Chapter 2 provides the historical context of the Ghana–Togo borderland region. I show how the border communities I have visited manifested both plurality and unity, showing strong remnants of Ewe unity despite the border but also dissensions reaffirming the border as a separation. I then delve deeper into the roots of the historical in-betweenness of the border region explaining the multiplicity of political communities layered on top of each other from the precolonial period to the 1956 plebiscite. Finally, I analyse the scholarship’s approach to nation-building projects arising from the border region in the 1950s. While the literature on political activism in the border region concludes on the failure of the diverse political projects that arose, the persistence of these projects today is not fully explained. I argue that the palimpsestic and interconnected nature of political communities in the borderlands contributes to explain this phenomenon – which suggests that other frameworks smaller than the Westphalian conception of nation-state are at work.

Chapter 9 is on the different motives and ways through which social actors destroy images, and the consequences of these actions on different forms of image ‘death’. Analysing image destruction could show the different dynamics of what is tolerated in the public space, what is deemed appropriate, representable, and visible, and what is deemed offensive and needs to be made invisible. Methods for researching absences will be presented and applied on the case example of digital memes.

Friendship is largely perceived as a private and highly positive relationship. By interrogating friendship performances undertaken by girls at school and on social media, this chapter illuminates the public and critical aspects of friendship. I draw on performative theory and the sociology of personal life to analyze data from two ethnographic studies, one conducted with girls in an elementary school in Israel and the other conducted with girls in an antiracist youth work organization in Scotland. I analyze the aims, content, and outcomes of friendship performances as well as the contexts that shape them. I argue that successful friendship performances strengthen and validate these relationships, especially in socially intensive settings, while failed performances reflect and lead to friendship difficulties and breakdowns. Moreover, as friendship is relatively uninstitutionalized and its obligations unclear, publicly performing friendship enables individuals to elucidate their desired friendship characteristics and try to live up to their demands.

Chapter 4 turns to the so-called general semantic network (GSN), which consists of several very high-level, interconnected cortical areas that are considered transmodal because they operate on two or more types of sensory/motor information. Mounting evidence suggests that the GSN contributes to word meanings by performing a variety of integrative and relational functions. Continuing with the example of scissors, the GSN conjoins its distinctive experiential features (which, as noted above, are housed in modal networks of sensory/motor areas), assembles them into a coherent concept that can easily be accessed during language production and comprehension, situates this particular concept in relation to many others, and connects it with personal memories and attitudes (e.g., using one’s favorite pair of scissors in an enjoyable project). As we’ll see, one of the most fascinating properties of the GSN is that it overlaps substantially with the well-studied default mode network (DMN), which mediates internally oriented mental processes such as recalling one’s past, imagining one’s future, simulating dialogues, and contemplating other people’s thoughts and feelings – all of which require semantic cognition.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 celebrated the centennial of Tennessee’s admission to the United States. This chapter argues that the use of Greek and Grecian architecture at Nashville was connected to Nashville’s reputation as a city of learning and culture. During the nineteenth century, Nashville was known as the Athens of the South and of the West. A life-sized replica of the Parthenon was the fair’s premier building. Archaeological accuracy and color were also essential to creating the fair’s Parthenon. Other buildings incorporated classical motifs from different periods, demonstrating the flexibility and fluidity of ancient architecture and embodying the neo-antique. This classical architecture embodied Nashville’s arrival as a city, but it also celebrated the New South and reflected the codification of the racist Jim Crow laws. Thus, the appropriation of classical architecture to justify institutional racism is examined. Egyptian architecture played a prominent role here. Shelby County erected a pyramid for its pavilion, which was an exceptional use of Egyptian architecture at United States fairs. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the enduring importance of the rebuilt Nashville Parthenon (and its Athena statue) as a symbol of culture and democracy for the city.

This chapter looks at Barbara Strozzi both as a daughter and a mother. She was raised in the house of her adoptive father, Giulio Strozzi, and her mother, Isabella Garzoni, or Griega. The relationship between Barbara–born illegitimately, as had been her father and grandfather before her– and Giulio, is enhanced through a close reading of his wills. The household eventually expanded to include Barbara’s four children, born to her and one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Vidman. Barbara had known Vidman at least from 1634, as revealed in Nicolò Fontei’s dedication to Vidman in his Bizzarie, though their first child was born only in 1641. Vidman died in 1648, yet the Strozzis’ connections to his family continued until 1719, with the death of Barbara’s eldest son, Giulio Pietro.

