Bowen’s novels and short stories operate through an infrastructure of sound that includes technological conduits such as telephones and radios, as well as material and environmental media that produce, amplify, or distort sound. This sonic infrastructure governs the circulation of information. It also determines who hears what and what gets lost in transmission. Each of Bowen’s works generates a soundscape that embodies its historical and political context. For example, ‘Summer Night’, a short story set in Ireland during the Second World War, amplifies conversations, mechanical noise, and the resonance of domestic spaces as if close-miking the soundscape for bits of information. Instead of being a background element in the texture of her fiction, sound is integral to the construction of her narratives. Sound informs Bowen’s literary style: her writing directs the reader’s ear and, in doing so, demands to be listened to.

In 1967 Pablo Neruda wrote his only play, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, which recreated the popular legend of the Chilean emigrant in “gold rush” California, who ended up becoming a bandit, pursued, and killed by the rangers. With the data collected during his trip to the United States, Neruda wrote his piece with the collaboration of the director Pedro Orthous, a member of the Chilean National Theater and one of the best representatives of political theater in Latin America. Both in the staging and in the text, the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose work began to be known throughout the world, is discernible, but also that of the political theater written in Spain before and during the Civil War, especially of Fermín Galán, the drama of another communist poet friend of Neruda, Rafael Alberti.

Chapter 5 tackles the meanings and emotions an image can afford through its contents and form. The body of the image refers to the characteristics of the image, its visual features, pictorial composition, and material form, and how those together afford certain meanings and interpretations of the image in a specific moment in its life trajectory. The visual interpretation method is presented then applied on a case example of street poster images.

The Gulf is changing the geography of production and consumption. Its import demand is leading to control over production in agricultural countries in Asia and Africa. Its weight in export markets gives it influence over trade terms and standards of production. This is concomitant with the development of transport infrastructure and the growth of the Gulf’s logistical sector. A facet of this change is a fundamental reorganisation of regional food trade that has allowed countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia to achieve some of the largest values of food exports in the Arab region. Another trend is the increasing control that Gulf conglomerates have over food production in regional countries such as Egypt and Iran.

This essay focuses on Pablo Neruda’s politics as seen in his social and historical poetry, much of it having been published after the end of World War II. It concentrates on two collections: Canto general (1950) and España en el corazón (1937), in which one sees the development of a more pronounced political and historicist agenda. The latter text focuses on Spain and specifically on his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that forced him to take sides with the republicanos and the Marxist cause. Later, after the horrors of World War II, he published Canto general, where the Marxist and communist cause becomes fundamental to his poetry, whether it treats the “liberators” of Latin America throughout the centuries, the segregationist United States, or the Soviet Union. In sum, Neruda progressed in the mid-twentieth century into a profoundly committed political poet.

Like other areas of law and legal practice, the arbitration world is beginning to grapple with how to harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) while managing its risks. Analogizing to existing AI tools for analysing case law and judicial behavior, as well as to algorithmic hiring applications, this chapter explores how similar technology could be used to improve the process of selecting investment arbitrators. As criticisms of investment arbitration continue to mount, a new selection tool could help to address systemic concerns about fairness, diversity, and legitimacy. Such a tool could level the playing field for parties in terms of access to information about prospective arbitrators as well as expand and diversify the pool of viable candidates. In addition to providing guidance for the parties making their own selections, the suggested tool could be used by arbitral institutions to help with appointing the tribunal president or even, with the parties’ consent, the entire panel. The chapter provides a framework for thinking through questions of design and implementation and concludes by addressing potential challenges and objections.

This chapter examines the origins of the Home Rule movement during the 1870s focusing on Isaac Butt’s pioneering vision of federalism as a constitutional solution to Ireland’s governance. The analysis reveals how Butt’s Irish Federalism (1870) proposed a radical reimagining of the United Kingdom’s structure,creating national parliaments for local affairs while maintaining an imperial parliament for common concerns. The chapter explores the intellectual foundations of this federalist model, showing how it emerged from earlier debates about representation while attempting to reconcile Irish autonomy with the Union. Butt’s federalist framework was fundamentally unionist in intent, seeking to perfect rather than dissolve the imperial connection. However, as the chapter traces, this nuanced constitutional position became obscured as the Home Rule idea was adopted by more radical voices who reinterpreted it along separatist lines. The chapter illuminates this pivotal transitional period when the constitutional experimentation of federlaism gave way to the more rigid nationalist/unionist binaries that would dominate Irish politics by the 1880s.

Food acts as a proxy for different political agendas in the Gulf states. For governments, it is a means to reproduce nationalism and identity; it is a vehicle for citizen upgrading. Questions of environmental sustainability and consumption pervade food and agriculture, and in the Gulf, this is managed through a techno-political discourse. The development of indoor farms that utilise technology presents farming as a means to produce food that is free of its social and ecological dimensions. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the way in which boycotts provide Gulf societies with a means of expression and agency.

Chapter 7 focuses on more local dynamics over cross-border voting in certain borderland localities where all scales merge, and where palimpsestic political communities emerge even more clearly. It emphasizes the question of authority in the recognition or contestation of belonging. By campaigning in the Togolese borderlands in the 2000s, the Ghanaian political parties aimed to instrumentalize cross-border ties and recognized the authority of the local level in confirming belonging to the nation. This chapter demonstrates that the local level is the authority on and the gatekeeper of national belonging. As a consequence it shows that the local level is the most powerful layer of belonging in the palimpsestic political communities of the region, since it is capable of influencing all the other layers of belonging.

Composed of twenty-four states (2.6 million square miles), the Trans-Mississippi region was once described as the “Great American Desert”, due to its sparse population. This narrative gave way to one of settlement and progress as the region became home to white settlers, who displaced Indigenous Americans. To many, the region represented the West, agriculture, and the frontier. Omaha (Nebraska) hosted the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898. The fair aimed to demonstrate that Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi region were economically important. The fair organizers utilized ancient architecture to create the fair’s main court and purposefully evoked Chicago’s Court of Honor. The fair’s architects incorporated original details that reflected the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. The fair’s second season, named the Great American Exposition, reused the fairgrounds and its architecture to create the first colonial exhibition in the United States. The intersection between classicizing architecture and colonialism is also explored. Ancient Egyptian architecture was erected only in the Midway, the fair’s entertainment zone, reflecting a shift in how Americans perceived Egypt and architecture. Lastly, the chapter explores how Indigenous Americans were architecture-less at this fair and how this reflects their marginalized position in American society.

Intertwined with romanticism and his communist political stance, Neruda expresses in multiple lines an ecocritical stance. Animals, landscapes, and the critique of the ideology of progress are found throughout his poetry. This chapter seeks to highlight his contribution within a broad conception of “environmental history.”

What does it look like for new research to remain in dialogue with the past; to express evolving knowledge in a creative duet with the intellectual genealogies undergirding these paths; to evince a melting pot of inspiration over siloed discourses? These are the questions that guide this introductory chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price. Beginning with the story of Price’s plea for her music to have an audience with the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky and segueing into the deeper history of Black classical music community building in which Price’s music and memory was upheld, this chapter lays out priorities that must inform the twenty-first-century landscape of Price scholarship.

For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.