at play, the chapter emphasizes the similarities in the narratives appearing at the regional level (Ewe-speaking southeast Ghana) and the local level (in the dukɔ of Dzodze), and will trace this logic from the 1910s to the 2010s, based on the Commission of Enquiry chaired by Sir Francis G. Crowther in 1912. This chapter will therefore look at power dynamics and disputes between Anloga, Dzodze and other dukɔwo in southeast Ghana in the first half of the twentieth century.

Barbara Strozzi dedicated two of her music prints, Cantate, ariette, e duetti (Opus 2, 1651) and Sacri musicali affetti (Opus 5, 1655), to the Austrian Habsburgs, which raises questions about the nature of her relationship to the powerful imperial family. This essay places her prints into the context of the Habsburg courts and examines textual and paratextual elements of the prints to suggest reasons why she may have chosen to dedicate them to the Habsburgs. It argues that the dedications served different purposes but that both of them ultimately served as publicity for the composer herself, in that she used a connection to the Habsburgs to help shape her public image.

This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

Bowen’s letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. The country provided the location for significant events in her life: the breaking off of an engagement; the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court; or mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. Like many of her characters in her novels and short stories, Bowen’s response to, and relationship with, Italy is multi-layered and nuanced, the result of her experiences, both physical and emotional, over many years. This chapter draws on those experiences in Italy, placing Bowen’s writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.

Personhood, for Aquinas, functions on the paradoxical structure of the soul’s incompleteness and completeness. The soul is an incomplete part absent the specific human body and yet if the soul were only an incomplete part, it could not function as the substantial form of the body and thus as its guiding principle as consciousness. It appears that Aquinas is placing us in a dialogic tension, a metaphysical gray area. This chapter addresses how this Thomistic ontological tension at the heart of the human person is more receptive of, and in more decisive confrontation with, postmodern views of personhood that fail to achieve coherence and consistency, often due to rejections of manufactured unity and then because of the epistemological crisis rooted in long-discarded and devastated metaphysical foundations. The dignity of the human person necessitates an open nature understood in Aquinas, and sensed in postmodern weak theological and poetic thought, but one metaphysically decisive and real, that does not fall into a taxonomy of cultural and social conventions.

Early modern Venice and its lagoon had a complex religious landscape, with two bishops, nearly eighty parishes, fifty nunneries, thirty-six male monasteries, more than 300 confraternities, and four ospedali grandi, all performing religious services as often as eight times a day or just once a year. Venetians and visitors could attend masses, vespers, devotional services, displays of relics, and processions, following published calendars, often indicating when musical performances could be expected. Venetian printers issued a constant stream of religious and devotional texts and images, facilitating private worship in the home, and those with the means could also purchase religious paintings. While Roman Catholics naturally dominated the city, there were also members of other religions, including Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and Jews, and even some clandestine Protestants.

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha-machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.

The introduction to this volume advances its collective research agenda of renewing and advancing critical approaches to friendship and modern personal life. It outlines what a critical approach to friendship entails and delineates three central themes underlying debates in the social science literature on friendship: ideals, choice, and contexts. It both consolidates these debates and offers new directions for advancing them through a series of key interventions in critical approaches to friendship. These interventions are divided into the core thematic sections of the book: (1) critical intimacies, differences, and ruptures; (2) critical sociabilities beyond the private; and (3) critical relational junctures. The introduction also elucidates the thematic cohesion of the volume, emphasizing how the chapters are united by a commitment to ethnographic methods, interpretive theoretical approaches, and critical theory.

How is the Gulf understood in the global political economy, and how can we avoid the way in which this region is sometimes subject to exceptional treatment? This book lays out a framework that shows the importance of food to the Gulf states and how we can theorise this significance. This includes works on food regimes, resources, and technopolitics.

A certain mystique has evolved surrounding Barbara Strozzi and her compositions. The popularity of her work beyond the field of musicology and music history classrooms is evidenced by the many performances that occur worldwide, nearly every week. (Anyone who subscribes to Google Alerts can receive notifications of upcoming performances.) Her provocative music and persona have also inspired novelists: Russell Hoban featured her in his My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007) and she is also the protagonist of a new verse novel for young adults, The Star and the Siren, by Colby Cesar Smith.

In 1915, the Panama–Pacific International Exposition announced San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake that had devastated the city. This chapter examines why the fair organizers and architects used classical architecture to promote San Francisco’s economic success and to articulate the continued narrative of American progress. Roman architectural forms were used extensively in many of the fair’s courts, including the Court of the Universe. The neo-antique architecture and sculpture of the Court of the Universe was also a crucial way for the fair organizers to demonstrate San Francisco’s unique position (due to its West Coast geography) to develop economic ties with Asia. Neo-antique architecture helped to prove that San Francisco was a modern city, fully recovered from the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and poised for cultural and economic greatness. This chapter also examines why other state and national pavilions were erected in a classicizing style, demonstrating the potency and flexibility of ancient architecture in conveying different aims. Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts was the fair’s architectural hallmark. His decision to evoke the ruins of ancient Rome for his Palace was a strikingly modern choice and stands in contrast to the celebratory architecture of the rest of the fair.

The current practice of disability studies largely groups itself according to various “models” of disability, such as the “medical,” “social,” “identity,” and “minority.” While insightful, each is incomplete: some focus on the medical component of disability, others on its social implications, and yet others on its personal significance. The present chapter proposes an account of disability grounded in Thomistic anthropology. In this system, an individual is a human being insofar as he or she possesses a particular kind of essence or nature. Given this nature, a person has certain natural abilities that, if certain other requisite conditions are met, allow the person to perform typical operations. Disability – and the closely related term “impairment” – concerns inabilities to perform given activities and various consequent inequities that may arise. The “Thomistic model” proposed aims to incorporate insights from prevailing models of disability and, thus, to enrich contemporary disability studies through the application of Thomistic philosophy.

In most of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, short stories, and essays published between 1929 and 1949, London never quite registers as the same city from one work to the next. Bowen’s representations of London across her oeuvre are best characterised by their unceasing transformations, ever-morphing geographies, atmospheric shifts, and cosmopolitan bearings. Before she moved to a terrace house on Regent’s Park in 1935 with her husband Alan Cameron, her fiction, like Bowen herself, was London-adjacent. It registers in some of her early work as a city that broadcasts the dull enticements of ancestral obligation. Ingénues in these novels adapt this habit; they gaze at London from afar through the combined lenses of a vivid, though vague, literary imagination and a sluggish cultural legacy, or they conceive of it as a launchpad for a career as an artist. After 1935, and especially after her experiences of London during the blitz, Bowen’s perceptions of the city transform from immobile scenes of social paralysis towards the blistering desire for new, enthralling, and sometimes strange associations.