This chapter addresses the Black Atlantic threads contained in Pablo Neruda’s corpus, mainly in Canto general (1950) and Canción de gesta (Song of Protest, 1960). The chapter is particularly focused on moments of poetic representation of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. In this vein, it discusses the Caribbean literary influences – and specifically Négritude and Negrismo movements – that impacted Neruda’s writing, including the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. As a result, this essay unveils Neruda’s sociological but also political motivations for including the historiographical context of the Black Caribbean in his work, including Cuba’s Black internationalism in Canción de gesta. This latter part of the chapter, which is informed by a personal interview with Roberto Fernández Retamar, sheds light on the political reasons for the neglect of Neruda’s Black Atlantic in Canción de gesta, and offers considerations for correcting the overlooked dimensions of his work.

This essay analyzes the ambivalent status of objects in Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s studies of the paradoxes present in the figure of the collector, it traces the way poetic objects in Neruda’s odes appear simultaneously as treasured possessions and utilitarian agents of revolution. Although the portrayal of everyday objects in his later work has been read as propagandistic, it is in their personal link to the poet as collected objects that Neruda’s objects retain the potential for social change Benjamin outlines in the collector.

This chapter reviews the legislative history of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the role of rent-seeking in affecting key aspects of the law. These aspects include uniform ambient air quality standards across a large, heterogeneous country; the prevention of significant air quality deterioration, even in areas above the national standards; and a new source review that requires the best available pollution control technologies in new facilities also in areas with air quality at or above the national standard. These policies might seem reasonable, except that they impose costs on sections of the country where there may be little corresponding net benefit. The question then arises as to why the CAA is structured in this manner. Are there transaction cost savings arising from these rules? Or are they better explained by rent-seeking among politicians, agency officials, industry and labor lobbyists, and environmental nongovernmental organizations?

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

Chapter 5 addresses yet another aspect of word meanings. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the linguist J. R. Firth (1957, p. 11) stated that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” More recently, this idea has been supported by distributional semantic models (DSMs), which come from computational linguistics and demonstrate that a word’s meaning can in fact be derived partly from its statistical co-occurrence patterns with other words. For instance, part of the meaning of scissors can be derived from its tendency to be used together with certain other words like sharp, pointy, cut, snip, paper, hair, etc. DSMs are surprisingly good at predicting people’s performance on many (although not all) conceptual tasks, and they are now so sophisticated that they constitute the engines of many chatbots and AI systems. What’s more, by combining DSMs with brain mapping methods, a rapidly growing line of research has been accumulating evidence that the distributionally based properties of word meanings are not only captured by purely verbal representations in the core language network, but enable a “quick and dirty” shortcut to comprehension.

The short story is a young art’, Elizabeth Bowen declared in her introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Stories; ‘as we know it, it is the child of this century’. The contemporaneity of the short form allowed Bowen to argue that it was free from many of the conventions that tether more established literary modes – exposition, for instance, as well as unwieldy segues, and what she termed the ‘forced continuity’ of longer prose narratives. It also encouraged her to conceptualise the short story in relation to other types of writing, particularly poetry and the novel. This chapter explores Bowen’s aesthetics of short fiction through an analysis of a selection of her stories and non-fiction. In essence, she believed that the structural economy of the short form meant that stories are defined by obliquity and concision. She also considered the form – or rather, the forms – of short fiction to be productively uncertain, and understood that the same story can be simultaneously concise, expansive, and wonderfully strange. This chapter examines the complexities of this stance, and its implications for reading Bowen in the twenty-first century.

Saving species from extinction as called for by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) can be a public good. If attention is directed to those species that have reasonable recovery potential and the costs are not too great, then the resources might be well spent. If they are devoted to those that have little chance for recovery, then the exercise may be less beneficial. Proponents argue that all species deserve a chance, but because real resources are involved, people are affected. They must support funding and costly resource-use restrictions over very long periods to list, protect, and enhance at-risk species. There are opportunity costs and tradeoffs. The process of endangered species protection then ought to be a reasoned one that weighs costs and benefits. There is no avoiding the challenge. Unfortunately, as detailed in this chapter, protecting endangered species has not been a reasoned process. It is contentious and combative. The record of success is extremely sparce. Rent-seeking undermines chances for long-term recovery for prospective species.