This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

This introduction frames Soviet Moldavia as a revealing case for examining the social and political dimensions of postwar Jewish life under late Stalinism. It situates the republic’s Holocaust survivors within the broader Soviet landscape and explains how its dual Romanian?Soviet heritage shaped postwar trajectories. The chapter details the book?s extensive archival base – spanning Moldovan, Russian, and Ukrainian repositories – and its reliance on oral histories to recover individual voices. It also addresses methodological challenges in using Stalinist investigation files and evaluates their evidentiary value alongside survivor testimony. Engaging with current historiography on Soviet Jews and post-Holocaust Europe, the introduction argues for a shift away from center-focused and repression-centered narratives toward a view that highlights Jewish initiative, adaptation, and participation in the reconstruction of Soviet society. By outlining these goals and methodological commitments, the introduction establishes the conceptual and evidentiary foundations for reinterpreting Jewish life in the postwar Soviet borderlands.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter examines the issue of antisemitism in Soviet Moldavia during the late Stalinist era, showing how both state policies and Jewish perceptions of discrimination evolved over time. In the immediate postwar years, Jews found professional opportunities within Soviet structures, but as political suspicion toward them intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, uncertainty grew about their place in society. While Jews were not formally excluded from key sectors in Soviet Moldavia, the shifting political climate led some of the local decision-makers to question whether restrictions should be imposed. This atmosphere of heightened scrutiny made Jews more attuned to potential discrimination, with many interpreting career obstacles through the lens of rising antisemitism. The chapter explores how Jews navigated these challenges – some seeking protection through party networks, others filing formal complaints, and many attempting to assert their place within the shifting professional landscape.

This chapter explores the relationship between Hans Kelsen’s philosophical relativism and his theory of democratic leadership. First, it argues that Kelsen’s theory of democratic leadership cannot be fully understood unless placed within his broader political thought, which includes a commitment to philosophical relativism. Second, it suggests that Kelsen provided an original answer to the puzzle of democratic leadership that is significant in its own right. Writing during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, Kelsen made a crucial distinction between autocratic and democratic forms of leadership: while autocratic leaders are seen as possessing absolute knowledge and, therefore, hold unlimited power, democratic leaders are thought to carry only relative truths, and their power is consequently limited. Kelsen demonstrated that if we believe moral absolutes exist, it is logical to have an absolute leader with unfettered power. In contrast, if we hold that moral absolutes are inaccessible to human knowledge and only relative truths exist, it follows that leaders should have limited power and be subject to constant scrutiny and control. Contrary to the common characterisation of Kelsen as an abstract and idealist thinker, this chapter shows that his approach to political leadership was normative yet realist. Rather than eliminating leadership, Kelsen associated democracy with multiple, temporary leaders who have limited and relative political power.

This chapter examines how and why the idea of “liberal democracy” was invented by French liberals in the 1860s. I argue that liberal democracy was conceived as an essentially polemical concept, defined in reaction to what French liberals identified as a defective form of democracy – namely, Napoleon III’s “Caesarist democracy.” I also show that, initially, one of the key meanings of liberal democracy was the idea of rule by public opinion. The first theorists of liberal democracy criticized Caesarism as a dangerous combination of plebiscitary sovereignty and silencing of public opinion. Meanwhile, they argued that the exercise of popular sovereignty should be confined to legislative elections, and that a free and independent public opinion should influence both elections and representatives. This perspective was articulated by figures such as Eugène Pelletan, Auguste Nefftzer, Charles Dollfus, Édouard Laboulaye, Anatole Prévost-Paradol and Émile Ollivier. The chapter further explores how the invention of the term “liberal democracy” overlapped with efforts to create a liberal tradition, as well as with a defense of settler colonialism in Algeria.

I revisit how my practice of adda instituted a counter-hierarchical, shared practice of knowledge making which helped to show the diverse locations and experiences that produce a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. I recount how my performances of adda helped to carve out specific conversations—in authors’ texts and lives—to show how these are conscious experiences of law that account for the diverse organisations of mutual law–life relations in an Indian post-colonial context. I draw this book to a close by reaffirming that the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence is a diverse body of knowledge that is produced out of the disparate lived practices of varied groups of people who live different lives and relate with law differently; and that the performances of emplaced conversations help us attend to, and recognise, such differences in law-life relations.

