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.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s core arguments – specifically, that studying the reception of ancient architecture at the world’s fairs at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco furthers our understanding of the complex and possibly conflicting and contradictory ways in which the ancient world and its architecture were understood in the United States between 1893 and 1915. The appropriation of classical architecture for museums and fine art galleries emerges as a major theme. While classical architecture could be used to justify empire and institutional racism, it could also symbolize democracy and cultural sophistication. The fluidity and flexibility of ancient architecture underscore why it was so widely and creatively adapted in the United States. The physical legacy of these fairs – the buildings that survived and the parks – is also considered. In addition, the conclusion discusses the decline of ancient architecture as one of the most potent ways in which fair organizers expressed their cultural, political, and economic goals; the rejection of historical forms was vital to the birth of architectural Modernism. In sum, neo-antique architecture at American world’s fairs helped the nation and various cities to forge imagined ties to a glorious past, frame the present, and envisage the future.

This essay examines various forms of transactional relationships, from marriage and concubinage to brothel prostitution and the informal exchange of sex for sustenance. It considers the life of famous musician Barbara Strozzi, institutional attempts to manage prostitution through legislation and charity, and the negotiation of transactional sex amongst the city’s poorest residents. Byars demonstrates that early modern Venetians saw sexuality as both necessary and dangerous, fleshes out the porous boundaries on the spectrum between marriage and prostitution, and explores how women navigated the socioeconomic systems that commodified them.

When considering the importance of France in Neruda’s life and works, scholars have chronicled up to nine separate visits, from the anecdotes of amorous adventures to a desperate search for political asylum, friendships and romances, forged and dissolved. This chapter studies the importance of France and its impact on the evolution of Neruda’s artistic values and production through the literary lens of key poems associated with five particular visits to France. Among other poems related to Neruda’s stay in France, this chapter focuses on references to Picasso in Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind, 1952) and their collaboration in Toros (Bulls, 1960), where they express their shared love for and faith in Spain.

As business transactions and the global economy become increasingly digitalized, international investment disputes will deal with novel assets in new boundary-defiant contexts. Indeed, jurisdictional arguments and objections will likely require arbitral tribunals to confront with the uneasy task of delineating the ‘localization’ of investments in digital economy assets such as cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and data-related investments. However, given that even more traditional assets have raised a variety of problems relating to territorial nexus and localization, the authors believe that the digital economy emphasizes what are essentially differences in degree rather than in kind. This chapter discusses the complexities that arise in considering the idiosyncrasies of investments in digital economy assets within a traditional territorially defined jurisdictional framework. First, the authors present some of those new digital economy assets and canvass several typical cross-border challenges inherent in international investment arbitration. Second, they question how traditional objections to jurisdiction ratione personae and jurisdiction ratione materiae might be employed when the investments in question relate to those digital developments. Third, the chapter raises questions about states’ jurisdiction to prescribe, and ponders the potential effects for purposes of jurisdiction of states asserting their authority to prescribe over investments or investors outside their territory.

While living in exile in a divided Berlin after the 1973 military coup and Pablo Neruda’s death twelve days later, Antonio Skármeta created his own version of Neruda in Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), a humane image of the poet that contrasted with the one-dimensional communist martyr projected after his death. Skármeta wrote the base story for four different media under the same title: a radio drama, a play, a film, and a novel. The story has since been freely adapted by others, such as Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (The Postman), Daniel Catán’s opera, with Plácido Domingo as Neruda, and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s recent film released by Netflix. Aside from clarifying the confusion in the critical bibliography regarding these multiple stories, this chapter focuses on Skármeta’s two media versions of Ardiente paciencia, the play and the film, to show how a single artistic creation can captivate audiences worldwide.

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, or White City, marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World” and showcased Chicago’s ambition to be a modern metropolis. While Chicago’s architecture is often labeled as Beaux-Arts or Roman, this chapter argues that the architecture of its key buildings and central spaces embodied the bricolage of the neo-antique. The White City established neo-antique architecture as the preferred architectural idiom for American world’s fairs. This architecture also demonstrated that the United States was now a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. The lasting impact of the White City’s architecture is evident in urban planning, especially in the City Beautiful movement and in civil buildings built after the fair. Other buildings at the fair, such as Haiti’s pavilion, also utilized classicizing architecture. For Haiti, the ideals of democracy and the cultural cachet of classical culture informed the choice of classical architecture here. Ancient Egyptian architecture also appeared in the form of a replica of the Temple of Luxor, located in the Midway Plaisance, the fair’s entertainment zone, aiming to educate and entertain visitors. The reception of ancient architecture at the White City reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between nineteenth-century America and the ancient world.

Chapter 8 looks at some of the ways local historians represented their region’s or town’s history and the ways they crafted narratives that placed their local, idealised communities within the history of wider communities. The chapter looks in particular at the ways local historians discussed the historical topography of their regions and towns, the ways they dealt with non-Muslim and pre-Islamic history, and the master narratives they used to build their communities’ histories, in particular the ways in which those narratives differed from the ones often encountered in universal histories. One overarching argument of the book, brought to the fore in this chapter, is that local history-writing was, in the early Islamic centuries at least, not always as distinct from universal history-writing as we are sometimes led to think; and that where differences can be seen, they often concerned the conception of community and the role of elites as much as whether a given work covers the history of one region much more thoroughly than others.