This chapter examines the rise of U.S. interest in the Nicaragua Canal in the context of the Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century as well as the beginning of a transatlantic rivalry between Great Britain and the United States over control of the canal route. This chapter illuminates how the status of the Mosquito Kingdom as an Indigenous polity became the crucial fulcrum around which this transatlantic rivalry operated so that the Mosquito question became inextricably linked to the Canal question at a time when the canal also became central to Nicaragua’s nationalist project and regional aspirations.

By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

This chapter revisits “critical friendships,” exploring how moments of sociopolitical and health crises shape and challenge relational bonds. Drawing on UK-based studies of personal responses to Brexit and dating app use during COVID-19, we demonstrate that theoretical assumptions about friendship’s egalitarian and inherently “good” nature often fail to capture the complexities of lived experience. The Brexit study revealed how political differences strained friendships, yet participants often prioritized shared history over political alignment. The COVID-19 study found that while apps facilitated “suffused” relationships during lockdown, these relationships were ultimately disappointingly short-lived. Using Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” we demonstrate how the illusion of the ideal “pure” friendship creates an inevitable disappointment when such relationships prove unachievable. Yet despite these disappointments, the “goods” of friendship can still outweigh the “bads” of “the times” in the potential for new suffused relational forms, however fleeting, as well as in the effort expended to sustain friendships.

This chapter examines the life, movement, and works of Margherita Costa, a professional singer and one of Italy’s most prolific women writers. With Barbara Strozzi, Costa shared an occasional city (Venice), a prominent dedicatee (Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), and several poetic themes, including that of the bella donna, a trope of Baroque Marinist verse. Found primarily in her first poetry collection, La chitarra (1638), Costa’s bella donna is not simply a physically alluring woman who articulates and pursues her own desires—already an innovation—but is also a singer. The chapter concludes by considering three examples of musically centered poems in the volume: erotically charged verse to a Venetian noblewoman, complaints to a negligent lover who demands her song, and humorous poems regarding the gift of an ugly, out-of-tune harpsichord.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s deep and complex relationship with the Soviet Union, as reflected in his memoirs Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (I Confess That I Have Lived: Memoirs, 1974). It explores the poet’s encounters, reflections, and evolving perceptions of the country, its people, and their connections to Chile. It analyzes Neruda’s initial fascination with Soviet socialism and communism and his gradual disillusionment with certain aspects of the regime under Stalin’s leadership. The chapter delves into the complexities of the poet’s political and personal allegiances reflected in his encounters with the prominent figures of the Soviet intelligentsia, such as Ilya Ehrenburg. The comparative analysis of Neruda’s memoirs and poetry allows us to shed light on the intertwined histories of Chile and the Soviet Union, highlighting the enduring impact of Neruda’s Soviet odyssey on his literary work and political convictions.

Just as Elizabeth Bowen’s life was shaped by monumental and international conflicts, so war fundamentally shaped her short stories and novels. The First World War haunts Bowen’s debut novel, The Hotel; the Irish War of Independence transforms the very landscape of Ireland in The Last September; and the Second World War draws up numerous conflicts of allegiance and communication in The Heat of the Day and short stories such as ‘Mysterious Kôr’. Throughout these instances, war creates complicated feelings of simultaneity, where the past and future collapse into an inarticulable present, as can be felt in the futile performance of polite society among the Anglo-Irish in The Last September. As much as that suspension of time crushes any sense of futurity, it also opens the opportunity for reimagining the existing orders of the world; hence, war can constrain expression, as with the hedged communication in the short story ‘Careless Talk’, and afford sexual liberation for characters in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ and ‘Summer Night’. For Bowen, the tensions thrown up in war offer not a dialectic but a series of ruptures that can only be experienced, not resolved.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.

