This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

“Singers (1941–1982)” examines Argentine popular songs about the Falklands/Malvinas Islands through a systematic analysis of previously unexplored sources: the musical works registry of the Argentine Society of Authors and Composers (SADAIC) from its foundation until 1982. While has focused largely on songs produced after the war, this chapter turns to compositions written before 1982, when military action remained an imagined possibility rather than an immediate reality. Reading song lyrics as historical sources, the chapter shows how popular music articulated an “emotional community” that, through diverse tones and registers reinforced the belief that “the Malvinas were, are, and will be Argentine.” Expressed through an art form accessible to broad audiences beyond intellectual or economic elites, these songs projected a forward-looking vision of sovereignty reather than a retrospective memory of loss. The chapter argues that this repertoire sustained a latent fantasy of recovery helping to explain the widespread popular support for the 1982 invasion, despite the military regime’s deep economic and political crises.

In 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, there was an exponential increase in the number of deaths in the country. These deaths can be explained, among other factors, by the easing of restrictions on social isolation and the delay in purchasing vaccines. In that context, family members and friends had to deal with abbreviated funeral rituals experienced in a context of necropolitics. In this chapter, based on the analysis of the death of Vítor, a forty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor, we see how new protocols aimed at containing the spread of the virus affected the traditional rites, shortening their sequences and phases – thus reducing community participation to a minimum – and, in turn, how they drove the creation of new possible rituals. If, on the one hand, the new possible rites point to a process of creating funerals that combines in-person tributes and the use of new technologies, on the other, they highlight the consequences of mourning experienced in a context of political tension mainly due to the actions of a conservative and denialist government.

This chapter introduces the broad conceptual framework of the processes of subjectivisation within global discourses and connects it to agency. It introduces the idea of situational agency and draws upon Mahmood’s work to suggest that agency can be found in the ‘inhabitation of norms’. the chapter provides a background context to post-genocide Rwandan policies, introducing the key agenda of unity and reconciliation, and presents Rwanda as a post-colonial state. Finally, this chapter problematises the collection and interpretation of field data in a post-colonial setting.

Chapter 2 explores how networks of power both reinforced and blurred social and occupational boundaries for non-Muslims. It examines which professions they were barred from, which they were pushed into, and which they came to dominate. In some instances, demand for goods and services such as music, dance, and alcohol created negotiated spaces where Muslims relied on non-Muslims, illustrating how exclusion and dependence coexisted in ways that unsettled rigid divisions – a dynamic analyzed through the concept of heterotopia. At the same time, although formally restricted from certain trades, non-Muslims were entrusted with sensitive occupations such as banking and currency exchange that required significant trust. Many also became leading merchants or specialized craftsmen, using transnational networks of co-religionists to expand their influence, advocate for greater rights, and secure a stronger position in regional commerce. The chapter introduces some well-established non-Muslim trading firms.

The central theme of Chapter 1 is the negotiation between non-Muslims’ sense of belonging and the degree of recognition granted by Muslims and state authorities. It examines the tension between national and religious identities and the legal frameworks that shaped non-Muslims’ lives, including the concept of dhimma/zemmeh, the payment of the non-Muslim tax (jezyeh), judicial procedures, and the valuation of blood money (diyeh). Particular attention is given to the Treaty of Torkamanchay and its consequences for non-Muslim Iranians, especially the establishment of the “Department of Diverse Peoples” within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to handle their cases. Patterns of migration and displacement also form part of this discussion. The chapter further argues that the emergence of the Babi and later Bahaʾi faith in Iran unsettled and redefined perceptions of all non-Muslims in Iranian society.

Nonparametric statistics is concerned with making inference about aspects of an underlying distribution without enforcing explicit structural assumptions on their form. We study the nonparametric statistical problem of estimating a (Lebesgue) density based on a sample of independent, real-valued random variables. Kernel density estimators are simple and conceptually appealing, and we present finite-sample guarantees on their variance and bias under appropriate smoothness assumptions. These clarify the role of the key tuning parameter associated with the method, namely the bandwidth. We also present two techniques for bandwidth selection, based on least-squares cross-validation and Lepski's method.

The first half of this chapter explores the linguistic means by which Twa tell their story. By mobilising linguistic resources, they are challenging their continued exclusion under the charge of ‘mind-set’ problems and are attempting to renegotiate the social constructs that govern the position of Batwa in Rwandan society. As such, the language practice of contradiction is read as an assertion by Twa of their full membership in society and a demand for equal care. The second half of the chapter locates the Rwandan state as the key mediator of global life for Rwanda’s Twa, translating global ordering narratives into the everyday. The state makes use of the development narrative, refracting it through the prism of national unity, to offer Twa an attractive and accessible vision of a non-fragmented modern Rwandan subject.

The concluding chapter situates the book’s findings within Tunisia’s political trajectory from 2016 to the present. Building on the deliberative practices observed between 2013 and 2016, it argues that the decline in civic and political rights was not due to the transgression of liberal norms, but rather to their top-down imposition as universal and unconditional. This imposition, coupled with the neglect of locally grounded democratic expressions, contributed to growing public disillusionment with democracy and its transformative potential. However, despite ongoing constitutional crises, government reshufflings, and authoritarian presidential rhetoric, many Tunisian citizens continue to debate what it means to live democratically. This chapter critiques dominant approaches to studying democracy, both in Tunisia and globally, and highlights the need to account for democratic practices that exceed institutional frameworks. It calls for a deeply social understanding of democracy, one that recognizes the dynamic interplay between political institutions and everyday social life.

This chapter engages with the uneasy materiality of burned human remains as distinct from the material presence of fleshed, unburned, and articulated bodies. It works against perceptions of incinerated remains that establish them as “second-rate” corporeality of the dead and argues, instead, that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains. This is especially the case when the fired-transformed remains do not result from cremation but, instead, are the outcome of a violent and purposeful destruction of the corpse. While burning constitutes a radical intervention into the material register of human remains, it rarely erases them entirely. Cutting across a spectrum of rematerializations and transformations of ashes from the Holocaust that encompass environmental encounters, memorialization, archeological interventions, display, and material dispersal, the chapter considers incinerated human remains as lively and resistant traces. It argues that ashes comprise a challenging and transformative presence, one that is acted upon and, through a myriad of practices, constituted and/or undone as human remains. At the same time, the chapter casts ashes from the Holocaust as agentive and politically expressive, and, thus, invested with the ability to challenge and defy the human-made politics of dead bodies.