This chapter explores how Carpentier’s activities as a musicologist and music critic extended beyond Cuba and influenced composers, cultural brokers and music scholars throughout the continent. His theorization of a Latin American identity inspired by ideas of creolization and eclectic experimentation provided composers and music critics with useful concepts that helped them reframe their new music as universal through the local while sidestepping the musical “postcard nationalism” that was associated with populist movements after World War II. I examine the legacy of one of Carpentier’s most significant contributions, La música en Cuba (1946), and his relationship to Cuban composers in the decades that followed. I focus on the writings and compositions of scholars and composers who relied on Carpentier’s works to better understand their own musical traditions and compositions, such as Carlos Sandroni, Juan Blanco and Leo Brouwer, who syncretized Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso with Western postmodernist discourse.

Race-making is an inherently embodied activity, rooted in the senses and predicated on corporeality. As a result, visuality and materiality are central to processes of race-making, and studies of ancient visual and material culture therefore have much to contribute to modern scholarship on ancient race-making. This chapter explores what can be learned from visual and material culture about processes of race-making in the ancient Greek world, considering a series of examples. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, these examples demonstrate a variety of potential approaches, as well as highlighting some of the key challenges and limitations of working with visual and material culture.

This chapter maps Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent epic which dissects the US in the Vietnam era. It shared the National Book Award in 1973. Anchored by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the volume’s pivotal poem, it boasts the key line, “I here declare the end of the war,” and includes seventy-five other poems, among them elegies for Neal Cassady and Che Guevara. The chapter shows how Ginsberg links fragments – newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, lyrics from popular songs and more – into a coherent lament for America itself. It also dissects the journal the poet kept while traveling across the nation and that provided him with the raw material for The Fall of America.

This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

This chapter describes the WTO dispute settlement system, focusing on its structure, procedures, and recent challenges. The WTO system, established in 1995, was a significant innovation in international trade law, featuring mandatory jurisdiction and a detailed set of rules in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU). It aimed to ensure adherence to WTO commitments and provide predictability to the trading system.However, recent US concerns over the Appellate Body’s functioning led to blocked appointments, rendering the Appellate Body defunct and the system non-binding. This crisis has led to the exploration of alternative mechanisms like the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) and increased reliance on regional trade agreement dispute settlement mechanisms.

As the tensions between the Chinese population and the foreign sojourners and settlers of the treaty powers in post-1842 China led to a series of violent riots and deadly conflicts in the second half of the nineteenth century, the foreign powers were desperate to find an effective mechanism to prevent such occurrences. Influenced by a colonial siege mentality and the idea of a state of emergency, the treaty powers created an exception to international law, Western law and Chinese law by subjecting the Chinese government authorities to a regime of strict liability, holding them legally liable for all the ’anti-foreign’ incidents and the resulting damage to foreign interests, regardless of circumstances. This chapter investigates the historical forces and international politics that prompted this regime of strict liability in late Qing China. It calls for more attention to the deep-rooted connections between such practices in the age of empire and the various forms of emergency powers and security regimes that have continued to plague our modern world today.

The cultural discontinuities following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms include the abandonment of major centers and smaller settlements accompanied by loss of social structures, literacy, quarried stone architecture, and figured representations. Archaeological evidence from four centuries later, in the eighth century BCE, shows that there were also important continuities, e.g., the Greek language, names of divinities, a warrior ethos, and communal feasting. Greek commerce both eastwards and westwards increased, and Greeks began to settle in the West Mediterranean and North Africa. This volume examines the Greek Iron Age, ca. 1200–700 BCE, between the Mycenaean collapse and the beginning of the Archaic period. The relative chronology of this period, based on carefully constructed sequences of pottery styles, provides a stable framework. However, recent radiocarbon dates have suggested that the absolute dating of the pottery styles should be revised upwards.