This chapter focuses on Price’s art songs and their biographical resonances. Brought into focus are settings of texts by poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), and Langston Hughes (1901–1967). Dunbar inspired numerous early twentieth-century composers of African descent, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, R. Nathaniel Dett, Nora Holt, and William Grant Still. Hughes’s and Douglas’s poetry became a source of inspiration for new generations of Black composers during the Black Renaissance era of the interwar period. Price joins a long list of esteemed composers who engaged with a Black literary canon in their vocal works. Furthermore, Price’s, her predecessors’, and her peers’ settings of Black poetry continued trends in German Romanticism that explored the marriage of music and poetry and positioned this union as a vehicle for national expression and spiritual transcendence. With these settings, Price therefore worked toward a consolidation of a Black aesthetic in the classical solo voice traditions – one that told a great deal of her own story, too.

Whereas Chapters 3–5 deal with different aspects of the representation of word meanings, Chapter 6 focuses on their organization. The two most well-studied domains of object concepts are animals and tools, and words for them (e.g., dog and scissors) appear to be organized as separate, category-specific circuits, each of which includes all three types of representation mentioned above – namely, sensory/motor representations in modal networks, integrated representations in the GSN/DMN, and purely verbal representations in the core language network. The contrasting specializations of these circuits for animal and tool concepts reflect many factors that involve both the learning environment and innate patterns of cortical connectivity. This chapter also shows that three other categories of lexically encoded object concepts similarly appear to have distinct neural substrates: plants (especially fruits and vegetables like apple and potato); people (including face parts like eye, body parts like hand, and unique individuals like Tom Hanks); and places (including generic scenes like beach and famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower). What’s more, there are some hints that hundreds of other classes of word meanings may be distinguished, like in a thesaurus, by the fine-grained representational geometries of numerous cortical areas, especially those comprising the GSN/DMN.

In this chapter, the book is introduced by interrogating how a political community is constructed and with what membership boundaries, especially when it lies across borders, or at another level than the nation-state. I argue that the political belonging found at the local level and based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ – whereby the individual is bound to a particular community and has access to a bundle of rights by virtue of the ‘first-comer’ or ‘early-comer rule’– informs and contributes to the making of other types of political belonging at different levels.

This chapter examines how the 2011 uprising disrupted the authoritative intellectual model, leading to an ideal of radical embeddedness – a position of unconditional solidarity with the people. Intellectuals, once expected to enlighten and guide, increasingly deferred to public sentiment, sometimes at the expense of critical intervention. Two intellectual orientations co-existed: a Bourdieusian model, which maintained analytical distance, and a Boltanskian model, which embraced radical egalitarianism. However, exile fostered self-perceptions of epistemic inferiority, particularly in trauma work aimed at global solidarity. While radical embeddedness strengthened solidarity narratives, it also weakened political influence, leading intellectuals to avoid institutional politics and produce politically hesitant interventions. The chapter argues that this shift neutralised secular democratic currents, leaving the movement vulnerable to competing ideological forces. Ultimately, while embedded intellectuals sought praxis, their deference to public sentiment limited their impact.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 1 (1644), composed to poetry by Giulio Strozzi, comprises madrigals of two to five voices, so that it stands apart from all of her other works, largely written for one or two voices. While many of the themes in the book follow the work of Barbara’s predecessors and contemporaries, with poems of love, both requited and unrequited, some of the texts refer to old age and the fleetingness of life. In this chapter I suggest that the book represents, in part, an homage to the recently deceased maestro di capella, Claudio Monteverdi (1568-1643). Aside from nods to “la vecchiezza,” there is the transformation of Strozzi’s and Monteverdi’s “Gira il nemico” from Book 8 into a lament of old age, along with references to the master’s Orfeo and to the composer’s last publication, Selva morale e spirituale.

As one of the most prolific poets of twentieth-century Hispanic literature, Pablo Neruda’s influence affected diverse cultural and sociopolitical environments. His literary creation and participation in the public sphere led to the poet receiving prizes and awards of both modest and spectacular prestige. While some of Neruda’s awards prompted political controversies that revealed the peculiarities of his character, all of these honors extended his prominence as Chile’s chief poet in the World Republic of Letters. The acquisition of coveted international recognition was, however, of secondary importance to Neruda: His greatest achievement was his own people’s understanding and emotional identification with his poetry.