Chapter 9 demonstrates that there was a negative homestead effect on the development of homesteaded lands compared to lands that were sold. In other words, even after 100 years of the date of the initial homestead patent being issued, those lands were less likely developed. This finding is very robust and does not depend on any measure of land quality or particular measure of later development. The effect, however, is driven by the earliest homesteading, and our evidence shows that it stemmed from homesteaders “being in the way” of early commercial development.

Drawing on critical realist ontology and critical realist discourse analysis, the chapter analyses how the concept of resilience can be and has been applied to Black, Asian, and minority ethnic families and communities in ways that are biased, stigmatising, and pathologising. It argues that current definitions of resilience need to be redefined and reconceptualised, particularly in settings dominated by White middle-class voices that define what ‘positive emotions’, ‘successful traits’, and ‘coping mechanisms’ entail. Here, through racism and flawed perceptions and interpretations of resilience and ‘Othering’, members from ethnic minority communities are defined as in need of resilience support, whilst at the same time their experience of structural racism is being erased. Reframing resilience thus means taking account of multifaceted and interactive effects of personal, material, institutional, and political factors that impact on behaviour, well-being and resilience, as well as acknowledging that the way in which ‘behaviour’ is received is by default flawed, if this is largely informed by an oppressive White middle-class viewpoint.

In this chapter we review the essential highlights from previous cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of relativization. Specifically, we review studies that are relevant to the acquisition of headedness at earliest stages of complex sentence formation in the child. The preponderance of this research is based on observations of natural speech samples. This review reveals an absence of headedness in early child attempts at relativization, and a variety of evidence supporting children’s early creation of headless relativization. We suggest that these early data cohere with our leading hypothesis and with the proposed UG template.

This chapter argues that the Afrobarometer survey findings indicating South Africans’ preference for housing over land are easily misunderstood. Supported by modern science, it emphasises human interconnectedness as evidenced and grounded in land-based relationships. The chapter therefore critiques the limited world-sense within which ‘property’ is conceived in Ramuhovhi and Malan and, instead, amalgamates vernacular, ‘(un)customary’, and ‘(un)common’ law to illustrate how relationships, ‘seen’ particularly through the spatiotemporal lens of Ubu-Ntu, might deepen our constitutional understanding of ‘property’. It thus shows how the concept of ‘house’ (beyond physical structure) – perceived in ‘vernacular time’, rather than Euromodernity’s ‘colonial time’ – equitably shapes ‘property’ rights, linking them to multigenerational ‘survivance’ and thereby integrating Ntu principles into contemporary legal interpretations. Hence, the chapter concludes the book by demonstrating how embracing the vernacular law conceptions of ‘human(e) existence’, ‘rights’ and ‘house’ would transform the sociolegal reality for South Africans by decolonising it and achieving sustainable socioeconomic change. Returning to encounters in Mbuzini, the chapter ends by highlighting young people’s understandings of Ubu-Ntu and ‘housing’ amidst colonial law’s afterlives and vernacular law’s continued erasure. It contends that true transformation demands respecting the country’s constitutional commitments by genuinely representing all South Africans’ diverse normative ideals.

This chapter explores a genre of activist theatre that has developed in play texts written in the French language in countries of West Africa since 2000. This theatre in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo builds on the legacies of performance traditions and picks up the momentum of theatre from the post-independence era starting in the 1960s, and then the activist theatre of the 1990s. This theatre has transitioned from what it was in the twentieth century theatre as it reacts to new realities in Africa and to the redefining of global relations. West African theatermakers have rejected the European models in a literary decolonization effort. By maintaining connections to earlier African forms, contemporary playwrights in Francophone West Africa keep traditional means of storytelling alive and use these influences to write new theatre genres that diverge from those of European theatre. The chapter examines examples of plays from Francophone West Africa to highlight three components of activist playwriting: how it is political, how it is universal, and how it relates to other forms of African theatre. Finally, it approaches theatre as an activist artform in performance, considering who is engaged, and where and when this happens.