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

This chapter explores Ginsberg’s poetic adaptations of Mahayana Buddhist ethical teachings known as the Six Perfections. It considers: 1) how Buddhism began (for Allen Ginsberg) and what wisdom within it drew him to develop his poetic sensitivities; 2) how generosity of spirit implicit within a Buddhist ethical framework (known as the Six Paramitas) relates to the continuous syncretism within his work; 3) how liberal openness in his work is essentially a practice of patience; 4) how Buddhist non-Manichean critique became, increasingly, the central ethical constraint of the writing; 5) how joyful humor makes Ginsberg’s evangelism tolerable to secular liberals; and 6) what it means to say that concentration is a form of consecration in Ginsberg’s work.

The Alejo Carpentier Foundation was created in 1993 with the purpose of preserving materials and offering researchers the patrimony left by the author, as well as publishing his work in Cuba and abroad. Regarding the dissemination of the author’s works, the institution, which owns the copyrights for the novelist, has maintained and extended its relations with publishing houses from numerous countries that make his oeuvre known in diverse world languages. The Foundation supports in many ways the study of Carpentier’s life and works (publications in different media outlets, scholarships, consultations, courses, and international colloquiums), but, above all, it facilitates research of a considerable fund of first rate documentation, which is structured as active literature (the editions of his works in multiple languages), secondary literature (the many studies on his work), his personal library and the Carpentier Papers archive. The above is discussed in this chapter following a chronological sequence.

This chapter starts with a basic description of Neandertal tooth size and morphology, emphasizing similarities and differences from the teeth of modern humans. The chapter then proceeds to highlight how the study of Neandertal teeth has advanced our understanding of Neandertal phylogenetic relationships, diets, behavior, growth and development, and finally, dental pathology. Dental distinctions between Neandertals and modern humans appear to have been present one million years ago, with Homo antecessor already showing morphology in the direction of Neandertals. Evidence from the study of Neandertal teeth suggests that Neandertal diets were more diverse than originally thought, and in some times and places included plant material. Differences in dental developmental timing between Neandertals and modern humans seem to primarily emerge during later childhood, especially in relation to third molars. Neandertals, like earlier hominins, had low caries rates, but their most common dental affliction appears to have been periodontitis.

How did the Sinitic empires of the Qin and Han interact with their neighbours before the adoption of the concept of international law from the West, following the establishment of the nation state with fixed frontiers in the late seventeenth century? The dominant model is the concept of ‘tribute’ first outlined by John K. Fairbank based on the foreign-relations practices of the late imperial Qing empire. This chapter argues that is incorrect. Apart from engaging in military action, the early East Asian empires followed the ways in which states had related to each other for centuries prior to the establishment of the empires, i.e. by accepting hostages, which developed into the giving of pledges (both used the same term, zhi), and in establishing marriage relations. The earlier ritual of ‘covenant making’ was replaced by a new legal instrument, the binding yue ‘agreement,’ a form of contract. Although local and regional authorities gave ‘prestations’ to the central court in imperial times, it is argued that ‘tribute’ (gong) was not significant until the later Han, when, on the basis of the mention of tribute in two canonical texts, it was incorporated into Confucian world view.

This chapter analyzes historical declamation as an advanced stage of fiction training in the Roman rhetorical curriculum. It argues that rhetorical exercises, especially controversiae and suasoriae, fostered the skills of fictionalization through revisionist reimaginings of the Greek past. Exploring a wide corpus of exercises about Alexander the Great, the chapter demonstrates how students were trained to compose plausible fictions within recognizable historical frameworks. Drawing on rhetorical handbooks, school papyri, and declamations, it reconstructs four dominant themes: impersonations of Alexander and his circle; inter-polis disputes in the shadow of Macedonian conquest; “travel advisories” debating the limits of Alexander’s empire; and “postmortem” scenarios reflecting Alexander’s legacy. These exercises strengthened students’ command over the techniques of impersonation, pseudo-documentarism, and meta-exemplarity. The chapter also shows how historical declamations modelled indirect reflection on imperial power. Rather than transmitting historical truth, revisionist fictions taught students how to manipulate exempla and construct immersive alternatives to the Roman present.